REPRESSION AND INTIMATIONS OF DEATH:

FREUD’S UNCANNY AND COMPOSITIONAL FRAGMENTS

IN THREE TWENTIETH-CENTURY PIECES

by

Jared Andrew Rex

September 1, 2012

A thesis submitted to the

Faculty of the Graduate School of
the University at Buffalo, State University of New York
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of
Master of Arts

Department of Music
 UMI Number: 1520011

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ii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work would not have been possible if not for the encouragement from many

individuals. First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Martha Hyde for assisting me

with this topic from the beginning, taking me on a thesis advisee, and having faith in my

musical and linguistic abilities. I am thankful for her thorough edits and fantastic insight

into the subject. I would also like to extend my gratitude to my committee member Dr.

Richard Plotkin for providing expert advice on my writings. I am deeply indebted to Dr.

Kerry Grant for quickly joining my committee and for his willingness to assist the

process in my time of need. I am also appreciative to Dr. Michael Long for reading and

providing feedback on my first chapter. Additionally, I am extremely grateful to the

librarians at the UB Music Library—Nancy Nuzzo, Dr. John Bewley, and Rebecca

Belford—for refining my research abilities and techniques over the course of my

graduate career. I am also grateful for the constant support of my family and friends over

the years. Finally, and certainly not least, this thesis would not have been completed

without the love and support of Alex. His willingness to read my drafts as well as offer

insight into my thought-process was invaluable.

iii
 CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii

CONTENTS iv

ABSTRACT v

Chapter 1 1

Chapter 2 21

Chapter 3 36

Chapter 4 52

BIBLIOGRAPHY 77

iv
 ABSTRACT

The study of musical meaning has become an increasingly important topic of discourse

among music theorists over the past thirty years; however, the study of twentieth-century

musical semiotics has remained underexplored. Moreover, the link between musical

fragment forms and the semiotic code of the uncanny has never been elucidated in the

writings of music theorists. Sigmund Freud's essay Das Unheimlich explores the

psychological uncanny, which splits the ego into a double that represses one's awareness

of mortality; this concept provides a fertile starting point for exploring twentieth-century

musical semiotics. This paper synthesizes these areas of study through an overview of the

writings in the field and through analyses of three twentieth-century compositions. These

include Claude Debussy's Voiles, Béla Bartók's Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra,

and “Es Blendete uns die Mondnacht” from György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments.

v
 to Julia Benfer (1910-2009)
for teaching me the beauty of analyzing what I hear
and for instilling in me the musical sensitivity to do so
 Chapter 1

Much of human life is a search for meaning, and nowhere is that more evident than

in our striving to understand the significance encoded in expressions of art. Music is an

especially fertile ground for questions of meaning. Why this form? Why this key? Why

does this piece make us feel the way it does? Modern analytic techniques have explored

these questions and have provided a vocabulary to grapple with the difficulties of meaning

in an evocative art form. This has proven especially valuable in the pursuit of meaning in

twentieth-century music, where obscurity often leaves listeners vaguely baffled, vaguely

chilled. This paper argues that one of the reasons is the presence of the musical semiotic

code of the uncanny. It traces the rationale for a semiotic analysis of twentieth-century

music; it demonstrates the significance of fragment form as a potent vessel for the sinister

and unsettling subliminal message of the uncanny; and it explores the origin of the uncanny

in the quintessentially modernist, Freudian conception of life as a struggle against death.

Over the past thirty years, the study of musical meaning has become an

increasingly frequent topic of discourse among music theorists. Because modernism in all

the arts emphasizes formal analysis, the analysis of musical meaning has been neglected in

favor of what we commonly describe as structural analysis. Additionally, there are many

intangible elements present in music that these forms of analysis neglect or fail to

adequately address. As a relatively new phenomenon, the study of hermeneutics, or the

study of meaning, and semiotics, or the study of how the meaning is encoded into musical

signs, present a new theoretical framework in which we can approach the topic of musical

meaning from the perspectives of historical roots and literary narrative theory. Thus,

1
theories of musical semiotics, musical hermeneutics, and musical narrative strive to

identify meaning through signs and codes present within the music itself. By applying this

type of analysis primarily to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, many scholars

attempt to unravel new musical meaning contained therein.1

Leonard Ratner is considered to be the father of the topical analysis movement

and was the first to explore topical analysis within Classical music in his groundbreaking

Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style, published in 1980.2 For Ratner, a topical

analysis involves associating specific gestures with technical details based on historical

fact, such as rhythms or contours creating certain styles, and he thus views a piece as a

collection of isolated manifestations of gestures. Because instrumental music from the

Classical period frequently changes character every few measures, Ratner accounts for

these changes as the music’s means of expressing the many emotions elicited from all

aspects of life. Common examples of topics are dances (minuets, marches, etc.), stylistic

genres (singing style, brilliant style, etc.), and text painting. Additionally, Ratner focuses

on the distinction in signification by stressing the difference between symbolic

signification and iconic signification. In identifying these topics, Ratner demonstrates a

highly technical view, but one that strives to categorize changes in style and texture by

creating a schema in which these topics function in isolation, oppositionally, and

                                                                                                               
1
The following books provide an extensive overview of the history of musical semiotic theory, as
well as the foundations of the musical narrative theory: Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1979); Eero Tarasti, A Theory of Musical Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994).
2
Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer Books,
1980).

2
simultaneously.3

Many scholars, having been highly influenced by Ratner’s work, have continued

to explore different aspects of musical meaning. Kofi Agawu also explores eighteenth-

century music from an approach first defined by listening through expression and

structure. When extended to multiple topoi, Agawu’s work explores music through the

relationships between signs’ interactions with one another.4 Raymond Monelle was one

of the first scholars to study narrative analysis in music.5 His work focuses on describing

music by its inherent meaning and argues that the meaning of music can only be

described in reference to history, and thus cultural temporality.6 Robert Hatten has

devised the concept of “markedness” by analyzing excerpts of Beethoven’s work, and he

combines techniques of topical analysis with expressive genres.7 Jean-Jacques Nattiez

also examined the web of meaning through musical semiotics in relation to culture.8 The

writings of musical semiotics have been extended to musical narrativity9 and

                                                                                                               
3
Oppositions are a common part of semiotic theory. In short, oppositions involve the
juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated objects, yet each concept remains a part of the other. For a
thorough discussion of musical oppositions, see the introduction of Esti Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody
and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000).
4
V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991).
5
Raymond Monelle, Linguistics and Semiotics in Music (Chur: Hardwood Academic, 1992).

6
Ibid., The Sense of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

7
Robert S. Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
8
Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990).
9
Michael Klein, “Chopin's Fourth Ballade as Musical Narrative,” Music Theory Spectrum 26
(2004): 23-56; Bryon Almen, A Theory of Musical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2009).

3
intertextuality.10 Most of the literature on these latter subjects addresses music composed

throughout the nineteenth century.

Surprisingly, very few scholars have explored semiotics and musical narrative in

twentieth-century music, especially in music that lacks neoclassical allusions or tonality.

Currently, this small body of work includes analyses of pieces by Arnold Schoenberg,11

György Kurtág,12 Claude Debussy,13 Witold Lutoslawski,14 John Adams and Steve

Reich,15 and György Ligeti,16 in addition to an upcoming collection of essays focusing

exclusively on musical narrativity.17 It is easy to understand why many theorists have

overlooked twentieth-century music in the search for semiotic meaning. Due to what we

often describe as the emancipation of dissonance, it is difficult to grasp musical semiotic

                                                                                                               
10
Ibid., Intertextuality in Western Art Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
11
Alan Street, “The Obbligato Recitative: Narrative and Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, op.
16,” in Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 164-183.
12
Martha M. Hyde, "Semiotics and Form: Reading Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments," in
Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 5, eds. Maciej Jablonski and Michael Klein (Poznan: Rhytmos,
2005), 185-207.
13
Michael Klein, “Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse as Territorial Assemblage,” 19th-Century Music 31
(2007): 28-52; Steven Rings, “Mystéres Limpides: Time and Transformation in Debussy's Des pas sur la
neige,” 19th-Century Music 32 (2008): 178-208.
14
Nicholas Reyland, "Livre or Symphony? Lutosławski’s Livre pour orchestre and the Enigma of
Musical Narrativity," Music Analysis 27 (2008): 253-95.
15
David Schwarz, “Listening Subjects: Semiotics, Psychoanalysis, and the Music of John Adams
and Steve Reich,” Perspectives of New Music 31, no. 2 (1993): 24-56.
16
Yayoi Uno Everett, “Signification of Parody and the Grotesque in György Ligeti’s Le Grand
Macabre,” Music Theory Spectrum 31 (2009): 26-56.
17
Michael Klein and Nicholas Reyland, eds., Musical Narrative after 1900 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2012). The book is scheduled for release on October 24, 2012.

4
signs or musical narrative from music without tonality.18 Traditional signs, if present at

all, do not act in traditional ways. Thus, signs can change meaning and act differently

than we have learned through tradition to expect. It appears that musical narrative

continues in the twentieth century, but now adapts to the new forms of media, such as

film and cinema.19 Moreover, for many complex twentieth-century compositions,

traditional forms of analysis seem inadequate because they do not sufficiently address

musical meaning. For example, analyses that rely only on the identification of recurring

pitch-class sets seem particularly inadequate for much experimental music by Krzysztof

Penderecki or Karlheinz Stockhausen.20 Thus, musical semiotics provides yet another

provocative reason to pursue a study of musical narrativity in twentieth-century music; it

offers a way to glimpse meaning in what may otherwise appear to be chaotic and

unexplainable noise.

Composers of the early twentieth century were products of the nineteenth century

by birth and culture and, by further extension, would have been familiar with the

traditional semiotic signs used in the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, they appear to

have continued using these signs in much early twentieth-century music.21 For instance,

                                                                                                               
18
For a discussion of Arnold Schoenberg’s concept of the emancipation of dissonance, see Carl
Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press
1989), 379-89.
19
See Klein and Reyland, Musical Narrative after 1900. The introduction, written by Michael
Klein, assumes the presence of musical narrative in the twentieth century and attempts to characterize its
changes and behaviors.
20
See Morag Josephine Grant, “Experimental Music Semiotics,” International Review of the
Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 34 (2003): 173-91 for one attempt to analyze experimental music with
musical semiotics.
21
One common technique composers use to evoke the past is quotation. For an extensive
discussion of this technique in twentieth-century music, see David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural
Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

5
formal evocations of prior forms, such as sonata form, became commonplace and, when

present in the twentieth century, can often evoke nineteenth-century semiotic codes. The

forms are often obscured in some aspect, and nineteenth-century elements can obscure

the perception of what the music is evoking.22 The ultimate challenge for music theorists

is to decide how or even if twentieth-century music evokes the past through specific

semiotic codes that may have roots in earlier music.23

Given the sheer overabundance of nineteenth-century semiotic codes available for

use by twentieth-century composers, it is difficult to categorize which codes have

continued to be evoked. However, one of the most prevalent codes appears to be the

uncanny, which originated as a nineteenth-century literary genre. Strongly tied to the

Germanic Gothic novel, this code carries sinister and chilling connotations. Thus, by

default, the uncanny is associated with other Gothic novel elements, primarily

supernatural occurrences often involving death or its repression.24

The term “Gothic” initially arose as an eighteenth-century adjective to describe

                                                                                                               
22
For an extensive review of how early twentieth-century composers use older forms to
reconstruct and evoke the past, see Martha M. Hyde, “Neoclassic and Anachronistic Impulses in Twentieth-
Century Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 18 (1996): 200-35.
23
It is obvious from the scarcity of writings on the subject that theorists are undecided about how
to deal with musical semiotics in twentieth-century music. Simply extending prior semiotic signs to
twentieth-century music and examining if they are present is enough to begin an examination of how they
function in atonal music. Furthermore, narrative theory can easily be applied to atonal music. See Jonathan
Cross, “Music Theory and the Challenge of Modern Music: Birtwistle’s ‘Refrains and Choruses,’” in
Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 184-94. While Cross does not provide a satisfying solution to the problem, he does identify many
issues that inhibit the semiotic analysis of twentieth-century music.
24
For a detailed and comprehensive overview of the origins of the uncanny and how this concept
pervaded literature, psychology, and nineteenth-century culture, see Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New
York: Routledge, 2003).

6
the cruel and credulous aspects of life in the Middle Ages.25 Because of the commonly

superstitious early Romantic culture, the term “Gothic” was further applied to

supernatural elements of novels. There is a strong link with the uncanny arising from

nostalgia originating in Gothic novels. Within Gothic novels, one of the primary

underlying themes is a constant focus on the supernatural juxtaposed with what is

tangible and natural. Within these novels, the plots often end without resolution, leaving

the reader understandably perplexed. Should the novel vary from this trend and end with

a resolution, there are two common types: the supernatural becomes incarnate or

manifest, in which case, it crosses into a different literary genre, referred to as “the

marvelous;” or the event is rationally and logically explained, but nonetheless remains

shocking and induces anxiety through the unexpected, and it thus “provokes in the

character and in the reader a reaction similar to that which works of the fantastic have

made familiar.”26 For example, at the end of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, we

are left wondering if the governess is insane or if ghosts manifested themselves in the

flesh.27 On a basic level, Gothic novels, in fact, can often resemble fairy tales.

In literary criticism, it is difficult to pinpoint a specific definition of the uncanny

because it is so “broad and vague, but so is the genre which it describes: the uncanny is

                                                                                                               
25
For an elaborate discussion of the word “Gothic,” see Margaret L. Carter, Spectre or Delusion?
The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 5.
26
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland: Press
of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 46.
27
For a interesting discussion of The Turn of the Screw as a narrative of darkness implying
sinister undertones, see Dani Cavallaro, The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear
(London: Continuum, 2002), 104-8.

7
not a clearly delimited genre...”28 In other stories, even as banal an event as murder can

provoke an uncanny effect as well. Beyond Gothic novels, there are many other

definitions of the uncanny throughout German literature. While most definitions agree on

most of the attributes of the uncanny, the meaning and use of the word has changed since

its original inception. In the most basic sense, the uncanny always “…involves feelings of

uncertainty…a critical disturbance of what is proper [and]…co-mingling of the familiar

and unfamiliar.”29 Eventually, the uncanny began to penetrate other literary works, even

those written in the nineteenth century in England and America. Perhaps it is most

prevalent within the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, as they often manifest the uncanny

using techniques similar to those found in European literature.30

Despite the difficulties of precisely defining the meaning of uncanny, one famous

definition emerged from one of Sigmund Freud’s essays published in 1919.31 For Freud,

the uncanny is clearly related to its origins in the novel, but the definition primarily

applies to explaining the psychological repression of death.32 At some length he

describes the uncanny’s difficult attributes as a relation to what is known juxtaposed with

                                                                                                               
28
Todorov, The Fantastic, 46. Of special interest is that a specific definition for the uncanny
remains elusive because it can assume altered forms depending on the context in which it appears.
29
Royle, The Uncanny, 1.
30
Sybil Wuletich-Brinberg’s Poe: The Rationale of the Uncanny (New York: P. Lang, 1988)
presents an all-encompassing study of the uncanny in Poe’s literary works. Many of the concepts covered
in the text assist in broadly defining the literary genre.
31
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 193-233.
32
Freud refers to the German word unheimlich for the uncanny whose literal translation is
“unhomely.” For an extended discussion of the German connotations of the word, see David Punter, “The
Uncanny” in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London:
Routledge, 2007), 129-36. When discussing the word’s etymology, Putner emphasizes “…because that
which is ‘heimlich’ is in fact also ‘surrounded’, ‘secret’, ‘kept close to home’, then it also becomes
‘unheimlich’, incapable of full description, unknown to those who are outside the magic walls” (130).

8
what is not known. Thus, the uncanny recollects a once familiar memory that has been

repressed through time, but one that cannot be fully remembered. Freud implies that the

memory should have stayed in the past, and its surfacing constitutes an element of

terrifying recognition. Drawing heavily on the work of Otto Rank, Freud extends the

definition of the uncanny to the concept of the ego’s formation of the double as insurance

against its destruction. This repression of mortality is created during a person’s youth.

Later in life, the double reverses its course and splits, bringing with it the ghastly

harbinger of death as the ego acknowledges its own mortality.33 Other criteria Freud uses

to identify the uncanny’s presence is “something repressed which recurs.”34 Signs for the

uncanny’s presence also extend to obsessive-compulsiveness. It is easy to understand

how a Freudian definition of the uncanny can be expanded to a literary narrative of

repression. The criteria include something which occurs, is repressed, reoccurs, and

ultimately brings with it a struggle and the ghastly harbinger of death. This narrative of

repression can be effectively extended to musical narrative, which engages a new path for

exploring musical meaning in twentieth-century music.

Much has been written about musical manifestations of the uncanny prior to the

twentieth century, but not after. Because the literary concept came to general fruition

with two articles, one by Ernst Jentsch (1906) and the one by Freud mentioned above

(1919), the uncanny also changed its definition from its original provenance as a literary

genre in Gothic novels. The traditional, supernatural definition and the Freudian one both

agree that the uncanny engages both ambiguity and some aspect of imminent death.

                                                                                                               
33
For an intriguing explanation of the ego and its double, see Susan Sugarman, Freud on the
Psychology of Ordinary Mental Life (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 61-69.
34
Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 78.

9
 If the definition of the word “uncanny” changed in the beginning of the twentieth

century, then it seems likely that the musical semiotic codes for its presence changed as

well.35 Due to the free or contextual nature of twentieth-century compositions, the

uncanny clearly continues to intrude but often in a smaller and more sequestered way. In

music composed before 1900, Michael Klein elegantly coins musical signs for the

uncanny as any “signs for the ombra topic…enharmonicism, strange uses of

chromaticism, odd voice-leading, and mechanical repetitions of musical material”36 (to

which I add the whole-tone scale as shown by my later analysis of Debussy’s Voiles). We

can extend most of Klein’s tonal musical signs to twentieth-century music, especially in

music that unambiguously evokes the past in its form or in its allusions to tonality. For

music that is fully atonal, we often find that the uncanny is evoked by an accompanying

text.37

                                                                                                               
35
See Jo Collins and John Jervis, eds., Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) for a comprehensive discussion of how the definition of the
uncanny is transformed in twentieth-century culture.
36
Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 87. Unfortunately, Klein’s convincing intertextual
analysis using musical signifiers for the uncanny only encompasses music beginning with Beethoven and
finishing with Schoenberg’s Gurrlieder and does not explore the musical uncanny in later twentieth-
century music.
37
In addition to Klein, the following sources that consider the uncanny deserve close reading:
Joseph Kerman, “Opus 131 and the Uncanny,” in The String Quartets of Beethoven, ed. William
Kinderman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 262-78; Christopher H. Gibbs, “‘Komm, geh’ mit
mir’: Schubert’s Uncanny Erlkönig,” 19th-Century Music 19 (1995): 115-35; Lawrence Kramer, “Chopin at
the Funeral: Episodes in the History of Modern Death,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54
(2001): 97-125; Michael P. Steinberg, “Canny and Uncanny Histories in Biedermeier Music,” in Listening
to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2004), 94-132; Nicholas Cook, “Uncanny Moments: Juxtaposition and the Collage Principle in Music,” in
Approaches to Meaning in Music, eds. Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2006), 107-34; David Schwarz, “Music and the Gaze: Schubert’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’ and
‘Ihr Bild,’” in Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997),
64-86.

10
 Other scholars have explored the impact of the uncanny in late nineteenth-century

music. In an effort to give a comprehensive formula for uncanny passages in tonal music,

Richard Cohn has traced uncanny moments beginning with the music of Carlo Gesualdo,

but primarily focuses on late Romantic composers, such as Richard Wagner and Anton

Bruckner, and he does not explore this concept in twentieth-century music.38 Michael

Cherlin identified brief moments that evoke tonality in Arnold Schoenberg’s music as

uncanny and, based on nineteenth-century practice, explains how early twentieth-century

composers repress tonality. “The ghosts of the past become particularly haunting if we

live with them on a day to day basis. Transposing Freud’s thoughts onto a musical

sphere, I would say that tonality, the most ‘Heimlich’ of musical groundings, becomes

increasingly estranged and repressed as Schoenberg and others struggle to surmount it.”39

Thus, it is less a question of whether or not the uncanny is present in twentieth-century

music; rather, it is the study of how it is evoked and why its musical meaning is worth

pursuing. Often, the uncanny arises from its association with ambiguity40 and is best

analyzed in music by applying Freud’s narrative of the repression of death by the ego’s

creation of a double.

                                                                                                               
38
Richard Cohn, “Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age,” Journal of
the American Musicological Society, 57 (2004): 285-324. Cohn’s convincing discussion emphasizes the
influence of the Freudian uncanny in the early twentieth century, but does not discuss music after Richard
Strauss. Cohn seeks to explore “resemblances that both co-relate individual musical representations of the
uncanny, and bind those representations to the uncanny…” (286).
39
Michael Cherlin, “Schoenberg and Das Unheimliche: Spectres of Tonality,” The Journal of
Musicology, 11 (1993): 362.
40
V. Kofi Agawu, “Ambiguity in Tonal Music: A Preliminary Study,” in Theory, Analysis and
Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 86-107. Agawu
identifies the issue of musical ambiguity and presents a case study of how to successfully deal with musical
ambiguity. He does not connect ambiguity with the uncanny, yet the connection is obvious from the
uncanny’s historical association with inherent ambiguity.

11
 Another aspect of the Gothic novel genre often working in tandem with the

uncanny was “the fantastic.” The fantastic is defined as the point of hesitation when one

questions the reality of a supernatural or strange occurrence. Today, this concept persists

in the literary genre of magical realism.41 Because the uncanny is associated with the

supernatural and with death, and because the fantastic represents the moment the mind

tries to determine whether a seemingly mystical event is real, one way of repressing the

awareness of death, from a Freudian perspective, is through distracting the ego by

creating a double. From a historical perspective, there is no better example of the

obsession with repressing death than the general fascination with the fantastic in

nineteenth-century Viennese culture.42 Clearly, the repression of death manifested itself

as a Freudian “double” by creating a fantasy world obsessed with waltzes.43 For the

Viennese, waltzes served to repress unsettling events in life, such as political turmoil and

death. The repression culminated in a trend of suicides in the late nineteenth century,

creating much anxiety in Vienna. Additionally, the obsession with magical elements as a

distraction became a common trend in Viennese society. Later nineteenth-century

composers, regardless of nationality, would have been aware of this concept. For

                                                                                                               
41
See Todorov, The Fantastic for a discussion of how the fantastic and uncanny interact with
each other.
42
See Alessandra Comini, The Fantastic Art of Vienna (New York: Knopf, 1978) for an elaborate
discussion of the fantastic in nineteenth-century Viennese culture, especially within music, art, and
literature. Her convincing argument elaborates on distraction and repression as foundational cultural traits
of Viennese culture.
43
See Hyde, "Semiotics and Form: Reading Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments," in Interdisciplinary
Studies in Musicology 5. Hyde explores the connection of waltzes in operas with death and demonstrates
how the concept is still present in contemporary music, using as an example one of Kurtág’s’s Kafka
Fragments.

12
instance, Debussy’s fascination with the esoteric can be interpreted as providing a

distraction from death.44

Other common ways of repressing death in the nineteenth century arose through

nostalgia. For instance, the Roman Ruins in Schoenbrunn Castle Park was a piece of

architecture that “had been built as a romantic ruin in 1778, and for the observant painter

it served as a marvelous depository for the elusive, deep pockets of light that were

reflected by the translucent water of a still pool onto the jumble of undergrowth, statues,

and architectural fragments.”45 It is evident that the ubiquitous Viennese obsession with

creating a fantasy world, through ruins, fragments and nostalgia, was a deeply engrained

technique of repressing one’s sense of mortality in nineteenth-century societies, and it is

thus intertwined with signs for the Freudian uncanny.

The Viennese preoccupation with repression through ruins provides a link

between the Freudian uncanny and the semiotic interpretation of literature and music.

The fragment was a common literary genre in the late Classical and early Romantic

periods, but the allure of fragments or ruins predates by hundreds of years what we

commonly describe as musical fragment form. The literary form of the fragment is

strongly connected with the eighteenth-century fascination with ruins. Many

archeological discoveries unearthed massive architectural and sculptural ruins, most

                                                                                                               
44
For a connection between Debussy’s fascination with the esoteric and his musical esoteric style,
see David Paul Goldman, “Esotericism as a Determinant of Debussy's Harmonic Language,” The Musical
Quarterly 75 (1991): 130-47.
45
Comini, The Fantastic Art of Vienna, 8. This example shows the obvious connection with
repressing life events by the creation of a double manifested from nostalgia for the past. Again, early
twentieth-century composers would have been aware of this symptom of repression.

13
notably at Pompeii and other lost cities in Ancient Greece and Rome.46 The Romantics

became obsessed with the concept of the incomplete, and consequently it became

reflected in the literary form of the fragment. While fragments are not explicitly

associated with the uncanny, the appeal of the fragment, by default, also relies on and

arises from a strong nostalgia for the past.

As a common literary form in the nineteenth century that was developed in the

late eighteenth century, the fragment is usually considered a short and self-contained

entity. Literary fragments are complete in themselves, yet they simultaneously imply

things outside or beyond themselves. Its typical short length allows it to grow and change

constantly for its duration, a feature that proves essential for provoking ambiguity. As a

result, fragments possess a cyclical feeling, as they often begin in the middle of a thought

and end unresolved. Paradoxically, they can be viewed as both complete and

fragmented.47 One commonly used image to describe Romantic fragments is as “pieces

broken off from an ancient vase.”48 Each fragment attempts to reconstruct the original,

yet the original can never be reconstructed: too much of it can never be retrieved. The

inherent melancholy apparent in this kind of loss clearly contributed to the sense of the

uncanny. Any number of fragments can only provide general ideas about the vase—its

form, its texture, the decorations painted on its surface—but no fragment can provide

                                                                                                               
46
The Romantic fascination with ruins also extended to literary fragments from antiquity. This
connection, between physical and literary ruins, was a common preoccupation of the Romantics. For an
extensive discussion of these concepts, see Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique
of a Form (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 28.
47
For a basic discussion of how fragment forms are connected with ruins and nostalgia for
antiquarianism, see Sophie Thomas, “The Fragment,” in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 502-13.
48
Beate Julia Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poets: Fragmentation of
Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 28.

14
completion. Fragments also bear a strong connection with sketches49 and possess a close

relationship with ruins. Each mirrors the other.50 Other scholars stress the relationship of

“ruins and monsters,”51 pointing to the distressing deformity of ruins.52

By the Romantic era, musical fragments began to manifest themselves as

character pieces by Robert Schumann53 and preludes by Frederic Chopin,54 to name only

two examples. In order to understand how the Romantic fragment is evoked in the

twentieth century, we first need to understand what it meant to Romantic composers. In

The Romantic Generation, Charles Rosen summarizes many specifics of Romantic

fragment form in music and how contemporary composers related to it. For instance,

until the mid-nineteenth century rarely did a piece end with anything other than a tonic

chord, let alone a dissonance. Yet Schumann does just that in “Im wunderschönen Monat

Mai” from his song cycle Dichterliebe.55 The introduction of musical fragment form also

                                                                                                               
49
Samuel Johnson made this connection while editing the works of the celebrated poet Edmund
Smith. For a thorough discussion, see Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the
Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 58.
50
Ibid., 59.
51
Linda Cummins, Debussy and the Fragment (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2006), 21-22.

52
For a detailed history of the origins of the fragment and how Romantic authors (such as
Wordsworth and Coleridge) viewed the fragment in conjunction with ruins, see Thomas McFarland,
Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981).
53
Robert Schumann’s music evokes the concept of distance through his musical and literary
analyses, texted and instrumental music, and music and scenery. For an extended discussion of Schumann’s
use of these in fragment forms, see Berthold Hoeckner, “Schumann and Romantic Distance,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 50 (1997): 55-132.
54
For a proposed theory and analysis of closure in Chopin’s Preludes, see V. Kofi Agawu,
“Concepts of Closure and Chopin's Opus 28,” Music Theory Spectrum, 9 (1987): 1-17.
55
Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 41.
Here I summarize Rosen’s ideas, as well as rely on his elegant prose. While there are many other musical
sources on the subject, Rosen’s entire chapter warrants close reading.

15
coincided with a change in harmonic language brought about by Romantic composers.

When discussing this song, Charles Rosen argues that the form is circular and produces

the effect “…that we feel the infinite possibility of return.”56

Many fragments possess a cyclical feeling because they often begin and end

unresolved with their musical content isolated from the whole work. Yet the whole work

requires the fragment’s presence in order to complete itself. For example, in Schumann’s

Carnaval not only is each character piece isolated and in itself complete, but each also

depicts something specifically indicated by its title, which is related in turn to the entire

work. Because each miniature piece is complete, fragments also contain an inherent

tension and conflict with self-identity.57 Rosen beautifully summarizes this characteristic

as unstable and ambiguous, “…implying a past before the song begins and a future after

its final chord”58 and “separate from the rest of the universe…[but suggesting] distant

perspectives.”59

One of the common misconceptions of fragment forms is that they must always

be quite short. If many physical ruins from antiquity remain massive yet incomplete, such

as the Roman Colosseum, one questions the validity of the common assumption that all

literary fragments—and thus musical ones as well—must be only a few lines and of short

duration. As mentioned above, musical Romantic fragment forms lack completion, are

                                                                                                               
56
Ibid., 44.

57
See Lisa Ann Musca, “The Piano Fragment and the Decomposing of the Musical Structure
from the Romantic to the Postmodern” (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2007) for a
discussion of how fragments and miniatures deal with issues of closure, tracing music from Beethoven to
Schoenberg.
58
Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 56.
59
Ibid., 48

16
usually short, and often appear as sets of character pieces. This topic warrants special

consideration because twentieth-century music evokes the past by using unconventional

twentieth-century techniques. For instance, if tonality appears in certain twentieth-

century pieces, it is often used in a distorted way and, instead of evoking past practice, it

is used ultimately to deconstruct the music.60 Past forms do appear and bring with them

an inherent ambiguity if compared with traditional formal structures. Forms, as well as

tonality, do not always bear their traditional connotations, and they change to

accommodate the new forms and compositional methods of twentieth-century music.

Thus, we will discover that fragment forms are not always short, as some scholars have

commonly assumed.

One good example of a long, literary fragment is by the celebrated poet Samuel

Taylor Coleridge. Composed after a dream in 1797, the circumstances surrounding the

poem “Kubla Khan” are clearly uncanny. The plot occurred in an opium-induced dream,

and after awaking Coleridge began to transcribe it in the form of a poem.61 Unfortunately,

he was quickly interrupted by a visitor and could not remember the rest of the dream.

While the content and analysis of the poem is not of prime importance here, the fact that

Coleridge could not remember the rest of the dream and published it regardless implies

that fragments can be of longer length even in the Romantic era.62 The length of “Kubla

                                                                                                               
60
I explore this concept to explain the presence of the uncanny in my analysis of the second
movement of Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto.
61
For an extensive discussion of the circumstances surrounding the composition of “Kubla
Khan,” see Elisabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (New York: Octagon Books, 1975).
62
Many literary scholars dispute the meaning and influences contained in Kubla Khan. For an in-
depth discussion of current discourse, see Robert F. Fleissner, Sources, Meaning, and Influences of
Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000).

17
Khan” is 54 lines; while this is long for a literary fragment, it nonetheless possesses many

of the same qualities found in other fragments. Coleridge originally estimated that the

finished length would likely have been between 200 – 300 lines. His intent was to create

a complete poem, but it remains a fragment because it was unfinished. Today, literary

scholars still consider “Kubla Khan” to be a fragment even though it is unfinished.63 As

we will see, a musical parallel to Coleridge involves the events surrounding the

composition of Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto. The primary difference is that death

interrupted Bartók from its completion, and thus it can be considered a literal

compositional fragment.

The link between fragments and the uncanny has been largely ignored in the

writings of literary and musical scholars. It is interesting to draw comparisons between

the similarities of the two. The Freudian uncanny arises from nostalgia and ambiguity in

the same way that fragments arise from nostalgia. The nineteenth-century Viennese

obsession with the past was a common way to repress troubled everyday life and

exemplifies a culture embracing a strong formation of a Freudian double. The

circumstances surrounding the allure of fragment forms are very similar. Thus, fragments

are, in a sense, uncanny, because they imply a past memory or place, just as the ego

creates the double in an early phase to repress death. Yet, fragments can never provide a

complete memory because there is always something missing—a feature that is used to

create a Freudian uncanny effect. In ruins, the original memory is repressed, and all that

remains is a partial structure. Not surprisingly, the presence of the uncanny in twentieth-

                                                                                                               
63
One source, which rewards close reading, discusses Coleridge’s life and common literary
themes throughout his writings. See The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

18
century music often reveals itself in fragment forms and thus is strongly connected to the

presence of fragments. I propose that any definition of fragments in twentieth-century

music must describe them in some sense to be incomplete. Such examples include not

only the traditional fragment forms, such as those found in sets of Preludes, but also

works left unfinished by the composer. Fragments thus, by definition, can be uncanny

simply due to their incomplete form.

One of the only sources that treats the presence of the Freudian uncanny in

fragments is an analysis of Samuel Coleridge’s unfinished poem “Christabel.” Because

this important connection is underrepresented in literature, it is important to summarize

most of the argument here, as it provides the primary link with the musical uncanny and

musical fragment forms.64 The Gothic and confusing nature of the text of “Christabel”

imply the presence of the Freudian uncanny in multiple ways. First, the poem’s text

contains many elements of repetition or “doubling,” which aggressively evokes the

uncanny. Because the doubling could change based on the text,

the condition of the poem as a mutilated relic of antiquity, suggests

another, namely Schelling’s suggestion that ‘Unheimlich’ is the name for
everything that ought to have remained...secret and hidden but has come to
light. This presence informs Freud’s observation that the uncanny ‘is that
class of the frightening that leads back to what is known of old and long
familiar.65

Thomas argues that readers are often puzzled by the poem’s strange subject

matter and that aspects of it, the uncanny manifestations, should have remained hidden.

                                                                                                               
64
See Sophie Thomas, “The Return of the Fragment: ‘Christabel’ and the Uncanny,” in
Untrodden Regions of the Mind: Romanticism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Ghislaine McDayter (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 2002), 51-73. Thomas’s convincing argument is the foundation for the
connection between the uncanny and fragment forms.
65
Ibid., 52.

19
Furthermore, Thomas explores the concept of disturbing ambiguity—another signifier of

the uncanny—in fragment forms, and he beautifully summarizes the relationship between

the uncanny and fragments: “…by extension, the presence of the fragment, as a persistent

reminder of the remainder, may be seen as the allegorical presence within a text, within

every text (no matter how lively) of its own ‘death’: its own necessarily incomplete

incompletion.”66

I will continue the discussion of the relationship between fragments and the

uncanny in three twentieth-century pieces that can best be described as compositional

fragments. The first, Debussy's Voiles, demonstrates how twentieth-century composers

still rely on nineteenth-century signs, acting in their traditional ways, for the uncanny to

manifest itself through oppositions. The second analysis, the second movement of

Bartók’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, No. 3, shows that the uncanny can mutate in

twentieth-century music to manifest itself in a longer fragment form. Here, the uncanny is

used to evoke and distort past formal structures and tonalities, as Bartók seeks to repress

his own sense of mortality. The final analysis, a movement from Kurtág’s Kafka

Fragments, shows that twentieth-century composers can read a Freudian textual narrative

of repression throughout a cycle of fragments to explain the otherwise unconnected

placement of fragments within a larger, incomplete whole. By exploiting the connections

between fragments and the uncanny, we will become better equipped to explore musical

narrative in the twentieth century.

                                                                                                               
66
Ibid., 69.

20
 Chapter 2

I know that indefiniteness is an element of true music, a suggested indefiniteness bringing

about a definiteness of vague and therefore of spiritual effect.
—Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

Impressionist composer Claude Debussy completed his first book of piano

Preludes late in his life and in only three months between December 1909 and February

1910. A second book of preludes followed two years later, and both books constitute a

total of 24 preludes, each of which has a unique title that may or may not indicate the

presence of extra-musical meaning in the prelude. The second prelude from Book 1,

Voiles, is notoriously ambiguous, peculiar both in its title and its use of the whole-tone

scale. I begin by examining the connection and extension of the Romantic fragment to

Debussy’s harmonic vocabulary. By further extending the discussion to Debussy’s

fascination with the works of writer Edgar Allan Poe, I will review a preexisting pitch-

class set analysis and determine why a semiotic analysis is needed for a fuller

understanding of its musical meaning. In focusing on semiotic oppositions that manifest

in opposing registers, I then examine Michael Klein’s semiotic codes for the presence of

the uncanny in Voiles by analyzing its musical content, concluding with a Freudian

narrative reading.

Preludes have much in common with fragments. In fact, most preludes in the

Romantic sense are fragments because they are essentially preludes to nothing, unlike

Bach’s celebrated Preludes and Fugues. One of the best example of preludes as

Romantic fragments is Frédéric Chopin’s Preludes, op. 28, published in 1839. The

scholar Charles Rosen argues that even though they are often performed as a complete set

21
today, much evidence suggests that Chopin intended them to be performed individually

or in groups.1 Additionally, unlike Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, there is no method of

organizing Chopin’s Preludes through similar keys. From a traditional understanding of

the prelude, Chopin’s Preludes challenge our understanding of a “set” by seeming closer

to 24 separate pieces published under one title. It is in this way that Debussy’s two books

of Preludes strongly evoke Chopin’s Preludes. Each prelude cultivates contrast to the

extent that their association instead strongly invokes a group of disconnected fragmentary

forms. By Debussy’s time, the fragment was certainly a recognized and accepted form.

Because the Preludes were composed late in Debussy’s life, it is important to note

Debussy’s contemporaneous obsession with sustaining the French musical heritage of his

predecessors. In the last decade of his life, he began to compose piano works in older

forms, such as preludes, etudes, and sonatas. Moreover, he dedicated his set of Études,

published in 1915, to François Couperin (1668-1733) and Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849).2

Even though Chopin was a Polish national, he lived in Paris for much of his life and, in

turn, Debussy viewed Chopin as his French musical predecessor. Furthermore, Debussy’s

Études during his lifetime were frequently compared with those of Chopin.3 Thus, it is

not surprising that Debussy’s Preludes evoke Chopin’s and offer a direct extension of

nineteenth-century fragment forms. However, there are many differences between both

                                                                                                               
1
Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 83. This remains an issue of debate among musicologists.

2
Marianne Wheeldon, “Tombeau de Claude Debussy: The Early Reception of the Late Works,”
in Rethinking Debussy, eds. Elliott Antokoletz and Marianne Wheeldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 261. Wheeldon details Debussy’s correspondence with Durand et Fils, his publisher, regarding the
protracted discussion of the dedication to both Couperin and Chopin.
3
See Marianne Wheeldon, Debussy’s Late Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009),
56-57.

22
composers’ preludes. Debussy disregards “key order, thus creating a closed but

unordered collection, and one that is closed simply through association with Chopin and

other prelude collections—the number twelve having meaning only in memory.”4 And

unlike Chopin’s Preludes, Debussy added titles which appear as postscripts at the end of

each prelude.

Debussy’s fascination with preserving past musical lineage is complemented by

an equally obsessive interest in the literary works of Edgar Allan Poe. Beginning in 1901,

Debussy began using two short stories by Poe as texts for short operas, neither of which

were ever completed. In a letter from Debussy to André Caplet, he speaks of his

overriding fascination with Poe:

I cannot hide from you that I have been giving in to neglecting Images to
the benefit of Mr. E. A. Poe. . . . [His works are] nearly anguishing. It
makes me cast essential affection aside. This man—though
posthumously—exercises an almost tyrannical influence on me, which is
nearly anguishing, and I lock myself like a brute in the “House of Usher,”
lest I be keeping company with the “Devil in the Belfry.”5

From this correspondence, it is evident that Debussy’s infatuation with Poe’s

writings had begun to penetrate other aspects of his life. The above letter was written on

September 21, 1909—merely two months before he composed Voiles. Both “The Fall of

the House of Usher” and “Devil in the Belfry” were written in the traditional genre of the

nineteenth-century Gothic novel by Poe, and both function according to the expectations

for Gothic novels as outlined in Chapter 1. Clearly, the uncanny, ambiguity, and the

sublime preoccupied Debussy when composing Voiles. Thus, in addition to the evidence

                                                                                                               
4
Cummins, Debussy and the Fragment, 154.
5
Claude Debussy, Claude Debussy Through His Letters, trans. by Jacqueline M. Charette (New
York: Vantage Press, 1990), 93.

23
of Debussy’s obsession with the past by using traditional forms, it seems likely that he

also incorporated the uncanny into his compositional process through his strong interest

in Poe’s works.

Many aspects of Voiles embrace ambiguity. The Prelude’s title lacks an initial

French article, denuding it of gender and thus rendering it ambiguous and open to

multiple interpretations. This was clearly deliberate on Debussy’s part, because he placed

an ellipsis before the noun instead of an article. Similar to Voiles, most of the titles for the

remaining Preludes are somewhat arbitrary; but unlike Voiles, most were written as

suggested afterthoughts by Debussy’s wife, Emma.6 Thus, scholars continue to debate

which noun best represents Voiles. The English translation is either “veils” or “sails.”

Additionally, some scholars have attempted to analyze the music based on the possible

meanings of the Prelude’s title. For instance, Frank Dawes eloquently describes both

options: “The veiled thirds of the opening, faintly suggestive of the Faun’s pipe again,

could be either; but the rocking ostinato at très souple and the hint of flung spray in the

grace-notes of the last page suggest a seascape, or at least a harbor-scape.”7

In turn, many music theorists attempt to find literal musical meanings from the

title Voiles. Unfortunately, this type of analysis only leaves us searching for musical

elements that indexically point to one over the other instead of embracing the inherent

ambiguity. If the titles were indeed afterthoughts, there still is much in the music that

communicates a semiotic code signifying something beyond the sea. In a discussion of

                                                                                                               
6
Marguerite Long, At the Piano with Debussy (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1972), 62.

7
Frank Dawes, Debussy Piano Music (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), 38.

24
Debussy’s peculiar use of tonality, Boyd Pomeroy turns to Voiles “only to find a

‘structural vagueness’ resistant to…well-defined tonal criteria.…Debussy ended up going

beyond its natural limits. As for that perplexing ‘structural vagueness,’ it will require

nothing less than a (new) ‘form of analysis to cope with the problems to which the new

systems give rise.’”8

Pomeroy’s assessment implies that theorists are puzzled by how to approach an

effective analysis of Voiles, most likely because the harmonic content of the piece

consists of only one whole-tone scale, except for six measures that are solely pentatonic

(mm. 42-48).9 There are no extra accidentals or modulations throughout the Prelude. One

common type of analysis used to explain Debussy’s use of scales is a pitch-class set

analysis. Richard Parks creates a schema by organizing Debussy’s commonly used scales

into four genuses: diatonic, whole-tone, chromatic, and octatonic. When analyzing

Voiles, Parks focuses on the connection of the whole-tone and pentatonic scales to exploit

“the differences and interconnections between two contrasting [pitch class] set genera.”10

At the end of his rigorous pitch-class set analysis, he summarizes that “…the whole-

tone’s genus’s symmetrical structure and homogeneous [interval class] content radically

restrict the possibilities for tonal relations.”11

Thus, in support of Pomeroy’s request for a “new form of analysis to cope with”

Voiles, and after examining Park’s thorough pitch-class set analysis, it seems clear that

                                                                                                               
8
Boyd Pomeroy, “Debussy’s Tonality: A Formal Perspective,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Debussy, ed. Simon Trezise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 163.
9
See Claude Debussy, Préludes pour Piano (Paris: Durand, 1910), 4-7 for the score.

10
Richard S. Parks, The Music of Claude Debussy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 59.

11
Ibid., 64.

25
other forms of analysis must be employed to further explore musical meaning in Voiles.

Due to the limitations of pitch-class set theory, most twentieth-century analytic

approaches fail to offer a convincing analysis of Voiles. Examining the music’s semiotic

content, however, opens the possibility of discovering something beyond scaler

oppositions. If we must embrace the ambiguity of the Prelude’s title, can we also ask if

the music in any way suggests repression? By acknowledging Debussy’s use and

extension of the Romantic fragment form to his Preludes, we now have the freedom to

uncover any nineteenth-century signs for the uncanny, since the same forms of these

codes are often present in twentieth-century music.

The Prelude’s form, which is somewhat ambiguous, presents a basic A-B-A1

structure. On first glance, we can hear the Prelude’s opening as the struggle between the

oppositions of contrasting registers. The opening motive in the right hand (mm. 1-4) and

its answer in the left hand (interrupted at mm. 7-8 but subsequently stated in full at mm.

8-14) appear, with few exceptions, in the exact registers in which they are first stated.

The first motive projects a calm and stagnant rhythmic topos that blocks or subverts

continuing development. At the beginning of m. 2, Debussy notates the opening G♯,

found in m.1, as A♭, providing a sense of bizarre and extraneous enharmonicism. The

only slight derivation of the first motive appears in m. 2 with the octave transfer (C5–C6)

coupled with a crescendo that somewhat conceals a continuous whole-tone descent from

G♯5 to B♭4. If we hear this as depicting calm water for “sails,” then a small wave

apparently has disrupted this calmness. The motive dies out with a strong decrescendo,

providing the theme with a sense of resignation.

26
 But before we hear the second motive at m. 7, a repeating B♭1 appears in the bass

at m. 5 and obscures the piece’s calmness and serenity. Although the B♭s are jolting, the

pitch is not random; the right hand’s opening motive ends on B♭6. At first, the B♭s seem

to provide the first sense of “harmony,” due to the stepwise descent in the right hand

from E4 and C4; but instead they turn the piece in an unexpected direction. I later interpret

further the insistent nature of the repeating B♭s, but even at the outset a strong sense of

two oppositions is projected—the opening higher and static descent of thirds against dark

or ominous repetitive B♭s two octaves lower. In real time, this subtle, unmitigated

opposition causes one to feel disoriented and unsure of the future direction of the piece. It

is important to clarify that because Debussy is using the same whole-tone scale, there is

often an association between motive and register, just as there is an association between

pitch and pitch-class.

By the time the second motive is fully stated, the listener may become somewhat

apprehensive due to unrelenting repetition of the B♭1s. However, instead of developing

and expanding the motives (found in the right hand at m. 7) into new thematic material,

Debussy continues to state them in full (except for the brief disruption of a “small wave”

in m. 11) juxtaposed against one another. Here, the pitch center briefly centers around the

A♭4 in the right hand against the recurring B♭1 in the left hand. It is as if each motive

struggles to stay alive, to keep its distinctive characteristics within a sea of turmoil

threatening to overthrow each one’s adherence to a specific register. Finally, in m. 18,

new thematic material enters, but only as a whole step ascent in thirds from C5-D5-E5-F♯5

27
(mm. 18-20) and finally finishing on G♯5/A♭5 in m. 21, which leads to a new motivic

idea starting in m. 22. This new motive is so insistent and repetitive that it eventually

dominates the right hand in m. 28. As the left hand struggles to catch up with a whole-

tone scale ascent in m. 29, it seems too late and hope seems to recede. What was static

and peaceful at the beginning has become obsessive-compulsive and has overthrown our

sense of what the piece means, perhaps by storm or hurricane. By m. 31, the left hand has

ascended into the right hand’s registral domain. The right hand has nowhere left to go and

attempts to fight against the left hand. In m. 32, the right hand resigns and momentarily

surrenders to the left hand. The music reverts to its original state in m. 33 with the

addition of a new accompanying motive in the right hand, placing the oppositions even

farther apart. As the registers suddenly change and normalize around middle C, chaos

begins between both hands but dies down briefly in mm. 40-41.

In this reading, the B section arrives in m. 42 with an unleashed pentatonic scale

that ushers in a glimpse of change. While lasting only 6 measures, the section contrasts

markedly with the previous material by presenting for the first time new harmonic

content. Here, for the first time, the oppositions of register are broken. Both hands play

lush scales, which continue to ascend until the climax in m. 44. Unfortunately, the whole-

tone scale is too insistent, and the pentatonic scale subsides in mm. 45-47 with four

cadences.

Even when the material of the A section returns in m. 48, it is not until m. 50 that

an explicit restatement of the second motive occurs in its initial register (m. 33). This

time, motives in the inner register, the site of previous oppositional conflict, project

splashes of the whole-tone scale that provide support below the melody in the high

28
register. Here, the clearly defined oppositions of the A section are obscured by the

addition of a measure of chords in higher and lower registers (m. 54), which are then

repeated in an even higher register (m. 56). In m. 58, the new extreme registers become

blurred and intertwined with the opening melody in its original register, largely obscuring

the previously defined oppositions. The motive from the opening motive can only state its

first four measures before it finally submits to the excessive whole-tone scale and dies

away.

By examining oppositions, we have made sense of differences in register, but we

have not yet examined how the fragment projects a sense of the sinister and uncanny. As

discussed in Chapter 1, the uncanny can be signaled by “signs for the ombra

topic…enharmonicism, strange uses of chromaticism, odd voice-leading, and mechanical

repetitions of musical material. The uncanny is associated with signs for terrible

recognition, anxiety, dread, death and the sublime.”12 In tonal music and twentieth-

century music that invoke past forms, composers will often use functional harmony. But

what about music that is not explicitly or fully tonal? Beyond fragment form and

oppositions, how can we investigate if the uncanny is present when “tonality” is derived

from only two modal scales?

When Arthur Wenk speaks of Debussy’s use of the whole-tone scale in his mature

music, he makes a pertinent observation: “Debussy remarked of the necessity ‘in some

places to paint in monochrome and to be content with shades of gray.’ The absence of

semitonal inflection in the whole-tone scale offers a musical monochrome…the harmonic

blankness of the whole-tone scale renders it particularly appropriate to represent fear,

                                                                                                               
12
Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 87.

29
confusion, dread, all of which convey a certain paralysis and immobility.”13 Thus, within

Debussy’s output, Voiles is uncanny by being largely comprised of pitches from a single

whole-tone scale. If Wenk states that the whole-tone scale can also symbolize “fear,

confusion, [and] dread,” and Klein states that uncanny musical signs can also be

indexical for “fear and trembling,”14 can we add this to our semiotic musical vocabulary

for the presence of the uncanny? And if so, what happens when we apply this type of

analysis to Voiles? Are we able to discover yet deeper meaning? While the uncanny may

not always consist of the presence of a whole-tone scale, I have nonetheless used it in this

context to enhance our understanding of how the uncanny can behave outside of

traditional tonality. By applying Freud’s narrative of struggle between the creation of the

double to distract the ego from approaching death, we are able to discover a markedly

different, almost ghastly reading of the piece.

Immediately from the opening phrase in mm. 1-2, we are met with a sign that the

uncanny is omnipresent, lurking in the shadows, through an odd enharmonic notation.

The piece begins with a G♯5 in the soprano voice at m. 1, yet the alto voice moves

stepwise by descent to a notated A♭4 instead of G♯4. Furthermore, the A♭4 in m. 2

becomes G♯5 when it ascends to accompany the octave leap in the soprano. At first, we

may assume that Debussy tries to preserve some type of distinction between certain

registers by exclusively limiting accidentals to those registers; however, this does not

explain why Debussy notates the previous G♯ as A♭ in mm. 29-47. (Additionally, there is

                                                                                                               
13
Arthur B. Wenk, Claude Debussy and Twentieth-Century Music (Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1983), 42.
14
Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 85.

30
no difference in the tone quality of either written pitch when performed on a piano.) By

changing the accidentals within a span of four measures, it is also visually awkward for

the pianist to read. It is almost as if Debussy mimics the inherent struggle between the

registers by creating a mental struggle between the pianist and written score. Clearly the

presence of the whole-tone scale on a background level enhances the uncanny effect.

Accompanying our struggle and identification of the uncanny is an attempt to

understand what, if anything, is repressed for the entirety of the piece. If we read the

contrasting sections as oppositions between the whole-tone and pentatonic scales, could

the pentatonic scale represent that which is being repressed? Because of the alternation in

notation between the A♭ and G♯, I read A♭5 of the higher register as repressed from the

beginning. When we finally see an A♭ in m. 2, it is obscured and repressed through an

octave leap to G♯. As it attempts to overthrow the double, the double apparently

disregards its threat, quietly replacing it with G♯. Thus, the opening phrase could be read

as recalling a distant memory, only to have the double repress it with the octave transfer

jolting us back to reality.

Just as the opening motive descends into the abyss, the sinister B♭s arrive in the

bass at m. 5, suggesting to us that the complacent opening melody represents more than it

seems to be. The lyrical second opening motive attempts to move out of the strange and

terrifying world by ascending by step in m. 7, but the B♭s, while toujours pp, seem to

imply that the ghastly harbinger of death loiters in the background, waiting for the proper

time to unleash death. While not our repressed A♭s, the bass B♭s, in their persistence,

also seem to signify the uncanny. As the theme expands in m. 10 from the right hand to

31
the left hand, the opening motive returns in full once again against the two other motives.

In my reading, I hear this entrance as obsessive because the motive returns in full and

attempts to momentarily obscure the ascent of the second motive. The opening motive is

restated in full yet again at mm. 15-17, but this time, it is finally able to break free of the

monotonous opening section by stealthily creeping out by whole step ascents in m. 18.

All is not well, however, because compulsiveness overtakes the motive by insisting on its

ascent only by step. The left hand has embraced fuller chords to prepare for a possible

struggle (mm. 15, 17, 19), but the music temporarily rests on D7 at m. 22, implying that

we have briefly surrendered and allowed the memory to overtake us.

Mechanical repetitions of musical material are unmistakably projected at the end

of m. 22 beginning with the right-hand’s newly elaborated motive, which is repeated

twice. While the right hand is eventually able to momentarily shake free of the uncanny

and move on to similar but different melodic material (mm. 25-26), the left hand is stuck

in mechanical repetitions of dotted rhythms in rotation with the pitches D4-C4-F♯3-C3 in

mm. 23-28. By m. 29, the right hand can no longer contain itself and begins to spin out

of control with repetitions, all of which eventually lead it to its climax in m. 32. The

climax, while only at a piano dynamic level, is initially provoked by the left hand’s

dotted rhythms. I read this as a strong attempt to overthrow the double, primarily due to

its robotic nature. Because the efforts are in vain, since the right hand goes off in its own

direction, the left hand changes its strategy and attempts to bring the realization of death

via ascending whole-tone scales. Measure 29 is also the first time A♭ appears in the

higher register (A♭5), suggesting that the memory is stronger than the ego had thought.

32
As the memory and ego battle, the deathly B♭s finally cease for two measures (mm. 31-

32) only to project a new compulsively repetitive ostinato motive.

The A♭s (in both hands at m. 33) allow us to remember the repressed memory for

the first time. In this reading, the B section begins at m. 33 as the music becomes the

memory by way of the A♭s. The sinister B♭s in the bass become longer, recurring less

frequently, and they seem to fall into the background with the uncanny. Because a new

rotating motive was introduced in m. 32 (D5-E5-D6-D5), we are unable to repress the new

material to fully uncover the memory—it is too persistent. This motive acts as a constant,

mechanical reminder that the uncanny is still with us, strategically planning the

destruction of the double. Even though the A♭s are finally allowed to surface (mm. 33-

36), we are not able to understand and enjoy the memory because the melodic content

stays the same, immovable in its texture. When the mechanical motive ceases in m. 38,

another brief struggle between the ego and the repressed memory commences in the

contrary motion between both hands. Just when it seems like the ego has gained control,

the alteration of the A♭s and B♭s in m. 41 cease the struggle and, for the first time, allow

us a moment of clarity. The A♭3 in m. 41 is the key to unlocking the past.

As the repressed memory reveals itself in full (mm. 41-43), Debussy abandons his

strict adherence to the earlier defined registers. The memory finally gains enough

momentum to completely overtake the ego, even if only briefly. The ascending

pentatonic scales imply splashes of life. At the beginning of m. 42, the new motivic

material is repeated and insisted upon as the memory grows from a small reminiscence to

33
a detailed painting with two new pitches, D♭ and E♭, introduced by the change in key

signature from no sharps or flats to five flats at m. 42. What has been repressed quickly

becomes our reality. The B♭1 in the bass acts as a support rather than a reminder of our

sense of mortality due to the key change at m. 42 and the role of B♭ in the pentatonic

scale.15 In addition, all dissonance disappears as we reach the climax in m. 44. The music

finally seems to work naturally and smoothly. It is at the climax that the memory cannot

overthrow the ego and quickly resigns, almost apologetically, by four consecutive

cadences to E♭ minor (mm. 45-46). These cadences are not strictly tonal; however, the

effect is achieved by the perfect fifth in the left hand (D♭2-A♭2), which acts as the

dominant, resolving to a minor third (E♭2-G♭2) or tonic. The missing note of the tonic

chord, the B♭, not surprisingly, is played in the bass immediately following each cadence

in E♭ minor (beginning in m. 45), punctuating the temporal space after each cadence.

Now that the double has split, the terrifying recognition of impending death confuses the

music for two measures by its stagnant and fragmented whole-tone scales that lead to

nowhere (mm. 48-49). The B♭s jump back and forth in octaves (B♭1-B♭2), as if death is

following our every move as a constant reminder of its presence (mm. 48-57). In an effort

to restore the order of the opening, the ego brings back in the upper register the second

motive from mm. 9-13. This manifestation loses its momentum and thus its initial

                                                                                                               
15
The B♭1, played in the bass in both m. 42 and m. 43 acts as a note of stability instead of a
reminder of the ghastly harbinger of death.

34
promise that the opening will return; it now merely acts as a recollection of that motive,

rejecting its initial active role. By m. 54, death is mischievously made manifest in the

circular chordal motions in the right hand. I hear this as death knocking at the door,

patiently waiting until we must finally succumb to it. In m. 55, disjointed whole-tone

fragments return from the inner voices in mm. 48-53 and allow the music to become

static once again.

Finally, in m. 58, the first theme returns, but its static and repetitive material loses

strength because of its softer dynamic of piu pp. As it attempts to become part of death in

order to accommodate its new uncanny surroundings, it barely unfolds the opening first

phrase before it is trapped at the end of its descent (mm. 61-62). For the first time in the

piece, the sinister B♭s have disappeared—because death has taken its toll, and they are

no longer needed. As a small token of hope in death, the persistent G-sharp has

relinquished its double, and finally mutated into the A♭, which has been repressed from

the beginning. In its last moments of life, even though impending death has been

accepted, the two intervals at the end of the motive, F♯4-D4 and E4-C4, attempt to flee in

mm. 62-64. Instead of succeeding, they are caught in the midst of death. With one final

sigh at the end of m. 64, the motive becomes a victim of the uncanny and succumbs to

death.

35
 Chapter 3

When Tibor Serly saw [Bartók] on the evening of 21 September [1945],

Bartók was working on the orchestral score of the Third Piano Concerto;
Peter Bartók had drawn the measure bars for him, and with the manuscript
scattered over his bed he was struggling to fill in the last few
measures….The next day he was taken from the tiny apartment on 57th
Street to the West Side Hospital. There, on 26 September…Béla Bartók
died.1

The above quotation is how historian Halsey Stevens describes the end of Béla

Bartók’s life after an extended battle with leukemia. The Third Piano Concerto and the

Viola Concerto, both composed during Bartók’s final months, were left unfinished at the

time of his death. While the Viola Concerto primarily consisted of unfinished sketches,

the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, No. 3 was complete except for the orchestra parts

for the final 17 measures. Serly, a friend of Bartók who later realized the Viola Concerto

from sketches, was also responsible for finishing the third movement of the Third Piano

Concerto.

Due to Bartók’s simultaneous struggle with his own mortality and composition of

the Third Piano Concerto, many scholars acknowledge that the second movement has

strong autobiographical allusions, but in doing so, they have attempted to map literal

autobiographical narratives onto the music. One common reason for this treatment of the

movement is due to its tempo marking, Adagio religioso. It is the only instance in

Bartók’s oeuvre that religioso is used. As Ferenc Bonis argues, “in the light of our

knowledge of Bartók’s [religious] ideology this [marking] would be an insoluble puzzle

                                                                                                               
1
Halsey Stevens, The Life and Music of Béla Bartók (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 105-106.

36
if the music itself did not [quote or allude to] a movement of a Beethoven string

quartet...(from the A minor Quartet, op. 132).”2

Rather than agree with speculative autobiographical evidence and analyze the

movement intertextually with Beethoven’s op. 132, my analysis takes a different

approach. I have allowed the music to speak for itself to tell us that it contains an inherent

uncanny narrative. My analysis focuses only on the second movement, the Adagio

religioso. I begin with exploring the connection between the second movement and the

musical fragment. Due to the movement’s ambiguous formal design, I show that only a

semiotic analysis can interpret this formal ambiguity. Moreover, I show that strange and

inexplicable moments in the music use the same Romantic period signifiers to signify the

presence of the uncanny. I then examine the uncanny passages through the Freudian

concept of repression and conclude with a Freudian narrative reading by using uncanny

moments to signify musical repression.

Before one can proceed with a topical analysis, it is important to explain the

connection between Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and the musical fragment. While it is

atypical for music theorists to isolate a movement from a concerto and analyze it apart

from the whole piece, unusual features in the second movement require special

refinement of analytical techniques. As explained in Chapter 1, the link between the

musical fragment and the musical uncanny has remained virtually unexplored in literary

and musical writings. And one could easily question whether one movement from a

concerto could be a musical fragment. Furthermore, the second movement of this

concerto is not short; in performance it lasts more than ten minutes. I propose that the

                                                                                                               
2
Ferenc Bonis, “Bartók and Wagner,” in Bartók Studies, ed. Todd Crow (Detroit: Information
Coordinators, 1976), 88.

37
fragmentary nature in this case occurs because Bartók left much of the piece unfinished,

just as Samuel Coleridge’s long unfinished poems are considered fragments. However,

the second movement of the concerto, other than its attacca into the final movement,

could easily be performed alone as an independent work, for the movement is complete

in itself. The first and unfinished third movements, while stylistically similar to each

other, have little in common with the second movement. The outer movements, for

example, share similar tonality and character, yet these features are abandoned in the

second movement. If, for Freud, the creation of the double distracts the ego from its sense

of imminent death, then the second movement could be read as containing the struggle

and battle between the ego and double that is not present in the other movements.

Additionally, if Thomas argues that “the presence of the fragment, as a persistent

reminder of the remainder, may be seen as the allegorical presence within a text, within

every text (no matter how lively) of its own ‘death’: its own necessarily incomplete

incompletion,”3 we can certainly read the second movement as a fragment in itself

without considering the outer movements.

If we consider the overall form of the second movement, we might easily question

whether it relies on common neoclassical features, and thus, nineteenth-century semiotic

codes, for its form seems not to mimic any past model. It mimics some type of A-B-A1

structure featuring a calm and peaceful A section (mm. 1-57), a faster and heavily

contrasted B section (mm. 58-88), and a returning A section containing excessive new

material (mm. 89-137). Thus, one could further argue that the A1 section differs markedly

from the A section, and thus the piece is through-composed. Interestingly, the scholar

                                                                                                               
3
Sophie Thomas, “The Return of the Fragment: ‘Christabel’ and the Uncanny,” in Untrodden
Regions of the Mind: Romanticism and Psychoanalysis, 69.

38
Istvan Lang also caters to the movement’s inherent ambiguity and untraditional form. In

an attempt to treat the A1 section as variations on the opening A section, he observes that

I…think that Bartók ‘circumscribes’ something over and over again,

giving an ever more accurate reflection of what may perhaps have been
one of his greatest experiences, the encounter with nature at night, or
perhaps the abstraction of this encounter, the meeting of the man of
intellect, the humanistic being with primeval, biological life, with nature.
It is as if he were evaluating himself over and over again in the light of
this encounter. [This] movement [is] like a series of self-portraits by a
painter and gives a picture of the changes in the opinion of the artist about
himself.4

The formal ambiguity of the second movement cannot easily be explained by a

structural analysis. Thus, a topical semiotic analysis is one method that allows us to

explore musical meaning in the midst of ambiguity. It is easy to see how many

conventional topics work in tandem to create order in an ambiguous form. The movement

begins with a calm, reflective introduction (mm. 1-15) in the strings featuring imitative

counterpoint, a C pentatonic mode and static harmony.5 As the introduction subsides, the

solo piano enters at m. 16 with a chorale topic in a strict contrapuntal and tonal style. The

strings punctuate each of the piano’s cadences to extend their duration (mm. 20-23),

evoking a hymn-like topic. All is not well for long, however, as seemingly wrong notes

creep into the music, creating a jolting effect (for example, the A♯3 in m. 34). At the

climax of this section, the piano has a descending chain of diminished-seventh chords

                                                                                                               
4
Istvan Lang, “Bartók’s Heritage: A Composer’s View,” in Bartók Studies, ed. Todd Crow
(Detroit: Information Coordinators, 1976), 200.
5
See Béla Bartók, Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra (New York: Boosey & Hawkes,
1947), 32-48, for the score.

39
implying the intrusion of an ombra topic.6 When we reach the final cadence of the A

section at m. 54, the piano cadences in C major, without the third (E) from a ♭vii chord,

leaving the listener unsatisfied. Obviously, we have reached the end of the first section,

but the inexplicable chromaticism has obscured our understanding of what key we are in.

The strings return with a small variation of the introduction (mm. 54-57) perhaps

suggesting the form of theme and variations, but the material of the second section

interrupts before any conclusions can be made.

When compared with the A section, the B section appears to be unrelated. The

tempo is faster and the tonality is ambiguous. The melodic content focuses on short

motives as the strings trill and tremolo, the winds play small three- or four-note motives,

and the piano plays repetitive figures and scales. Conventional musical topics intrude in

the form of birdcalls in the solo piano and flutes—an indexical sign implying spring and

nature (mm. 63 and 75). The birdcalls transfer to the piano in descending chains (mm. 68-

71), hinting that a flock has emerged. The birdcall motives transition into whole-tone

scales in contrary motion (mm. 79-83) and inch us towards the climax of this section.

When we arrive in m. 84, the climax offers us the quintessence of nature: pentatonic runs,

trills that answer the birdcalls and suggest water, and an implicit return to the tonality of

C major. Because this piano concerto contains neoclassical features (such as conventional

topics and tonal allusions), one could argue that the purpose of this section is to showcase

the performer’s technical abilities through difficult, ostentatious passages. Such a

reading, however, would obscure any semiotic analysis, because traditional topics are

                                                                                                               
6
Ratner, Classic Music, 24. The ombra topic is rooted in the Baroque fantasia style and, in
eighteenth century opera, “is used to evoke the supernatural…representing ghosts, gods, moral values,
punishments.” The uncanny has its musical roots in ombra.

40
present. Furthermore, whatever this section may evoke, there exist no surface connections

to relate the B section to the A section.

As the B section dissipates and the opening material of the A section returns in m.

89, the topics also return but are obscured by the piano at cadence points with the

intrusion of chromaticism (see mm. 94-95). Because the woodwinds play the opening

chorale (from mm. 16-20), the piano plays contrapuntal lines containing many major-

seventh intervals provoking a sense of instability (see, for example, D5 against D♯4 in m.

92). When we reach the ombra topic from the A section (at m. 122), the strings finally

arrive with the melody in octaves while the piano arpeggiates diminished triads. As we

reach the conclusion of the section, the piano plays an extended solo cadenza (mm. 128-

134), accompanied by the only non-pitched percussion instrument in the entire

movement, the tam-tam (m. 128). It appears that the movement will end tragically, but

the piano cadences back to C major (in m. 134), a brief diminution of the introduction

returns (mm. 134-135), and the piano finishes the movement with a final cadence to E

major.

Having acknowledged the use of nineteenth-century semiotic topics, we have

made sense of this movement by using “tonal” topics. It appears that the neoclassicism

present in this movement is not only manifested through tonal allusions, but also through

traditional topics. While this is a logical reading, it leaves many aspects unaccounted for,

especially the strange chromaticism and birdcalls.

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, the uncanny is a semiotic code that signifies

“anything supernatural or beyond the normal” and “the weird, the sinister, and…the

41
terrifying in the sublime.”7 In order to explain the troubling moments of strange

chromaticism in the second movement, we need to reexamine the movement in search of

uncanny moments using the musical criteria established by Michael Klein. In so doing,

we achieve a better understanding of what these moments may likely signify.

The first signifier of the uncanny appears in m. 15 at the end of the introduction,

immediately before the piano’s entrance. The chord progression of the introduction

focuses around I (C major) progressing through V—III—IV—vi. This progression

evokes peace because the harmony is predictable, complacent, and static. As the canonic

motive from the opening descends through the strings in m. 12 over I 6/4, first in the

violins followed by the violas, we expect it to finish in a similar way in the celli. Before

the motive can continue, however, the celli descend a tritone from A2 to E♭2, instead of

to the E2 we expect. The E♭2 is jolting because it is accented and played on the downbeat

of m. 15. It is followed immediately by D♭2, which continues to obscure our perception

of the topic and of the key. Metaphorically, we believe we have reached inner peace, but

something else is attempting to intrude. Because this first uncanny moment happens in a

brief duration and at a soft dynamic level, the piano’s entrance with the chorale topic at

m. 16 is reassuring because the beautiful contrapuntal melody still evokes a sense of

peace.

The opening interplay between the piano and strings sets up an abstract

opposition. While both voices are in learned style, the strings never play dissonant

chords. In fact, the motivic material in the strings always contains tonal canonic or

                                                                                                               
7
Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 78.

42
imitative figures (see mm. 20-23). For the entirety of the A section, the strings only

punctuate cadence points almost as if attempting to ground the piano and to block the

destructive chromaticism. By the third phrase (mm. 31–37), the piano has invited

dissonance and begins to move away from its initial peaceful character. In m. 33, the

piano plays a diminished triad, the first present in the movement (beat 1), followed by

parallel octaves (beat 2) of m. 34 (A4/5 against A♯3). This is an example of the uncanny’s

strange voice-leading and strange note. While the A diminished triad is surprising, it is

justified because D♯4 properly resolves up to E4, restoring inner peace. Both hands move

in contrary motion, yet the strange note is approached through a passing motion. The

right hand descends in octaves from B5 to G5. The left hand ascends from G♯3 of its E

major chord (m. 34) to A♯3 and finally moves to B3 and D4.

After the cadence, the piano begins the fourth phrase (mm. 38–47) and continues

the strange chromaticism, emphasizing half-step relationships (F♯-F in mm. 38-39, G♯-A

in mm. 40-41, and C♯-C♮, B♭-B♮ in m. 45). The most jolting, and thus uncanny,

moment in this phrase occurs on the downbeat of m. 45. Due to the descent in octaves

from C♯-C♮-B♭-B♮ in both hands, the inner voices distort a G major chord; it creates a

sense of anxiety. Although the piano immediately cadences to A minor in m. 46, the

strings react to the disconcerting notes by playing an ascending A minor chord in

inversions while increasing dynamic range that tries to restore stability.

The fifth and final phrase of the A section (mm. 48–57) is characterized by a

downward chain of diminished- and half-diminished seventh chords played by the piano.

When all hope is lost, the E6 arrives (beat 4 of m. 53) and allows the piano to cadence

back to C major.

43
 Uncanny moments cannot be found in the B section; they wait until the return of

the A section to intrude again. At m. 89, the piano no longer plays its chorale; rather, the

woodwinds play the chorale and the piano plays a contrapuntal commentary. At the

cadence points, the winds hold each chord and the piano punctuates with odd scales that

seem to be unrelated to the chorale (see mm. 100-104). While the cadence points hint at

the uncanny, it is not until the third phrase that a literal musical sign appears. The

beginning of the phrase in m. 105 begins conventionally with canonic material interacting

in the piano between both hands. However, strange notes appear in m. 106 (see beat 4 –

F5 against F♯4) and continue into m. 107 (D♯5 against D5). The piano punctuates the

cadence at m. 109 by quickly alternating two whole-tone scales at once, again evoking a

sense of anxiety. The scales sound strange but familiar—another sign of the uncanny. In

the next phrase (mm. 112-121), the counterpoint disappears and the piano now plays

unison figures beginning with eighth notes increasing to triplets and finally to sixteenth

notes. In an effort to regain its bittersweet counterpoint, the piano uses obsessive motions

and attempts to expel the uncanny. When the flutes and clarinets play the strange set of

chromatic notes in m. 119 (C♯-C♮-B♭-B♮), the piano trills from D to E♭ in both hands

against them, creating an intensified clash. When the fifth theme returns in m. 122, the

strings finally return with the melody and the piano continues to play rising diminished

triads in octaves.

The tam-tam arrives at m. 128. The piano can no longer play with the strings,

because the oppositions between them are too strong. In this passage, almost everything

present in the piano is a musical sign of the uncanny. In the bass, there are many strange

notes and much chromaticism (see m. 132). While the right hand of the piano is derived

44
primarily from the octatonic scale, enharmonicism and chromaticism are unmistakably

present. We thus expect a ghastly ending because everything occurs simultaneously. In

m. 134, however, the sudden presence of E5 allows the piano to cadence on C major,

grounding the key center and restoring the peaceful topic from the introduction.

By identifying these uncanny moments, I have made sense of the shifts of

tonality, expression, and character. It is not enough, however, to simply identify the

uncanny. If the juxtaposition between tonality and the chromatic uncanny is all that is

present in the movement, we might read this piece as Bartók’s rushed attempt to finish a

concerto before his death. Reading uncanny moments still leaves us with the problem of

interpreting the B section. If we are correct in assuming that these moments signify

something more, we must answer further questions. Assuming that there is some type of

coherence in this movement, how do the uncanny moments together make sense? Why

are these moments present to begin with in a movement that could survive without them?

In short, what narrative makes the best sense for connecting these disorienting elements?

If we read this movement in terms of a Freudian narrative of the creation of the

double to distract from one’s sense of mortality, something musical must be repressed,

and it must recur later, bringing forth the ghastly harbinger of death. By applying this

narrative, we immediately perceive a different reading of the piece, one that is shocking

compared to my previous readings. This, I believe, is closer to Bartók’s intentions, as it

reflects his tenuous physical situation at the time of its composition.

It is easy to see how this movement appears to represent the struggle between the

double’s repression of death and the ego’s acceptance of mortality. The introduction

(mm. 1-15) as played by the strings represents a successful denial of death; we are at

45
peace because the ego has created the double and repressed its sense of mortality. The

first uncanny moment, in m. 15, represents the imperfection of this repression: although

the double has repressed mortality, it is always present in our subconscious mind (the

ego) and exposes itself in haunting ways. If we read uncanny moments as signifiers of

repression, we must determine what is repressed in the music itself. This repressed

awareness is made manifest by the descending chromatic major-second interval in m. 15;

in this case, it is E♭2 and D♭2. Here, I also propose that the repressed interval can appear

in many manifestations—verbatim, inversions, retrograde, and, in most cases, as a

diminution of a minor-second. It is derived from the fifth phrase of the A section with the

descending melody over diminished-seventh chords (mm. 48-53). The other occurrences

of the repressed interval are signaled by strange chromaticism. However, the first

manifestation in m. 15 is brief because the double takes over and sends the ego back to

denial.

The next uncanny moment arrives in m. 33. Because this moment is outlined by

stepwise counterpoint and appears within the inner voices, this manifestation of

repression is not as shocking as the previous instance in m. 15; the double continues to

repress our sense of mortality and the half-step chromaticism recalls m. 15 only on a

subconscious level. However, in mm. 44-45, the double begins to lose control with the

occurrence of the next uncanny moment. Here, the same descending major second (E♭-

D♭) returns from m. 15, but it is spelled enharmonically as E♭5 and C♯5. The strange

note (C♯5) occurs on the downbeat as the repression falters and a sense of mortality

begins to surface. Although the double has long successfully repressed the awareness of

46
impending death, death is more persistent than the double had assumed. Thus, the

repressed figure from m. 15 has more semiotic weight here, and the double seems

powerless to stop it from surfacing.

The previous uncanny moment has allowed imminent death to manifest itself in

the following phrase as diminished-seventh chords (beginning in m. 48). For a few

measures (m. 48-53), the double submits to reality, allowing the ego to explore our sense

of mortality. When the piano cadences back to C major in m. 54, the double regains

control and represses all previous confrontations with reality. We are at peace again,

perhaps emerging from a bad dream.

The logic of the B section emerges through this reading due to this nascent

repression, which creeps in through strange chromaticism. It represents life—not death—

and a complete escape from reality into the past, one that offers more promise than the

mere repression of death. It is the acknowledgement of repression that allows our mind to

wander to past memories after the uncanny reveals itself in the A section. If we take an

autobiographical approach as to what this memory might be, most scholars suggest that it

is Bartók’s experience with nature. If that is the case, it is easy to find representative

elements in this section. The different motives in all of the instruments represent life

found in a forest. The tremolos in the strings represent trees (mm. 58-67); the motives in

the lower strings represent animal footsteps (mm. 64-67); the oboe motive represents

insects (mm. 58-67); the clarinet, which plays an inversion of the falling tritone figure

from mm. 14–15, signifies some robust animal (mm. 59); and the piano and flutes

represent flocks of birds, as discussed above. All of the motives interact and answer each

other as if all of the creatures communicate using the same language and are talking

47
among themselves. By imagining this memory as an experience with nature in a forest

accessed by emerging repression, we can account for the stark change in material and its

motive-based structure. In short, in terms of a Freudian narrative, the double has

temporarily repressed the sense of imminent death and allows the ego to wander freely

into the past. The uncanny moments from the A section “[lead us] back to something long

known to us, once very familiar.”8

With the return of the A section, the woodwinds play the opening chorale,

implying that the double knows it is starting to fail, thus summoning other voices to its

aid. The piano’s antiquated contrapuntal lines include elements of the Baroque fantasia

topic at cadence points, which continue to recollect the past and begin the struggle with

our sense of mortality. We have briefly experienced the past accessed by a happy

memory of nature. Thus, the ego does not want to return to our complacent state of denial

of death created by the double. No longer is our awareness of death slowly stealing in; it

is evident that we have come too far to return to blissful ignorance. By the second

cadence point (mm. 100–104), the piano becomes obsessive with the scale figures from

the B section. Instead of connoting happiness, the scale figures now become uncanny in

and of themselves due to their insistent nature. They are skewed and bewildering; anxiety

begins to manifest itself. The possible destruction of the double is looming. By the fourth

phrase, beginning at m. 112, the piano becomes so obsessive that both hands play in

unison and finally lead in mm 118-119 to the third uncanny moment (the C♯-C♮-B♭-B♮)

by trilling from D to E♭.

                                                                                                               
8
Ibid, 78.

48
 As the piano reaches the chain of diminished-seventh chords in m. 122, the roles

have switched: the strings cry and tremble at its appearance while the piano evokes the

vision of terror by repeatedly playing diminished-triads. As the winds enter to plead with

the double, the double refuses to yield and brings us to the apotheosis, or turning point, in

m. 128.9 The chromatic half-step has allowed the ego to see the double as the ghastly

harbinger of death. If we read this section as the ego’s last confrontation and struggle

with the double, we still must account for the appearance of the tam-tam. Perhaps it is

here that we realize that we have been confronting the vision of terror all along. The stark

textural and melodic changes emulate a declamatory effect. By examining the pitches in

the right hand of the piano, we not only see the repressed chromatic half-step again and

again but also notice the octatonic scale that has been repressed for the entire movement.

At the first uncanny moment of the movement (E♭2-D♭2 in the celli at m. 15), it is easy

to see that these pitches are derived from D♭ octatonic scale (D♭- E♭-E♮- G♭…). At the

apotheosis in m. 128, it is easy to see that all pitches are derived from the E♭ octatonic

scale (E♭-F♮-G♭-A♭…). In the nineteenth century, the octatonic scale always signified

the supernatural and magical.10 Thus, Bartók would have been familiar with the scale’s

previous implications; clearly its emergence at the climax is intended to evoke the

supernatural. The same semiotic codes present in nineteenth-century music are present at

                                                                                                               
9
For a thorough discussion of the concept of apotheosis, see, Michael Klein, “Chopin's Fourth
Ballade as Musical Narrative,” Music Theory Spectrum 26 (2004): 23-56.
10
Herman Rechberger, Scales and Modes around the World, (Finland: Fennica-Gehrman, 2008),
40. “Russian composers often used the [octatonic] scale to evoke scenes of magic and exotic mystery
(Rimsky-Korsakov: Kashhchey the Immortal, Igor Stravinsky: Petrushka and The Rite of
Spring)….Octatonic scales were [most frequently] used by Béla Bartók, mainly in his work Mikrokosmos.”

49
the end of this movement, signifying the same signs via the octatonic scale. The scale

finally breaks out of its repression until it accepts impending mortality in m. 133 (E5) and

cadences to C major. Perhaps the final cadence to E represents success: we have

conquered death, and it is no match for us.

By using Freud’s concept of the uncanny and narrative of repression, this analysis

has made sense of strange and unexplainable musical events. I clarified at the outset that

it is not my intention to map an autobiographical narrative onto the music. However, the

results of the Freudian narrative reading provoke further questions. What is Bartók

repressing? Can we ever know without creating a historical fiction? Are there any

autobiographical hints in the music, or should we end our search for meaning here? We

need look no further than the tempo indication, Adagio religioso. It is tempting to

speculate what religious connotations this may have evoked for Bartók. He was raised

Roman Catholic as a child, converted to atheism as a teenager, and found an inner utopia

through nature for the rest of his life. Perhaps it is his Catholicism that has been

repressed. Perhaps this movement represents a return to or final confrontation with his

ingrained religious belief system. If we read this narrative along with Freud’s, the double

would not only represent the denial of death but also of religion. Thus, the opening

chorale is more complacent than previously noted because religion is repressed. The

repression triggers the uncanny moments and allows us to briefly acknowledge our own

mortality. In this reading, the B section represents a hopeful return to eternal bliss as an

escape from impending death. If this is the case, the double is present throughout the B

section, but it has transformed itself. It is a double in terms of body and soul—implying

hope, because the soul represents immortality. If we are to read this section as hopeful,

50
could we go as far as hearing it as the Garden of Eden or Heaven itself? This section

draws us back to nature, or, metaphorically, to religion and the hope of an afterlife. The

birdcalls represent the idea of life, the natural world continuing on in a dream realm

beyond death. As heaven dissipates and the ego takes us back to reality, the struggle

between repression of death and belief in the afterlife commences. By the time we reach

the apotheosis, death refuses to be repressed and splits the double in such a way that we

are forced to make a choice. In this reading, E5 (in m. 133) represents the decision to

accept or deny the afterlife. But which does it choose? If we look ahead to the final

cadence of the movement (mm. 136-137), the melody descends from G5 to E5, an Amen

figure that appears at the end of church liturgy and hymns. If we read this descent as the

conclusion of a hymn or prayer, the piano represents the church organist’s two hands and

is accompanied by the “pedals” of the organ, the celli and basses (which play DàE).

Although it remains ambiguous, the final cadence to E major gives the hope that life

continues on after death.

51
 Chapter 4

Golden lads and girls all must as chimney-sweepers come to dust.

—“Fear No More The Heat of The Sun” from Shakespeare’s Cymbelline

The meaning of life is that it stops.

—Franz Kafka

The above Kafka-attributed aphorism concisely describes one of the primary

themes of his large body of literary work. Born into a Jewish family in 1883, Kafka went

on to become one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century. Two of his

best-known narratives, Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, explicitly deal with

morbid themes of coming to terms with inevitable death. Clearly, he was preoccupied

with what we commonly refer to as the Freudian uncanny and the destruction of the

double.

Kafka, unable to finish many works before his death, left behind a number of

unintentional literary fragments. However, the piece this analysis is concerned with,

György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente: “Meine Gefängniszelle, meine Festung,” op. 24, is

drawn from another type of fragment—namely, the seemingly random but carefully

chosen lines from letters and diary entries left behind by Kafka. I begin by examining the

connection between Kafka and Kurtág, and then examine common themes throughout the

Kafka Fragments. By reading the entire text of the work as a Freudian narrative of

repression, I will investigate uncanny moments throughout the whole to make sense of

the final fragment, “Es Blendete uns die Mondnacht” [The Moonlit Night Dazzled Us],

where I read the death of the Freudian double.

52
 Upon his death, Kafka bequeathed his unpublished works to his close friend Max

Brod, requesting that they be destroyed and never published. However, because Brod

ultimately ignored Kafka’s request and did publish the fragments, some eventually served

as the text for Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragments, his third song cycle and another example of

twentieth-century music evoking nineteenth-century musical semiotic codes in

unconventional and untraditional ways. Unlike Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto, an

unintentional compositional fragment, and Debussy’s Voiles, ambiguously titled as part

of a set of preludes, Kurtág intentionally wrote this work in the form of musical

fragments. It is surprising that a twentieth-century composer would primarily compose in

fragments because this form comprises a traditional Romantic idiom. Scored for soprano

and violin, the cycle contains forty fragments, including repetitions, which Kurtág further

separates into four parts. But is Kurtág’s piece the product of a random ordering, or did

he deliberately create a narrative of the uncanny throughout the entire work?

Born in Lugoj, Romania, in 1926, Kurtág attended the Franz Liszt Academy in

Budapest, graduating in 1955. The Kafka-Fragments are dedicated to psychologist

Marianne Stein, one of Kurtág’s mentors during his musical studies in Paris in 1957.

Simultaneously studying composition with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen, he

became attracted to the compositions of Anton Webern. Stein encouraged Kurtág to

reject formal conventions and to focus instead on short bursts of emotion; he began to

compose in fragment forms arising from his exposure to and in the style of Webern’s

compact forms, causing him to radically change his previous compositional style.1 One

                                                                                                               
1
Peter Halasz, György Kurtág (Budapest: MAGUS Publications, Ltd., 1998) discusses Kurtág’s
experience in Paris in-depth, as well as providing a detailed study of his musical style and compositional
output.

53
abundant overarching metaphor in the Kafka-Fragmente is traveling down a path. Ruth

Gross connects this textual theme autobiographically with the dedication to Stein who

ultimately changed Kurtág’s own musical path.2 Thus, connections between Kurtág and

Kafka are easy to identify. Kafka wrote in the form of literary fragments, a logical

extension of prior nineteenth-century forms, just as Kurtág continues to compose in

musical fragments.

Because most of Kurtág’s compositional style features highly dense works of

short length that on the surface seem far removed from tonality or tonal allusions,

traditional forms of analysis yield minimal results. John Clough was among the first to

attempt an analysis of this work and applied neo-Riemannian techniques. In his

introduction, he acknowledges that “…even with the most powerful analytical tools, we

can only hope to gain some small insight to Kafka-Fragmente, while holding its deepest

aspects…to be essentially mysterious and beyond rational comprehension.”3 While his

analysis attempts to unravel order and structure by focusing only on the musical

transformations of trichords, he disregards the text without offering any explanation. It

seems, then, that conventional twentieth-century techniques—and pitch-class set analysis

in particular—reveal little of interpretive value. Consequently, I want to explore what

these fragments might mean to us from a semiotic perspective. Because Kurtág set the

                                                                                                               
2
See Ruth V. Gross, “György Kurtág’s ‘Kafka Fragmente’: Kafka in Pieces,” in Traditions of
Experiment from the Enlightenment to the Present, eds. by Nancy Kaiser and David E. Wellbery (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992) for an intriguing connection with autobiographical, textual, and
musical paths within the work.
3
John Clough, “Diatonic Trichords in Two Pieces from Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente: A Neo-
Riemannian Approach,” in Hommage à Kurtág, ed. Péter Halász (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2002), 333.

54
music to a preexisting text, we will use a literary narrative to explore semiotic

connections between the text and music itself.

Currently, the only semiotic analysis of Kafka Fragments is by Martha Hyde, who

shows that one of its movements is a direct extension of nineteenth-century musical

fragment form, even though many compositional devices are uniquely contemporary. Her

analysis examines how Kurtág deals with the issue of “how to create a sense of unstable,

incomplete or expanding meaning without tonal harmony and its formal conventions.”4

Kurtág achieves this by employing multiple nineteenth-century topoi simultaneously,

each of which carries traditional semiotic meaning. By doing so in a non-tonal

environment, the traditional meaning of the topics, while still present, are destabilized.

There are many questions to consider when investigating what kind of literary

narrative the piece evokes and how the music portrays that narrative. Because the work is

an extension of nineteenth-century fragment form, the question is whether we can read it

as an uncanny narrative imbued with the Freudian concept of repression.5 Does Kurtág,

in fact, evoke the uncanny using the criteria outlined in Chapter 1? If the fragments lack

functional tonal harmony and exploit traditional topics, how does Kurtág

evoke uncanny moments in a drastically deconstructed environment? Furthermore, is the

Freudian narrative of repression present? And if so, what in the music is being repressed?

Finally, what musical signs for the uncanny, if any, alert us to this narrative and how do

they differ from those of the nineteenth century?

                                                                                                               
4
Hyde, "Semiotics and Form: Reading Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments," in Interdisciplinary Studies in
Musicology 5,186.
5
Kafka was clearly aware of Freud’s writings. For a discussion tracing the development of
Kafka’s interest in Freudian psychology, see Eric Marson and Keith Leopold, “Kafka, Freud, and ‘Ein
Landarzt,’” The German Quarterly 37 (1964): 146-160.

55
 A quick examination of the final fragment, “The Moonlit Night Dazzled Us,” 6

reveals unique features that traditional methods of analysis cannot address. This final

fragment is the longest in the cycle, consisting of 10 pages and requiring approximately 6

minutes and 24 seconds to perform.7 Secondly, the text is full of pastoral and religious

imagery: “The moonlit night dazzled us. Birds shrieked in the trees. There was a rush of

wind in the fields. We crawled through the dust, a pair of snakes.” The solo violin begins

with a solemn introduction consisting of alternating musical motives and a sweeping

ascent over many registers (See Ex. [A]).8 Yet, before the soprano enters, the violin

quickly shifts textures to one of three whole notes ([A1]). This sudden change in texture

suggests a disruption that implies something unexpected has happened. Before we can

make sense of this, however, the original texture returns and conventional musical topics

intrude. Here, Kurtág evokes indexical signs for birds and wind ([D] and [E]). As the

wind begins to roar and the soprano pauses, with recurring four-note motives throughout

the violin, the register drops sharply to the lowest G on the violin, G3 ([F]). The soprano

also descends in register to evoke something crawling on the ground, a debased and

animalistic image to complement the disturbing text. When the soprano sings “a pair of

snakes,” which is only uttered once, the text stops in the soprano and gives way to a

bizarre extended vocalise for three pages ([J]). As the music progresses toward the

                                                                                                               
6
All of the titles and texts of the fragments are from the English postscript translations in Edito
Musica Budapest’s published score, which are translated by Júlia and Peter Sherwood. See György Kurtág,
Kafka-Fragmente für Sopran und Violine, op. 24 (Budapest: Editio Musica, 1992), 70-79 for the score.
7
I have used pages to describe the length of the fragment because Kurtág does not write in
traditional measures or bar lines; he indicates only phrase markings with a solid bar line at the end of a
section of text. The duration is from György Kurtág, Kafka-Fragments, performed by Adrienne Csengery
and András Keller, Hungaraton HCD 31135, 1992. Kurtág oversaw the preparation of the recording.
8
For my analysis, I have created rehearsal letters as points of reference. See Figure 1 on page 57
for the list of rehearsal letters with their respective page numbers and identifying elements.

56
Figure 1. List of Rehearsal Letters in Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragments

Rehearsal Letter Page Number Identifying Elements

A 70 System 1, beat 1

A1 70 System 3, first whole note (C5 and D4)

B 70 System 3, soprano’s entrance

B1 71 System 1, beat 1

C 71 System 2, C5 in soprano

D 72 System 1, subito quasio giusto (beat 1)

E 73 System 1, beat 1

F 73 System 3, Lento, rubato (beat 1)

G 74 System 2, a tempo in soprano

G1 74 System 2, interval from B♭3 to E♮4 in violin

G2 74 System 2, interval from B♭3 to A♭4 in violin

G3 75 System 2, beat 1

H 75 System 3, D4 and A3 (forte)

I 75 System 4, beat 1

J 76 System 1, solo in violin

L 76 System 3, solo in soprano

M 77 System 4, beat 1

N 78 System 1, ancora piu forte

O 79 System 1, beat 1

P 79 System 3, sostenuto, voce bianca

Q 79 System 4, beat 1

57
climax, the soprano and violin begin a large ascent in register until the apotheosis is

reached ([N]). It is not until the climax that the violin begins a downward spiral of runs,

and the soprano finally stops singing. At the end of the descent, the soprano utters for the

last time “We crawled through the dust, a pair of snakes” as the violin partially returns to

a truncated version of the beautiful introduction ([Q]).

One is puzzled why this final fragment evokes religious imagery that describes

the fall of man, and why it contains an extended soprano vocalise. Furthermore, why is

the imagery of crawling snakes evoked? Ruth Gross reads the final fragment as a

metaphor for the breakdown of language and communication that essentially leads to

modernism. In her view, the entirety of the work depicts the fall of man because the

fragments begin with the good path and end with our inability to continue walking—thus

we crawl on the ground. Additionally, she justifies the vocalise by using the alienation of

snakes from the trees to represent the breakdown of communication.9 But this analysis

does not explain the stark musical contrast with the other movements or convincingly

justify the vocalise. If we read an uncanny narrative for the entire work, then this

fragment must be the culmination of that narrative. But could it also embody the uncanny

in itself as an isolated fragment?

To further explain the diversity of musical topics, theorists tend to isolate specific

fragments from the whole and analyze each of them individually. One can certainly

justify this approach (as demonstrated in my previous analyses), but the Kafka Fragments

differs because the work is essentially a musical setting of a text. Should we read a

literary narrative throughout the entire set of fragments, as Gross has done, or should we

                                                                                                               
9
Gross, “György Kurtág’s ‘Kafka Fragmente’: Kafka in Pieces,” in Traditions of Experiment
from the Enlightenment to the Present, 205.

58
investigate the meaning of each one separately? Scholars agree that it is difficult to read a

single narrative that encompasses the entire piece because on the surface the texts seem

somewhat random. Hyde reads this problem as Kurtág’s “rejection of conventions,” a

valid construction when viewing the fragments in isolation.10 Ruth Gross argues that

“there is no real plot here”11 and “it is not always clear why Kurtág has chosen the order

he has, or what specific relationship each fragment’s setting has with the next.”12 She is

also correct in observing that the ordering seems both bizarre and strange. But Kurtág did

deliberately choose specific Kafka’s fragments and deliberately placed them into four

distinct sections. It seems likely, then, that there must be some overarching literary and

musical narrative that Kurtág seeks to project. To investigate its presence, we must

analyze the literary narrative through the entire set of fragments for uncanny moments, as

unconnected as they appear, and, based on these findings, further investigate what “The

Moonlit Night Dazzled Us” might signify.

Paradoxically, when considered as a whole, the fragments are far too varied to

grasp their meaning as one entity, which implies that they also carry meaning on an

individual level. Thus, I read two levels of fragmentariness: the first on the scale of the

entire work and the second on that of each dissected, discrete movement. I propose that

fragment form in this work can be fragmentary on multiple levels, both as one entire

piece as well as in each of its smaller fragments or movements. In both cases, neither

                                                                                                               
10
Hyde, "Semiotics and Form: Reading Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments," in Interdisciplinary Studies
in Musicology 5, 188.
11
Gross, “György Kurtág’s ‘Kafka Fragmente’: Kafka in Pieces,” in Traditions of Experiment
from the Enlightenment to the Present, 192.
12
Ibid., 192.

59
option constructs a satisfying whole or creates a duality of fragment form. Perhaps we

should consider if the strategic ordering of the fragments is a deliberate device used by

Kurtág in order to express an uncanny effect.

Clearly, one must examine the various recurring literary narratives throughout the

Kafka Fragments to begin to understand any overarching or inclusive narrative. Most of

the fragments can be successfully analyzed as distraction from death created by a double

and a few are, in a Freudian sense, uncanny on their own. The subjects contained therein

consist of anecdotes and proverbs (“The Good March in Step”), depictions of a specific

character or person (“The Seamstresses in the Downpourings”), mundane scenes from

everyday life (“Scene at the Station”), and moments of supernatural imagination and

fantasy (“Leopards”). Even though these themes are present throughout the work, the

texts of the fragments are too varied to make sense when read as a single inclusive

narrative.

One of the primary recurring music and textual themes is walking down a path.

The work of Hyde explores how Kurtág’s use of step motives and other traditional

devices contributes to the presence of musical topics. For instance, the first fragment of

Part I, “The Good March in Step,” contains two oppositions. The violin and soprano

begin in step with each other, but the dancers (mentioned in the text) quickly fall out of

step and jest as the violin marches on with its two-note step motive.13 “Like a Pathway in

Autumn” exemplifies the physical path in autumn when leaves continually fall and

constantly leave the path covered. The violin depicts the falling leaves with ascending

and descending scales. The path becomes an ironic image in Part III with “Destination,

                                                                                                               
13
Hyde, "Semiotics and Form: Reading Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments," in Interdisciplinary Studies
in Musicology 5, 188-89.

60
Path, Hesitation;” here, there is an ultimate destination but no path to it, with hesitation

representing our path through life.

Another recurring theme is the opposition of city with nature, or, when extended

to music, with a pastoral topic. Within this work, I read the pastoral topics as manifesting

the uncanny. In “Nevermore” (Part I), we are exiled from the city, but we are not told

where we are going. The “Scene at the Station” (Part I), depicts travelling on a train and

watching the onlookers as they freeze—but, again, we are not told where we are going.

We are exiled yet again in “Again, Again” (Part IV), but this time we know we are going

to multiple places in nature; at least we hope we will see mountains and desert. Unlike

the traditional nineteenth-century pastoral, the topic becomes uncanny here because we

are not given any sense of location and remain mystified as to where or when we will

ultimately arrive. In all three cases, the music does not manifest pastoral topics. At the

beginning of “Scene at the Station,” the violin has a chain of upward rising double stop

glissandi. Here Kurtág clearly uses an indexical semiotic sign that implies the whistle of

an approaching train. Yet, when the voice enters with mundane text, the fragment quickly

deconstructs itself and ends within three measures, conveying to the listener a musical

glimpse of a speedily passing train that lacks a destination.

It is evident that Kurtág often uses text painting in his musical settings—such as

indexical signs for birds, paths, or train whistles—to literally evoke musically the

meaning of the text. However, beyond this common compositional technique, does

Kurtág use any traditional musical signs to evoke the uncanny? Most of the uncanny

musical signs outlined by Klein are of little use here because the music does not make use

of tonality. For instance, examining chromaticism, or the strange note or voice leading

61
cannot be used to reveal to the presence of the uncanny. However, a common sign of the

Freudian uncanny is obsessive compulsiveness, and it is on this sign that I will focus to

interpret the final fragment.

When we read “The Moonlit Night Dazzled Us” as a whole, the narrative of

repression intrudes from the beginning to the end. Because the texts of this fragment

cycle contain features of Freud’s concept of repression, the cycle functions as a narrative

of the uncanny. On the surface the ordering of the fragments seems random, yet the

fragments whose texts allude to distractions act as a double, a Freudian double. Thus, the

narrative is that of repression with the uncanny manifesting itself at various points,

culminating in the final fragment with a final terrible recognition of death that fully splits

the double. Secondly, the final fragment itself manifests the uncanny through text and

music. The moment of revelation in the final fragment implies a repression prior to the

expressed moment and thought.

By using Kurtág’s four distinct sections as different parts of the narrative, it is

easy to see how repression and the uncanny manifest themselves in an overall literary

narrative. It is important to interpret the literary narrative before making sense of the

music, as it is the text that can reveal what the music might mean. In addition, to make

sense of “The Moonlit Night Dazzled Us,” the textual narrative of the Freudian uncanny

can clarify why this final fragment needs to appear. I have separated my narrative into

four distinct parts based on Kurtág’s sections: Part I as “depictions of a mundane life,”

Part II as the “uncanny explicitly manifesting itself,” Part III as the “increasing

realization of one’s mortality,” and Part IV as the “ultimate destruction of the double.” I

will only discuss the texts of fragments that contribute to the uncanny and double, and I

62
will assume that the other fragments contribute to the theme of distraction arising from

acceptance from the presence of the double.

With few exceptions, Part I exemplifies the strong formation of a preexisting

double. While the ordering of the fragments’ texts do not make logical sense, the bizarre

ordering is fragmented by the double. We are not afraid of death; therefore, the double

has confidently asserted itself. We begin with the text of the first fragment. “The good

march in step. Unaware of them, the others dance around them the dances of time.”

Obviously, we have accepted complacency, which emphasizes a successful denial of

death. “Like a Pathway” depicts a pathway in autumn, while “Hiding-places” deals with

elements of religion, specifically salvation. It is not until the sixth fragment of Part I

where one first notices the presence of the uncanny, suggesting an attempted overthrow

of the double. The text, “Nevermore, nevermore will you return to the cities, nevermore

will the great bell resound above you” can be read in several different ways. The

fragment’s title, “Excommunicatio,” immediately implies religious excommunication.

But did we choose to reject the chosen path of religion or is this a forced exile from urban

life? Because of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden with the fall of man, we are

exiled from a state of natural grace. Accordingly, human life is condemned to an

existence focused on cities and on such profane gatherings as the Tower of Babel, where

one attempts to reclaim virtue beneath the bells of churches. In this context, city imagery

implies religion, while exile from the city evokes the return to paradise. By not “returning

to the cities,” we can also read the text as bearing an uncanny manifestation of a pastoral

topic. In nineteenth-century music, a pastoral topic traditionally demonstrates a removal

of self away from the distractions of city life into a communion with nature. Here, the

63
removal of self is implied by the subtitle and the text of the fragment, but we are never

told what our destination is. We are exiled somewhere, but it is a forced exile rather than

one self-imposed for the purpose of experiencing nature. Thus, this fragment is the first

manifestation of the literary uncanny. Additionally, the music does not reflect traditional

pastoral topics and seems to deliberately oppose the text, creating oppositions on multiple

levels.

The remainder of Part I offers additional examples of the uncanny attempting to

manifest itself, but, as in “Nevermore,” the uncanny is lurking in the background and not

explicitly stated. The text of Fragment 8, “Someone tugged at my clothes but I shrugged

him off,” is a good example. Who is “someone?” A friend, an animal, or a specter of

death? If the double has repressed death, we are unaware of it when it appears. Thus, I

read “someone” as death tugging on our clothes, reminding us that it is always with us

lurking in the shadows. Before we can begin to speculate, the fragment is followed by a

repression of the prior manifestation of the uncanny by a scene of “The Seamstress in the

Downpourings.” It removes all prior context by offering a mundane distraction drawn

from everyday life. In Fragment 11, “Sunday, 19th July 1910,” it is evident that the

double has convinced us that our lives will go on forever by sleeping and awaking

(“Slept, woke, slept, woke, miserable life”). Most of the remaining fragments in Part I

continue with these themes until we reach Fragment 18: “The flower hung dreamily on its

tall stem. Dusk enveloped it.” It is obvious that this fragment depicts nature, but not in

the pastoral sense. Dusk inevitably leads to darkness, to sunset, and to death. It is a step

on the path that leads to realization. The flower is still lovely, as is dusk, yet night is

approaching.

64
 Part II exemplifies the “uncanny explicitly manifesting itself” with a realization of

the double, but remains peculiar for many reasons. Firstly, it contains only one fragment,

titled “The True Path.” Obviously, the uncanny is present from the text of the fragment:

“The true path goes by way of a rope that is suspended not high up, but rather just above

the ground. Its purpose seems to be more to make one stumble than to be walked on.”

The “rope” is those uncanny moments of recognition—horrible or pointless or

terrifying—in which we realize our own mortality. The music supports this literary

analysis with text painting and binary oppositions. The voice is nested within the

extremities of the notes of the violin except when we stumble upon the rope: at these

moments, the voice descends below the violin, and the violin evokes a wobbling

tightrope with a three-note motive.

Part III begins the “increasing realization of one’s mortality.” Death is looming

and causes the texts to become progressively more morbid. From Fragment 1 in Part III,

“To have? To be?,” we are immediately met with a realization of death because we are

“longing for the last breath, for suffocation.” The second fragment, “Coitus as

Punishment” is ironic in that it frames pleasure as punishment. It is also peculiar that

Kurtág repeats two fragments in Part III, “Miserable Life” and “Hiding-Places.” While

the musical settings differ from their initial fragments, we cannot make sense of why they

repeat unless we read the work as a narrative of the Freudian uncanny and repression. In

this way, we can make sense of the repetition as a manifestation of the uncanny.

Finally, Part IV can be read as the “ultimate destruction of the double.” The first

two fragments of Part IV begin with a lament of love. It is the first time that any of the

fragments focus on this particular topic. The text of Fragment 3 reminds us we cannot

65
escape death, “Though the hounds are still in the courtyard, the game will not escape, no

matter how they race through the woods.” The double anticipates a confrontation with the

ego and begins to offer hallucinations as a distraction. Fragment 5, “Leopards,” depicts a

rustic ceremony of leopards breaking into a temple and drinking jugs dry: “Leopards

break into the temple and drink the sacrificial jugs dry; this is repeated, again and again,

until it is possible to calculate in advance when they will come, and it becomes part of the

ceremony.” The progression of realization of death is escalated in Fragment 6, “In

Memoriam Joannis Pilinszky,” as well as with our final exile in “Again, Again.”

By the time we reach the “The Moonlit Night Dazzled Us,” we are overwhelmed

with the struggle between the double and ego, and we are simultaneously confused,

anxious, and dazed. The previous bursts of emotion have made us weary, and it is here

that the struggle between the ego and double commences textually and musically by way

of an epic battle. It is easy to see how the narrative of repression comes full circle in this

final fragment.

From the opening introduction of this final fragment, the music is surprisingly

serene and is marked dolce ([A]). Because the tempo is lento, the solo violin immediately

takes on a melodic role with a simple monophonic texture. The opening motive, E5-F♯5-

D♯6-F♯5, alludes to a traditional nineteenth-century pastoral topic in its ascent of a major

6th from F♯5 to D♯6, which centers the pitch material of the introduction around F♯5. As

the motive is played for the second time, the music begins to expand with continuous

ascents in intervals of thirds (C♯6-E♯6) and fourths (D♯6-G♯6). When the motive is played

the third time, the music becomes much more elaborate with increased rhythmic motion

and a great ascent in register from D7 to B7, while simultaneously decreasing the

66
dynamics to pppp. Much like the opening of Zoltán Kodály’s Summer Evening, which

features an unaccompanied English horn solo, the introductory material in the violin can

be read in terms of a Freudian narrative as the restoration of the double’s authority over

the ego. Here, for the first time in Part IV, the music is too pastoral for uncanny moments

to be present. At the same time, and to incorporate the accompanying text of the

fragment, the violin establishes the context of the piece by evoking a “moonlit night”

with its calm pastoral topic, which features many consonant intervals (thirds, fifths, and

sixths), typical of the nineteenth-century pastoral topic.14 As the violin attempts to play

the opening motive for the fourth time, it is suddenly interrupted by C5. The entrance of

this strange pitch causes the rhythmic propulsion of the introduction to hesitate (at [A1]).

The violin subsides by elongating the rhythm into three whole notes (the melody is C5-

G4-C♯4) and descends. In this fragment, centering the tonal center between G to C♯ is of

prime thematic importance. The stark rhythmic change (at [A1]) has little connection with

the prior serenity of the introduction. Due to this significant change in character, this

moment, in particular, represents a musical manifestation of the ego’s attempt to

overthrow the double; the presence of the descending tritone (G4-C♯4) suggests that

something has obscured an otherwise perfect moonlit night, given its historical

association with the diabolic. Additionally, the tritone descent at [A1] concludes on C♯4,

and it is not until the soprano enters when the double can repress the ego once more by

way of more pastoral material.

                                                                                                               
14
See “From Topic to Premise and Mode” in Robert Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures:
Markedness, Topics, and Tropes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) for an extensive discussion
of the musical components indicating the nineteenth-century pastoral genre. Many of the musical signs he
discusses are present in this final fragment.

67
 The Freudian double temporarily regains control over the ego (from [B] to [E])

and allows the pastoral topic to act as a repression of death. The soprano arrives with “the

moonlit night dazzled us” (at [B]) and immediately reinstates the pastoral topic by using

many of the same nineteenth-century techniques appearing in the violin’s introduction: a

strong emphasis on intervals of thirds and sixths, and continued repetitions of upward

rising contour (<0 1 2 1>) taken from the violin’s opening motive. The violin continues

in the character of the introduction (at [B]) and clearly evokes a carefree evening in

nature, imbued with complex scales and repeated rhythmic patterns.15 The soprano

centers around G♯4, the same pitch that launched the first uncanny moment. The double

continues to repress our sense of mortality as the voice repeats ascents and descents of

similar contour from the motivic material of the opening four-note cell. As soon as the

soprano finishes uttering the opening text, a vocalized melisma begins (at [B1]) with a

whole-step descent of major thirds (from E♯5-D♯5-C♯5). The importance of the descent in

major-thirds allows the soprano to continue in the consonant pastoral topic as the violin’s

rhythmic figures become increasing more complex and disturbing. As the soprano

attempts to break free and restore the pastoral order, it descends from F♯5 to B♯4. This

motion causes the violin’s rhythmic complexity to briefly subside and allows the double

to repress the ego through an obsessive-compulsive fixation with the thematic material

via descent. However, another uncanny moment creeps in at [C]. As the soprano holds

the aforementioned B♯4, Kurtág re-notates the pitch as C5, and it immediately provokes

chilling connotations. One of the most commonly used signs to indicate the presence of

                                                                                                               
15
Hatten argues that “hypnotic reiterations of motivic and rhythmic figures” (59) are a sign of the
pastoral topic. Here, Kurtág evokes the same nineteenth-century semiotic codes using a highly complex
rhythmic structure (see violin part at [B]).

68
the musical uncanny is strange enharmonicism. Because the B♯ is tied to C and sung by a

vocalist, there is no apparent need for Kurtág to notate this pitch differently. Thus, this

brief moment, which is only apparent in the score, provides a clue to the performer of a

subtle uncanny moment. Before the note makes a lasting impact, the soprano continues

its ascending melisma by a perfect fifth (C5 to G5) and continues to descend by step, first

in thirds (G5 to E5, etc.) and then by fourths (E5 to B4 ). As the soprano gains momentum,

the violin continues to evoke an animated night in nature with alternating pizzicati and

acro bow strokes. As the melisma begins to subside, Kurtág marks the final notes of the

soprano’s melisma as in sich summend or “inwardly humming.” It is evident that the

soprano has temporarily inwardly repressed the ego at the end of the long first phrase.

The second phrase (at [D]) quickly ushers in changes in topics and texture with

the arrival of the text, “birds shrieked in the trees.”16 This section clearly exemplifies the

continued successful repression of the ego by the double by continuing with a pastoral

topic. The violin changes its role and implies an animated nighttime scene in nature by

using contrasting harmonics with percussive bowing. The soprano takes on the shrieking

role of the birds with grace-note attacks in quick descents (frequently in fifths [G5 to C5

and F4 to C5]) punctuating the scene evoked by the violin. Most of the melodic content in

the soprano centers on C5. This section ends quickly, however, because Kurtág does not

repeat the text. “There was a rush in the fields” ([E]) continues with the same theme of

repression and surprisingly the mood does not change. The violin becomes obsessed with

small triplet figures in descents, but it is obvious that the double has repressed death. In

some ways, the rush of wind contributes to the loveliness of repressed horror.

                                                                                                               
16
The English postscript translation in the published score differs from a literal translation of the
text. A literal translation of the German would be “birds shrieked, birds shrieked from tree to tree.”

69
 It is not until we reach the Lento, rubato (at [F]) that the struggle between the ego

and double begins. After a fermata, this section begins with the violin abruptly dropping

in register to G3, the lowest note possible on the violin, and beginning to elaborate a

fourth (from G3 to C4) by stepwise ascent in triplets through A3 and B3. Here, the violin

centers itself around G3 and C4. As the motive is played the second time, it becomes more

elaborated with the new pitches B3 and A♭3. As the motive repeats for the third time,

chromaticism begins to intrude with foreign pitches (B♭3àC♭4àA3àA♭3). The violin

becomes so obsessed with the motive that Kurtág writes “ad lib.” with two repeat signs,

leaving it up to the performer to determine its duration. It is evident that the elaboration

of G3-C4, by way of a chromatic ascent and descent, portrays the couple crawling on the

ground (G3 ascending to C4, the ascent from B♭3àC♭4 followed by quick descent to

A3àA♭3). The voice arrives soon after with the text “we crawled through the dust” in a

traditional song-like manner. The entrance of the voice also shares the drop to the low

register with the violin as it begins on C4. Unlike earlier sections, the duration of the

soprano’s pitches become elongated and are juxtaposed against continuous thirty-second

and sixty-fourth notes that ascend in the violin. The pitch material of the soprano stays

within the confines of the violin’s fourth.

70
 Johann Sebastian Bach, Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Rust (Leipzig:
Breitkopf & Härtel, 1857), 7:378.

While the contour and chromaticism of the violin’s motive (at [F]) could clearly

be interpreted as portraying someone crawling on the ground, it also depicts another word

painting. Although the last part of text, “a pair of snakes,” does not arrive until [G3], [F]

is the first time, other than the uncanny moment found at [A1], that the pastoral topic

changes. But what is the music depicting? By simply looking at the music notation and

studying the contortions of the violin’s motive (at [F]), this passage bears a strong

resemblance to the bass aria, “Höllische Schlange, wird dir nicht bange,” from Johann

Sebastian Bach’s Cantata No. 40 (see the above example). Bach depicts the text “Serpent

benighted, art thou affrighted?” by using a twisting, curving, upward rising motive in the

first violins that continues to ascend with many sudden descents in pairs. Perhaps not a

71
coincidence, this so-called “serpent motive”17 and the melody both begin on the same

pitch (D4), yet the serpent motive weaves in and out of the melody. In Baroque music,

this motive is frequently depicted by “rocking gently back and forth” as the serpent hangs

“down from the tree before the woman…deluding her with its crafty speech.”18 Thus, this

motion is portrayed by its contour, which entwines around the melody. It is easy to see

how Kurtág clearly depicts the motive beginning at [F]. If the serpent motive arrives

before the text does, does it change our Freudian narrative of repression? The snakes

clearly enter (at [F]), yet the double cannot see them until it splits (at [N]). Thus, [F]

signifies the beginning of the struggle between double and ego, or between life and death.

If we read the ego, or snake, as the violin and the double as the voice, the struggle begins

with the double’s attempted repression of the ego. The violin’s drop in register, its

obsessive-compulsive nature, and its serpent motive eventually call forth the ghastly

harbinger of death. Regardless of how we try to repress our sense of mortality, it

nonetheless always intrudes, lurking persistently in the background.

Other than the uncanny nature of the serpent motive, the first uncanny musical

moment in this struggle occurs immediately prior to [G]. Just as the soprano utters the

text “we crawled” for the second time, the violin and the voice align and descend with a

quick chain of trills quasi glissando. However, as the descent occurs, the violin stops at

G3, its lowest note, as the voice continues to descend beneath the violin’s register to F♯3.

The double has temporarily overthrown the ego, but, as soon as the soprano attempts to

begin again with the elaborated fourth (G3-C4, see [G]), perhaps evoking a horn call, the

                                                                                                               
17
For a discussion of Bach’s use of the serpent motive, see Albert Schweitzer, J.S. Bach: Volume
II (London: A. & C. Black, 1935), 79.
18
Ibid., 79.

72
violin spins out of control by expanding chromatically and ascending in register. Here,

the violin moves not just by fourths, but also by tritones (see [G1]) and sevenths (see

[G2]). As the soprano utters the remaining text “through the dust,” the music and texture

begin to expand as “a pair of snakes” begin to become evident (see [G3]).19

By this point, we are no longer walking down the path as humans; rather, we are

creeping through the dust like sinister creatures. Metaphorically, this moment seems to

remove our humanity—our agency to walk—and to reduce us to crawling beasts. How

did something so lovely as the opening introduction become the terrible recognition of a

slithering snake? Throughout the entire work, reference to the city has represented the

wicked aspects of man, whether we read it as a representation of outright sin or as a

prison cell. To go back to nature, to commune with our true selves, we go back to the

Garden of Eden, often evoked by rural places, in search of inspiration and escape. We can

return to what we perceive as perfect harmony, yet we can never completely escape the

horrors of this world. In “The Moonlit Night Dazzled Us,” even the most lovely pastoral

moment is ironic, underlying a sense of horror when confronting our sense of mortality.

Here, the pair of snakes, of course, evoke the fall of man.

When the second snake emerges at [H], it becomes clear that Kurtág still

emphasizes the perfect fourth by inverting the original fourth (at [F] from G3 to C4) to D4

to G4.20 Due to the constant parallel motion between the intervals in the violin, the snakes

are working in tandem with each other to overthrow the double. When the soprano enters

                                                                                                               
19
Of particular relevance is that the violin begins playing in double stops immediately prior to
[G3] where Kurtág depicts a second snake.

20
Martha Hyde discovered Kurtág’s use of ascending and descending fourths in other movements
of the Kafka Fragments. See Hyde, "Semiotics and Form: Reading Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments," in
Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 5, 193-94.

73
with the text “a pair of snakes” at [I], the realization of mortality is looming. Because the

soprano’s low range is encased by the double stops of the violin, the “pair of snakes,” the

soprano becomes hypnotized and falls into a trance resulting in hysteria. Similar to

Baroque serpent topics, the “snakes” in the violin alternate and slither above and below

the voice. The snakes provoke the ghastly harbinger of death. Here, the double realizes

that it can no longer suppress death and chaos ensues. Because the soprano, or double, is

so frightened from the realization of death, it relinquishes its text and falls back on its

only possible response—an obsessive-compulsive motion that ascends and descends

through a complex vocalise. This demand for a reinstatement of the double acts as an

attempt to repress the realization of death. Kurtág evokes this struggle through alternating

solo sections between the two voices (see [J] and [L]), which begin a continuous rise in

dynamics and register. The snakes begin the overthrow of the double (at [J]), followed by

the double’s attempt to repress death with a solo (at [L]). The violin continues to ascend

in fourths, but rapidly expands to encompass other intervals as well. By the time the

register expands, we have successfully moved from the loveliness of the opening to the

ultimate horror—the ultimate dichotomy of repression and confrontation. As the climax

approaches (see [M] and the prior system), the registers become higher and the dynamics

increase until we finally reach the apotheosis (at [N]). It is here that the double splits and

sees itself for what it really is – the ghastly harbinger of death. Because of this terrifying

recognition, the music has no other choice but to obliterate itself by descending back to

earth, back to the dust from which we came. This is accomplished by a great descent in

register in both the soprano and violin beginning at [N] and ending at [P]. Because the

double has split (at [N]), the soprano stops seconds later (at [O]) and does not return until

74
the violin, or the ego, has finished. It is not surprising that the violin’s chromatic descent

depicts snakes being banished from the trees in Genesis and ends on G3, the lowest note

on the violin – the ground.

As the soprano finally enters (at [P]) singing the same text as before, it is also at

the lowest extremity of its range (F♯3). It is evident that Kurtág deliberately chose to set

the text in this range because it musically depicts the fall of man. It is hardly surprising

that Kurtág set the final utterance of “dust” as the only spoken word throughout the last

fragment. For we are made of dust and to dust we shall return. If we recall the first

uncanny moment of the piece (at [A1]), the tritone descent from G4 to C♯4 evoked

demonic connotations. Here, on the text “a pair of snakes,” the same tritone is inverted

(C♯4–G3) connecting the uncanny event from the beginning to the end. This tritone

represents the acceptance of our mortality and likely portrays our death. The descent to

G3 represents us returning to the ground. The violin’s final phrase, the recapitulation of

the introduction (at [Q]), evokes a peaceful end to our lives and fades away as dust is

dispersed into the wind.

****

The foregoing analyses have shown the usefulness of musical narrative in music

composed after the nineteenth century, but the scarcity of writings in this field indicates

the difficulty in exploring musical semiotics in modern, non-tonal music. We need to

remember that no single narrative can fully interpret a piece; my analyses have shown

only one possible way to explain a piece's dramatic and disorienting moments, moments

75
that can frustrate conventional analytic approaches. By examining the presence of the

semiotic code for the uncanny in fragment forms, I suggest that the musical narrative of

repression can be present in music lacking tonality or coherent tonal allusions, just as it

was present in earlier fragment forms both in literature and music. One could plausibly

read other narratives for each of my three pieces, yet any adequate narrative would need

to interpret the significant and dramatic features on which I have focused. From a broader

perspective, it is my hope that this study will spur other scholars to explore further the

merit of musical semiotics in twentieth-century music and beyond.

76
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