Musical Meaning and Interpretation - Böcker

This comprehensive volume offers a wide-ranging perspective on the stories that art music has told since the start of the 20th century. Contributors challenge the broadly held opinion that the loss of tonality in some music after 1900 also meant the loss of narrative in that music. To the contrary, the editors and essayists in this book demonstrate how experiments in approaching narrative in other media, such as fiction and cinema, suggested fresh possibilities for musical narrative, which composers were quick to exploit. The new conceptions of time, narrative voice, plot, and character that accompanied these experiments also had a significant impact on contemporary music. The repertoire explored in the collection ranges across a wide variety of genres and includes composers from Charles Ives and the Pet Shop Boys to Thomas Adès and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Charles Ives (1874–1954) moved traditional compositional practice in new directions by incorporating modern and innovative techniques with nostalgic borrowings of 19th century American popular music and Protestant hymns. Matthew McDonald argues that the influence of Emerson and Thoreau on Ives's compositional style freed the composer from ordinary ideas of time and chronology, allowing him to recuperate the past as he reached for the musical unknown. McDonald links this concept of the multi-temporal in Ives's works to Transcendentalist understandings of eternity. His approach to Ives opens new avenues for inquiry into the composer's eclectic and complex style.

In Sonata Fragments, Andrew Davis argues that the Romantic sonata is firmly rooted, both formally and expressively, in its Classical forebears, using Classical conventions in order to convey a broad constellation of Romantic aesthetic values. This claim runs contrary to conventional theories of the Romantic sonata that place this nineteenth-century musical form squarely outside inherited Classical sonata procedures. Building on Sonata Theory, Davis examines moments of fracture and fragmentation that disrupt the cohesive and linear temporality in piano sonatas by Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann. These disruptions in the sonata form are a narrative technique that signify temporal shifts during which we move from the outer action to the inner thoughts of a musical agent, or we move from the story as it unfolds to a flashback or flash-forward. Through an interpretation of Romantic sonatas as temporally multi-dimensional works in which portions of the music in any given piece can lie inside or outside of what Sonata Theory would define as the sonata-space proper, Davis reads into these ruptures a narrative of expressive features that mark these sonatas as uniquely Romantic.

In Sonata Fragments, Andrew Davis argues that the Romantic sonata is firmly rooted, both formally and expressively, in its Classical forebears, using Classical conventions in order to convey a broad constellation of Romantic aesthetic values. This claim runs contrary to conventional theories of the Romantic sonata that place this nineteenth-century musical form squarely outside inherited Classical sonata procedures. Building on Sonata Theory, Davis examines moments of fracture and fragmentation that disrupt the cohesive and linear temporality in piano sonatas by Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann. These disruptions in the sonata form are a narrative technique that signify temporal shifts during which we move from the outer action to the inner thoughts of a musical agent, or we move from the story as it unfolds to a flashback or flash-forward. Through an interpretation of Romantic sonatas as temporally multi-dimensional works in which portions of the music in any given piece can lie inside or outside of what Sonata Theory would define as the sonata-space proper, Davis reads into these ruptures a narrative of expressive features that mark these sonatas as uniquely Romantic.

Who inspired Johannes Brahms in his art of writing music? In this book, Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes provides a fresh look at the ways in which Brahms employed musical references to works of earlier composers in his own instrumental music. By analyzing newly identified allusions alongside previously known musical references in works such as the B-Major Piano Trio, the D-Major Serenade, the First Piano Concerto, and the Fourth Symphony, among others, Sholes demonstrates how a historical reference in one movement of a work seems to resonate meaningfully, musically, and dramatically with material in other movements in ways not previously recognized. She highlights Brahms's ability to weave such references into broad, movement-spanning narratives, arguing that these narratives served as expressive outlets for his complicated, sometimes conflicted, attitudes toward the material to which he alludes. Ultimately, Brahms's music reveals both the inspiration and the burden that established masters such as Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and especially Beethoven represented for him as he struggled to emerge with his own artistic voice and to define and secure his unique position in music history.

Who inspired Johannes Brahms in his art of writing music? In this book, Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes provides a fresh look at the ways in which Brahms employed musical references to works of earlier composers in his own instrumental music. By analyzing newly identified allusions alongside previously known musical references in works such as the B-Major Piano Trio, the D-Major Serenade, the First Piano Concerto, and the Fourth Symphony, among others, Sholes demonstrates how a historical reference in one movement of a work seems to resonate meaningfully, musically, and dramatically with material in other movements in ways not previously recognized. She highlights Brahms's ability to weave such references into broad, movement-spanning narratives, arguing that these narratives served as expressive outlets for his complicated, sometimes conflicted, attitudes toward the material to which he alludes. Ultimately, Brahms's music reveals both the inspiration and the burden that established masters such as Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and especially Beethoven represented for him as he struggled to emerge with his own artistic voice and to define and secure his unique position in music history.

To feel the emotional force of music, we experience it aurally. But how can we convey musical understanding visually?Visualizing Music explores the art of communicating about music through images. Drawing on principles from the fields of vision science and information visualization, Eric Isaacson describes how graphical images can help us understand music. By explaining the history of music visualizations through the lens of human perception and cognition, Isaacson offers a guide to understanding what makes musical images effective or ineffective and provides readers with extensive principles and strategies to create excellent images of their own. Illustrated with over 300 diagrams from both historical and modern sources, including examples and theories from Western art music, world music, and jazz, folk, and popular music, Visualizing Music explores the decisions made around image creation. Together with an extensive online supplement and dozens of redrawings that show the impact of effective techniques, Visualizing Music is a captivating guide to thinking differently about design that will help music scholars better understand the power of musical images, thereby shifting the ephemeral to material.

Music scholarship's views of Franz Schubert's instrumental works continue to evolve. How might aesthetic values, historiographies, revisions to the composer's biography, and disciplinary commitments affect how we interpret his music?Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation explores the aesthetic positions and operations that underlie critical assessments of Schubert's instrumental works. In six chapters, each devoted to one or two of Schubert's pieces, René Rusch examines the conditions that have prompted scholarship to reevaluate the composer's music and legacy, considers how different conclusions about his music may be reflective of certain aesthetic values, investigates the role of narrative in both music analysis and constructions of history, and explores alternative forms of coherence through updated analyses of the composer's instrumental works. Rusch's observations and comparative analyses address four significant areas of scholarly focus in Schubert studies, including his approach to chromaticism, his unique musical forms, the relationship between his music and biography, and the influence of Beethoven.Drawing from a range of philosophical, hermeneutic, historical, biographical, theoretical, and analytical sources, Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation offers readers a unique and innovative foray into the poetics of contemporary analyses of Schubert's instrumental music and develops new ways to engage with his repertoire.

Music scholarship's views of Franz Schubert's instrumental works continue to evolve. How might aesthetic values, historiographies, revisions to the composer's biography, and disciplinary commitments affect how we interpret his music?Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation explores the aesthetic positions and operations that underlie critical assessments of Schubert's instrumental works. In six chapters, each devoted to one or two of Schubert's pieces, René Rusch examines the conditions that have prompted scholarship to reevaluate the composer's music and legacy, considers how different conclusions about his music may be reflective of certain aesthetic values, investigates the role of narrative in both music analysis and constructions of history, and explores alternative forms of coherence through updated analyses of the composer's instrumental works. Rusch's observations and comparative analyses address four significant areas of scholarly focus in Schubert studies, including his approach to chromaticism, his unique musical forms, the relationship between his music and biography, and the influence of Beethoven.Drawing from a range of philosophical, hermeneutic, historical, biographical, theoretical, and analytical sources, Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation offers readers a unique and innovative foray into the poetics of contemporary analyses of Schubert's instrumental music and develops new ways to engage with his repertoire.

At the turn of the century, visionary composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes synthesized highly diverse elements from other musical traditions into his distinct artistic voice.   As American as he was far ranging in his interests, Griffes was an aesthetic polyglot, combining elements of literature, visual arts, global folk melodies, and contemporary European art music into a new musical language. The breadth of his sources of inspiration are breathtaking, including the sensual harmonies of fin-de-siècle French music, the British Aesthetic Movement, folk music drawn from the Middle East and Java, and a wide range of poets, including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Sharp. The Pastoral in Charles Griffes's Music explores both his music and the rich historical context from which it grew to enrich our understanding of the composer's artistic contribution and reveal new intersections and contradictions in European and American culture during the early twentieth century. Taylor A. Greer also critiques the philosophical foundation of topic theory and its relationship to the pastoral in Griffes's music to reflect on the end of the nineteenth century and clarify our understanding of his artistic influences.  With Griffes's conception of the pastoral, he transformed the siciliana-based tradition he inherited from the eighteenth century into a new and vibrant genre that preserved the usual associations of simplicity and tranquility and introduced new elements of tension into the pastoral ideal, including global voices, paradox, and occasional conflict.

At the turn of the century, visionary composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes synthesized highly diverse elements from other musical traditions into his distinct artistic voice.   As American as he was far ranging in his interests, Griffes was an aesthetic polyglot, combining elements of literature, visual arts, global folk melodies, and contemporary European art music into a new musical language. The breadth of his sources of inspiration are breathtaking, including the sensual harmonies of fin-de-siècle French music, the British Aesthetic Movement, folk music drawn from the Middle East and Java, and a wide range of poets, including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Sharp. The Pastoral in Charles Griffes's Music explores both his music and the rich historical context from which it grew to enrich our understanding of the composer's artistic contribution and reveal new intersections and contradictions in European and American culture during the early twentieth century. Taylor A. Greer also critiques the philosophical foundation of topic theory and its relationship to the pastoral in Griffes's music to reflect on the end of the nineteenth century and clarify our understanding of his artistic influences.  With Griffes's conception of the pastoral, he transformed the siciliana-based tradition he inherited from the eighteenth century into a new and vibrant genre that preserved the usual associations of simplicity and tranquility and introduced new elements of tension into the pastoral ideal, including global voices, paradox, and occasional conflict.

"Hatten's interpretations are at times surprisingly poetic in their expression. . . . In his book he effectively creates an interaction between aspects of music theory, analysis, aesthetics and semiotics. His work yields some novel insights that deserve careful consideration from anyone in these fields." —The Semiotic Review of BooksMusical Meaning in Beethoven offers a fresh approach to the problem of expressive meaning in music. Beginning with a provocative analysis of the slow movement of the Hammerklavier piano sonata, Robert S. Hatten examines the roles of markedness, Classical topics, expressive genres, and musical tropes in fostering expressive interpretation at all levels of structure. Close readings of movements from Beethoven's late piano sonatas and string quartets highlight less obvious expressive meanings and explain how more familiar stylistic meanings are consistently cued from one work to the next. Co-recipient of the 1997 Wallace Berry Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory.Musical Meaning and Interpretation—Robert S. Hatten, editor

"This book uniquely and successfully sustains a cohesive analysis of the work, career, and reception of a single artist. That the artist is Neil Young, one of the most confounding and mysterious of rock stars, is an added bonus. Finally someone will explain what's been going on all these years!" —Daniel Cavicchi, author of Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning among Springsteen FansAs a writer in Wired magazine puts it, Neil Young is a "folk-country-grunge dinosaur [who has been] reborn (again) as an Internet-friendly, biodiesel-driven, multimedia machine." In Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy, William Echard stages an encounter between Young's challenging and ever-changing work and current theories of musical meaning—an encounter from which both emerge transformed.Echard roots his discussion in an extensive review of writings from the rock press as well as his own engagement as a fan and critical theorist. How is it that Neil Young is both a perpetual outsider and critic of rock culture, and also one of its most central icons? And what are the unique properties that have lent his work such expressive force? Echard delves into concepts of musical persona, space, and energy, and in the process illuminates the complex interplay between experience, musical sound, social actors, genres, styles, and traditions.Readers interested primarily in Neil Young, or rock music in general, will find a new way to think and talk about the subject, and readers interested primarily in musical or cultural theory will find a new way to articulate and apply some of the most exciting current perspectives on meaning, music, and subjectivity.

The early 19th century was a period of acute transition in operatic tradition and style, when time-honored practices gave way to the developing aesthetics of Romanticism, the rise of the tenor overtook the falling stars of the castrati, and the heroic, the masculine, and the feminine were profoundly reconfigured. These transformations resounded in operatic plot structures as well; the happy resolution of the 18th century twisted into a tragic 19th-century finale with the death of the helpless and innocent heroine—and frequently her tenor hero along with her. Female voices which formerly had sung en travesti, or basically in male drag, opposite their female character counterparts then took on roles of the second woman, a companion and foil to the death-bound heroine rather than her romantic partner. In Voicing Gender, Naomi André skillfully traces the development of female characters in these first decades of the century, weaving in and around these changes in voicings and plot lines, to define an emergent legacy in operatic roles.

Alexandra Pierce singles out elements of music such as melody, meter, and phrase, and investigates the defining quality of each through movement. Although simple, these exercises engage the listening attention in complex ways and can be integrated into a musician's daily practice. Practicing movements that accurately reflect a musical element can improve technique and are audible in performance. They become part of your technical command. Short narratives that illustrate how performance practice problems can be approached and solved are scattered throughout the book. A video companion to Deepening Musical Performance through Movement can be found at the author's website, alexandrapierce.net/deepening.

How is it possible to talk or write about music? What is the link between graphic signs and music? What makes music meaningful? In this book, distinguished scholar Leo Treitler explores the relationships among language, musical notation, performance, compositional practice, and patterns of culture in the presentation and representation of music. Treitler engages a wide variety of historical sources to discuss works from medieval plainchant to Berg's opera Lulu and a range of music in between.

Is Language a Music? presents broadly ranging explorations of musical reference that address how and why language cannot be the only measure of meanings. Music, the author insists, is pervaded by significations, but often their erasure is as pertinent to artistry as their construction. This volume's 15 essays in musical semiotics are grouped into sections that treat issues in structural description, present alternative views of theoretical foundations, consider the elaboration of gestural references to form musical discourse, explore some stylistic issues in 20th-century music, and examine the resistance to reference which is esteemed in the tradition of absolute music.Musical Meaning and Interpretation—Robert S. Hatten, editor

Jairo Moreno adapts the methodologies and nomenclature of Foucault's "archaeology of knowledge" and applies it through individual case studies to the theoretical writings of Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber. His conclusion summarizes the conditions—musical, philosophical, and historical—that "make a certain form of thought about music necessary and possible at the time it emerges."Musical Meaning and Interpretation—Robert S. Hatten, editor

"The outstanding originality of this book lies in the detail and perspicuity with which interrelations are traced between texts, it even seems that relations sometimes work backwards. Above all, this book does not offer a 'theory of intertextuality.' Rather, it is a many-sided survey of the topic, open-ended and truthful. It is fresh and inspirational."—Raymond Monelle, Reader in Music at the University of Edinburgh and author of Linguistics and Semiotics in MusicIntertextuality in Western Art Music provides an interdisciplinary approach to the questions of music and meaning, using the approaches of Barthes, Foucault, Eco, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, and others. Drawing on research in aesthetics, hermeneutics, semiotics, narrativity, analysis, and musicology, Klein argues that each musical text is part of a cultural network of texts that code the ways we make sense of music.

The Musical Topic discusses three tropes prominently featured in Western European music: the hunt, the military, and the pastoral. Raymond Monelle provides an in-depth cultural and historical study of musical topics—short melodic figures, harmonic or rhythmic formulae carrying literal or lexical meaning—through consideration of their origin, thematization, manifestation, and meaning. The Musical Topic shows the connections of musical meaning to literature, social history, and the fine arts.

Approaches to Meaning in Music presents a survey of the problems and issues inherent in pursuing meaning and signification in music, and attempts to rectify the conundrums that have plagued philosophers, artists, and theorists since the time of Pythagoras. This collection brings together essays that reflect a variety of diverse perspectives on approaches to musical meaning. Established music theorists and musicologists cover topics including musical aspect and temporality, collage, borrowing and association, musical symbols and creative mythopoesis, the articulation of silence, the mutual interaction of cultural and music-artistic phenomena, and the analysis of gesture.Contributors are Byron Almén, J. Peter Burkholder, Nicholas Cook, Robert S. Hatten, Patrick McCreless, Jann Pasler, and Edward Pearsall.

Classical music permeates contemporary life. Encountered in waiting rooms, movies, and hotel lobbies as much as in the concert hall, perennial orchestral favorites mingle with commercial jingles, video-game soundtracks, and the booming bass from a passing car to form the musical soundscape of our daily lives. In this provocative and ground-breaking study, Melanie Lowe explores why the public instrumental music of late-eighteenth-century Europe has remained accessible, entertaining, and distinctly pleasurable to a wide variety of listeners for over 200 years. By placing listeners at the center of interpretive activity, Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony offers an alternative to more traditional composer- and score-oriented approaches to meaning in the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart.Drawing from the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, the politics of entertainment, and postmodern notions of pleasure, Lowe posits that the listener's pleasure stems from control over musical meaning. She then explores the widely varying meanings eighteenth-century listeners of different social classes may have constructed during their first and likely only hearing of a work. The methodologies she employs are as varied as her sources—from musical analysis to the imaginings of three hypothetical listeners.Lowe also explores similarities between the position of the classical symphony in its own time and its position in contemporary American consumer culture. By considering the meanings the mainstream and largely middle-class American public may construct alongside those heard by today's more elite listeners, she reveals the great polysemic potential of this music within our current cultural marketplace. She suggests that we embrace "crosstalk" between performances of this music and its myriad uses in film, television, and other mediated contexts to recover the pleasure of listening to this repertory. In so doing, we surprisingly regain something of the classical symphony's historical ways of meaning.

Debussy's Late Style explores Claude Debussy's musical responses to World War I. This period of composition encompasses the duration of the war and the last four years of Debussy's life. The works that emerged during this time reflect both wartime events and the composer's self-conscious desire to define his own musical legacy as he felt his life nearing its end. Debussy's complete wartime compositions comprise a small but significant body of works, some little known and some now acknowledged to be among the masterpieces of his career. These include the Berceuse héroïque, En Blanc et noir, the Douze Études, the "Noël des enfants qui n'ont plus de maisons," and the three instrumental sonatas (the Cello Sonata; the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp; and the Violin Sonata). Through music analysis, musicology, and cultural history, this study offers interpretive readings of Debussy's late works, focusing in particular on how they reflect the unique cultural milieu of wartime Paris.

Giacomo Puccini is one of the most frequently performed and best loved of all operatic composers. In Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini's Late Style, Andrew Davis takes on the subject of Puccini's last two works to better understand how the composer creates meaning through the juxtaposition of the conventional and the unfamiliar—situating Puccini in past operatic traditions and modern European musical theater. Davis asserts that hearing Puccini's late works within the context of la solita forma allows listeners to interpret the composer's expressive strategies. He examines Puccini's compositional language, with insightful analyses of melody, orchestration, harmony, voice-leading, and rhythm and meter.

Much music was written for the two most important dances of the 18th and 19th centuries, the minuet and the waltz. In Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz, Eric McKee argues that to better understand the musical structures and expressive meanings of this dance music, one must be aware of the social contexts and bodily rhythms of the social dances upon which it is based. McKee approaches dance music as a component of a multimedia art form that involves the interaction of physical motion, music, architecture, and dress. Moreover, the activity of attending a ball involves a dynamic network of modalities—sight, sound, bodily awareness, touch, and smell, which can be experienced from the perspectives of a dancer, a spectator, or a musician. McKee considers dance music within a larger system of signifiers and points-of-view that opens new avenues of interpretation.