=== === ============= ==== === === == == == == == ==== == == = == ==== === == == == == == == == = == == == == == == == == == ==== M U S I C T H E O R Y O N L I N E A Publication of the Society for Music Theory Copyright (c) 1999 Society for Music Theory +-------------------------------------------------------------+ | Volume 5, Number 3 MAY, 1999 ISSN: 1067-3040 | +-------------------------------------------------------------+ General Editor Eric Isaacson Co-Editors Henry Klumpenhouwer Catherine Nolan Lawrence Zbikowski Reviews Editor Robert Gjerdingen Manager Ichiro Fujinaga mto-talk Manager Jay Rahn Consulting Editors Bo Alphonce Richard Littlefield Jonathan Bernard Thomas Mathiesen John Clough Benito Rivera Nicholas Cook John Rothgeb Allen Forte Arvid Vollsnes Stephen Hinton Robert Wason Marianne Kielian-Gilbert Gary Wittlich MTO Correspondents Peter Castine, Germany Marco Renoldi, Italy Wai-ling Cheong, Hong Kong Ken-ichi Sakakibara, Japan Tore Ericksson, Sweden Roberto Saltini, Brazil Gerold W. Gruber, Austria Michiel Schuijer, Holland Tess James, England Uwe Seifert, Germany Henry Klumpenhouwer, Canada Panos Vlagopoulos, Greece Nicolas Meeus, Belgium, France Arvid Vollsnes, Norway Editorial Assistants Arthur Samplaski Michael Toler Brent Yorgason All queries to: mto-editor@smt.ucsb.edu or to mto-manager@smt.ucsb.edu +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ 1. Target Article AUTHOR: Koozin, Timothy TITLE: On Metaphor, Technology, and Schenkerian Analysis KEYWORDS: Schenker, metaphor, multimedia, Shockwave, Macromedia, QuickTime, digital audio, MIDI, Web Timothy Koozin University of Houston Moores School of Music Houston, TX 77204-4893 koozin@www.music.uh.edu ABSTRACT: Multimedia renderings for the World-Wide Web are offered as models which extend the technology commonly employed in expressing Schenkerian analysis. The study begins with a new appraisal of the role of metaphor, establishing that the qualities of imitation and participation which are embodied in the communication of metaphor are central to a Schenkerian approach. The computer renderings suggest ways computer representation might aid in the understanding of spatial metaphors which are inherent in Schenker's methodology. Essential features such as linear shape, direction, and structural levels are modeled through incorporation of sound, hypertextually linked images and texts, and real-time simulation. ACCOMPANYING FILES: koozin1.jpg, koozin2.jpg, koozin3.jpg, koozin4.jpg, koozin5.jpg Editor's Note: This text version of Timothy Koozin's essay is derived from a multimedia version which can be viewed with a Shockwave-enabled web browser.  The musical examples that accompany this version are taken from the original version, but reproduce only some of the visual, and none of the aural, content of the original. MTO readers are strongly encouraged to view the "full" version of the article. 1. Introduction [1.1] The renderings of musical analysis which follow are based on analytical approaches which have been influenced by Heinrich Schenker. This application forms a part of a larger project to explore the study of Schenkerian analysis in multimedia computer environments.(1) Multimedia technology invites music theorists to consider new ways of modeling musical processes, creating new opportunities to enhance understanding of music through visualization. On-screen texts and other computerized media differ from traditional media in significant ways, are organized differently, and function in different ways to accomplish different purposes.(2) The transfer of theoretical graphs to an electronic environment necessitates decisions which inevitably have substantive consequences for the music theorist and teacher. The use of multimedia invites the extension of our analytical metaphors in new directions. As we further the development of a rich real-time computer environment for musical analysis, new issues relevant to the study of music theory and cognition will emerge. It is hoped that these electronic musical analyses will serve as models for more ambitious multimedia-enhanced studies while promoting critical discussion.(3) ============================== 1. The multimedia version of this essay requires a web browser enabled with the Shockwave plug-in and QuickTime resources. For Windows machines, a MIDI-compatible sound card is required for audio. With exception of Example 4, audio examples are MIDI files played by the author and converted to QuickTime movie format. Example 4 employs a Shockwave streaming audio sound clip of a professional ensemble. The download sites referenced in the multimedia version have links offering installation information and technical specifications for both Windows and Macintosh machines. Aspects of this study were presented at a joint session on "Computer Imaging for Music Theory and Musicology" at the National Conference of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory in Phoenix, 1997. For a study focused particularly on real-time simulations for musical analysis, see Timothy Koozin, "Graphic Approaches to Musical Analysis in a Multimedia Environment," *Computers in Music Research* 5 (1995): 103-117. 2. For a good introduction to the study of electronic text, see Stephen A. Bernhardt's "The Shape of Text to Come: The Texture of Print on Screens," *College Composition and Communication* 44/2 (May 1993): 151-175, which includes a helpful bibliography. See also "Sense and Semblance: The Implications of Virtuality" in Sven Birkerts, *Readings* (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1999), 42-58. 3. Web-based musical analyses incorporating multimedia include David Headlam's "Multimedia for Music Study on the Web: Director from Macromedia," which contains much helpful information on the use of Shockwave technology, and Ann K. McNamee's "Publishing and Pedagogy Using Multimedia on the World-Wide Web," both of which appear in *Music Theory Online* 3.5 (1997). ============================== [1.2] A rich computer environment should offer new possibilities unavailable using traditional media. These multimedia renderings are intended as models which extend the technology currently employed in expressing Schenkerian analysis. Their purpose is to explore how the use of electronic media might shape and expand expressions of meaning in an analytical graph. Limited in scope, the examples are not in any way intended to represent a complete pedagogy or a substitute for the study of orthodox Schenkerian models. Building upon the premise that a Schenkerian graph is an illuminating metaphor for representing musical processes, the aim in creating these multimedia analyses is to extend the communicative power of the graph, exploring new ways to model essential features such as linear shape, direction, and structural levels.(4) ============================== 4. While developing the present study, the author was interested to note a number of messages posted to the mto- talk list addressing the topics of Schenkerian analysis and metaphor, in particular, the thoughtful postings from Nicolas Meeus (4 February 1998), Larry Solomon (19 June 1998), and Nicholas Cook (22 June 1998). For a broad assessment of research on metaphor, see Warren Shibles, *Metaphor: An Annotated Bibliography and History* (Whitewater, Wisconsin: Language Press, 1971). ============================== 2. Artistic Participation: Imaging the Masterwork [2.1] Aristotle provides the classical definition of metaphor: "Metaphor (*metaphora*) is the transference (*epiphora*) of a name to some other object."(5) A similarity of some kind between the commonplace meaning of a term and its metaphorical meaning justifies their association. As Aristotle writes, "A good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of dissimilars."(6) Paul Henle has pointed out that this resemblance has a dual nature, "an antecedent resemblance, which justifies the comparison in the first place, and an induced resemblance, which arises from the very fact that the comparison was made."(7) A metaphor may stabilize over time, becoming a commonplace unit of language. But if the aspect of induced resemblance in a complex metaphor is contemplated and enriched, it may retain its irreducible, evocative power. ============================== 5. Philip Wheelwright, "Semantics and Ontology" in *Essays on Metaphor,* Warren Shibles, ed. (Whitewater, Wisconsin: Language Press, 1972), 66-67. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. ============================== [2.2] Schenker created evocative visual and textual metaphors of lasting communicative power to express his analytical methodology. Antecedent resemblances in the visual domain, derived primarily from symbols of musical notation, are combined with word antecedents which metaphorically relate musical space to terms of spatial orientation in the physical world. The process of induced resemblance is continually revised and renewed as readers study Schenker's contribution and the vast amount of more recent work which incorporates Schenkerian methodology. [2.3] A Schenkerian graph visually communicates an analysis to a reader versed in its embodied concepts and symbology-- its "root metaphors." Meaning occurs as correlations between the reader's conception of the music and the symbolic elements of the graph resonate with expression of metaphor. "Reading" a graph requires an act of imagination and poetic faith similar to that which any metaphorical text tacitly assumes. It is worth noting, however, that for Schenker, the graph is more than an interpretation of music expressed in a visual image. Schenker's stance toward his graphic analyses is essentially metaphorical. For Schenker, the graph *is* the piece-- a direct manifestation of the musical artifact. Schenker's observations are founded on principles he regarded as universals, which were "true in the sense of the truth of the great masters."(8) The point here is not to delve deeply in to Schenker's rhetoric or epistemology--a vastly complex topic--but simply to underscore the central role of metaphor.(9) If the analytical graph is appreciated more fully as a metaphor or metonym, then one can more readily accept the notion that the graphic rendering *is* the music made tangible. To offer an analogy, it is not so different from the proud parent who pulls out a photograph and says, "These are my children." The photograph, of course, does not constitute children and yet onlookers immediately accept the "similarities in dissimilarities" embodied in the photograph. The photograph captures an essence representative of the whole. ============================== 8. *Free Composition (Der freie Satz)*, translated and edited by Ernst Oster (New York: Longman, 1979), xxii. See also Nicholas Cook, "Schenker's Theory of Music as Ethics," *Journal of Musicology* 7 (1989): 438. 9. Important sources on the evolving rhetoric of Schenkerian analysis include William Rothstein, "The Americanization of Heinrich Schenker," *In Theory Only* 9/1 (1986): 5-17; William Pastille, "Heinrich Schenker, Anti-Organicist," *19th-Century Music* 8/1 (1984): 29-36; Richard Littlefield and David Neumeyer, "Rewriting Schenker: Narrative-History- Ideology," *Music Theory Spectrum* 14/1 (1992): 38-65; Richard Cohn, "The Autonomy of Motives in Schenkerian Accounts of Tonal Music," *Music Theory Spectrum* 14/2 (1992): 150-170; Joseph Lubben, "Schenker the Progressive: Analytic Practice in *Der Tonwille*" *Music Theory Spectrum* 15/1 (1993): 59-75; Nicholas Cook, "Schenker's Theory of Music as Ethics"; and Felix Salzer's dialog with Joseph Straus in *Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis.* Carl Schachter, Joseph N. Straus, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3-14. ============================== [2.4] Aristotle writes, "Art either imitates nature or else gives the finishing touches to what nature has left incomplete."(10) A useful example of both imitation and participation in rendering "what nature has left incomplete" can be found in the Paleolithic cave paintings of deer found in France and Spain. It has been observed that animals in cave paintings are sometimes drawn where there are already depressions or fissures in the rock which might serve as a deer's head or antlers. This suggests that the Aurignacian artist may have felt the presence of the totemic animal already manifest in the rock itself and experienced a sense of participation in helping to bring forth the energy represented in the powerful image. ============================== 10. Quoted from the *Physics* in Wheelwright, "Semantics and Ontology," 70. ============================== [2.5] This element of participation in making manifest for all to see that which is already present in nature (i.e., nature as represented in the "universal truths" embodied in the masterworks) perfectly characterizes Schenker's stance toward the musical work. In the his introduction to *Free Composition,* Schenker writes, The musical examples which accompany this volume are not merely practical aids; they have the same power and conviction as the visual aspect of the printed composition itself (the foreground). That is, the graphic representation is part of the actual composition, not merely an educational means.(11) ============================== 11. Schenker, *Free Composition,* xxiii. ============================== [2.6] The qualities of imitation and participation which are embodied in the communication of metaphor are central to Schenker's approach. The great masters provided the foreground, as represented through the visual artifact of the score.(12) It was Schenker's expressed task to complete the visual presence of the art work, thereby illuminating, as Aristotle describes, "what nature has left incomplete." As Schenker states, "Since the task of revealing the world of the background fell to me, I was not spared the difficulty of finding symbols for it."(13) ============================== 12. Schenker's important work with manuscript sources shows his great sensitivity to the visual impression of autographs, which, as he states in describing his impression of Chopin's autograph of the Op. 45 Scherzo, have the power to "speak directly to the eye and lead reliably to important insights." (From the preface to the Schenker edition of Chopin's Op. 101, as quoted in John Rothgeb, "Schenkerian theory and manuscript studies: modes of interaction" in *Schenker Studies,* Hedi Siegel, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5. See also William Rothstein, "Heinrich Schenker as an Interpreter of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas," *19th-Century Music* 8/1 (1984): 3-27). 13. Schenker, *Free Composition,* xxiii, n. 1. ============================== 3. Altering the Knowledge Medium [3.1] Schenker sometimes used the word "pictures" (*Bilder*) to refer to analytical graphs. Though sometimes translated as "illustrations," the notion of Schenker as a maker of pictures which render the art work visible is intriguing.(14) Traditionally, words have been the privileged medium for directly conveying important ideas, with "illustrations," like forms of imagery evoked through pictorial language, serving a function somehow external and subservient. This reflects a traditional hierarchy which can be traced to the Latin poet, Horace, who advised mixing "the sweet with the useful," employing the ornamental image to guide the reader toward the "valuable lesson."(15) Although theorists since ancient times have employed visual imagery to convey ideas, Schenker more than any other theorist has altered this paradigm. Schenker's decision to speak through visual images necessarily precluded even the possibility of *saying* all there might be to say in his accompanying texts, because the visual image has virtually limitless connotations. That Schenker's graphs speak volumes on their own is partly due to the nature of visual objects. Visual information may be semantically rich, spatial, and temporal, differing greatly from symbolic information represented in alphanumeric form. Data base designers are now at work creating image searching systems to meet the challenges posed by new data types of images and videos.(16) As multimedia archives for music proliferate, the modes by which musical scholars present their work and access knowledge will necessarily evolve. ============================== 14. I am grateful to Timothy Jackson for help on this point. In his study, "Heinrich Schenker as Composition Teacher: the Schenker-Oppel Exchange" forthcoming in *Music Analysis,* he cites references to the creation of "Bilder" (pictures) in Schenker's so-called "Lesson Books" for 1929-31. The term also appears in later writings. For example, in *Der Freie Satz* Schenker writes, "Die von mir Urlinie-Tafeln benannten Bilder zeigen die vorletzte Stimmfuehrungsschicht, auf sie folgt der Vordergrund." *Neue musickalische Theorien und Phantasien,* Vol. III, *Der Freie Satz,* second ed., edited and revised by Oswald Jonas (Universal Edition, 1956), 58. Ernst Oster's translation in *Free Composition* appears on p. 26. 15. Christopher Collins, *Reading the Written Image: Verbal Play, Interpretation, and the Roots of Iconophobia* (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 1. In contrast, see Felix Salzer's comments on the "self-sufficient and self- explaining" aspect of Schenker's approach in Heinrich Schenker, *Five Graphic Analyses* (Dover, 1969), 16-17. 16. See Amarnath Gupta, Simone Santini, and Ramesh Jain, "In Search of Information in Visual Media," *Communications of the ACM* 40/12 (1997): 35-62. The volume is devoted to visual information retrieval and includes several bibliographies. ============================== [3.2] Schenker himself was no advocate of new technology.(17) It is somewhat ironic that Schenker decried the proliferation of technology as symptomatic of a cultural decline while pushing the envelope on media technology in terms of how a scholarly book should look and function. Employing visual media to communicate complex ideas, he prefigured the cultural shift toward multiple modalities we experience today. The multimedia examples which follow are intended to provide a glimpse of the ways computer representation might aid in the understanding of spatial metaphors which are inherent in a Schenkerian approach. As a preliminary study, each example might be regarded as a "miniature" which in some way offers an added dimension to the traditional graphic model. The first example embeds explanations and interpretations within a graph through overlays accessed through user response. The second and third examples employ color, sound, motion, and perspective to enhance representation of hierarchical layers. Example 4 renders a digitally scanned score excerpt synchronized with an artist ensemble sound clip and an analytical graphic overlay, illustrating a format for on-line study of an authentic document and audio recording. The last example is an analysis of a short piece in its entirety, with graphic analysis, real-time score display and commentary. ============================== 17. See Schenker's comments on technology and culture in *Free Composition,* xxiii-xxiv, 6, and 160. ============================== 4. Multimedia Rendering: Haydn, Divertimento in B flat, II (*Chorale St. Antoni*) [4.1] Through the use of interactive computer graphics, interpretations of a sketch can be embedded within it. The Shockwave-enabled graph employs imbedded "balloon" annotations to provide a tutorial on some basic Schenkerian symbols. It is based on a sketch by Forte and Gilbert. In this excerpt from the *Chorale St. Antoni* attributed to Haydn, the neighbor note figure at m. 6 is expanded in the next measure, returning again as an incomplete neighbor three measures later. As shown in the graph, both D and C are elaborated with passing tones which receive consonant support.(18) [Example: koozin1.jpg] ============================== 18. Allen Forte and Steven Gilbert. *Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis* (W. W. Norton, 1982), 20. ============================== [4.2] Graphic overlays in the example provide more information. Schenker interpreted this five-bar phrase as a grouping of 3+2, with a tonic prolongation at measures 1-3 followed by a two-measure cadence. The dotted rhythm helps articulate the paired linear motions each descending by third. Discussing the opening 5-measure phrase, Wallace Berry suggests at least the possibility of a contrary interpretation of 2+3 measures, given the change in texture, chromaticism, and harmony at measure 3. His conception of "interphrase grouping" in the opening could apply as well to the consequent phrase shown in the example.(19) ============================== 19. Wallace Berry, *Musical Structure and Performance* (Yale University Press, 1989), 29-30. Schenker's sketches of the entire theme appear in *Free Composition,* Fig. 42, 2 and Fig 138, 3. Many writers have discussed this passage, including Lerdahl and Jackendoff, William Benjamin, Allen Forte, Joel Lester, and Jonathan Kramer. For a summary, see Kramer, *The Time of Music* (Schirmer Books, 1988), 444-45, n. 74. The piece is also discussed in H. Lee Riggins and Gregory Proctor, "A Schenker Pedagogy," *Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy* 3/1 (1989): 13-21. ============================== [4.3] Schenker's voice leading graph in *Free Composition* (Figure 42, 2) provides a broader context for understanding the passage. Schenker's graph reveals a deeper level of the middleground for the entire theme, showing the dividing dominant which precedes the consequent phrase quoted in Forte and Gilbert's example. Note that the deep-level elaboration of scale degree 3 with an upper neighbor note in Schenker's graph (marked "n.n.") nicely corresponds to the foreground- level neighbor motions shown in Forte and Gilbert's graph at m. 6-7. (A scan of Schenker's complete voice leading graph is provided in the multimedia version with the kind permission of European American Music.) 5. Multimedia Rendering: Bach, French Suite No. 2, Menuet [5.1] This example, based on a study by David Beach in *Aspects of Schenkerian Theory,* employs color and sound to enhance the presentation of the graph.(20) Surface-level events are shown in black. The running eighth notes of the foreground embellish a deeper stepwise motive shown in red. Brackets in this rhythmic reduction show how the third-span in bar 1 is extended in bar 2 and again in bars 3-4. Notice that the longer line spanning the sixth E down to G fills in the interval found in the first two eighth notes of the melody. [Example: koozin2.jpg] ============================== 20. David Beach. "Schenker's Theories: A Pedagogical View" in *Aspects of Schenkerian Theory* (Yale Univ. Press, 1983), p. 7. ============================== [5.2] The deeper graph in blue shows how voice exchange occurs on both tonic and dominant harmony. This excerpt also illustrates the concept of interruption. The structural line descending from 3 (shown with stemmed notes highlighted in yellow) is interrupted after the motion to 2. Using the buttons alongside the example, it is possible to hear a "realization" of each level of the graph. This is a useful tool for helping students hear relationships among structural levels. Two realizations are offered for the middle reduction in red. Realization 2 interprets the tied F in the bass more literally, underscoring the connection for a complete octave ascent in the bass while underplaying the tonic harmony at measure 3. [5.3] The contrasting realizations illustrate how an aural complement may enhance a graph and even provoke new ways of hearing a passage. While it is important to clarify that an audio rendering can only "simulate" a deeper structure, it may nonetheless provide a powerful aural metaphor. 6. An Animated Rendering: A Question of Perspective [6.1] A graphic analysis can vividly represent hierarchical processes in music. While a musical graph customarily takes the form of a static image on a flat page, it may richly evoke spatial qualities of proportion and perspective. The animated rendering shown here underscores the element of perspective implied in any hierarchical analysis. Though perhaps a bit whimsical, it challenges our assumption that a musical graph is necessarily a static image on a flat page. [6.2] Analysts have often displayed structural layers in a top-down reductive model. From a pragmatic point of view, it makes sense to put the musical foreground first, showing underlying layers of structure beneath it which are revealed through the process of reduction. David Beach's well-known analysis of this passage is rendered in this manner.(21) ============================== 21. Ibid. ============================== [6.3] We should hasten to clarify that this particular example represents three hierarchical layers--or more specifically, a passage in a composition, a metric reduction, and a middleground graph--and not a Schenkerian foreground, middleground and background. It does, nonetheless, serve to dramatize the element of spatial orientation we generally take for granted in layer analysis. Schenker's own graphs are generally rendered in a bottom-up model of compositional unfolding or "composing out" (*Auskomponierung*). This places the graphic reduction in the more privileged position, showing how the piece unfolds through elaboration and diminution of the fundamental structure. [6.4] The question of "top-down" or "bottom-up" is, in part, an ideological issue. The point to be made here is that it is also a question of perspective, deriving ultimately from the metaphorical representation of music through spatial imagery. [6.5] As Peter Westergaard rhymed in his "Geometries of Sound in Time": To show the pulls and tugs, to show tension we need--as Schenker found--a third dimension.(22) Another simulation offered here is in inspired by Westergaard's rendering, in which he skews Schenker's layers "as they might have been redrawn by F.-E. von Cube." Tracing a line through the *Schichten* from foreground to a single vanishing point, each now's a line, and all nows complete their journeys at a triad where they meet. [Example: koozin3.jpg] ============================== 22. Peter Westergaard sets Schenker's three levels for the first waltz in Brahms' Op. 31 in "Geometries of Sound in Time," read as the keynote address of the 1994 Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory in Tallahassee, Florida, printed in *Music Theory Spectrum* 18/1 (1996): 20-21. See Felix-Eberhard von Cube's three-dimensional renderings in *The Book of the Musical Artwork: An Interpretation of the Musical Theories of Heinrich Schenker.* Trans. and ed., David Neumeyer, George R. Boyd, and Scott Harris (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), 226 and 275. ============================== [6.6] In the future, computer environments may enable us to represent the spatial qualities of music in new ways. Rendering software for animated three-dimensional imaging is now available, but music theorists have yet to take full advantage of it to model musical structures. Perhaps one day we will visualize music through vivid three-dimensional renderings, virtually moving through layered environments as we explore musical processes. 7. Multimedia Rendering: Arcangelo Corelli, Trio Sonata, Op. 3, No. 2, Fourth Movement [7.1] This example demonstrates on-line delivery of synchronous high-resolution digitized images and audio. (Sound recording is used by permission of the Smithsonian Institution. The performers are Jaap Schroder and Marilyn McDonald, violins; Kenneth Slowik, cello; Konrad Junghanel, theorbo; James Weaver, organ. Score excerpt is used by permission of W. W. Norton.) [7.2] It is possible to help students begin to recognize linear structures without necessarily invoking Schenkerian terminology. The graphic overlay shows the linear/motivic framework projected through a recurring melodic pattern which ascends by step (as shown in blue) and returns downward (as shown in red). A fauxbourdon-like intervallic pattern based on the opening motive occurs at m. 8-10. An augmentation of the ascending gesture is used to form the closing phrase of the first section, m. 15-19. [Example: koozin4.jpg] [7.3] A format employing score, audio, and graphic overlay can inform analyses while minimally intruding on the musical sources under study. It can be particularly useful in helping students understand how abstract theoretical concepts relate to their experience of a musical work. 8. Multimedia Rendering: Schumann, Humming Song (*Traellerliedchen*) [8.1] This analysis of a complete piece integrates analytical graphs, a MIDI audio performance, and a complete "scrolling" score. The ternary piece consists of three harmonically closed sections. The subtle differences distinguishing each section are significant. No perfect authentic cadence is heard until the end of the "B" section, underscoring the large-scale motion to the dominant. [Example: koozin5.jpg] [8.2] The motivic repetition highlighted in red marks the climax of the middle section and the return of the "A" section. The highpoint in the middle section recalls the opening notes of the piece, forming a local subdominant elaboration of the dominant. The climax near the end of the piece, highlighted in blue, is decidedly more dissonant by comparison, due to the clashing dominant pedal tone. [8.3] At first glance, it might seem that the opening melody forms an unfolding of the tonic elaborated through passing tones, as shown in the Alternative View. But this interpretation (a), would suggest a misreading of the intervallic pattern in tenths in the outer voices (b). The opening gesture is better viewed as a nested neighbor motion (c). The linear intervallic pattern in tenths persists throughout, providing a powerful element of continuity in the piece. With remarkable economy, the bass voice goes its own way only to direct motion toward cadences. 9. Conclusion [9.1] Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the formation of metaphors is a fundamental human impulse: What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified.(23) Nietzsche asserts that language is fundamentally metaphorical. In the cognitive hierarchy, visual metaphors are not mere illustrations of verbal expressions, but are more deeply fundamental. It is not surprising, then, that a Schenkerian graph speaks louder that words. As Nicholas Cook writes, "A Schenkerian analysis is not a scientific explanation, but a metaphorical one; it is not an account of how people actually hear pieces of music, but a way of imagining them."(24) ============================== 23. Friedrich Nietzsche. "On Truth and Falsity in their Extramoral Sense" in *Essays on Metaphor,* Warren Shibles, ed. (Whitewater, Wisconsin: The Language Press, 1972), p. 5, reprinted from *The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche,* Vol. 2, trans. by M. A. Mugge (New York: Russell and Russel, 1964). 24. Nicholas Cook. Music, *Imagination, and Culture* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 4. ============================== [9.2] In discussing Cook's contributions, Lawrence M. Zbikowski writes in a recent *Music Theory Online* article that "A musical culture is, in essence, a repertoire of means for imagining music."(25) This repertoire of cultural metaphors is in constant flux, as the images pervading a culture evolve. The metaphors through which we imagine music are unavoidably shaped by modern technology. Computer- generated visual images and digitized sounds are as much at home in the academy as they are in the mass media, providing super-realistic documentation to lend authority to scholarly discourse. As digital media becomes more ubiquitous, it becomes increasingly important that we as music theorists study how the technological devices we use shape our analytical and pedagogical work. ============================== 25. Lawrence M. Zbikowski. "Metaphor and Music Theory: Reflections from Cognitive Science" *Music Theory Online* 4/1 (1998), part 2.2. ============================== [9.3] To study how current technologies may beneficially impact the content and reception of theoretical discourse, we should explore ways to expand the metaphors through which we explain music. Pedagogically, multimedia designs are attractive because they enable us to present complex aural/visual ideas vividly. Concepts that might be cumbersome to explain verbally are often elucidated quickly through examples that can be seen and heard. It should not be tacitly assumed, however, that such applications of technology are "transparent" or that digital enhancements are automatically a good thing. For example, the digital appropriation of a musical "sound clip," score image, or other musical artifact is in some ways a subversive act which warrants thoughtful consideration. There is always danger of trivializing the very thing we wish to explore in all its depth. On-line academic forums are likely to become increasingly important in this regard, since they challenge scholars to use new media effectively to communicate substantive ideas. As serious musical analyses in digital formats become more pervasive in the scholarly community, they will provide models which can beneficially impact the quality of Internet- based instruction in the music curriculum. [9.4] The ability to hypertextually link sounds, graphic analyses, and commentaries may provide powerful pedagogical tools and lead to open analyses which interrelate multiple analytical perspectives. But a word of caution is appropriate here as well. A fine Schenkerian analysis, like a fine piece of music, is rich in its layers of meaning. Embedded messages in an "interactive" rendering might elucidate meaning but could also detract from the communication of subtleties in a musical graph. In Schenkerian studies, there is also the danger of placing too much emphasis on the graph itself and its syntactical components, while neglecting the theoretical concepts on which it is based. Multimedia renderings may help students understand Schenkerian ideas and provide theorists with new formats for modeling music, but renderings in new media will not serve as a substitute for primary readings in Schenkerian literature. [9.5] The examples provided in this study, while limited in scope, have been designed to go beyond the demonstration of multimedia as an useful presentation tool for teaching. The intention has been to scratch the surface of what may come in the future as theorists express Schenkerian concepts using the tools of multimedia. Through the incorporation of sound, hypertextually linked images and texts, and real-time simulation, current multimedia technology enables us to expand the ways we model our imaginings of musical works. This may lead to new conceptions about musical structure and the process through which we visualize and communicate musical ideas. ====================== 2. Reviews AUTHOR: Buhler, James TITLE: Review of Roger Scruton, *The Aesthetics of Music* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). KEYWORDS: Scruton, aesthetics, criticism, analysis James Buhler Carleton College Music Department 1 North College Street Northfield, MN jbuhler@carleton.edu [1] Roger Scruton's *Aesthetics of Music* is a smart, witty, and eloquent book, full of passionate and persuasive argument. An articulate conservative political philosopher closely associated with Margaret Thatcher, Scruton is also an amateur composer, who obviously cares deeply about music and is much concerned with diagnosing the reasons for the decline of musical culture in recent years. Scruton's aesthetics draws heavily on German idealism, which he couples with a thorough knowledge of analytic philosophy and a surprisingly firm grasp of contemporary music theory (Schenker, Lerdahl and Jackendoff). The result is a rare thing: a book on music aesthetics where both philosophical and musical issues are handled deftly and thoughtfully. [2] Following the tradition of idealist aesthetics, Scruton grounds his thinking about music on a distinction between sound and tone. Without tone, he says, music cannot exist. Tone, moreover, cannot be reduced to sound; instead tone arises from something we hear in sound when we hear it as music. "A tone is a sound which exists within a musical 'field of force.' This field of force is something we hear, when hearing tones" (p. 17). Scruton is surely correct to emphasize that music, unlike sound, is an "intentional object of musical perception" (p. 78). Consequently when discussing music, we must, Scruton argues, be careful not to commit the error of mistaking sound for music, that is, the material substrate for the ideal object, even though the temptation will be great given the material substantiality of sound. "When we hear music, we do not hear sound only; we hear something in sound, something which moves with a force of its own" (pp. 19-20). What precisely is this something? [3] Tone, according to Scruton, is wholly the product of imagination; it seems to occupy a place in some imaginary musical space. Tone is not material, then, but idea. Scruton argues that precisely when we must imagine a representational excess over the material world, "metaphors seem indispensable . . . because we are using them to describe something other than the material world; in particular because we are attempting to describe how the world seems, from the point of view of active imagination" (p. 91). The experience of sound as music depends radically on our imagining the sound as something other than mere sound. "Perception is a natural epistemological power of the organism, which depends on no social context for its exercise. The musical experience, however, is not merely perceptual. It is founded in metaphor, arising when unreal movement is heard in imaginary space. Such an experience occurs only within a musical culture, in which traditions of performance and listening shape our expectations" (p. 239). Metaphor is essential rather than contingent to musical experience, for it is the means of discursively mapping an imaginary musical space. The metaphor cannot be eliminated because music is not a natural type, not wholly contained in the material object. "The indispensable metaphor occurs when the way the world seems depends upon an imaginative involvement with it, rather than on our ordinary cognitive goals. And this is the case when we listen to music" (p. 92). Music then is something radically human, "the intentional object of an experience that only rational beings can have" (p. 96). Sound itself is always marked by a deficiency that only the metaphors of music can redeem. "It is true that the terms used to describe music refer to material sounds. But they refer to them under a description that no material sound can satisfy. Sounds do not move as music moves. . . . Nor are they organized in a spatial way, nor do they rise and fall. Yet this is how we hear them when we hear them as music" (p. 93). This means that "metaphor cannot be eliminated from the description of music, because it defines the intentional object of the musical experience. Take the metaphor away, and you cease to describe the experience of music" (p. 92). Consequently, forging metaphorical descriptions of music is never an extra-musical activity but a fundamental aspect of understanding sound as music: without metaphor there can be no musical descriptions but only descriptions of sound. "Metaphor," Scruton insists, "describes exactly what we hear, when we hear sounds as music" (p. 96). [4] The central metaphor for describing our experience of music, Scruton argues, is tonality. Tonality is the name we give the fictional world of music, the metaphorical order we hear in sound when we hear sound as music. One reason the metaphors of tonality are so crucial, Scruton says, is that they permit us to experience music spatially. "Tonal harmony enables us to hear simultaneous musical events as similar or varied; as moving together through a common intentional space; as creating tension and resolution, attraction and repulsion; as answering, commenting upon, and questioning each other; as moving with the force and logic of gestures which are mutually aware, and mutually accommodating. Triadic tonality is not a system of conventions, arbitrarily devised and imposed by fiat; it is the life-giving air which the voices breathe, and through which they move in dance-like discipline" (p. 271). Tonality permits us to experience music as a "journey through tonal space" (p. 286). Music that lacks tonality, he says, also lacks the "paradigm of musical organization" that is tonality. Non-tonal music, in other words, suffers from a poverty of organizing metaphors, and Scruton holds this lack more responsible for the difficulties nontonal music has had in finding and sustaining an audience than anything in the actual sound of the music. Moreover, he notes that "attempts to depart from tonality, or to discard it entirely, seem only to confirm its authority over the musical ear" (p. 239). To the extent that nontonal music remains indebted to tonal metaphors, its organization will seem anti-tonal, that is, a nihilistic negation of tonality, whose impulses will continue to be acutely felt as tonal absences. [5] Scruton directs his critique of nontonal music primarily against serialism, which, he says, determines the sonic order of pitches rather than the musical order of tones. Serialism, in other words, orders sound rather than tones, which means that serialism is fundamentally incapable of displacing the centrality of the tonal metaphor. Serialism in this view becomes a kind of musical utopia that cannot succeed because in its enthusiasm to order the material properties of sound, it forgets about tone, which consequently has only an accidental appearance in the music. What is heard in a serial piece, Scruton asserts, is often anything but the serial organization. Serial music often "[elicits] the ghost of tonal order" (p. 296), and we are often "hearing against the intellectual structure, and incorporating what we hear into tonal or quasi-tonal categories" (p. 94). Scruton is no doubt correct that the serial organization is often of little apparent musical import, though he perhaps indicts serialism too quickly on this count. For Scruton, the lack of connection between musical and intellectual organization of serial music counts as a fatal flaw because it suggests that serialism's utopian project, a complete transformation of musical listening, has failed. "The purpose of serial organization was precisely to replace the order of tonality with an order which, by treating the twelve tones permutationally, would confer equality on each of them. In other words, it was to endow the musical surface with a new heard order." (p. 296). But this statement of the utopian intentions of nontonal composition is not quite persuasive, for it ignores the crucial critical function of this utopia as an image of the not-yet, of what might be otherwise. Equally plausibly, it could be asserted that the purpose of serial organization was not so much to assert a novel organization of the musical surface as to endow the musical surface with a systemic resistance to tonal order. When Boulez polemically declared that Schoenberg was dead, he did not emphasize the extension of serial procedures as opening up a new order of hearing. Rather he argued that total serialism offered a means to avoid uncritically reproducing and affirming the old musical order. Boulez, in other words, conceived total serialism as the ultimate extension of the critique of tonality that Schoenberg had, in Boulez's opinion, rather too timidly initiated. [6] By withholding the organizing metaphors tonality grants to music, nontonal music registers a self-reflective ambivalence toward images of social order implicit in tonality. Scruton, too, unwittingly concurs with this line of argument: "Atonal music in the theatre expresses states of mind that are always partly negative: every lyrical passage is shot through with anxiety; each loving gesture is also a gesture of betrayal; there is no affirmation of life that does not mask a will to destroy it. It as though anxiety were programmed into this music and can never be wholly eliminated" (p. 306). What Scruton especially disproves is the ambivalence, the lack of clear affirmation. Nontonal musics asks, as it were, whether social order is possible without coercion. Unlike tonality, which calls forth an image of social harmony, as though it were actually present in the world, nontonal music does not affirm this image. In this way, nontonal music understood as a critique of tonality reveals a moment of ideological delusion in tonality, that is, tonality as false utopia. Scruton cannot acknowledge this possibility except obliquely, when he hears in Berg or Stravinsky, for instance, "a reading of serialism against itself, so that each harmony and motif contains a kind of pointer towards a distant tonal center" (p. 307). Even in these instances he transmutes this effective serialism into a kind of nostalgia for a lost tonal order rather than interpreting it as a more determined critique of tonal thinking. Yet such music gains its musical power precisely through a critical orientation toward tonality, not because it returns to tonality nostalgically and unproblematically. [7] If Scruton remains unconvinced by the product of nontonal composition, he finds the products of mass culture equally troubling, and he directs especially nasty barbs at REM, Nirvana, and heavy metal. Repeating a tired motif of cultural criticism, he ridicules the substitution of rhythm by beat in popular music and bemoans the "decline of popular culture" (p. 157), which he understands as having devolved from the cheerfulness of jazz at the beginning of the century to the nihilistic despair of heavy metal and grunge today. "Music soothes, cheers, pacifies; it threatens the power of the monsters, who live by violence and lawlessness. Those lonely, antinomian beings are astounded by music, which speaks of another order of being....It is this very order that is threatened by the monsters of popular culture. Much modern pop is cheerless, and meant to be cheerless. But much of it is also a kind of negation of music, a dehumanizing of the spirit of song" (p. 504). Such complaints about popular culture are not confined to political conservatives, of course, and Scruton is aware that his perspective on mass culture is not far removed from Adorno, from whom he remains curiously anxious to distance himself. Thus, Scruton claims a qualitative difference between Adorno's mass culture and the mass culture of today and detects "something hasty and undiscriminating in [Adorno's] dismissal of an entire subculture, as though we could not distinguish the cheerful and life-enhancing sound of Louis Armstrong from the monsters of Heavy Metal" (p. 480). Yet Scruton too hardly prove capable of making distinctions in mass culture today--it is all "sentimental and idolatrous" (p. 506). [8] Scruton is more convincing when attempting to refute "the idea of mass culture as a 'bourgeois' product, and of modernism as the only available answer to it" (p. 469). His intriguing thesis here is that mass culture is not the product of the bourgeoisie but of democratic culture. "If you ask yourself seriously, when the transformation of popular music began, the answer would surely be in the twentieth century, with the reduction of the jazz and blues tradition to a set of repeatable melodic and harmonic formulae, held together by a continuous 'beat.' This was not a bourgeois phenomenon at all, and had less to do with the triumph of capitalism than with the triumph of democracy" (pp. 469-70). Scruton, as usual, draws too fine a distinction here, for it is simply implausible that "the masses themselves produced this music" (p. 470), as if the productive capacities paid for by the bourgeoisie played no mediating role in the shift to a consumer-oriented culture. Without the phonograph, radio, film and, later, television--all reproductive technologies requiring capital investment far beyond the means (and so control) of the masses, no matter what the extent of their representation within the images--mass culture could not exist. And one of the characteristics of mass reproductive media is that they supply not only a product but also help create demand for it. "Spontaneous" artistic production does not generally occur in mass culture because there is simply too much money at stake. The maxim of the swing band--no practicing on the bandstand--is the general condition of cultural production in the era of mechanical reproduction. [9] Still, Scruton is correct to emphasize the impact that the "collapse of bourgeois culture" (p. 470) and its replacement by "democratic culture" have had on musical life in the present century. And Scruton, no less than Adorno, is forced into cultural retreat if not actual hibernation in the face of consumer capitalism. "High culture," Scruton writes, "is now the province of a minority," as if this has not always been the case; "those with ears must guard them from the white noise of modern life; and exercise them only in private, or among those like-minded listeners whom they encounter in the concert hall" (p. 470). Culture, Scruton argues, is in decline because the bourgeoisie are in decline. "It is only in certain cultural conditions--those which the bourgeois order most readily promotes, by promoting the prosperity which is the root of leisure--that this flowering of the aesthetic impulse can occur" (p. 478). Scruton's nostalgia for the old cultural order blocks critical reflection on it, something Adorno, for all his hostility toward mass culture and his reverence for traditional bourgeois culture, never forgets: namely, what are the conditions of possibility of leisure time? Or, to put it more bluntly, Who pays for it? [10] Yet it is more productive to read Scruton charitably here as trying to open a space between the two dominant elements of modernist culture, and, to his great credit, he struggles mightily against a mandarin impulse to write off all of democratic culture. Mass culture in his view is essentially a product of American cultural hegemony. Consequently, he is inclined to treat it as a somewhat unruly step-child of European bourgeois culture. The category of taste serves to distinguish these cultures: "Democratic culture presses us to accept every taste that does no obvious damage. A teacher who criticizes the music of his pupils, or who tries to cultivate, in the place of it, a love for the classics, will be attacked as 'judgemental.' In matters of aesthetic taste, no adverse judgement is permitted, save judgement of the adverse judge. This attitude has helped America to survive and flourish in a world of change. An aristocratic culture has an instinctive aversion to what is vulgar, sentimental, or commonplace; not so a democratic culture, which sacrifices good taste to popularity, and places no obstacles whatsoever before the ordinary citizen in his quest for a taste of his own" (p. 497). Although his sympathies clearly lie on the side of bourgeois, aristocratic taste, Scruton does occasionally describe democratic culture in almost heroic terms, as the triumph of freedom, though his celebratory tone in such instances is always tempered: democratic freedom is not a freedom he himself can fully embrace, nor really even comprehend: "What I have described is not the decadence of popular music, but its final freedom--its breaking-loose from the channel of taste, into the great ocean of equality, where the writ of taste no longer runs. The postmodern world denatures music only because it denatures everything, in order that each individual might have his chance to buy and sell. Popular music ceases to be music, just as sexual love ceases to be love: nothing less than this is required by the new form of life--the fear, inadequacy, and anger that attend the attempt to live without the blessing of the dead--is itself expressed by the popular culture and reabsorbed by it. The cheerlessness of so much pop music is therapeutic: an acknowledgement that we live outside society, that we too, in granting equality to every human type, have become monsters, and that a monster is an OK thing to be" (pp. 504-05). Scruton, of course, cannot sustain this thought and I suspect he stated it even here with tongue placed firmly in cheek. For Scruton's larger purpose is to fight for the soul of American culture, to instill in it an image of culture as something better than what is, and to promote taste as something worth having. This goal helps make sense of the strange ending of the book where instead of resolution we find a piling up of difficult problems that follow from the collapse of high modernist culture. [11] The difficulty of Scruton's conclusion can perhaps be best seen in his discussion of sentimentality. Sentimentality, he writes, "is a vice. Not only does it place someone at a distance from reality; it also involves an overvaluation of the self at the cost of others. The other person enters the orbit of the sentimentalist as an excuse for emotion, rather than an object of it. The other is deprived of his objectivity as a person, and absorbed into the subjectivity of the sentimentalist. The other becomes, in a very real sense, a means to emotion, rather than an end in himself" (p. 486). The problem with sentimentality, then, is that it instrumentalizes the other. To his credit, Scruton realizes that popular and high art are both often sentimental. "We are all to some extent sentimentalists" (p. 488). Sentimentality in Scruton's reading turns out to be a kind of defense against the (post)modern world. It allows us to surmount intractable difficulties by saying: "let us pretend" (p. 488). Yet his account of sentimentality leaves him in something of a quandary. On the one hand, he cannot really wish directly for the restoration of bourgeois culture without lapsing into sentimental nostalgia for the lost order. But on the other hand, he cannot endorse the "faint sarcastic smile" (p. 492), the cynical reason, the return to "'tonality' in inverted commas" (p. 490) in neo-romanticism because in the awareness that comes with quotation, a crucial element of innocence is lost. Composition in inverted commas, he says, instrumentalizes emotion, becomes another instantiation of sentimentality. Tonality is no longer possible when it is heard as "tonality." "The fact that an innocent stance towards the world is unavailable, makes music uncomposable. That which music expresses has gone from the world; and so music too must go" (p. 491). Scruton attributes this "death" of music to the triumph of democratic culture and the leveling of taste that goes with it, but it is equally possible that such loss of faith, as it might be called, has as much to do with a general reflection of democratic culture on its own conditions of possibility. "Tonality" registers, as it were, the necessity and impossibility of our experience of the modern world: that we must negotiate that world using organizing metaphors that we know at some level to be ideologically suspect and false, but that also remain useful and at some level even indispensable. [12] Scruton, however, can see only how the pragmatism of democratic culture instrumentalizes musical thought and erodes standards of judgment and taste, so he holds out hope that a new bourgeoisie will emerge that will be able to "restore" tonal thinking without instrumentalization, sentimentality, or nostalgia. He claims to detect signs that "a new bourgeois order is emerging--one which does not feel the force of modernism's bleak alternatives. It is a fragile audience: its ears muddied by pop music, its body starved of rhythm, its soul untutored in religious hope. Yet it has encountered the old musical culture and been inspired by it" (p. 507). It would be easy to ridicule this thought as the feeble hope of a profoundly conservative and nostalgic man--whatever this "new bourgeois" audience may be it is clearly happier in a Broadway theater listening to the insipid melodies of Andrew Lloyd Weber than in the concert hall--but I find it is more productive to interpret Scruton's statement as expressing a genuine desire to see democratic culture transcend itself, to become something more than what it currently is. [13] This brings me to a final point and that has to do with the critical interpretation of music, something about which Scruton offers many important insights. While Scruton is largely dismissive of authors such as Adorno and McClary who seek among other things to understand the way ideology becomes manifest as music, their complaints against the narrowness and the illusion of "value-free" analysis are largely accepted by Scruton. Indeed, for Scruton, hearing music as music requires the "background assumption" of musical value. Consequently, Scruton has as little patience for a "value-free" analysis of music as has Adorno or McClary: "A willed neutrality is a kind of judgement, and critics with a political judgement are rightly suspicious of scholarship which forbids us to ask the pressing questions--questions concerning meaning and value--which trouble our listening habits" (p. 365). Like Adorno or McClary, Scruton pushes description into evaluation, suggesting that the language with which we describe music cannot be separated from our evaluation of it because the whole point of musical description is to get the reader to hear the music as the author does. "Aesthetic description is an immovable part of critical practice, and can be distinguished from aesthetic evaluation only with difficulty, and only at the risk of isolating the evaluative judgement and emptying it of content. The good critic is not the one who ranks works of music in an order of merit, or assigns credit marks to each, but the one who alters our perception of the thing we hear, so as to persuade us of his judgement" (pp. 372-3). In terms of analysis, Scruton recommends seeking out not deep structures, which explain surface structures, but latent structures, which actually form part of the surface. Such structures, Scruton argues, "are structures we can be brought to hear in the surface, as we broaden our musical understanding, and begin to notice relations that are more subtle than those which immediately strike the ear. An analysis of latent structure is also a piece of music criticism. For it aims to bring into salience what is important in the music, and to lead us to hear with greater understanding. It effects an adjustment in the intentional object--and could indeed be compared to the work of psychoanalysis, in bringing into consciousness the full matter of the musical response" (p. 425). The convergence between critics such as Adorno or McClary, whose politics he despises, and his own position, is nowhere stronger than in his attempt to sharpen the critical dimension of analysis: "Analysis makes sense, therefore, only as a prelude to criticism. Criticism begins and ends in an elaborate act of ostention. The critic asks us to notice certain things, and to hear them differently" (p. 428). Ideological critics, Scruton says, act responsibly to the extent that they seek to transform our hearing, to the extent that they make us hear differently rather than simply imposing an ideological reading on the material whether it fits or not. Yet Scruton's complaint really amounts to nothing more than pointing out that poor ideological criticism exists--certainly nothing to be surprised about. [14] Scruton also raises a more substantial claim against ideological criticism, that it presumes "an untenable theory of history" (p. 430), namely, Marxism. While Scruton is certainly justified in pursuing this argument, he conveniently uses it as cover for the fact that his own conservative theory of history is hardly more tenable. If Scruton finds Marxian accounts of history implausible, as having been left in the dustbin of history, then it is also true that his own ideologically conservative historiography is equally bankrupt. What then are we to make of this situation? A pervasive skepticism towards the ultimate truth of the large organizing metanarratives that drive thought defines the peculiar quality of the postmodern condition, a kind of living in quotation marks: it is difficult to accept any grand theory as anything more than a working hypothesis that is evaluated pragmatically, less in terms of its general truth than in the particular insights that it allows. If Scruton stands on no firmer intellectual ground than those he labels Marxists, then this perhaps accounts for why the careful reasoning and measured tone he otherwise employs in the book always gives way to invective whenever he confronts political criticism with which he disagrees. "Some of 'culture' is the unintended by-product of social order; but much of it, including art, is freely intended. And that which is freely intended is always more than ideology, even if it is also ideology. A work of art may express and endorse the social conditions which gave rise to it; but it may also question them" (p. 430). Few ideological critics would disagree with Scruton's truism so far as it goes, certainly not Adorno, the implied target. Indeed, the idea of a critical function for art, the questioning of social conditions through artistic autonomy, is at the heart of Adorno's defense of great art. But Scruton continues: "and if it is a great work of art, it will transcend [the social conditions] entirely to see into the human heart. Its meaning as ideology may be what interests us least, when we see it as a work of art" (p. 430). Even granting that ideology is indeed what interests us least when we hear music as music, it might still prove instructive to inquire into this disinterest--its conditions of possibility, say--to understand how music can be heard as music in the first place, and to measure the social interest of hearing with disinterest. Art, too, bears a social cost. Leisure, as Scruton knows, lies near the heart of the matter, but he remains blind to the full ramifications of the category, in particular, that the distribution of leisure time is not equitable. [15] Here, then, we return to Scruton's initial premise, the division of tone and sound, which had at first seemed so plausible and intuitively correct. In fact, this division is not so innocent, which does not mean that we can do without it. While problematic, the premise remains absolutely indispensable. Scruton is certainly right that music does not exist without tone; when we listen to sound as music, we all necessarily become idealists. Yet just because we must hear tone in sound if we are to hear sound as music does not mean that we should take the separation of sound and tone as an unproblematic given. Instead, the aesthetics of music needs to be pushed to self-reflection on the point so that the irreducible idealism of hearing music in sound is disenchanted. With self-reflection, idealism turns into its opposite, revealing the social conditions that sustain it, indeed that make it possible in the first place. AUTHOR: Temperley, David TITLE: Review of *Musical Languages* (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997) KEYWORDS: music, language, phonology, syntax, semantics, metaphor David Temperley Ohio State University School of Music Weigel Hall Columbus, OH 43210 temperley.1@osu.edu ABSTRACT: Joseph Swain's *Musical Languages* is a systematic comparison of music and language, examining possible musical parallels to linguistic concepts such as phonology, syntax, meaning and metaphor, and also comparing music and language in terms of the role of context and the nature of historical change. *Musical Languages* is open-minded, cogent, and full of interesting ideas. Some of the parallels drawn between music and language seem overstated, while some differences are exaggerated; and some of Swain's positions, though quite reasonable, are not as well-defended as they could be. [1.1] On cursory inspection, the book that Joseph Swain's *Musical Languages* brings to mind most readily is Leonard Bernstein's *The Unanswered Question*. *The Unanswered Question*, based on six lectures Bernstein gave at Harvard in 1973, is an ambitious and all-embracing attempt to explain music in linguistic terms. Bernstein argues for profound musical parallels to the linguistic levels of phonology, syntax, and semantics (these being the topics of the first three lectures), and finds analogs to many other linguistic phenomena along the way: phonemes, morphemes, parts of speech (nouns, verbs, and adjectives), syntactic transformations (deletion, negation and interrogation), rhetorical devices (alliteration and chiasmus), and metaphor, among others. Like Bernstein, Swain begins with three chapters on phonology, syntax and semantics; and the question Swain poses, in his first sentence, as the underlying concern of his book--"How is music like language, and so what if it is?"--might have served equally well for Bernstein's. [1.2] This resemblance between Swain's book and Bernstein's is probably unfortunate. *The Unanswered Question* has not been well-received in scholarly musical circles; the relatively few references to it that can be found are mostly derisory.(1) And in truth, Bernstein's book is an extremely problematic one. It comes across as a prolonged brainstorm, in which Bernstein throws out a series of superficial parallels between music and language, but rarely stops to consider whether they really hold up. (His insistence on viewing motivic relationships as "Chomskian transformations" is one especially problematic example.) Bernstein seems interested only in how music is like language, not how it isn't; and this gives the book a very one-sided, agenda-driven feel. But prospective readers of *Musical Languages* should not be deterred by fears of *The Unanswered Question II*. Indeed, the great virtue of Swain's book is that it is *not* agenda-driven in this way. *Musical Languages*, as Swain's first sentence suggests, is indeed a systematic study of the parallels between music and language; Swain considers many of the same parallels that Bernstein does, and many others besides (and here he has the advantage of 25 years of research in both music and linguistics since Bernstein's book). But at every step he carefully considers whether the parallel can be sustained; and in many cases he concludes that it cannot, or at least not without serious qualification. ======================================================= 1. See, for example, Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, *A Generative Theory of Tonal Music* (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 329; and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, *Music and Discourse*, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 112. ======================================================= [1.3] If undertaken open-mindedly, as Swain's book is, a study of the parallels between music and language is an extremely worthwhile and timely endeavor. For, despite general (and justified) skepticism about glib claims that "music is a language", the fact is that analogies between music and language are a vital part of current musical thought and discourse, perhaps more so than they have ever been. Recent examples include Cooper and Meyer's theory of rhythm, based on prosody; the semiotic work of Nattiez and others; the "generative" theory of Lerdahl and Jackendoff, inspired in part by theoretical linguistics; and the work of Newcomb, Maus and others in the area of musical narrative.(2) Language has proven to be an immensely rich source of ideas for scholars of music, and there is every reason to continue to look to it for inspiration. ======================================================= 2. Grosvener Cooper and Leonard Meyer, *The Rhythmic Structure of Music* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Nattiez, *Music and Discourse*; Lerdahl and Jackendoff, *Generative Theory of Tonal Music*; Anthony Newcomb, "Schumann and Late Eighteenth- Century Narrative Strategies," *19th-Century Music* 11.2 (1987), 164-74; and Fred Maus, "Music as Narrative," *Indiana Theory Review* 12.1 (1991), 1-34. ======================================================= [1.4] Parallels between music and language are of particular interest from the point of view of music cognition. It is generally assumed that music takes advantage of capacities of the brain for certain kinds of perceptual and cognitive processing. The question then arises, where do these capacities come from? One possibility is that they evolved in the service of music itself; another possibility is that they originally arose for other purposes, and were borrowed by music at a later stage. Among the obvious candidates for these "other purposes" is language. For example, recent research has shown that intonation patterns in speech play a vital role in communication with infants (who of course have not yet mastered other aspects of language);(3) this raises the possibility that our great sensitivity to pitch later in life, which has little obvious practical value, may be a remnant of an important infant ability. In this way, finding parallels between music and language can shed light on the cognitive basis of music. Where parallels with language are not found, that is interesting too, because it means we have to look elsewhere in explaining music's cognitive origins. ======================================================= 3. Sandra Trehub, Laurel Trainor, and Anna Unyk, "Music and Speech Processing in the First Year of Life," in *Advances in Child Development and Behavior*, vol. 24, ed. Hayne W. Reese, (San Diego: Academic Press, 1993), 1-35. ======================================================= * * * [2.1] *Musical Languages* is organized as a series of essays examining different aspects of the music-language analogy; the essays are largely self-contained, and are best considered one by one. It should be noted that the book is chiefly concerned with Western art music of the "common-practice" period, although passing references are made to other kinds of music. [2.2] Swain begins by exploring the parallels between music and language at the phonological level. Both linguistic and musical systems are built from a small inventory of discrete, categorically perceived units: phonemes in language, pitches in music. In both cases, these units are perceived instantly and automatically, though they are by no means cleanly distinguished in the acoustical signal. However, the parallel is not as straightforward as it first seems: are notes of the same pitch-class in different octaves the same "phoneme," or different? What about two notes of the same pitch but different timbre (violin versus clarinet)--are these phonemically the same, despite the great musical importance that timbre may have? Swain tentatively proposes that pitch and rhythm are the essential phonemic properties of notes, while timbre is analogous to intonation and stress in language. Another issue Swain raises is "arbitrariness." Phonemes in language are generally held to be "logical primitives," possessing no meaning on their own. In the case of notes, however, Swain finds this doubtful; surely the timbre of a note is a meaningful aspect. (Using timbre as an example is a bit confusing here, since Swain had earlier suggested that timbre was not a phonemic property of notes.) But even the arbitrariness of phonemes in language is open to question, he argues; for example, most words beginning with /sl/ are pejorative, suggesting that phonemes themselves may carry subtle meanings. [2.3] There is much insight and good sense in Swain's discussion of phonological parallels between music and language. However, there is more to be said about this issue, particularly the question of arbitrariness. [2.4] In the most general sense, arbitrariness has to do with the relation between the form of something and its functional properties (by this I simply mean the properties of the thing that relate to its function in the larger system). The functional properties of a word in a language are semantic (it has a meaning) and syntactic (it is a member of some syntactic category: noun, verb, etc.). Words are comprised of phonemes; however, you cannot predict, or figure out from general principles, the semantic or syntactic properties of a word from the phonemes that make it up. (Strictly speaking, we should speak about morphemes here, not words, a morpheme being an indivisible unit of meaning; for example, the word "speaking" has two morphemes, "speak" and "ing." However, words often correspond to morphemes; thus speaking of words instead of morphemes, as Swain himself does, seems to be a reasonable oversimplification.) One could imagine a language where phonemes themselves had meanings--/s/ meant "animate object", /p/ meant "large", etc.--and the meaning of a word arose from the meanings of its phonemes; but that is clearly not the case, at least in English. It is true, as Swain points out, that there are a few cases where phonemes appear to be correlated with semantic properties, such as /sl/; but these are exceptional curiosities. From a computational point of view--that is, from the point of view of the workings of a system (human or artificial) that uses language--what this means is that the properties of words cannot be figured out as they are heard, but must simply be stored in some kind of giant "mental lexicon." This is the essence of arbitrariness. While the meaning of a word is arbitrary, the meaning of a sentence is not; it arises in a principled way from the words that comprise it. Hence we can generally figure out the meaning of a sentence we have not heard before, but not, generally, new words (without the benefit of context). (Another useful concept from linguistics here is "productivity": phonemes are not generally used productively, in that they cannot normally be combined to form novel words, whereas words can be used productively to form novel sentences.) [2.5] Now consider the relation of notes to phonemes. Let us assume, for the moment, that pitch is the sole phonemic property of notes; every note is an instance of a pitch, just as every occurrence of a phoneme is an instance of that phoneme. Just as phonemes combine to make words, notes can be combined--to make a motive, for example. Motives then have properties of certain kinds, just as words do. (Let us ignore, for now, whether these properties are best considered syntactic or semantic.) For example, a motive has a certain contour and certain harmonic and tonal implications, among other things. However, these properties of a motive are not arbitrary; they follow in a rule-governed way from the pitches it contains. The proof of this is that we are generally able to understand new motives--to recognize their tonal (and other) properties--that we have not heard before. This, then, is a crucial difference between pitches and phonemes that Swain does not mention. [2.6] This point has a further implication. Although words are comprised of phonemes, there is little reason to attribute syntactic or semantic properties directly to phonemes; we could only do so by listing all the words to which each phoneme contributed. But since the properties of a motive arise in a principled way from its pitches, there is more justification in that case for attributing properties to pitches themselves. Every motive that begins with D4 has an (at least potential) implication of a D harmony, and so on. Thus we might well say that D4 itself carries this implication. For this reason, one might argue that the proper counterpart to pitches is words, not phonemes. However, there is a difference here as well. The properties of pitches--for example, the harmonic implications of D4--are not arbitrary, but arise in a principled way from the acoustic form of pitches, specifically their heights. (One could imagine a musical language where the properties of pitches were arbitrary and had to be learned for each pitch, but this is clearly not the case.) In short, pitches are like words (and unlike phonemes) in having properties that give rise in a rule-governed way to the properties of larger units that contain them; but while the properties of words are themselves arbitrary, the properties of pitches are not. [2.7] None of this conflicts in any fundamental way with Swain's view of musical phonology. Swain is in fact inconclusive about whether notes are a satisfactory analog to phonemes, and if so, what properties of notes are phonemic. As noted earlier, Swain himself argues that a note may have "meaning" (the term "meaning" is problematic here; I would rather say that a note has properties which give rise in rule-governed ways to the properties of larger units that contain it). While Swain uses the example of timbre, my point is that even pitch is a "meaning"-ful property in this way (and rhythm as well, incidentally). In short, Swain does not seem to fully appreciate the non-arbitrariness of the relation between a motive's properties and the pitches that comprise it; at the same time, he understates the arbitrariness of this relation in the case of words and phonemes, by focusing on exceptional cases like /sl/. In this sense the pitch-phoneme analogy is somewhat more problematic than he acknowledges. * * * [3.1] Turning to syntax, Swain observes that the term is used quite widely among music theorists, though with little agreement or specificity as to its meaning; and the situation is not helped by the fact that linguists, too, often give rather vague definitions of syntax. (One recent survey defines syntax as the study of "the ways words can be combined to form phrases and sentences"(4).) Swain begins by presenting the idea of a syntactic system as one that generates all the well-formed utterances of a language; as he notes, this is not an idea with obvious applicability to music. He goes on to a penetrating discussion of the role syntax actually plays in language, and what musical analogs might be found for it. First, syntax "controls the flow of information." In languages, syntactic rules provide cues as to what word is coming next, allowing us to absorb the incoming stream of information more easily. In music, Swain suggests, syntactic rules (such as rules of harmony) serve a similar function, providing a hierarchical system for grouping notes together. (Here, the linguistic counterpart to notes seems to have shifted from phonemes to words. Swain probably should have drawn attention to this; as I argued above, however, words are in some ways a better parallel to notes than are phonemes.) This argument, though interesting, is not entirely convincing. It suggests that syntax is merely a way of increasing the comprehensibility of the information that is there; surely it is more than that. Swain's second argument, by contrast, is compelling. As he notes, syntactic structure in languages conveys vital information about the relations between words. "If the semantic aspects of content words express things, actions, and states in the world, the syntactic relations among those words convey the relations among those things, actions, and states" (p. 24). It is syntax that tells us, for example, that "the ball hit the boy" means something different from "the boy hit the ball." In this case, Swain argues, there is no real parallel in music. In music, the role of syntax is rather different: to regulate relations of tension and resolution. In discussions of a Josquin motet and a movement from Bach's Goldberg Variations, Swain shows how various kinds of tension--melodic, harmonic, textural, and metrical--contribute to the music's overall effect. ======================================================= 4. Andrew Radford, *Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1. ======================================================= [3.2] One problem here is that Swain is not very clear about what constitutes syntax in music. He tells us what it does--it allows the hierarchical grouping of events, and "mediates the relation of tension and resolution"--but not what it is. It appears that syntax is the structures that give rise to the kinds of hierarchical grouping and tension-resolution patterns that Swain discusses: harmonic structure, metrical structure, phrase structure, and contrapuntal structure (the grouping of events into lines), perhaps among others. (One might also consider motivic structure--the network of motivically related segments in a piece--to be an aspect of syntax, but Swain appears not to do so (p. 32); I will remain non-committal on this issue here.) I think Swain is right in locating musical syntax in these kinds of structures. A better account could be given, however, of why these structures are analogous to syntax in language. [3.3] As Swain notes, the essential role of syntax in language is in expressing the relations between words. In this way, syntactic processing can be seen as an intermediate stage between phonological processing (identitifying phonemes and words) and semantic processing (comprehending meaning). Consider the parallel of harmonic structure with linguistic syntax. A harmonic structure is formed from the notes of a piece; it then contributes in important ways to the piece's higher-level effects and implications (whether we call these "meanings" is beside the point for now). For example, a harmonic structure indicates patterns of tension and resolution, a sense of a journey through some kind of harmonic (and tonal) space, emotional connotations connected with major and minor and the like, and large-scale structural cues such as cadences; harmonic progressions may also have extramusical associations, for example, a Flamenco progression suggesting something Spanish. A similar argument could be made for other structures such as a meter. In both language and music, then, we begin with small, discrete units; from them, we generate intermediate structures; and from these, we form some kind of higher-level understanding. The basis for calling harmony and meter "syntax," by this view, is simply that they are intermediate structures between a lower phonological representation and a higher level of understanding. Now, there are a number of important differences between linguistic syntax and musical syntax, as I have defined it here. Harmony and meter would seem to be qualitatively quite different from linguistic syntax (at least as the latter is commonly understood in linguistics); one might argue also that while syntactic structures in language are simply a means to an end, those in music (whether "meaningful" or not) are really an end in themselves, contributing directly to the value and interest of a piece. The point is that the parallel does provide some basis, and I think a reasonable basis, for describing certain kinds of musical structure as "syntactic." [3.4] Swain's view of what the syntactic structures of music are--though not as clearly stated or well-defended as it could be--seems basically reasonable. Swain is right, also, that the main role of syntax in language--expressing the relationships between words--has no real counterpart in music. However, I am not persuaded by Swain's argument that the main role of musical syntax is to mediate patterns of tension and resolution. In my view, tension-resolution is only one among a number of higher-level effects arising from musical syntactic structures; I see no reason why it should be privileged over others. * * * [4.1] Swain's discussion of semantics begins with a conundrum. Music certainly seems to mean something. To deny this would be to claim that the way music is matched with text or dramatic action is unimportant--any music should be equally appropriate for any situation; and this is clearly not the case. On the other hand, there is such wide disagreement on exactly what pieces mean--for example, on the emotional connotations of a piece--that any meaning music might have seems quite different from the precise meaning of language. (I would take issue with Swain here. Is there really so much disagreement over musical meaning--emotional connotations, for example? If two listeners disagree over whether a passage expresses "sublime confidence," is it because they disagree about the meaning of the music, or the meaning of "sublime confidence"?) Swain proposes a way out of this dilemma in the concept of "semantic range." He notes that most words--even seemingly straightforward words like "floor"--have a wide range of possible meanings; the exact meaning intended is made clear by the context. In the same way, he argues, a musical gesture or idea has a range of possible meanings; when combined with a particular text or dramatic situation, its meaning becomes much more specific. Given its text, the music of "For Unto Us A Child Is Born" from Handel's *Messiah* connotes angels and triumph; given a different text, it could connote something else, but it could never connote grief and misery, because this is outside its semantic range. (Notice that the counterpart of words is back to motives again--although Swain makes the excellent point that motives are not discrete in the way that words are; whether something is an instance of a motive is a matter of more-or-less, not all-or-nothing. He might have pointed out also, that, whereas a linguistic message is usually clearly and exhaustively divided up into words, a musical message is often _not_ clearly segmented into motives; is it not always clear what constitutes a motive, and much music arguably does not involve motives at all. This is another way that words are more like notes than motives.) [4.2] The semantic range of a word or motive, then, is a permanent attribute which is used to narrow down its possible meanings in a given situation. The question is, how do people know what the semantic range of a word or motive is? Here again, the notion of arbitrariness is essential; and this time Swain is clearer about it, although still not as clear as he could be. The meanings (semantic ranges) of words are arbitrary, he notes, and this means that they must be learned, one by one, by demonstration or in some other way. The semantic ranges of musical motives are generally not arbitrary; this is why we are able to figure out the semantic range of a new motive that we haven't heard before. Presumably we do this with the aid of some general principles which govern the semantic ranges of musical motives. (These principles may themselves be conventional and arbitrary--for example that major is happy and minor is sad; but they are general principles nonetheless.) Swain seems to be aware of all this, but never quite says it. Interestingly, Swain points to one case--the leitmotif of Siegmund questioning Bruennhilde in Wagner's *Die Walkuere*--where the music does not seem to be particularly appropriate for the situation in any way; in this case, he suggests, the meaning of the motive is essentially arbitrary, since it does not follow the usual general principles. [4.3] Swain's "semantic range" idea is interesting and suggestive. However, he is somewhat unclear on the fundamental question of what musical meaning actually is. At times, he tends towards the view I expressed earlier: that meaning in music--or at least, the best analogy to meaning in music--is simply the higher-level effects of structures such as harmony. "The meaning of a syntactic event . . . is what the syntax creates, what effect on the understanding community of listeners it has, among other things" (p. 66); "how a composition creates effects in listeners is the beginning of meaning" (p. 69). As noted earlier, Swain sees tension and resolution as centrally important among these syntactic effects. Elsewhere, however, "meaning" seems to refer specifically to refer to extramusical references: leitmotifs, word painting, and the "topics" characteristic of classical-period music (fanfares and the like). "The meaning of a passage or a piece, while an important aspect of its character and identity, is hardly ever the single overwhelming factor in its success" (p. 68); here Swain is referring to extramusical meanings, as opposed to things like tension and resolution. Either definition could be defended, but there seems to be some inconsistency here. [4.4] One possible objection to attributing meaning to musical effects and implications is that they are not propositional. Swain seems concerned about this, arguing that while linguistic meaning is normally propositional, musical meaning (even the "extramusical" kind) hardly ever is. But is this really true? If we hear storm music in an opera, this surely expresses a proposition--"there is a storm coming"--just as surely as if a character came onstage and expressed the proposition in words; and doesn't the music of "For Unto Us A Child Is Born" express at least the proposition "Something joyful is happening"? As Swain points out, linguistic meaning is often not propositional either. He might have observed, further, that even when it is, it is often extremely vague and indeterminate. When Lennon and McCartney write, I give her all my love That's all I do And if you saw my love You'd love her too And I love her (5) the propositional content could hardly be fuzzier: who is speaking, who is being spoken about, what is the situation? Almost all that is being conveyed is "somebody loves somebody else"; and this much is arguably conveyed by the music itself. Any difference in propositional concreteness between music and language is surely only a matter of degree. ======================================================= 5. From the Beatles song, "And I Love Her." ======================================================= [4.5] Another issue in musical semantics concerns emotion: assuming that music relates to emotion in some way (and Swain clearly believes it does), what is the nature of this relation, and is it a kind of meaning? Swain treats this issue only in passing, though it has received much attention in music theory and aesthetics.(6) Despite these various caveats, I do not wish to seem overly negative about Swain's discussion of meaning. It is not necessary to give a precise definition of musical meaning to discuss it usefully and insightfully, as he shows. We should bear in mind, also, that there is nothing like an adequate, widely-accepted definition of "meaning" in language, covering all kinds of linguistic meaning from everyday conversation to poetry. In view of this, it is perhaps unfair to expect a conclusive answer as to whether music has meaning. For the most part, Swain's discussion of musical semantics is sensible, original, and convincing. ======================================================= 6. Authors who have explored this issue include Suzanne Langer, Leonard Meyer, and Peter Kivy. An excellent survey of work in this area is found in Malcolm Budd, *Music and the Emotions* (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). ======================================================= * * * [5.1] Having presented the three levels of phonology, syntax, and semantics, Swain turns his attention in the fourth chapter to the way they interact. Here he also adds a fourth level--the "pragmatic" level, which in linguistics refers to knowledge about the situation and the speaker's intentions. In language, Swain observes, the four levels are inextricably intertwined. Our higher-level knowledge about the world and the situation exerts constant "top-down" influence on lower levels: whether we hear a word as a noun or verb, or even whether we hear one phoneme or another ("nature" or "Nietzsche"). We try to interpret things in the most reasonable way, making as much sense out of the situation as possible. In a discussion of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Swain applies these principles to music perception. The same pitch can be either D# or Eb, depending on the situation; the perceptual decision between the two requires consideration of the entire context, and may shift from one interpretation to another in light of subsequent events. Our expectations about what we will hear influence our perceptions as well; in many cases, the genre of a piece (and by this Swain means chiefly its instrumentation) is a major factor in these expectations. In Beethoven's violin concerto, Swain argues, it is sublimely appropriate that the conflict between Eb and D#, so central to the piece, is ultimately resolved by the solo violin. [5.2] Swain turns next to the issue of metaphor. There is a consensus among students of metaphor that it must involve two things: first, "some concept . . . is transferred or grafted on to another concept"; second, "the graft suggests some similarity between the concepts that is 'discovered' or 'constructed' by the perceiver at the same time that it suggests something semantically strange about the graft, a 'patent falsehood or even absurdity in taking the conjunction literally'" (p. 99). Swain then presents a definition of musical metaphor: "a passage whose 'absurdity' or incongruity is syntactic; a passage that performs strangely in its context, controlling tension and creating articulations in ways unaccustomed and yet comprehensible" (p. 100). Swain goes on to discuss several examples of musical metaphors. In the dialogue between Orfeo and the messenger bringing news of Euridice's death in Monteverdi's *L'Orfeo*, the sudden harmonic shifts to G minor convey Orfeo's emotional distress. In the B minor fugue from Book I of Bach's *Well-Tempered Clavier*, a very slow underlying harmonic rhythm (a rhythm of half-notes, in a Largo tempo) turns out to be appropriate for the unusually large scale of the composition. [5.3] In the move from the consensual definition of metaphor to Swain's own definition of the musical case, something seems to get lost. Swain's musical metaphor retains the sense of something strange or absurd; but where is the sense of grafting one concept onto another? This concern arises also in the examples Swain gives. The very slow harmonic rhythm of Bach's fugue may well be strange. But for what is it a metaphor? The moves to G minor in *L'Orfeo* are strange as well, yet right for the situation, as they express Orfeo's emotional state; but is this metaphorical, and if so, is any kind of musical expression metaphorical? By Swain's definition, it seems that a musical metaphor is simply something that is in a way strange, but in another way makes sense and seems appropriate. This is surely an important phenomenon in music--perhaps it is much of what makes music interesting; but it seems too broad to be equated with metaphor. * * * [6.1] In the final three chapters, Swain broadens his view of the music-language comparison, considering how music is like language in terms of its interaction with its larger cultural context and the way it changes over time. Swain begins with a chapter on "artificial languages," languages deliberately created by a single individual: these include Esperanto, computer languages, and--in the musical domain--serialism. (The Ars nova is also discussed in this context, but Swain seems less certain about its status as an artificial language.) Swain's main point here seems to be that composers who use artificial languages run the risk that audiences will not understand their music--a somewhat obvious point, although Swain largely avoids heaping blame on one side or the other, which is a commendable achievement in itself. [6.2] Much more stimulating is the following chapter, in which Swain discusses the evolution of musical languages. While change in verbal languages comes from many sources, one very important phenomenon is "trading relationships." When change occurs in some aspect of a language, this may result in a loss of information which must be counteracted by change in some other aspect. For example, it used to be that case information in English (whether a noun is subject or object) was communicated by inflectional endings. As the inflections began to drop out, case information had to be conveyed in some other way; this resulted in the development of fixed rules of word order (subject-verb-object), which previously had varied rather freely. As another example, Chinese used to distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants (for example, /b/ versus /p/ and /d/ versus /t/). This distinction gradually disappeared; but the syllables that had been distinguished in this way came to be distinguished in another way, namely in the tones of the following vowels (a distinction that was latent anyway, since vowels after unvoiced consonants naturally tend to be pitched slightly higher than those after voiced consonants). Are there analogs in music? Swain argues that there are. In Renaissance music, he suggests, stylized cadences--7-6 suspension cadences, with the penultimate soprano note raised a half-step, where necessary, to create a "leading-tone"--served to provide an easily recognizable cue to phrase endings. From this developed the V7-I cadence, a gesture whose pitch content was so distinctive that the strict rhythmic conventions of the Renaissance cadence were no longer necessary. Likewise, he argues, it is no accident that the rise of genres such as the string quartet and the symphony--lacking the solo-ripieno contrast of the Baroque concerto--coincided with a new interest in the possibilities of large-scale tonal contrast; with one kind of contrast no longer available, something new had to be found to take its place. As Swain notes, it is sometimes difficult to be certain about the causal relationship in such cases (did the rise of the string quartet cause greater interest in large-scale tonal contrast, vice versa, or both?); but that some kind of trading relationship is involved seems fairly clear. [6.3] While I am not qualified to comment on Swain's linguistic examples, the "trading-relationship" idea is a fascinating one which does indeed seem applicable to music. Let me suggest a third example. In jazz, one finds a much broader vocabulary of chords than in "common-practice" tonal music: triads are elaborated not only with sevenths (major or minor), but with added sixths, ninths, and elevenths, with various alterations and in various combinations. Yet there is much less variety of inversion than in classical music; the chords of jazz tunes (as represented in lead sheets, for example) are overwhelmingly in root position. Here again, there is a trade-off. The notes C-E-Bb-D-Ab, in that order from low to high, clearly form a C7 9 b13; but arranged in a different order they could undoubtedly form other things (such as Bb7 9 #11), and if such inversions were permitted, a great deal of harmonic ambiguity could result. The greater freedom in chord extensions has to be counteracted by a loss in freedom of inversion if the essential information--the root of the chord--is to be conveyed. Of course, in some varieties of jazz--especially more modern jazz--the bass plays with considerable freedom; a variety of inversions are in fact used; and the result is, indeed, a great deal of harmonic confusion! In a way, this supports my argument: combining extensional and inversional freedom leads to harmonic ambiguity. But it shows that we must be careful in assuming that harmonic information must always be clearly conveyed; in some circumstances, apparently, this requirement is relaxed. [6.4] Exploring musical change leads us to the question of style, and Swain's final chapter examines the relationship between musical style and musical language. Swain begins with a critique of Leonard Meyer's theory of style as "a replication of patterning." Swain rejects Meyer's approach on the grounds that it seems to be interested only in what is common among pieces, neglecting what is unique. I am quite unable to understand this objection. Surely the term "style" does refer to what is common among a number of pieces; surely it does not in any way deny the importance of what is unique; surely we must understand the commonalities of a style in order to appreciate how certain pieces deviate from these commonalities. As an alternative to Meyer's theory, Swain advocates a view based on a remark of Charles Rosen: "A style may be described figuratively as a way of exploiting and focusing a language." "Focusing a language," in Swain's view, seems to mean simply coordinating its elements in an effective way: in other words, using it well. Though Swain's analyses are, as always, interesting and insightful, this is not one of the more persuasive chapters of the book. * * * [7.1] Surveying Swain's various answers to his underlying question--"How is music like language?"--and my responses to them, I find many areas where I agree and a few where I do not. In some cases the parallels with language are overstated; the phoneme-pitch analogy is more problematic than he makes it out to be, and the role of metaphor in music is, at least, not convincingly demonstrated. In other cases, Swain seems to understate the parallel; for example, he seems overly pessimistic about music's capacity for propositional meaning. At the broadest level, though, his conclusions as to the similarities and differences between music and language seem largely correct. And whether or not one agrees with him on a particular issue, one always feels--to return to my opening point about *Musical Languages*--that he is approaching it with an open mind. [7.2] Though I mostly agree with Swain as to the basic parallels between music and language, I often wish he had been clearer about his positions and the reasons for them. In particular, he seems ambivalent about the parallels between pitches and phonemes, words and phonemes, and words and motives, switching back and forth between them at different times. As I have argued in this review, there are merits and problems with each of these analogies. Pitches are like phonemes in that they are small, categorically perceived units, and each musical "language" seems to involve only a small number of them. However, pitches are like words, and not like phonemes, in that they have properties which give rise in rule-governed ways to the properties of larger units. In terms of meaning, the word-motive parallel seems more plausible than the word-phoneme parallel; the properties of a pitch seem too atomic and abstract to really be considered "meaning," whereas the properties of a motive (a leitmotif, for example) sometimes are not. However, motives are not discrete the way words are, and music is not completely made up of motives the way that language is completely made up of words. Given that each of these analogies has points in its favor, Swain's ambivalence between them is fully justified. But he might have been more explicit about his reasoning. Perhaps he avoided such rigorous discussions, in part, in the interest of making the book entertaining and accessible--a goal that he certainly achieved. [7.3] The book is greatly enhanced by its many and varied references to linguistic and musical research--not to mention psychology, philosophy, literary criticism, and other things. I should note, also, that Swain's analyses are invariably musical, perceptive, and full of contagious enthusiasm for the music. [7.4] Whether one is more struck by the differences or the similarities between music and language is perhaps largely a matter of perspective; whether one considers music to be a kind of language (a question on which Swain wisely remains non-committal), even more so. In any case, this book serves as an excellent introduction to the many sides of the music-language analogy. The question of "how is music like language" is a hugely important one, and Swain--like Bernstein before him--is to be credited for tackling it head-on. It is a question that eminently deserves to be asked, and asked repeatedly, *at least* every 25 years. ====================== 3. Music Theory International AUTHOR: Tore Eriksson TITLE: Four Swedish Dissertation in Music Theory KEYWORDS: Musicology in Sweden, Mozart, Algorithmic composing, Ingvar Lidholm, twelve-tone music, Bo Nilsson, serialism, Debussy, tonality, confusion B. Tore Eriksson University of Lund Department of Art History and Musicology Box 117 221 00 Lund Sweden b.t.eriksson@telia.com [1] There is a lot of interesting musicological work going on in Sweden. The program of the conference "Musicology Today," arranged by the Swedish Society for Musicology in June 1999 in Falun, gives a fairly good picture of the distribution of interests. There are several presentations of historical, sociological and ethnomusicological research; there are papers about rock music, the Swedish "troubadour tradition," pedagogical problems, gender and music, postmodernism, chorale singing, and so on, but only one single presentation that concerns music theory. The subject has a well established tradition of being treated as "narrow" and of marginal interest by the universities. Before 1995 there were only two or three PhD dissertations where music theory was the main concern. Since 1995 there has however been on the average one each year. From the viewpoint of the MTO reader I think it is of greater interest to take a closer look at four of the dissertations than to present a congress report. I was a committee member at the presentations of Berggren's and Tillman's dissertations and external reader at Derkert's. Ulf Berggren: Ars Combinatoria, Algorithmic Construction of Sonata Movements by Means of Building Blocks Derived from W. A. Mozart's Piano Sonatas, Uppsala University 1995 The dissertation is written in English [2] "This dissertation is about automatic musical construction. Its objective is to try to define musical elements, building blocks, and structural principles by which these can be combined to create musical movements in classical style by means of a completely automatic process. The study focuses on conventional aspects of classical music, rather than on mastery. This is motivated by reference to 18th-century music theory, which deals with 'mechanical' means of composition, some of them being a musical ars combinatoria." Berggren derives a set of rules from a number of Mozart sonatas as seen through traditional music theory. He claims that his model covers "both high and low structural levels," but seldom reaches below the surface. As a result his "Mozart program" generates a string of plausible building blocks in a sonata-like sequence, without the kind of overarching lines and connections that are so obvious in the real thing. However a lot of the interaction between the building blocks are nicely replicated. To write a computer program that generates "whole sonata movements . . . being reasonably compatible with the classical style" is no mean feat. At least it clarifies the limitations of traditional music theory. If Berggren could rewrite the program in such a way that other researchers could easily test different sets of rules the results might well be revolutionary. Joakim Tillman: Ingvar Lidholm och tolvtonstekniken Analytiska och historiska perspektiv på Ingvar Lidholms musik från 1950-talet Stockholms universitet 1995 (Tillman: Ingvar Lidholm and the twelve-tone method) The dissertation is written in Swedish, but has an extensive summary in English [3] This is an excellent piece of work. Tillman draws a detailed map of the stylistic landscape in Sweden during the fifties while remaining firmly anchored in Lidholm's use of twelve-tone methods. The main part of the book consists of a very thorough series of analytical studies of both the compositions that immediately preceded the twelve-tone works and these works themselves. Different aspects are studied through several works: Lidholm's series, "chords," tonality, and so on. The first time I read the book I was a bit disappointed that Tillman accepted the "orthodox twelve-tone rules" as an analytical point of reference. Schoenberg himself stressed that the twelve-tone method was a compositional method, not an analytical one. The creators of the "orthodox" method (Eimert, Jelinek, Krenek, Rufer etc) didn't seem to understand that there is any difference between the two aspects. Tillman, however, does. He uses the "orthodox" rules as a kind of ruler to measure Lidholm's degree of acceptance of the twelve-tone concept. It works very well. Lidholm's serial techniques are put in further perspective by tables showing each series characterized by its set type content. The analytical results are perceptively fused with a historical and stylistic discussion. Gunnar Valkare: Det Audiografiska Fältet Om musikens förhållande till skriften och den unge Bo Nilsson's strategier Musikhögskolan i Göteborg 1997 (Vakare: The Audiographic Field) The dissertation is written in Swedish, but has an extensive summary in English. [4] The starting point of Valkare's text is the paradox he sensed around Bo Nilsson's music. The last third of the book is a very convincing demonstration that Nilsson's music is auditively, nonserially composed, but clothed in all the trappings of post-war serialism: mathematical formulas (mostly corrupted), scientific jargon (mostly pseudo-) and extremely avant garde-looking scores (with dynamic levels expressed as numbers and so on). Valkare shows that the most likely explanation behind the paradox is Nilsson's intuitive grasp of the fact that the value judgement at the time would be primarily dependent upon the notated music and the avant garde paraphernalia and not on the sound. At the same time there was a repressed longing for the emotional, auditive side of music. He simply provided both. According to Valkare, Nilsson used a series of romantic, jazz-inspired or impressionistic chords (picked out at a piano) as main points distributed over a piece. Between these points each voice is constructed according to a "chromatical semiautomatic tone choice method". That the music is non-serially and auditively composed is probably true. The stylistic roots of the chords also seem correctly identified. But the "semiautomatic" part of the explanation is unconvincing. If Valkare's methods (checking off tones against a chromatic scale) were used on for example the melodic lines in Berg's Wozzek, you would get about the same result as with Nilsson. If the "tone choice method" depended upon the auditively chosen chords, we wouldn't know. Valkare's method erases the tracks. While groups of tones are of central interest to his analysis, he never refers to set theory. Even a hastily prepared set-type map of a few Nilsson pieces will show that the chords do indeed have strong connections to the "melodic" web. Far from being "semiautomatic" the tone choice method seems just as auditive as for the chords. This strongly supports Valkare's main argument. Why did he use the blunt "scale checking"' method? -- It seems like "semiautomatic" analysis to me. How could such a paradoxical situation as the enthusiastic reception of Nilsson's music emerge? Valkare's primary answer is to point at the separation that occurred in the early modernism between notated and sounding music. In order to trace the cultural steps even further back, Valkare loses himself in an anthropological fog, strangely ethnocentrical and wordy. Jacob Derkert: Tonalitet och harmonisk artikulation i Claude Debussys verk Om reception, harmonikteori och analys Stockholms universitet 1998 Derkert: Tonality and harmonic articulation in the works of Claude Debussy. In Swedish. English summary. [5] The first six chapters of Derkert's text are impressively ambitious. He seems ready to include everything: The concept of tonality, tonality versus atonality, methods to deduce roots of chords, Rameau's and Riemann's theories of harmony and tonal functions, the rise of Debussy analysis in Germany during the Twenties. He is extremely thorough at that point--it seems that every German dissertation about Debussy is scrutinized. He does not however find much that is useful. Instead he turns to a few French and American texts, only to find them just as unsuited for his purpose. This forces Derkert to build a formal system of tonality. After forty pages he seems to forget his own system and turns to fifth progressions and then to comparisons of pitch content. These at least generate massive tables. Still, Derkert does not seem content and turns to set theory. The basics are explained in detail and at length. The theory is finally used on two much-analysed preludes by Debussy. The book is a decisive step backwards from the results of Richard S. Parks. ====================== 4. Announcements Conference Announcement: Music Theory Midwest Call for Papers and Session Proposals: Performance 2000 New Discussion List: Musikeion New Discussion List: Academic Women in Music Conference Announcement: Enlarging the Words: Schoeck's Operas Reflected Through Culture Conference Announcement: Symposium on Systems Research in the Arts Call for Joint Session Proposals: Toronto 2000 Call for Papers: Music Theory Society of New York State Change of Editorship, _Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy_ _________________________________________________________________ Conference Announcement: Music Theory Midwest Music Theory Midwest Tenth Annual Conference Butler University, Indianapolis, IN 14-15 May, 1999 Music Theory Midwest 1999 will be held on 14-15 May at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN. Complete conference information, including the program and registration form, are available at the MTMW web site: . A highlight of the conference will be the keynote address by Dr. Bruno Nettl, Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, who will speak on "Theory as National Emblem: The Persian Radif in World Music." In addition to over 30 paper presentations, other special events include a reception following the keynote address Friday afternoon, an opportunity to hear the Indianapolis Opera production of Verdi's _Macbeth_ on Friday evening, and a Saturday luncheon. Local arrangements coordinator is Jeff Gillespie. Please contact him for any further information not available on the web site: MTMW 99 Local Arrangements: Jeff Gillespie Assistant Professor of Music Butler University 317-940-6416 _________________________________________________________________ Call for Papers and Session Proposals: PERFORMANCE 2000 April 26-29, 2000 University of Southampton, UK Hosted by the University of Southampton on behalf of the Royal Musical Association, PERFORMANCE 2000 offers a conference platform to be shared by scholars and performing musicians. The conference sessions will allow participants the opportunity to present work that offers new understanding of the relationship between scholarship and performance. It is anticipated that presentations exemplifying this relationship may take many forms. Thus, proposals for academic papers of the traditional kind (e.g. concerning the study of performance practice and theory, or the empirical study of live and/or recorded performance, or the performative aspects of scholarly discourse) will be considered on the same basis as proposals for performances that embody the fruits of scholarship and demonstrate a rationale for those performances, together with formats that lie in between (such as lecture recitals by individuals or groups). Following normal practice, the programme committee expects to apply thematic groupings to those proposals eventually accepted, thereby scheduling sessions which mix live performance and academic presentation in unforeseen ways. Performances taking place within the conference programme will thus not be restricted to the traditional lunchtime and evening timeslots. Proposals (no longer than 250 words) should include an abstract and/or scholarly rationale, together with precise details of any musical works to be performed live and the names of all performers in such cases. Please note that no fees will be payable by the conference to performers involved in these sessions. The committee also seeks proposals for complete themed sessions involving a number of participants. Such proposals should include all appropriate detail for each individual component of the session (max. 250 words per component, as above), together with a rationale for the session as a whole (max. 500 words). Such proposals should be made in the name of all participants. Each proposal, whether for a single presentation or a themed session, should indicate clearly the name, postal address, email address and daytime telephone number of the person who will act as the contact point for correspondence with the programme committee and other conference officials. Proposals should be sent to the chair of the programme committee at the address below (email submissions acceptable). Closing Date for Receipt of Proposals--1 July 1999 Programme committee: Eric Clarke, University of Sheffield Mark Everist, University of Southampton (chair) Colin Lawson, Goldsmiths, University of London Anthony Pople, University of Nottingham Preliminary enquiries may be made of the programme committee through the chair: Mark Everist, Department of Music, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ _________________________________________________________________ New electronic discussion list: MUSIKEION. Dear friends of smt-list, I would like to invite you to join MUSIKEION. MUSIKEION, an e-mail based discussion list on musical meaning, is hosted by the Graduate Department in Communication and Semiotics, Catholic University of Sao Paulo, whose head is the semiotician Prof. Lucia Santaella. The name "musikeion" comes from a combination of two Greek words, "mousike"--music, and "semeion"--sign. It indicates, thus, the field of interest of this forum: all issues of meaning in music. Our interest in MUSIKEION is the discussion of all kinds of music and music related topics from the vantage point of musical semiotics. Irrespective of the fact that my research approach is Peircean, MUSIKEION is open to all traditions of musical semiotics, which I think is our duty to consider and discuss. If you are interested in, or wondering about, questions of musical qualities, existence, forms, reference, representation, perception, cognition, performance, teaching, theorizing, critique, composition, improvisation, etc., which constitute our broad range of topics, you are welcome to sign up MUSIKEION. The list, directed and managed by me, has been operating since June 1998 (at first as "musignif"). It is a multi-language list, and discussions have been held in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French. People subscribing to MUSIKEION come from several areas related to music and musical studies. Among the subscribers there are students, performing musicians, composers, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, music analysts and music semioticians of several traditions. If you want to subscribe to MUSIKEION list send a message to with an empty subject, and write the following in the body of the message: subscribe musikeion If you want to get other information on the list commands send a: help If you want to see what has been posted, you may read messages at: I am ready to answer any questions, as well as to assist with any technical problem you may have in subscribing, unsubscribing, sending messages, etc. That is my role as list manager. MUSIKEION is set as an open forum. Subscribers can post messages directly to the list, without the need of a previous approval. In case of need, however, I can interfere as a moderator in order to keep discussions pertinent to our subject matter. I also take part in discussions as an ordinary member of MUSIKEION, and in that case my position is equal to everyone on the list. You are most welcome to sign up for MUSIKEION! My best regards, Jose Luiz Martinez martinez@originet.com.br martinez@pucsp.br _________________________________________________________________ New Discussion List: Academic Women in Music "Academic Women in Music" is a public discussion list devoted to concerns and experiences of women who teach music at universities and colleges, either in performance, musicology, conducting, composition, theory, pedagogy, electronic music, music education, or any musical area or combination of areas. One of the pages to examine for discussion material is Dr. Bernice Sandler's page, "Women in Academia," which materials are used with her permission. Designing this page came about because of a discussion on the IAWM list about the behavioral differences between men and women (academics) with respect to their levels of assertiveness. The essays include: 1. Women Faculty at Work in the Classroom, or, Why It Still Hurts to be a Woman in Labor 2. Handling Sexual Harassment 3. Ways in Which Men and Women May Be Treated Differently 4. Intervening When Male Students Engage in Negative Behaviors Toward Women 5. A New Look at how even the best of teachers--women and men-- often treat male and female students differently, in ways that limit women's full participation in the classroom. Academic Women in Music discussion list: For further info, contact Connie Sunday . _________________________________________________________________ Conference Announcement: Enlarging the Words: Schoeck's Operas Reflected Through Culture The Othmar Schoeck-Society and the International Festival of Music Lucerne are organizing a symposium on the operas of the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) in Lucerne, Switzerland, on August 13 & 14, 1999, with the following title: Enlarging the Words Schoeck's Operas Reflected Through Culture Studies If you are interested and would like more information, please check out the following web site: _________________________________________________________________ Conference Announcement: Symposium on Systems Research in the Arts EVENT: Symposium on Systems Research in the Arts HOST: 11th International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics, and Cybernetics DATE: August 2-7, 1999 DESCRIPTION: A symposium for systems research in the arts will be held in conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics, and Cybernetics August 2-7 in Baden-Baden Germany. Papers related to music are invited. For further information, please visit , with particular interest to the link Symposium on Systems Research in the Arts. REGISTRATION DEADLINE: Please see the IIAS Web site. PAPER/PROPOSAL DEADLINE: May 20, 1999 (abstract) COST AND PAYMENT OPTIONS: Please see the IIAS Web site. TRAVEL AND HOTEL INFORMATION: Please see the IIAS Web site. CONTACT: Jim Rhodes Box 2076, Shorter College Rome, GA 30165 USA Office: 706-233-7272 Fax: 706-236-1515 Email: jrhodes@shorter.edu _________________________________________________________________ Call for Joint Session Proposals: Toronto 2000 TORONTO 2000: MUSICAL INTERSECTIONS Open Call for Proposals for Joint Sessions (*Proposal deadline: June 1, 1999*) The Society for Music Theory will hold its annual meeting November 1-5, 2000 in Toronto, Canada, together with fourteen sister societies engaged in music research and the teaching of music in U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities. Entitled *Toronto 2000: Musical Intersections*, the conference will bring together The American Musical Instrument Society (AMIS); the American Musicological Society (AMS); the Association for Technology in Music Instruction (ATMI); the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres (CAML); the Canadian Society for Traditional Music (CSTM); The College Music Society (CMS); the Canadian University Music Society (CUMS); The Historic Brass Society (HBS); the Canadian and U.S. chapters of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM); the Lyrica Society for Word-Music Relationships; the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM); the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC); and The Sonneck Society for American Music. The Steering Committee for this joint meeting invites proposals from members of the participating societies for sessions that focus on interdisciplinary topics in the scholarly study, teaching, or creation of music (including performance), in an effective session format involving members from two or more of these societies. A proposal for a joint session may be coordinated with a separate evening concert. Presentations in these sessions may be given in English, French, and Spanish. Proposals for joint sessions must describe the topic and state the purpose of the session in fewer than 1000 words, give contact information for the session coordinator (valid for all of 1999), and provide a one-page resume [accents aigues on both "e"s] for each committed participant. The Steering Committee encourages proposals that include participants from many disciplines; it is expected, however, that scholars in the field of music be members in good standing of at least one of the participating societies; membership should be indicated on the resume [accents aigues]. All participants must register for the conference. Six copies of each proposal should be sent no later than June 1, 1999 to Dr. Leslie Hall, Department of Philosophy and Music, Ryerson Polytechnic University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto M5B 2K3, Canada. Proposals may also be sent before June 1, 1999 by electronic mail to Dr. Hall at . Facsimile transmissions will not be accepted. Joint sessions for the Toronto 2000 meeting will be selected by the fifteen-member Steering Committee by December 1, 1999, before the SMT deadline for regular proposals for the meeting. Individuals participating in these special joint sessions may also appear on any one other session on the formal Toronto program. For further information, feel free to contact me at the e-mail address above . Janet Schmalfeldt SMT President Tufts University home: 3 Cliff Street Arlington, MA 02476 (new zip) (781) 641-3317 _________________________________________________________________ Call for Papers: Music Theory Society of New York State Music Theory Society of New York State Annual Meeting New York University 8-9 April 2000 The program committee for the year 2000 meeting of MTSNYS invites proposals for short presentations (15 minutes) or long presentations (30 minutes) concerning any aspect of music theory or analysis. Areas of particular interest include: Music and Cinema Analysis Symposium on Haydn's String Quartets, op. 76 Analysis of the Music of "Downtown" NYC Composers, from Cowell to Bang on the Can Music and Metaphor Papers given at national conferences or previously published will not be considered. Any number of proposals may be submitted by an individual, but no more than one will be accepted. Most papers will be placed in 45-minute slots, with about 30 minutes for reading and 15 minutes for possible response or discussion. Paper submission should include: 1. Six copies of a proposal of at least three but no more than five double-spaced pages of text. Each copy should include the title of the paper and its duration as read aloud, but not the author's name. 2. An abstract of 200-250 words, suitable for publication. 3. A cover letter listing the title of the paper and the name, address, telephone number, and e-mail address (if applicable) of the author. Proposals should be sent to: Poundie Burstein, MTSNYS Program Chair Music Department Hunter College, CUNY 695 Park Avenue New York, NY 10021 **** POSTMARK DEADLINE IS 1 OCTOBER 1999 **** Members OF MTSNYS 2000 Program Committee are Poundie Burstein, Chair (Hunter College, CUNY); Craig Cummings (Ithaca College), Donna Doyle (Manhattan School of Music), Matthew Santa (The Graduate School and University Center of CUNY), Klaus Sinfelt (New York University), and Kristin Taavola (Sarah Lawrence College). _________________________________________________________________ Change of Editorship, _Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy_ J. Kent Williams, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has been appointed editor of the _Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy_ for 1999. Submissions are now being reviewed for the 1999 issue. Cover letters and 5 blind copies of each article may be mailed to: JMTP School of Music University of Oklahoma Norman OK 73019 For information regarding 1997 and 1998 issues, contact Mary Wennerstrom School of Music, Indiana University, Bloomington IN 47405 We anticipate publication of 1997, 1998, and 1999 issues before the end of this calendar year. ====================== 5. Employment University of Auckland, New Zealand, Head of the School of Music McGill University, Faculty of Music, Faculty Lecturer, Department of Theory Mount Vernon Nazarene College, Asst.-Full Professor, Music Theory University of Southampton, Lectureship in Music _________________________________________________________________ University of Auckland, New Zealand, Head of the School of Music QUALIFICATIONS: Outstanding academic reputation in one of the following areas: Composition, Musicology, Music Education, World Music and Performance and a demonstrated ability for academic leadership with an emphasis on people skills. JOB DESCRIPTION/RESPONSIBILITIES: The Professor will be responsible to the Vice-Chancellor through the Dean of the Faculty of Arts for such teaching and related duties, including examining, as may be required, and will be expected to encourage, supervise and engage in research within the University. He or she will be expected to develop teaching and research programmes, maintain close links with academic communities, and provide leadership within the Department. The successful candidate will also be expected to contribute to the growth of Music and develop relationships with institutions throughout New Zealand and particularly in the Auckland region. As Head of the School of Music, the Professor will be responsible to the Vice-Chancellor through the Dean of the Faculty of Arts for the organisation of teaching and for expenditure in the School and generally for carrying out all administrative duties pe rtaining to the Headship of the School. At times when not holding the Headship the Professor shall be responsible to the Vice-Chancellor through the Head of School for such teaching and related duties, including examining, as may be required by the Head of School and will be expected to encoura ge, supervise and engage in research within the University. Candidates should note that any Professor who holds a Chair within a Department or School may be asked from time to time to undertake the duties of Acting Head. All Professors are eligible to serve (and may be required to serve) as term as Head of the De partment or School to which they are appointed notwithstanding that they may have already served one or more such times. SALARY RANGE: Minimum of NZ$89,699 per annum. Payment of a supplement may be negotiated. ITEMS TO SEND: Three copies of applications. DEADLINE: 17 May 1999 CONTACT: Dr Fiona McAlpine, tel. 64-9-373 7599, ext. 7405, fax 64-9-373 5446, email: or Professor Douglas Sutton, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, telephone 64-9-373 7599, ext. 8426, fax 64-9-373 7478, email: . The School of Music's website is . Further information and Conditions of Appointment should be obtained from the Academic Appointments Office, telephone 64-9- 373 7599, ext 5789, fax 64-9-373 7023, email: _________________________________________________________________ McGill University, Faculty of Music, Faculty Lecturer, Department of Theory QUALIFICATIONS: Applicants should hold a Ph.D. but those close to completion are encouraged to apply. Preference will be given to applicants with a specialisation in 20th century music who are able to teach a course on mathematical models for music analysis. JOB DESCRIPTION/RESPONSIBILITIES: Duties will entail the teaching of undergraduate theory courses at all levels, including the teaching of qualifying year theory courses for graduate students. SALARY RANGE: ITEMS TO SEND: Applicants should submit a curriculum vitae and statement of research interests, and arrange to have three letters of reference sent. DEADLINE: July 31, 1999 or when the position is filled CONTACT: Professor Bruce Minorgan Chair, Department of Theory Faculty of Music McGill University 555 Sherbrooke Street West Montreal, Quebec H3A 1E3 minorgan@music.mcgill.ca fax: (514) 398-8061 _________________________________________________________________ Mount Vernon Nazarene College, Asst.-Full Professor, Music Theory QUALIFICATIONS: The successful candidate will have a doctorate in music theory with a strong supporting area in keyboard studies. JOB DESCRIPTION/RESPONSIBILITIES: The position to be filled at the rank of Assistant, Associate or Full Professor includes primary responsibility for the theory core (B.A. in Music with tracks in performance, church music, music education, general music), piano (and organ if appropriate) and additional teaching responsibilities related to the individual's qualifications. Additional faculty responsibilities include advising majors, departmental committees and college-wide committee service. SALARY RANGE: $28,000-48,000 ITEMS TO SEND: 1. Four references 2. Evidence of teaching competence 3. One- or two-page statement of personal faith and understanding of college's mission. 4. Official transcripts for all college and university work. DEADLINE: June 15, 1999 CONTACT: Dr. Henry Smith Vice President for Academic Affairs Mount Vernon Nazarene College 800 Martinsburg Road Mount Vernon, OH 43050 for additional information: _________________________________________________________________ University of Southampton, Lectureship in Music The Department of Music at the University of Southampton invites applications for a lectureship in Music. The lecturer will join a team of committed scholars and teachers in a dynamic department at the leading edge of musical research. Candidates must have a Ph.D. in music and a proven track record in research and publication. There is no restriction on the subject area(s) of the lecturer's research, except that we will not appoint a candidate whose principal activity is composition (in which area we are currently making other appointments). We aim to appoint someone at an early stage in their career who will become a leader in her/his field. The lectureship will be on the Lecturer A/B scale with a salary range of £16,655-£29,048 depending on experience and standing. For further information please contact the Head of the Department of Music: Mark Everist, Professor of Music, Department of Music, University of Southampton, Highfield, SOUTHAMPTON SO17 1BJ, UK. Tel.: +44 (0)1703 594563; Fax.: +44 (0)1703 593197; Email: . Visit the Department of Music web site at . Application forms and further particulars may be obtained from the Personnel Department (A), University of Southampton, Highfield, SOUTHAMPTON SO17 1BJ, UK (Email: ), to be returned not later than 28 May 1999. Please quote reference number A/672. ====================== 6. New Dissertations Anson-Cartwright, Mark. "The Development Section in Haydn's Late Instrumental Works." City University of New York, 1998. Foley, Gretchen. "Pitch and Interval Structures in George Perle's Theory of Twelve-Tone Tonality." University of Western Ontario, 1999. Pacun, David E. "Large-scale Form in Selected Variation Sets of Johannes Brahms." University of Chicago, 1998. _________________________________________________________________ Anson-Cartwright, Mark. "The Development Section in Haydn's Late Instrumental Works." City University of New York, 1998. AUTHOR: Anson-Cartwright, Mark TITLE: The Development Section in Haydn's Late Instrumental Works. INSTITUTION: City University of New York BEGUN: May, 1995 COMPLETION: August, 1998 CONTACT: Prof. Mark Anson-Cartwright Music Department Emily Lowe Hall 112 Hofstra University Hempstead, NY 11549 _________________________________________________________________ Foley, Gretchen. "Pitch and Interval Structures in George Perle's Theory of Twelve-Tone Tonality." University of Western Ontario, 1999. AUTHOR: Foley, Gretchen TITLE: Pitch and Interval Structures in George Perle's Theory of Twelve-Tone Tonality INSTITUTION: University of Western Ontario BEGUN: September, 1997 COMPLETION: January, 1999 ABSTRACT: George Perle, American composer and theorist, has authored an innovative theory called _Twelve-Tone Tonality_ (1977; 2nd ed. 1996), an atonal compositional system based on the conjunction of interval cycles and inversional symmetry. This dissertation explicates Perle's theory in a reorganized, more accessible format, providing detailed analyses of two etudes from Perle's _Six Etudes for Piano_ (1973-76). The analyses differentiate between the abstract dimension of the twelve-tone tonal constructs and their concrete realization at the musical surface, and show both local and long- range structure. The analyses extend beyond Perle's own dissemination of the theory by utilizing the tools of pitch-class set theory as well. The study explores the fundamental entities of Perle's theory, the cyclic sets, outside the context of twelve-tone tonality, from which emerge close associations of set classes identified as "imbricated cyclic set families." These families share a number of structural properties, including inversional symmetry, transpositional combination, and equivalence in other modular universes. The study also introduces an original similarity relation, the RSYM relation, to reflect the symmetrical nature of the intervallic similarity between pairs of set classes in the ICS families. Through the presentation of the tenets of twelve-tone tonality, the theoretical exploration of the cyclic sets, and the analysis of selected works, the dissertation aims to show the depth and potential of the theory, both within and outside its own context. KEYWORDS: atonality, axis of symmetry, interval cycles, inversional symmetry, modular equivalence, George Perle, pitch-class set theory, similarity relations, transpositional combination, twelve-tone tonality TOC: Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: The Theory of Twelve-Tone Tonality Chapter 3: Structural Properties of Cyclic Sets Chapter 4: Analysis of Etude No.1 and Etude No.4 from _Six Etudes for Piano_ by George Perle Chapter 5: Conclusions CONTACT: Gretchen Foley 43 Ottawa Street St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada A1A 2Z3 Tel:709-726-4280 bfoley@calvin.stemnet.nf.ca _________________________________________________________________ Pacun, David E. "Large-scale Form in Selected Variation Sets of Johannes Brahms." University of Chicago, 1998. AUTHOR: David E. Pacun TITLE: Large-scale Form in Selected Variation Sets of Johannes Brahms INSTITUTION: University of Chicago BEGUN: COMPLETION: 1998 ABSTRACT: This dissertation presents a study of large-scale form in selected variation sets of Johannes Brahms. Large-scale variation form is defined here as the relationships between variations (the theme included) and how these relationships may be united or reduced into an extensive plan covering the entire set--that is, one over and above the mere series of independent pieces that are expected in variation sets. Chapter I examines past readings of Brahms's variations and specifically argues for a network-based approach to the analysis of large scale form in variation sets. The purpose here is not so much to engender flexibility as to allow the exploration of large-scale unity, as it might otherwise be conceived, a broad, multi-leveled framework rather than a fixed hierarchical edifice. Chapters II-VII then offer detailed analyses of a selection of Brahms's variation sets and variation movements. Chapter II, on the Handel Variations, opus 24, demonstrates how the variations divide into three segments of roughly equal length, with parallel developments suggesting a cyclic progression from one segment to the next. This quality is then mirrored in the culminating fugue, which has cyclic properties over and above those normally affiliated with fugal writing. Chapter III, on the Haydn Variations, opus 56b, argues that the arrangement of variations--here a loose arch--can be explained in part by the deployment of two unordered diatonic pitch-class cells derived from the theme. The passacaglia that concludes the work exhibits a similar progression between the same two diatonic cells and at one point reiterates a common pitch configuration. Textural differences surrounding this configuration suggest that this moment in the passacaglia serves to normalize tensions within the variation's arch design, and thereby allows the work to forge ahead to its concluding thematic apotheosis. Chapter IV, on the Schumann Variations, opus 9, attempts to modify the current view of the work's large-scale form as guided by Brahms's ascription of the individual variations as "Kreisler" or "Brahms." Here a variety of developments, including hints of a broader cyclic return, cut across the boundaries suggested by the "Brahms"/"Kreisler" ascriptions. Unlike chapters II and III, which assert an order that had not been previously recognized by scholars, the concern here is to problematize the overly tidy orderings suggested by other scholars and to assert a complexity where none has been acknowledged. Variation sets in Brahms's multi-movement instrumental compositions prove analytically less complex. Chapter V first explores how variation sets occupying interior movement positions often fail to achieve complete closure. In the variation finales to the String Quartet in B -Major, opus 67, and the Clarinet Quintet in B-Minor, opus 115, however, closure is projected in a variety of ways through the recapitulation of first movement material. Chapters VI and VII treat in greater detail the variation movements from the Piano Trio in C-Minor, opus 87, and the Sextet in G-Major, opus 36. Modifying past analyses which treat the opus 87 movement as rondo-like, chapter VI explores how subtle motives patterns establish a large-scale reversal between the first and last variations. This reversal not only more accurately reflects the large-scale form of the set, but ultimately helps to situate the movement and the movement's form within the context of the work as a whole. Finally, since large-scale issues in the opus 36 variation movement have already been dealt with in a convincing manner by Elaine Sisman, the body of chapter VII utilizes transpositional combination to show how certain complex thematic relationships within the variation theme and the movement effect a critical shift in the treatment of thematic material on the level of the work as a whole. ====================== 7. New Books Princeton University Press Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography Translated by Stewart Spencer Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera _________________________________________________________________ Princeton University Press Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography Translated by Stewart Spencer "Hans Werner Henze is one of the most important composers of the twentieth century, and these are his extensive, detailed memoirs. For that reason alone, they should be read. I found the book highly interesting and highly readable." --John Rockwell, Editor, Arts and Leisure, The New York Times Hans Werner Henze is one of the world's leading composers. His autobiography is frank, impassioned, and alive with memorable images and characters and graphic accounts of the creative process and performances of his music. Henze's unhappy childhood during the onset of Fascism found release in music, which, in spite of the disruption of the war, became the center of his life. He studied composition but began to make a career as a ballet conductor, until his creativity found expression in music that, by the early 1950s, had begun to distance itself from the fashionable but dogmatic rules of serialism in favor of his own individualistic conception of beauty. In both the political and sexual spheres, Hans Werner Henze is an outsider whose utopian dreams of a humane communism have always had to contend with reality. In musical and cultural matters, however, he is one of the best-connected and most influential figures of the postwar era and his autobiography brims with personal stories and observations of such luminaries as Igor Stravinsky, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Ingeborg Bachmann, Luchino Visconti, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. A true cosmopolitan, he is happiest living in Italy, where his innate lyricism has found a natural home. "Bohemian fifths" are intervals that were played by Bohemian horn players, and which, according to Baroque and Classical rules, were proscribed. Henze's writing protests the lack of freedom that such a prohibition implies, both in music and in life. Hans Werner Henze was born on July 1, 1926, in Gutersloh, Germany. Since the 1970s, he has lived in Marino, near Rome. His creative output covers all musical genres, including operas (Boulevard Solitude, Konig Hirsch, Der Prinz von Homburg, Elegy for Young Lovers, Der junge Lord, We Come to the River, The English Cat, Das verratne Meer, Venus und Adonis), ballets (Ondine, Orpheus, Le disperazioni del Signor Pulcinella, Labyrinth, Le fils de l'air), oratorios such as Das Floss der Medusa, nine symphonies, the instrumental Requiem, and many concertos. Stewart Spencer is the editor, with Barry Millington, of _Selected Letters of Richard Wagner_, _Wagner in Performance_, and _Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion_. He has also translated books on Wagner and Liszt. 0-691-00683-0 Cloth $35.00 US 520 pages, 5 x 8, 23 photographs. For sale only in the U.S. Gary Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera In this bold recasting of operatic history, Gary Tomlinson connects opera to shifting visions of metaphysics and selfhood across the last four hundred years. The operatic voice, he maintains, has always acted to open invisible, supersensible realms to the perceptions of its listeners. In doing so, it has articulated changing relations between the self and metaphysics. Tomlinson examines these relations as they have been described by philosophers from Ficino through Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, to Adorno, all of whom worked to define the subject's place in both material and metaphysical realms. The author then shows how opera, in its own cultural arena, distinct from philosophy, has repeatedly brought to the stage these changing relations of the subject to the particular metaphysics it presumes. Covering composers from Jacopo Peri to Wagner, from Lully to Verdi, and from Mozart to Britten, _Metaphysical Song_ details interactions of song, words, drama, and sounds used by creators of opera to fill in the outlines of the subjectivities they envisioned. The book offers deep-seated explanations for opera's enduring fascination in European elite culture and suggests some of the profound difficulties that have unsettled this fascination since the time of Wagner. Gary Tomlinson is Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and has held Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. His books include _Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance_ and _Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others_. Princeton Studies in Opera Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, Editors 0-691-00409-9 Paper $18.95 US and £11.50 UK and Europe 0-691-00408-0 Cloth $49.50 US and £29.95 UK and Europe 192 pages, 6 x 9, 7 halftones, 12 music examples. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ Copyright Statement [1] *Music Theory Online* (*MTO*) as a whole is Copyright (c) 1999, all rights reserved, by the Society for Music Theory, which is the owner of the journal. 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