Aesthetics of Music

Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Perspectives is an anthology of fourteen essays, each

addressing a single key concept or pair of terms in the aesthetics of music, collectively serving as
an authoritative work on musical aesthetics that remains as close to ‘the music’ as possible. Each
essay includes musical examples, which are drawn from works in the eighteenth, nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Topics have been selected from among widely recognized central issues in
musical aesthetics, as well as those that have been somewhat neglected, to create a collection that
covers a distinctive range of ideas. All essays cover historical origins, sources and developments
of the chosen idea, survey important musicological approaches, and offer new critical angles or
musical case studies in interpretation.

Stephen Downes is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Aesthetics of Music
Musicological Perspectives

Edited by
Stephen Downes
First published 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ideas in the aesthetics of music: musicological approaches/edited by
Stephen Downes.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Music – Philosophy and aesthetics. 2. Musicology. I. Downes, Stephen C., 1962– editor.
ML3845.I34 2014
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2014011012

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 Contents

List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction
STEPHEN DOWNES

2 Values and judgements

JAMES GARRATT

3 Absolute music
THOMAS GREY

4 Program music
JAMES HEPOKOSKI

5 Beautiful and sublime

STEPHEN DOWNES

6 Dialectics and musical analysis

JULIAN HORTON

7 Classicism/neoclassicism
KEITH CHAPIN

8 Romanticism/anti-romanticism
SANNA PEDERSON

9 Jazz – avant-garde – tradition

KENNETH GLOAG

10 Narrative
NICHOLAS REYLAND

11 Music and the moving image

JEREMY BARHAM
12 Irony
JULIAN JOHNSON

13 Propaganda
JIM SAMSON

14 Virtuosity and the virtuoso

JAMES DEAVILLE

List of contributors
Index of musical works, composers and performers
Index of terms in aesthetics
General index
 Illustrations

Musical examples
2.1 Rimsky-Korsakov, Sheherazade, Andantino, mm. 5–19
2.2 Bruckner, Symphony No. 1 (1890–1 version), finale, mm. 361–7
2.3 The Beach Boys, ‘God Only Knows’, figured bass reduction
5.1 Beethoven, Symphony No. 9, Finale, mm. 216–36
5.2 Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act 3: Isolde, ‘Tristan! Ah!’
5.3 Poulenc, Pastourelle, close
5.4 Poulenc, Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings, opening organ solo
5.5 Poulenc, Sextuor, ‘Divertissement’, opening
5.6 Tchaikovsky, Rococo Variations, mm. 17–21
6.1 Mozart, Piano Sonata, K. 457, first movement, mm. 1–19
6.2 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, ‘The Tempest’, first movement, mm. 1–24
6.3 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, first movement, progress of motive ‘y’ in
exposition
6.4 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, first movement, first-theme recapitulation
6.5 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, first movement, mm. 121–217, bass progression
6.6 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, first movement, first and second themes
6.7 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, first movement, closing group, progression from lyric to
march topics
6.8 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale, combination of march and chorale in first-theme
recapitulation
6.9 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale, combination of first- and last-movement main themes
in closing-group recapitulation
6.10 Berg, Piano Sonata Op. 1, mm. 1–11, functional and motivic design
6.11 Berg, Piano Sonata Op. 1, first-theme recapitulation
6.12 Berg, Piano Sonata Op. 1, C minor/B minor duality in first theme and overarching
cadential progression
7.1 Mozart, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, ‘Solche hergelauf’ne Laffen’
7.2 Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress, ‘Farewell for now’, mm. 1–25
7.3 Rousseau, Le Devin du village, ‘Dans ma cabane obscure’, mm. 1–15
7.4 Beethoven, Fidelio, Act 2, Scene 1, ‘Gott! Welch Dunkel hier’
7.5 Riemann, Allgemeine Musiklehre (Katechismus der Musik), 2nd, revised edn, Leipzig:
 Hesse, 1897, 108.
7.6 Mozart, String Quartet K. 590, Allegro moderato, mm. 1–18
7.7 Mozart, Symphony K. 551 ‘Jupiter’, Allegro moderato, mm. 387–92
10.1 Handel, Suite No. 6, Allegro (fugue), mm. 63–6
10.2 Beethoven, Piano Sonata, Op. 57, No. 1, ‘Appassionata’: Allegro assai, opening
10.3 Beethoven, String Quartet in F major, Op. 135, fourth movement: motto
10.4 Beethoven, Piano Sonata in A major, Op. 101, Allegretto ma non troppo, mm. 35–40
10.5a Chopin, Prelude, Op. 28, No. 3, opening
10.5b Chopin, Prelude, Op. 28, No. 3, mm. 20–7
10.6 Mahler, Symphony No. 9, first movement, Andante comodo: Fig. 3, mm. 20–4 (detail)
10.7 Beethoven, Piano Trio No. 5 in D major, Op. 70, ‘Ghost’, opening enigma
12.1a Mahler, Symphony No .9, third movement, mm. 352–5 (trumpets)
12.1b Mahler, Symphony No. 9, third movement, mm. 444–5 (clarinets)
12.2 Mozart, String Quartet in A major, K. 464, Minuet, mm. 55–72
12.3 Schubert, ‘Frühlingstraum’ from Winterreise, mm. 1–26
12.4 Beethoven, Piano Sonata, Op. 106, ‘Hammerklavier’, Scherzo, mm. 153–75

Figures
4.1 Generalized conceptual integration network
6.1 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, first movement, formal synopsis
6.2 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale, formal synopsis

Table
3.1 Recurrent conceptual dichotomies in the discourse of ‘absolute music’
 Preface

Aesthetics of Music is a collection of musicological essays that arose from two impulses. First, as
an historical musicologist who enthusiastically drew upon the discipline’s recent assimilations
(transformations and deformations) of new critical perspectives on history, politics, literary
theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis and so on – feeding on the new musicologist’s
methodological smorgasbord – I began to be concerned for the place of aesthetics. Ideas that find
their traditional place within aesthetics (notions of beauty, taste, judgement, value, unity,
meaning and so on) seemed to permeate these diverse approaches to studying music, often in
innovative ways. Aesthetic ideas were clearly being rethought, revalued and revitalized by the
context of new creative and critical developments. But in other parts of recent musicology,
reflecting aspects of wider intellectual fashion, the notion of an ‘aesthetic’ seemed to be
neglected, rejected, even pilloried. In such a climate, on the one hand a sustained pursuit of the
aesthetic could seem suspicious or anachronistic, while on the other hand a ‘return’ to the
aesthetic could be deliberately provocative. It was clear that a renewed focus on how
musicologists think through aesthetic ideas would be timely.
The second impulse came from my experience as a teacher of aesthetics in British university
music departments. As I prepared these courses, and as my students kept reminding me, there
was no immediately obvious first place to go for an up-to-date picture of musicological thinking
about ideas in aesthetics. Philosophers, by contrast, seemed well served, and musicologists
rightly turn to them for specialist insights into musical ontology, meaning and other areas. But
musicological ideas of aesthetics, though of course informed by the gains and claims made by
philosophy, are (or should be) made different, through reflecting the specialist knowledge
required and developed by the discipline. In particular, musicological work in aesthetics can
confidently keep ‘close to the notes’ – however these are manifest or experienced in score,
performance, and/or recording – and close to the ways these materials are creatively produced,
related and received. The aim, however, is not to produce a traditional textbook, nor an
exhaustive compendium or ‘companion’, but a collection which, while surveying important
aspects of the development of ideas in the field and where they now stand, also offers new
critical positions and thereby proposes fresh areas for research in the aesthetics of music.
No collection of essays that seeks to offer space for sustained musicological discussion of
musical manifestations of aesthetics ideas could possibly cover all topics that have legitimate
claims for inclusion. The selection offered here has been chosen to offer perspectives on both
long-established topics and more recent ideas in ways that facilitate discussion of a diversity of
musical styles, including the Western classical concert tradition, popular music from a range of
geographical origins, jazz and music for screen. The ideas focused upon in the essays reflect and
refract core issues of value, judgement, technique (virtuosity) and analysis; reconsider and
problematize important oppositions (absolute music and program music; classicism and
neoclassicism; romanticism and anti-romanticism; avant-garde and tradition; the beautiful and
the sublime); and pursue new angles on constructions of meaning through engagement in debates
on dialectics, irony, music and moving images, narrative and propaganda.

Stephen Downes
Royal Holloway, University of London
October 2013
 Acknowledgements

This book was completed during a period of research leave, the first part of which was granted
by the University of Surrey, the second by Royal Holloway, University of London. I am grateful
to both institutions for their support. I am also grateful to my editors at Routledge’s New York
office, Constance Ditzel and Elysse Preposi, for their wise and patient guidance through the
volume’s gestation.
Jake Willson set the musical examples with exemplary skill and care. The cost of reproducing
copyright examples was supported by the School of Arts, University of Surrey and Cardiff
University Music Department.

Examples from the following works are reproduced with permission:

Francis Poulenc, Sextuor © Copyright 1945 Edition Wilhelm Hansen. All rights reserved.
International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.
Francis Poulenc, Concerto en sol mineur pour orgue, orchestra à cordes & timbales (édition
1999) © Copyright 1999 – Éditions Salabert – Paris. Tous droits réservés – All rights reserved.
Reproduced by kind permission of MGB Hal Leonard, Italy.
Francis Poulenc, Pastourelle , © Editions Heugel & Cie, reproduced by kind permission of
Editions Heugel & Cie, Paris/United Music Publishers Ltd, England.
Chester Kallmann, Wystan Auden and Igor Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress © Copyright 1951 by
Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music
Publishers Ltd.
 1
Introduction
Stephen Downes

The place of aesthetics in musicology

There is no self-standing entry on ‘aesthetics’ in Grove Music Online. A search for this term
results in being directed to well over fifty other entries of bewildering diversity, from ‘affect’ and
‘Armenian music’ to the Czech composer and aesthetician Otakar Zich. 1 The plethora of
apparently related entries suggests a topic pervasively relevant in musicology. Yet it seems
undeserving of a single focused discussion. 2 A search under the alternative spelling, ‘esthetics’
in one sense provides even less joy. Again, there is no self-standing entry and now the reader is
encouraged to seek out but one alternative, a subsection of the long multipart entry on
‘philosophy of music’. Pursuance of this link raises the spirits of the aesthetically curious in
musicological hyperspace, however, for it supplies several richly informative pages covering the
history of musical aesthetics from 1750, discussion of key figures (with Kant, Schopenhauer,
Hegel and Schleiermacher headlining), and focused consideration of topics such as ‘subjectivity
and language’, ‘Romanticism’, ‘formalism’ and ‘disintegration’. The entry is written by Andrew
Bowie, author of books widely read and admired by musicologists (especially Bowie 2003 and
2009). Bowie is a Professor of Philosophy and German. Through both its commissioning and its
structure Grove clearly positions aesthetics as a subcategory of philosophy. Up front, however,
Bowie’s professional website declares his conviction that philosophical issues are inseparable
from ‘other key cultural responses to the problems of the modern world’. Few would disagree
with this. (We need not only take Bowie’s word for it: as well as being a superior philosopher,
Bowie is also a very capable jazz musician.) Bowie provides a fine subentry, but Grove’s
editorial decisions raise the key question of the place of the aesthetics of music in the
disciplinary and interdisciplinary scrutiny of this cultural activity. 3
Work by philosophers on the German aesthetic tradition in which Bowie specializes has
flourished especially strongly in recent years. The consideration of music in this tradition has
been richly explored by, for example, a collection of essays edited by Jost Hermand and Gerhard
Richter (2006) and Lydia Goehr’s Elective Affinities (2008), which also spreads its range to wider
fields, for example, the aesthetics of John Cage (via Arthur Danto). More broadly, when
philosophers have recently considered music, questions of ontology, expression and meaning are
often the focus of attention, as represented by much of the work of the prolific Stephen Davies
(e.g. 1994, 2003) and Peter Kivy (e.g. 2002, 2012). 4 Other dimensions of the aesthetics of music
are a prominent focus in the work of Jerrold Levinson; the second part of his Pleasures of
Aesthetics (1996, 27–125) is devoted to the aesthetics of music, and this was quickly followed by
Music in the Moment (1997); music also figures centrally in Nick Zangwill’s The Metaphysics of
Beauty (2001) and his Music and Aesthetic Reality is forthcoming in 2014. This is but a small
sample. Aesthetics seems to have a secure place and future within the philosophical discussion of
music.
The fruits of this vigorous activity in the past fifteen years or so offer a positive contrast to
Roger Scruton’s pessimistic statement made in the early 1980s:

There is little literature in the history of modern philosophy that is more exasperating than that
devoted to the aesthetics of music. When the standard of philosophical competence is high
enough to be taken seriously, the standard of musical competence is usually (as with Kant and
Hegel) too low for the exercise to be worthwhile. Hardly any writer troubles himself with
examples or analysis, and almost all rest their case in some vast and vague abstraction …
(Scruton 1983, 34)

On the other side of the musical aesthetic discourse it might equally be considered that
musicologists have too often displayed lacunae in their philosophical competence. The result can
be that even when philosophers and musicologists appear to be talking about the same thing,
there is sometimes a despairing sense, to paraphrase Cole Porter, that while ‘You say sonata, I
say sonata’. And so it may be tempting to call off any prospective interdisciplinary relationship.
Yet, the philosopher Andy Hamilton has insisted, surely correctly, that aesthetics must not
simply be a subdiscipline of philosophy: ‘writers in aesthetics should bring to bear as much
critical awareness and practical knowledge of the arts as possible’. A plea one might, of course,
reverse – musicologists who engage with aesthetics should bring as much critical awareness and
knowledge of relevant philosophical insight as possible. Hamilton lays his Kantian and Adornian
cards on the table, particularly lauding the latter’s efforts to ‘unify philosophical aesthetics and
the analysis, criticism and history of art’, something he considers ‘essential though too rarely
attempted’. He also hails Scruton as one of a rare breed of philosopher who can offer such a
difficult ‘cross-fertilization’. Analytical philosophy, more broadly, gets it in the neck for a
‘puzzling philistinism’, the product of its characteristic ahistorical and ‘scientific bias’. For
Hamilton, the aesthetics of music ‘has to be understood through its history’ and as dealing with
something ‘humane in utterance’ (Hamilton, 2007, 2, 7–8). 5
Hamilton’s more positive viewpoint suggests that philosophers and musicologists might, after
all, be able to call the calling off, off. Scruton’s own Aesthetics of Music (1997), a full-length
discussion of musical aesthetics tellingly rich in concrete musical examples and not shy of
employing the terminology of music theory and analysis was clearly his own response to the
bleak scenario he described in 1983. The book quickly proved productively provocative in
musicological circles. Brave and bold, it is a work that wears the author’s musical expertise and
his musical prejudices on its sleeve. In the view of a prominent music theorist and musicologist,
Scruton’s book was especially important for drawing aesthetic inquiry closer to the concerns of
music theory and analysis and thereby demanding critical scrutiny of the languages those
disciplines deploy to describe music and its meaning.

Scruton’s work provides sufficient demonstration of the pertinence of aesthetic thinking to

music theory. Taking aesthetics seriously has a number of practical consequences. Meaning,
for example, can no longer be left implicit in what we do, but must be confronted more
explicitly. And to get at meaning, we need to take a hard look at our meta-languages and to
probe the necessarily metaphorical nature of all talk about music.
 (Agawu 2000, 493–4 )

Scruton, of course, remains a prominent figure who continues to write frequently on music
and, in so doing, continues to stimulate vigorous debate. In a recent collection of essays
responding to Scruton’s output on aesthetics (Hamilton and Zangwill 2012), a quarter are
devoted to musical issues. But of the fifteen contributors (including Scruton himself), Michael
Spitzer is the sole musicologist. Given the prominence of music in Scruton’s aesthetics, Spitzer’s
may seem to be a token presence, even if it is a particularly authoritative one (Spitzer has
produced two major musicological monographs steeped in philosophical erudition: Spitzer 2004,
2006). Elsewhere, Spitzer has urged for more balanced dialogue between musicology and
philosophy. In his introduction to a collection of ten essays on significant figures in the German
tradition of the philosophy of music (from Kant to Adorno), two of which are by musicologists,
he lays down a gauntlet for both disciplines. On the one hand, he identifies an ‘inward turn’ in
the ‘new’ musicology of the 1990s, which he characterizes as a ‘self-reflective’ scholarly project,
one which, ‘where it does look out, is highly selective, or apparently unaware of the crucial
philosophical backgrounds to its favoured sources of reinvigoration’. And on the other hand, he
notes the disappointing ‘passing over of musical structure’ in the work of those analytical
philosophers who deal with music, including, for example, Davies, Levinson and Kivy (Spitzer
2010). The recent formation and activity of the RMA and AMS Music and Philosophy Study
Groups 6 has provided a platform for scholars in the fields to engage more fully and publicly in
Spitzer’s desired dialogue. Aesthetics would surely be prominent. And yet the inaugural 2011
conference of the RMA group listed just one session on aesthetics. The 2012 program included
sessions whose titles focused on analysis, hermeneutics, ethics, perception, expression, music
and language; as with Grove Online, it seems that aesthetics is nowhere and yet, one suspects,
that it must be nearly everywhere.
While philosophers have continued to pursue a wide range of issues in aesthetics, the position
of aesthetics within musicology in recent times has seemed much more uncertain. The entry on
‘musicology’ in the Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music (to which this current volume
stands as in part complement and part contrast) states that the ‘bulk’ of recent activity in the
discipline has been engaged in ‘critical interpretation of musical works: what they mean (or
meant); why there were composed; and how they may inform a larger historical, intellectual, or
aesthetic discourse’ (London 2011). Aesthetics here can be read as the third-rated term, as
something of an afterthought. A decade earlier the prospects of aesthetics in musicology might
have seemed even bleaker. In Alastair Williams’s view, musicology throughout the 1990s
reflected the fact that ‘“aesthetics”, with its elitist connotations, is not a widely used term
nowadays in the fields of critical and cultural theory, since it evokes a rarefied branch of
philosophy concerned with the appreciation of art and nature’ (Williams 2001, 10). Such a view
seems to confirm that by the end of the twentieth century aesthetics had apparently become
irrelevant to the new, culturally informed and cutting-edge critical interests of musicologists. Not
so long before, however, a tranche of major musicological publications had offered authoritative
histories, digests and anthologies of musical aesthetics. The English translation of Carl
Dahlhaus’s condensed, concentrated Esthetics of Music (1982) was widely read in the 1980s (part
of the rich series of translations of Dahlhaus’s work appearing during that decade). Dahlhaus co-
edited with Ruth Katz a vast, multivolume collection of source readings (Dahlhaus and Katz
1986–93). A collection edited by Peter le Huray and James Day was warmly received as
providing a long-needed musicological resource (le Huray and Day 1981), as was a
contemporaneous and comparably authoritative collection by Edward Lippman (1986–90).
Lippman also provided a magisterial, one-stop History of Western Musical Aesthetics (1992) a
publication closely contemporaneous with the English translation of Enrico Fubini’s own
historical survey (Fubini 1991, whose publication history in its original Italian goes back to the
1960s). Less than ten years later, were these books really in danger of gathering dust in the
musicology remainder bin?
Musicological rumours of the death of aesthetics were, however, greatly exaggerated.
Introducing the provocatively titled Resisting the Aesthetic (1998), a collection of musicological
essays from the 1990s, Adam Krims called for a redefinition and interrogation, rather than
indulgence in a ‘fantasy of escaping the aesthetic’. He argued that a rethinking of aesthetics
needed to play a part of the development of a new musical poetics. In response to the ‘crisis of
close reading’ which arose from the rush to discredit musical analysis as an activity that
uncritically sustained outworn notions of aesthetic formalism and autonomy, Krims urged for the
development of self-reflective modes of approach in which aesthetic questions gained a new
place within critical practice. Crucially, for Krims, the disciplinary split between music theory
and musicology, a ‘disciplinary reinscription of the text/context dichotomy’, needed to be
overcome in order to develop a ‘postmodern’ music scholarship which resists the old ideology of
aesthetic autonomy (Krims 1998, 2–11). 7 (This disciplinary split has always been less operative
in British universities, where they characteristically co-exist within music departments, but
Krim’s arguments retained urgent currency across the oceanic divide.)
In a surreptitious footnote Krims reflects that a familiar aesthetic binary may be at play in
musicology’s disciplinary agony: ‘the fact that beauty, not the sublime, has constituted [music
theory’s] principal means of validation helps to explain its resistance to some postmodern
theories’. This binary returns later more prominently in Krims’s main text where he describes the
‘sublime presence of “the social” returning to haunt the formerly sanitized world of musical
structure’ (Krims 1998, 13, n. 1). Krims is overtly influenced here by Joel Galand’s 1995 essay,
‘The Turn from the Aesthetic’, itself a response to the famous debate in the early 1990s between
Gary Tomlinson and Lawrence Kramer on what should characterize a ‘postmodern’ musicology
(Kramer 1992, 1993; Tomlinson 1993a, 1993b). Galand turns to Peter Brooks’s cautionary
words regarding the impulse to ‘go straight for the interpretive jugular’, and the need to regard
the importance of a notion of aesthetics embracing form, structure and genre (Brooks 1994). In
particular, Galand urges that the ‘postmodernist distrust of the aesthetic needs to be tempered by
a recovery of what was originally at stake in the positing of such an autonomous sphere’. He
argues that the

distinction between ‘aesthetic autonomy’ on the one hand, and ‘worldliness and contextual
continuity’ on the other, is forced because notions of aesthetic autonomy were from the very
first interwoven with problems both ethical (the mediation of individual and society) and
epistemological (the mediation of precept and concept).
(Galand 1995)

Galand places special emphasis on the category of the sublime (and this is what Krims alighted
upon), as an opening up to unanticipated potentiality, as an emancipation. This aspect of the
aesthetic Galand traces right back to Alexander Baumgarten’s insistence in his seminal
Aesthetica (1750) on aesthetic confusion and the resulting separation of art from a singular
notion of truth or knowledge. The aesthetic emerges from contemplation and contingency; it
need lead neither to mystification nor to the transcendent. Galand urges that we have to ‘dare’ to
‘become sublime’ (Galand 1995, 80–5). Hail the bravery of the newly befuddled aesthete !
Galand points out the contrast between the aesthetic implications of romantic irony
(contingency, ambiguity and incompleteness) and the later romantic’s despair at the prospect of
‘the impossibility of attaining absolute knowledge, of reconciling our finite sensibility with the
infinite’, the ‘sentimental’ romantic’s consequent indulgence in a fantasy of absolute music
based on claims of art’s organic and transcendental properties (see Nelson 1998). From this late
romantic position, Galand notes, ‘it is easy to envisage how the aesthetic might become
ideologized’ (Galand 1995, 86, 90). If recovered, however, the critical edge of aesthetic’s
original context can act as a potential check on the tendency, too often found in the counters to
this aesthetic ideology, to reduce the richness of the human subject to a much less interesting,
one-dimensional political animal. If achieved, the aesthetic might then not merely survive the
debunking of the ideology of ‘absolute music’ (see Chua 1999) (and its prized assets of
autonomy and unity), but emerge invested with a revitalized relevance.
Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) gave substantial impetus and focus to the
critical interrogation of the transcendent claims historically made for aesthetics. Its impact in
cultural studies was immense. After Eagleton, aesthetics was seen by some working in this field
(and in many other disciplines, such was the reach of Eagleton’s book) as the forbidden fruit. But
Michael Bérubé castigated those who, in recklessly polemical mode, proclaimed the purported
‘Return to Beauty’ in the 1990s for indulging in empty, provocative posing, for dismissing (or
forgetting) in dubious acts of disciplinary politics decades of work in cultural studies in which
the aesthetic remained a central concern (Bérubé 2004). Bérubé takes this critical moment as an
opportunity to ‘revivify’ persistent but important questions and in particular to revisit a famous
paragraph from Raymond Williams:

If we are asked to believe that all literature is ‘ideology’, in the crude sense that its dominant
intention (and then our only response) is the communication or imposition of ‘social’ or
‘political’ meanings and values, we can only, in the end, turn away. If we are asked to believe
that all literature is ‘aesthetic’, in the crude sense that its dominant intention (and then our only
response) is the beauty of language or form, we may stay a little longer but will still in the end
turn away.
(Williams 1977, 155)

Bérubé insists that the aesthetic is not something that exists in a realm discreet from the social
or historical: aesthetic functions become manifest under certain (social, historical) conditions. He
also points up the potentially critical and dissenting edge to aesthetics by emphasizing that
historically aesthetics developed in romantic opposition to the instrumentality and rationalization
of the dominant social system. He argues:

Where aesthetics went wrong theoretically was in its attempt to discover either the specific
properties of an object or (following Kant) the conditions of possibility for certain modes of
apprehension that would allow for a distinct realm of beauty.
(Bérubé 2004, 11–12)

In the early years of the twenty-first century several disciplines produced important texts that
offered revaluations of the aesthetic displaying the kind of critical sophistication and historical
awareness that Bérubé insisted upon. In literary studies, Isobel Armstrong proposed an
‘alternative aesthetic discourse’ in response to the anti-aesthetic voices, as counter to the way in
which the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ has left the aesthetic impoverished. Aesthetics, for
Armstrong, must not be a threadbare version of nineteenth-century German Idealism; recent
aesthetic debate, she argues, has been too often based on ‘derivative, oversimplified Kantianism’
on an unchanging, historically uninflected notion of the aesthetic. In particular she notes a
preoccupation with the sublime and widespread silence on the ‘politics and poetics’ of beauty,
driven by the conviction that the beautiful is the province of reactionary anachronism
(Armstrong 2000, 1–5). 8 Critical theorists John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, introducing a
collection on the ‘new aestheticism’, noted how ‘the rise of critical theory in disciplines across
the humanities during the 1980s and 1990s’ had ‘all but swept aesthetics from the map’ (Joughin
and Malpas 2003). Critical disdain for the image of the solitary, unworldly aesthete and
debunking of proclamations of ‘Universality’ had done their work of aesthetic cleansing. In
response, Joughin and Malpas were concerned to revalue the ‘singularity’ of the aesthetic which
is too often ‘effaced’ through thick explications in terms of politics, culture, ideology, and so on.
In pursuing this line, they argued, criticism is ‘in continual danger of throwing out the aesthetic
baby with the humanist bathwater’. The requirement, therefore, is to ‘avoid the pitfalls and
reductive unities of an old-style aestheticism’ and also reconsider the philosophical relationship
of contemporary critical theory to aesthetics. In a fashion comparable with Armstrong, they
urged that the characterization of the aesthetic as a ‘static’ or ‘essentialist’ category needed to be
overthrown, and especially perhaps the prevailing over-simplified or one-sided notion of
aesthetic autonomy. Joughin and Malpas are keen to emphasize that this does entail dismissing
the relevance and significance of the recent critique of aesthetics. Rather, they seek a dialectical
conception of autonomy. If specificities and particularities of the art work and experience are
taken into account, then a historically, politically and critically informed approach need not be an
‘anti-aesthetic’ one (Joughin and Malpas 2003, 1–21).
Meanwhile, several prominent musicologists sought to untangle and reassess that web of
contested terms – autonomy, analysis and unity. David Clarke called for a more ‘dynamic,
frictional view of musical autonomy’, and noted the ‘slippage’ between autonomy and
overlapping terms, one of which is the aesthetic. Clarke argued that such terms should be neither
fetishized nor interred but rather, through examining their historical and political ‘situatedness’,
be made more malleable (Clarke 2003, 159–69). 9 Giles Hooper joined Joughin and Malpas in
the aesthete’s bathroom in declaring that ‘we need not suppose that we must throw the analytical
baby out with the pseudo-objectivist bath-water’. For Hooper, the

challenge facing contemporary musicological study … has less to do with the vicissitudes of
postmodern theory and the denigration of an outmoded ‘modernism’ – an attitude which only
serves to obscure and distract from more productive and pertinent matters – than with the
mediation between two apparently antithetical conceptions: music as an autonomous
manifestation of abstract structural relations, and music as a thoroughly and multiply mediated
concrete or symbolic phenomenon.
(Hooper 2004, 311–29; see also Hooper 2006)

Contemporaneously, Kevin Korsyn argued that, in the face of the charge that the aesthetic is
ideological because it proposes a false synthesis or unity, the need was to historicize notions of
unity and scrutinize the motives for their invocation. In particular, Korsyn noted that a ‘decisive
shift in attitudes towards unity occurred with the development of aesthetics as an independent
region of philosophy starting in the mid-eighteenth century’. From Bowie’s Aesthetics and
Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche he draws out the significance of the link between the birth
of modern aesthetics and the development of modern notions of subjectivity. For Korsyn, the
‘cryptosubjectivity’ of aesthetic discourse ‘is one reason why a reconsideration of the notion of
artistic autonomy in our time, through concepts such as that of intertextuality, has gone hand-in-
hand with critiques of the “Cartesian” subject’. Korsyn’s proposal is that in order to scrutinize
this relationship between aesthetics and subjectivity musicologists move beyond formalism by
opening the process of analysis to historical and contextual considerations. This would seem to
require a large degree of interdisciplinary work, but ultimately he is doubtful ‘whether a
synthesis or fusion of disciplines can fully achieve this goal, because the notion of synthesis may
itself be a formalist ideal’ (Korsyn 2004, 337–51; see also Korsyn 1993 and 2003).
In 2006 the bath-time aesthetics discussion group was joined by Richard Taruskin, who
identified the jeopardized ‘baby’ in question as ‘the shared view that art is valuable “for its own
sake”, worth our time even if it doesn’t give us new or useful knowledge’. Bemoaning a lack of
critical interrogation of aesthetic autonomy in musicology, he noted the ‘regrettable
metamorphoses’ of ‘that which sustained art in the nineteenth century to that which merely
stained artistic thought and practices in the twentieth’ (especially manifest in a marginalizing
avant-garde, moribund, anachronistic performance practices, and abstract, sterile, formalist
analytical musicological methods). Taruskin attacked the ‘stale binarism’ that lies behind the
separation of historical and aesthetic artistic significance in Dahlhaus’s Foundations of Music
History , a high profile example of the ‘great bane’ of the rigid ‘either/or’ which he identifies as a
legacy of Cold War cultural politics. Taruskin urges that we must now instead attempt a ‘truly
dialectical’ interaction, one incorporating the human agencies and historical contexts that
generate discourses concerning aesthetic autonomy, value and meaning of art. Ultimately,
however, Taruskin is ‘hostile to the idea of aesthetic autonomy’, which he views as ‘debased
beyond hope of redemption’ (Taruskin 2006; Dahlhaus 1983).
Some of this early twenty-first-century debate was revisiting ground tilled several years before
by the pioneering collection of essays on Music and Society edited by Richard Leppert and Susan
McClary, whose keynote statement was an essay on ‘The Ideology of Autonomous Art’ by the
sociologist Janet Wolff (1987). Contemporaneously, the relevance of aesthetic autonomy was
hotly debated in studies of pop and rock music, where it was always at least problematic. 10 Also
in 1987, Peter Wicke’s study of rock music, while rejecting the claims of artistic autonomy,
challenged the assumed blasphemy of talking aesthetics when Chuck Berry had well and truly
rolled Beethoven over. For Wicke, though rock songs are not artistic objects designed for
disinterested contemplation, and their content is not merely found in forms or some ‘hidden
“content”’ that demands deciphering, the ‘theoretical apparatus of aesthetics … helps to decipher
[rock’s] noisy sounds’. Rock is a ‘symptom’ of a social and cultural context but this should not
mean that addressing ‘the music’ is neglected or deemed needless. In Wicke’s study aesthetics
survives in necessary new guise. Rather than a ‘bourgeois’ aesthetics of art, which turns an
ideological blind eye to artistic technique, the mundane modes of musical production, Wicke
proposed an aesthetics of rock that turns its focus to the new technologies and is capable of
moving between the profane and quotidian, the niche and commercial, the provocative and
pleasurable. Two strands emerge as especially significant: an ‘aesthetic of sensuousness’ in
which the simple, banal and trivial, rather than viewed as aesthetic failure, play vital roles, and
an aesthetic of constructed synthesis, in which fragments snatched from the ‘whirlpool of mass
culture’ are formed into a various ‘commercial conglomerations’ (Wicke [1987] 1990, ix, xi, 24,
26) .
 Wicke’s book was a sophisticated piece of aesthetic work. But where, asked Richard
Middleton in a sympathetic review, is ‘the text’ (Middleton 1991)? Any potential neglect of ‘the
music’ was declared as vehemently avoided in Theodore Gracyk’s 1996 attempt to ‘map’ the
aesthetics of recorded rock music. Gracyk aimed to ‘challenge the hegemonic impulses of high
culture’, invoking Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of the complications in the relationship of
aesthetic judgements to the particularities of cultural period (thereby avoiding the ahistorical
dangers of transcendental aesthetics). By contrast with a bourgeois notion of ‘fine art’, Gracyk
sought an aesthetic that can make meaningful insights into music which is commercial and
technological but which also in certain practices embraces notions of autonomy. To develop this
he argues that due regard is required of the social aspects lying in the aesthetic, that his
predecessors have lapsed too readily into transcendentalism. He offers a defence of Kant against
the devotees of formalist autonomy. A sliding scale of autonomy is proposed, an ‘elasticity’ in
the concept (Gracyk 1996, i, xiii, 213–18). However, Gracyk’s rock aesthetics still left Donald C.
Meyer yearning for scholarly demonstrations of the ‘beauty and meaning’ of individual songs,
for a combination of ‘local’ and the ‘global’ perspectives (by which he meant text and context)
(Meyer 1998). A rebalancing along these lines was something attempted by Allan F. Moore in
his Rock: The Primary Text ([1993] 2001). Moore identified his ‘primary question’ to be an
‘aesthetic’ one, and the ‘primary text’ to be the musical sound itself. By contrast, for example,
with Simon Frith’s self-declared technical ignorance, Moore’s approach is underpinned by
detailed analysis of musical styles, which are considered to be ‘partially autonomous’. 11
The work of Rose Rosengard Subotnik has been especially important in new musicological
thinking about a range of important aesthetic questions. Subotnik’s essays began appearing in the
late 1970s, when they were often met with consternation: their acceptance into the musicological
‘canon’ was confirmed when they were collected and published in two volumes (1991, 1995).
Some have taken her work as cue to developing a musical aesthetics in which ideas of autonomy
are renegotiated rather than, as Taruskin would much prefer, allowed to drain irrecoverably down
the plughole. Andrew Dell’Antonio’s 2004 collection, Beyond Structural Listening? , takes its
spur from Subotnik’s questioning of the universality of the ‘structural listening’ model –
identified by Subotnik as the ‘leading aesthetic paradigm’ and ‘yardstick of aesthetic (and moral)
value’ in twentieth-century German and Anglo-American musicology. In response, Dell’Antonio
brings the discussion of aesthetics into the context of postmodern models of knowledge which,
after Lyotard, offer a counter to the modernist aim of revealing the deeply embedded truth-
content of art. This alternative model is one of negotiation, of recognizing the ‘impossibility of
stable truth’ of pursuing the immanent meaning of structures other than those of supposed
organic unity, the incomplete and partially integrated which allow spaces for the unknowable.
Thus ‘new parameters’ beyond the teleological or totalizing are suggested for the aesthetic
valuation of music. Dell’Antonio sees this as an expansion of possibilities operating in an
implicit ‘politics of listening’. Precursors are identified in Schumann’s musical criticism and the
sublime aesthetics of early nineteenth-century Romanticism (as noted by Galand, this is the
notion of aesthetics widely explored before the fantasy of absolute music took hold among the
later Romantics) (Dell’Antonio 2004, 1–11). In his contribution to the collection, Martin
Scherzinger highlights how the ‘radical particularity of musical experience’ can resist the
totalizing impulse and, more widely, how ‘the emancipatory figuration of the aesthetic’ can be
provide an opportunity ‘for imaginative political intervention in the world’. Scherzinger is
concerned with the question of how reflecting on the aesthetic (that is, an interpretative process
that doesn’t read ‘right through the musical text as if it was a mere representation of the social’)
might generate social and political insights: he is proposing a new relationship between the work
and the world, one based upon a dialectical antitheses between a ‘productive autonomy’ and an
‘effective resistance’ to that autonomy (Scherzinger 2004a, 253).
In a closely related essay, Scherzinger similarly wrote of the ‘complex and dialectical’
relationship of art and world, of how within that relationship the notion of aesthetic autonomy
has a ‘socially critical and provocative side’, one that can ‘defy’ ideological constraints on
meaning. In modernism, with its characteristic discontent with the world, Scherzinger sees this
dialectic being placed under heightened tension. He asks, then, how a new productive
relationship between aesthetics and politics might be developed in ‘postmodern’ times. A trawl
through the selected writings of Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch leads
him to identify art’s authentic truth content as emerging through a dialectical relationship
between aesthetic norms and conditions handed down through history and the particularity of
subjective expression which negates or disintegrates these aesthetic materials and thus resists
false unities. However, as this relationship is truly dialectical, this process serves to sustain
aesthetic illusion. Scherzinger insists on the ‘vagueness’ and ‘variability’ of aesthetic autonomy,
so that its meanings can only be revealed through analysis of particular artistic examples
(Scherzinger 2004b). For Scherzinger, an opening up of discussion on the issues of aesthetic
autonomy, value and particularity, still widely considered taboo, is most urgently needed in the
early twenty-first century. This is because he sees the prospect of the emancipatory uncertainties
emerging from a relationship of the political and aesthetic as offering a desperately required
counter to the ‘closing’ of the American mind, the collapse of open, rational critique under the
political and institutional powers held by the adherents to the new dogma, a force that has also
been all too apparent in America’s strongest political ally, the UK. As Scherzinger noted,
Korsyn’s (dissensual) musicological community would ideally be one populated by ‘ironic
scholars’ who openly acknowledge, indeed delight in, the limitations and provisional status of
their claims to knowledge (Scherzinger 2006). Gone would be the days when, hand on the Urtext
score, a musicologist might make statements claiming to contain nothing but the whole truth.
These declarations came, of course, at a time made fraught by a viciously divisive political
atmosphere in both the US and UK, in which conflicting and contentious claims of ownership of
the ‘known’ and the ‘truth’ became notorious. Satirists had a field day. In the first transmitted
episode of The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, USA, 17 October 2005) Stephen Colbert said to
camera:

I will speak to you in plain, simple English. And that brings us to tonight’s word: ‘truthiness’.
Now I’m sure some of the ‘word police’, the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say,
‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anyone who knows me knows I’m no fan of dictionaries or
reference books. They’re elitist – constantly telling us what is or isn’t true … I don’t trust
books. They’re all fact, no heart. And that’s exactly what’s pulling our country apart today.
’Cause face it, folks: we are a divided nation … between those who think with their head, and
those who know with their heart.
(Quoted in Erion 2007, 14, n. 5)

Even more humorously apposite is Colbert’s audacious address at the 2006 White House
Correspondents’ Association Dinner, in which he compared himself with President George W.
Bush, who was sitting just a few feet away :

We’re not so different, he and I. We both get it. Guys like us, we’re not some brainiacs on the
 nerd patrol. We’re not members of the Factinista. We go straight from the gut; right sir? That’s
where truth lies, right down here in the gut.
Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You
can look it up. Now I know some of you are going to say, ‘I did look it up, and that’s not true.’
That’s because you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells
me that’s how our nervous system works.
(Quoted in Griffioen 2007, 227) 12

In the Scherzinger–Korsyn vein, much musicological work in recent years has pursued a
sceptical interrogation aimed at revealing the ‘truthiness’ of claims to know what is true (more
widely, see Wolff 2008). However, the doubleness of Colbert’s devastating caricature is actually
especially revealing. Music can hit us in the gut as well as get inside our head; it possesses the
potential to have impact on both our physique and our psyche. Both can ‘get it’ but, partially
because of that double hit, the ‘it’ of the music is far from a stable ‘truth’.
Georgina Born’s work on cultural and aesthetic experience is pertinent here. She explores the
musical experience as one of both presence and meaning, one that can move between the somatic
and semantic where body and mind are interacting, potentially mutually intensifying, interfering,
or momentarily erasing. In such a model no prior assumption is made on which of these binary
terms is primary and each is always mediated by social and environmental contexts (musical
practices, institutions, technologies, ‘imagined communities’, manifold cultural, political and
economic processes). Both the social and the musical must therefore be considered multiple. To
illuminate these experiences Born proposes a new type of interdisciplinarity, a ‘relational
musicology’ (Born 2012; see also Born 2010a and in embryonic form, Born 1991). This aims to
reveal how aesthetic ideas are generated within modes of listening (and here we might recall
Subotnik), understood widely as ‘experiences’ which, depending on context, embrace the
contemplative, the corporeal and the collective (Born 2010b). 13 It is hard not to think of Prince’s
2004 funk hit ‘Musicology’ and in particular the line ‘’Cause we got a PhD in Advanced Body
Movin’, which encapsulates the potent co-existence of the immediate pleasures of physical
intoxication and a sophisticated knowledge-base that allows the listener, or dancer, to grasp the
song’s complex, allusive content, with its nostalgic and canonizing functions (especially
valorizing James Brown), which are visually reinforced by the imagery of the song’s video. 14
The somaesthetic, to use Richard Shusterman’s term (Shusterman 2012), of the bodily
experience, and the aesthetic pleasure of semantic recognition are brought together in a shifting,
grooving relationship. The urge to understand the wide range of musical experiences that
generate seemingly infinite variants of this kind of multiple aesthetics is what drives the recent
development of relational, cultural and critical versions of the activity formerly known simply as
musicology.
Prince’s declaration of doctoral distinction in dance practices in one sense raises him and his
funk band as highly trained specialists, musicians who have worked long and hard to reach an
‘advanced’ level of technique. Indeed, Prince is readily figured as a virtuoso artist making songs
and performances of high technical and aesthetic complexity (see Hawkins and Niblock 2011).
One is reminded of Susan McClary’s classic 1989 dissection of the political, institutional and
social contexts for the valorization and self-validation of composers of ‘difficult’ music (headline
figures in McClary’s discussion are Roger Sessions, Arnold Schoenberg, Milton Babbitt, Pierre
Boulez) whose work gains prestige as ‘high’ art in inverse relationship to its low levels of
comprehensibility and epitomizes an avant-garde stance of extreme autonomy (and also,
McClary argues, of endemic misogyny). By way of provocative contrast, McClary raises the
funk classic ‘System of Survival’ (1987) by Earth, Wind and Fire (who are name-checked by
Prince on the faculty of his musicology groove academy) as an example of a complex idiom
demanding musical (and technological) expertise and imagination yet also one with wide popular
appeal. Vital and exuberant, this is music replete with ‘infectious rhythms’, but McClary’s
hearing avoids the perils of primitivism, for this is a musical expression that ‘I’ will survive in
the face of institutional and political marginalization, a song that also manifests ‘an intelligence
that accepts experiences of the body … as integral parts of human knowledge that accrue value
precisely as they are shared and confirmed publicly’. This is ‘smart’ music, one that, along with
offering physical invigoration, invokes complex ‘forms of sedimented cultural memory’
(McClary 1989). 15 The funk aesthetic, as outlined by Shusterman (1992, 169–202), is one
example for David Hesmondhalgh of music’s ability to ‘promote human flourishing’ and its
emancipatory potential. In the face of the ‘suspicion’ in cultural studies of categories, including
the aesthetic, Hesmondhalgh mounts a defence of the experiences of music that can invigorate
and vitalize, can move and shake, or bump and grind, without neglecting or denigrating the
significance of meanings created by imaginative contemplation and emotional reaction
(Hesmondhalgh 2012). 16 To recall Colbert’s comical anatomy, the aim is to consider how the
experience of different types of music moves between the instinctiveness of ‘gut’ reactions, the
reflectiveness of the ‘head’ and the expressiveness of the ‘heart’.
In his Music and the Politics of Negation James Currie argues that though musicology may
seem to have woken up from the ‘nightmare’ of modernist dogma of aesthetic autonomy the
apparently enlightened ‘postmodern’ musicology that emerged might equally be identified as
ideological because of its wide exclusion of something to do with the ‘Music’ itself. For music to
hold its due position in musicological scrutiny, Currie argues, we should allow it to move
between enchantment (to suggest, or conjure aesthetic illusions of, something more beautiful
than the real) and disenchantment (to suggest a contextual sublime, of how music can intimate
and undermine, affirm and negate, its own autonomy through aspects of its musicality, including
formal process of integration, disintegration, unity and contrast, topic and allusion, surface and
depth, resolution and dissonance). We might then move between ‘enjoyment’ (the sublime
experience of jouissance ) and the ‘pleasures’ of the beautiful, and above all begin to embrace the
singular riskiness of autonomy (Currie 2013, ix and passim ). 17 As Lawrence Kramer has
recently put it,

the ‘cultural turn’ that reached musicology some two decades ago is now mature – mature
enough to confront its own conflicted relationship to the aesthetic. It was for a time necessary
to subordinate aesthetic appreciation to cultural critique so that the latter could find its voice.
But the aesthetic is insubordinate by nature.

Kramer argues that ‘aesthetic play trumps ideological form, including the form of the ideology
of the aesthetic’, that ‘we need to return to an arena that some of us have never left: the musical
work … to consult the work, not to idolize it’, and thereby allow aesthetic pleasure to fulfil its
potential as generator of an ‘immanent critique’ (Kramer 2008, 4–5). A volume that brings
together essays that consider a range of musicological approaches to topics in aesthetics is,
therefore, especially timely .
On what follows
As we have seen, the aesthetic, though contested and occasionally (it seems) detested, is
everywhere. Selecting from the vast array of ideas in musical aesthetics was therefore a tough
editorial task. The aim was to gather essays focusing on ideas that would include some long
considered central to the aesthetics of music (absolute music, the avant-garde, program music),
some important binary oppositions (beautiful and sublime, classicism and neoclassicism,
romanticism and anti-romanticism), some that have become hot musicological topics in recent
years (irony, metaphor, narrative, virtuosity), and some which may have seemed outdated,
neglected or until now scattered around an assortment of writings (dialectics, judgement and
value, propaganda). By contrast with a compendium of short entries, contributors were
commissioned to write essays of a length that allows detailed discussion of musical examples as
well as rich consideration of context. 18 Inevitably, this restricted the number of essays. No doubt
many readers will consider other or alternative topics to have strong claims to inclusion.
However, some that may seem to be notable absentees are well represented in the recent
literature, 19 and checking out the indices of this volume should demonstrate that the selected
topics facilitate the embracing of ideas related not only these issues but also, for example, to
genre, gender, nation, performance, and so on. The selected range also allows the discussion of
music from a wide variety of styles, tastes, traditions, functions, historical period, and
socioeconomic and geographical origins. The authors were chosen to offer a balance between
long-established figures of musicological authority and those whose careers are ascending
towards such status, as well as a balance between North American and British musicologists. It
remains a source of regret to me that there is only one female author among them, but sometimes
the availability and willingness of collaborators imposes such representation. I am, of course,
enormously grateful to those who in writing the essays that follow have contributed to the
making of this volume.
James Garratt’s chapter on values and judgements provides an introduction to one of the most
complex and controversial subjects in music aesthetics: value, in particular the issues and
problems surrounding the evaluation of musical works. It explores the challenges posed by the
collapse of traditional value systems – including the loss of a ‘gold standard of aesthetic
judgment’ (Baudrillard) – and discusses whether in the wake of this, it is still possible to make
principled judgements today. The opening section probes some key issues and problems, such as
the relationship between aesthetic value and art’s other values, and the nature of the principles
and criteria that might be used to justify a particular value judgement. In doing so, it introduces
ideas from key figures within Western aesthetics, such as Kant, and also the views of opponents
such as Bourdieu. It tackles head-on the charges of elitism and conceptual imperialism that have
been levelled at traditional conceptions of aesthetic value, acknowledging that all value systems
serve the ends of specific communities and rely on hierarchical, exclusionary strategies. It also
probes the limitations of evaluative criteria, stressing the impossibility of Dahlhaus’s notion of
‘proving’ a value judgement.
The chapter fleshes out these perspectives and relates them to practice by exploring two key
phases of value formation within Western music: the consolidation of the idea of classical music
within Austro-German culture in the age of Beethoven, and the defining phase of American rock
music and discourse in the mid to late 1960s. It draws on a wide range of contemporary texts in
order to shed light on how the new values emerged, how they were conceptualized by
contemporaries and how they conflicted with more established value systems. As well as
exploring the differences between the values of these two cultures, it also highlights the parallels
between the aesthetic ideas of rock’s champions in Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone and those of their
counterparts in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 150 years earlier; as well as placing a
premium on the idea of the artist, originality, authentic expression and the creation of fixed
musical objects, both discourses placed themselves in opposition to a mainstream perceived as
formulaic and commercially driven. This leads to a discussion of the precise relationship
between cultures and values, and the idea that the concept of culture has become too
cumbersome to capture the fluid ways in which value systems interact in the present age.
The term ‘absolute music’ as a designation for autonomous instrumental art music emerged in
the nineteenth century, although it became standard terminology only in the twentieth. In his
essay Thomas Grey explores how in modern scholarship the term has become identified with a
Romantic appreciation of the metaphysical value of instrumental art music as an ineffable
‘higher language’, resonating with affective and psychic states but not constrained within any
system of signification. Recognition of instrumental music as a paradigm of formal, non-
representational beauty independent of linguistic concepts predates the Romantic view and
continues up to the present. After reviewing the origins of absolute music as a term and concept,
the chapter then interrogates the boundaries of the concept, proposes a traditional dichotomy of
cultural attitudes, and notes ways in which ‘absolute music’ structures debates in current musical
scholarship.
The aim of James Hepokoski’s chapter on program music is to redirect a conversation now
grown stale into more fruitful, more practical modes of approach. It starts by laying out some
traditional understandings of and controversies surrounding program music (as a presumed
alternative to absolute music or ‘pure music’) and then proceeds to suggest some ways of
moving beyond the standard debates. Within the European art–music tradition the terms
illustrative music and program music refer to instrumental compositions that invite their listeners
to attend to them with the aim of grasping their correspondences with (normally) pre-given
external images, texts, sounds, situations, ideas, or narratives of varying degrees of specificity.
While broader understandings of the term have been advanced to include all illustrative music,
program music is most scrupulously regarded as that subset whose otherwise idiosyncratic
formal structures or musical materials are most readily grasped by mapping the details of the
music on to a governing external narrative or temporal sequence of images. A piece’s backdrop
storyline, that is, plays a vital role in helping one to understand its ongoing musical processes
and intended representational content.
When one peers into the voluminous literature on the history, aesthetics and practice of
illustrative claims within art–music, one is immediately entangled in knotted arguments and
terminological tussles. One of Hepokoski’s central contentions is that the traditional,
philosophically posed question, ‘is pure music (or this or that piece) actually capable of
expressing or representing things outside of itself?’ is unproductive. In part, this is because of the
record of historical evidence: much music of the past has been created and listened to under the
belief that it can. The traditional question’s narrow framing can imply a search for a hardened,
essential nature for ‘music alone’ an abstraction to be thrown on to the examination table and
considered largely apart from issues of the historicity of such questions or the differing affective
and imaginative experiences of those who interact compellingly, and in multiple ways, with
individual works. Some discussions along these lines can strike musicians as disorientingly
unmusical, caught up in a skein of philosophically in-house argumentation, where concerns to
preserve a disciplinarily sterilized wording seem distant from a more imaginatively attuned
musical knowledge and experience. Instead, Hepokoski’s essay suggests ways of cutting through
these issues by appealing to historical understandings and immediate experiences of listening.
Consequently, this essay glances at three of the many issues currently in play in any such new
understanding of program music: (1) titles and other paratexts (citing the views, among others, of
Levinson and Genette); (2) topic families (Ratner, Monelle, Hatten, and others); signs, metaphors
and blended spaces (Lakoff and Johnson, Fauconnier and Turner). These issues are not
conceptually separate but rather intersect as complements, different ways of approaching the
same theoretical problem. The essay concludes by touching on some practical problems of
extramusical implication as confronted within the disciplines of music history and analysis.
Right from what is often considered to be the birth of modern aesthetics in the eighteenth
century the relationship between the beautiful and sublime has held a prominent position. The
various manifestations of these concepts in philosophical discourse and artistic theory and
practice from the seminal texts of the Enlightenment through romanticism, modernism,
postmodernism and many other ‘-isms’ in between have received voluminous attention. In
musicology itself, the categories are hardly neglected, but though the sublime has generated
much prominent work, the beautiful has tended to do so rather more surreptitiously (this reflects
a wider tendency in cultural discourse), with the prominent exception of the sustained debate
over Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (first published 1854). Chapter 5 starts on
familiar ground, discussing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as
works which, as many recent commentators have noted, complicate and problematize the two
terms and their relationship; it then turns to some under-explored categories – the comic, the
Gothic, the sentimental and the grotesque – which in different ways twist and turn the beautiful
and sublime to fascinating artistic ends. These aesthetic categories will be illustrated by
examples from the music of Francis Poulenc (passing by way of Tchaikovsky) in order to offer
maximal contrast to Beethoven and Wagner, and also to wrench the debate away from Germany.
Although dialectical modes of thought have, from the early nineteenth century forwards,
exerted a wide-ranging and fundamental influence on music-historical and music-theoretical
scholarship, a broad introduction to this strand of engagement is yet to be written. Consequently,
despite the fact that much current scholarship remains indebted to dialectical models there is as
yet no introduction supplying a concise contextualization of this research or surveying the field
to which it contributes. Julian Horton’s essay seeks to fill this gap, offering a thorough yet
accessible guide to the subject, which combines explication of the basic mechanisms of
dialectical thinking with a survey of landmark texts. The essay pursues five successive
objectives. It begins with an introduction to dialectics as a philosophical strategy, from Hegel’s
idealism and its impact on Karl Marx’s materialism to the negative dialectics of the Frankfurt
School in the twentieth century. It appraises the Hegelian method, especially as formulated in The
Phenomenology of Mind and construed in recent secondary literature, before assessing its
evolution in the so-called left- and right-Hegelian tendencies of nineteenth-century thought, the
persistence of left-Hegelianism in the theoretical Marxism of the interwar years, and ultimately
the negative dialectics of Adorno, which stressed the failure of dialectical synthesis as an arbiter
of social authenticity.
Horton then offers focused surveys of two threads of musical thought: theoretical applications,
as exemplified by A. B. Marx’s Formenlehre and Hugo Riemann’s theory of harmony; music-
historical applications, from Franz Brendel’s Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und
Frankreich von den ersten christlichen Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart to Theodor Adorno’s
Philosophie der neuen Musik and after. The theoretical impact of the dialectical model is keenly
felt in A. B. Marx’s Die Lehre von der musikalichen Komposition , in which the evolution of
forms is construed as a result of the dialectic of rest and motion ( Ruhe and Bewegung ) incipient
in musical material and its resulting syntax (embodied respectively in the phrase forms of the Satz
and the Gang ). In Riemann’s functional theory, dialectical thought emerges instead in the
concept of harmonic dualism, which proposes the antithetical relationship of major and minor
systems.
The historical dimension of Hegel’s (1931) thought – its narrative of intellect’s progress
towards self-awareness, or the condition in which ‘mind is object to itself just as it is’ (
Phenomenology of Mind ) – had a fundamental impact on how the action of music history was
conceived. Horton pays special attention here to the notion of historical progress developed by
Brendel, and pursue its subsequent manifestations through the polarization of progressive and
conservative tendencies in late nineteenth-century Austro-German musical discourse and the
concept of historical necessity driving Schoenberg’s musical aesthetics, to the negative-
dialectical opposition of Schoenberg and Stravinsky underpinning Adorno’s Philosophie der
neuen Musik . Taking Adorno’s direct affiliation of Hegel’s dialectic and Beethoven’s concept of
sonata form as a starting point, Horton gives analytical substance to these considerations via a
succinct case study, looking afresh at the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata Op.
31, No. 2, as an example that has provoked influential dialectical interpretation (seminally in the
work of Carl Dahlhaus) and sustained subsequent commentary. In particular, he evaluates both
how antithesis might manifest itself in purely musical terms (as the embodiment of identity and
difference within musical material), as well as the idea that structural events might act
synthetically upon such an opposition (for example, in Adorno’s claim that dialectical
overcoming is a characteristic of the Beethovenian recapitulation). Horton concludes by
assessing the persistence of dialectical thinking and its prospects, notably in the wake of
postmodern philosophies and their musicological implications, taking the thoughtful analysis of
postmodern musicological trends in relation to Habermas’s work advanced by Michael Spitzer as
a touchstone for debate.
Classicism and neoclassicism are terms often linked to the music of the eighteenth and
twentieth centuries respectively, or to an art-music tradition that originated in Europe and spread
internationally, or, most broadly, to various musical traditions around the globe that have
developed canons of classics and practices of emulation. This diversity of classicisms suggests
that it is best to define classicism and neoclassicism liberally, as inflecting a variety of practices
(canon formation, imitation and emulation), stylistic ideals (formal balance, the synthesis of parts
into wholes, and the presentation of human artifice as nature), and values (restraint, order,
control). Although these practices, styles and values take many forms, crossing times and
cultures, they nonetheless often point in one of two different directions, termed ‘standard’ and
‘ideal’ classicism by Ernst Robert Curtius. Necessary for pedagogy but also beloved by dictators,
standard classicism emphasizes the codification of imitable norms, stylistic regularity, and a
restraint based on reason (or raison d’état ). A tempering of standard classicism, ideal classicism
emphasizes the production of inimitable works, a style that sometimes skirts the line between
classicism and mannerism, and a restraint based on taste and good judgement. Both types of
classicism can manifest themselves in composition, performance, dress, behaviour and all other
aspects of musical practice. Despite the ubiquity of classicist practices, however, they owe their
specific forms to the particularities of different historical situations. Notably, in the Western
tradition, without a canon of classic works, genres or artistic rules handed down from Greek or
Roman antiquity, musicians have had to establish their own classics and to develop their own
classic genres and techniques. If musicians have always held a close eye on their fellows in other
artistic media, they have also had to invent their discipline in a way unknown to others.
Sanna Pederson’s essay on romanticism and anti-romanticism begins by summarizing the
understanding of romanticism from the standpoint of a critical theory that argues for romanticism
as the only possibility of getting disentangled from the dialectic of the Enlightenment. An
historical account begins by showing how some of the main arguments against romanticism are
found in Hegel’s critique of romanticism and music. These include the idea of romanticism as
disease, as being all feeling and no thinking, and as having no real relation to the world. An
examination of Eichendorff’s literary fairy tale ‘The Marble Statue’ from 1819 establishes
romantic themes that recur in musical works from Schumann’s Liederkreis , Op. 38, to Wagner’s
Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde , and even his last opera, Parsifal . These include a dualistic
understanding of music, religion and woman as potentially both dangerously intoxicating and
restoratively purifying.
The years around the 1848 revolutions marked the first groundswell of anti-romantic
sentiment in music criticism. The confusion and contradictions within this critique reveal how
Hegel’s fundamental ambivalence about music and art in general developed into an anxiety over
music’s purportedly romantic nature. A realistic, politically engaged music would only be
possible if it could be separated from romanticism. After 1848, Wagner took up precisely that
question in his Zurich writings. His solution was to not question music’s essentially romantic
nature, but to supplement it with what it lacked, namely ideas and political engagement. The
Zurich writings are the most extended anti-romantic polemic against music that we have in the
nineteenth century. They share the same premises of another enormously influential critique of
the romantic understanding of music, Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen ([1854] 1986). The
backlash against romantic music can also be seen in the success of Offenbach’s creation of opéra
bouffe , a light, satirical genre that drew on eighteenth-century classical predecessors.
Wagner found it impossible to sustain his anti-romantic manifesto while continuing to
compose music. He found a way out with the writings of Schopenhauer, a philosopher whose
pessimism and metaphysical theory of music gave expression to a renewed or neo-romanticism
beginning in the 1850s. Inspired by Schopenhauer, Wagner came to see music’s romantic
qualities as positive rather than negative. The resulting work, Tristan und Isolde , is arguably the
most romantic opera ever written.
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music also represents a highpoint of
romantic expression. It tried to discredit anti-romantic arguments against music and celebrate the
Dionysian force of music, proclaiming a rebirth of art through Wagner’s operas. However,
within a decade Nietzsche reversed himself and turned against romanticism and Wagner. His
notions of romanticism as diseased and decadent played a major role in the emerging concepts of
decadence and degeneration that seemed to diagnose the condition of Western art and society at
the end of the nineteenth century.
Wagnerism reached its peak in the years leading up to the First World War. The inflation of
Wagner’s metaphysical, mystical theories by his followers pumped the romantic aspect of music
up to new dimensions. However, the First World War punctured the giant romantic bubble, and
after the Second World War there was an even stronger reaction against musical romanticism.
Since then, musicologists have been rewriting the history of the twentieth century and
discovering a continuity of romantic music from the nineteenth century that survived the
backlashes .
Another crucial opposition in aesthetics is that between tradition and the avant-garde. Certain
forms of jazz music have routinely been described as avant-garde, with the provocative,
challenging aspects of this music readily interpretable as subverting the conventions of a
tradition. Kenneth Gloag’s chapter outlines some key ideas about how in general the term avant-
garde may be positioned as a concept through an engagement with some of the key texts and
ideas, with Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde providing a productive starting point. Three
specific jazz musics that have all been identified as avant-garde in the literature – Charlie Parker,
Ornette Coleman and Anthony Braxton – are used as case studies to illustrate some of the critical
issues in the debate about jazz as an avant-garde art form. However, it is argued that, after a
moment of critical tension, these examples of avant-garde jazz have been absorbed into a
tradition in ways that begin to question how a concept of tradition is both constructed and
interpreted.
Slow-burning questions of music and narrative have long concerned musical criticism, but
more recently they have ignited into debates engulfing leading contributors to contemporary
musicology. As Nicholas Reyland shows in his essay, at their centre, the arguments have
concerned whether instrumental music can tell or otherwise represent a story and/or aspects of a
narrative discourse. Orbiting issues engage with (for instance) the role of the perceiver and her
listening community when music is heard as a narrative, how the criticism of music with text
(songs, program music, operas, concept albums, etc.) might be influenced by such debates, and
how a study of music outside the common-practice tonal period in Western art–music (the
crucible for most of the debating thus far) could impact on these considerations. Criss-crossing
the debate are unavoidable questions relating to music history and hermeneutics, not least those
concerning how and why music comes to tell specific (yet often opposing) stories for socially
and historically situated subjects. The debate over music and narrative is not only about whether
music can or cannot tell a story: it concerns the cultural work carried out when narratives are
enacted by musicians, performers and perceivers.
Reyland’s chapter surveys the relevant literature to date, summarizing key contemporary
disputes and placing them in a broader historical context. This permits the identification of places
where, broadly speaking, the literature has reached a consensus on central issues. From the
threads of the many existing theories of musical narrative, a meta-theory of musical narrativity
can begin to be woven. Yet cutting-edge work on the topic is also moving away, most
productively, from the question of whether one can speak of musical narrative, to consider
instead why one should be disposed to do so in the first place, and in turn what such acts of
reading might seek to achieve aesthetically, culturally or politically, for the makers, performers
and consumers of music (including, of course, the very music critics engaging in the discipline’s
narrative turn). Reyland’s essay therefore frames its survey of the literature to date (which is
itself divided into sections detailing narratological criticism of common-practice tonal music and
other musics) with a framing narration of its own: a new theory of musical narrativity that draws
on the existing literature but also on phenomenology, reader-response criticism and reception
theory to explain how music can come to be interpreted as a narrative, and how many narrative
readings can in turn be read for what they say about the construction of music’s aesthetic and
socio-cultural significance. Throughout the essay, thumbnail music analyses exemplify key
points relating to the literature, to the study’s original theoretical proposals, and to its discussion
of how and why musical narratives, and critical interpretations thereof, matter and mean.
Julian Johnson’s chapter explores musical irony as a historical category from the classical
style to postmodernism, suggesting that the ironic turn is part of a larger self-reflective or even
self-critical attitude within musical modernity. After considering some basic examples of musical
irony (founded in the disjunction between generic expectations and their subversion), it reviews
the relative paucity of scholarly studies of this aesthetic category in music (compared to literary
irony). Three historical divisions follow. The first of these examines irony and humour in Haydn
and Mozart’s chamber music, showing how the influence of opera buffa introduced the possibility
of irony into classical instrumental music, with a particular focus on Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ quartets.
The second section, focused on the nineteenth century, suggests that although big public forms of
musical romanticism often avoid an ironic mode, the idea continues to play a key role in other
forms, such as German lieder from Schubert and Schumann to Mahler, and also in comic opera,
specifically the operettas of Offenbach. The third section examines the varied forms of irony in
modernism, including works by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Satie and
Shostakovich before concluding with a consideration of polystylistic aspects of more recent
music (Schnittke, Berio, Ligeti). The final section looks back across these two hundred years of
musical modernity to argue that the self-critique of musical forms and language by means of
irony points to broader philosophical significance. Not only is it contemporary with the self-
critique of language in literature and philosophy, but it also assumes a particular significance in
that context (as a non-linguistic form of irony). The chapter concludes by focusing on a single
moment of late Beethoven (the coda to the Scherzo of the Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106)
arguing that in this ‘moment’ one can discern a faultline of the whole of modernity.
Jim Samson’s essay on propaganda explores the concept in a rounded way, recognizing that
negative connotations of the term were neither there from the start nor suggested by the
etymology, where the essential link is with the propagation of values. The essay also identifies
and discusses elements of propaganda avant la lettre , bearing in mind that the term entered the
language as late as the seventeenth century, that it gained widespread currency only in the mid
nineteenth century, and that a key stage in its subsequent dissemination occurred as recently as
the First World War. A notably broad range of musical reference, which moves widely in
historical and geographical focus, includes discussion of the workings of censorship and
propaganda in the Bolivian Andes, the Griot or Jali musicians of West Africa, music in North
Korea, Iran, South Africa and Tibet. The topic is further elaborated by discussion of music and
confession in sixteenth-century Germany, music under Soviet Communism and recent examples
of music from the former Yugoslavia.
The discourse of virtuosity, as James Deaville explains, has occupied a central position in
musical performance and aesthetics for the past two hundred years. It has been able to maintain
its appeal despite ongoing aesthetic opposition and changes in popular taste. This continuing
fascination with excessive performance and the figure of the virtuoso merits study in terms of
history, practice, aesthetics and reception. However, as a cross-disciplinary cultural practice
cultivated since the Renaissance, virtuosity has historically encompassed excellence not only in
music, but also in other areas of human performance. Thus any aesthetic study of virtuosity must
position it as indexing extraordinary – even excessive – accomplishment in general, as reflected
in the earliest definitions of the term. As the concept and its phenomenal manifestation came to
centre around music in the early nineteenth century, philosophers and aestheticians were
challenged to bring virtuosity into intellectual discourse, however they may have responded to
the practice and its practitioners. The topic has remained a site of contention for cultural
observers and agents, marked by a series of constructed contradictions: genius or charlatan,
extraordinarily endowed human or machine, sincerity or manipulation, and even superhuman or
freak. These paradoxes that inhabit the world of the virtuoso and virtuosity may prove
irreconcilable, yet it is nevertheless possible to arrive at a description of the practice that draws
upon a wide range of historical and current thought. It is clear that virtuosity is a product of
performance that communicates something extraordinary between artist(s) and audience.
The investigation of the aesthetics associated with virtuosity necessitates several steps,
beginning with an exploration of the concept’s origins and historical meanings. This study
focuses on its development within the realm of classical music, in the disparate discourses of the
Anglo-American, French and German reception. Along the way, it is important to consider the
factors that have contributed to and hindered research into virtuosity and how the practice
evolved in its specific social and cultural contexts in those language regions identified above. An
extended review of the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century literature about
virtuosity uncovers certain commonalities in its aesthetic assessment, including the centrality of
Liszt, but it reveals considerably more divergences that arise from the positions and perspectives
of individual authors and their own milieus. Thus the French have deployed aesthetics in their
attempts to come to terms with virtuosity (as seen in the work of Vladimir Jankélévitch and
Antoine Hennion, among others), while the numerically and conceptually wide-reaching array of
English-language studies rely upon an admixture of cultural studies and new historicist
approaches (e.g. Richard Leppert, Lawrence Kramer and Dana Gooley). This literature survey
leads to a distillation of aesthetic issues regarding the nature and role of the practice and
practitioner, a review of the critique of virtuosity and the related paradoxes, and a brief
consideration of the possibility of somatic excess and disability as informing the reception of
virtuosity.

Notes
1 Available at: www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music (accessed 30 July 2013).
2 Aesthetics does have an entry in Beard and Gloag 2005, 3–6. In German musicology the place of aesthetics has long seemed
more overtly central, manifest, for example, by the journal Musik & Ästhetik . Indeed musical aesthetics has long seemed
more prominent in continental Europe than in Anglo-American musicology. Those with French can see Arbo 2007, which
does contain a small number of English contributors but is dominated by French and Italian authors.
3 It also possibly raises issues of disciplinary confidence. A recent textbook in ‘music studies’ (Harper-Scott and Samson 2008)
also turns to Bowie for its chapter on aesthetics, when the rest of the sixteen chapters (except the one on Jazz, also by Bowie)
are all by musicologists.
4 See also the essays collected in Robinson 1997 and Stock 2007.
5 A similar plea for the sustained interaction of philosophical aesthetics and modern artistic practices and criticism was made in
Benjamin and Osborne 1991, xi.
6 Available at: www.musicandphilosophy.ac.uk ; www.ams-net.org/studygroups .
7 Like Hamilton, Krims raises Adorno as an important and inspirational precursor of this sort of project, for his interrogation of
the role of analysis and its relationship to historical interpretation in the pursuit of a work of art’s ‘truth content’. There has
since been something of a reaction against Adorno in some quarters and support voiced for alternative philosophical figures
for musicological engagement, for example Richard Taruskin’s hailing of Vladimir Jankélévitch as the ‘anti-Adorno’ on the
dust jacket of Carolyn Abbate’s translation of Jankélévitch’s Music and the Ineffable (2003), or the stellar panel (the
philosophers Bowie and Scruton and the musicologist Stephen Hinton) who discussed whether Adorno was a ‘dead duck’ at
the 2012 RMA MPG conference (panel and floor seemed in favour of the opinion that Adorno remains in pecking good
form).
8 On the marginalization of the ‘beautiful’, see my essay ‘Beautiful and sublime’ on pp. 84–110.
9 For an example of Clarke’s approach in detailed action, see Clarke 2011.
10 Leppert and McClary’s volume also included Frith 1987, which argued that an aesthetics of popular music must be based on a
sociology of popular music.
11 The revised edition of Moore’s book symbolized the sustained relevance of its central argument in the new century. For a
discussion of notions of the aesthetic and the nature of the pop ‘text’ closely contemporaneous with Moore’s second edition,
see Hawkins 2002.
12 British readers have little foundation for smug national feelings of political exemption or cultural superiority. For a hilarious
dissection from a British satirist of how the ‘West’ moved from the Age of Reason to the Age of Reagan and beyond, see
 Wheen 2004.
1 Nicholas Cook (2012) has pointed out the relationship with Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (2002).
3
14 See Vernallis 2004, which includes a case study analysis of the video for Prince’s ‘Gett Off’ (1991), with its comparable
evocations of James Brown (here alongside those of Jimi Hendrix).
15 The latter themes are also considered in McClary and Walser 1994.
16 Hesmondhalgh cites, as an important precursor, Anne Danielsen’s analysis, which moves along the ‘anti-primitivistic’ lines
McClary suggested twenty years earlier, of funk’s deployment of technical and musical technique (a good deal of hard work)
to produce physically uplifting art (Danielsen 2006).
17 Currie 2009 explores the political aspects of his argument more fully. Carolyn Abbate 2004 made proposals closely related to
Currie’s. Abbate sought to counter the tendency of hermeneutic interpretation to ignore the musical ‘real’ event, and find a
central place for ‘aesthetic pleasure, the apprehension of beauty’ which, she argues, ‘is not evil, nor is it just a hedonistic
consolation’, because beauty makes us more acutely aware of the phenomenal world. Important here for Abbate is Elaine
Scarry’s influential On Beauty and Being Just (1999). (Susan Sontag said something very similar in Against Interpretation
way back in 1964: that commentary should make the art ‘more real’, rather than tame it through interpretation, that ‘in place
of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art’.) This ‘erotic’ quality underlies (unstated) Ian Biddle’s discussion of the complex,
ambivalent, relationship of the (institutionalized, professionalized, specialized) discipline of musicology to the pleasures and
enjoyment of listening, of what it permits (and itself becomes enthralled by) and prohibits (what it might appear to be
appalled by); Biddle proposed that ‘radical’ pleasures (traumatic, transformative, or contentious) be considered within a
‘radical musicology’, one which leads to questioning the apparently unquestionable. ‘On the radical in musicology’, Radical
Musicology 1 (2006). Available at: www.radical-musicology.org.uk .
18 In this way the book contrasts with the ‘companion’ approach of, for example, Gaut and Lopes 2013, or a ‘reader’ such as
Stecker and Gracyk 2010.
19 See, for example, Berger 2005, Watkins 2011, Macarthur 2001, Neal 2001 and Walden 2013. Aesthetics is also a major idea
in, for example, Fonarow 2006 and Gracyk 2007; see also the images and texts in Savage and Gibson 2012.

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 2
Values and judgements
James Garratt

Introduction
Questions of value are at the heart of music aesthetics, prompting or shaping most of the
other concepts, issues and debates explored in this book. This is hardly surprising, given that
values and judgements of one kind or another are a basic and constant part of our life
experience. Our values, and the values ascribed to music by the cultures we identify with,
are fundamental to how we interact with it, shaping what we listen to and how we listen to
it. Similarly, the process of evaluating music is not an abstruse activity limited to
professional critics or examiners, but rather an inextricable part of performing, composing
and writing about music.
In spite of its importance, value is an issue that musicians and musicologists tend to talk
around rather than confront directly. 1 In part, this is because of the unconscious or
unreflective way in which values – whether moral, political or artistic – often work: the
criteria shaping our choices and judgements are not always transparent to ourselves, let
alone communicated to others (see Levy 1987). The main reason for treading cautiously in
this area, however, is the much broader crisis that has eroded and latterly engulfed Western
conceptions of value, removing all sense of stability and certainty. While this crisis had been
brewing for two centuries, it is only in recent decades that Friedrich Nietzsche’s vision of a
future in which ‘the highest values are devaluated’ has come to fruition (Nietzsche 2003,
146). Paradoxically, the causes of this process – social atomism, consumerism, a collapse of
traditional sources of authority – resemble the ills that aesthetics, at the time of its
emergence in the late eighteenth century, was meant to be able to heal; for Friedrich Schiller
and contemporaries, aesthetic cultivation would ultimately instil wholeness and unity in
place of fragmentation (see especially Schiller [1794] 1967). Today, the idea of a society
united through beauty and shared aesthetic values seems a naive or even dangerous illusion.
Rejecting the idea of universal values, and dismissing truth, goodness and beauty as
ideologically dubious fictions, we have come to view values as made not given,
emphasizing their culturally contingent nature and local field of operation.
The idea that values are tied to particular cultures, and that each culture has its own
unique value system, has helped foster the view that ‘all cultures are equal in dignity, and
therefore of equal worth, since each can be seen as embodying an aspect of human totality’
(Koïchiro Matsuura, ‘Preface’ to Bindé 2004, ix). As this emphasis on equality and common
humanity suggests, modernity has not entirely discarded the values bequeathed by the
Enlightenment. Yet such values survive in a demystified and radically pluralistic form,
drained of the confidence and optimism that originally engendered them. Western culture’s
descent into what Gianni Vattimo describes as a ‘twilight of values’ has been far from
painless (Bindé 2004, 7–12). For the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, writing at what was
arguably the zenith of this process, the result has been a paralysing sense of decentredness
and rootlessness: ‘a dispersal and involution of value whose upshot for us is total confusion
– the impossibility of apprehending any determining principle’ (Baudrillard 1993, 10). The
sense that all fixed or shared points of reference have melted away is particularly acute in
relation to art and aesthetics; in Baudrillard’s analysis, the loss of a ‘gold standard of
aesthetic judgment’ has robbed art of its capacity to innovate, counter reality or follow its
own laws, making it wholly subject to the laws of the market (Baudrillard 1993, 14–15).
Reduced to a value-free game, the artworld has little to offer but a repetition of hollow
gestures divorced from the ideas that engendered them (Baudrillard 1993, 4; see also ‘The
Conspiracy of Art’ [1996], and ‘No Nostalgia for Old Aesthetic Values’ [1996] in
Baudrillard 2005). Aesthetic discourse and artistic institutions are for Baudrillard part of this
‘conspiracy of art’, concealing art’s commodification by continuing to draw on evaluative
concepts that have lost their substance.
In retrospect, the cynicism and world-weariness of such 1990s critiques may seem
overstated (since 9/11, it has become abundantly clear that strongly held values are by no
means a thing of the past). However, the central dilemma that Baudrillard identifies – the
loss of a gold standard of judgement, and the difficulty of orienting ourselves among
competing values – remains acute. This is particularly true in relation to music. Indeed, there
are few more striking symptoms of the decline of established aesthetic values than the
collapse in prestige of Western classical music over the last half century. Stripped of its
claim to embody universal, transcendent values, classical music has become simply one
genre among many. Value pluralism has brought clear benefits to the musical sphere, of
course, as is evident from the ever more diverse curricula of university music courses: the
classical canon has rightly receded as hitherto marginalized forms of music have been
embraced. But this same pluralism makes it hard to invoke the progressive, universalist
conceptions of culture and aesthetic education that enabled music to enter the academy in
the first place. If traditional aesthetic values are irretrievable or undesirable, does that force
us to accept the kind of value-free nihilism that Baudrillard describes? And is he right to
view art’s commodification – the collapse of artistic value into economic value – as being
unavoidable in our postmodern (or post-postmodern) age? (See Nealon 2012, esp. 43–65.)
There are three possible approaches to these questions. The most common – for
musicologists, as for the public at large – is to take it as read that musical evaluation is
simply a matter of personal taste (‘it’s all subjective …’), and to regard as elitist or intolerant
any notion that one work, genre or practice might be ascribed more value than another. This
perspective certainly points to the lack of confidence characterizing our age, as well as
reflecting some characteristic modes of present-day musical consumption (in particular the
solitary musical islands we inhabit as iPod listeners). In relation to our discipline, this stance
is exemplified by the 1990s New Musicology, with its zeal for highlighting the ideologically
charged nature of the values shaping Western classical music, and for debunking earlier
approaches to music analysis. This eagerness to critique the concepts and categories of old-
school aesthetics is matched by a reluctance to posit new alternatives to them (symptomatic
of this retreat from judgement, as Sianne Ngai has noted, is the use of the word ‘interesting’
as an ersatz for more emphatic evaluations; see Ngai 2008).
If the first approach embraces postmodernism, the second represents a modernist or
traditionalist resistance to it. From this perspective, the sceptical, subjectivist mentality
outlined above is a form of mass delusion engendered by capitalism and the culture industry
(modernist critique) or by trendy relativism and cultural decline (traditionalist critique).
Unlike the sceptics, latter-day modernists and traditionalists are keen to stress the superlative
value possessed by the music they favour, whether it be the avant-garde or the classical
canon. To sustain this viewpoint, they continue to draw on the assumptions, categories and
hierarchies of earlier aesthetics, dismissing the idea that these have lost their substance and
credibility. This endeavour to reassert traditional values is perhaps most associated with
right-wing commentators (the best-known example within music aesthetics is Roger
Scruton: see Scruton 1997, esp. 369–91, 474–508 and Scruton 2009, 205–27). However, it
can also be seen in the problematic ongoing project to resurrect the modernist philosopher
Theodor W. Adorno as a lodestar for musicology.
A third approach – that informing the present chapter – seeks to avoid these extremes of
debilitating uncertainty and false security. It rejects the idea that judgements of value are
purely subjective, emphasizing how the tastes of individuals are shaped and articulated
within social contexts. At the same time, it takes a pluralistic approach to value, recognizing
the diversity of value systems that co-exist in the present, and rejecting conceptions of value
conceived around the idea of a unitary artworld or aesthetic regime. Acknowledging the
plurality of values, it should be noted, makes them no less real: principled judgements not
only remain possible, but are fundamental to our involvement in and identification with
different forms of music-making. 2 Our active participation in musical communities –
multiple, overlapping and, increasingly, virtual – entails not simply assenting to shared
values, but rather a role in the ongoing process by which they are renewed and
reinvigorated. It is this active engagement, rather than any aesthetic dogma, that prevents
art’s value from being seen in purely economic or consumerist terms.
All of which makes it essential that we probe the value concepts and criteria inherited
from earlier aesthetics, establishing which remain useful and which need to be rethought or
discarded. First, I explore some key issues and problems, such as the relationship between
aesthetic value and art’s other values, and the nature of the principles and criteria that might
be used to justify a particular value judgement. I then compare how musical values
functioned within two different cultures at crucial junctures in the history of Western music:
the crystallization of the idea of classical music within Austro-German culture in the age of
Beethoven, and the defining phase of American rock music and discourse in the mid to late
1960s. After examining these case studies of value formation within particular cultures, I
then explore what it is that enables us to appreciate the music of cultures beyond our own.

Key issues and problems

The first problem we must confront is that posed by the idea of aesthetic value. Up to this
point, I have largely avoided this term and instead talked more broadly of value(s): first,
because the values embodied in any musical work or activity are more diverse than even the
most capacious definition of aesthetic value allows, and second because the phrase carries a
host of misleading associations. For many postmodern commentators, particularly those
identifying their stance as ‘anti-aesthetic’, the idea that artworks or artistic experiences may
possess a form of value that is uniquely aesthetic – as opposed to cultural, social, economic
and so on – is highly suspect: a means for an elite to assert the superiority of its preferred
forms of art over the tastes of the majority (see especially Foster 1983 and Bourdieu 1984).
As with broader critiques of the idea of aesthetic autonomy, assaults on aesthetic value
present the concept as exclusionary in nature, seeing it as shunting aside other forms of
value as ‘extrinsic’ and thus non-essential. For Barbara Herrnstein Smith, this pursuit of the
purely aesthetic has the effect of stripping away art’s essential values until nothing remains:

The recurrent impulse and effort to define aesthetic value by contradistinction to all forms
of utility or as the negation of all other nameable sources of interest or forms of value –
hedonic, practical, sentimental, ornamental, historical, ideological, and so forth – is, in
effect, to define it out of existence.
(Herrnstein Smith 1988, 33)

There is some justification for this stance, given the highly restricted conception of
aesthetic value presented in some of the key texts on aesthetics from the eighteenth to the
twentieth centuries. In part, this narrow view of value stems from a tension within the
founding document of modern aesthetics, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). In
carving out his realm of taste, Kant builds a series of distinctions, differentiating between
useful and beautiful objects, extrinsic versus intrinsic purpose, and sensory pleasure versus
disinterested contemplation. The purely aesthetic requires the exclusion of all extraneous
factors, including emotional response and a concern for content, since ‘any taste remains
barbaric if its liking requires that charms and emotions be mingled in … beauty should
actually concern only form’ (Kant [1790] 1987, 220, 223). These stringent conditions for a
pure judgement of taste are linked by Kant to an equally restrictive idea of ‘free beauty’:

Many birds (the parrot, the humming-bird, the bird of paradise) and a lot of crustaceans in
the sea are [free] beauties themselves [and] belong to no object determined by concepts as
to its purpose, but we like them freely and on their own account. Thus designs à la
grecque [Louis XVI style], the foliage on borders or on wallpaper, etc., mean nothing on
their own: they represent [vorstellen ] nothing, no object under a determinate concept, and
are free beauties. What we call fantasias in music (namely, music without a topic [Thema
]), indeed all music not set to words, may also be included in the same class.
(Kant [1790] 1987, 229, section 16)

As Kant’s examples suggest, this conception of the pure judgement of taste is an

abstraction, applicable only to a narrow strand of art which he regarded as merely
decorative. Although this ‘arabesque aesthetic’ has sometimes been viewed as anticipating
formalism (in particular, Eduard Hanslick’s view of the musically beautiful), Kant makes
plain that such pure judgements of taste do not apprehend art’s nature or value; the
judgement of fine art is always impure, since only through being allied to other forms of
value can art be invested with wider significance (Kant [1790] 1987, 229–36, sections 16
and 17). However, the effect of this is that Kant presents two distinct conceptions of value:
one stressing purity, form and disinterested contemplation, and the other art’s capacity to
engage with and enrich other spheres of human experience. Although most later conceptions
of aesthetic value are grounded on less restrictive principles than Kant’s pure judgement of
taste, they share the same tension between safeguarding art’s value and making it worth
something: the paradox, as Steven Corcoran puts it, that ‘art is art to the extent that it is not
art’ (Corcoran 2010, 18–19).
Rather than segregate music’s aesthetic dimension from its other values, it is better to
view the former as complementing and overlapping the latter. This enables us to view the
aesthetic not as the residue left over once the extrinsic and useful are filtered out, but rather
as the ‘value added’ that the experience of all music provides. As this suggests, moving
away from the separatist conception of aesthetic value – and the notions of purity,
contemplative listening and transcendence associated with it – is essential in engaging with
musical worlds beyond the ‘decorative’ absolute instrumental music invoked by Kant. This
move also helps us to rethink some of the other hierarchies and binarisms which the idea of
aesthetic value calls into play, emphasizing that such value is not the preserve of one
particular artistic tradition or stratum.
The most problematic of Kant’s dichotomies is the distinction between high and low art.
Kant’s concern with investing high art with significance leads him to distinguish between
the agreeable arts, ‘whose purpose is merely enjoyment’, and the fine arts, whose content
prompts thought and discussion: ‘It is agreeable art if its purpose is that the pleasure should
accompany presentations that are mere sensations ; it is fine art if its purpose is that the
pleasure should accompany presentations that are ways of cognizing ’ (Kant [1790] 1987,
305–6, section 44). Famously, Kant included Tafelmusik , or dinner music, within his
agreeable arts, presaging the low ranking he accords music in general:

[If] we assess the value of the fine arts by the culture [or cultivation] they provide for the
mind … then music, since it merely plays with sensations, has the lowest place among the
fine arts (just as it may have the highest among those [whose value] we assess by their
agreeableness as well).
(Kant [1790] 1987, 329, section 53)

The ideological agenda behind Kant’s opposition of high and low art – pitting the aesthetic
cultivation of an elite against the sensual gratification of the masses – is not made explicit.
Subsequent commentators such as Friedrich Schiller, however, were unabashed in
presenting this dichotomy in class terms, distinguishing the ennobled tastes of a ‘few select
circles’ from the animalistic pleasures of the populace at large, and considering music to
epitomize the latter: for Schiller, when music exercises its effect,

on all faces there usually appears an expression of sensuality, verging on something

brutish … in short, all the symptoms of inebriation appear – clear proof that the senses are
feasting … All these emotions, I say, are excluded from [high] art by a noble and
masculine sort of taste, because such emotions simply gratify the senses .
(Schiller 1993, 49) 3

For the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, such dichotomies reveal the self-interest and
class prejudice behind the entire project of aesthetics. For Bourdieu, Kant’s aesthetic
principles express the ‘sublimated interests of the bourgeois intelligentsia’, performing the
ideological operation of making universal ‘the dispositions associated with a particular
social and economic condition’ (Bourdieu 1984, 492, 493). In Bourdieu’s reading, the entire
tradition of Western aesthetics from Kant to the present enacts the same operation through
its institutions, discourses and practices, affirming as natural the tastes and values of a
particular class. These dispositions serve not only as markers of status, but as a means to
legitimize and perpetuate existing class structures and social inequalities. For Bourdieu,
‘nothing more clearly affirms one’s “class”, nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in
music’ (Bourdieu 1984, 18). While classical music – ‘the “pure” art par excellence’ – may
seem to epitomize the Kantian notions of disinterested pleasure and the pure judgement of
taste, an appreciation for it is far from being something natural or innate; rather it is a sign of
a high level of cultural capital, of acculturation within a ‘more polished, more polite, better
policed world’ than that inhabited by lovers of other forms of music (Bourdieu 1984, 19,
77).
The most important aspect of Bourdieu’s critique of the aesthetic is his reminder, as Tia
DeNora puts it, that ‘unlike gravity or the sound barrier, artistic value is an institutional fact,
not a natural one’ (DeNora 2004, 44). Bourdieu’s emphasis on the role that institutions such
as concert halls, conservatoires and even university music departments play in producing
value and perpetuating hierarchies has had a major impact on subsequent discussions of the
topic (see, for example, Frith 1998 and Born 1995). However, there are several key
problems with his account. While he is right to stress the ideological dimension of Kant’s
dichotomies, he constructs an implausibly homogeneous picture of aesthetics and its values
on the basis of them (and in doing so, gives a distorted account of the role that the pure
judgement of taste plays in Kant’s text). 4 The result is that Bourdieu actually deepens the
divide between high and low art, presenting each as appealing to wholly separate, class-
based constituencies. In addition, he entrenches the notion that aesthetic value has relevance
only for high art (a move that helped ensure that aesthetics remained a dirty word within
sociology and cultural studies until the late 1990s). Thirty years on, Bourdieu’s view of
classical music as a marker of the dominant culture of the bourgeoisie looks decidedly
outmoded. Today, listening practices no longer map neatly on to class distinctions (if they
ever did), and current sociologists building on Bourdieu’s ideas tend to identify bourgeois
taste not with high art but with cultural omnivorousness or – as Zygmunt Bauman puts it –
‘maximum tolerance and minimal choosiness’ (Bauman 2011, 14; see also Peterson 1997,
Eriksson 2011 and Prior 2013). This points to a broader problem with Bourdieu’s view of
how taste communities relate to social strata. In what Bauman calls our ‘fluid modern
world’, the idea of rigidly demarked musical tastes, or for that matter, social classes, is a
thing of the past; not only are listening practices more pluralistic, but the tie has loosened
between value communities and the cultures that originally engendered them.
Paradoxically, these socio-cultural changes only reinforce the argument that distinctions
between high and low art, or claims for the superiority of one kind of music over another,
are arbitrary and ideologically grounded. 5 We should avoid assuming that aesthetic
hierarchies and dichotomies are signs of a hegemonic culture flexing its muscles, however,
since they can also serve as survival strategies for new or fragile subcultures. As the
reference to a ‘few select circles’ attests, the distinctions employed by Schiller and
contemporaries in carving out the aesthetic field, and in elevating the prestige of the art
forms they valued, reflected the aspirations of a small minority, not the interests of a
dominant class. Similarly, the two musical communities explored in the next section initially
represented minority tastes rather than powerful institutions or interest groups. As a glance
at some later artistic manifestos will confirm, the kinds of distinctions employed by Schiller
were to remain crucial for those championing new ideas and movements or challenging the
status quo. Rather than being unique to the discourses of high culture, all value communities
rely on hierarchies and exclusionary strategies in order to define and perpetuate themselves.
Recognizing that such distinctions – and the evaluative criteria that work alongside them –
are ubiquitous and serve the ends of particular communities helps us to see them for what
they are: propositions rather than diktats, unstable principles that continually compete with
alternative aesthetic constructs.
All of which suggests that we’re moving towards a position where good and bad music
exist, but do so only relationally (i.e. in relation to the local, contingent criteria upheld
within particular value communities). 6 We will return later to the problems posed by this
notion of discrete musical cultures, each governed by its own unique set of values; for now,
we need to establish how evaluative criteria work in practice. Musical judgements of value
amount to more than preferences, since the evaluation is accompanied by a justification that
appeals to shared principles. For an earlier generation of musicologists, including Carl
Dahlhaus, evidence-based argumentation grounded in music analysis provides a means of
objectively ‘proving’ a value judgement (Dahlhaus [1970] 1983, viii and 3). Today, there is
little point in trying to resurrect the term ‘objective judgement’, since it conjures up a host of
unhelpful associations (such as the idea of impartiality and of universal, timeless values).
But another sense of objectivity – that judgements need to make reference to the properties
of the musical object in order to be persuasive – remains crucial.
For nearly 2,500 years, the general principles informing such object-based judgements
have been remarkably consistent within Western aesthetics. From Aristotle to Augustine and
Aquinas, beautiful objects necessarily exhibit order, unity, proportion, clarity and
complexity; similarly, Monroe C. Beardsley, in what is probably the most influential
twentieth-century equivalent to such taxonomies, argues that aesthetic beauty rests on the
interplay between unity, intensity and complexity (Beardsley 1981, 454–89). Whether the
longevity of such criteria demonstrates their universality or simply their banality is a moot
point. At best, such general criteria offer merely a baseline for judgement, a low-level hurdle
that we expect musical works and experiences to leap over. At worst, they have been
elevated as ultimate guarantors of value: not so long ago, music analysts assumed that a
demonstration of unity was sufficient to secure a composer’s place in the musical canon,
while for a generation of high modernist composers, the pursuit of complexity became an
end in itself (see Morgan 2003 and the responses in Music Analysis 23, 333–88; Mahnkopf
2006). The limitations of these general criteria have led commentators to come up with
alternative principles, more specifically attuned to musical processes. One well-known
example is Leonard B. Meyer’s argument that music acquires value by setting up
expectations and then delaying their fulfilment; through creating and overcoming obstacles,
music rises above the conventional and heightens the listener’s gratification (Meyer 1959).
Another is Heinrich Schenker’s view that organic coherence, verifiable through his
analytical method, provides an incontrovertible measure of musical value: a means to
distinguish the masterworks of Bach and Beethoven from the inorganic aberrations of
Wagner and Stravinsky (see Pastille 1995).
For Lawrence Kramer, general value criteria such as unity, coherence, complexity and
narrative tension fail to address the particularity of individual musical works, and thus miss
what compels us to engage with them:

Many forgotten or little-esteemed works meet all the criteria with little or no effect. The
truth is that meeting aesthetic criteria is easy. Many much-beloved works do not bother to
 do it, or do it as a matter of routine while going about their more vital business.
(Kramer 2009, 25)

But the distinctive qualities of such works do not emerge in a vacuum. Rather, their
individuality is dependent on their generic, institutional and cultural contexts – that is, the
conditions of possibility within the value community that produced them. The sounding
forms of individual works – to adapt a Hanslickian manoeuvre – are conditioned by the
inner form of conventions and values with which they are in dialogue. The more we grasp
this inner form, the more we understand the evaluative criteria pertinent to a particular work.
These criteria are highly variable, being historically and generically specific. A seemingly
universal aesthetic principle such as originality, for example, only emerged in Western
culture in the second half of the eighteenth century, and offers a misleading measure for
music of earlier periods; even during the periods when it was operative, its importance was
outweighed by other criteria in some fields of composition (e.g. church music). (On
originality, see Adorno 1997, 172–3; see also Garratt 2002, 9–11, 173–80.) In addition, we
should avoid assuming that criteria that served as generic norms within one national
tradition had the same weight elsewhere.

Musical Example 2.1 Rimsky-Korsakov, Sheherazade , Andantino, mm.

5–19

Consider, for example, the theme from the second movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Sheherazade ( Musical Example 2.1 ). Approached with expectations shaped by the Austro-
German symphonic tradition, there is some justification for Roger Scruton’s negative
evaluation of the theme, which he bases on ‘the limpness of the melodic line, the lack of
inner voices, and the failure to develop’ (Scruton 1999, 373). For Rimsky-Korsakov’s
defenders, such as Steven Griffiths, such a dismissal mistakes as a failing the work’s chief
strength – that is, its ‘directness of expression unhampered by quasi-symphonic complexities
of texture and structure’ (see Griffiths 1990, 245). Certainly, Scruton’s reasoning seems
faulty, given the quasi recitando idiom and the developmental potential of the theme’s
metrical ambiguity (a potential fully taken up in the subsequent variations). Even so,
Scruton’s negative evaluation may seem to be justifiable on other grounds. From an early
twenty-first-century perspective, the theme smacks of orientalist kitsch (think desert
caravans and harem girls); indeed, the sheer overexposure of this music, together with the
numerous pallid imitations it inspired, has had the effect of leaching away at least some of
its charm and vitality (on kitsch, see Kulka 1996). 7
In the case of this example, two different lines of argument generate a similar overall
evaluation. But what if a range of evaluative criteria produce a conflicting picture? We tend
to assume that lower-level aesthetic criteria add up to produce an overall judgement.
However, even if such criteria result in a litany of superlatives, there is no guarantee that the
work in question deserves a correspondingly glowing overall evaluation; as Theodore
Gracyk argues, ‘the piece might be a hodgepodge of merit-qualities that lack internal
connection to one another’ (Gracyk 2011, 170). A more familiar problem is the degree of
influence that one particular criterion should have on an overall evaluation. In this
connection, Dahlhaus cites the critic Hans Georg Nägeli’s negative appraisal of the first
movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 (‘Jupiter’); for Nägeli, the use of alternating tonics
and dominants in the passage before the second theme debases the work through its
triviality:

Pay attention to measures 19–21 in the first Allegro and compare them with measures 49–
54; furthermore, do the same in the second section, measures 87–89 and 117–122. Such a
mere alternating between a triad and a six-four-chord based on the exact same note is
already trivial per se, indeed, it is one of the most worn-out and common commonplaces
that typically is only used by the most common composers in orchestral compositions to
facilitate the entrance of the French horns into the tutti. Here, however, this triviality
appears analogously twice (i.e., four times in the very same piece).
(Nägeli 1826; in Dahlhaus [1967] 2004, 342)

To damn the whole on the basis of such a detail would surely count as poor judgement.
While musical preferences often rest on such small moments, moving beyond such narrow
focuses is what differentiates a reasoned evaluation from a preference or a Nägeli-style
polemic. If I had to plump for one of the two versions of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 1 in C
Minor (1866, 1890–1), for example, the first thing that would enter my head would be the
extraordinary passage in the coda of the revised version (Musical Example 2.2 ), music that
seems to break out of the confines of its surroundings and offer a monumental summation of
its composer’s late style. While I enjoy luxuriating in this moment of overripe romanticism,
however, I have no doubt that a point-by-point comparative evaluation would find in favour
of the earlier version of the symphony (in which the work’s pithily classical themes are
matched by their elaboration rather than fussily reworked to suit a later idiom). Such
judgements treat evaluative criteria as evidence that can be stacked up in order to prove a
case. But although the language of judgement recalls the world of the courtroom, there is
nothing remotely definitive about artistic evaluations. There is no equivalent to DNA
evidence among evaluative criteria; rather, as Gracyk argues, they offer no more than ‘rough
heuristics for evaluating partial aspects of works’ (Gracyk 2011, 173).
 Musical Example 2.2 Bruckner, Symphony No. 1 (1890–1 version),
finale, mm. 361– 7

Value formation in classical music and sixties rock

Within particular cultures, a range of different factors contribute to the shaping of values and
evaluative principles. Rock’s mid-1960s transformation from a teenage craze into a more
consciously ambitious medium was not triggered solely by influential albums such as the
Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), but also points to the growth of a music-aesthetic discourse
in which rock was taken seriously. Similarly, the crystallization of the values of classical
music in the early nineteenth century was not just a response to Beethoven’s symphonies,
but reflects complex changes in the way that music was written about and received.
Engaging with the music of Beethoven and the Beach Boys is crucial to grasping these new
values (and to seeing how these new ideas interacted with earlier perspectives). But to
understand the value systems at work in these two cultures, we cannot simply deduce rules
or principles from exemplary pieces of music; rather, we need to examine how musical and
aesthetic discourses interact, and gauge the perspectives which most closely represent those
of the broader value communities which engendered them.
In examining both these cultures, it is important to disentangle the values of their
formative phase from the later baggage they accumulated. Austro-German musical culture
from c .1800 to c .1830 has often been fingered as the source of a host of ideas and
developments fundamental to how Western classical music is still perceived today: the
concept of the musical work and of aesthetic autonomy, the idea of absolute music, the
practice of contemplative listening in the concert hall, the growth of the musical canon, the
emergence of music analysis and the turn towards objectivism in musical evaluation. (The
locus classicus for this approach is Goehr 1992.) In reality, many of these ideas and practices
did not become established until the second half of the nineteenth century – the start of what
might be termed the ‘museum phase’ of classical music – and were only then projected back
onto Beethoven and his age. 8 As well as distinguishing between the ideas of Beethoven’s
age and later accretions, we need to avoid distorting our picture of the former by
homogenizing different value systems into a uniform aesthetic of ‘serious’ music (see
Garratt 2010, 27). Indeed, within the pages of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and other
early nineteenth-century journals, the evaluative criteria found in music reviews reflect four
distinct strands of thought: (1) the aesthetics of Kant and Schiller, and of music critics who
adapted and developed their ideas; (2) the Romantic transcendental/idealist aesthetic of
instrumental music as popularized by E. T. A. Hoffmann; (3) pre-Kantian aesthetic theory,
derived mainly from encyclopedists such as Johann Georg Sulzer; and (4) more practically
oriented, genre-focused criteria drawn from eighteenth-century composition treatises (such
as those by Johann Philipp Kirnberger and Heinrich Christoph Koch). Broadly speaking, the
new musical values that emerge in the nineteenth century represent a combination of the
first two categories, but even Hoffmann draws extensively on ideas from the latter two
categories.
Rock discourse in its formative phase was no less pluralistic. In part, this reflects the wide
range of styles rock drew together, but it also points to the multiple strands of media that had
a role in the production of its values. Initially, print discussions of rock were largely limited
to teen magazines and trade papers, but the mid-1960s saw the emergence of specialist
magazines such as Crawdaddy (1966–) and Rolling Stone (1967–), while serious attention
began to be given to rock in the arts sections of newspapers and periodicals like Village
Voice and Partisan Review ; this shift was paralleled on radio, with new FM stations
engaging more broadly and deeply with rock than the earlier top-forty focused AM stations
(for more detail, see Regev 1994, 90–1). If these developments all affirmed rock’s cultural
importance, they represented its value in very different ways. As well as taking account of
this diversity, we need to distinguish the values imputed to rock in this formative period
from those it acquired later, particularly after it entered its museum phase in the early 1980s
as ‘classic rock’.
One common factor shaping value formation in classical music and sixties rock is the
demand to be taken seriously, an aim that in both cases resulted in a complicated,
ambivalent relationship with the dominant discourses of art. Rock musicians and critics
wanted rock to be treated as more than simply a teen craze, while their counterparts around
1800 wanted music to be accorded the same aesthetic dignity as the other arts. The familiar
tale of music’s emancipation c .1800 centres on questions of status: how musical
commentators, in the decades following the publication of the Third Critique redressed
Kant’s low evaluation of music and in particular refuted his notorious equation of
instrumental music with Tafelmusik . But this tale ignores the other side of this strategy of
legitimation, since in many respects, Kant’s aesthetic and evaluative principles were
imported wholesale into musical discourse. While instrumental music required its own
unique rationale, critics were in other ways keen to demonstrate that music – if assessed
through ‘reasoned judgements’ rather than ‘mere impressions’ – was perfectly capable of
satisfying the same aesthetic criteria as the other fine arts (Friedrich Rochlitz, ‘Gedanken
über die Oper’ [1798], as quoted in Applegate 2005, 90). Accordingly, music critics and
aestheticians such as Rochlitz, Christian Friedrich Michaelis and Amadeus Wendt sought to
construct a category of musical art that marginalized music’s sensual dimension, lay
emphasis on its capacity for purposive form, and stressed that musical works – like their
counterparts in the other arts – demanded active engagement and repeated encounters for
their qualities to be fully appreciated (see especially Michaelis 1997, 9, 16, 91).
In relation to rock the idea of art proved more contentious. For some 1960s musicians and
critics, it was unproblematic to view rock’s new seriousness as a sign of its ascent to the
level of art (see, for example, Anderson [1967] 2007). Others repudiated attempts to ‘reduce
rock to something other than itself in order to ascertain its validity’, and regarded the self-
conscious artiness of albums such as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
(1967) and the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) as a threat to rock’s
own unique values (Meltzer [1970] 1987, 15). Urging it to remain true to its roots, Jon
Landau argued in 1968 that ‘rock is not primarily poetry or art, but something much more
direct and immediate than either. Rock and roll has to be body music , before it can be head
music, or it will wind up being neither’ (Landau 1972, 134). Rather than simply judging
rock by principles that were alien to it, rock’s incorporation into the institution of art
threatened for some critics to neuter its subversive, populist character. In an interpretation
that later became standard within sociological studies, Ellen Willis claimed that

rock has been co-opted by high culture, forced to adopt its standards – chief of which is
the integrity of the art object. It means the end of rock as a radical experiment in creating
mass culture on its own terms, ignoring elite definitions of what is or is not intrinsic to
aesthetic experience.
(Willis [1968] 2005, 222)

The idea that the cultural establishment was imposing its own values on to rock led Richard
Meltzer and other critics to sketch out an alternative ‘rock aesthetic’, with the aim of
maintaining its distinctness and counter-cultural energy (Meltzer [1970] 1987; see also
Chester 1970). The view that approaching rock from the perspective of art overlooks its true
values, or ‘praises it for all the wrong reasons’, remains common today (Gracyk 2007, 12).
But however valid, this standpoint should not obscure the extent to which sixties rock
appropriated principles and practices from high art. The shift away from cover versions
towards largely original material, and the concern for creating unified albums were two
symptoms; just as important was the increasing concern with creating complex, fixed
musical objects – sometimes irreproducible in live performance – within the recording
studio. No less than classical music, rock began to be seen as rewarding repeated listening
and demanding undistracted contemplation; commenting on Pet Sounds , Brian Wilson
urged that ‘the best way to listen to the whole album is through headphones in the dark’
(Wyn Jones 2008, 46).
Crucial to value formation within both classical music and rock were the kind of
dichotomizing strategies seen earlier in Kant. In order to elevate some music to the level of
high art, music critics around 1800 zealously partitioned the musical field, marginalizing
genres, practices and even classes of listeners who failed to measure up to the new aesthetic
ideals (see especially Sponheuer 1987). One particularly unhelpful dichotomy that emerged
in this period is that of pure versus applied art, or art music versus functional music. (On the
relationship between functional or ‘non-aesthetic’ music and value, see Gracyk 2011, 173–
4.) Misreading Kant’s distinction between free and accessory beauty, Nägeli constructed a
particularly rigid distinction between these two categories, consigning everything except
pure instrumental music to the lower sphere of applied art (Nägeli 1802–3, 225–37, 265–74;
see Garratt 2010, 33–4). Fundamental to elevating music’s status was excluding genres that
offered only sensuous stimulation or empty virtuosity, with the aim of fencing off – as
Rochlitz put it – ‘music which makes itself valid as art from that which is a mere fleeting
entertainment’ (‘Verschiedenheit der Urtheile über Werke der Tonkunst’, in Rochlitz 1824–
32, Vol. IV, 193). Such dichotomies were reinforced from the 1820s through the widespread
elevation of Beethoven as an antithesis to Rossini, pinning the eagle against the butterfly, or
German seriousness and truth against Italian sensuality and triviality (on the Beethoven–
Rossini debate, see Sponheuer 1987, 9–35). During Beethoven’s lifetime, it must be
emphasized, these new ideals represented a minority aspiration, remained in a state of flux,
and in no sense reflected the norms animating contemporary institutions and practices. This
explains the tensions that exist between some of the new artistic values and Beethoven’s
own output; it was later generations that sought anxiously to distinguish the ‘true’ values of
Beethoven’s age from those that produced the ‘Battle Symphony’ Wellingtons Sieg , or the
cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick (see Cook 2003).
Rock defined itself through similar dichotomies, with musicians and critics seeking to
distance its creativity and subversiveness from commercial mainstream pop. In an early
issue of Crawdaddy , Paul Williams emphasized that ‘rock ‘n’ roll, or the big beat, or
whatever clumsy term we want to use, is a musical idiom quite apart from what is selling at
the moment; i.e. quite apart from pop music’ (Williams [1966] 2002, 39). Like the
proponents of classical music a century and a half earlier, Williams distinguished the select
category of listeners capable of appreciating rock from the majority, with its ‘strange
affection for saccharine-sweet movie soundtracks and for Herbert Alpert and his Tijuana
Dross’ (Williams [1966] 2002, 39). Although one British critic invoked the Kantian
opposition of fine and agreeable art in championing the Stones over the Beatles, rock critics
were in general wary of the distinctions and vocabulary associated with high culture (Merton
1968). Far from rejecting sensuous pleasure or the idea of entertainment, critics like Robert
Christgau emphasized rock’s physicality, ‘unrelenting eclecticism’ and ability to ‘dignify the
ephemeral and demean the profound’ (Christgau [1970] 2013). The most extensive attempt
to grasp rock’s eclecticism, Meltzer’s Aesthetics of Rock (1970), argued that rather than
carving out a territory for itself through such dichotomies, rock had swallowed them whole,
revelling in its ‘incoherency, incongruity, and downright self-contradiction’ (Meltzer [1970]
1987, 7). Tellingly, Meltzer argued that only after acknowledging how rock had widened the
vocabulary of aesthetics – through drawing in the ‘incongruous, trivial, mediocre, banal,
insipid, maudlin, abominable, trite, redundant, repulsive, ugly, innocuous, crass, incoherent,
vulgar, tasteless, sour, [and] boring’ – should critics consider applying high art terms such as
‘poignant, sincere, beautiful, etc.’ to it (Meltzer [1970] 1987, 13). Such a perspective –
resisting the urge to tidy up or sanitize the rock aesthetic – finds plenty to support it in the
Beach Boys back catalogue. The group’s most successful album of 1965–6 was not the arty
Pet Sounds but a collection of covers ( Beach Boys’ Party! ), while one year earlier the band
had released the kind of festive LP more often associated with fifties’ crooners (The Beach
Boys’ Christmas Album ). And few forms of pop more closely resemble a caricature of
Adorno’s critique of the culture industry than the surfing songs – ‘Surfin’ Safari’ (1962) and
‘Surfin’ USA’ (1963), which made the group’s name.
One shared component within the values of classical music and rock is an aesthetic of
subjective expression, reflected in the ideas of genius, originality and authenticity found in
both discourses. In both cultures these ideas were surprisingly fluid and multivalent. While
genius and originality were well established as aesthetic criteria by Beethoven’s day, some
of his critics understood them in terms quite different from Romantic notions of
untrammelled creativity or rhapsodic personal revelation. Rather, reviewers schooled in
eighteenth-century aesthetics conceived genius as inventiveness (the capacity to produce an
inexhaustible flow of workable musical ideas) and an identifiably personal idiom, qualities
that were expected to be matched by an adherence to other aesthetic principles if they were
to avoid straying into bizarreness and caprice (see Morrow 1997, 99–133). Thus, a Viennese
reviewer praised the ‘Eroica’ Symphony for its

great and daring ideas, and, as one can expect from the genius of this composer, great
power in the way it is worked out; but the symphony would improve immeasurably (it
lasts an entire hour) if B. could bring himself to shorten it, and to bring more light, clarity,
and unity into the whole.
(Anon., ‘Vienna, 9 April’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung , 7 (1805), 501–2, in Senner
2001, 17)

Only a small minority of critics used the term ‘genius’ in the Romantic sense when praising
Beethoven, such as an 1807 review describing how, ‘scorning all fetters, he expressed
himself with all the depth and genius of his soul’ (Anon., ‘News. Prague’, Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung , 9 (1807), 610, in Senner 2001, 34). Even Hoffmann, aware of the
negative associations of genius with ‘extravagant bizarreness’ and ‘uncontrolled
imagination’, avoided using the term without clarification: one of the most surprising
aspects of his review of Beethoven’s Fifth is his recurrent qualification of genius with the
idea of circumspection (Besonnenheit ), as in his argument tha t

is it only through entering very deeply into the inner structure of Beethoven’s music that
the great presence of mind of this master reveals itself, which is inseparable from true
genius and is nourished by unceasing study of the art.
(E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Review’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 12 (1810), 630–42 and
652–9, in Senner 2001, 97–8)

If genius remained unstable and contested in the age of Beethoven, the concept of
authenticity was in a similar state of flux in sixties rock discourse. Authenticity, in the sense
of honest, heartfelt personal expression, was dismissed as ‘meaningless’ by Meltzer as a
criterion of value (Meltzer [1970] 1987, 10). 9 For other critics, however, it rapidly came to
serve as rock’s key point of orientation: the glue that enabled its eclectic idioms to gel
together and a brake on – or compensation for – its drift towards artistry and artifice. The
concept entered rock discourse via folk rock; it first crops up in Crawdaddy , perhaps
unsurprisingly, in relation to Bob Dylan, described as a ‘1960s bard with electric lyre and
color slides, a truthful man with x-ray eyes you can look through if you want’ (Williams
[1966] 2002, 36). The idea that rock offered a window on the soul of its creators put a
premium on originality, spontaneity and raw emotion. A 1970 review of Van Morrison notes
that ‘what one hears is not style, but personality … the authenticity of spirit’, while Landau
argued that ‘the criterion for art in rock is the capacity of the music to create a personal,
almost private universe and to express it fully’ (Anon. 1970; Landau, 1972, 15). Several of
the concept albums from the late 1960s were perceived as suspect from this perspective; for
Landau, the posturing, artifice and lack of truth of the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties
Request brought it close to kitsch, while Richard Goldstein condemned Sgt. Pepper as an
‘immense put-on … dazzling but ultimately fraudulent’ (Landau 1967; Goldstein 1967). Pet
Sounds , in spite of its artistic ambitions, proved immune to such criticism. While band
member Mike Love was concerned that it would be regarded as ‘ego music’, critics
considered it to take the ideal of authenticity to a new level; for Stephen Davis, it showed
that composer Brian Wilson had ‘his psyche on the pulse of universal subjectivity’, offering
an ‘intense, linear personal vision’ with the ‘emotional impact of a shatteringly evocative
novel’ (Davis [1972] 2013).
In the case of Beethoven, contemporary reviewers employed a range of intrinsic and
technical criteria – unity, organic development, clarity of modulation, diligence in
contrapuntal elaboration, and so on – to back up their general evaluations. Even these kinds
of criteria meant different things to different critics. Thus when Wendt talks of the
importance of unity, what he has in mind is not primarily how themes or movements
interrelate, but rather the necessity of a ‘dominant mood, which the work of art must bring
forth as a total impression’ (Amadeus Wendt, ‘Thoughts about Recent Musical Art, and van
Beethoven’s Music’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 17 (1815), 630–42 and 652–9, in
Senner 2001, 187). As Holly Watkins points out, Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth
too remains loyal to the eighteenth-century idea that each movement should be governed by
a single affect (Watkins 2004, 198). However, Hoffmann, alongside a handful of other
contemporary reviewers, was also concerned with demonstrating the thematic unity of
Beethoven’s works (in this case, the ‘deeper relationship’ between the themes of the two
allegros and the minuet; Senner 2001, 110). Other critics such as Rochlitz also supported
their judgements with detailed commentaries on the music, highlighting the ways in which
Beethoven had departed from convention and thus deceived listeners’ expectations (Anon.
[Friedrich Rochlitz], ‘Review’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 9 (1807), 321–3, in Senner
2001, 21–2) .
This level of musical commentary is foreign to sixties rock discourse; indeed, some critics
regarded such discussion as pointless, arguing that ‘the aesthetic originality of rock never
inhered in its strictly musical qualities’ (Christgau [1970] 2013). As Ellen Willis noted in
1968, however, albums such as Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper , not to mention the preference for
more complex music and lyrics exhibited by rock’s new ‘student-hippie-intellectual
audience’, resulted in ‘an increasing tendency to judge pop music intrinsically’ (Willis
[1968] 2005, 222). Certainly, internal musical criteria alone cannot give an exhaustive
account of a song’s value, although they may not seem a bad place to start. Consider one of
the best-loved songs from Pet Sounds , ‘God Only Knows’, hailed by Paul McCartney as the
greatest song ever written. Indeed, the effusive praise routinely lavished on this song has led
to something of a backlash: Gracyk singles it out in highlighting the distortions that result
from treating rock as art, arguing that any subtlety it possesses is ‘only discernible against
the backdrop of 1960s formulas’ (Gracyk 2007, 13). But this backdrop – just like the body
of expectations that Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ plays against – is not something external to the
music, but rather is heard in dialogue with it. The 32-measure song form provides the
conditions of possibility for the music of ‘God Only Knows’, and there is nothing unusual
about its 8+4 measure verse/chorus scheme; similarly, the idea of a bridge section in a
related key is standard within the genre. What is different here, however, is how the move to
the subdominant in the bridge conditions the tonal behaviour of the entire song, which,
though nominally in E major, is characterized throughout by a tension between it and A
major (see Musical Example 2.3 ).
This tonal plasticity – emphasized by the avoidance of authentic cadences and root-
position tonics – is what gives the song its feeling of expansiveness. But the rigidity of the
eight-bar phrase structure is also softened by the subtlety of the voice leading, in particular
the supple bass lines (notice how the tension between E and A major is reflected in the
mixed messages sent out by the chords and voice leading in measures 7–8 and
subsequently). By beginning each verse in the subdominant, Wilson makes the song’s
masterstroke seem utterly natural. While the idea of presenting the verse harmonies in the
subdominant in the bridge was not new, what is striking here is the smoothness with which
the song drops back into the original key – a moment rendered even more arresting by the
truncated three-measure phrase that precedes it. No wonder that Daniel Harrison claims
‘there is no moment in rock music more harmonically and formally subtle than this
transition’, and that Dominic King describes it as ‘the most perfectly constructed song in
pop history’ (Harrison 1997, 35; King [2005] 2013).
All of which raises several questions. Does discussing the song in this manner –
emphasizing its harmonic sophistication and how it plays with expectations – merely
subordinate it to evaluative criteria conceived around art music? Given that, like any
artefact, it is the product of a particular culture, should we restrict ourselves to the kind of
appraisals that were the norm within that culture at the time it was conceived? And if not,
does that mean that the music of all cultures and periods can be measured by the same
standards: where should we draw the line? Clearly, the analytical comments made above
only access one aspect of the song’s value (a fuller account would surely mention the
colourful ‘Baroque rock’ instrumentation, the delicate ways in which the vocal line and
harmonies respond to the lyrics, and the haunting lead vocals). Yet as my choice of ‘God
Only Knows’ reveals, there is a danger when classically trained musicians venture into pop
that they focus on material that can most readily be accommodated within their existing
aesthetic biases; as Gracyk argues, ‘we know that some popular music meets some of the
standards of excellence recognized by traditional aesthetic theory. But it usually satisfies
another set of standards, inimical to those traditional standards’ (Gracyk 2007, 25). As the
comparative discussion above confirms, there are substantial divergences between the values
of rock in its defining phase and those of classical music. Few would dispute Gracyk’s
argument that rock should be accorded its own aesthetic, rather than judged from
perspectives conceived around classical music: after all, doesn’t every culture have its own
very different set of values?
 Musical Example 2.3 The Beach Boys, ‘God Only Knows’, figured bass
reduction

Perhaps it does, but the idea of culture is certainly an obstacle to understanding how these
different values interact. The problem is that it suggests a series of hermetic boxes, each
containing its own wholly distinct value system. Thus Gracyk speaks of the ‘barriers’ and
‘divides’ between musical cultures, a viewpoint that leads him to argue that ‘far from being
a universal language, music appears to be a divisive force’ (Gracyk 2007, 69, 77; Gracyk
2011, 174). However, this perspective seems at odds with our everyday experience of
engaging with and appreciating music from a range of cultures. The capacity to appreciate
music from multiple cultures should not lead us to overlook the differences between their
values, or to minimize the effort that fully understanding them involves. It does remind us,
though, that value communities are loose, porous formations, constantly overlapping and
intermingling; rather than emphasizing simply what’s unique and distinct about them, we
also need to look for points of commonality. Two centuries ago, Kant assumed the existence
of a sensus communis aestheticus – a shared sense of the aesthetic – that enabled
cosmopolitan individuals to cultivate a broadened way of thinking and make judgements
from a universal standpoint (Kant [1790] 1987, 295, section 40). While Kant’s universalism
is no longer attractive, we can surely still benefit from conceiving the aesthetic as an active
endeavour to grasp the values of other cultures and to seek out common ground between
them.
Notes
1 Notable exceptions include Dahlhaus [1970] 1983; Johnson 2002; Kramer 2009.
2 Some examples of the broader project of re-establishing the idea of principled judgements include Squires 1993 and Wolff
2008.
3 On Kant, Schiller and aesthetic ideology, see Eagleton 1990 and Woodmansee 1994, esp. 57–86.
4 For a more detailed discussion of Bourdieu (and his misreading of Kant), see Gracyk 2007, 29–33.
5 For a useful survey of how aesthetics has responded to critiques of the high/low dichotomy, see Novitz 2003.
6 On the ubiquity of the concept of bad music, see the essays in Washburne and Derno 2004.
7 See also www.arabkitsch.com (accessed 25 June 2013).
8 The idea of a museum phase in the history of Western classical music stems from Burkholder 1983.
9 The wider connotations of authenticity in rock are explored in Weisethaunet and Lindberg 2010.

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 3
Absolute music
Thomas Grey

Introduction
Any music is ‘absolute’ – in the usual understanding of the term – if it is presented to the listener
as a sounding aesthetic object without accompanying verbal text (in the form of vocal lyrics,
program, or descriptive title) and without serving any particular function besides the listening
experience itself. Normally, this is understood to be instrumental music, although vocalise or
electronic music, for example, could also fit the definition. While clear examples can be found in
the music of the late Renaissance or early Baroque in the form of instrumental canzonas,
ricercares, contrapuntal fantasias and above all the Baroque fugue, the apogee of ‘absolute
music’ as a practice and an ideology is usually located between the era of Viennese classicism, in
the later eighteenth century, and the early Romantic era, when writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann
began to articulate a distinct, positive aesthetic of pure instrumental music (most famously in
Hoffmann’s 1810 review-essay on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony). 1
The opposition to instrumental music expressed by British essayist Charles Lamb in his
‘Chapter on Ears’ ( Essays of Elia , 1823) is a satirical provocation on the part of a professed
musical agnostic, but it is in many ways just as instructive as the paeans to the transcendent
powers of ‘pure music’ intoned by his German Romantic contemporaries:

Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and
embitter my apprehension. Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of
mere sounds; to be long a-dying, to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by
unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable
tedious sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze
on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops ,
and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent extempore tragedies to answer to the
vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime – these are faint shadows of what I have
undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music .
(Lamb 1835, 43)

Lamb’s complaint on the importunities of ‘empty instrumental music’ is essentially an

amplification of Bernard de Fontenelle’s famous quip from a century before: Sonate, que me
veux-tu? (‘Sonata, what do you want of me?’). 2 Both respond to the sense that the relatively
recent phenomenon of instrumental music is making unwonted – and unwanted – demands on the
attention and even understanding of the listener. For Lamb, a concerto or other modern ‘piece of
music’ harasses the listener with a surfeit of decorative ‘sweetness’ without signification,
emotional gestures without referents, audible syntax without semantics, and the contours of
dramatic mimesis without character or plot. The terms of his objections tell us much about the
technical conditions that had evolved in the era of tonal music since the seventeenth century,
enabling the rise of what came to be called absolute music. Even the anti-musical Lamb detects
the role of affective, rhetorical gesture and syntactical phrasing or punctuation (‘a book, all stops
’) that allowed contemporary listeners to hear music as a wordless ‘language of feelings’. Along
with these internal, technical conditions of composition enabling genres of independent
instrumental music are social conditions: the increasing presence of music-making within the
everyday soundscape of bourgeois life in the form of domestic music-making and public
concerts. Even apart from larger trends in late Enlightenment and Romantic-idealist intellectual
discourse, there is good reason why the need for a theory of ‘absolute’ instrumental music came
to be felt by the early nineteenth century. The following sections of this chapter will attempt to
(1) sketch the historical development of ‘absolute music’ as both a concept and a specific term;
(2) interrogate the parameters understood to constitute ‘absolute music’ in the era of tonal
common practice; (3) distinguish between a Romantic metaphysics of absolute music and an
other (empirical, formalist) versions; and (4) consider the status of the concept in contemporary
scholarship and criticism.

Absolute music as term and concept: an historical perspective

The term ‘absolute music’ can be traced, tellingly, to two nearly contemporaneous and
antagonistic sources: Richard Wagner and Eduard Hanslick, each writing around the very middle
of the nineteenth century. Wagner introduced the term in a significant though historically
obscure context, the programmatic commentary he devised for a performance of Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony he conducted in Dresden in April 1846. Explicating the introductory gestures
of the famous finale, Wagner writes:

With the beginning of this finale Beethoven’s music takes on a more distinctly speaking
character: it leaves behind the character of pure instrumental music such as had been
maintained throughout the first three movements, the realm of infinite and indistinct
expression…. We must admire how the master has prepared the entrance of language and the
human voice as something both anticipated and necessary by means of the shattering recitative
of the double basses when, nearly transgressing the boundaries of absolute music, this
recitative engages the other instruments with its powerfully emotional discourse, pressing for
some resolution, and finally issuing in a lyrical theme.
(Wagner 1887, vol. 2, 60–1; trans. Grey 2009, 486)

Wagner’s text would not have reached many readers, at least until it was reprinted in his
collected writings in the 1870s. All the same, it tells us a great deal about the emerging critical
discourse of what would eventually be canonized under his phrase, ‘absolute music’. First of all,
he provides the alternative, more standard locution for the idea in the early nineteenth century,
‘pure instrumental music’. Second, he alludes to the Romantic aesthetic ideology that had been
influentially articulated by E. T. A. Hoffmann, specifically with reference to Beethoven’s
symphonies, in relating ‘pure instrumental music’ to ‘the realm of infinite and indistinct
expression’. Third, he rehearses his own critical argument, more emphatically and influentially
expressed in The Artwork of the Future some years later (1849), that Beethoven’s Ninth – like
the later music as a whole – exemplified a modern aesthetic imperative for music to move
beyond the realm of ‘indistinct expression’ and to seek new representational and expressive
determinacy either through the internal development of compositional resources – harmonic,
melodic and formal – or ultimately through a new synthesis of music with poetry or drama. 3
While the initial circulation of this 1846 program note may have been very restricted, Wagner
returned to the term ‘absolute music’ repeatedly throughout both The Artwork of the Future and
Opera and Drama (1852), texts that were widely read and debated following their first
publication. In both of those texts the term is subject to Wagner’s polemic against the cultivation
of the traditional arts in their individual, isolated (‘absolute’) condition, which is to be
superseded by the combined or ‘total artwork of the future’ (Gesamtkunstwerk der Zukunft ).
Eduard Hanslick’s path-breaking short treatise of 1854 Vom Musikalisch-Schönen ( On the
Beautiful in Music or, in Geoffrey Payzant’s 1986 translation, On the Musically Beautiful ) has
traditionally been viewed as a theory of absolute music. This view is certainly accurate, even
though – somewhat paradoxically – the term ‘absolute music’ appears only incidentally in the
text. As with Wagner’s first use of the term, this ‘incidental’ appearance is nonetheless
significant, and can help us understand the general purpose of Hanslick’s treatise as well as
clarifying some common misapprehensions about it.
In the middle of his second chapter, devoted to the demonstration that ‘the representation of
feelings is not the content of music’, Hanslick comments on the methodology of this
demonstration: ‘We have deliberately chosen instrumental music for our examples.’ (In addition
to a brief analysis of the opening theme of Beethoven’s overture to the ballet The Creatures of
Prometheus Hanslick invokes, in passing, Bach’s preludes and fugues, symphonies of Haydn and
Mozart, and ‘an adagio of Beethoven, a scherzo of Mendelssohn, or a piano piece by Schumann
or Chopin’ as representative types; Hanslick [1854] 1986, 14).

This is only for the reason that whatever can be asserted of instrumental music holds good for
all music as such. If some general definition of music be sought, something by which to
characterize its essence and its nature, to establish its boundaries and purpose, we are entitled
to confine ourselves to instrumental music. Of what instrumental music cannot do, it ought
never be said that music can do it, because only instrumental music is music purely and
absolutely (denn nur sie ist reine, absolute Tonkunst ).
(Hanslick [1854] 1986, 14–15; see Hanslick [1854] 1990, 52)

Hanslick is making a simple clinical, procedural point. Arguments about how music ‘works’
or about its effects are best made with reference to music without accompanying text, function or
other extra-musical dimensions. Hanslick’s later critical opposition to both the theories and the
music of Richard Wagner has, together with the resonance of the phrase die reine, absolute
Tonkunst when recalled out of context, probably contributed to the notion that Hanslick’s treatise
glorifies instrumental music at the expense of vocal music or opera. 4 In fact, in the very
nextsentence Hanslick denounces invidious comparisons of the value of instrumental versus
vocal music as ‘dilettantish’ and irrelevant, following which he turns to examples of vocal music
(if only to prove the non-exclusive relationship of verbal semantics to musical settings of a given
text).
Just as in Wagner’s reference to ‘absolute music’ in his 1846 commentary on Beethoven,
Hanslick’s single use of the phrase ‘absolute music’ (as absolute Tonkunst ) exemplifies its
genealogy in the locution ‘purely instrumental music’, which continued to remain standard
parlance throughout most of the nineteenth century. Both Wagner and Hanslick apply the
adjective ‘absolute’ in the sense made current at the time through the writings of Ludwig
Feuerbach to denote an isolated, specialized branch of knowledge, practice or inquiry. Wagner
would go on to emphasize the critical implications of this isolation – a ‘bad’ autonomy charged
with cutting music off from a natural and healthy interaction with its sister arts – throughout the
so-called Zurich writings from around 1850. Hanslick’s unique application of the adjective in On
the Musically Beautiful , on the other hand, can easily be heard to resonate with the Hegelian
metaphysics of the ‘Absolute’ (which he famously invoked in a passage later deleted from the
final pages of the treatise at the prompting of his colleague Robert Zimmermann). 5 To begin
with, however, ‘absolute music’ denoted for both Wagner and Hanslick simply the repertoire of
‘pure instrumental music’ as it had developed over the preceding two centuries of European
musical practice.
Although, as Sanna Pederson has persuasively demonstrated, neither Wagner’s nor Hanslick’s
original uses of the phrase ‘absolute music’ brought the term into regular critical use during their
lifetimes, both of them exerted considerable influence on debates over the concept and status of
‘purely instrumental music’ at a time when the emerging canon of instrumental classics was
confronted by modern, post-Beethovenian music with claims to new levels of expressive or
semantic determinacy. Wagner stated his position in no uncertain terms. ‘Who will be to
Beethoven what he was, necessarily, to Mozart and Haydn?’ he asks, rhetorically, in The Artwork
of the Future . ‘No one, not even the greatest [musical] genius, since the Genius of absolute
music no longer needs him’ (Wagner 1887, vol. 3, 101). 6 That is to say, for Wagner the age of
‘absolute music’ has come and gone; the ‘greatest musical genius’ will henceforth be working in
some other sphere (specifically, the combined musical-dramatic ‘artwork of the future’). And
although Hanslick, as mentioned, did not set as his goal in On the Musically Beautiful to argue for
the supremacy of a classical instrumental canon over opera, program music, or the dawning
Wagnerian ‘music drama’, it is entirely justified to view his book as the first and faraway most
influential statement on the idea of ‘absolute music’, even if he did not grant the term itself a
special status.
The essentials of this statement can be located in two arguments of Hanslick’s book: the
‘negative’ thesis of his second chapter, that the artistic value or ‘content’ of music
(paradigmatically, instrumental music) is not to be sought in the putative feelings or emotions
generated by it; and the ‘positive’ thesis of his third chapter, that the artistic value or ‘content’ of
music, however elusive, is intrinsic to the materials of the composition and their treatment by the
composer, what Hanslick tried to sum up as tönend bewegte Formen (‘musically sounding forms
in motion’, or in Payzant’s translation, ‘tonally moving forms’; (Hanslick [1854] 1990, 75;
[1854] 1986, 29). 7 Hanslick had more difficulty in formulating the second, or positive thesis of
musical beauty, in part because he was hobbled by an obligation to work with categories of
‘form’ and ‘content’ received from contemporary aesthetic philosophy. In treating the categories
of musical ‘beauty’, ‘value’ and ‘content’ as all more or less synonymous, and insisting on their
immanence to ‘musically sounding forms in motion’ Hanslick can be regarded as articulating a
foundational principle of ‘absolute music’.
A succinct definition of the idea can also be found near the beginning of his third chapter
(‘The Musically Beautiful’), where he answers the question ‘What kind of beauty is the beauty of
a musical composition?’ as follows :
 It is a specifically musical kind of beauty. By this we understand a beauty that is self-
contained and in no need of content from outside itself, that consists simply and solely of tones
and their artistic combination. Relationships, fraught with significance, of sounds which are in
themselves charming – their congruity and opposition, their separating and combining, their
soaring and subsiding – this is what comes in spontaneous forms before our inner
contemplation and pleases us as beautiful.
(Hanslick [1854] 1986, 28) 8

Along with ‘purely musical’, the phrase ‘specifically musical’ was another standard locution for
the idea of absolute music in Hanslick’s and Wagner’s time, one whose currency can be directly
linked to the impact of On the Musically Beautiful . It is worth recalling again, as Pederson has
shown, that only Wagner used the term ‘absolute music’ with any regularity before the end of the
nineteenth century, and that only in his ‘Zurich’ writings of 1849–51 where it is the object of a
polemical critique (Pederson 2009). Despite the undeniable importance of a Romantic
metaphysics of ‘purely instrumental music’, the Hegelian notion of the ‘Absolute’ routinely
invoked in current scholarly discussion of ‘absolute music’ was not necessarily central to
discussions of the idea in the nineteenth century. Hanslick’s ‘specifically musical’ and Wagner’s
‘absolute music’ around 1850 simply denoted ‘music alone’ (to invoke the title of one of Peter
Kivy’s many essays on music aesthetics – see Kivy 1990), while the claims of such music to
transcendent metaphysical import remained a matter of context, repertoire and individual critical
beliefs.
Questions of terminology aside, it has long been assumed that a philosophical discourse of
absolute or purely instrumental music emerged between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries in response to the rapid rise of instrumental genres such as the sonata, string quartet,
and symphony during this period, above all in the canon of the ‘Viennese classical school’ of
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Mark Evan Bonds has influentially proposed an alternative
view, that a new propensity to ‘idealist’ structures of thought in German-language philosophy of
the period provided the necessary matrix for a new valuation of instrumental music in the era of
Beethoven and E. T. A. Hoffmann (Bonds 1997; see also Bonds 2006). The issue can easily
devolve into a kind of chicken-or-egg problem if we attempt to isolate musical practice from
intellectual-cultural context, and it probably makes most sense to view the two in a productive
dialectical or symbiotic relation. Clearly much had changed between the time of Fontenelle’s
querulous challenge, Sonate, que me veux-tu? and the effusions of Tieck, Wackenroder, or
Hoffmann over the intimations of utopian and infinite other worlds vouchsafed by the sonatas
and symphonies of their day. The concept of absolute instrumental music gained further critical
traction soon after Wagner and Hanslick named it around 1850 with the extensive debates over
program music, ‘music drama’, and the ‘New German School’ of musical progressives – debates
generated in large part by the polemics of Wagner’s ‘Zurich’ writings of 1849–51.

Testing the boundaries: three propositions

As Wagner’s role in the terminological history of ‘absolute music’ suggests, it was not just the
growing repertoire of instrumental music since the late eighteenth century that brought the
category into focus, but also the aesthetic challenges issued to that ‘classical’ repertoire in the
nineteenth century. The instrumental recitative ‘nearly transgressing the boundaries of absolute
music’ in the finale the Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (in the words of Wagner’s 1846
programmatic commentary) becomes a key figure in this process. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier
, Couperin’s pièces de clavecin , or Scarlatti’s Essercizi all seemed to know their place and did
not challenge the nominal hegemony of opera or sacred vocal music. The revolutionary example
of Beethoven’s major instrumental works, most pointedly the Ninth Symphony, seemed to
question the limits of ‘pure instrumental music’ and to encourage subsequent generations of
composers, listeners, and critics to do the same. Absolute music thus became an important
concept precisely when it became a contested one. Now, as then, the purposes of the category
can be gauged by interrogating its boundaries.
One heuristic exercise would be to try mounting an argument in defense of each of the
following three propositions:

All music is absolute.

Some music is absolute.
No music is absolute.

Proposition 2: ‘Some music is absolute’

This second proposition is, of course, the normative one. In this view, most classical instrumental
genres such as the fugue, the string quartet, the sonata, and the symphony are ‘absolute’ music.
Granting some basic familiarity with Western tonal practice, individual examples of any of these
genres can be heard and understood largely without reference to external factors. This does not
preclude the fact that knowing other fugues, quartets, sonatas and symphonies will enhance
one’s understanding of any given individual example. Most such music, however, can be
adequately appreciated and ‘understood’ without reference to concepts, images or verbal data.
Under this normative view texted vocal music, from Gregorian chant and Renaissance sacred
polyphony to Italian madrigals, opera of any era, lieder or other genres of art song, and all types
of popular song do not qualify as absolute music, for several reasons. In most cases the melodic
material has been conceived to match at least some elements of the textual metre, rhythm, rhyme
and so forth, so that it cannot be fairly evaluated without some reference to these. In most cases,
too, the musical setting is understood to express, highlight or otherwise enhance the meaning of
the text, usually in some affective dimension, though also as rhetorical utterance, or simply as
resonating in some (admittedly unspecific) way with the semantic dimension of the text. Even if
the text of a vocal composition is in a language not understood by a given listener – for instance,
a Latin motet, an Italian aria, a Russian opera chorus, a Hungarian or Swedish art song, or a rock
song with lyrics rendered unintelligible through raucous delivery and amplification – the listener
will still likely be aware of the impact of structural or rhetorical linguistic features on the musical
composition. Programs or, more commonly, simple descriptive titles also invite an imaginative,
referential dimension into the reception of a musical work that disqualifies it as ‘absolute’ in the
normative view.

Proposition 1: ‘All music is absolute’

The metaphysics of music articulated by Arthur Schopenhauer in The World as Will and
Representation (vol. 1, 1818; vol. 2, 1844) can be cited in defence of the first of our three
propositions. For Schopenhauer, music (meaning for him European art music from the early
eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, essentially) differs from the other arts in being
conceivable as a ‘direct’ reflection of the all-encompassing principle of the ‘Will’, rather than a
second-hand representation of the Will’s external manifestations in the natural world or the
universe of human affairs. The ‘absoluteness’ of music in this reading is not a matter of music’s
essentially formal (decorative or patterned) attributes, as it would be in Kantian aesthetics or for
Hanslick, but simply in its lack of reference to the phenomenal world. In this view any titles,
programs or vocal texts may serve an illustrative function, but our perception of the music ‘itself’
is not fundamentally altered by them.

This is why one may set a poem as a song, or a visual representation as a pantomime, or set
both to music in an opera. Such individual pictures of human life, set to the general language
of music, never correspond or connect to it with complete necessity; rather, they stand in the
same relation to it as an arbitrary example does to a general concept.
(Trans. Dahlhaus 1989, 131; Schopenhauer [1818] 1969, vol. 1, §§52, 263) 9

The position makes sense for someone like Schopenhauer who had grown up in an era when
imitation theory and the doctrine of affections were still the norm. One or another setting of one
or another Metastasio simile aria differs only incidentally, not essentially, from the rest, never
bearing the unique impress of single, unmistakable illocutionary model.
Extrapolating from this view, even without reference to the Schopenhauerian ‘Will’, we could
insist simply on the phenomenological pre-eminence of the immediate acoustic experience of
any musical work, object or performance. Many textual and cultural contingencies may
determine crucial elements of the sounding object in a performance of Musorgsky’s Boris
Godunov or a song by Rodgers and Hart or a mixed-media aleatoric composition of John Cage.
But in this strict view, those contingencies will not fundamentally alter the experience of these as
music , rather than as drama, lyrics or performance concept. Our attitude toward the music may,
of course, be inflected by those other things, but the music is what we hear first.

Proposition 3: ‘No music is absolute’

Richard Wagner’s open letter ‘On Franz Liszt’s Symphonic Poems’, written in February 1857, is
often viewed as a document of Wagner’s reception of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic ideas, which he
had encountered over the preceding few years. There is some justification for this; yet in trying
to defend Liszt’s controversial essays in ‘program music’ against the background of his own
heated polemics against all and sundry traditional musical genres in the ‘Zurich’ writings,
Wagner backs himself into a defence of our third, apparently anti -Schopenhauerian proposition:
‘No music is absolute.’ He begins by rehearsing Romantic metaphysical claims of music’s
‘transfiguring power’, for example: ‘music will never, in any union into which it may enter,
cease to be the highest, most redeeming art.’ And further: ‘It is the nature of music to realize in
and through itself, unmistakably and immediately, certain truths that the other arts can only hint
at or suggest’ (Wagner 1887, vol. 5, 191; trans. in Wagner [1857] 2011, 76). But since Wagner
himself had argued earlier that all instrumental music was essentially a temporary, if historically
useful, aberration in between Greek tragedy and the modern musical-dramatic ‘total artwork’, he
is forced to perform an elaborate rhetorical dance around his own notions of musical ontology :

Nothing is less absolute than music, as regards its presence in our lives, and the champions of
an absolute music are clearly a muddle-headed bunch. To confound them it would suffice to
 have them name, if they could, any music independent of those forms derived from corporeal
motion or from poetic verse (according to the causal circumstances).
(Wagner 1887, vol. 5, 191; trans in Wagner [1857] 2011, 76) 10

Wagner is referring to his ‘genealogy’ of classical instrumental forms from the traditions of
binary dance forms of the earlier eighteenth century and, more broadly, the relation of classical
phrase structure to symmetries of dance or rhyming metrical verse. In this view, there is no such
thing as a ‘purely’ abstract music, since all empirical musical practices (as opposed to
speculations about divine or celestial music) are conditioned by aspects of the human body,
voice and fundamental cultural practices. Thus, if Romantic composers like Berlioz or Liszt
choose to push the envelop of musical form by inflecting its primitive dance-based outlines with
allusion to mythic or literary narrative, this need not constitute an unpardonable transgression.
No music is truly ‘absolute’, since all music is founded, at some level, on shapes and forms of
human activity. The foundational activities of song, dance and religious ritual, he argues, are
merely giving way to more differentiated models of myth, epic and drama. As the musical means
enabled by those first categories become more differentiated or sophisticated, with time, this
expansion of the human ‘models’ for musical practice is a natural move in the cultural evolution
of the art form.

Further testing the boundaries: function, programs, titles

All three of these propositional formulas could be argued at length and on the basis of examples
from nearly any historical period or musical culture. The German Romantic–metaphysical
tradition has tended to gravitate towards the first of them (‘all music is absolute’), while
contemporary ‘post-modern’ cultural theory tends to promote the third one (‘no music is
absolute’), as we will see further in the concluding section of this chapter. But since the second
proposition remains the normative view in musical scholarship and criticism, it could be helpful
to consider the kinds of discriminations that view presupposes – what makes some music
‘absolute’ and other music not? – against a small range of individual cases.
The autonomy or self-sufficiency of absolute music, as traditionally construed, is often
contrasted with music intended to serve a function, social or institutional in nature. To begin
with, we would have to exempt the ‘function’ of aesthetic contemplation, since that is the
function of any form of art, by definition. (The dividing line between aesthetic contemplation
and edifying or ‘quality’ entertainment is, of course, porous, and in many contexts non-existent.)
Even with that allowance, citing ‘function’ as a restrictive boundary for absolute music is
problematic. The ostensible function of much early instrumental music within the Catholic
Church service (ricercares, toccatas, trio sonatas, and so forth) is scarcely to be distinguished
from the aesthetic contemplation of music in the salons of aristocratic or bourgeois amateurs or
in the early concert hall. Speaking of an extensive four-part ricercare from a 1547 publication by
Jacques Buus, Richard Taruskin maintains that it ‘is no “absolute music” in our modern sense of
the term’ because of its nominal function of accompanying the communion during the mass
service – and in spite of his own assessment of the piece as an ‘academic’ demonstration of
compositional method (Taruskin 2005, 608). 11 Of Giovanni Gabrieli’s sonata for three violins
and bass from the posthumously published 1615 Canzoni e sonate , on the other hand, Taruskin
points out: ‘what would remain for centuries the elite genre of “absolute” secular instrumental
music [i.e. the sonata] was born in church’ (Taruskin 2005, 796). For Taruskin, the Buus
ricercare tends, in its effect, towards a kind of sonic wallpaper appropriate to its function as
liturgical ‘background music’, whereas the Gabrieli sonata engages its listeners more forthrightly
through an element of rhetorical flair in its deployment of instrumental textures and harmonically
directed bass. As musical objects, however, both pieces have an equal claim to aesthetic
autonomy. It is by no means clear that functional utility has dictated the differences between
them, or that it constitutes a limiting contingency in one case and not the other.
Reinhard Strohm’s objection to the idea that ‘function or relevance for social practices should,
generally, have been a hindrance to music’s possession of work-character’ should thus probably
be extended to determinations regarding absolute music (Strohm 2000, 135). Usually at issue, in
either case, is a question of aesthetic ambition or demands: whether or not the music presupposes
an attentive, engaged listener – a viable aesthetic ‘subject’. A piano etude may be wholly
functional, like those of Charles-Louis Hanon, for instance. Most etudes, however, while still
functional, may also be heard as musical works, whether of limited or more substantial aesthetic
interest, as testified by Robert Schumann’s numerous reviews of etudes by his contemporaries,
not to mention his own. The same applies to most other repertoires of ‘functional’ music, such as
dance music or music for religious ceremony. Certainly, much of it may exhibit little or no
‘work’ quality, and may not even be preserved in written or other stable form. However, the
potential functionality of a Bach cantata or a set of waltzes by Johann Strauss Jr neither
precludes their status as works nor their ability to be heard, in some part, as absolute music. An
instrumental sinfonia to a Bach cantata borrowed from a concerto, or vice versa, is surely an
example of absolute music; a concerted chorale-based movement from such a cantata arranged
for instrumental performance is probably an example; a recitative with continuo accompaniment
is probably not. Compositional style and substance are the determining factors, not liturgical
function.
Similar factors are at issue when Wilhelm Seidl invokes ‘organic wholeness’ as a criterion of
absolute music in the early Romantic view leading to Hanslick, citing the neo-Kantian Christian
Friedrich Michaelis (Seidl 1994, col. 20). Granted, Michaelis echoes Karl Philipp Moritz’s
classic formulation of aesthetic autonomy: an organically constituted artwork will ‘contain its
entire purpose and raison d’être within itself’ (cited by Siedl 1994, col. 20). 12 This is not so much
determined by the presence or absence of social, religious or pedagogical function, however, as it
is by the degree of interest that attaches to the internal ‘organization’ of the music (still in
Michaelis’s terms). The relation of dance forms to concert genres from the seventeenth to the
nineteenth centuries illustrates the process, or spectrum, very clearly. French court dances,
polonaises and mazurkas, and indeed waltzes, all gained aesthetic interest as they lost functional
purpose. A rudimentary 16-measure dance composition may be perfectly coherent as an
autonomous musical object, just not very interesting in most cases. The self-sufficiency of
absolute music implies a self-sufficiency of aesthetic interest. Function may weigh against that,
but need not determine its presence or absence.
The role of critical subjectivity in setting the bar of aesthetic interest in the case of nominally
functional music is illustrated, somewhat surprisingly, by Hanslick himself in a response to
Mozart’s ‘Posthorn’ Serenade (K. 320) on a Viennese concert program in 1881:

Mozart’s Serenade No. 9 in D major belongs, like that whole half-obsolete genre of the
serenade itself, to a more accompanimental, decorative kind of music. In the right place ideally
in the park of some old castle – and at the right time, on a fragrant summer night, such music
might act as a balsam to our drowsy senses and feeling. Today, a century after its composition,
 it offers too little substantial interest [substantiellen Gehalt ] for musical reflection and
emotional engagement [unserem musikalischen Nachdenken und Nachfühlen ] when presented
as an independent concert item; it merely ripples past us softly and gently, without making any
deeper impression.
(Hanslick 1886, 294)

Belying his posthumous, largely mistaken, reputation as a classicist and a formalist, Hanslick
dismisses even one of Mozart’s more mature and, indeed, more ‘substantial’ serenades as too
beholden to its original function as aristocratic divertissement to qualify as legitimate, ‘absolute’
musical fare in the modern concert hall.
A program Hanslick encountered shortly afterwards, in December 1883, provides a cross-
section of contemporary repertoire illustrating precisely the boundaries that the concept of
absolute music was intended to police as it started to become an accepted critical tool. This
program, conducted by Hans Richter, consisted of the premiere of Brahms’s Third Symphony,
the Viennese premiere of Liszt’s symphonic poem Mazeppa , and an orchestral song-setting of
Shelley’s ode ‘To Night’ (in German translation) by Robert Volkmann. Not surprisingly,
Hanslick’s response to the Brahms symphony confirms how much the viewpoint of On the
Musically Beautiful as well as Hanslick’s attitudes as a music critic (the two are by no means
identical) continue to define what is still understood today as absolute music. Appealing to the
topos of ineffability or music’s transcendence of language, he laments that ‘the critic’s eloquence
diminishes in proportion to that of the composer’ and that only extensive score examples or,
better still, repeated listening can truly reveal the aesthetic value of the work (Hanslick 1886,
361). 13 He eschews the ‘poetic-picturesque’ method of ‘translating one’s impressions into a
series of images, balladic motifs, or novelistic episodes’, since that runs counter to his ‘belief in
the purely musical significance of an instrumental composition’. Still, he readily situates
Brahms’s new Third Symphony with respect to the affective and topical associations of the
Beethoven canon as well as of Brahms’s first two symphonies (starting from Richter’s sobriquet
for the Third as Brahms’s Eroica ). Brief verbal accounts the thematic material, dynamic contours
and generalized musical attributes are offered (‘more concentrated in form, more transparent in
detail, more plasticity of motivic ideas, richer instrumentation and more varied timbral
combinations’ than the first two symphonies). Yet the music emerges as paradigmatically
absolute precisely in defying adequate verbalization. It is not just the work’s structural, textural
or rhythmic complexity, but also its situatedness within a network or discourse of ‘symphonic’
values that contributes to its quality as a meaningful artwork. (Hanslick’s final comment is
simply ‘if only Schumann were still alive to hear it!’.)
The Liszt symphonic poem and the Volkmann orchestral song on the same program both
belong outside the pale of absolute music, clearly, but that does not principally determine
Hanslick’s critical response to them. Comparing the general tone of ‘reflective, dignified, warm
feeling’ in the Volkmann with that of Schumann’s Paradies und die Peri he groups them, together
with Brahms’s and Beethoven’s symphonies, as ‘poetic musical works [ Tondichtungen ] that
breath freely the atmosphere of musical beauty’, in spite of the ‘differences in content and form,
as well as artistic value’ (Hanslick 1886, 366). The negation of those ideals in Mazeppa is not
strictly blamed on the choice and role of the poetic program, although Hanslick is predictably
dismissive of both. Rather, as with most of Liszt’s orchestral works, he objects to what he
regards as noisy, pretentious, overwrought treatment of musically feeble materials (‘the lack of
formative musical power applied to great ideas that grow and move from inside outwards is
masked in all of them by showy orchestral effects and all sorts of portentous gesturing’)
(Hanslick 1886, 367). Moreover, Hanslick himself points out the genealogy of this particular
symphonic poem in a series of piano etudes, acquiring its official association with the poetic
protagonist of Hugo and Byron only midway through the series. (‘It would not be unfair to call it
a tenderly reared and groomed piano etude’, he concludes, alluding perhaps to Mazeppa’s horse,
who in Hanslick’s view is the real protagonist of the story; Hanslick 1886, 368.) The genesis of
Mazeppa as a symphonic poem illustrates a broad truism, even if Hanslick does not dwell on the
implications in his review: Romantic program music is seldom ‘purely’ programmatic, any more
than Romantic symphonies are ‘purely’ absolute, if the first means adhering closely to a
preconceived verbal–narrative outline and the second means eschewing any referential
dimension that might be construed as extra-musical. Symphonic poems no less than symphonies
are often located ‘between’ program and absolute music, taken as heuristic ideal types. 14

Two cultures of absolute music

The German writer August Halm, whose critical advocacy of Bruckner’s symphonies is
frequently referenced in discussions of the aesthetics of absolute music, is best remembered for
his 1913 book Von zwei Kulturen der Musik (‘On Two Cultures of Music’) portraying Bach’s
fugues and Beethoven’s sonatas as two paradigms of German instrumental, or absolute, musical
tradition that also established a dialectic for later developments. The phrase, and to a certain
extent the repertoires, might be adapted to organize a range of dichotomies that emerge
repeatedly in talk about absolute music.
The terms in which these dichotomies might be formulated do not necessarily map on to each
other with complete consistency, and, as we’ve seen in the preceding section, determinations
regarding the status of absolute music tend towards a wide spectrum of possibilities more than
clear binarisms. Nonetheless, the dichotomies expressing what I am calling ‘two cultures’ or
conceptual attitudes of the absolute music idea are aligned in parallel columns in Table 3.1 , for
ease of comparison.
To orient ourselves within these related dichotomies we might start by thinking of examples
from each of August Halm’s original ‘two cultures’ of German instrumental music, say the
fugues in C major or C minor from Book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier , on one hand, and
Beethoven’s Sonata in C minor, Op. 111, on the other hand. Despite differences of mode, affect
and perhaps tempo between the Bach fugues, both invite contemplation as purely musical objects
exemplifying features of melody, harmony and counterpoint and a relatively clear set of
procedures understood by the term ‘fugue’. The two movements of Beethoven’s Op. 111
likewise exhibit contrasts of mode, character and tempo – indeed, more marked contrasts. While
standard classical procedures of sonata organization, counterpoint, binary theme and variation
play an essential role, commentaries on this work almost invariable press beyond clinical
description of the notated materials to invoke some imposing expressive, imaginative,
metaphorical dimension accessed by the music. The Bach fugues and the Beethoven sonata all
engage with terms from either of our two ‘cultures’ of absolute music; but the fugues align more
readily with the values in the first column of Table 3.1 , while the sonata aligns more readily with
those in column two.

Table 3.1 Recurrent conceptual dichotomies in the discourse of ‘absolute music’

Classical Romantic
Empirical Metaphysical
Denotative Connotative
Formalist–analytical–positivist Spiritual–metaphorical–hermeneutic
‘It’s just music ’ ‘It’s not just music’
Absolute (Feuerbachian) Absolute (Hegelian)
Hanslickian Schopenhaueria n

Wilhelm Seidl has described an aspect of these dichotomies in terms of a ‘classicistic’

orientation, more typical of philosophical approaches to the question of absolute music, versus a
Romantic orientation in the tradition of such poet–critics as Wackenroder, Tieck and Hoffmann
(Seidl 1994, col. 16). Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful speaks for the first group, while
Arthur Seidl’s attempt to supplement that with a treatise on the ‘musically sublime’ ( Vom
Musikalisch-Erhabenen , 1887) represents a continuation of the Romantic tradition in the wake
of Wagner, Schopenhauer and the New German School – the tradition that sought to elevate the
significance of music above mere ‘sounding forms’ but without circumscribing it in overly
concrete verbal or representational terms.
The ‘classical’ or ‘empirical’ conception of absolute music is the simple, essentialist one I
have also indicated as ‘denotative’ in Table 3.1 – that is, a usage that denotes merely the
observable, audible phenomena of the music as a self-sufficient means of aesthetic pleasure.
Although early (‘classical’ or neoclassical) aesthetic thought of the eighteenth century did remain
largely beholden to theories of imitation, even extended to music, there was already some
theoretical conception of absolute music in this simple empirical sense, appropriate to the large
emergent repertoire of tonal instrumental forms. As John Neubauer has shown, French thinkers
like Charles Henri Blainville ( L’Esprit de l’art musical , 1754), Boyé ( L’Expression musicale
mise au rang des chimères , 1779), and Guy de Chabanon ( De le musique considérée en elle-
même et dans ses rapports avec la parole […], 1779–85) clearly articulated an appreciation of
music as an autonomous, non-imitative and non-referential medium (Neubauer 1986, especially
Chapter 12 , ‘Toward Autonomous Music’, 168–81). The pseudonymous Boyé expressed this
succinctly:

The principal object of music is to please us physically, without troubling the mind to search
for useless comparisons in it. One must absolutely regard music as a pleasure of the senses and
not of the mind. As soon as we try to attribute the cause of its impressions on us to a moral
principle we lose ourselves in a labyrinth of extravagances.
(Cited in Neubauer 1986, 169)

By insisting on musical pleasure as a purely sensual, auditory phenomenon, however, writers

like Boyé and Chabanon do not allow for the cognitive perception of melody, harmony,
counterpoint or structural designs that would be necessary to a formalist aesthetic, properly
speaking.
The position of music in Kant’s Critique of Judgement , the essential aesthetic treatise of the
late Enlightenment, remains a matter of debate. Kant’s personal attitude probably resembled that
of the French ‘sensualists’, but the broader framework of the Critique allowed for the appreciation
of art on the basis of largely internal formal attributes. Kant’s Critique acknowledged the
possibility of art that elicits a ‘free harmonious play’ of the understanding and imagination
without reference to ‘concepts’, occupying a sphere of ‘free beauty’. 15 His famous formulation
of ‘purposiveness without purpose’, pointing to the objective character of artworks and our
‘disinterested’ pleasure in them, has always been particularly suggestive in relation to the
dynamic flux and implicitly teleological character of tonal musical structures. At the same time,
the very susceptibility of instrumental music to these ingredients of a formalist aesthetic of
beauty aroused Kant’s suspicions as to its ultimate value, indeed its very status a ‘beautiful’
rather than merely ‘agreeable’ art (as it would be in the sensualist view), providing pleasurable
sensory stimulation unrelated to man’s higher moral – and indeed conceptual – faculties. In this
sense, Kant regarded music consistently within the terms of our ‘first culture’ of absolute music
(classicist, empirical and at least proto-formalist), while ultimately condemning its lack of access
to the terms of the second, Romantic culture: its inability to communicate ‘spiritual’ content by
means of sign or metaphor.
Between Kant and Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful , at any rate, the conceptual
foundations of a formalist aesthetic of absolute music begin to crystallize, an aesthetics that
could underwrite the modernist practices of academic musical analysis, even if such practices
would have been unintelligible to an Enlightenment philosopher such as Kant and alien, at best,
to Hanslick, as humanistic critic and historian at heart. While modern-day scholars have been at
pains to point out the Romantic, organicist, metaphysical premises of the analytical thought of
Heinrich Schenker, the essential avatar of modern formalist analysis (see Cook 2007 and Korsyn
2009), he and his widespread legacy remain firmly aligned with the first column of our ‘two
cultures’. The intellectual prestige of formalist musical analysis has usually depended on the aura
of the other, ‘Romantic’ culture without genuinely sharing its metaphysical or hermeneutical
postulates.
The essential opposition between these two cultural attitudes is most immediately expressed in
the two senses of ‘absolute’ circulating in German philosophical discourse in the early nineteenth
century, both of which continue to cling to modern usage and to generate confusion within that
usage. The adjective ‘absolute’ in Ludwig Feuerbach’s vocabulary, as adopted by Wagner in the
Zurich writings, is merely denotative of the autonomy of a given cultural practice or branch of
knowledge. In this, Wagner’s original sense, absolute music is just music, with no ambition to
participate in other discursive realms. This we could call absolute music with a lower-case ‘a’,
music in isolation (or ‘dissolved’) from verbal, conceptual or even any clearly specified affective
considerations. However, starting with the German Romantic generation, the very purity of such
autonomous music, its apparent transcendence of language, sign and emotional specificity was
believed to open up a channel of communication with the Hegelian ‘Absolute’, a divine,
metaphysical order of knowledge (however vaguely defined) of religious pedigree, redolent of
the noumenal Platonic ‘ideas’ also adopted by Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. In this other ‘upper-
case’ usage, autonomous instrumental music means more than an abstract play of sounding
forms; it gestures towards some higher, supra-linguistic, and indeed supra-sensible reality
without resorting to any prosaic, unequivocal sort of code. Whether it does so through the stark,
austere forms of Bach’s Art of the Fugue or the more various, emotionally charged rhetoric of a
Brahms or Bruckner symphonic adagio, the music is understood to mean more than a description
of its notes on the page; it is more than ‘just music’.
Hanslick himself, who, as we know, flirted with the idea of the Hegelian ‘Absolute’ before
censoring it from later editions of his treatise, retained some commitment to both of these
‘cultures’. The figures of the sounding ‘arabesque’ and ‘kaleidoscope’, for example, that
Hanslick suggested as a means of visualizing music’s abstract, formal beauty were much derided
by Romantically inclined critics in his own day as demeaning, relegating music to the status of
acoustic wallpaper (computer screen-saver images would be an apt modern analogue to
Hanslick’s ‘moving arabesque or kaleidoscope’). Kant was generally inclined to accept such
consequences, for, although he allowed that music might engage ‘the understanding and the
imagination’ at some level, he assumed that it was essentially void of cognitive value. It offered
nothing to ‘think about’ in any substantial way. Hanslick was at pains to refute this implication,
as is most evident when he attempts to qualify his figures of abstract, formal pattern or design,
the arabesque and kaleidoscope. ‘Let us think of this lively arabesque as the dynamic emanation
of an artistic spirit’; the musical kaleidoscope ‘presents itself as the direct emanation of an
artistically creative spirit’. The final result of these qualifications is the famous dictum:
‘Composing is a work of mind upon material compatible with mind’ ( Das Componieren ist ein
Arbeit des Geistes im geistfähigen Material ; Hanslick [1854] 1986, 31; cf. Hanslick [1854]
1990, 79). The multiple iterations of ‘spirit’ and ‘mind’ ( Geist in German) in these passages
indicate Hanslick’s desire to bridge the ‘two cultures’ of absolute music, after initially grounding
his arguments in the classical–empirical version. In Hanslick’s view, the aesthetic character of a
musical theme and attention to its travels in the course of a composition, whether a Baroque trio
sonata movement or the Franck D minor Symphony, do give a listener something to ‘think about’.
Adherents of the second, Romantic culture believe that the semantic indeterminacy of
instrumental music transports the mind to some purer, higher plane – vouchsafing intimations of
the ‘infinite’ or Absolute. They would also assume (and Hanslick would not deny) that some
works achieve this more effectively than others. For this school of thought, some music is, in
fact, just music, but for that very reason, not upper-case ‘Absolute’. Moving from the sounding
arabesque of the trio sonata towards the ‘spiritual’ heights and depths of the Romantic symphony
is a historical process that requires the collaboration of composers and listeners. Composers
agree to provide more to ‘think about’ in their compositions, and listeners agree to do the
thinking.

The historicity of absolute music and current perspectives

In retrospect, we can say that the ‘idea of absolute music’ evolved gradually along with the
development of a repertoire of tonal instrumental music in Europe, mainly from the early
eighteenth century onwards. A ‘first culture’ of absolute music was firmly in place by the turn of
the nineteenth century – otherwise, who would have been attending concerts or buying printed
scores of sonatas, quartets and the like? More suddenly, around this time, a ‘second culture’ of
absolute music emerged in response to the aesthetic refinements of Viennese Classicism (at least
paradigmatically), but crucially enabled by epistemic shifts in contemporary culture: the rise of
idealist thinking in philosophy and the related metaphysical turn in the Romantic literary-critical
imagination, as emphasized by Mark Evan Bonds. The more emphatic claims of this second,
Romantic–metaphysical culture contribute to the matrix that engenders a robust, visible
discourse of ‘absolute music’ in the first place, by the middle of the nineteenth century,
introducing the term still in use. The less emphatic, and potentially negative or at least self-
effacing claims of the first culture are reflected in its somewhat shadowy status, lacking any
single conceptual banner before ‘pure instrumental music’, the ‘specifically musical’ and
‘absolute music’ began to enter the critical vocabulary later on. Both models continue to be
available, depending on the sensibility of the user/listener and the character of the repertoire in
question.
If that roughly summarizes the genesis of the concept, according to the bifurcated model I
have proposed, we might conclude this overview of absolute music as aesthetic issue by turning
to a current perspective. Is absolute music a historically bounded phenomenon? Is the concept
limited to a more-or-less fixed historical repertoire? Should it be cited by modern scholars and
critics as a historical phenomenon rather than indulged as an inevitable, ongoing, harmless
reality?
Carl Dahlhaus viewed the second, Romantic–metaphysical culture of absolute music as the
dominant, unifying paradigm of nineteenth-century German music – still in large part the model
for the concert (or museum) culture of classical music today. However, his study of the idea
trails off with reflections on the ‘musicality’ of French symbolism (Mallarmé) and the late-
Romantic legacies of Wagner, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Implicitly, with the collapse of a
Romantic world-view after the First World War, the prestige of upper-case Absolute music also
waned, even if the persistence of the Classical–Romantic musical canon still invites it as an
appropriate aesthetic mindset for audiences and critics of that canon.
For some time now musicologists, responding to the promptings of postmodern critical
thinking of one kind or another, have been vigorously questioning whether absolute music does
still represent an ‘appropriate aesthetic mindset’, even for our continued contemplation of the
classical music canon. The question of the historical limits of the concept, then, can be put both
to the conditions of new musical production and to the reception (in whatever genres or cultural
spheres) and study of the Western art–music canon after the twentieth century.
The first line of interrogation here would raise the question as to whether any music besides the
Western art–music canon might also be considered absolute music – for example, styles of
improvisatory modern (‘free’) jazz in the tradition of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, the
electric guitar virtuosity of Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix, some approaches to electronic
composition, ambient or environmental music, ‘sound art’ or any other practice that primarily
invites contemplation of a ‘pure’ musical sound-object. The answer should probably be a
qualified ‘yes’, although the topic deserves separate study, taking into account the specific
cultural environments of any one of these types. 16
The second line of interrogation would direct us to the work of musicologists such as Susan
McClary or Lawrence Kramer and its influence on musical scholarship over the last two decades.
The large-scale reaction against modernist formalism in the arts – and more particularly in
academic criticism of the arts as typified by mid-century ‘New Criticism’ that limited
interpretation to ‘work-immanent’, preferably structural data – rapidly infiltrated musical
scholarship after the 1980s. Decades of earlier philological scholarship devoted to the
codification of authentic musical texts or formalistic analysis of canonic scores appeared to be
predicated on a doctrine of absolute music reaching back, reasonably enough, to the late
nineteenth-century origins of the discipline. Rebellion against the doctrine and the modes of
scholarship predicated on it took various forms, sharing the aim of revealing the cultural
contingencies of many different ‘classical’ works. Gender roles and stereotypes, constructions of
sexuality and desire, master narratives of self and other, politics of national identity,
psychoanalytic programs, figurations of the body and much else were revealed as active subtexts
of musical works long suppressed by the ideology of pure, non-referential music – subtexts of a
canon whose very superiority resided in its supposed autonomy from the rest of human affairs.
Much of the meaning that was teased out of the canon in the course of this postmodern critical
turn can, in fact, be identified with the Romantic turn from ‘absolute’ to ‘Absolute’ music. 17
When Susan McClary, for instance, reads in the first movement of Brahms’s Third Symphony
the narrative of a tonally compromised Romantic-heroic protagonist (the A of the first subject
providing a psychological catalyst analogous to the famous C of Beethoven’s Eroica ),
negotiating the seductive wiles of melodic stasis and otherness while struggling to define himself
in contrast to an overweening patriarchal structural order, she is supplying plausible
metaphorical terms for what made this symphony ‘meaningful’ to Hanslick, in comparison to the
merely pleasant diversion of the ‘Posthorn’ Serenade. Granted, Hanslick demurred to explaining
the symphony in terms of ‘ballads or novels’, and his resulting critical impasse illustrates the
initial, properly Romantic conception of music as ‘Absolute’ in the sense of conveying meaning
that is detailed, densely textured, but inscrutable (McClary 1993). (Hanslick also fails to mention
the A .) When Hermann Kretzschmar, a somewhat younger colleague of Hanslick, cited by
McClary, identifies the second theme of the Brahms movement as a Delilah-like odalisque with
dubiously narcotic power, he is betraying the code of ‘Absolute’ ineffability, but at the same
time responding to the challenge of that code. The Romantic ‘Absolute’ continually dares the
listener to interpret its secret language, while threatening that such an act may shatter the
beautiful illusions he or she beholds in its shimmering mirage.
Upper-case Absolute music, born as it were under the sign of Beethoven’s symphonies and E.
T. A. Hoffmann’s criticism, has thus perhaps always gravitated towards a condition ‘between
absolute and program music’. Attempts to uncover layers of semantic, social, political or
gendered meaning in earlier instrumental music face different challenges. McClary’s reading of
subversive behaviour in the concertante continuo part of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto
profits from a clearly exceptional feature (the massive harpsichord cadenza), considered against
the norms of the Baroque concerto. When Leo Treitler describes the expressive nuances of the
Andante con moto of Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 in E , K. 543, in terms of a psychological
narrative, he is also pointing out – in fact, explicitly so – that the transition to a Romantic culture
of absolute (‘Absolute’) music was underway in Mozart’s late instrumental works (Treitler
1988). Recognizing an audible ‘staging of the body’ in Mozart’s late Divertimento for string trio,
K. 563, Lawrence Kramer presses harder against the dividing line between autonomous musical
‘beauty’ and conscious expressive signification (Kramer 1995, 25–32). In this case,
representative of many similar cultural interventions in absolute music on the part of modern
scholars, the critical strategy permits us to distinguish between what is going on in the music
itself – essentially absolute and self-sufficient? – and the critic’s licence to hear exemplifications
of physical or cultural phenomena outside of the score. Rather than questioning the aesthetic
autonomy of the music, the reading is a rhetorical performance that relies, as rhetoric, on the
ability to persuade its audience to adopt a particular perspective.

***
As Roger Scruton rightly asserts, ‘the term “absolute music” denotes not so much an agreed idea
as an aesthetic problem’ (Scruton 2013). 18 The problem begins with ascertaining the degree of
aesthetic autonomy that might plausibly be ascribed to a particular musical work or practice.
Since no music exists outside of some cultural context, cultural contingency alone is not useful in
establishing the boundaries of absolute music (unless it were to refute the concept altogether).
For practical purposes, music involving any kind of a verbal text, beyond generic titles and
performance directions, should be excluded from the category, although it is reasonable to make
distinctions regarding the substantive role of the text in the production and reception of the music
in question. It is certainly reasonable to distinguish between instrumental music that operates
within a strongly circumscribed set of conventional musical procedures (Bach’s The Art of
Fugue , a Clementi piano sonata) and that which invites, or requires, a range of specific, ‘real-
world’ references (Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory , Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite ). The term
‘absolute music’ emerged at a time when the need for such distinctions began to be felt more
pressingly than before. It was also a time when the practice of culturally unmarked ‘absolute
music’ was giving way to a more self-conscious, culturally marked conception of ‘Absolute
music’. Aesthetic awareness of the earlier practice seems to develop during the eighteenth
century, and continues alongside the emergence of the consciously elevated Romantic aesthetic
and practice in the next century (say, a popular air with variations by Henri Herz alongside the
‘Diabelli’ Variations of Beethoven).
The whole spectrum of ‘absolute’ musical attitudes and practices continued to accompany the
accumulating canon of Western art music into the twentieth century, when the canon and the
accompanying aesthetics became increasingly historicized. 19 In scholarship of the later
twentieth century, however, the two ‘cultures’ of absolute music yield a new division: the fixed
musical text as the autonomous object of musical analysis, as opposed to the ‘open text’ of
cultural-hermeneutic interpretation. Traditionally, the work of professional music theorists is
performed on examples from the Western canon taken in the first sense, while increasingly the
work of musicologists (if it still concerns that canon) is performed in the second sense. ‘Post-
canonic’ Western art music, for its part, continues to cultivate both autonomous and
heteronomous tendencies inherited from the Romantic era, though it is seldom inclined to forgo
the prestige of the upper-case Absolute.
In glossing a series of remarks from Igor Stravinsky, famous for his dismissal of the Romantic
fetish of music as ‘expression’, Richard Taruskin draws attention to a characteristically high-or
late-modernist doctrine of ‘the music itself’. This certainly designates music as an isolatable
aesthetic object worthy of close analytical scrutiny. Taruskin associates Stravinsky’s idea of ‘the
music itself’ with his turn to serialism in the 1950s, asserting that ‘it has nothing to do with the
nineteenth century’s “absolute music,” with which it is now often mistakenly interchanged’
(Taruskin 1997, 365–8). ‘For the absoluteness of absolute music,’ Taruskin continues, ‘as
Wagner (yes Wagner) first envisioned it, was an absolute expressivity, not an absolute freedom
from expression.’ The remark illustrates how completely the later Romantic–metaphysical sense
of ‘Absolute’ music has come to dominate usage, even though Wagner himself used the term
almost exclusively to designate musical practice divorced from the rest of culture – indeed, just
‘the music itself’. For late Stravinsky and the high-modernists of the generation of Pierre Boulez,
Milton Babbitt and the Darmstadt school, the ‘first culture’ of absolute music had returned with a
vengeance, or we might say, with an attitude. Music was now provided with a pithy retort to that
impertinent question, Sonate, que me veux-tu ?: ‘Nothing – who cares if you listen?’ Even if this
is a contested caricature of musical high modernism, it suggests an extreme form of ‘absolutism’
that synthesizes aspects of both our traditional cultures, the empirical-formalist emphasis on pure
sounding object and a belief in music’s elevation above quotidian human affairs.
The strength of the term ‘absolute music’, despite the continual fluctuations of usage, lies in
the way it forces some determination on the part of the user (listener) as to what range of things
he or she brings to the music in question, and what range of things she or he is inclined to take
away. Questions of musical expression, signification and value, the ontology of musical form,
text and work will always be with us, and the variety of such questions is to be celebrated, not
bemoaned. The concept of absolute music remains a necessary compass in navigating our
bearings in relation to repertoire of all kinds, in deciding what it means to us as ‘just music’,
what kinds of things we might add to or subtract from that figure, and in analysing virtually any
of our beliefs about what music does.

Notes
1 For the text of Hoffmann’s review, see Charlton 1989, 234–51; the later redaction published in Part 1 of Kreisleriana (1814)
as ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’ is also included, 96–103. The latter, as translated by Oliver Strunk, can also be found in
Treitler 1998, 1193–98.
2 Fontenelle’s famous question seems to have circulated as a timely bon mot after the middle of the eighteenth century. Its
citation in the entry ‘Sonata’ in Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de Musique (Paris: chez la Veuve Duchesne, 1768, 444–5), where
Rousseau contrasts the aesthetic claims of vocal and instrumental music, has probably most contributed to its canonization.
(Rousseau mentions it as a conversational, rather than published, remark.)
3 On this general argument in Wagner’s writings, and its parallels in contemporary critical thought on music, see Grey 1995,
chapters 1 and 2.
4 Nick Zangwill, to cite one example, speaks of Hanslick’s ‘purist stance against opera’, although this has no bearing on his
project of remounting Hanslick’s case against ‘emotions’ as the content of music in terms of contemporary analytic-
philosophical aesthetics (Zangwill 2004, 30). Even Carl Dahlhaus commits this error in Chapter 2 of The Idea of Absolute
Music when he writes: ‘Hanslick, in appropriating Wagner’s term ‘absolute musical art’, did just the opposite [of Wagner],
reverting to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s thesis that pure instrumental music was the ‘true’ music and represented the goal of the
history of music’ (Dahlhaus 1989, 27). Moreover, the quoted phrase (‘reine, absolute Tonkunst’) is, of course, Hanslick’s
version, not a version ‘appropriated from Wagner’. Neither Hanslick nor Hoffmann claim that instrumental music ‘represents
the goal of the history of music’.
5 On the deleted passage, see Dahlhaus 1989, 28; Bonds 1997, 414–16; and Bonds 2012.
6 ‘Wer will nun auf Beethoven das sein, was dieser auf Haydn und Mozart im Gebiete der absoluten Musik war? Das größte
Genie würde hier nichts mehr vermögen, eben weil der Genius der absoluten Musik seiner nicht mehr bedarf.’
7 A problem with Payzant’s rendition of this famous phrase is that the word ‘tonal’ in modern English usage connotes features
of the major-minor diatonic ‘tonal’ system as codified since the seventeenth century, while the German word ‘Ton’ and its
derivatives (‘tönen, tönend’) connote musical sound-material more generally (even if, for Hanslick and his contemporaries,
such material was inevitably construed as ‘tonal’ also in the more restricted sense).
8 In the original this passage reads: ‘Es ist ein specifisch Musikalisches. Darunter verstehen wir ein Schönes, das unabhängig
und unbedürftig eines von außen her kommenden Inhaltes, einzig in den Tönen und ihrer künstlerischen Verbindung liegt.
Die sinnvollen Beziehungen in sich reizvoller Klänge, ihr Zusammenstimmen und Widerstreben, ihr Fliehen und sich
Erreichen, ihr Aufschwingen und Ersterben, – dies ist, was in freien Formen vor unser geistiges Anschauen tritt und als schön
gefällt’ (Hanslick [1854] 1990, 74). Despite the many large and small emendations made to the text by Hanslick across the
many editions that appeared in his lifetime (as indicated in Strauss’s edition), this whole passage notably remained
unchanged.
9 Schopenhauer does, in fact, distinguish between the justifiable use of music to set vocal texts (where the music provides an
appropriate if not exclusively necessary ‘counterpoint’ to the text) and programmatic or ‘imitative’ music, meaning for him
mainly musical imitations of natural phenomenon. These miss the point of music in trying to operate like poetry or painting,
i.e. in representing the phenomenal world.
10 Wagner’s original epithet (translated here) was ‘sinnlose Köpfe’. In the published version of the text Franz Brendel, editor of
the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , seems to have modified this to read ‘the advocates of an absolute music clearly do not know
what they are talking about’ (Wagner 1887, Vol. 5, 191).
11 ‘While applying a technique that had its origins in text setting’, the ricercare, by exhaustively exploring transpositions and
permutations of a single subject, has ‘clearly and deliberately transcended those origins and has entered the utopian realm of
abstracted technique’ (Taruskin 2005, 610).
12 Excerpts of Michaelis’s essays in the Allegemeine musikalische Zeitung are translated in le Huray and Day 1988, 199–205.
13 The discussion of the Third Symphony quoted from in this paragraph extends from 361 to 366. Gooley 2011, 313–15 cites
this review of the Third Symphony premiere as an example of Hanslick’s methods of negotiating between establishing a
consensus with his readership and at the same time instructing them in matters of taste and judgement, especially of new or
challenging works.
14 The phrase ‘between absolute and program music’ has been invoked in modern critical scholarship above all with reference to
the role of topical-characteristic and narrative traits in the symphony from Beethoven to Mahler, as well as elements of
generic and formal hybridity. See, for example, Wiora 1963, Finscher 1979 and Newcomb 1984. The aesthetic implications of
these intersections are also discussed in Dahlhaus 1989, chapter 9 (‘The Idea of the Musically Absolute and the Practice of
Program Music’): 128–40.
15 For a summary of the terms of Kant’s aesthetics and music’s ambiguous position in the Critique of Judgement , see Ginsborg
2011, especially the section on ‘Kant’s alleged formalism’, 334–36, as well as Neubauer 1986, chapter 13, ‘Kant and the
Origins of Formalism’, 182–92.
 16 Some preliminary considerations relevant to the question can be found in Davies 1999 and Gracyk 1999. Within the culture of
Western modernist art music the experimental tradition from John Cage back to the Italian ‘futurists’ would have to be
considered. Early in the twentieth century Feruccio Busoni invoked the term ‘absolute music’ (without necessarily
envisioning later experimental let alone popular practices) to mean a new, improvisatory practice unfettered by conventions of
scale, tonality, ‘textbook’ form, or the orchestral instrumentarium. ‘Absolute’ in this sense means absolutely free, unbounded.
See Knyt 2012.
17 Similarly, the musical meditations of Vladimir Jankélévitch, which have attracted renewed attention under a broadly
postmodernist aegis, are strongly grounded in the second, Romantic-metaphysical culture of absolute music, inflected with a
Franco-Slavic accent in place of the traditional Germanic one. See Jankélévitch, 2003, and the panel Gallope et al . 2012.
18 Scruton’s otherwise useful resumé of the ‘aesthetic problem’ erroneously attributes the term itself to the Romantic critics of
the 1790s and early 1800s, none of whom, of course, used it.
19 Sponheuer 2005 outlines two directions the idea of absolute music has taken in ‘post-Romantic’ culture: contemporary art
music adopts a formalist stance, relating to the ‘first culture’ described above, while the public at large remains committed to
the Romantic-metaphysical view (although it seems unclear whether that can be distinguished here from the traditional
‘aesthetics of feeling’, as writers from Hanslick to Dahlhaus have been at pains to do).

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 4
Program music
James Hepokoski

Chess does not tell stories. Mathematics does not evoke emotions. Similarly, from the
viewpoint of pure aesthetics, music does not express the extramusical. But from the viewpoint
of psychology, our capacity for mental and emotional associations is as unlimited as our
capacity for repudiating them is limited. Thus every ordinary object can provoke musical
associations, and, conversely, music can evoke associations with extramusical objects.
(Schoenberg 1967, 93)

Schoenberg’s declaration in Fundamentals of Musical Composition affirmed an article of faith

among certain elite sectors of European art-music composition and reception, at least from the
mid-nineteenth century onwards. Within that composer’s art world, heavy with the burdens of
history and the imperative towards greatness, two contrasting ideas about musical content could
be held in tension: the supremacy of music as a self-sufficient art (idealizable, pure sound-
structure) and music’s capability of also calling up sensuous resonances or pictorial things
beyond itself – emotions, moods, images, narratives. Here we have a perennial problem in the
aesthetics of music: ‘formalist’ vs. ‘expressive’ (or sometimes, more controversially,
‘representational’) constructions. How were these to be reconciled? Was a reconciliation even
desirable?
On the one hand, in Schoenberg’s day, ‘from the viewpoint of pure aesthetics’, it seemed
axiomatic for many Western art-music initiates to assert that instrumental music was to be
revered as a language higher than words, set apart from everyday concerns. This tenet endorsed
the aesthetic primacy and self-standing legitimacy of what had come to be regarded as the purely
musical ( das rein Musikalische ), the specific tradition-world of the medium. Such was the
polemical position of musical autonomy, music’s initially Romantic, proud claim to be both
autopoietic (self-perpetuating within its own discursive domain) and untranslatable, exempted
from any ‘corruption into the mundane’ or philistinish attempt to collapse its significance into a
verbal explication or analytical description (Goehr 1998, 6–47; quotation from p. 30). In the
hands of the master composers, it was sometimes believed, pure music, devotionally
contemplated, could become an agent of disclosure, granting access to an otherwise ineffable
experience. (That such ideological convictions arose in specific historical and cultural
circumstances, caught in the swirl of particular interests and agendas, is self-evident.)
On the other hand, the insistence upon music’s specialized, internal concerns was countered by
an awareness of its broader impacts cross-culturally and across larger stretches of time. Most
musical experience, perhaps all of it, is typically intertwined with extramusical (
aussermusikalisch ) factors or impressions: personal or social responses and functions,
imaginative construals, sympathetic affective states, trances and rituals, or representations of non-
musical images. For Schoenberg it was ‘the viewpoint of psychology’ that accounted for such
‘mental and emotional associations’. This was the other aspect of its content, the more traditional
pole of music’s power. ‘Many composers have composed’, he continued, ‘under the urge to
express emotional associations. Moreover, program music goes so far as to narrate entire stories
with musical symbols. There also exist a great variety of ‘characteristic pieces’ expressing every
conceivable mood.’ To be sure, as a latter-day adherent of the metaphysics of music, Schoenberg
endorsed music’s sufficiency as the main thing, regarding these psychological qualities only as
‘secondary effects’ (Schoenberg 1967, 93).
Within the European art-music tradition the terms illustrative music and program music refer
to instrumental compositions that invite their listeners to attend to them with the aim of grasping
their correspondences with (normally) pre-given external images, texts, sounds, situations, ideas,
or narratives of varying degrees of specificity. Into such categories fall Vivaldi’s Four Seasons ,
Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique , Strauss’s Don Quixote ,
Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht , and thousands of other analogously titled compositions. In its
most restrictive sense, the term ‘program music’ is historical. From the mid-1850s onwards it
was promoted by the Liszt Circle – the New German School – as what Carl Dahlhaus
characterized as a ‘catchword for a thought-complex’ ( ein Stichwort für einen Gedankenkomplex
) accompanied by rebellious assertions of artistic progress, the merger of instrumental music with
poetic images, and the right to bold, non-traditional musical and structural experimentation
(Dahlhaus 1988, 372). While broader understandings of the term have been advanced to include
all illustrative music, program music is most scrupulously regarded as that subset of
representational music whose otherwise idiosyncratic formal structures or musical materials are
most readily grasped by mapping the details of the music onto a governing external narrative or
temporal sequence of images. A piece’s backdrop storyline, that is, plays a vital role in helping
one to understand its ongoing musical processes and intended representational content. This is a
distinction made influentially, among many others, by Otto Klauwell and his generation early in
the twentieth century and insisted upon more recently, for instance, by Roger Scruton in the New
Grove Dictionary (Klauwell 1910; Scruton 2001). 1
Such issues vaulted into prominence in the nineteenth century, when exalted claims about the
transcendental capacities of music were reaching their apogee. Contested versions of the claim
split into the well-known partisan controversies that pitted the flamboyant Lisztians and
Wagnerians against the Brahms Circle’s stern proponents of pure music, with their doctrinaire
‘crusade against musical infidelity’. 2 Famously sympathetic with the Brahmsians was the critic
Eduard Hanslick, promulgating his formalist view of music as essentially ‘sounding forms in
motion’, a purist conviction downplaying the roles of emotion, expression, or representation.
Those familiar battles need not be rehearsed here – Kant, Schopenhauer, Marx, Berlioz, Liszt,
Ambros, Hanslick, Gurney, and all the rest. Musicologically oriented accounts of the issues once
thought to be at stake are legion, and in this essay my interests will take different directions. 3
Nonetheless, current considerations of these topics, found especially within philosophical
aesthetics, proliferate in the aftermath of those once-towering controversies, fortified by the
lingering status claims and academic perpetuation of the now-commercialized ‘great-music’
repertories.
When one peers into the voluminous literature on the history, aesthetics, and practice of
illustrative claims within Western art music (and for practical reasons the present discussion is
limited to that repertory), one is immediately entangled in knotted debates and terminological
tussles. ‘For one reason or another,’ Peter Kivy noted, ‘musical representation has been
problematic ever since there has been musical representation at all’ (Kivy 1984, 123). Not only
are the most basic terms vigorously interrogated—‘imitation’, ‘representation’, ‘depiction’,
‘evocation’, ‘denotation’, ‘expression’, ‘image’, ‘program’, ‘metaphor’, ‘symbol’, ‘topic’,
‘iconicity’, ‘indexicality’, ‘the purely musical’ and dozens of others – but they are also often laid
out in writings designed to confirm or display pre-assumed aesthetic commitments. As Detlef
Altenburg put it, public discourse on this topic has engendered ‘a Babylonian confusion of
tongues’ ( eine babylonische Sprachverwirrung ) (Altenburg 1997, col. 1821).
Nor is it easy to enter the fray neutrally. There has long been a sizeable component of
cultivated musicians ready to cast a cold eye on art music that seeks to conjure up external
images – battles, storms, bird-calls, sunrises, and so on. For some, such a practice was at best a
symptom of the childish stage of the art, a debased or trivialized music incapable of rising above
the level of a mere oddity or diversion. At worst, if taken seriously, it could lead less cultivated
audiences away from a deeper regard for nineteenth- and twentieth-century music’s more purely
expressive or formal claims. Positions along these lines generated persistent attempts to justify or
recuperate such characteristic works as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony – the usual touchstone in
this debate – by marginalizing their pictorial invitations and appealing instead to their internal
musical processes. 4 These views were enhanced in influential sectors of anglophone music
theory and history in the mid-to-late twentieth century, when the professionalizing concerns of
the subdisciplines aspired to the scientism of positivistic fact or technical, syntactic analysis,
regularly sidelining inquiries also into hermeneutics, musical meaning, affective content, or
semantic connotation. Today, all of these and many more are restored as areas of intense
exploration. The new musicology and music theory of the past two decades – more interpretive,
more contextual – is sometimes characterized by its proponents, as Nicholas McKay has put it,
as a season of generational renewal and thaw after ‘the harsh winter of the twentieth-century’s
formalist discontent with [what were regarded as] “outmoded” expressive attitudes to music’
(McKay 2007, 160). With the thaw, pressing questions about musical representation and
program music rise again to the fore.
One aspect of this renewal directs attention toward the important role of the performer or
listener in his or her interactions with instrumental music – dialogic acts of perception and
construal. As I have elaborated in an earlier, more historical study, program music (like absolute
music) is more productively viewed as a hermeneutic genre than as a stable, ontological property
of any individual work. A hermeneutic genre is a familiar, pre-established category of (actual or
anticipated) apprehension concerned with the interpretation of meaning. It is initialized by
personal or cultural interests: how one elects to hear a specific work, influenced, as one wishes,
by such clues as titles or written programs. As a consequence:

The supposed opposition of absolute and program music is a false dichotomy, one forged in
the heat of nineteenth-century polemics…. The seemingly mutually exclusive extremes—
absolute versus programmatic understandings—are not our only choices. Between them lies a
flexible middle ground, a vast zone of nuanced implication that may be tapped in various
ways, depending on the desired point of view. Consequently, what we encounter is a spectrum
of possibilities under which any single piece might be framed for understanding….
Nevertheless, in their interactions with the public, composers sometimes highlighted one or
two of these meaning-strata while downplaying the others. Some works do invite richer
speculation about representational allusion than do others.
 (Hepokoski 2001, 434–5)

Considerations along these lines lead one to conclude that the traditional, philosophically posed
question ‘is pure music (or this or that piece) actually capable of expressing or representing
things outside of itself?’ is unproductive. In part, this is because of the record of historical
evidence: much music of the past has been created and listened to under the belief that it can.
(Schoenberg’s remark quoted at the outset of this chapter underscores that conviction.) The
traditional question’s narrow framing can imply a search for a hardened, essential nature for
‘music alone’ – to draw upon Kivy’s term – an abstraction to be thrown onto the examination
table and considered largely apart from issues of the historicity of such questions or the differing
affective and imaginative experiences of those who interact compellingly, and in multiple ways,
with individual works (Kivy 1990). Some discussions along these lines can strike musicians as
disorientingly unmusical, caught up in a skein of philosophically in-house argumentation, where
concerns to preserve a disciplinarily sterilized wording seem distant from a more imaginatively
attuned musical knowledge and experience.
The many varieties of art music, however, are typically engaged with by performers and
listeners under variable social roles and conditions made available by broader cultural matrices.
We may regard these experiences as total listening situations in which music is never experienced
as isolated or alone – never heard free from the force-fields of expectation, habit, knowledge or
external association. Nicholas Cook has made the same point, adding, ‘It is through the
interaction of music and interpreter, text and context, that meaning is constructed…. It is wrong
to speak of music having particular meanings; rather it has the potential for specific meanings to
emerge under specific circumstances’ (Cook 2001: 180). Within the art-music culture of
listening being considered here, aesthetic absorption and knowledgeable commitment (fired in
part by Schoenberg’s ‘mental associations’) are familiar components of adequate participation.
Listeners set these into motion by sympathetic acts of projection, identification and imagination.
These are the terms in which the program-music question is most productively addressed.
No brief treatment of such topics can do justice to the labyrinthine problems at hand. One is
obliged to simplify, to filter out much that is relevant. What follows are mere glances at three of
the many issues currently in play: titles and other paratexts; topic families; signs, metaphors and
blended spaces. These issues are not conceptually separate. They intersect as complements,
different ways of approaching the same theoretical problem. I conclude by touching on some
practical problems of extramusical implication as confronted within the disciplines of music
history and analysis.

Titles and other paratexts

Sometimes amplified by written programs or other verbal commentaries, evocative titles are
regular features of illustrative music: Haydn’s ‘Representation of Chaos’ in The Creation ,
Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, Debussy’s ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ or ‘Reflets dans l’eau’.
(Here we shall suppose that such verbal descriptors are ones sanctioned by the composer.)
Defending the expressivity and charm of music qua music against the potentially delimiting
aspects of this intermixture, advocates for the non-translatability of purely musical processes –
formalists and anti-representationalists – downplay or disregard the aesthetic functions of these
things. The standard observation is that music, unlike language or painting, is intransitive,
incapable of unequivocally denoting non-musical objects or images, much less asserting
propositions. In Suzanne K. Langer’s once-influential terms, music is an ‘unconsummated
symbol’, lacking an unambiguous referent (Langer 1957, 240–1). 5 One could not know from the
music alone what its putative illustrative intent, if any, might have been. What if the piece had
been given a different title? Or none at all?
On this familiar view, while one cannot rule out the background sway or secondary effect of
titles on our perception, aesthetically it is only the music’s inner coherence and expressivity that
matter. In the final analysis, the title is not an essential part of the work, much less the key to a
crass decoding of what the music really means. Instead, the poetic idea suggested by a title is at
best an initial motivator for the composer, a point of departure or perhaps something fancifully
concocted after the event of composition. One finds such convictions, for instance, in Wagner’s
idea of the verbal, ultimately transcendible ‘form motive’, a conceptual forerunner of Mahler’s
concept of an external program as only a set of descriptive ‘signposts’ or ‘milestones’ of service
mostly to the otherwise mystified, naive beginner, unable to follow the higher reality of his
music’s form, sequence of moods, and verbally inexpressible ‘inner program’. 6
Dahlhaus’s discussion of programmaticism with regard to Beethoven’s Egmont Overture
provides an ingenious (neo-Schoenbergian) suggestion along these lines. Quite apart from the
piece’s potential associative references to the narrative storyline in either Goethe’s play or the
political-historical background to it, Dahlhaus asserts that the music’s motivic logic effects an
‘aesthetic transformation’ in which extramusical connotations are transmuted into purely musical
thought, leaving behind only minimal, perhaps negligible, residues of the original, literary
subject. ‘Abstract musical processes gradually force the programmatic aspect into the
background – admittedly without extinguishing it entirely…. [This is] the transformation of
content into form [‘formal process as formalization’]’ (Dahlhaus 1991, 15). 7 Similarly (though
argued from a thought-world utterly separate from Dahlhaus’s), Scruton’s analytic-philosophical
concept of musical understanding is limited to ‘its meaning as music’ . He puts the matter point-
blank: ‘We can have a considerable, even perfect, understanding of a piece like [Debussy’s] La
Mer while being ignorant of, or dismissive towards, its representational claims’ (Scruton 1997,
131). 8 This declaration seeks to strike at the heart of program music, whose grounding conceit is
that of associative hearing – inviting experiences of intermedial delight or amazement by asking
the listener to blend the ongoing musical ideas with pre-given external images or narratives.
Such views tilt the scales in favour of a ‘musical purism’, postulated a priori, that belittles or
brackets out non-musical aspects of the total listening situation, including the interpretive
psychologies and historical knowledge deployed by style-competent performers or listeners.
More sympathetic to exploring the workings of musical representation, Kivy, in Sound and
Semblance (1984), crafts an appealing explanation for the persistent appeal of this stark
‘antirepresentational thesis’. Confessing that he too is ‘drawn strongly’ to the latter by his
‘musical nature’ – clearly, one that savours the wonders of the musical medium – he nonetheless
concludes that, at bottom, it remains

an extremely useful falsehood. For so strong is the urge, in the West, to give music a subject, a
literary content, a philosophical message, that a proper mean can only be struck, it would
seem, by aiming at the opposite, formalist extreme. Whatever its usefulness, however, a
falsehood it remains.
(Kivy 1984, 216) 9

Those willing to move beyond that falsehood will engage the important play of associative
imagination and psychology as participatory aspects of the total musical experience. Kendall
Walton puts his finger on the central issue: ‘Mere titles often suffice to make music patently
representational; indeed I cannot imagine music which an appropriate title could not render
representational. Music stands ready to take on an explicit representational function at the
slightest provocation’ (Walton 1994, 47). Walton alludes here to the framing functions that,
within literary theory, we can associate with Gérard Genette’s study of paratexts , features of
presentation ancillary to the otherwise unadorned text: titles, intertitles, epigraphs, separate
explanatory notes, dedications, and much more – conditioning mediations between the text and
its readers (Genette 1997). Paratexts are also central to the repertory of music presently under
consideration and particularly to the experience invited by illustrative or program music. Here
the unadorned text is the bare notation (or its acoustic realization), though that text is surrounded
and inflected by a panoply of ‘non-sounding elements’ – paratextual and cultural – necessary for
a rich, historically adequate construal. 10 In Lawrence Kramer’s terms, most musical texts
(including seemingly non-illustrative ones) are accompanied by textual and citational inclusions,
two types of ‘hermeneutic windows’ inviting robust interpretations from those who are drawn to
pursue them (Kramer 1990, 9–10).
Within the field of philosophical aesthetics Jerrold Levinson (1985) has laid out the case for
titles with admirable clarity:

Titles of artworks are often integral parts of them, constitutive of what such works are….
[They] are plausibly essential properties of them, in many cases…. The title slot for a work of
art is never devoid of aesthetic potential; how it is filled, or that it is not filled, is always
aesthetically relevant. (A work differently titled will invariably be aesthetically different.) …
[Titles] serve as presumptive guides to perception of a certain sort.

Most instances of explicitly illustrative music bear what Levinson designated as either a
‘focusing’ or ‘disambiguating’ title-type. The former guides the listener towards the leading
conceptual idea of the work; the latter ‘can serve to fix or endorse one perceptual reading rather
than another’, important ‘if the body of the work is representationally ambiguous [as often within
musical works]’ (Levinson 1985, 23, 24, 35, 36; Kivy 1984, 40 also endorses the disambiguation
function of titles). To this we need only add the obvious, namely, that all relatable paratexts may
be considered under the same line of thought. These include: a composer’s (or authorized
proxy’s) separate, sometimes detailed programmatic explanation of the music (as with Weber’s
Concertstück , Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique , or the composer-approved, published
Musikführer that lead us through the illustrative details of Richard Strauss’s tone poems);
ongoing intertitles distributed throughout the score to indicate what is being currently
represented here or there (as with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons , with its ‘demonstration-sonnet’ lines
intercalated at relevant locations within the individual string parts, Liszt’s Schiller-based Die
Ideale , Smetana’s Vltava or Bartók’s Kossuth ); and suppressed programs that are later discovered
and made public (as with Berg’s Lyric Suite ).
As I have written elsewhere, a titled character-piece for keyboard or a titled concerto, overture
or symphonic poem participates in a tradition wherein the implicit game of intermedial
association is presupposed to be aesthetically significant (Hepokoski 1992). In declining to play
the associative game proposed by the composer one would be – following Levinson’s argument
– listening to an ‘aesthetically different’ composition, even though it would ‘sound the same’. 11
Bracketing out the historically conditioned title of La mer in quest only of its ‘meaning as music
[alone]’ is certainly possible and may be gratifying on its own terms. But it is nonetheless to
construe the work in an aesthetically different sense from that of the more complete conception
offered by the composer. Some listeners may not be troubled by this. From the standpoint of an
enriched hermeneutics, though, titles and composer-intended paratexts – however we might learn
of them – are essential for more thoughtful explorations of the layers of connotational and
cultural implication that such works invite us to consider.

Topic families
Beyond verbal paratexts the question of musical representation extends into the individualized
content and processes of the programmatic work – its succession of musical modules, most of
which, while highly characterized, will not carry explicit labels. How might we interpret their
potentially representational roles? When considering the possible semantic implications within
Western instrumental music, philosophers have typically sought to elucidate the musical sign or
figure not by examining concrete situations of historical practice but rather by interrogating the
logic and persuasiveness of the various theoretical possibilities. Typical is the approach taken by
Stephen Davies, hauling the program-music claim before the analytic-philosophical tribunal. ‘If
music is representational,’ we are told, ‘it must satisfy the general conditions for representation.’
Davies posits four that are ‘necessary’: (1) the composer’s intention to illustrate; (2) a
medium/content distinction (the music should represent something other than music); (3) some
sense of resemblance between the music and what is represented (possibly adapted from Richard
Wollheim’s ‘seeing-in’ theory for pictorial art); and (4) the potentially clarifying role of
conventions. Following an exhaustive review of philosophical positions and their complications,
Davies pronounces the verdict:

For the most part, the richness of music does not arise from its depictive powers…. [though] I
allowed that there may be a degree of depiction in music … based on natural (but
conventionally structured) resemblances…. Music’s power lies more with its expressive than
with its limited representational possibilities.
(Davies 1994, 51–121; quotations from pp. 52–3 and 121) 12

A cleaner, more provocative path through all of this has been cleared in the past three decades
within the discipline of music study proper, particularly (though by no means exclusively) in the
subfields concerned with the historical identification and interpretation of musical ‘topics’. These
are recurring, ‘conventional musical signs, or ‘commonplaces’ of style … familiar, expressive,
rhetorical gestures encoded in referential musical patterns’ (McKay 2007, 160). None of this is
news to music scholars, well aware that the study of musical topoi was proposed in 1980 by
Leonard G. Ratner, who documented several late eighteenth-century types and subdivided them
into topics and styles (Ratner 1980, 9–29). 13 Most of them are readily recognizable: dance-
rhythm identifiers (gavotte, minuet, passepied, gigue, bourrée, contredanse), march, fanfare,
musette, pastoral, hunt, Sturm und Drang, Empfindsamkeit , singing style, brilliant style, learned
style, mechanistic clockwork, French Overture, and others as well. One of several strategies of
that decade to encourage the legitimation of a historically responsible hermeneutics, topic theory
helped the discipline, in Hatten’s words, to begin ‘to recover from the [midcentury] repression of
expressive discourse fostered by a formalist aesthetics’ (Hatten 1994, 228; also quoted in McKay
2007, 161) .
 Ratner’s original list of connotative signifiers opened the door not only to inquiries into the
associative connotations and registers of such topics (Allanbrook 1983) or to a tabulation and
modest expansion of the accepted eighteenth-century ‘universe of topic[s]’ (Agawu 1991, 30)
but also to a broader array of shared, readily understood musical signs within the tradition,
however creatively individualized these commonly shared signs (or types) might have been
realized in any particular work (or token). One might imagine the vast set of such signs to be
arranged on a continuum of musical ostension, ranging, on the one end, from more or less
obvious or onomatopoetic instances (‘sounds like’) to, on the other end, less obvious figures of
conventional or arbitrary association. 14 (Zones within this continuous span might be regarded as
correlates to Peirce’s famous distinctions between the icon, index and symbol.) The easy cases
are the most obviously mimetic ones, musical analogues of actual sounds that in turn call up
associated images: thunderstorms, rushing water, hunting horns, bagpipe drones, bells, bird calls,
animal cries, battle-clashes. All such are the stock-in-trade of the seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century aesthetic of ‘imitation’: Farina’s Capriccio stravagante of 1627 (imitating cat,
dog and hen); Biber’s Sonata violino solo representativa for violin of ( c .1669: nightingale,
cuckoo, frog, hen, quail and cat) and militaristic Battalia (1673); various storm interludes (
symphonies ) in French tragédies lyriques – and in Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’ (along with birds and a
barking dog); and so on.
Moving along the continuum, one finds analogues of slow- or fast-moving actions or motions:
light breezes, sunrises, rippling brooks, spinning wheels, pictorial ascents or descents, sunrises,
rapid, energetic bustle, glistening sparkle, sudden surprises, bucolic placidity, and so on. 15
Further along, these blend into motion- or contour-analogues of human emotions or affects, more
or less standardized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: jubilant fanfare-like effects;
ascending or descending contours with characteristic affective connotations; the major–minor,
slow–fast dichotomies and their emotive implications; in minor, the well-documented lament or
grieving figure (a descending-tetrachord bassline from tonic to dominant, sometimes
chromatically filled in – a type of passus duriusculus – and produced as an ostinato bass); various
standardized depictions of the demonic (or dance of death); accepted folkloric signs or other
national style-identifiers of a people, nation or Volk ; and many others. And on the far end, less
unequivocally, one encounters characteristic signs of triumph or defeat, exultation or manic fear,
struggle, despair, breakthrough, the heroic, the learned, the hymnic, the lyric, the ineffable,
rapturous love, divine grace, and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of others – all standard topical
effects of nineteenth-century music. Far from remaining semantically mute or ineffably cryptic,
asking only for our rapt and reverent silence, much of the instrumental music within the
European tradition is bursting with connotative implication historically inlaid into the style and
waiting to be explored hermeneutically by the imaginative and responsible interpreter.
Individualized topics have musical and cultural histories, spanning the centuries. These may
be considered as topic families extended through historical time, within which they are subject to
social and individual ramifications and modifications. One may trace the tradition of battle-
depictions, for instance, from Janequin’s program chanson, La Bataille de Marignan; La guerre (
c .1520s) and William Byrd’s ‘The Battle’ (1591, from My Ladye Nevell’s Booke ) through many
dozens of subsequent works including Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory and Tchaikovsky’s 1812
Overture , along with several pieces from the twentieth century. Or the topic family of bird-calls
from Janequin through Biber, Vivaldi, Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, Ravel, Delius, Respighi,
Messiaen, Rautavaara ( Cantus arcticus , 1972), and beyond; or storms; or bells; or mechanical
clocks and other gear-and-lever gizmos; or the sea; or dreamlike or enchanted travel by boat
(siciliana? barcarole?, e.g. Edgecombe 2001). Large-scale historical studies have been made of
the musical signs of the pastoral (Jung 1980); of the structural and varied affective connotations
of The Chromatic Fourth during Four Centuries of Music (Williams 1997); and even of musical
depictions of such human gestures as questions (Jessulat 2000). In addition to providing
sophisticated discussions of the historical background and intellectual structure underpinning
topic theory, Raymond Monelle has produced historical and cultural studies of several topic
families and their near-relatives. These include the 6/8, 9/8 or 12/8 galloping gait of the ‘noble
horse’ from c .1800 through such exemplifications as Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’, Wagner’s Ride of the
Valkyries and Sousa’s march, The Washington Post ; the descending half-step pianto (the figure of
tears, grief or wearied sigh); and a book-length historical study of ‘hunt, military, and pastoral’
(Monelle 2000, 41–80 and 2006). The potential list of such inquiries seems endless.
Several points follow – and not a few caveats. First, it is clear that much, perhaps even most,
Western instrumental music participates in a historically conditioned, shared semantic network, a
significant portion of which is at least approachable by topic-family theory, broadly and flexibly
construed. Even though irreducible factors of pure music’s systematic procedures and regulated
traditions are also very much in play, the now stale argument that untexted music – much less
program music or music with titles – is ipso facto incapable of pointing toward recognizable
external referents or affects with cultural connotations is no longer tenable. Conversely, though,
one needs to realize that topic theory, still in its raw and rudimentary phases, by no means
answers all of our interpretive questions. Overplaying its cards can lead to breathtakingly naïve
hermeneutic claims. Second, the universe of topic families, including their many shades and
variants, is far larger and more varied than anyone has yet described. It also includes overlapping
topics and individual figures capable of more than one topical reference. Third, selecting an
appropriate (generalized) topic-label for a given figure is more challenging than might initially
appear. A procedural risk of topic theory is that it can tempt the overconfident interpreter, with a
presumed master-code-book securely in hand, to leap rashly into a quick, reductive labeling. To
do so is to discredit what ought to be a more subtly tinged enterprise. We need to think through
our descriptors critically, sceptically, weighing alternatives, problematizing what we might mean
with such descriptions. Most of the entailments that follow rely on our initial decisions, and
those decisions are often the weak links in the chain. (Let Ratner’s designation of the opening of
the Eroica as a waltz stand as a caution to us all: Ratner 1980, 223.)
Fourth, even when we think that we have identified the proper family of a given figure, we
need to be attentive to the nuances and complications that any individual token of it can present.
It may be that the manner of its realization is more noteworthy than the topic itself. Fifth, merely
identifying a topic or series of topics is not enough. Topic-recognition must never be taken to be
a simple translation of music’s meaning into words. It is only an initial step prompting further
inquiry and careful interpretation, particularly with regard to topical inflection and the narrative
journey through arrays of topical successions. Sixth, compositionally to illustrate or connote
musically is, more often than not, to activate a pre-existing topical tradition of signification and
then to tailor it to one’s own cultural and aesthetic purpose. To access a culturally available style
is to channel the memory of its historical traditions, to draw on the potential of its past history of
connotatively charged accumulations. Any topical study of a single work or set of closely related
works should consider the matter both synchronically and diachronically. Individual evocations
of birds, water, battles, storms, fanfares, hunts, and all the rest may plug more directly into the
topical tradition than into the external referent itself .
This last point questions the extent to which extramusical references are, in fact, extramusical
at all. Monelle deals with the issue from the standpoint of a hard-line semiotics. ‘The status of a
… semiotic entity [such as a musical topic] is not guaranteed by its relation to a real state of
affairs, but by its interpretability within a code.’ Ultimately, the verbal designation for a topic
(storm, pastoral, lament, and so on) can be best grasped as what Peirce called an ‘interpretant’, a
conventional mode of connecting the signifier (or, for Peirce, the ‘representamen’) to the
signified (or ‘object’). In short, musical topics, while codelike, ‘need not refer [directly] to a
‘world’ of extension’ [objective things in the world ‘out there’], and their meaning is not
‘referential’. On the contrary, they must refer to semantic values, defined and implied by the
signs themselves…. The meaning of the musical sign is not to be sought in the world at all. It is
to be sought within the [signifying] system’ (Monelle 2006, 20–32; quotations from 21 and 22).
This is an aggressive claim. Encountering a historically advanced instance of the tempest topic –
Beethoven’s ‘Gewitter, Sturm’ movement from the Pastoral Symphony, say, or Wagner’s Prelude
to Act 1 of Die Walküre – need not be regarded as an ad hoc, individual illustration of any
particular, external storm, nor even of essential storminess, as grounded in the composer’s
personal experience. Rather, on Monelle’s semiotic-absolutist terms, what would be conjured up
is a new realization of the craft-inherited ‘musical storm’: a traditional, vividly imaginative
convention available within the historical codes of music. 16

Signs, metaphors, blended spaces

What if, cutting free from turgid philosophical snarls, we were to take the obvious for granted,
either observationally or on the basis of personal experience? What if we were to concede that
the total listening situations of different listeners and different historical eras have experienced
instrumental music as rich in a multitude of different connotations? Presupposing that we have
an interest more advanced than that of projecting subjective cloud pictures on to the music, the
more trenchant question, beyond the disambiguating functions of titles and topic families,
becomes one of enquiring into the phenomenological or cognitive factors that enable associative
listening in the first place: Schoenberg’s ‘viewpoint of psychology’. That question, too, has been
of growing interest in the past three decades, both inside and outside the professional field of
music study.
Fundamental to all associative listening and relatable to the general, though somewhat
different, question of musical signification is the operation of metaphor: one thing is heard as
being like, or otherwise equated with, another, different thing. This is typically the situation
claimed to be engineered by the musical signs encountered in illustrative music, one that was
already an acknowledged experiential curiosity, a source of wonder, by the mid-eighteenth
century: this stretch of musical sounds ‘is’ a storm (we are urged to hear it as a storm or even,
cross-sensorily, to see it as one in an act of ‘pictorial listening’), even while its musical
significance is by no means reducible only to a storm); another a love-declaration; a third an
image of mourning; another a heroic countenance. 17 Metaphor theory is currently a burgeoning
field, one that is anything but settled. Consequently, one should speak rather of recent metaphor
theories , in contestation not only with each other but also with other modes of approach to such
issues. A number of these theories recast earlier concepts of metaphor and also claim to be
informed, to a greater or lesser degree, by ongoing research in cognitive science, with its interest
in the physiological embodiment of the mind. Only a small number of its relevant aspects (and
even fewer of its intersubjective variants) can be touched upon here .
George Lakoff’s influential ‘contemporary theory of metaphor’, developed also with Mark
Johnson around 1980, marked an important early stage in this inquiry. Lakoff notes, for instance,
that ‘metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not [merely] linguistic, in nature’. ‘The locus of
metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms
of another.’ One can investigate metaphorical expressions in terms of mental processes that
normally operate below the linguistic threshold, ‘mostly unconscious, automatic, and used with
no noticeable effort’. Lakoff and Johnson write of a ‘source domain’ being mapped onto a ‘target
domain’, now-familiar terms in metaphor theory. In one of their paradigmatic metaphorical
expressions, ‘LOVE is [or as] a JOURNEY’ (as in ‘It’s been a long, bumpy road’), ‘ontological’
and ‘epistemic’ characteristics of the richly furnished source domain, JOURNEY, are being
mapped on to the equally rich target domain, LOVE – which in turn is being understood in terms
of sharable features from JOURNEY: ‘mapping knowledge’ about the one, journeys, onto
knowledge about the other, love. Their study, then, deals with the common psychological
activity of ‘cross-domain mapping’ (Lakoff 1993, 202–51; quotations from, in order, 244, 203,
245, and 206–12). 18 For our purposes this is what happens when the domain of music is
associated with that of the different domain of either a sung text (as with word-painting) or an
external, verbalized image, narrative or other paratext.
In The Way We Think (2002), Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner developed further their
concept of ‘conceptual blending’, another way of construing this quasi-automatic cognitive-
metaphorical process. Rather than being restricted to a two-domain model, Fauconnier and
Turner propose a model capable of incorporating, then merging, four or more ‘mental spaces’,
the final one of which is a ‘blended space’ of ‘conceptual integration’. (‘Mental spaces are small
conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and
action … connected to long-term schematic knowledge [that structure them] called ‘frames”)
(2002, 40). 19 Figure 4.1 , adapted from their work, presents a diagrammatic ‘conceptual
integration network’ (CIN) of a generalized, elementary (four-space) version of their proposal.
Partial, corresponding, and relevant structural aspects of two different input spaces (love and
journey, perhaps; or a purely musical figure and an associatable verbal paratext) are to be
blended into a third – represented below them – as a new, blended space of ‘formal integration’,
‘emergent structure’ or ‘meaning. In order to arrive at the blended space, the generic space
deploys a system of selection that can capture or identify attributes, features, or structure that the
two input spaces have in common and on to which it mapped. Additionally, the whole CIN
process of metaphor production can be governed or organized externally, so to speak, by the
application of a frame or set of general principles, accepted as relevant and appropriate, that
govern the interests or procedures of the conceptual blend. 20 Such a model has proven attractive
to musicological and music-theoretical work on musical meaning and metaphor. Discussions and
applications of it to music are found, for instance, in interdisciplinary studies by Nicholas Cook
and Lawrence M. Zbikowski. 21
The relevance of such a concept to music that seeks to be representational – as only one of its
multiple facets – is clear. A pictorial or literary title or other paratext signals that a work is in
dialogue with a historically situated genre (concert overture? programmatic symphony or
concerto? characteristic piece for keyboard? symphonic poem?) within which, traditionally, we
are invited to pursue various degrees of intermedial blending, even while few, if any, would be
so narrow as to claim that that blending alone exhausts the aesthetic interest or meaning of the
piece. Our awareness of the ramifications of the genre – above all, its historical placement, its
traditions, its community-shared directives for reception – can be regarded as providing a
regulative frame for the enterprise.
Figure 4.1 Generalized conceptual integration network (adapted from Fauconnier and Turner
1998, 142–4)

Conceptual acuity within the generic space realizes that we are invited to locate similar
attributes within the two input spaces. We are then asked to correlate aspects of the ‘music
alone’– phrase-to-phrase modular content and longer range structure – with the implications of
the work’s evocative title (or other paratext) through an imaginative recognition of those
topological or structural attributes that both input spaces are imagined to have in common. Cook
refers to these as ‘enabling similarities’ or ‘homologies’. They can include shared specifics of
motion, speed, repetitive gestures, precision, intensity, clash, turbulence, calm, affective posture,
high or low cultural register, and many others. 2 2
Here is where the deployment of topic families or appropriately individualized, ad hoc
gestures renders the situation more complex. From this perspective the ‘music alone’ (what one
hears, the acoustic surface) can be recognized as pre-loaded with historically conditioned
significations: hunt, march, storm, prayer, minor- or major-mode connotations, or any of a vast
number of expressive or representational possibilities. Like dead or frozen metaphors, these
seemingly natural associations of topic are long-established cultural products of earlier
metaphorical blends. Hatten refers to them as immediate, stable and near-literal ‘correlations’ or
‘shared general meanings’, conventions that are ‘inherited from earlier styles’ and can
encompass accrued expressive meanings (‘expressive genres’) broader than topics per se. 23
What one might at first naively imagine to be a simple input of ‘ music alone’ is not ‘music
alone ’ at all. It never is. Instead, even while we may not be cognizant of the underlying factors
at work in these fluid moments of immediacy and transience, we experience music as a richly
complex, affective space that is always already the outcome of several earlier, assimilative
blends that can be (or have been) automatically set into motion in our own acts of listening. Held
up to inspection, the ‘music alone’ turns out to be a generous aggregate of ready-made,
previously blended spaces, historical accretions, standardized connotations – hyperblends of
newer metaphors grounded in multiply accumulated layers of more elemental, prior metaphors –
that are each themselves open to historical and stylistic inquiry. Bristling with interpretive
potential, the rippling thicknesses of these connotative features afford a near-immediate cross-
space mapping of the ‘music alone’ onto the non-musical implications suggested, in yet another
stage of assimilation, by the provided programmatic title or paratext. The result of the mapping is
a new entity, a conceptual hyperblend, understood as an emergent meaning made possible
through the listener’s individualized, performative acts of absorption and imagination. The
mutually correlatable tensions of the music and the analogue-image are brought together into a
differing, unitary mental space of new signification, a newly created metaphorical meaning. 24
An additional aspect of the encounter with any piece of music is the experience of its
sonic/modular change through linear time: attending to the musical process in motion. This
stream-of-change carves out a singular temporal space of affect and image. Changing from
moment to moment as the piece scrolls through time, the processual flow of enacted blends can
be construed, with the help of memory and anticipation (phenomenological retention and
protention), as an impression of coherent, expanding spatiality. Enabling that impression is a
cross-space mapping, in Lakoffian terms, of the common TEMPORALITY as SPACE metaphor,
perhaps inflected also with such schemata as CONTAINER merged with JOURNEY (or even
STORY). With such a realization (while I do not seek to oversimplify a complex matter) the
problematics typically associated with the issue of musical narrative can be recast. When the
impression of narrativity occurs in music, it is the result of the production of a different mode of
conceptual integration. And again, it is one typically invited by the program-music composer. 25
(I revisit the question of linearity in the final section of this chapter.)
The common, spatial impression of the blended-space end-product has been noted in differing
ways. For philosopher Kendall Walton, the ‘representational arts’ in general are characterized as
fictional ‘work worlds’ built upon ‘props’ in ‘games of make-believe’. Even non-representational
music is experienced as having ‘spatial perspectives’ construable as engrossingly subjective,
intimate ‘game worlds’ of ‘imagined feelings’ (Walton 1990; 1994, 56, 59). For musicologist
and cognitive theorist Eric F. Clarke, the final experiential product is a ‘virtual object that I hear
as having a bodily character’, one with ‘virtual agency’ and ‘virtual motion’ readily attributed to
it. The performer’s or listener’s willing absorption into an ‘environment’ of ‘virtual reality’
encourages and rewards a close personal identification with these musical blends and processes
(Clarke 2005, 182–8). Even more broadly, all of this resonates synergistically with music theorist
Robert Hatten’s extended semiotic studies of the embodied nature and communicative potential,
for style-competent listeners, of ‘musical gesture’, defined as an ‘energetic shaping through time’
and a ‘movement (implied, virtual, actualized) interpretable as a [conventionalized] sign … [and]
marked as meaningful … biologically and/or culturally’ (Hatten 2004, 1, 93, 125). 26 And much
of this, with some allowance for flexibility, can also be read as compatible with Lawrence
Kramer’s recent insistence on the mutual, deeply subjective interaction of music and listener,
with the latter ‘hearkening’ to the call of music and, in effect, lighting the music up (
Aufleuchtung ) with a sympathetic response, hearing music under an aspect. For the humanist
Kramer, however, the semiotic route, aspiring to science and objectivity, misses the point:
‘Semiotic models suggest that expressions signify or symbolize feelings without requiring their
presence in either sender or receiver.’ Instead, Kramer insists that we need to realize instead the
indispensable role of participatory subjectivity, to understand that it is only ‘that openness, which
coincides with the necessary mutuality of the expressive act and the reply that reexpresses it,
[that] marks the point of theoretical sufficiency’ (Kramer 2012, 156). 27

Beyond cloud pictures: historically aware hermeneutics

Topic and metaphor theories remind us that music, as encountered in total listening situations,
harbors a richness of potential implication that can be experienced and reflected upon in a variety
of ways. The question of whether instrumental art music can be legitimately associated with
cross-sensory images or deeply felt personal responses has been eclipsed by larger questions of
how such commonly intuited associations happen and what we are to make of them. At first
glance, the ease with which such associations can arise might suggest that the process is
inevitably random or casual, uncontainable, merely personalized and arbitrary. But listeners vary
in terms of interests and interpretive expertise. They differ in what they bring to the place of
encounter and for which larger purposes that encounter is sought. For a more professionalized
sector of listeners, particularly, though not exclusively, those invested in the disciplines of music
history and music theory, the interpretation of musical texts in a historically and analytically
responsible way is an issue of paramount concern.
The interpretation of such texts is a fraught and multilayered affair. It involves attending to the
problematics of negotiating between our own, limited horizons and the contrasting ones that, for
specific purposes, produced the historical texts under examination. It can entail the generation of
potentially persuasive reconstructions of an imagined compositional intention, itself a complex
and methodologically charged issue. And it demands the adducing of reasoned arguments on
behalf of the latent implications within the text, setting forth a proposed meaning beyond a
work’s merely personalized significance-for-me. Even while we might be attracted to topic and
metaphor theory as helping to bolster or legitimize our willingness to embrace the enterprise of
hermeneutics, we also confront professionalized constraints that challenge our natural tendency
to believe our first impressions of the recognizable pictures (emergent meanings, blended spaces)
that we think that we see in the clouds. To get a sense of some of these issues within the question
of illustrative music, we might do well to revisit some basic concepts, ones that will, in the end,
drive us back into the realm of historical musical structures and technical processes: a necessary,
disciplinary grasp of how compositions are crafted in the workshop .
We recall that the term ‘program music’ can be restricted to those works with defensible
narrative claims, to those pieces that invite us to map their presented temporal successions, with
varying degrees of specificity, on to a presumed or given external narrative. Program music, that
is, is a subset of the broader category of illustrative music. To be sure, all such distinctions are
blurry, in part because several types of seemingly abstract works within a tradition – perhaps
most notably, the sonata tradition – can also be construed as implicitly narrative in their pursuits
of generic, cadential goals and, in most cases, of eventual resolutions (Hepokoski and Darcy
2006, especially 250–4, 306–7, 312–16, 336–42). This was emphatically the case in the
nineteenth century, when issues of illustration, program and structure were inflated into grand
subjects of aesthetic debate, and when partisan compositional agendas increasingly claimed to be
allied with musical progress.
Most discussions of musical representation (or emotional resonance, for that matter) center on
what I call the vertical dimension of an isolatable musical module: a single passage’s immediately
experienced connotative significance, the illustrative moment considered apart from the role of
its placement(s) within the larger composition. But program music additionally invites the
listener to consider the narrative implications in the context of its horizontal placement within an
environment of situational change from module to module. What is that moment’s role among
the work’s formal processes? What does it mean to have this musical module situated there (as
opposed to elsewhere) – and following, say, that module? In the case of sonata-based works, what
is the way in which that or that module has been placed into a dialogue with that structure’s
generic action-spaces?
One complicating factor is that, quite apart from its representational ambitions, such music
also has its own traditions and norms qua music to unfold within its own domain. With paratexted
music we are asked to navigate between (at least) two sets of often-complex relational networks:
(1) the music’s external framing under extramusical concepts (poetic ideas, implied
representations, topic families, potential analogical narratives) and (2) the music’s simultaneous
relation to the historical tradition of how this or that genre of music is to be crafted (the work’s
dwelling within an ongoing, definable and relatively autopoietic musical world). The nineteenth-
century program-music game explored the interaction of these two networks. While either can be
conceptually isolated for heuristic purposes, the game’s larger purpose was to engage both of
them dialogically and to encourage the listener to do so as well. The temptation to avoid is to
overweigh either the one network or the other – or worse, imprudently to discard one of them
illegitimate or negligible. Instead, we should strive to keep both sides of the binary continually in
play – and in tension – even as we temporarily tip the balance this way or that, depending on the
stretch of music that we are considering and the interpretive concerns at hand. This demands a
constant nuancing, seeking always imaginatively to grasp a historically viable concept that could
have been capable of generating a ground-plan for the details of what one hears within a musical
work. This is a fundamental hermeneutic challenge: we need responsibly to imagine what
broader network of ideas might have lain behind the compositional impulse that could account
for everything that one encounters in the final product. Close music-technical analysis matters –
a great deal.
In cases where paratextual evidence is absent or incomplete, and where there is nonetheless a
reasonable implication of a background poetic idea steering important aspects of the composer’s
musical choices, we might put forward the cautious (albeit fallible) suggestion of a viable
rhetorical analogue that functions productively, metaphorically, at the core of the music. Such an
imaginative analogue proposes a generalizable concept under which what is presented to us on
the acoustic surface would make sense – would cohere as a whole. Always challengeable and
provisional in its status as a proposed reading (not an objective discovery), a viable rhetorical
analogue is subject to a number of heuristic limitations. The analogue should be: (1) historically
plausible (one could make a case that the conceptual analogue, broadly construed, was indeed
part of the generalized culture and life-world of the composer; one could imagine the composer
to have been aware of such ideas); (2) apt or relevant with regard to the work at hand (more
locally, a reasonable connection might be found between this specific work’s range of concerns
and the larger cultural world available at the time); and (3) homologous in close detail to the
work’s musical processes (phrase-by-phrase mappable on to the work; supported by the local,
ongoing musical details at virtually all points of close reading).
While music and its claims inhabit a domain separate from words or images, in paratexted
music we are asked to set up a topical or metaphorical relationship between them. One must be
clear: music does not (and cannot) present ideas or images in the manner that words do. What it
can do within its own domain, though, is to cultivate expressive musical analogues to those ideas
or images. But how? Setting aside in this discussion the equally important issues of music’s
political roles of affirmation or resistance – its ideological and social functions – music is a
sensuous and temporal medium historically bound up with elemental human gesture and
colorations of mood. As also noted by others, the sense of ‘mood’ suggested here may be
relatable to such existential aspects of consciousness as Heideggerian Stimmungen (‘attunements’
of mood), which are not yet attached to intentional objects, as are emotions (Heidegger 1996,
126–34, 312–17). 28
While any adequate consideration of music and mood would take us far afield, we might at
least propose that what music can do (or at least what it was claimed to be able to do) is to light up
the successive affects of a generalized or verbal paratext. It can do this by means of its own
potential for being interpreted analogically, a potential that we as historical listeners are typically
willing to project upon it in search of communicative wholeness and gestalt coherence – all as
part of playing the game properly. Music can provide an experiential analogue to an implicit or
explicit paratext. In turn this can be experienced as a heightened, interiorized richness accessible
only within the domain of music. It remains an analogue to experience that nonetheless, and on
its own terms, asks also to be grounded within the network of relations that it establishes with
accepted musical practice. In Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream , for
instance (where both Marx and the later Mendelssohn provided us with a guide to what each
section of the piece had sought to illustrate – ‘the dance of the elves’, the court of Theseus, the
hunting party, the wanderings of the young lovers, Bottom and the rude mechanicals, and so on),
29 one is to imagine that the affective and topical experiences of the relevant programmatic
concepts are lit up sensuously by extended paragraphs of music – by a succession of discrete
musical tableaux that also operate dialogically (make sense) within their historical traditions of
sonata-structure, harmony, form, orchestration, and so on. They remain experiential,
representative analogues within an essentially musical experience, and it is only through that
musical experience, historically grasped, that they can be adequately interpreted.
So where does this leave us? Music can be relatable to an accompanying or implicit paratext in
any number of ways. A composer’s musical choices are invariably made in dialogue with
established musical traditions. These choices are not only piece-specific but also relational, since
they put to work individualized tokens of readily recognizable families of community-shared
signs, patterns, topics, expectations, and the like. A composer’s choices reach into the history of
his or her materials, and as we explore a work’s acoustic content that history should be
thematized, not bracketed out. Reflecting on a composer’s choice of musical material, we need to
be aware of how and why, within a concrete historical situation that also bears exploration, the
composer is accessing, inflecting, and sometimes even exceeding commonly encountered generic
norms to produce particular expressive or illustrative effects.
Among the musical strategies through which an impression of adequacy can be enabled and
constrained are those that we have considered earlier, along with a few others: titles, topic or
affect families (established historically and culturally within the tradition, and including such
aspects as tempo, orchestration, harmony, counterpoint, dynamics and articulation), intertextual
allusions to individual moments (or sounds) of past esteemed or canonic works within the
tradition (such as Tchaikovsky’s rewriting in Francesca da Rimini of the mid-nineteenth-century
‘inferno’ topic – not to mention the contrasting love music – initially encountered in Liszt’s
earlier Dante Symphony), ad hoc thematic identifiers (the contrasting Max and Agathe themes of
Weber’s Freischütz Overture) and leitmotifs. All of these strategies are vertical in their immediate
connotations. They ask for a sympathetic recognition of representation within the ongoing flash
of the now. As such, they function as musical lightings-up of that now and its paratextual
implications. For analytic and hermeneutic purposes we should construe these aspects not
exclusively as individualized or unique expressions but rather as emplotted arrangements of
generically standardized postures or conventions. When the eventual sonic product as a whole
(the work) is allied to a complex paratext (as with the extreme case, say, of Strauss’s Also sprach
Zarathustra ), all of this can become extraordinarily dense in its moment-to-moment layers of
implication.
This brings us once again to the final complicating factor: the sophisticated, ‘purely musical’
aspect of the horizontal; the linear and generic implications provided by the composer’s temporal
arrangement of the vertical nows into a coherent musical shape – or form – usually construable
as unfolding in dialogue, however loosely, with the flexible norms of a historically familiar
musical genre. What is required of us here is an informed, historical knowledge of the generic
conventions within which the individual work asks to be interpreted (or, in ambiguous cases, at
least seems to ask to be interpreted). This implicates the basic principle of reading form
dialogically, within the flexible norms and established models appropriate to the composition’s
time and place. One needs to be aware of each potential genre’s acceptable range of conventions
and deviations. In difficult cases we are obliged to decide what the relevant genre (or set of
genres?) is with which the given work is most likely to be in dialogue. 30 It seems clear, for
instance, that sonata-form conventions, however loosely construed, are still ones operative in the
backgrounds of such deformational works as the first movement of Berlioz’s Harold en Italie or
Wagner’s Overture to Der Fliegende Holländer , while the ritornello- or rondo-like aspects of the
episodic successions of Smetana’s Vltava declare early on in the piece that they are unfolding
outside of the interpretive guidelines of sonata form.
In sum: in all programmatic or illustrative works there is also, within the historical tradition, a
purely musical dimension – horizontally. There is a dialogical musical narrative to be read within
its own domain: forms, pattern-types, arrangements, resolutions, standard realizations or
deformations thereof, and so on. In dialogue with historical genres that provide guidelines for
interpretation, these narratives can be grasped only horizontally, in terms of strictly musical
conventions. The analyst or commentator is then to place that musically illuminated horizontal
process into a metaphorical dialogue with determinative features of the relevant paratext (or, as it
is often characterized, the ‘description under which’ we are invited to apprehend it). Ultimately,
both vertical and horizontal implications need to be merged with sensitivity and flexibility to
produce a reading (not a solution once and for all) that is, at bottom, a viable rhetorical analogue
to what is presented within any such individual piece. 31
That said, the question of the specificity of one’s reading (not to mention its degree of
certainty) still looms large. The practice of interpreting the connotations of illustrative music is
not one in which the scientific-proof approach is applicable. Rather, it is an area for historically
informed hermeneutics and analysis – individual readings of works, not discoveries of facts
embedded in the fabric of the work. In such inquiries, where interpretive stumbles are all too
frequent, one might do well to keep in mind the admonition of Aristotle in the Nicomachean
Ethics (book 1, chapter 3 ):

Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for
precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of
the crafts…. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premises to
indicate the truth roughly and in outline…. It is the mark of an educated [person] to look for
precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.

Notes
1 Klauwell 1910, v–vi: While other construals are defensible, program music, ‘in the strict[est] sense’, is that in which the form
and content of the piece, in purely musical terms, would be ‘an unsolvable puzzle’ without the supplied program. Scruton
2001, 397: ‘Properly speaking … programme music is … music that seeks to be understood in terms of its programme; it
derives its movement and its logic from the subject it attempts to describe.’ The all-too-familiar, negative variant of this
construal asserts that a program is often offered to cover up defects in purely musical structure or logic.
2 The characterization is that of Hatten 1994, 232.
3 The opposing nineteenth-century arguments were more complicated and nuanced than might initially be imagined. For
German-language readers, the extended historical summary of the whole question of program music in Altenburg 1997 is
magisterial, providing a commanding overview of the changing concepts of the attendant issues and complications. See also
Dahlhaus 1988, 365–85. For English-language readers, among the numerous brief treatments of the debate over music and
representation in the nineteenth century are Dahlhaus 1982, 52–63 and 1989, 128–40; Goehr 1998, 6–47; and Hepokoski 2001.
4 On this point (here considering Tovey’s defence of Beethoven’s Pastoral ) Richard Will’s remarks are on the mark: ‘Like
many of his contemporaries, [Tovey] assumes that programmatic music is based on ‘extramusical’ considerations such as the
narrative structure of programs rather than the ‘musical’ principles that underpin absolute music, whose presence in the
Pastoral , conversely, reveals that it is not an unusual mixture of music and language but a ‘perfect classical symphony’….
[But this leads to the position that] any work using a sonata or other familiar form … is [to be] considered absolute music with
an irrelevant text. The works are thereby defended from the accusations of formal incoherence leveled at programmatic works
by writers like Eduard Hanslick, Edward Dannreuther, or Tovey … but they are also put decisively in the realm of the
ineffable’ (Will 2002, 19–20). (See again Klauwell 1910 and Scruton 2001.)
5 Summaries of Langer are also readily located. See, for example, Åhlberg 1994.
6 Foundational for any discussion of this issue, Mahler’s famous – and conflicted – comments from 1896, 1897 and 1902 on the
utility of printed programs for his early symphonies may be found in Martner 1979, 177–81, 212–14 and 262. ‘Inner-program’
claims, insisting that his music’s ultimate content resides in a quasi-spiritual ‘mood’ or ‘residue of mystery’, are made in letters
to Max Marschalk (20 March 1896) and Max Kalbeck (January 1902). Verbal ‘signposts’ and ‘milestones’ (preliminary aids
within what is more truly a musical sphere of ‘obscure feelings, at the gate that opens into the ‘other world’) are adduced in a
letter to Marschalk on 26 March 1896 and compared with ‘a map of the heavens, so that [the listener] can get a picture of the
night sky with all its luminous worlds. But any such [programmatic] exposition cannot offer more. People have to have
something already known to refer to if they are not to lose their way.’
A contextualized précis of Mahler’s views, along with a discussion of the term ‘form motive’ (from Wagner’s 1857 essay,
‘Über Franz Liszt’s Symphonische Dichtungen’), may be found in Dahlhaus 1989, 90–1. On Liszt, Wagner and the form
motive, see Hepokoski 2001, 433–4. For similar historical issues and recent discussions, see also Hepokoski 1998. A helpful
pathway leading beyond some of the program- and/or absolute-music snares in Mahler is provided in Micznik 2007.
7 For a discussion interrelating the Egmont story’s implied narrative action with the work’s musical structure, see Hepokoski
2002.
8 Scruton’s anti-representationalist argument was initially laid out in his frequently cited, earlier essay, ‘Representation in
Music’, Philosophy 51 (1976), 273–87. A telling reply to any such assertion about ‘musical understanding’ may be found in
Kivy 1984, 148.
9 ‘Musical purism’ is also a term associated with Kivy. Kivy’s book is a strong, extended defense of musical representation.
See also the useful reply to it in Dempster 1994.
10 Cf. Roman Ingarden’s argument that some ‘nonsounding elements’ belong to the ontology of the musical work: 1986, 83–
115.
11 This position is explorable through the classic philosophical question of the identity of indiscernibles: things are not identical
if they do not have all of their properties in common. Cf. the famous exemplification of a different case of non-identical
indiscernibles in Jose Luis Borges’s 1944 short story, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ .
12 Scruton 1976 had postulated five similar conditions, one of which is particularly stringent and on whose terms, on Scruton’s
view, music fails: ‘A representational work of art must express thoughts about its subject, and an interest in the work should
involve an understanding of those thoughts … Sometimes we feel that a work of art is filled with thought, but that the thought
cannot be detached from the work. It is impossible to put it into words (or into other words). Such cases, I should like to say,
are cases not of representation but of expression’ (273–4). Or: ‘Thoughts have structure: they refer to objects, and predicate
properties of them’, Scruton 1997, 127). For Wollheim’s influential ‘seeing-in’ theory – now discussed by most philosophers
of music aesthetics – see Wollheim 1980.
13 Also relevant are standard figures of rhetoric, potentially fruitful but not considered in the present essay. Ratner’s pioneering
work is both acknowledged and subjected to a much-needed critique in Monelle 2000, 24–33.
14 See also the similar ‘typology of musical illustrations’ laid out in Kivy 1984, 28–60.
15 Richard Will’s close study of The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (2002) – of which
Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is the most noted example – documents that that genre ‘is first and foremost a genre of
pastoral idylls, thunderstorms, military conflicts, hunts, and political identities’, p. 2). In terms of tabulation: ‘Titles consisting
of only one or a few words identify over 70 examples as pastoral … 15 as military, 15 as hunts, 10 as storms, and more than
30 as expressions of national or regional characters – in sum, nearly 150 symphonies or movements as representations of
[these] five subject categories’ (p. 1). For a recent identification of the ‘sunrise topos’ in music, see Sisman 2013.
16 Monelle’s example (2006, 28) is not a storm but the signification of a ‘noble horse’, previously discussed in Monelle 2000.
17 See, for example, the recent discussion of the mid- to late-eighteenth century’s astonishment at the ready ability of the mind
to visualize things within musical experiences as laid out in Loughridge 2011. One of several telling examples is provided on
p. 214: ‘For the German composer Adam Hiller [in 1754] … the ability of musical imitations to bring to mind visual images
seemed inexplicable – magical.’ Loughridge goes on to note that in that year Hiller wrote: ‘We often let one sense give the
illusion of another or we let hearing represent things that otherwise would not be at all suitable for it. Things that should be
grasped by means of an entirely different sense organ seem suddenly to have changed their nature: we believe we find them in
tones, and we really do find them there, as vastly different as they otherwise are. Is this not a kind of magic?’ Here the
translation is taken from Lippman 1992, 118. I take the term ‘pictorial listening’ in the decades around 1800 from the
important comments on musical pictorialism, tableaux and ‘visual or quasi-visual experiences’ in Mathew 2013, 89–101.
18 The article updates and summarizes the theory initially presented in Lakoff and Johnson 1980 and elaborated in numerous
other studies of each author. More recently, Lakoff has welded his project to cognitive-science research – neural flows and
pathways of the brain, cross-synapse firing, and so on, all of which led him to an even more emphatically ‘embodied’ concept
of the mind – and has updated and redubbed his theory as ‘The Neural Theory of Metaphor’ (Lakoff 2008).
19 For a summary, see Fauconnier and Turner 1995, 183–204, esp. 184. A related term associated with Lakoff is ‘image-
schema’ (with an ‘image-schema structure’ characterized by a ‘cognitive topology’: Lakoff 1993, 214. Lakoff’s synoptic
‘Neural Theory of Metaphor’ (2008, 30) understands Fauconnier’s and Turner’s term ‘mental space’ as ‘a mental simulation
characterizing an understanding of a situation, real or imagined’ and ‘blending’ as ‘neural binding’.
20 The model in Figure 4.1 , and the quotations in the text above, are derived from Fauconnier and Turner 2002, passim , and
1998, 133–87, from which I adapt wordings found on 134, 142–4.
21 Cook 2001 takes us through many of the complicating issues at hand in helpful ways. Zbikowski has been interested in the
applications of Fauconnier, Turner and recent metaphor theories to vocal music. Among his several discussions see
Zbikowski 1999, 2002, 2008, 2009. Sceptical of the utility of applying language-grounded concepts of metaphor to the
different conceptual world of music, Spitzer (2004) is concerned with developing historical, aesthetic and phenomenological
constructions of the issue, calling upon the metaphor-theory frameworks, for instance, of Paul Ricoeur (itself indebted to that
of Max Black) and several others.
22 Cook 2001, e.g. 172–4, 181. Some of the attribute types listed here are taken also from Hatten 1994. Cook’s homologies and
enabling similarities are what Lakoff would call the ‘ontological’ or ‘epistemological correspondences’ between the ‘image-
schema structure[s]’ of each domain (Lakoff 1993, e.g. 214).
23 Hatten 1994, 67–90 (expressive genres, topics, ‘frozen’ metaphors), 162–72 (‘The Role of Metaphor’), 255, 289; 2004, 12.
From the latter, see also p. 297, n. 1, comments on Lakoff and Johnson, Fauconnier and Turner (judged to be ‘a richer
model’) and Zbikowski. Monelle 2006, 22–3, also summarizes Hatten’s concept of correlation vis-à-vis topic theory.
 24 Here I have inflected Fauconnier and Turner with language from the tension-metaphor theory of Max Black, particularly as
summarized and inflected by Paul Ricoeur in, e.g. Ricoeur 1976, 46–52, and 1981, 165–81.
25 Within historical practice the multiplication of metaphors or hyperblends is typically extended beyond the individual work to
be broadly applicable as grounding aesthetic axioms of certain types or schools of composition. Such metaphors may be
understood as foundational guidelines for both composition and subsequent reception: compose works and invite
performances and listenings to them as if such-and-such were the case. See Watkins’s recent provocative study of depth
metaphors (2013).
26 The importance placed on embodiment reaches back to Johnson 1987 and to Lidov 1987. For other issues of subjective
identification within the world of music construed as signs, see Cumming 2000.
27 Aufleuchtung , aspect and ‘hearkening’ occur repeatedly as central ideas throughout the book.
28 Subsequent discussions of music and ‘mood’ (as opposed to object-directed ‘emotion’) are numerous. Some engaging
samples include Berger 2000, 200–1; Savage 2009, 93–5, 101–2, 104, embedded within a Ricoeur-inflected approach; Carroll
2003, 521–5, and Kivy’s response to Carroll (Kivy 2009, 79–99), insisting that while music, contra Carroll, does not ‘arouse’
moods, it can be (in Kivy’s characteristic wording) ‘expressive of’ them.
29 The programmatic intentions are laid out in Todd 1993, 12–13, 72.
30 On the importance of this problem, see my discussions throughout Caplin et al . 2009, especially ‘Sonata Theory and Dialogic
Form’, 71–89.
31 I have sought to do this with such studies as Hepokoski 2006 and – extending the procedure to a composition with more
‘abstract’ claims – Hepokoski 2012.

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 5
Beautiful and sublime
Stephen Downes

Introduction
The impact of the rediscovery of the treatise on the sublime ascribed to Longinus (1978), the
importance of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful ([1757] 1990) and Kant’s Critique of Judgement ([1790] 1952) have
been summarized aplenty. 1 However, although the sublime has generated voluminous,
often adulatory critical commentary, the beautiful has tended to do so rather more
surreptitiously. 2 Theodor Adorno and Jean-François Lyotard famously declared the sublime
to be the authentic aesthetic mode of modern art. The sublime size of the twentieth-century
literature on the sublime reflects the widely held sympathy for this view, and also the ability
of the term to generate seemingly unlimited variants or subtypes. 3 The beautiful, by
contrast, has frequently been considered to be a suspicious aesthetic choice for the artist of
modern times. Beauty is often condemned as anachronistic, reactionary or fake, as lapsing
too readily into kitsch through offering false, invidious perfections. In this way beautiful
forms are often marked as the disreputable products of an ideological airbrush, from which
we gain dubious pleasure because we are duped and fail to notice the exclusions or
marginalizations that allow the construction of images of apparent flawlessness. When
Lyotard famously stated that the sublime ‘is perhaps the only mode of aesthetic sensibility to
characterize the modern’ (Lyotard 1991) he derived this stance from Adorno, who wrote in
his Aesthetic Theory that adherence to a sublime aesthetic is necessary for authentic modern
art:

after the fall of formal beauty, the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism
… The ascendancy of the sublime is one with art’s compulsion that fundamental
contradictions not be covered up but fought through in themselves; reconciliation for
them is not the result of the conflict but exclusively that the conflict becomes eloquent.
(Adorno 1997, 197) 4

Lyotard concluded, in terms redolent of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and

Representation , that the aesthetic and experience of the sublime lies at the heart of
modernism’s characteristic preoccupations with the futile strivings of the ‘Will’ in the face
of the powerlessness of the faculty of representation. Sublime moments are where ‘modern
art finds its impetus’ (Lyotard 1984). 5 Elsewhere Lyotard laid emphasis on the sublime
effect of intensification: ‘intensity is associated with an ontological dislocation’, which tends
towards the shock, liberation from the classical ideal of imitation, an attempt to represent the
unrepresentable and the instability of form, in the modern move to the avant-garde (Lyotard
1991, 101–5) .
A more nuanced post-Adorno standpoint was developed in Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay on
‘The Sublime Offering’. This essay begins from an Adornian position in stating that the
‘motif of the sublime … announces the necessity of what happens to art in or as its modern
destiny’. Art ‘shudders’; it suspends or interrogates itself; as it is ‘seized by the sublime’ the
aesthetic is suppressed or rejected as art is given over to something other than the beautiful.
If beauty slides into the agreeable, Nancy argues, it loses its artistic quality; artfully, the
beautiful might, by contrast, be ‘suspended … transformed and transfigured’ in the sublime.
More ambiguously, the beautiful might be found in an equivocal position between the
sublime and the agreeable. Wherever it lies, Nancy writes, ‘all of modern aesthetics … has
its origin and raison d’être in the impossibility of attributing beauty merely to beauty and in
the consequent skidding or overflowing of the beautiful beyond itself’ (Nancy 1993).
Nancy seems to be struggling to find an appropriate place for beauty in authentic art, his
equivocations over its status manifesting a latent ambivalence that seeps into much
twentieth-century critical discourse. Beauty, Wendy Steiner has argued, ‘is certainly a
magnet for the cultural anxieties of our day’. Steiner has observed that although modern
artworks may often suggest profound beauty, this was a beauty characteristically fraught
with the withholding of ‘pleasure, insight, empathy’ (Steiner 2001, xv–xviii; see also
Gilbert-Rolfe 1999). Arthur C. Danto noted how beauty has more widely been ‘on the
defensive’ since the concept of the sublime entered Enlightenment consciousness with the
rediscovery of Longinus. In the twentieth century the ‘intractable avant-garde abjured
beauty … as if attractiveness was somehow a stigma’ (Danto 2003, 7, 147). The notorious
appropriations of notions of beauty that emphasize purity and perfection for political
ideologies of the most inhuman kinds made standing up for the beautiful highly problematic.
Famously, in his later work Paul de Man exposed the potential dangers in Schiller’s concept
of beauty in the aesthetic state by citing its grotesque misreading by Goebbels. (Here we
might recall Walter Benjamin’s identification of the need to politicize aesthetics, not
aestheticize politics.) De Man’s motivation was in strong part driven by a desire to exorcize
his now infamous early espousal of a fascist notion of ‘aesthetic totality’. Any counter to de
Man’s rejection of the aesthetics of beauty as a dangerous fallacy must begin by developing
a more nuanced stance on the claim that ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’. Only if Keats’s
famous poetic phrase is unquestionably accepted as a definition of the aesthetic do the pairs
truth/beauty and false/ugly assume equivalence. If an aesthetic of the beautiful is to be
sustained it must negotiate positions that are diverse, ambiguous and potentially subversive
(see MacKenzie 1993). (There has long been literary debate over whether Keats’s line
should be read ironically.) A response on behalf of beauty can be more defiant than
defensive – for example, through promoting the recursive relationship of aesthetics and
eroticism, extolling beauty as celebratory and polymorphous (see Davis 2010). 6 If, in the
later twentieth century, beauty was ‘back’, it should nonetheless not return as a familiar,
comfortable refuge but rather as challenging and non-compliant (see Donoghue 2003, 11,
63; Mothersill 1984; Bérubé 2005; Wolff 2008). Post Paul Ricoeur, we might conceive an
‘aesthetics of suspicion’, which does not ‘obliterate’ beauty, but rather offers a context in
which it might be ‘expanded, twisted, shifted and split’. In such a framework one might take
the example of contemporary artists who ‘have taken pleasure and critical purchase from the
confusion and collapse of the distinction between beauty and a vast range of its antonyms,
such as ugliness, the banal, ideology, chaos, and so on’ (Beech 2009) – to which one should,
of course, add the sublime.
If during much of the twentieth century beauty seemed widely debunked or debased only
to become revitalized towards the century’s end, then its aesthetic sibling the sublime
similarly fell into a period of disrepute before returning to favour. However, it hardly
emerged unscathed. The experience of the sublime was placed centrally in the construction
of the modern subject in Enlightenment discourse (see De Bolla 1989) but in the sceptical
modernisms of the early twentieth century the concept of the sublime and the subjective
identity and power it seemed to promise was rejected (and often savagely parodied). As Judy
Lochhead summarizes, the sublime was, however, widely reaffirmed in the second half of
the century. It was found to be once more seductive because of its promises of freedom.
Headlining post-structuralists fell under the sublime spell: for Derrida, its unboundedness
facilitated deconstructive consideration of the problem of boundary, of the framing of the
work of art; for Kristeva, it underpinned examination of the abject; for Lyotard, it was part
of a postmodernism that eschews totality, grand narratives, wholeness and the comforts of
good form. Other influential later twentieth-century examples included Frederic Jameson’s
notion of the technological sublime and John Milbank’s sublime as a modern transcendent,
one not of beautiful, complete unity (as only found in the pre-modern God) but one that
presents an unknowable void. Feminist theorists joined the sublime party and attempted to
refashion the concept as a way of developing an empowering aesthetic or experience for
women. For Lochhead, however, the sublime is irredeemably tainted by its associations with
insidious cultural and political ideologies of power and gender. She argues, therefore, that
the ‘resuscitation’ of the ‘once moribund concepts of the sublime and its twin, the ineffable
… under the banner of postmodern thought’ is a regressive move, one, in particular,
contrary to feminism (Lochhead 2008). 7
The prominent valorization of the sublime through its identification with a ‘masculine’
subjectivity is almost matched by its historical identification with the ‘musical’. Kiene
Brillenburg Wurth has discussed a specifically ‘musical’ sublime which questions the
possibility of the final elevating or resolving moment that defines the sublime’s ‘legitimate
mode’, as most famously proposed in Kant’s Critique of Judgement . At the turn of the
nineteenth century the ‘musical’, considered as profoundly empty sign, came to denote the
infinite or undecidable. The power bestowed upon the Kantian subject in the last phase of
the sublime experience no longer seemed available; the final closing resolution was deemed
unachievable. Tied with the rise in cultural value of instrumental music (which Kant
notoriously derided as more pleasure than culture) ‘“musicality” materializes as the effect of
philosophical and fictional representations of music as an instrument of the indefinite’. As a
circular relationship develops between this notion of musicality and sublimity in the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the endlessly deferred or denied completion, felt in
Sehnsucht (infinite longing), acquires an ‘elective affinity with the sublime feeling’ (Wurth
2009, 17 and passim ). 8
The most famous example of this sublime in musical criticism is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. 9 Hoffmann describes how the symphony
facilitates the contemplation of the infinite through the experience of its sublime effect, its
potential to elevate the subject, to point to the absolute and to express endless longing (
Sehnsucht des Unendlichen ). As Bonds notes, Hoffmann’s essay is clearly indebted to Jean
Paul’s notion of the sublime as ‘applied infinity’ (Bonds 2006, 45–50). Hoffmann’s
emphasis on the sublime was to prove enormously influential, but the beautiful also had
important contemporaneous advocates. August Wilhelm Schlegel held the beautiful to be a
partial revelation of the infinite, so the contemplation of the beautiful is capable of
generating ‘infinite striving’, as desire arises for higher, ideal forms of beauty; and Schlegel
ascribed music a high place in his consideration of art for its incorporeal intimations of
perfect harmony. The similarities with Hoffmann’s claims for the musical sublime are clear.
10 As Bonds further notes, therefore, any distinctions between the sublime and the beautiful
often seem prone to dissolution. Schlegel described how a work of art might shift or tilt
between sublime and beautiful effects so that neither dominated the other. This ambiguity
between the beautiful and sublime suggests the possible coexistence of two apparently
contradictory paths towards the absolute. In this context irony can facilitate an affirmative
mode through its ability to sustain a double trajectory. Bonds finds this powerfully
exemplified in the late works of Beethoven, with their prominent ‘juxtapositions of the
profound and trivial, great and small, the sincere and humorous’, and expressions of ‘a
pressing demand’ for a ‘transcendent perspective’ which lies beyond a single point of
ultimate reference (Bonds 2006, 58–60). The length of the shadow cast over the nineteenth
century by Beethoven’s ‘sublime’ symphonies certainly means, as Richard Taruskin says,
that ‘the history of music in the nineteenth century [up to the First World War] could be
written in terms … of the encroachment of the sublime upon the traditional domain of the
beautiful, of the “great” upon the pleasant’ (1997, 258). The next section begins, however,
by putting some detail on the potentially ironic context for reconsidering the sustained but
ambiguous coexistence of beautiful and sublime pathways.

Beethoven and Wagner

In a sophisticated interpretation of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, Stephen Hinton (1998)
identifies the symphony’s ‘hermeneutic crux’ in the ambiguity produced by the music’s
ironic relationship to the text at the famous lines delivered by the baritone soloist:
Oh friends, not these tones!
O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern lasst uns angenehmere Let us raise our voices in more
anstimmen, und freudenvollere! pleasing and more joyful sounds!

One prominent aspect of this tonal complexity is the extensive melisma on angenehmere ,
which occurs over the transitional harmonic moment in the move from minor to major, and
the change from emphasis on B to B (and therefore suggests a move from negation to
affirmation; see Musical Example 5.1 ).
These melismatic extravagances, out of place in a recitative, far more likely to be found in
an aria, might be heard as generating an ironic distance from the pleasures evoked in the
text. In the Third Critique Kant notoriously applied the term angenehm to music in order to
relegate its aesthetic status (see Kant [1790] 1952, 195–6). Beethoven’s musical
excessiveness suggests ironic negation of this denigration of music as merely agreeable
sensations (as Hinton notes, ‘agreeable’ or ‘pleasurable tones’ is almost a tautology in
Kantian terms). Furthermore, in these melismas Beethoven invokes an operatic style, one
‘adequate to the kind of reception suggested by Kant’s term’. With Beethoven’s well-known
antipathy towards Rossini in mind, the melismas are a cryptic allusion to the virtuoso
dispenser of angenehmere Töne . For Hinton, the baritone’s preceding ‘not these tones’
rejects the instrumental variations that had earlier been cut off by the Schrekensfanfare
(Wagner’s term for what many have heard as a sublime, terrible rupture) and thus rejects the
‘symphonic’, or ‘cultured’, treatment of the theme. After this rejection, the ‘Rossinian’
melismas ironically present the musically beautiful alternative. Thus, two possible versions
of the finale to come are presented – one cultured, the other pleasant (Hinton 1998).
For Hinton, this unresolved ambiguity can be heard as reflecting Beethoven’s awareness
of the limits of his art. In the face of the obligations of the genre, the burdens of working
through the finite towards realizing a vision of the infinite that is the goal of the ‘sublime’
symphony, Beethoven realizes the ultimate inability to supply symphonically the fullness of
joy. The late eighteenth-century origins of the symphonic sublime have been traced by Carl
Dahlhaus, who cites Schulz’s article on the symphony in Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine
Theorie der schönen Künste (1794) as seminal. The article describes the symphony as
‘grand, noble, and sublime’ and compares it with the Ode through its characteristic
combination of passion and reflection. This combination also informs Hoffmann’s critique
of Beethoven’s Fifth which extols sublime effects but also Beethoven’s cerebral
achievement in marshalling the ‘apparent disorder’, the rapturous and suddenness, the
convulsions of the ‘ grand style’, towards an order that is higher (or deeper, depending on
which spatial metaphor is employed). Here Hoffmann echoes Sulzer’s article on the sublime
in Allgemeine :
 Musical Example 5.1 Beethoven, Symphony No. 9, Finale, mm. 216–36

When order is created out of disorder and confusion then, for those who discern in some
degree the rightness of it, it is a sublime thought, that, out of all the apparent disorder in
the physical and moral world, the most beautiful order is achieved in the whole.
(Dahlhaus 1991, 68–72)

Nonetheless, as Hinton’s reading of Beethoven’s Ninth suggests, the transcendent

obligations of the sublime might leave the earthly artwork necessarily in a state of
imperfection. As Andreas Eichhorn notes, the symphony’s difficulties and ambiguities are
manifestations of Beethoven ‘composing out the idea of unrepresentability’ into the music.
The sublime becomes identified with magnificent, heroic failure: subsequent retouchings of
the symphony are, suggests Scott Burnham, in effect attempts to ‘beautify’ troubling aspects
of the work. They partially iron out its ironic creases, smooth over its astonishing
imperfections and thus diminish the work’s sublime quality (Eichhorn 1993; reviewed in
Burnham 1996).
The ‘beautification’ of the Ninth is identified by Robert Fink as part of a dominating
disciplinary practice. Responding to Susan McClary’s notorious (often misrepresented)
descriptions of sexual violence, Fink turns to Lyotard’s postmodern sublime: ‘McClary
heard in Beethoven’s Ninth what I did: not the abstract comforts of Hanslick’s “musically
beautiful” but an audible trace … of Lyotard’s postmodern sublime’ (Fink 2004, 111;
McClary 1991, 128–30). As Fink notes, the famous moment of recapitulation in the first
movement might be raised as paradigm of the romantic musical sublime (as influentially
described by Christian Friedrich Michaelis 11 ), but there is a deeply problematic violence in
this passage (described by McClary) from which two strategies emerge. The ‘ sublimating
strategy, which attempts to focus on and interpret the music’s extremity, gives rise,
dialectically, to the beautifying , which attempts to deny or minimize any disturbing aspects,
usually by exalting technical description over exegesis’. In musicology this latter strategy, in
which incoherence and ‘troubling, horrific excess’ are tamed through making formal sense,
became the ‘default interpretative strategy for canonic music’, an ascendant tradition of
‘defense mechanisms’, until McClary and the ‘new musicologists’ that followed her blew
away these repressions of the troubling sublime (Fink 2004, 113–20).
Contra the ‘beautifiers’, Fink hears the recapitulation in the first movement of
Beethoven’s Ninth as offering no saving resolution. It is, rather, a ‘shattering irruption’, a
‘failure of form which is traumatic’. The Schrekensfanfare in the opening part of the finale is
a ‘garbled attempt at the failed progression of the first movement recapitulation’ and the
finale’s last Prestissimo ‘provides the orgiastic release we demand, no more decorously than
the Rossinian stretta-finales whose shrill sound world … it so brazenly appropriates’. This
material is, for Fink, ‘pure noise’. In Fink’s reading of the symphony in terms of the
postmodern sublime, there is no formal resolution but rather the ‘violent noise of form-
annihilating “success”’ (Fink 2004, 139–40). To hear the end of the symphony in this way is
to question the success of the work’s ‘search for order’, to evoke Maynard Solomon’s now
classic essay. Solomon noted that Beethoven’s ‘structural powers’ are severely tested by
manifold disruptive elements; for Solomon, this search for order in the face of chaos is the
composer’s ‘modernist contribution’. The quest is described in terms of sublime struggles
and activity that promises freedom, by contrast with the shackling, enervating qualities of
the beautiful Schiller described in his essay ‘On the Sublime’ (1801; Solomon 1986). 1 2
This image of the composer wrestling ‘heroically’ with the creative process and the
demands of his sublime art is, of course, a crucial aspect of the construction of Beethoven as
the very model of a modern male genius (see Pederson 2000). As Kivy notes, the precedent
for the Beethovendian concept of genius was established by Longinus’s On the Sublime . The
artist is portrayed as possessing powers that enable the writing of the sublime, with all its
characteristic rule-breaking and hence its imperfections, and hence also of the artist rising to
a position of deity, of giver of new rules, of originality. By contrast, the trope of the
beautiful revolves around discussions of the genius myth of Mozart as the perennial child
creating effortless perfections rather than Beethoven’s effortful imperfections: ‘Beethoven
the sublime, Mozart the beautiful’ (Kivy 2001, 132). In seeking a contrast to Beethoven’s
sublime Ninth, Solomon cites a letter from Mozart to his father (1781):

Passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust,
and music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please
the listener, or in other words must never cease to be music.
(Solomon 1986, 17)

Mozart’s music hardly seems to require beautification, although it did get a dose of
‘sublimification’ through the romantic legacy of a preference for the Sturm und drang works
in G and C minor, where if beauties are found they are conditioned by ‘strangeness’ (see
Carruthers 1998). The long acknowledged special quality of beauty in Mozart’s music has
recently been discussed in ways which begin to reveal a beautiful complexity that is far from
passive or monochrome. Schiller considered the sublime to be a ‘mixed feeling’, a
combination of ‘melancholy’, ‘joyousness’ and ‘rapture’ (Schiller [1801] 1966, 198). The
beautiful might be similarly composite, ambiguous and, again like the sublime, tinged with
irony. For Solomon, Mozart’s slow movements are paradigms of those works of the
‘greatest beauty’ which are ‘pervaded by heavy sadness, a knowledge of loss, a touch of
fear, a sense of transience, a whiff of mortality’. Their formal returns act as repairing,
healing, and a move towards an ideal fusion (Solomon 1996, 194–7). For Scott Burnham,

Mozart, poised at the crossroads of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, offers ironic
intimations at once revelatory and resigned, redemptive and melancholy. We hear the
sound of these intimations as beautiful. The awe we experience in perceiving them is not
overwhelming, not in the sublime manner.
(Burnham 2013, 101)

The beautiful in Mozart offers an alternative sense of self to that created in the Kantian
sublime, one generated through access to an inner realm, one of transcendence but also
involving a loss of innocence. In Burnham’s words this is a ‘melancholy’ yet ‘astonishing’
beauty of ‘ironic intimation’, one that in Così fan tutte goes so far as to problematize the
equation of truth and beauty (Burnham 2013, 114–15).
Hanslick judged the music of the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, for all the
‘immensity’ of its subject and ‘grandeur if intention’, and ‘for all its [musical] brilliance’, to
be ‘ unschön ’. This judgement comes in an extended footnote to discussion of the ‘harmful
and confused’ attempt to understand music as a language – consequences of
‘disconnections’ and ‘interruptions’ which ‘signify nothing but ugliness’ (Hanslick [1891]
1986, 43). In his Beethoven essay, published in the centenary year 1870, Wagner described the
Ninth as a highpoint in Beethoven’s achievement in ‘advancing’ music ‘far beyond the
region of the aesthetically Beautiful, into the sphere of the absolutely Sublime’ (Wagner
[1870] 2008, 32, 36). Such descriptions firmly place ‘advanced’ music in the sublime
aesthetic category. Sections of Wagner’s essay are none-too-veiled critical responses to
Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful . Though Wagner takes Schopenhauer as his starting
point for the concept of the sublime in music, he departs from this to move into an anti-
Hanslick polemic (see Kropfinger 1991, 136–9). 13 Wagner argues, via Schopenhauer, that
the ‘illusive surface’ ( Schein ) of art is a mere ‘semblance’. From the ‘principle of
tranquillisation by sheer pleasure in the semblance’, he writes, ‘has come our term for beauty
( Schönheit ); the root of which word in our German language is plainly connected with
Show ( Schein ) as object, with Seeing ( Schauen ) as subject.’ The beautiful is a dream-like
illusion, or delusion. By contrast, Wagner describes the striking concept of the ‘scream’:

From the most terrifying of such dreams we wake with a scream , the immediate
expression of the anguished will … Now if we take the Scream in all the diminutions of
its vehemence, down to the gentler cry of longing, as the root element of every human
message to the ear … neither artistic beholding nor artistic fashioning can result from
aught but a diversion of the consciousness from the agitations of the will.

With the ‘scream’, at whatever level of intensity, no illusion is possible. And this is the basis
of music’s sublime nature. Music’s true character is revealed as ‘the effect of beauty, the
very first effect of music’s appearance, advances the most directly to a revelation of her
truest character through the agency of the sublime’ (Wagner [1870] 2008, 7–8, 11, 13, 15).
14 Music reveals that truth is sublime and sublime is truth.
Wagner argues that the systematic ordering of rhythmic structure in periodic phrasing
moves music closer to the beauty characteristic of plastic forms, but it is possible to pierce
these beautiful musical forms through moments of rupture. These moments of formal
disruption reveal music’s true, sublime essence. The complex intensifications of Tristan’s
delirium scene in the final act of Tristan und Isolde are a sustained rupture of this kind, in
which musical coherence is seriously imperilled. Tristan’s death at the end of this scene is a
‘critical moment’ followed, according to Thomas Grey, ‘naturally [ sic ] by a stabilizing
catharsis’ provided by Isolde’s quasi-autonomous ‘Transfiguration’. This cathartic ending,
Grey notes, also ‘picks up the thread of the Act II love duet so brutally broken by
Brangane’s scream’ (Grey 1995, 337). The long-delayed closure of the cruelly interrupted
Act 2 love duet in the final cadence of the Transfiguration is clear and familiar. The
similarly belated closure of the musical ruptures at Tristan’s death near the beginning of Act
3, Scene 2 is more subtle. As Isolde takes the dying Tristan in her arms, the opening
paragraph of the Act 1 Prelude is recapitulated ( Musical Example 5.2 ). This is a potentially
closing gesture of return to the work’s musical origins as well as a musical expression of the
powerful force of memory. The recapitulation proceeds up to the beginning of the ‘glance
motive’, but is broken at the moment Tristan expires. His final spoken word, ‘Isolde’, halts
progression through pausing on the E–D appoggiatura. He dies as the rhythm and motive
begins up again, but the music stops on a reharmonization of the melodic B Grey notes that
it is ‘severed with exquisite delicacy by a diminished triad [E —G –C] struck on the
harp’ (Grey 1995, 357). Isolde gasps (‘Ha!’) on F . (As Wagner says in his Beethoven essay,
sublime moments of rupture need not always be screamed out fortissimo. ) Subsequently,
Isolde pleads that Tristan’s wound might be healed and she recalls the rapture of the lovers’
night with a momentary adumbration of the B major resolution of her upcoming
transfiguration music. Her final pitch at the end of the Transfiguration is the F upon which
her gasp had broken the musical form at the moment of trauma, now supported by the
heavenly harp’s B major arpeggios, possibly a belated resolution of the harp’s rupturing
diminished triad. The final recall of the opening of the Act 1 Prelude in the very last bars
accomplishes the formal closure that the recapitulation during Tristan’s death scene had
promised yet not fulfilled. It also completes a musical ‘frame’ for the piece, enclosing the
opera’s sublime boundlessness with beautiful, formal control.
 Musical Example 5.2 Wagner, Tristan und Isolde , Act 3: Isolde,
‘Tristan! Ah!’

Nietzsche noted the precariousness of Wagner’s artistic balancing act in Tristan . As is

well known, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Nietzsche expounded his theory that the Greek
Apollonian culture of beauty ‘was based on a veiled substratum of suffering and
knowledge’. This Apollonian beautiful illusion existed in a ‘mutually intensifying’ dialectic
with Dionysian pain and contradiction, with an awareness of the ‘horror and absurdity of
existence’, in which art turned to the sublime and yet also the beautiful in ‘the taming of
horror through art’. For Nietzsche (of 1872, when his relationship with Wagner was at its
most adulatory) the intensifications of the third act of Tristan produced effects so powerful
that they are unbearable and shattering for the individual listener, who is on the verge of
expiring as the ‘wings’ of their soul – to recall a poetic image of Plato’s – convulse.
However, in the face of these sublime Dionysian forces the beautiful forms of the
Apollonian were ‘aimed at the reconstitution of the almost fragmented individual’; they
‘emerge with the healing balm of a blissful deception’ as the listener identifies with the
suffering, dying mythic hero Tristan and his beloved Isolde. Thus ‘the Apolline wrests us
from the Dionysiac universality, and delights us in these individuals; to them it attaches our
pity, through them it satisfies our sense of beauty, which craves great and sublime forms’
(Nietzsche [1872] 1993: 26, 40, 102). Nietzsche, of course, was soon to turn against
Wagner. In The Case of Wagner (1888) his music is deemed a dangerous narcotic, an
expression of neurosis; Wagner is the hypnotic master of hysterical, theatrical illusion or the
dealer of musical dope. And in opera after Wagner it is possible to identify an anti- Tristan
tradition in which the transcendent, redemptive aesthetic aspirations of Wagner’s opera,
exemplified by what Slavoj Žižek calls the ‘impossible fantasmatic resolution’ of Isolde’s
Verklärung , is denounced, debased or dismantled (see Žižek and Dolar 2002, 200). 15

Across the divide?

Žižek argues that the identity of love and death at the end of Tristan und Isolde should not
detract from recognizing that ‘a striving to experience life at its excessive fullest is what
Wagner’s operas are about’. He identifies two main musical versions of this vital excess:
German (Wagner) and Italian (Rossini), distinguished by their reflecting two versions of
Kant’s sublime; for Žižek, the ‘opposition of the Rossinian and Wagnerian sublimes
perfectly fits the Kantian opposition between the mathematical and the dynamic sublime’
with the former ‘enacting the subject’s inability to comprehend the pure quantity of the
demands that overflow him, whereas the Wagnerian sublime is dynamic, enacting the
overpowering force of the one demand, the unconditional demand of love’ (Žižek and Dolar
2002, 105–10). In proposing this sublime dualism along national lines, Žižek provides a
delayed aesthetic variant of a long-established division in writing on nineteenth-century
music, one that has recently been closely interrogated.
Benjamin Walton has observed that the reception of the 1828 performances of
Beethoven’s symphonies in Paris shows they were often heard with ears attuned to Rossini’s
operas. Beethoven’s sublime symphonic effects were found to be comparable with Rossini’s
famous stretti and crescendos, even to the extent of employing the comparison to make the
occasional gripe about tiresome noisiness. This kind of listening might be characterized (and
disparaged) as revelling in the effects of a shallow sublimity rather than the kind of ‘deep’,
hence profound, sublime which, as described by Hoffmann, is connective, developmental
and synthetic. (If so condemned, then it pre-empts Adorno’s despair at those radio listeners
who only attend to’ beautiful’ moments in Beethoven (Adorno 1998).) A. B. Marx’s strategy
to exclude Rossini’s music from Berlin concert life was based upon denigrating the Italian’s
music as merely sensual, as lacking higher spiritual quality and therefore not belonging to
the great, Hegelian developmental line. Beethoven’s victory, based on the profound ‘depth’
ascribed to his instrumental music by contrast with the merely pleasurable superficiality of
Rossini’s operas, marks his ascent to the dominant position in what is often called the ‘twin
styles’ (Walton 2007, 218–27, 247–51). 16 As Julian Johnson reminds us, however, the
loftiest of Beethoven’s works often include shocking ‘intrusions of the worldly’ (the Turkish
March in the last movement of the Ninth, for example) and are far from lacking examples of
effects comparable with a ‘Rossinian theatricality’ (Johnson 2013). Such materials counter
Hoffmann’s reading of Beethoven’s music as ‘not of this world’ (for a critique, see Rumph
1995). In Beethoven, the aesthetic of an apparently otherworldly sublime and an overtly
worldly ambition come together in works that try to speak to the whole of humanity. The
problem that Johnson explores is how to perceive and interpret the quotidian materials and
their contrast to the ‘sublime’: is the artistic aim one of transcendence, ennoblement or
emancipation? Or is it humorously subversive, exemplifying a modernity related to the
ironic effects of Jean Paul Richter’s ‘inverted sublime’ ( umgekehrte Erhabene ) (of which
more later)?
Of course, Beethoven did not have the sublime all to himself. The reception of
Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1831) played an important part in the debate in 1830s Paris
between the Rossinians and Beethovenians (sustained, in his own style and to his own ends,
by Wagner in Opera and Drama , 1851). Beethoven’s symphonies, after François-Antoine
Habeneck’s 1828 performances, were raised as fulsomely sublime rather than empty form,
in short, as musical ‘high’ art rather than ‘low’ entertainment (or ‘deep’ rather than
‘shallow’ of course; see Ellis 2004 and Johnson 1995). Meyerbeer suffered critical attack
from those subcribing to the depth model of the musical sublime. (Wagner famously decried
the cheap, superficial thrills – ‘effects without causes’ – in Meyerbeer’s grand operas). But
Meyerbeer’s musical effects evoke a sublime of substantial cultural significance, particularly
through the way they subvert the sensual/spiritual opposition so crucial for Madame de
Staël’s highly influential, post-Kantian valorization of spirit over matter and notions of ideal
beauty, as well as for the ‘twin-style’ musical division. Music’s apparently double material
and metaphysical significance is evoked through the possibility that mechanical wonders
might produce spiritual effect because of the divine or diabolical potential of the new
theatrical technology. French grand opera becomes a giant machine. Meyerbeer deployed a
vivid array of machinery into generating sublime effects. In the final act of Robert le Diable
the organ enters as a ‘sublime invasion’ on to the operatic stage; its music is physically
imposing (its sound produced by the biggest musical machine around) yet also symbolic of a
sublime, spiritual realm. The distinctions that lie behind the raising of German metaphysics
against Italian sensualism are thereby complicated. However, the effect is also ambivalent
and uncanny. The sublime is suggested by fantastic, mechanically produced musical effects
that ‘take on a deadly, quasi-gothic power’ (Dolan and Tresch 2011). 17
Walton places the continuation of the ‘twin-styles’ debate in the context of the rise of l’art
pour l’art . Developed through simplified versions of Kant, in the tradition established by de
Staël, l’art pour l’art amplified the metaphysical claims of high culture and belittled the low
pleasures of mere entertainment. As John Wilcox put it, notions of l’art pour l’art emerged
out of ‘fantastically careless and incompetent misreading’ of Kantian disinterestedness
through garbled glosses of Critique of Judgement , with the terms beautiful and sublime
thoroughly embroiled in the mix. After the influential work of de Staël and Benjamin
Constant, Victor Hugo’s ‘Preface to Cromwell ’ (1827), much admired by Théophile Gautier,
was crucial in raising the cause and value of purportedly pure and free art. Gautier’s preface
to his Premières poesies (1832) focused this debate on beauty and he developed this more
fully in his Du Beau dans l’art (1847) through unsurprising invocations of Plato, Kant and
Winckelmann (Wilcox 1953). That part of the story of the French beautiful and sublime, for
which limitations of space do not permit exploration, would move from Gautier through
Baudelaire to Mallarmé and the reflective, voluptuous, exquisite moment that is ‘libidinally-
charged’ through a kind of sublime evasion, a slipping on the edge between idealization and
consummation (Minahen 1999). 18

Sublime and beautiful inversions: some examples from Poulenc

After sublime invasion and sublime evasion another artistically productive variant lies in
sublime inversion. 19 We saw how irony in Beethoven emerged as a mode through which
the aesthetic claims of the sublime and beautiful might be played against each other and
their claims to truth be queried. The comic offered another mode through which these
aesthetic categories might be reconsidered or sustained in variant forms. Raimonda Modiano
has described how Friedrich Theodor Vischer was ‘the last major aesthetician in the
tradition of German idealism who tried to rescue the sublime from the inferior status
assigned to it by Hegel’. Vischer’s main claim in his Über das Erhabene und Komische
(1836) was, as Modiano summarizes, that ‘the sublime had suffered too long at the hands of
earlier aestheticians by being contrasted to the beautiful rather than seen as evolving from
it’. Rather, the sublime should be seen

as one of the two forms in which the beautiful manifests itself in its gradual unfolding
from an original unity. The other form with which the sublime is intimately linked and
which presupposes the sublime for its full effect is the comic.

Vischer’s argument highlights the idea that both the comic and the sublime are based on a
dismantling of the beautiful, ideal identity of the sensible and supersensible. In Vischer’s
comic sublime, by contrast with the tragic sublime, after this negation there is no drive
towards a final resolution or affirmation of order. However, although comedy brings the
sublime down to earth, it needs its high aspirations to survive. The comic can bear no fake
sublimity. The infinite longing for the sublime ideal remains, but the comic subject is not
allowed to forget the life mundane and the limits of sublime possibilities. Modiano ponders
whether a comic version of the sublime might be more likely to remain attractive in a
sceptical, anti- or post-romantic age, in which hope for transcendence or subjective unity is
denuded, even though it depends upon a sustained power of the absolute through requiring
comparison of the finite and the infinite, a comparison which particularly flourished in the
romantic era (Modiano 1987). 20 Writing in the 1970s, Thomas Weiskel famously asserted
that the sublime, as a tainted aesthetic, ‘must now be abridged, reduced, and parodied as the
grotesque, somehow hedged with irony to assure us we are not imaginative adolescents’
(Weiskel 1976: 6). And Mondiano notes how ‘the moderns customarily turn the comic into
the absurd and the sublime into the anti-sublime’; but there is much modern art in which the
distinctions and rejections that Weiskel and Modiano describe are complicated by nostalgic
remnants of traditional aesthetic concepts. The music of Francis Poulenc plays with such
categorical ambiguities with particular subtlety. In so doing, it invokes variants of the
sublime and beautiful in the guises of the comic, Gothic, sentimental and grotesque.
Poulenc’s little piano Pastourelle (1927) at first presents a naive and carefree character –
an idyll of gentle comfort and delights. In its final measures, however, this is thrown into
doubt and disarray ( Musical Example 5.3 ).

Musical Example 5.3 Poulenc, Pastourelle , close

There is a sudden eruption of pounding bass B —D minor thirds, followed without

transition first by the quiet, high-register reinstatement of the major third D of the home key
and then a surprise fortissimo , quirkily spaced final tonic chord. These juxtaposed,
contradictory gestures subvert the character and function of formal closure and resolution
that are so crucial for the traditional aesthetic of a ‘beautiful’ work of art. Instead of
confirmation of a unified and discretely framed piece, the final succession of unpredictable,
paradoxical figures creates a destabilizing, unsettling edge, which the throwaway final chord
seeks to dismiss but only serves to further exaggerate. However, meaningful patterns
emerge. It is possible, upon reflection, after the shock, to relate the B minor bass figure to
the more melancholic, plaintive material in the middle section of the piece. Furthermore, the
idyll–threat–humour succession suggests a psychological process. The passage closely
parallels the Freudian model of humour where the return of the pleasure principle diffuses
the dangers of the real for the purpose of the survival of the ego. In 1927 Freud wrote that
humour tells us ‘Look! Here is the world which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a
game for children – just worth making a jest about!’ Expressive tactics might turn to
Freudian pleasure-producing techniques of condensation, displacement and substitution
(Freud [1927] 1964). Thus, Poulenc’s musical humour can express a vital strategy in the
survival of a threatened subject. It might also be seen as a microscopic and comically
transformed version of the Kantian sublime, in which humour displaces the role of reason,
as the flippant displaces foreboding in the function of confirming the subject’s survival after
the destabilizing experience of the sublime. The Freudian model proposes a mechanism
involving depth psychology, but the humour in Poulenc’s piece, generated by comic
juxtapositions characteristic of the surrealist poetry he greatly admired and often set (Jacob
and Apollinaire), also raises the question of whether, by contrast with the modern subject
constructed through linear development, reconciliation and synthesis or through the
discovery of a core or origin, there might be no deep self to be uncovered (see Løvlie 1992
and Downes 2006). It seems to challenge notions of a consistent, sincere, unified self-
expression. In this way the music problematizes the old binaries of depth and surface, unity
and diversity. One wonders what motivates this succession, this disruption of a beautiful
idyll; is it deep anxiety or passing whimsy?
Jean Paul’s analysis of humour as the inverse sublime in his Preschool of Aesthetics (1804)
is useful here. In Jean Paul’s model, ironic detachment results from the juxtaposition of
details of a finite world with the idea of the infinite, provoking not a position claiming
superiority over the world but a sympathetic response to the revelation of the whole world’s
folly. It contains a serious element, ‘bearing the tragic mask, at least in its hand’, as Jean
Paul puts it; for the greatest humorists, he said, ‘we have to thank a melancholy people’.
‘After each pathetic strain’, Jean Paul writes, ‘a comic relaxing’ is desired and this is
achieved by a ‘reductive seriousness’, the pathetic sensation is scaled down, into sensuous,
individualized particles that ‘cannot be gaudy enough in humour’ and that might be pursued
‘into trivial details’. Jean Paul argues that ‘laughing matter’ is ‘derived from the sublime’,
although it annihilates the sublime and takes the place granted to reason in the Kantian
model; the humour as inverted sublime, as it ‘revels in its own contradictions and
impossibilities’ and a ‘predilection for the most vacuous ending’ rejects Kantian rationality.
What we are dealing with, Jean Paul says, is a ‘humoristic subjectivity’, as all this is
perceived by the subject ‘dividing [itself] into finite and infinite factors’ (Casey 1992, 246,
250–9).
Destabilization resulting from the subversion of sublimity is also characteristic of the
Gothic. As Avril Horner has discussed, Burke’s discussion of the sublime in his
Philosophical Enquiry greatly inflected the discourse around English Gothic writing (Horner
2005). 21 The Gothic sublime is closely related to Burke’s terror and Kant’s initial stage of
the sublime experience, but it does not promise the mastery which follows, sharing
something of the rupture, discontinuities and bursting of the artistic frame that has come to
be called postmodern. Gothic writing characteristically subverts binary oppositions. (Typical
examples are ‘the quick and the dead’; eros/thanatos; pain/pleasure; natural/supernatural;
material/transcendent; human/machine; masculine/feminine.) In so doing it destabilizes
cultural and supposedly ‘natural’ boundaries and intensifies anxiety concerning the
sustained coherence and even survival of the modern subject through heightening fear of the
Other. It presents disturbing embodiments of unspeakable horrors; it imperils the mastery of
the dominant elements culturally established in such binary oppositions. The troubling
invocations of Good versus Evil, material versus spiritual, life and death, raise religious
questions in a manner highly attractive in a sceptical age. The Gothic points with a quivering
finger to that which lies beyond the limits of Enlightenment knowledge, to dark corners
unilluminated by the light of reason or the glow of angels. It is also often deliberately
unsettling in its sudden, deliberately shocking changes of tone, its generic and allusive
promiscuity and relish for rhetorical hyperbole.
Critical work on the Gothic has often focused on the uncanny (with Freud as stimulus, of
course). Scrutiny of the Gothic by recourse to depth psychology can fruitfully be
complemented by addressing the play of surface effects – incongruity, juxtaposition,
hybridity and malformation – which are characteristic responses to the loss of transcendence
and threats to unity. This ludic quality is often overtly comic, but the comic turn in the
Gothic is too often simply pathologized as hysterical laughter – a sort of carry on screaming.
In the Gothic ‘comic turn’ – as in Jean Paul’s model of humour as inverse sublime – terror is
suspended and horror is held in abeyance; it also ‘offers a position of detachment and
skepticism’ towards the nostalgia for lost transcendence; it can be considered to be ‘the
beginning of a deconstructionist turn inherent within modernity’. The Gothic deploys masks,
deformity, exaggeration, the grotesque or diabolical to play upon mistaken identities,
question notions of origin, and darkly twist the fortunes of fate. Gothic texts also often
display their artifice through preoccupation with surface effect, intertextual allusion,
simulation, stylization, self-parody and fakery. In flaunting with the ludicrous they push the
relationship between sign and signification to breaking point. Authenticity or authority is
thereby profoundly problematized. A common strategy in Gothic narrative is to include the
discovery of an ancient text as source of lost truth or hidden ‘depth’, so that authenticity is
‘deferred’ to a secondary, embedded (faked) text which may be inscrutable but which when
deciphered opens some portal to a realm of forbidden, often terrible truth (Mishra 1994). 22
The opening gesture of Poulenc’s Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings might be
considered as presenting a ‘found musical document’. It brazenly raises from the dead
Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor BWV 542 ( Musical Example 5.4 ).

Musical Example 5.4 Poulenc, Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings,
opening organ solo

The infernal return to Bach can be heard as disturbing discovery rather than rappel à
l’ordre . The chord in m. 2, a diminished seventh over a dissonant bass, is an harmonic
deformation of rather macabre effect, after which it is impossible not to hear a ‘shiver’ or
‘shudder’ on the strings, again on that tawdry, favourite chord of uncertainty, the diminished
seventh. The evidently borrowed nature of the opening immediately challenges the notion of
artistic autonomy, and yet, at the motivic level the rest of the concerto can be shown to be
one of Poulenc’s most ‘unified’, that is, self-derived or autonomous works. The concerto
wears the motivic variations that tie the main themes together on its sleeve, so the one,
penultimately placed exception to this motivic ‘family’ (an elegiac string theme) is
especially telling. In the end, then, autonomy is again challenged by exoteric material.
Before this, however, at the structural climax, the comic turn characteristic of the Gothic
gives an unsettling twist to the anticipated moment of formal resolution and subjective
synthesis.
The opening paragraph of the concerto is in effect a slow introduction, leading in
conventional fashion to a climactic dominant. What follows is a kind of double exposition,
two parallel paragraphs based on subjective dualisms. A third allegro theme (fig. 37), derived
from a jubilant subsidiary idea, sounds like a recapitulation as it marks the return to the
‘home’ key, G minor, and restores the allegro tempo of the first main theme. It also suggests
summary or synthesis as it incorporates dissonant chords from the slow introduction (1
before fig. 38) and transformations of material from the second subject of the first
expository thematic pair (fig. 41). This, however, is the most complex, ambiguous section in
the concerto, characterized by multidimensional hybridity. It combines elements of the first
two subjects, and in traditional formal terms, as recapitulation, it suggests a new, unified
identity emerging out of previous contrast and dissonance, a restoration of beautiful form.
However, for all those suggestions of roundedness, resolution and unification it is a comic
turn, a character generated by the perky motivic repetitions and the registration of the organ,
which unceremoniously takes the instrument out of the church and dumps it into the
fairground. Through motivic transformation (or deformation) and timbral effect the jocular
displaces the jubilant. There is a kind of doubleness (which the double structure of the work
to this point also sustains) in that at once the moment suggests the aspiration to subjective
unity or resolution in ‘deep’ structure, yet only to take an unexpected humorous turn to the
frivolous, a light-heartedness not apparently ‘earned’ or anticipated, couched in tones of
decidedly ‘low’ cultural value. One could read this as a Freudian comic displacement or
substitution in the face of something terrible or fearful and thereby sustain the depth
psychological strain of much Gothic criticism, but the moment’s effect depends also upon
surface ambiguity and playfulness, achieved through apparent hybridity and malformation.
After this the subsequent return of the opening ‘authentic’ musical relic sounds less a
commemoration and more a bastardization.
Mourning, through elegy, is the concerto’s last response, elegy as reparation and mode of
utmost beauty, which seeks to ‘transform pain into something endurable’. 23 In this elegiac
theme Poulenc’s use of lower, muted solo strings rather than violins in full ‘throat’ might
suggest distance or darkness. His great friend Jean Cocteau might well have gagged; he had
famously demanded composers write for an ‘orchestra without the caress of the strings’. The
string solo is an instrumental tone previously used in the second subject of the second
thematic pairing, where Poulenc’s Concerto is at its most saccharine and hence seems to
challenge notions of ‘good taste’ most strongly. The category invoked here is the
‘sentimental’, a kind of debased beautiful, evoked in the concerto as aesthetic complement
to the debased sublime of the Gothiccomic. As Hans Keller noted, the romantic solo violin is
the chief suspect as instrumental carrier of the sentimental. Keller identifies the inhibitions
and defences against sentiment produced by the fear of feeling held most strongly by those
in the ‘best society’, a society that calls sentiment ‘sentimentality’. Such defensiveness is
often built upon ‘a chronic sense of humour’ (Keller 1994, 71). One of Poulenc’s artistic
achievements is that humour and sentimentality are released from such a crippling bind
through their central role in rethinking the traditional aesthetics of the sublime and beautiful.
The sentimentalist is routinely denied a place at modernism’s high table. This is part of
modernism’s ‘anxiety of contamination’, to use Andreas Huyssen’s phrase, the aesthetic
barrier is erected to separate (and protect) ‘art’ from the trivial, banal, tawdry and the
commonplace. Huyssens describes how this is notably exemplified by Gustav Flaubert’s
Emma Bovary, a ‘sentimental’ reader of trashy romances, who stands for ‘woman’ as lover
of inferior literature, confirming her place with mass culture on the low side of the ‘great
divide’, a division excluding women and their sentimentality from high art. (And, by
extension, their forms of beauty: Huyssen cites Max Horkheimer and Adorno’s figuring of
mass culture as the evil queen seeking confirmation, in her own mirror, that she is the ‘most
beautiful in the land’. Huyssen 1986, ix and 44–62; Horkheimer and Adorno 1982, 141). 24 )
As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (2004) notes, the sentimental is condemned for its lack of
subtlety or ambiguity, its transparent, manipulative and false expression, its wilful turn away
from the darker ‘truth’ of the ‘real’. Aesthetically, the sentimental seems worthless. And
ethically it seems, at best, dubious. However, Dillon argues that considering aesthetics as
political practice reveals close links with sentimentalism, one that facilitates analysis of
sentimentality’s prominence in the nineteenth century and its debasement in the twentieth.
The eighteenth-century rise of modern aesthetics and the turn to liberal politics were both
founded upon the freedom ascribed to the autonomous, aesthetically educated subject.
Sentimentalism, by contrast, seems to offer no such autonomy, but rather anti-individualism,
a consequence of its basis in consumerism, functionalism and domesticism (of women, of
course). Dillon continues by noting that sentimentalism characteristically includes the
moment of reflection on an emotion that is excessive and overtly cultivated. The
characteristic use of established convention, the turn to well-worn tricks of the trade, also
makes constructiveness manifest. Sentimentalism can therefore offer a critical aspect, one
exposing the limits or problems underlying pretensions to aesthetic autonomy (and of liberal
politics). Rather than be seen simply as aesthetic failure, the sentimental has the potential to
expose both the possibilities and the limitations of the aesthetic: ‘one might locate aesthetic
and political possibilities – conjunctions and disjunctions, negotiations between inside and
outside – within rather than beyond the formulaic feelings of sentimental discourse’ (Dillon
2004; see also Tanner 1976–7).
The sentimental also, of course, raises the wider issue of kitsch. The best analysis of this
relationship is Robert C. Solomon’s discussion of ‘sweet kitsch’ (Solomon 1991). 25
Kitsch’s fatal flaw can lie in its perfect execution, its unblemished quality, as well as in its
lack of ambiguity, necessary in that it is overtly designed to illicit a predictable response,
often through recourse to cliché. Kitsch exhibits a beauty that seems unrealistically pure,
immaculate or simplistic, or lays its overt knowledge of traditional forms and techniques on
with the thickest trowel around. The fake, moribund, morbid, mawkish, spurious and
saccharine: these are the expressive reference points of kitsch and its enjoyment is often
explicitly diagnosed as unwholesome, a symptom of malaise, indolence or indeed of
effeminacy. It is excessive, its emotion is not sufficiently suppressed; it is childlike, naive,
immature, its devotees are displaying an inability or lack of desire to cultivate the control of
the adult sophisticate, the tastes of the true aesthete.
Solomon offers a ‘qualified defence’ of sweet kitsch through rethinking and revaluing
sentimentality. He notes, as did Keller, the modern suspicion of the more tender emotions,
one based on the orthodoxy of ‘masochistic modernism’, which preaches algolagnic art, the
pleasure of pain, or a modernist credo that ‘tis better to shock than to delight or sympathize.
A key figure in the ethical degrading of the sentiment and sentimentality was Kant (again)
for whom the aesthetic judgement of sentimentality was impossible or irrelevant, for he
dismissed it on ethical grounds as deceitful, as manifesting a flaw in character, even as mark
of decadence or degeneracy. Subsequent attacks on kitsch are often less aesthetic than
political, or are focused on its problematic emotional content/character as apparently a mode
of distraction or self-deception whose aim is soothing catharsis through emotional
manipulation which violates subjective autonomy and freedom, and is therefore humiliating
(and hence also, of course, a potentially powerful tool of ideological indoctrination through
propaganda). However, Solomon argues that ‘one of the purposes of art’ might be ‘to
remind us of just those tender, outgrown sentiments’, perhaps even to disturb us regarding
their loss. ‘Better yet, art can help us feel them again, and move us to action on their behalf.’
Vicarious emotion is not necessarily false; neither need be the apparently superficial or
ephemeral. The venerable depth versus surface binary is a powerful metaphor which
celebrates total, long term engagement and denigrates momentary diversions in which
nothing appears to be at stake. All out depth, however, is the ‘province of a few self-
destructive romantics’; ‘casual emotion … is the currency of everyday life.’ Of another
pernicious binary divide, between pleasure and culture, Solomon challenges us to consider
which is the more ‘self-indulgent’. Of the charge that sentimentality is a distortion of
‘reality’, well this could be a most valuable strategy. And, in any case, all emotions tend to
distort; distortion is the norm, not the abnorm.
To summarize, when we hear music as sentimental we might, after Solomon, look
positively upon versions of sweet and possibly vicarious expression and so recuperate
expressive and aesthetic types elsewhere too swiftly rejected. After Dillon, in sentimental
music we might hear a rather sophisticated probing of the problem of aesthetic autonomy
and the related issue of artistic sincerity through overt constructiveness and reflectiveness –
building with old bricks and emoting on emotion. Some signals for a sentimental hearing of
music would be overt borrowing; overt technique; legitimization of the apparently banal; a
reflection on the problem of returning to very or over familiar forms of beauty.
‘Divertissement’, the second movement of Poulenc’s Sextuor , opens with an allusion
almost as overt as that which begins the Organ Concerto. In this case it is to Mozart’s Piano
Sonata in C major K545, a work which, perhaps for amateur pianists particularly, is iconic
of Mozart’s ‘beautiful’ Classical style ( Musical Example 5.5 ).
The differences, though, are telling. In Poulenc’s first bars, by contrast with Mozart, the
melodic third is absent. This allows it to be prominently present in the accompaniment,
where it is subject to major–minor alteration. The ‘tenor’ line in the piano doubles the
oboe’s dissonant C to expressive effect as the static tonic harmony means that the leading-
note creates the major seventh dissonance, whereas in the Mozart there is passing harmonic
support for the leading note B. This inner piano line foreshadows the turn in the oboe
melody in m. 2. This is comparable with the inverted relationship between the bass and the
treble lines in the Mozart. Poulenc replaces Mozart’s Alberti bass with an accompanimental
figure of similar rise and fall, but now with falling sixth from the ‘sweet’ major third, a fall
that will soon become melodically significant. 26
After a contrastingly jocular middle section the closing part of the movement begins with
the return of the opening theme in the fashion of ternary form. However, the returning theme
is played in the dominant. Such tonal ‘misbehaviour’ is not unusual for Poulenc, but his
tonal choices should not be lightly dismissed as inconsequential. The contradiction of
traditional tonal expectation creates a return strongly tinged by a sense of loss. This is
intensified as the dominant turns to minor, in an expansion of the major–minor fluctuation
of the opening two bars. The recapitulation is condensed, but time is allowed for sighing
descents over the dominant of A and a new descending chromatic figure (fig. 8). Sighs and
laments seem the order of the day. This expressive quality combines with the lack of tonal
closure, felt poignantly because the evocation of ternary design suggests a partial sense of
lost formal beauty because the remnants of such closed formal ‘logic’ remain in play. As a
result, we might hear the movement as sentimental in the familiar, elegiac Schillerian sense
in which a return to Arcadia is recognized as impossible, but the urge to go forward to
Elysium, which Schiller proposed, also seems absent. Instead, it proposes a form of
expression in which a lost, beautiful (Mozartian) mode is evoked in deliberately excessive
and sweet yet partial reconstruction, excessive because it really does lay on the material
carriers of expression more thickly than in the ‘original’ .
 Musical Example 5.5 Poulenc, Sextuor , ‘Divertissement’, opening

Poulenc’s opening melody is also a flagrant pilfering from the gavotte of Stravinsky’s
Pulcinella . He has pickpocketed a musical imposter; there’s no honour among
compositional thieves. Stravinsky’s counterfeit is poised, cool and undemonstrative;
Poulenc’s, in the best sentimental fashion, is indulgent, melancholy and effusive, yet pensive
and self-reflective. Anything Igor can do, Francis can do more sentimentally, but Stravinsky,
too, has his sentimental moments. In this aspect creative relationships with the music of
Tchaikovsky are especially telling. In Tchaikovsky, Poulenc found a Mozartian ally in his
pursuit of sentimental beauty. Tchaikovsky’s reverence for Mozart is often dismissed as
nostalgic, as producing superficial, faked and fawning Mozartiana. This is part of the once
critically commonplace dismissal of Tchaikovsky’s music as vulgar, sentimental and
feminine (all terms Poulenc would eagerly embrace for his own music of course). By
contrast with the assimilation of Mozart, starting with Hoffmann, into an invented tradition
of the Germanic musical sublime, Tchaikovsky’s enthusiasm for Mozart plays an important
part in his commitment to an aesthetic of pleasure, delight and enjoyment, related to
preromantic discourse. This aesthetic is reflected in the preference for the theatrical or
quotidian rather than ambitions towards the abstract or transcendent. Furthermore,
Tchaikovsky’s overt eclecticism made him especially conscious of style, composing music
‘nonchalantly transparent to models and sources’ (Taruskin 1997, 249–53). The latter
comment could equally apply to Poulenc or Stravinsky. Tchaikovsky lies transparently
behind Stravinsky’s Le baiser de la fée (1928), of course. He lies more coyly perhaps in the
first two movements of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind (1923–4) where the
‘sentimental’, Tchaikovskian ‘resonances’ of ‘stifled sighs’ reveal ‘the nostalgia, however
mocked or squeamishly disguised, was real enough’ (Taruskin 1996, 1608). However
repressed, these echoes of Tchaikovsky’s sentimental style suggest that beneath the brittle
exterior of Stravinsky’s music lies a soft centre.
In a radio interview, Poulenc declared that the main theme for the Adagietto of his 1924
ballet Les biches was inspired by a melody in The Sleeping Beauty (here he beats Stravinsky’s
Le baiser de la fée by four years; see Poulenc 1954, 55.) 27 An unacknowledged
Tchaikovskian resonance lies in the chromatic swoon, which is the melody’s second idea.
This might recall the chromatic inflections common as an expressive turn in Mozart’s
melodies, especially through the second-hand example of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo variations,
Op. 33. In Tchaikovsky the chromatic material that brings his theme to a close (mm. 17–21)
can be considered sentimental because it lies outside the controlled, ‘beautiful’ thematic
form as an excessive, one might say, indulgent supplement (its pastoral resonances – pedal
open fifth and woodwind scoring – add further qualities of a sentimentalized idyll; see
Musical Example 5.6 ).

Musical Example 5.6 Tchaikovsky, Rococo Variations , mm. 17–21

It is also an expansive, delayed echo of the F (flat sixth) which inflected the end of the
horn solo line immediately prior to the theme’s presentation. The melodic emphasis on the
flat sixth on the horn is a romantic sign of melancholy and seems to confirm the sense that
the ‘Mozartian’ theme that follows is being recalled as a beloved lost object. The chromatic
codetta to the theme offers sentimental reflection on this melancholic context (the pastoral
idyll, then, is characteristically shadowed by elegy). In Poulenc, the excessive chromaticism
is placed centrally within the main melody and is derived from the chromatic inner line in
the accompaniment. They are sensual, erotic sighs, but the extension of chromatic descent to
the enharmonic minor third emphasizes the melancholic character. The chromatic rise of the
second half of the theme offers a counterbalance, peaking on the joyful major sixth (G) and
leading to purely diatonic closure. It is this rising part of the theme that most directly relates
to the melody of the Pas de quatre of Sleeping Beauty that Poulenc played in the 1954 radio
program. In a 1948 radio talk called L’exquise mauvaise musique , Poulenc said: ‘In
Tchaikovsky, between the pure and the sublime, there is room for this type of delicious
music’ (Poulenc 1999, 67). 28 The chromatic gesture in the Adagietto is a ‘deliciously bad’
musical idea: second or even perhaps third hand, sentimental, neither ‘pure’ nor ‘sublime’,
but vicarious and vulgar, posing, in provocatively erotic fashion, as an alternative to the old
binary opposition of beautiful and sublime.
The evocations of the Gothic, comic, sentimental in Poulenc’s music are crucial to the
compositional revaluation of aesthetic traditions of the beautiful and sublime. Poulenc’s
aesthetic choices were often strongly driven by political imperatives. In the fraught political
arena of early twentieth-century France, with prominent state investment in culture and
manipulation of its public discourse, composers acutely felt the ‘pull’ between aesthetics and
ideology. Against a circumscribed notion of French ‘classic’ style (Latin, pure,
proportionate, well ordered, a beautiful style to be remembered and defended) Poulenc and
others sought to include that which was excluded from this notion (the popular, the
commercial, new alternatives to ‘authorized’ forms of beauty). It was a dissenting and
demystifying impulse, a railing against reification and chauvinistic idealism. However, as
Jane Fulcher notes, this was pursued through ‘respecting traditional cultural frames so that
the internal, logical breaks would become more apparent’. Aesthetic norms and traditional
hierarchies were invoked in order to be disorientated. Alongside this working from within,
there was a desire to incorporate the exoteric, to construct a subjectivity not based on
romantic inwardness but on collective experience. Satie, described in Le coq as one who
‘insouciantly abjures “the sublime”’ was a model, but one that each of Les Six took to
different ends (Fulcher 2005, 15, 156, 165). 29 For Poulenc, the end was to establish a
repertory of strategies that facilitated new musical variants – inversions, subversions, one
might even say perversions – of those aesthetic qualities traditionally assigned to the
beautiful and sublime.

Notes
1 A brief selection of recent secondary sources offering both persuasive overviews and interesting critical angles: Kirwan 2005,
Shaw 2006, Prettejohn 2005, Scruton 2009, Zangwill 2001 and Eagleton 1990, who is especially trenchant on the sublime.
2 Todd Gilman has noted, following Frances Ferguson, how the sublime tended to be discussed in detachment from the
beautiful, as part of the marginalization of the latter. Gilman describes how the work of the English composer Thomas Arne
suffered through being identified with denigrated notions of beauty by contrast with the increasing value placed on the
‘sublime’ music of Handel. Gilman 2009, Ferguson 1992, 44–5. On Handel and the sublime, see, for example, Shapiro 1993,
Harris 2005 and Mathew 2009. The wide spread of considerations of the sublime in recent musicology can be indicated, for
example, by Jaeger 2010 and Krims 2002. For an interesting pair on a ‘subspecies’ of the sublime in music, see Shreffler
2006 and Drott 2004. The discussion of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (first published 1854) shows no sign of
slowing: important recent musicological enquiries include Petty 1998, Burford 2006, Titus 2008, Bonds 2012, and the essays
in Grimes et al . 2013.
3 Those who have followed the recent development of ‘ecomusicology’ (usefully exemplified by the essays collected in
Journal of the American Musicological Society , 64 (2), Summer 2011, might see, for example, Hitt 1999. In the wake of
9/11, there has been important work on the sublime, terror and trauma; see, for example, Ray 2005 and, more generally,
Battersby 2007.
4 This view has been highly influential in recent musicology. Max Paddison states that the shift from natural beauty to the
natural sublime in the philosophy of Burke and Kant ‘is the mark of the modern age’ and concludes that ‘autonomous avant-
 garde music’ (a musical trend of wide cultural prestige, one characteristically complex, esoteric, iconoclastic and
overwhelming) is the ‘epitome of the experience of the sublime’ (Paddison 2004).
5 On Schopenhauer and the sublime, see, for example, Vandenabeele 2003, Trigg 2004 and Vasalou 2013.
6 Also see Hickey [1993] 2009 which provoked something of a critical storm in the early 1990s.
7 Lochhead’s essay elicited a playfully polemical response from James Currie (2008). On the gendered discourse of the
beautiful and sublime, see Korsmeyer 2004, esp. 37–47 and 133–40; Yaeger 1989, 191–212; Mattick, Jr 1990; on the
gendered discourse of musical beauty, see, for example, Head 1995. For a musicological essay indebted to Jameson’s
‘technological sublime’, see Richardson 2008, esp. 144–6.
8 Kant’s ideas on music’s place in aesthetics have received much discussion. For recent analysis, see, for example, Parret 1998
and Weatherston 1996.
9 Published in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Leipzig). Hoffmann’s review is available in translation in Bent 1994, 145–60,
and Charlton 2004, 234–50.
1 In the entry on ‘Schönheit’ and ‘Schön’ in Gustav Schilling’s Universal Lexicon der Tonkunst (1834–8), the beautiful is
0 identified with a formal perfection achieved through unity in variety and a vitality given to pleasing form made possible
through a higher spiritual power, ‘the faculty of the absolute’ and a ‘striving for the ideal’. For Schilling, beauty thus causes
the infinite to be felt in finite forms. He identified contrasting ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ qualities (such as strength–
gentleness, sublime–naive), which ‘consort’ together to create ‘sublime beauty’. The sublime is thus merely one category of
beauty and not diametrically opposite to it (for Schilling the opposition of beautiful and sublime has ‘destroyed the unity of
art’). But such perfections, the highest forms of beauty, are striven for, desired, and only partially realized in artistic
reflections of eternal beauty. Music, in its special substance, however, is the most brilliant foreshadowing of the transcendent.
In le Huray and Day 1988, 313–17.
11 In Berlinische musikalische Zeitung (1805); trans. available in le Huray and Day 1988, 202–4.
12 Schiller nonetheless argued that we need the two, both the sublime sudden jolt of freedom and the refined sensuousness of
beauty: Schiller 1966, 198–9, 201, 211.
13 For Wagner’s explicit denigration of those who identify music’s essence with the ‘pleasure in beautiful forms’ (Hanslick
hardly requires naming), see Wagner [1870] 2008, 14.
14 On examples of the scream in Wagner, see Friedheim 1983.
15 The public debate between Hans Werner Henze and Helmut Lachenmann in the early 1980s sustains this argument on
whether ‘Tristanesque’ beauty remains relevant in twentieth-century music; see Lachenmann 1980 and 1997, Henze 1983,
345–6 (entry dated 13 October 1982) and Downes [1973] 2011.
16 Dahlhaus constructs the ‘twin styles’ in 1989, 8–11, 56. This is critiqued by Kramer, 1995, 46–51. For an attempt to subvert
the division of the beautiful into two through this Beethoven–Rossini opposition, see Downes 2003. For discussion of
Rossini’s reported comments on music’s sublime and beautiful characteristics, see Fabbri 1994.
17 More on the Gothic sublime below. Space does not here permit consideration of Berlioz’s important contribution to the
debate on music as sublime. See, for example, Kolb 2009, esp. pp. 32–3.
18 This is highly suggestive for understanding the music of Debussy.
19 Parts of this section were presented at the conference ‘Rethinking Poulenc’, Keele University, June 2013, and at a research
seminar hosted by the Music Department, University of Nottingham, February 2013.
20 A stimulating and approachable essay on this topic is Brendel 1990.
21 The following paragraph is greatly indebted to Homer’s study. On the relationship of the Gothic and sublime, see also Botting
1995, 25–8.
22 On the sublime in the Gothic novel, see also Ferguson 1992, 97–113. For recent musicological considerations of the Gothic,
see Esse 2009, Head 2011, the reading of Chopin’s Prelude in C minor, Op. 28, No. 20 in Kramer 2012 and Grey,
forthcoming.
23 Danto feels we ‘understand too little about the psychology of loss to understand why the creation of beauty is so fitting as a
way of marking it – why we bring flowers to the graveside, or to the funeral, or why music of a certain sort defines the mood
of mourners. It is as though beauty works as a catalyst, transforming raw grief into a tranquil sadness, helping the tears to
flow and, at the same time, one might say, putting the loss into a certain philosophical perspective’ (Danto 2003, 111).
24 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has highlighted how the homo–heterosexuality opposition marks many cultural binarisms, including
art/kitsch and sincerity/sentimentality; the latter is associated with discredited or devalue notions – manipulative, vicarious,
morbid, knowing, the arch. Sedgwick argues that, from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries, the exemplary
sentimentalist is not the woman but the ‘homosexual’, and the problematic rehabilitation of the sentimental is manifest in
several guises, including the camp (2008, 143–6).
25 For a thoroughly negative view, see Savile 2002: 315–19; and for a rejoinder in the same volume, Newman 2002: 320–31.
Solomon’s work on sentimentality is also critiqued in Begbie 2007.
26 There are many motivic derivations in Poulenc’s opening paragraph.
27 Moore 2012, 11–15 shows the comparison with the theme from The Sleeping Beauty , which Poulenc played during the radio
interview.
 28 entre le pur et le sublime chez Tchaikovski, il y a la place pour ce genre de délicieuse musique . In Poulenc (1954) used the
similar phrase l’adorable mauvaise musique to describe the piano music of Anton Rubinstein (la célèbre Romance ), Grieg
and Borodin, which he heard his mother play alongside Mozart, Chopin, Schubert and Schumann.
29 The other crucial context for these aesthetic choices, which cannot be discussed here, is the social milieu from which
Poulenc’s commissions emerged; for discussion of examples, see Epstein 2013 and Kahan 2010.

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 6
Dialectics and musical analysis
Julian Horton

Introduction

Prospects
The Great Either/Or is the seemingly inescapable debate, familiar to all academically
trained musicologists … epitomised in the question made famous by Carl Dahlhaus … the
most prestigious German music scholar of his generation: Is art history the history of art,
or is it the history of art ? What a senseless distinction! What seemed to make it necessary
was the pseudo-dialectical ‘method’ that cast all thought in rigidly – and artificially –
binarized terms.
(Taruskin 2010, xvii; see also Dahlhaus 1983)

Richard Taruskin’s indictment of dialectical thought hardly bodes well for a chapter
committed to explaining dialectics as a music-analytical tool. Taruskin’s argument fans out
from a specifically methodological complaint about dualism’s pointless reductionism to
encompass ideological objections about false notions of dialectical necessity, especially
those claiming the music-historical high ground in the wake of Schoenberg’s view of
atonality as an imperative foisted on music by history. Laid to rest by postmodern critique in
other disciplines as a remnant of modernism, dialectics has, for Taruskin, persisted
anachronistically in musicology thanks to the sheer force of Theodor Adorno’s influence,
buttressed by Dahlhaus’s popularity.
Ironically enough, the historicism that Taruskin marshals as a working alternative
furnishes the grounds for dialectics’ resuscitation. For although the mortality of Hegel’s
philosophy has long been recognized – as Charles Taylor observed in 1975, ‘no one actually
believes [Hegel’s] central ontological thesis, that the universe is posited by a Spirit whose
essence is rational necessity’ – the intimate relationship dialectical thought enjoys with the
post-Enlightenment history of Western music speaks to a need for an analytical approach
that captures this relationship and unpacks its implications (Taylor 1975, 538).
Consequently, although we can accept Taruskin’s suspicion of the idea that music history
reflects a dialectically unfolding meta-narrative, it is entirely reasonable to argue that music
written in the age of Hegelianism absorbs something of that epistemological context. This
argument can be extended to encompass Adorno as well. Even if his elitist apologia for
Second-Viennese modernism can be attacked as limited in time and place, that very
historical and geographical circumscription underpins the terms of his work’s historicist
defence.
The convergent evolution of central European philosophy and a wide range of phenomena
that have come to define the institutions of European art music supplies perhaps the most
compelling justification for this attitude. Most overt in this respect is the historical parallel
between the development of Hegel’s critical dialectic out of Kant’s system of antinomies
and the evolution of high-classical practice into the music of the ‘Romantic generation’, as
Charles Rosen describes it, a correlation to which Beethoven must inevitably be regarded as
pivotal (see Rosen 1995; Rosen has specifically in mind the generation of composers from
Schubert to Wagner). More generally, the close fit between philosophy and music in this
time can be understood as the product of a post-revolutionary turn, which witnessed the
emergence of philosophical and musical strands of idealist thought, as well as a complex of
social, cultural and political forces, in which many of the structures of contemporary musical
life have their origin (on this subject, see Weber 2008).
In the history of ideas, the dialectical shift is a major element of the Sonderweg or ‘special
path’ that German intellectual life arguably pursued from the later eighteenth century (on
which, see Lepenies 2006). Fragmented politically and only belatedly affected by the forces
of industrialization that transformed England or revolution that shaped France, the German
lands fostered a strand of philosophy emphasizing cultural idealism over political or
economic emancipation, which had tangible musical manifestations. Thus, when Robert
Schumann, writing in 1839, opined that ‘Just as Italy has its Naples, the Frenchman his
revolution, the Englishman his merchant marine, etc., so the German has his Beethoven
symphonies … With Beethoven he has recovered in spirit what he lost to Napoleon’, he
gave voice to a sense of shared cultural identity orientated around Beethoven, which is
coeval with the idealist philosophy of Hegel or the poetry of Hölderlin (see Schumann 1965,
148; trans. modified).
The primary aim of this chapter is to scrutinize the relationship between dialectical
thought and musical analysis, paying special attention to close reading of the post-
Beethovenian repertoire. I nominate three epistemic shifts as a broad historical framework.
The first is naturally located around the turn of the nineteenth century, in the context that
produced Hegel himself and Beethoven as his musical correlative. The second is signalled
by the ‘sharper key’ of Germanic musical politics obtaining after the revolutions of 1848,
driven by the reception of Wagnerian music drama and Lisztian instrumental music and
apostrophized in Franz Brendel’s overtly Hegelian history of music, which delineated
contemporary music in antithetical terms and lent new urgency to the need for compositional
solutions that overcame keenly felt dualisms (Brendel 1852; see also Gur 2012). The debates
raging around the symphony in the late nineteenth century, which found their epicentre in
the stand-off between Brahmsian and Brucknerian variants in Vienna, signified a
polarization of opinion that was in many cases (Brendel’s, for instance) consciously
dialectical. The third shift encompasses Second-Viennese modernism up to 1914, a
repertoire that furnished the musical ground zero of many of Adorno’s arguments, and
which can be understood as a point of culmination for the idealist turn, notwithstanding later
attempts at revival.
These historical markers provide a structure for narrating a history of contact between
music and dialectics (rather than a dialectical history) via analytical case studies of
Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata, Op. 31, No. 2, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5 and Berg’s
Piano Sonata Op. 1 respectively. By way of establishing philosophical and methodological
contexts, I provide a brief preparatory appraisal of Hegelian and Adornian dialectical
mentalities, in so far as this is possible under the present constraints .

Two dialectical models

The Hegelian dialectic

It is, of course, hardly feasible to encompass the history of dialectical thought here, or even
to give a substantial account of its Hegelian formulation. The notion of the dialectic is at
once sufficiently engrained in popular understanding as to obviate extensive consideration,
and sufficiently evasive as to resist straightforward explanation. The following is
consequently designed as a sketch of the critical problems attending Hegel’s idea rather than
a systematic introduction. The notion of dialectic pervades Hegel’s mature writings; three
sources are, however, prominent in attempts to define its nature and function – the
Phenomenology of Mind , the Encyclopedia Logic and the Science of Logic – and it is these
on which my outline primarily draws.
The core debate surrounding the Hegelian dialectic centres on the extent to which he
conceived it as a species of logic akin to (for example) syllogism, as a mode of reasoning
analogous to deduction or induction, as a critical method, or indeed as a methodology of any
kind. The dialectical idea is most commonly formulated in triadic terms, through the well-
known sequence ‘thesis – antithesis – synthesis’; but scholars of Hegel have been quick to
point out the inadequacy of this formulation. As Frederick Beiser writes:

Although it is possible to talk about a dialectic, it is advisable to avoid the most popular
way of explaining it: in terms of the schema ‘thesis – antithesis – synthesis’. Hegel never
himself used this terminology, and he criticised the use of all schemata. In the
Phenomenology Hegel did praise ‘the triadic form’ that had been rediscovered by Kant
…; but this is a reference to the triadic form of Kant’s table of categories, not a method of
thesis – antithesis – synthesis.
(Beiser 2005, 161)

Beiser is no less suspicious of the view that dialectics is a kind of formal logic: ‘Another
common misconception is that the dialectic is some kind of alternative logic, having its own
distinctive principles to compete with traditional logic. However, Hegel’s dialectic was
never meant to be a formal logic, one that determines the fundamental laws of inference
governing all propositions, whatever their content’ (Beiser 2005, 161). In general, it can be
argued that any attempt to render the dialectic in methodological terms is bound to fail,
because Hegel’s philosophy is altogether opposed to methodology, in the sense of a
structure of principles that is justified a priori and then applied to problems of ontology or
epistemology.
Hegel’s opposition both to the notion of philosophy as a methodology or system of a
priori principles and to the idea of formal logic are evident in the introductory remarks to the
Science of Logic :

[W]hat logic is cannot be stated beforehand, rather does this knowledge … first emerge as
 the final outcome and consummation of the whole exposition. Similarly, it is essentially
within the science that the subject matter of logic, namely, thinking or more specifically
comprehensive thinking is considered: the Notion of logic has its genesis in the course of
the exposition and cannot therefore be premised.
(Hegel 1969, 43)

Logic, in these terms, is not the form of cognition abstracted from its content; rather, Hegel
locates it in the realm of ‘pure science’, in which context it is an absolute mode of thought,
arising when the opposition of form and content has been overcome. In other words, it ‘is to
be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth
as it is without veil and in its own absolute nature’; or as explained more succinctly in the
Encyclopaedia Logic , it is ‘the science of the pure idea , that is, of the Idea in the abstract
element of thinking’ (Hegel 1969, 50; 1991, 45).
The view pursued here explains the dialectic in three basic ways: first, as a turn in the
history of ideas, in which respect it responds primarily to Kant; second, as an a posteriori
response to the ontology, or being, of the subject; and finally, as a model of the historical
development of consciousness. In the first sense, Hegel’s dialectic is an attempt to rescue
metaphysics in the wake of Kant’s critical philosophy, and specifically of the system of
antinomies developed in Part II of the Critique of Pure Reason , which forms a central
component of what Kant termed the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’. In that context, Kant
formulated four antithetical propositions (antinomies) as an elaboration of the ‘antithetic of
pure reason’ (Kant 1991, 257–81). These together map out a terrain of assertions, arising in
the application of pure reason, which generate contradictory but logically consistent forms.
He explains:

If we employ our reason not merely in the application of the principles of the
understanding to objects of experience, but venture with it beyond these boundaries, there
arise certain sophistical propositions or theorems [which] have the following peculiarities:
they can find neither confirmation nor confutation in experience; and each is in itself not
only self-consistent, but posesses conditions of its necessity in the very nature of reason –
only that, unluckily, there exist just as valid and necessary grounds for maintaining the
contrary proposition.
(Kant 1991, 257)

Kant nominated four such antinomies, each defined by a thesis and its antithesis: (1) the
world either is, or is not, infinite with respect to time and space; (2) every ‘composite
substance’ either is, or is not, irreducibly complex; (3) everything that happens either is, or
is not, determined with respect to causality; and (4) there either does or does not exist an
‘absolutely necessary being’, which is the world’s primal cause. Kant’s objective was not
reconciliation of the antinomies, so much as the development of a ‘sceptical method’, which
policed transcendental propositions (Kant 1991, 258–9).
Hegel praised Kant for elevating dialectic to the status of ‘ a necessary function of reason
’ [Hegel’s italics], but criticized Kant’s dualistic formulation on the grounds that ‘if no
advance is made beyond the abstract negative aspect of dialectic, the result is only the
familiar one that reason is incapable of knowing the infinite; a strange result for – since the
infinite is the Reasonable – it asserts that reason is incapable of knowing the Reasonable’
(Hegel 1969, 56). In the Science of Logic , the notion of dialectic develops immediately out
of this perception: it does not reside in antinomy in the Kantian sense, but in ‘the grasping of
opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative’ (Hegel 1969, 56).
The ontological explanation of the dialectic posits it as the mechanism of the progressive
self-understanding of consciousness (the Spirit or Geist ). Tracing the progress of this is the
task of the Phenomenology of Mind , in which, as Hegel described it, he had ‘exhibited
consciousness in its movement onwards from the first immediate opposition of itself and the
object to absolute knowing’ (Hegel 1969, 48). As Hegel explains, this is related to a
conception of logic, because logic as pure thought comes about through the agency of the
dialectic, as a consequence of the action of overcoming, synthesis or ‘sublation’ ( Aufhebung
), which eliminates the distinction between thought as the object and the subject of
consciousness. 1 Ultimately, the Science of Logic is organized as a narrative of the dialectic
through which the condition of logic ‘as pure reason’ comes about; as Taylor explains,
‘Hegel is going to offer us a transcendental logic which will also be an ontology’ (Taylor
1975, 227). Thus the Logic operates by scrutinizing the dialectical process through which
grounding categories in our experience of reality are constituted. Hegel’s first category,
‘Being’, for instance, devolves into quality, quantity and measure, and each is dismantled
into subcategories, which are defined through dialectical motion, beginning with the
opposition of being and nothing, the synthesis of which produces the condition of becoming.
Finally, the dialectic constitutes an historical model, because the progress of Spirit
towards self-understanding is also the engine of human history. 2 The ultimate goal of
history in these terms is a situation in which the model of the state is in exact accord with
Spirit’s self-understanding; and this is of necessity ‘a community which is in conformity
with reason; or … one which embodies freedom’, since Spirit’s self-understanding as pure
reason is also the condition of its freedom (Taylor 1975, 389). In these terms, world history
is regarded as a progression of civilizations, which tend increasingly towards the unity of
society and the self-conceiving Spirit, each dialectically superseding its predecessor. The
dialectic is therefore the mechanism of a goal-orientated history, driven forwards by the
actions of ‘world-historical individuals’, who access the condition of the Geist , or in Hegel’s
terms ‘comprehend the substantial content which is the will of the world Spirit’, and so push
society towards the next stage of its development (see Hegel 1955, 89–90; quoted in Taylor
1975, 392).

Adorno and negative dialectics

A detailed account of the reception of these ideas would require nothing less than an
intellectual history of German culture from Feuerbach and Marx through Benjamin, Adorno,
Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School to Jürgen Habermas; in effect, a history of the
philosophical context of ‘the moment of German music’, as Berthold Hoeckner has called it
(Hoeckner 2002). Isolation of Adorno as a representative case is more realistic, and is useful
for several reasons. His writing voices substantially the Central-European endgame of
Hegelianism, while also displaying an investment in music that is unique among
philosophers seeking to continue the Hegelian–Marxist line of critical thought. Moreover,
the continued pertinence of dialectics in recent musical thought results overwhelmingly from
his enduring influence, both directly as mentor for a body of sympathetic scholarship and
indirectly through the impact of scholars working in Adorno’s shadow (above all,
Dahlhaus).
 If Hegelianism in the nineteenth century maintained a conviction in historical utopianism
(the nature of which varies depending on right- or left-orientation), then Adorno offers a
characteristically twentieth-century variant, which mingles Marxist credentials with an elitist
propensity to defend the bourgeois canon, a dedication to progressive composition, and a
loss of faith in music’s capacity to express the overcoming of social antinomies. His
overriding pessimism combines with critical theory’s admixture of philosophy, sociology
and psychology to problematize straightforward classification; as Martin Jay has observed:

The force-field of Adorno’s intellectual career … would thus include the generating
energies of Western Marxism, aesthetic modernism, mandarin cultural despair, and
Jewish self- identification, as well as the more anticipatory pull of deconstructionism.
Although at certain moments and in certain moods Adorno may have been attracted more
to one of these poles than to another, his work as a whole can best be grasped as an
uneasy tension among all of them.
(Jay 1984, 22)

Adorno pursues Hegel’s philosophy of history to the extent that he accepts the dialectic as
history’s basic mechanism, and adopts its Marxian inversion by seeing in this process the
reflection of an economic or sociological base rather than a transcendent World Spirit. In
Adorno’s formulation, however, this process is deprived of its synthetic goal. The will
towards overcoming constitutes a bourgeois aspiration, arising from the post-Enlightenment
dialectical tension between the subject’s rational freedom and his or her subordination to the
collectivizing tendency of society. 3 If the achievement of the Enlightenment was to
emancipate the individual by asserting the primacy of rational autonomy over social
function or convention, then the question arises as to what kind of a society can be devised,
which respects this autonomy while also preserving a notion of collective responsibility. The
great bourgeois aspiration is the attainment of such a social order, the citizens of which
could act freely in accordance with the dictates of reason and simultaneously fulfil their
communal responsibilities; this, in effect, is Hegel’s state in unity with the self-conceiving
Geist .
Adorno’s historical model is in essence the narrative of this aspiration’s failure. The truth
of the post-Enlightenment world is the looming impossibility of reconciling individual and
collective; it is, in other words, defined by an antinomy that can’t be resolved, not by the
escalating resolution of contradictions that drives Hegel’s model. The more individuals posit
utopian solutions, the more acutely the inadequacy of these solutions is exposed. Worse, the
political mechanisms of the bourgeois world have led either to the increasing subordination
of the individual to the reproduction of capital (in market economies) or to the hubristic
assertion of an individual will over an anonymous populace (in totalitarian societies).
Adorno borrows the Marxian notion of alienation to characterize the results: the protracted
experience of an unresolved conflict between the self-knowledge of rational freedom and its
instrumental domination by society serves to accentuate the condition of social isolation. In
brief, the individual’s authentic modern experience is alienation, the sense of a disjunction
between self-knowledge and social circumstance that can never be reconciled. It is in this
sense that Adorno’s philosophy of history is negative-dialectical ; the fabric of society is
defined by contradictions, the attempted synthesis of which is consistently negated. 4
This view is given music-historical traction via another dialectical argument: the claim
that music’s autonomous structures embed its social significance. Musical works, like all art,
constitute ‘the unconscious historiography of their epoch’ (this idea is formulated in this
way in Adorno 1984, 261). Their social ‘essence’ can therefore be read from their technical,
structural components; the intra-musical embodies the extra-musical, because the former is
the dialectical partner of the latter. Properly conceived, the task of music analysis is thus not
simply to give a structural account of the musical work, but to unearth its ‘truth content’,
since its social meaning unavoidably speaks through its technique (see Adorno 1982).
More than this, a work’s structure is inevitably freighted with traces of its history, because
the work’s individuality is always wrought from convention. The argument here turns on a
dialectical definition of musical material, as that which simultaneously individuates the
piece of music and defines the lingua franca on which the composer draws (see Paddison
1993, ch. 2). The main theme in the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 2, No.
1, for example, is unique to that piece, to the extent that its specific identity is shared with no
other work. Yet every aspect of the theme is conventional: its initial motive comprises a
Mannheim ‘skyrocket’ decaying to a turn figure; the partnering of tonic and dominant forms
of this idea in measures 1 to 4 is a widespread device, as is the paraphrase of the same
motives and harmonic progression in half the duration in measures 5 to 6; and overall, the
theme’s sentential design relates it to thousands of other late eighteenth-century melodies.
The theme, in brief, is simultaneously individual and conventional.
Connecting this perception to the negative-dialectical concept of history allows the
tension between tradition and innovation to be interpreted socio-politically as well as
musically. The rational subject’s relationship to society speaks through the composer’s
individuation of convention; the musical material’s task is in this respect the mediation (
Vermittlung ) of the creative subject and its objectified social other. And because this
interaction is disposed in time across a work’s or movement’s overall form, the formal
process takes on the character of a narrative of the subject’s social condition. Thus, Adorno
explicitly stressed the analogy between Beethoven’s treatment of sonata form and the
Hegelian dialectic, which was guaranteed by Beethoven’s treatment of the recapitulation as
a locus of reconciliation (see Adorno 1957 and 1998). At least in Beethoven’s middle
period, this relationship borders on synonymy: Beethoven expresses in music what Hegel
expresses in philosophy.
Adorno brought the negative-dialectical idea to bear on his own historical circumstances
in the Philosophy of New Music , first published in 1949. 5 The dialectical method is
announced immediately in the Introduction’s recourse to Walter Benjamin, which cites
Benjamin’s dictum in the Origins of German Tragic Drama that ‘Philosophical history as the
research of origin is the form that, in the most remote extremes … reveals the configuration
of the idea as the configuration of the totality, characterized by the possibility of a
meaningful juxtaposition of these extremes’ (Benjamin 1977, 47, cited in Adorno 2006, 7).
The vicissitudes of Adorno’s present, however, render inadequate any application of this
idea that pushes towards Hegelian syntheses:

At a historical hour, when the reconciliation of subject and object has been perverted to a
satanic parody, to the liquidation of the subject in the objective order, the only philosophy
that still serves reconciliation is one that scorns the illusion of reconciliation and asserts
against universal self-alienation the reality of the hopelessly alienated for which the
‘thing-itself’ scarcely speaks any longer.
 (Adorno 2006, 25)

Adorno sees in these circumstances ‘the far limit of … immanent method’: new music can
either express alienation as the authentic condition of the modern subject, or else sacrifice
subjectivity to an ‘objective order’, which devalues the free individual before the musical
analogue of false totality. Critical method cannot move beyond this dualism, but is instead
bound to reveal either the truth of alienation or the lie of totality in any musical work.
The book’s design nominates the governing music-historical antinomy of its time –
progress and regression – embodied in the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky as the
extremes of these two poles. Its local organization remains true to critical theory’s anti-
systematic stance, progressing paratactically through the elaboration of dialectically argued
concepts (23 in the Schoenberg essay; 27 in the Stravinsky essay), which form a
constellation of ideas rather than a ramified, teleological thesis.
In the technical domain, the defence of Schoenberg is founded on a defence of atonality,
as the necessary outcome of a tendency inherent in the musical material. As Adorno argues:

By no means do all tonal combinations … stand indifferently at the disposal of the

composer today. Even the duller ear perceives the shabbiness and tiredness of the
diminished seventh chord or of certain chromatic passing notes in the salon music of the
nineteenth century. For the technically experienced ear, vague discontent of this kind is
transformed into a canon of prohibitions. If all is not deception, this canon now
demeasures the means of tonality, which is to say, the whole of traditional music.
(Adorno 2006, 32)

Schoenberg’s response to this imperative coordinates a radically dissonant language with a

rejection of tonal forms; these together signify a collapse of the musical work, expressed
through the increasing compression diplayed in his freely atonal pieces. If such music sits at
the extreme limit of the material’s tendency, then it also sediments a social truth: ‘The
critique of the temporally extensive schema is bound up with that of the content: phrase and
ideology. Music, contracted to a moment, is true as an eruption of negative experience’
(Adorno 2006, 34).
At the same time, Schoenberg’s preoccupation with concepts of material development
anchors his radicalism in tradition. In particular, the pushing of developing variation towards
a condition of ‘total development’, in which all syntactic norms are subordinated to motivic
transformation, is prefigured in post-Beethovenian instrumental music, and especially in
Brahms’s music, which emancipates thematic treatment (as a narrative of the rationally free
subject) from formal convention (as analogues of an objective order):

In Brahms, development, as thematic labour, had already utterly siezed possession of the
sonata. Development, universalized, is to reconstruct the sonata’s problematic totality ….
Within the framework of tonality he broadly rejects the conventional formulae and
rudiments, and at every moment – so to speak – he produces the unity of the work anew,
in freedom …. By assimilating Beethoven and Brahms, Schoenberg’s music can lay claim
to the legacy of classical bourgeois music much as the materialist dialectic relates back to
Hegel.
(Adorno 2006, 47)
 Schoenberg’s technique is progressive precisely because it realizes this tendency at a new
level of innovation, a characteristic that also guarantees its social authenticity:

The cognitive power of new music … is legitimate only in that it … transcends – both
annuls and saves – romantic differentiation on a technical level, and thus according to its
substantiality. The subject of new music … is the real, emancipated, isolated subject of
the late bourgeois period.
(Adorno 2006, 47–8)

At the antithetical extreme, Stravinsky is cast as an agent of restoration, who effectively

sacrifices individuality to an objectification of musical materials, and in so doing
subordinates the subject to a false totality. Where Schoenberg’s atonal music is intensely
subjective, Stravinsky’s music renounces interiority in favour of a series of quasi-objective
categories, from the preservation of tonal idioms and the rejection of expression to the
neoclassical treatment of old forms as musical ‘found objects’. Thus, his preoccupation with
ballet is for Adorno the product of an imagination ‘that is drawn to the place where music …
functions intentionlessly and excites corporeal movement instead of being burdened with
meaning’, an assertion that is given substance through comparison of Petrushka with
Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (Adorno 2006, 108). Whereas in Pierrot ‘everything rests on the
solitary subjectivity, withdrawn into itself’, in Petrushka ‘the music identifies not with the
victim but with the annihilating authority’ (Adorno 2006, 110). Such a retreat from
subjectivity is most controversially expressed in The Rite of Spring , Stravinsky’s ‘virtuoso
composition of regression’, the central theme of which is again ‘an antihuman sacrifice to
the collective: a sacrifice without tragedy’ (Adorno 2006, 111). The Rite , however, goes
beyond divesting music of the association between material narrative and empathy with an
expressive subject, and embraces wholesale ‘identification with the collective’. The Rite ’s
sacrifice is devoid of tragedy because ‘there is no aesthetic antithesis between the one
sacrificed and the tribe’ (Adorno 2006, 118). 6
In neoclassical music, objectification is turned instead towards past forms and styles,
producing a musical vocabulary amassed ‘out of putatively presubjective phases of music’.
At its worst, this technique produces music that for Adorno courts incomprehensibility. In
direct opposition to the organicism of Schoenberg, which seeks coherence even as it
alienates its listener, Stravinsky’s neoclassical music masks incoherence with surface
familiarity, to the end of enforcing a kind of musical authoritarianism:

It is precisely the objective incomprehensibility, associated with the subjective impression

of being somehow traditional, that unyieldingly silences any disputatiously questioning
ear. The blind obedience that authoritarian music anticipates corresponds to the blindness
of the authoritarian principle itself.
(Adorno 2006, 152)

In all, Adorno offers us a stark choice: if music pursues a notion of community, then it
embraces a lie of collectivity that tends towards totalitarianism or submission to the culture
industry; if music honours the material’s immanent tendency, then it forever condemns the
composer to isolation.
Three analyses
Adorno’s work brings the association of dialectics and musical thought to an apex of
sophistication. Its biggest lacuna is the absence of a correspondingly complex approach to
analysis, a difficulty that has been addressed by Max Paddison:

One cannot escape the feeling that, even though the analyses themselves tend to be
irritatingly fragmentary, the real problem lies in the strange disparity between the
sophistication and radicality of his aesthetics and sociology on the one hand, and on the
other hand the lack of sophistication and the traditional character of his music-analytical
method.
(Paddison 1993, 169 )

Numerous attempts have since been made to add more analytical flesh to Adorno’s
philosophy (for example, see Chua 1995; Spitzer 2006; Agawu 2005). The three analyses
offered here gloss some of these attempts, while also advancing novel dialectical readings.
Central to each analysis is a preoccupation with the antinomies projected by the material on
the one hand, and with the nature of the formal processes they compel on the other. The
former are understood as the music’s generative elements, the latter as the means by which
the struggle for reconciliation is realized in musical form. The embodiment of conflict is
explored in a variety of parameters, from motivic and thematic considerations to topical
discourse and its expressive consequences.

Beethoven: Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, ‘Tempest’

Dahlhaus’s various commentaries on the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata
constitute perhaps the most widely debated analytical applications of dialectical thinking.
For Dahlhaus, the vital achievement of this movement is the collapse of thematic
presentation into thematic process. The essential feature of the primary material is no longer
melodic presentation as the articulation of key and topic, but the exposure of a formal idea,
which is realized in the inception of a dialectical process of thematic development. This is
achieved by decoupling the classical association between the presentation of material and
the assertion of a formal premise. Eighteenth-century composers usually begin a sonata by
establishing key and ‘affect’ within a conventionalized thematic form, the result being a
statement of the theme’s identity (a Satz in the language of nineteenth-century Formenlehre
). Any variation or inspection of the theme’s properties happens later, in parts of the form to
which such activity is appropriate. In the ‘Tempest’, no such distinction is observed:
development sets in immediately and is ongoing, and this calls into question the very
existence of a Satz or the division of labour it supports.
Comparison of the ‘Tempest’ Sonata’s opening with that of Mozart’s K 457, shown in
Musical Examples 6.1 and 6.2 , explicates Dahlhaus’s point. Mozart’s theme comprises an
expansive sentence, which can be broken into statement and response (measures 1–8),
continuation (9–16) and cadence (17–19 1 ). The theme is, to be sure, motivically pregnant,
a property that Mozart exploits immediately in the transition, which begins with a retrieval
of the statement’s head motive. At the same time, a clear distinction between a
presentational phase of action (the sentence) and its consequences (the transition) is
preserved; the form’s core idea and first-theme function are one and the same, as a result of
which what happens next emerges as a development out of the movement’s initial premise.
The opening of the ‘Tempest’ cannot be parsed so straightforwardly. To the extent that
they divide into two units (measures 1–6 and 7–21 1 ), the second of which revisits the
material of the first, measures 1–21 1 are loosely periodic, although various factors challenge
this interpretation, not least of which is the phrase’s manifestly irregular length. As
Dahlhaus points out, however, the alternation of Largo and Allegro material combines with
the prevailing dominant harmony to lend the music an introductory flavour that thwarts
identification of an unambiguously presentational first-theme function. The music after
measure 21 does not compensate, but instead moves efficiently into a transition by
sequencing the initial arpeggiated figure in the interests of modulating towards V/v. For
Dahlhaus, there is no ‘theme’ here in the sense established in Mozart’s K 457. Rather the
notion of a stable first subject collapses into a dialectic of preparation and continuation:

Musical Example 6.1 Mozart, Piano Sonata, K. 457, first movement,

mm. 1–19
 The ‘theme’ is both an improvisatory introduction and a transitional pattern; instead of
being presented in a standard exposition, it dissolves into an ante quem and a post quem:
measure 1 is ‘not yet’ and measure 21 is ‘no longer’ the ‘actual’ exposition, which in Op.
31, No. 2 does not exist. Nowhere does the thematic material take on a basic form;
instead, it manifests itself in changing guises according to its location in the formal
process, like variations without an explicit theme.
(Dahlhaus 1989, 15)

What imparts coherence to this music is, for Dahlhaus, not the procession of formal
functions (first theme – transition) but the concept regulating material development, which is
manifest in the processes in which the motives participate. The disposition of the harmony
exacerbates this condition. The tonic’s grounding assertion is located at the start of the
transition; in harmonic terms, measures 1–20 comprise an upbeat to the transition, which
then honours its conventional tonal function by modulating.
Dahlhaus associates this dialectical turn with Beethoven’s middle-period music in
general, a shift that is coeval with the first maturity of Hegel’s philosophy (Op. 31, No. 2
dates from 1802; the Phenomenology of Mind was published in 1807). Its consequence is the
emergence of a conception of form as the exposure and resolution of a problem: the opening
of Op. 31, No. 2 sets up a ‘problematic’ – the dialectic of pre- and post-thematic functions –
to which the remainder of the movement is a response. The problem itself is the movement’s
‘underlying idea’, defined as
 Musical Example 6.2 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, ‘The
Tempest’, first movement, mm. 1–24

the manner in which a specific association is made between the development of the
thematic material, the disposition of the formal functions, and the succession of the
aesthetic characters: a manner of connection which can be traced back to a problem, to
which the finished movement is the solution.
 (Dahlhaus 1991, 145)

The transatlantic reception of Dahlhaus’s analysis has crystallized around Janet

Schmalfeldt’s article on the movement, which has spawned a rich secondary literature
(Schmalfeldt 1995; reprinted and revised in Schmalfeldt 2011, ch. 2). For Schmalfeldt,
Dahlhaus identified a core feature differentiating classical and post-classical practice, which
is the shift from architectonic form to form as the embodiment of process. Classical form is
concerned with the material’s ‘being’ ( sein ), expressed in the delineation of thematic
presentation and variation. Romantic form rather concerns material ‘becoming’ ( werden ),
under the influence of which presentation is no longer detached from development, but is
indentured to it. The synonymy of Beethovenian sonata form and the Hegelian dialectic
noted by Adorno is instantiated here; in Schmalfeldt’s words, ‘Beethoven’s techniques of
development and variation are precisely those aspects of his treatment of form that so
preoccupied Adorno in his critique of European music from late Beethoven to Schoenberg
and beyond’ (Schmalfeldt 2011, 29). Beethoven is not content simply to allow his themes to
exist as self-sufficient melodies. Instead, they are caught up in a process, which strives
towards a moment of ultimate overcoming, where initial antinomies are resolved at a higher
level of consciousness.
Schmalfeldt contextualizes Dahlhaus’s analysis within the history of dialectical thinking
from Hegel to Adorno, by way of A. B. Marx and Arnold Schoenberg, and also augments it
by seeking a reconciliation of the dialectical reading with Schenkerian analysis. In so doing,
she uncovers an additional process, which links the main and subordinate themes. This
flows from the unassuming turn figure that embellishes the half cadence in measure 6. As
Musical Example 6.3 shows, this figure (labelled ‘y’) gradually takes on motivic
significance as the exposition progresses. It gains rhythmic stability in measure 23, as a new
response to the germinal arpeggiation (which Musical Example 6.3 calls ‘x’). The next stage
of ‘y”s evolution arrives with the standing on V/v achieved at measure 41, where it now
migrates into the texture, appearing in diminished form as the left-hand tenor voice. With
the resolution on to v 6–3 at measure 55, the exposition’s most stable subordinate-theme
candidate is reached, conceived as a rhythmic reimagining of ‘y”s inversion.
The progress of ‘y’ across the exposition sets up an additional process, which is the
effective antithesis of the germinal dialectic noted by Dahlhaus. Whereas ‘x’ initiates
development, ‘y’ develops towards a thematic form, which is realized as the second subject.
Beginning life as a purely ornamental feature, ‘y’ becomes a theme. Measures 6–55 therefore
adumbrate the second theme at the same time as they posit the idea that underlies the first
theme’s function. The two processes cross paths in the transition, where both ‘x’ and ‘y’
have equal motivic weight. After this convergence, ‘x’ temporarily recedes from the
discourse, and ‘y’ is allowed to develop its thematic identity.
 Musical Example 6.3 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, first
movement, progress of motive ‘y’ in exposition

Commentators responding to Schmalfeldt’s work have addressed the movement’s

ambiguities from other directions: William Caplin has, for instance, emphasized its form-
functional characteristics; James Hepokoski has viewed it from the perspective of sonata
theory (Caplin 2009; Hepokoski 2009). One feature of the movement that has eluded
substantial explanation is the first-theme recapitulation, quoted in Musical Example 6.4 . The
theme’s expositional form – its succession of basic and contrasting ideas within a loosely
periodic design – is essentially preserved here. The basic idea is, however, attenuated in
each statement by the addition of a free recitative prolonging the underlying harmony, and
from measure 159, the Allegro contrasting idea digresses towards the remote key of F
minor and abandons any thematic correspondence with the exposition, beyond the retention
of a chromatic ascent as voice-leading framework. We emerge by measure 171 on to the
standing on V first heard in measure 41, here transposed into the tonic, and from this point
the recapitulation proceeds in direct analogy to the exposition, with the addition of a brief
dissipatory coda.
The difficulty here is that the first-theme reprise has none of the features we commonly
associate with stabilization or the overcoming of contradictions, a property that calls into
question the straightforward synonymy of Beethovenian form and Hegelian philosophy. On
the contrary, Beethoven exacerbates all the instabilities inherited from the exposition. Those
elements most redolent of an introduction – the slow tempo and non-tonic harmony – are
given extra rhetorical emphasis; and the resolution of the standing on V on to i disappears
completely, together with any delineation of first theme and transition. Moreover, the
Largo’s harmonic provisionality now has additionally to be understood in relation to the
retransition, the standing on V of which it effectively extends. The first theme is now
problematic not only because it sounds like an introduction, but also because it sounds like a
continuation of the development. In fact, as Musical Example 6.5 shows, there is no
resolution of the dominant initiating the retransition in measure 121 until the return of the
second theme over i 6–3 in measure 185.
Musical Example 6.4 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, first
movement, first-theme recapitulation
 All of this has three major ramifications. First, there is no recapitulatory synthesis of the
initial dialectical ‘idea’. To be sure, the exposition complex returns in the tonic, but this
alone cannot guarantee the resolution of its inherent contradictions; Dahlhaus’s point is,
after all, that the form’s generative concept appears within the primary material, not in the
tonal contrast between it and the subordinate group. Second, the relationship between the
processes surrounding ‘x’ and ‘y’ changes fundamentally. The adumbration of ‘y’ now
dominates the discourse, as if its tonic reprise could only be secured by dissolving the first-
theme function into a kind of through-composed improvisation. The contest of ‘x’ and ‘y’ is
therefore not resolved into a higher order; the former simply dissipates by way of clearing
space for the latter. Finally, and most importantly, this imbalance provokes a radical
reconception of where the form’s goal should be located. The ultimate resolution of the
retransitional standing on V is the tonic perfect authentic cadence (PAC) closing the second
group by measure 217. Hepokoski and Darcy would call this the Essential Structural Closure
(ESC), an event that customarily has structural force because it brings the second theme’s
end cadence into tonal agreement with the first theme (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, 232–3).
7 Measure 217, however, supplies the first structural root-position tonic since measure 21,
which means that it simultaneously fulfils an expectation of tonic arrival normally attending
the recapitulation’s start. The form is in consequence more negative-dialectical than
dialectical. In a maneouvre that would become widespread in later music, it is not more than
the sum of its antithetical parts, and so engenders a teleology that oversteps the movement’s
end: we wait for a synthetic event to arrive later in the movement cycle, which the first
movement has frustrated.
 Musical Example 6.5 Beethoven, Piano Sonata Op. 31, No. 2, first
movement, mm. 121–217, bass progressio n

Dahlhaus argued that the dialectical concept of form he found in the ‘Tempest’
apostrophized the ‘strong’ form of composition in its time, supplying one half of an
overarching historical dialectic between Beethovenian instrumental music, the urgent
teleology of which foregrounded the concept of ‘becoming’, and Rossinian vocal music,
which maintained the primacy of ‘being’ in its preoccupation with a melody’s inherent
quality rather than its structural potential (see Dahlhaus 1989, 8–15). Although we might
baulk at such nationally grounded dichotomies (the ‘strength’ of Beethoven’s conception
implies the weakness of Rossini’s), we can nevertheless accept that a dialectical reading of
the ‘Tempest’ captures something of the work’s context in the history of ideas.
The first movement’s unresolved antinomies also have strong Adornian resonances. The
form’s subjective aspects – its thematic specificities and the ideas they embody – are not
reconciled with the dictates of formal convention. Instead, the recapitulation sacrifices
convention to subjectivity in key respects. The first-theme reprise is essentially a region of
subjectification, which temporarily dissolves the notion of a ‘tight-knit’ main subject into a
fantasia on its motivic content, an event from which the recapitulation’s synthetic function
never fully recovers. 8 The mediation of a social dialectic is tangible: the failure to contain
the music’s subjectivity within sonata conventions parallels the failure to generate social and
political order from rational individuality. In musical as well as political terms, the
resolution of this conflict is deferred as an aspiration.

Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale

Although Adorno’s equation of Beethovenian sonata form and the Hegelian dialectic posits
the relationship between expositional binary opposition and recapitulatory synthesis as
inherent in the sonata idea, the analytical headaches posed by the first movement of the
‘Tempest’ reveal how grossly reductive it is to argue that Beethovenian sonata forms in
general project synthesis as an expressively marked processual goal. It is more historically
sensible to observe that narratives of dialectical overcoming are rhetorically, expressively
and philosophically central to some genres in some contexts, and either present by negative
implication or largely incidental in others. At the level of the movement cycle, dialectical
synthesis is palpable as the mechanism of the Beethovenian symphonic struggle-victory plot
archetype, which is the agent of symphonic idealism enshrined in his Symphony No. 5.
Other strands of symphonism make expressive capital out of evading rather than accepting
this archetype. The valedictory ending tracking back to Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony finds
a nineteenth-century correlative in the notion of leave-taking as overcoming, expressed, for
example, in the endings of Brahms’s Symphony No. 3 and Mahler’s Symphony No. 9; and
negation as tragedy, expressed either in defiance or resignation, is basic to the narratives of
Brahms’s Symphony No. 4, Dvořák’s No. 7, Tchaikovsky’s No. 6 and Mahler’s No. 6 .
One magisterial example of a dialectical process that works towards an expressive,
structural and (arguably) socio-cultural synthesis occurs in Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5.
Completed in 1878, it represents the culmination of a sustained phase of compositional
development beginning with the Symphony No. 2 (1872, revised 1877), to which the
problem of the summative ending constitutes a central preoccupation. 9 The Fifth’s synthetic
character resides in its resolution of high-level formal problems, which its predecessor
works engage but (arguably) fail to surmount. This sense of overcoming can be
characterized in explicitly dialectical terms. On the largest scale, the work is organized into
two nested cyclical units, which are conceptually opposed. The first movement and Finale
are couched in an ambiguous but ultimately prevalent B major, and share material,
harmonic and tonal properties, as well as topical and expressive commonalities. The inner
movements are also related tonally (both tonicize D minor) and thematically (the main
theme of the Scherzo is an accelerated variant of that of the Adagio). The paired movements
are antithetically disposed in various ways. The outer movements embed minor-key aspects
in a major-mode context, while the inner movements embed major elements within minor
tonality. The movements’ topical contrasts are also clearly delineated. 10 The Adagio
focuses on the disposition of processional topics; the Scherzo cycles between scherzando
and Ländler material; the first movement and Finale are rather preoccupied with march and
chorale. These contrasts are anticipated in the first movement’s introduction, which begins
with a slow processional overlaid with imitative counterpoint, and proceeds through fanfare
and chorale to a peroration anticipating the main theme’s march topic.
The Symphony’s topical discourse sediments social meanings in a way that resonates
strongly with Adorno’s concept of unconscious historiography. 11 The encompassing
dualism of march and chorale signifies a dialectic of the sacred and the secular, the
accommodation of which constituted a basic dilemma for Bruckner’s symphonic style. This
issue finds its most compressed expression in the second-theme group of the Symphony No.
3’s Finale, which famously overlays a polka on to a chorale, an instance that is additionally
interesting for the (possibly anecdotal) biographical evidence that attends it (on which
subject, see Auer 1947, 426–7; trans. in Gault 2001). In general, it is reasonable to posit the
contested status of faith in the post-Enlightenment world as an overarching social concern of
Bruckner’s symphonies: the Beethovenian struggle-victory narrative becomes a vehicle for
the justification of a Christian worldview over and above its secular alternatives.
Typically, this dialectic is posited in the first movement’s sonata form as a premise for the
entire work. The exposition’s contrast of first and second themes is a contrast of secular and
sacred topics; as Musical Example 6.6 explains, the former is a march, the latter a chorale.
Both themes, however, engender instabilities, which are formally generative on the largest
scale. Despite the work’s encompassing major modality, the first theme is predominantly in
B minor. This inflection imposes itself in the theme’s first measure, and is confirmed by the
subsequent pull towards flat VI, the resolution of which causes the theme’s statement to lean
heavily on its culminating dominant. The second theme is no less wide-ranging. Its initial
phrase is framed by a motion from i–V in F minor, but passes through C and B on the
way; the elaboration of this music in measures 109–116 concludes in a half cadence in A
minor; and the last phrase unit of the theme’s first part begins on C minor and finally settles
in D by measure 131. In sum, the themes present their keys as provisional points of
orientation with a chromatic environment, rather than as stable premise and contrasted
counter-premise.
The topical stability of both groups is comparably clouded by rhetorical uncertainties. The
first group begins with a large sentential antecedent, the continuation phrase of which veers
away from the initial march through the introduction of a drooping chromatic figure from
measure 71, and the theme’s martial nature has to be reconstructed hastily in preparation for
the start of the consequent phrase at measure 79. Similarly, although the second theme’s
chorale character is initially clear, the entry of the violin counter-melody in measure 109
complicates the picture, projecting the impression of an obbligato line pulling the music
towards the topical hybridity of a chorale prelude. Both themes are in this way presented as
expressively provisional; we await a situation in which their unadorned topical condition can
be secured.

Musical Example 6.6 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, first movement, first

and second themes

The long closing theme steers a middle path between the duality of dance and song thus
far engendered, beginning with a lyric theme in the winds accompanied by a dotted crotchet-
quaver string rhythm, which as the section proceeds accelerates to recover the first theme’s
march rhythm, engulfing its nascent lyric features in the process ( Musical Example 6.7 ).
The acceleration goes into reverse following the highpoint at measure 199, and the
exposition closes with a calculated emptying out of the martial rhythm to the point of double
augmentation reached in measures 207–8, from which the structural cadence ensues.
Altogether, the exposition offers a threefold perspective on the dialectic of the secular and
the sacred, overlaid with a conflict between dance and song, and disposed so that each
perspective articulates a theme group, placing a different topic at its subjective core. The
disjunct disposition of the material raises another issue, which is the music’s oft-noted
block-like construction. Schubertian parallels are commonplace; similar habits in that
context have been explained as instances of parataxis: the non-linear presentation of material
associated with lyric rather than dramatic origins. 12 In stark contrast to the subsumption of
formal functions into developmental processes evident in the ‘Tempest’ Sonata, Bruckner
accentuates formal divisions with caesuras, in advance of which the music seems drained of
its developmental impetus. The result is a stratified texture more redolent of Stravinsky than
Beethoven. In itself, this can be understood dialectically, because the antithesis of parataxis
– the hypotactic continuity associated with Beethoven’s sonata forms – is not absent. Rather,
Bruckner constructs developmental threads, which weave dynamic continuities through the
paratactic design. On the largest scale, these continuities are the agents of synthesis: in the
Finale especially, their convergence is central to the form’s teleological process.

Musical Example 6.7 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, first movement,

closing group, progression from lyric to march topics

The movement’s design is explained in this way in Figure 6.1 . Thematic units are
disposed as self-contained boxes; instances of developmental continuity across the form are
signified by connective arrows. The four ideas proposed in the introduction (processional,
fanfare, chorale and martial peroration) are labelled I1–I4 successively; as the arrows
explain, these ideas are gradually worked into the developmental discourse in the
development and coda. Each expositional block then sets up material, which is later
revisited. The first theme, labelled A, operates teleologically in the manner of an ‘heroic’
Beethovenian subject. Its properties are exhaustively explored in the development as a
dramatic intensification of expositional instabilities, culminating in a detailed convergence
with the introduction’s fanfare idea (I2) in measures 283–314. The retransition reconstructs
A over a dominant peroration, but the recapitulation frustrates resolution of the theme’s
instabilities, its modal ambiguities being preserved in a radically compressed design. Theme
A ultimately prevails in the coda, which progresses from B minor to a triumphant tonic
major, fusing the theme’s Hauptmotiv with features of the introduction’s processional.
This triumphalism is, however, premature because it comes at the expense of the
movement’s other thematic protagonists. Themes B and C play only peripheral roles in the
development (C initiates the development, but quickly cedes to I1; B recurs in advance of
the retransition, which retrieves I4) and they remain paratactically isolated in the
recapitulation. Moreover, in both cases the reprise intensifies the material’s instability and
truncates its formal design. The overall impression is of two antithetical trajectories: theme
A works dynamically towards resolution in the coda; themes B and C persist as
disconnected, static blocks, the designs of which decay under recapitulation. The
movement’s ending is expressively provisional, because the antitheses of the sacred and the
secular, and of dance and song, are not brought together through the union of parataxis and
hypotaxis.

Figure 6.1 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, first movement, formal synopsis

Figure 6.2 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale, formal synopsis

The daunting task of resolving these issues falls to the Finale. The form, appraised in
Figure 6.2 , revisits and augments the first movement’s topical postures, disposed
paratactically in a way that again encourages the impression of a devolution of the social
order into its antithetical components. The opening recovers the first movement’s
introduction, but this now performs the opposite function; instead of adumbrating the
movement’s discourse, the slow processional initiates a series of disjunct prior-movement
reminiscences (measures 11–28), which briskly appraise the narrative to this point. 13
As Figure 6.2 explains, the Finale’s sonata design builds additional complexities into the
first movement’s dialectical scheme. The first group is unequivocally martial, but its fugal
organization (it is labelled as ‘fugue 1’ in Figure 6.2 ) suggests the learned style, and this
engenders a tension between two topics: the contrapuntal context lends the march an archaic
flavour, which its first-movement counterpart lacks. The second theme is a schnell polka and
as such displaces the first movement’s thematic opposition of secular and sacred styles:
here, both themes are secular, but represent secularity in its military and civilian spheres.
The closing group comprises two topically and thematically distinct sections (C1 and C2 in
Figure 6.2 ). The first dramatizes A-theme material through minor-mode inflection and
embellishment with Sturm-und-Drang tremolando string figuration. This texture is
perfunctorily dismantled in measures 159–174 and C2 follows as an unadorned chorale.
Thus far, the Finale has, like the first movement, disposed its material paratactically, as a
sequence of discontinuous blocks. The development, recapitulation and coda gradually and
systematically allow developmental continuities to take control of the discourse. The entire
span of the movement from the start of the development onwards is essentially one
developmental arc, allowing for a single digression accommodating the return of the second
subject. The key to this shift is counterpoint: following a perfunctory pre-core section based
on the C2 chorale, the development comprises two fugues, the first (‘fugue 2’ in Figure 6.2 )
based on C2, the second (‘fugue 3’) combining the chorale with the first subject. This
combination is announced at the outset of fugue 3, but its most assertive presentation occurs
at the start of the recapitulation, measure 374, following a formidably complex exploration
of the two subjects’ combinatorial properties ( Musical Example 6.8 ). 14 By foregrounding
counterpoint, the Finale opens up synthetic possibilities that are not available in the first
movement. At a stroke, the development and first-theme reprise reconcile two conceptual
oppositions: the sacred and secular materials for the first time work collaboratively, and the
conflicted relationship between dance and song starts to unravel.

Musical Example 6.8 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale, combination

of march and chorale in first-theme recapitulation
 Musical Example 6.9 Bruckner, Symphony No. 5, Finale, combination
of first- and last-movement main themes in closing-group
recapitulation

The closing-theme group and coda address two issues left unresolved at the first-theme
reprise. The closing group rapidly abandons its correspondence with the exposition in favour
of a secondary development section, which makes counterpoint a cyclical device by
variously combining the first- and last-movement main themes (the most extensive
combination is shown in Musical Example 6.9 ). The integrative effect of this combination is
implicative as well as actual, because it reveals the Finale’s main theme as a mediator
between the chorale and the first-movement march, that is, as a theme that can combine with
both. The retrieval of the first-movement theme is consequently more than a simple act of
recall; it signifies a reappraisal of that theme’s meaning for the work’s governing duality in
the light of the Finale’s contrapuntal solutions.
The coda, in turn, rectifies an inadequacy in the contrapuntal strategy. In fugue 3, march
and chorale are recast as partners rather than antagonists; the result is, however, not a new,
higher-level premise, but a relationship of equals that secularizes the sacred as much as it
sanctifies the secular. The coda reconceives this relationship in an entirely new light, by
marshalling the two march themes as the basis of the accompanimental texture for a chorale
prelude, the topical identity of which is magnificently exposed with the chorale’s entry as
cantus firmus from measure 583. In a colossal instance of what in Baroque music might be
termed Einbau technique, the martial music is drawn into the service of the chorale. It is hard
to imagine a more compelling musical realization of dialectical overcoming: the coda posits
the chorale as a new thesis, the agent of a social order in which the work’s secular elements
submit to a now self-evident Christian truth.
There is, of course, a great deal more to be said about the processes at work in this
symphony; the analysis nevertheless does enough to clarify some essential points. Primarily,
contrary to much popular discourse on the composer, there is very little in this music to
support the view that it conveys a pre-modern religious worldview. In its own way, the Fifth
Symphony is as radically teleological as its Beethovenian precedents; certainly, Bruckner
absorbs wholesale a concept of the symphony as idealist narrative, even if he remained
largely indifferent to the literature and philosophy grounding that narrative in the
Bildungstrieb (the drive towards cultural perfection) or historical dialectic. The difference
between Beethoven and Bruckner resides in Christianity’s function in this context. Whereas
(in the Ninth Symphony at least) Beethoven wants to show us a humanist ideal, in which
tribulation is banished by brotherhood, Bruckner envisions an ideal in which the verities of
faith are reaffirmed in the overcoming of social contradictions. The contradictions
themselves and the drama of their overcoming, however, remain expressively central to the
concept of symphonic narrative. Consequently, and crucially for the present chapter, the
notion of dialectic is pivotal to an understanding of this process, not because Bruckner
consciously designed symphonies in a Hegelian way, but because he inherited a genre that
had by the time of the composer’s maturity folded binary opposition into its conceptual
premise.

Berg, Piano Sonata, Op. 1

Berg’s Op. 1 furnishes a satisfying final example for various reasons. As a representative of
the Second-Viennese twilight of tonal practice, which nonetheless clings to sonata
conventions, it stands at the end of the dialectical historical turn nascent in Beethoven’s Op.
31, No. 2 and dramatized on the largest scale by Bruckner. The Sonata was, moreover, the
focus of one of Adorno’s most substantial forays into musical analysis, and as such
constitutes both an important precursor and instructive counterpoint to Dahlhaus’s
dialectical reading of the ‘Tempest’.
Adorno’s basic claim for Berg’s Op. 1 is that its objective, historically grounded material
is not syntactic convention but ‘the idea of the sonata itself, its exclusive, exhaustive
motivic-thematic craftsmanship, which leaves nothing to chance and makes do with a
minimum of given material’ (Adorno 1991, 42). Adorno’s ambitions have been glossed by
Paddison, for whom ‘the aim of the analysis is to explore the “immanent dialectic of the
musical material” within the structure of the work, as the mediation of new and old and,
effectively … the dialectic of expression and construction’ (Paddison 1993, 161). Central to
this intention is clarification of the ways that Berg mediates formal architecture as historical
material and the generation of coherence through developing variation, which proceeds by
the spinning out of new motive forms from a small motivic fund. In a less explicitly
dialectical reading, Schmalfeldt has pointed to the division into tonal and post-tonal
procedures that supports this dualism: the process of developing variation pulls the music
from tonal events that coordinate with the underlying architecture towards post-tonal
harmonic milieux that take hold when development is allowed free rein. The result is a
‘tension between background tonal plan and foreground harmonic language’, which is
‘initiated by the Grundgestalt ’ stated in the work’s first four measures (Schmalfeldt 1991,
105).
Although these tensions are vital to the sonata, I want here to explore, in dialectical terms,
a related aspect of Schmalfeldt’s analysis, which stems from the formal implications of her
syntactic parsing of the main theme, quoted in Musical Example 6.10 . Schmalfeldt explains
that Berg departs from convention by associating the work’s Grundgestalt , exposed in
measure 1–4 2 , with cadential rather than pre-cadential harmony, which means that
measures 4 3 ∓8 constitute a continuation ensuing from a cadence rather than preceding it.
This confers a special pedigree on the opening, because it fosters the need to exchange its
introductory quality for a thematic function as such; the Grundgestalt , in other words,
begins the Sonata bereft of a thematic home. Subsequently, however, the Sonata’s pervasive
chromaticism consistently subverts cadential progression, and this results in a dysfunction of
harmony and form that becomes explicit when the closing section merges back into the
exposition repeat, at which point it becomes clear that the Grundgestalt has total
responsibility for the form’s tonal grounding:

Musical Example 6.10 Berg, Piano Sonata Op. 1, mm. 1–11, functional
and motivic design

[W]hen the exposition is repeated, the cadential progression of the Grundgestalt – the
 only cadence within the entire exposition – has been placed in the service of closing the
exposition . As a result, here is an exposition that breaks a fundamental sonata rule: the
subordinate region, rather than confirming a new tonal centre, closes in the home key . In
that the Grundgestalt provides the only phrase that unequivocally defines a key, it is the
only true stable element against which Berg’s departure towards whole-tone and atonal
elements can be measured. In this work the Grundgestalt thus comes to represent tonality
itself: rather than juxtaposing a home key with a contrasting tonal centre, Berg verges on
contrasting tonality with atonality.
(Schmalfeldt 1991, 109)

It is worth bringing Schmalfeldt’s observations into closer contact with Adorno’s reading.
Taken together, they suggest that it is not only sonata form that is reified as historical
material here, but also tonality itself, as the principle that form articulates. Berg achieves this
by reconceiving sonata form’s thematic syntax, such that the Grundgestalt isolates rather
than articulates the tonic within the Sonata’s design. The dialectic of convention and
innovation is therefore contained with the first four measures, as a conflicted premise from
which the form evolves: perceived motivically, the Grundgestalt is thematically generative;
perceived harmonically, it is pre-thematic.
Close scrutiny of the first-theme group clarifies some of the mechanisms of this dialectic.
Its overall effect is to nurture form-functional ambiguity. Schmalfeldt has recognized the
opposed tendencies for thematic functions to become transitional and for transitions to
become thematic: measure 12 sounds like a transition, but the pitch-invariant return of the
main theme at measure 18 converts the intervening music retrospectively into a small-
ternary B section; conversely, although measure 18 initiates an A reprise, by the time we
reach the highpoint at measure 25 this section has definitively transformed into a transition.
Such bifocal ambiguities also colour the music’s local design. Schmalfeldt reads measures 4
2 ∓6 as continuational, but we might also see them as a veiled response to an opening
statement, notwithstanding the objection that measures 1–4 function as a cadence. Adorno
has noted the use of what he calls ‘axial rotation’ in these measures: characteristics of earlier
motive forms are retained ‘but their succession is altered’ (Adorno 1991, 43). Thus motives
‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ as labelled by Adorno and Schmalfeldt, and bracketed in Musical Example
6.10 , recur in measures 4 2 ∓6 reordered as ‘b’, ‘c’ and ‘a’. More than this, as Musical
Example 6.10 also explains, the Grundgestalt ’s underpinning chromatic bass descent,
defined in Musical Example 6.10 as ‘d’, recurs here in inversion, and the phrase is rounded
off in measure 6 with a twofold motivic counterpoint, which overlays variants of ‘a’ on to a
transposition of ‘c’ that parallels the end of the Grundgestalt : the new form of ‘a’ appears in
stretto between soprano and bass; and bass and alto effect a combination of ‘a’ and ‘c’. All
of this means that these measures can be understood as a variation of measures 1–4 1 as
much as a continuation phrase. The core dialectic embodied in the Grundgestalt is
consequently reproduced across measures 1–6, which comprise cadence and continuation if
harmony is given analytical primacy, or statement and response if motivic variation is taken
as the dominant parameter.
The Grundgestalt ’s pre-emptive cadential function imposes a risk of tautology on the
phrase ending, which is evaded by collapsing classical thematic syntax into a reassertion of
the dualism of function and process. Measures 7–8 fragment the material in a manner typical
of continuation functions, counterpointing ‘b’ and inversions of ‘c’, but the liquidation of ‘c’
in measure 8 is not coordinated with a cadential endpoint. Instead, ‘b’ and ‘c’ reappear in a
T1 transposition in measure 9. The functional perspective shifts again: measures 4 2 ∓8 now
resemble the contrasting middle of a small-ternary theme, nested within the A section of the
theme group’s overall ternary design, to which the Grundgestalt supplies the A section. The
initial cadence has to be reinterpreted afresh: rather than comprising a cadence abnormally
preceding a continuation, it emerges as the closing gesture of a (very small) A section. The
local A 1 implied by measure 9 is, however, also denied closure, dissolving instead into the
liquidation of ‘c’ in measures 10 and 11.
The way these local dialectical tensions map onto the form’s large-scale divisions is
evident through comparison of the expositional first theme and transition with the
corresponding music in the recapitulation, which enters with the retrieval of ‘a’ as anacrusis
in measure 110 3 and ends with the second-theme reprise initiated in measure 137. Berg
replaces the ternary features apparent in the exposition with a continuous span of music, in
which thematic presentation transforms into transition without harmonic delineation. The
first theme’s design is retained (with modifications that will be considered below) until
measure 117, from which point a process of contrapuntal fragmentation takes hold,
culminating at the dynamic highpoint of measure 129, which exhaustively developes the
combinatorial properties of ‘a’, ‘d’, ‘c’ and latterly ‘b’. The music of the theme’s contrasting
middle is now recast as an appendix to this intensification beginning at measure 131, serving
to connect the climax to the second-theme entry.
The most immediately striking feature of the recapitulation is, however, removal of the
cadence that delineates the Grundgestalt , the phrase instead culminating on a half-
diminished seventh chord ( Musical Example 6.11 explains this). As a result, the first-theme
recapitulation becomes entirely motivic; the Grundgestalt is denuded not only of its
affiliation with the putative tonic, but also (extrapolating from Schmalfeldt’s reading) of its
affiliation with the tonal system altogether. The dialectic of tonality and atonality is thus
reproduced on a larger scale; rather than stabilizing the exposition first theme, the
recapitulation displays its purely chromatic alternative.

Musical Example 6.11 Berg, Piano Sonata Op. 1, first-theme

recapitulation

Yet even though the trajectory thus far has pulled away from a reconciliation of tonal and
post-tonal media, the Grundgestalt yields two additional features, which supply the means of
the tonic’s ultimate recovery. Returning to Musical Example 6.10 , Schmalfeldt inteprets the
overall progression in measures 1–4 as a ii 7 ∓V∓i voiced as an imperfect authentic cadence
(IAC), in which the soprano in measure 2 is conceptually resolved onto in measure 4. Yet
one of the most notable aspects of the cadence is the fact that resolution of the surface
soprano in measure 3 onto , which would confirm a PAC, is conspicuously absent. The
unresolved – becomes a structural issue for the entire Sonata. Its persistence is felt in the
recapitulation, where, as we have seen, is reconceived as a suspension over a half-
diminished chord; and the recapitulation of the second theme supplies no tonic PAC in the
manner of sonata theory’s ‘essential structural closure’. As Musical Example 6.12 clarifies,
resolution of this issue is reserved for the work’s closing measures. A tonic PAC is finally
attained in measures 174–5 at the end of the closing theme, but is here commuted to . The
Grundgestalt ’s cadence finds an ultimate point of repose, but only once its soprano voice
leading has been chromaticized. The closing cadence mediates tangibly the dialectic of tonal
and post-tonal materials; the work’s tonality is secured by making a voice-leading
concession to its chromatic antithesis.

Musical Example 6.12 Berg, Piano Sonata Op. 1, C minor/B minor

duality in first theme and overarching cadential progression

In fact, the seeds of this trade-off are embedded in the Grundgestalt itself. Musical Example
6.12 also points out its inherent tension between B minor and C minor. Prior to measure 3,
one might easily imagine the second sonority of measure 2 as a C minor tonic seventh
chord, to which the initial half-diminished chord is a chromatic prefix; and the soprano’s
progress as far as measure 3 1 is readily construed as in C minor, an impression
that is only scotched once B minor V 9 has intervened by the end of measure 3. Thus the
Grundgestalt implies two semitonally related keys, the relationship of which projects yet
another perspectival dialectic: C minor is present as pre-cadential harmony in search of a
cadence; B minor emerges as a cadence in search of pre-cadential harmony. The means by
which C minor is ultimately accommodated within B minor is also the means by which the
final cadence mediates its chromatic antithesis: alteration of allows a residue of C minor –
its tonic scale degree – to persist even as the Sonata closes in B minor.
In Berg’s Op. 1, the embedding of antinomies has progressed to a point of almost
inconceivable density. The Grundgestalt itself is burdened with dialectical tensions to an
extent that impedes their simultaneous comprehension, and the music thereafter accrues
antithetical perspectives at every formal juncture, from the level of the phrase design to the
overall form. The resulting kaleidoscopic excess of conflicted readings generates a feeling of
disorientation that is both acute (because it pertains to each individual moment) and
cumulative (because it is sustained across the Sonata). The ultimate sense that no
overarching synthesis can draw all of these conflicts into a higher unity – in brief, the work’s
negative-dialectical posture – is basic to its expressive trajectory, and it is this above all that
locates it as one historical end-point to the manner of composition introduced in the first
movement of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’. Unlike Beethoven, however, Berg supplies no finale
that might take up his movement’s dualities and resolve them; the Sonata’s manifold
teleologies are simply left hanging with its closing chord. This is Adorno’s fractured totality
in nuce : resolution persists here as an aspiration with no prospect of fulfilment.

Conclusions
Although these analyses offer evidentially grounded narratives of formal and material
processes, the dialectical premise from which they proceed requires retrospective critical
qualification. We might, in particular, reasonably ask whether music can ever truly embody
contradiction. Dialectical thought is in the first instance conceptual ; whether we regard it as
logical or critical, the idea that the world necessarily responds to antinomic characterization
is at base an observation about its conceptual structure. However, the application of this idea
in musical analysis inevitably proceeds by metaphor or analogy, because musical material
has no capacity to embody concepts as immanent properties.
This point can be illustrated through consideration of the problem of formulating quality
or ‘being’ in musical terms. In the Science of Logic , Hegel distinguishes three states of
being, comprising the category of quality – ‘pure being’, ‘determinate being’ and ‘being-for-
self’ (being-in-itself) – the succession of which is construed dialectically. Pure being is
characterized as ‘equal only to itself’ and ‘not unequal relative to an other’; its antithesis is
‘nothing’, understood as ‘complete emptiness, absence of all determination and content’,
which is ‘undifferentiatedness in itself’. Because both being and nothing are defined by the
‘absence of determination’, they are, however, in effect the same. The resulting ‘unity’ of
being and nothing is called ‘becoming’: ‘their truth is … [the] movement of the immediate
vanishing of the one into the other: becoming [italics in original], a movement in which both
are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself’ (Hegel
1969, 81–3). The sublation that produces becoming generates a unity that is ‘determinate
being’, the ‘simplest oneness of being and nothing’, which Hegel also calls Dasein (‘being in
a certain place’ ) (Hegel 1969, 110). This also forms the starting point for a dialectic. The
antithesis of determinate being is finitude, because ‘being in a certain place’ is constituted
by limitation; the sublation of finitude produces the infinite , and this in turn supplies the
basis of a third category, ‘being-for-self’, or ‘infinite being’, which is ‘absolutely determined
being’ (Hegel 1969, 116–17 and 137). The process then begins again: ‘being-for-self as
such’ is opposed by plurality, which is understood as the differentiation of the one and the
many; and under sublation this creates attraction, which unifies being-for-self and plurality.
Finally, this unity furnishes the basis for Hegel’s second overarching category, ‘quantity’,
which altogether constitutes the antithesis of quality.
How might such a mode of argument be brought to bear on music? The literal application
of Hegel’s exhaustive derivation would court triviality, offering little more than a dialectical
explanation of any discrete span of music’s condition as a phenomenon, an explanation it
would necessarily share with any other phenomena possessing quality (if Hegel’s model is
to have any philosophical credibility at all). To state that measures 1–20 of the first
movement of the ‘Tempest’ are ontologically tractable because in their basic essence they
overcome the dialectic of being and nothing is to say nothing of music-analytical value
whatsoever.
Of course, Adorno and Dahlhaus do not proceed like this. Instead, they rely on the
assumption that musical characteristics can be understood conceptually in a way that is
susceptible to explication via dialectical argument. The affiliation of material and concept
comes first; the dialectical reading follows. The concept is not immanent to the music,
however: the ‘Tempest”s opening is not introductory because that concept resides within the
music; such a reading is plausible because conventions mimicking the rhetoric and syntax of
language allow us to make an analogy between the characteristics of measures 1–20 and
prefatory rhetoric, and those of 21–41 with the continuation rather than presentation of an
idea. In brief: convention facilitates analogy; analogy allows the marshalling of concepts;
and the availability of a dialectical structure of argument allows those concepts to be
disposed antithetically. Music, however, does not consist of concepts, but of sonorous
formations that can be made to stand for concepts.
None of this undermines fatally the project of analysing music in dialectical terms. The
intertwining of music and the history of ideas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
is sufficiently dense that any parallels drawn between dialectics and musical structure can be
amply justified through recourse to the cultural milieu as common ground. And no music
historian who is happy to accept the prominent role played by Hegel’s progressive notion of
history in the formation of culture can reasonably argue that it has no relevance for the
analysis of music. The looming danger – and Taruskin’s caution is well taken in this regard
– is that dialectics becomes a species of false consciousness, an all-encompassing model of
reality that all phenomena must reflect, rather than a tool enabling us to comprehend the
interaction of music, philosophy and society in a historically sensitive way.
The demise of Hegelianism has become a virtual first principle for those areas of the
humanities and human sciences trading under the names of postmodernism and neo-
liberalism in the last several decades. In political history, the collapse of the Berlin Wall has
been taken as conclusive evidence of its absolute morbidity, a claim given perhaps its most
well-known formulation in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man ,
which advanced the thesis that the triumph of late capitalism engendered the demise of any
concept of history as an overarching imperative or metanarrative (Fukuyama 1992). Yet the
global financial crisis has since cast considerable doubt on the security of Fukuyama’s
confident assertions, and the manifest cracks in the neo-liberal architecture that the crisis
exposed encourage us to find renewed value in an idealist philosophical mindset. This
chapter has cast dialectics in explicitly historicist terms, but its day as a model of the
political present may yet come again.

Notes
1 The question of how to translate Aufhebung is perennial and seems to admit no universally agreed solution. The common
options are sublation, synthesis, overcoming, resolution and reconciliation, none of which quite captures the German original.
I treat these alternatives as synonyms throughout this chapter, in the absence of a definitive adjudication on the issue. For
Hegel’s own explanation of the concept, see, for example, Science of Logic , 1969, 106–8.
 2 For an overview of Hegel’s model of history, see McCarney 2000.
3 The groundwork for this model is laid out in Adorno [1932] (2002), trans. as ‘On the Social Situation of Music’ in Essays on
Music , ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, 391–436. For a commentary, see Paddison 1993, 97–106.
4 Adorno’s most substantial elaboration of the negative-dialectical idea is Negativ Dialectik (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp,
1967), trans. E. B. Ashton as Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973), which includes a substantial excursus on the
Hegelian dialectic, 300–60.
5 Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1949). I have throughout referred to Philosophy of New Music
Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), in view of the oftnoted problems with the
other available English translation Philosophy of Modern Music , trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (London:
Sheed & Ward, 1973). For a penetrating analysis of the problems of translating this book, see Subotnik 2011.
6 For a counterpoint to Adorno’s reading, see Levitz 2004.
7 On the ESC in the first movement of the ‘Tempest’, see Hepokoski 2009, 203–5.
8 On the distinction between tight-knit and loose-knit thematic design, see Caplin 1998.
9 For a pertinent taxonomy of instrumental finale types, see Talbot 2001.
10 On the relationship between form and expression in this work and the Fourth Symphony, see Hatten 2001.
11 For a consideration of this topical discourse in the context of a general appraisal of the topic in nineteenth-century music, see
Horton in press.
12 On parataxis in Schubert’s music, see Mak 2006 and 2010.
13 The model for this is, of course, the opening of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a richly suggestive allusion, but
one that cannot be elaborated here.
14 For a more extended consideration of the design of this movement, see Horton 2006 and 2013, especially 215–19.

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 7
Classicism/neoclassicism
Keith Chapin

Introduction
On 26 September 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote from Munich to his father in
Salzburg about his work on Die Entführung aus dem Serail . As he explained his
compositional choices, he voiced his respect for a principle of restraint. In his discussion of
Osmin’s aria Solche hergelauf’ne Laffen , he first emphasizes the character’s excessive
behaviour. Provoked by Pedrillo’s questions and look, Osmin demands that Pedrillo be first
beheaded, then hung, then skewered on a hot spit, then burned, then bound and drowned,
and finally, just to ensure a job well done, quartered. As Mozart wrote:

For just as a man in such a towering rage oversteps all the bounds of order, moderation
and propriety and completely forgets himself, so must the music too forget itself. But
since the passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting
disgust, as music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must
please the listener, or in other words must never cease to be music , so I have not chosen a
key foreign to F (in which the aria is written) but one related to it—not the nearest, D
minor, but the more remote A minor.
(Anderson 1985, 769)

In part, the statement is a simple comment on the process of stylization involved in any
mediated representation of the world. In much eighteenth-century music, sighs are decorous
chromatic descents and fear never comes out as a scream. In part, the statement shows
Mozart’s awareness of a primary social function of music in his time, to provide pleasure to
those with the leisure and means to enjoy it. However, the statement is more still. It also
shows Mozart’s desire to achieve a balance between expressive force and cultivated grace.
Mozart wished to portray excess, but he worked with a normative notion of ‘music’ that
demanded limitation.
Although by no means a sufficient condition, such restraint is an essential ingredient of
classicism at multiple levels. From ethical and political perspectives, it can be both a good
and bad thing. Stylistic or formal restraint contributes to the capacity of certain musical
works, genres, styles, as well as the musicians who produce them, to serve as classics for later
generations, and thus as a means both to convey the wisdom of the past and to discipline or
suppress alternatives in the present. For those of classicist persuasion, then, such classical
models not only provide practical lessons but also demand an attitude of restraint and
humility. Classicists do not accept as their sole standard the musical wonts of the day, which
are ruts or fashions to them, even as they may be proper practices or exciting innovations to
others. The critical or stultifying edge of classicism can also be turned inwards, to rein in
received habits and thoughtless actions, as well as individual desires and passionate
expressions. Finally, neoclassicism implies self-consciously respectful, nostalgic, or ironic
distance with respect to classicism itself. Classicists take their bearing from classical
models, neoclassicists from a classicizing tradition. In music, neoclassicism has come to be
associated with the twentieth-century rejection of Romanticism (Messing 1988; Whittall
2001), but it is easy to espy neoclassicism in much of the classicism of the preceding
centuries. The line is blurry at best. 1
No matter one’s feelings about the phenomenon of classicism, one cannot deny its
centrality as a historical force. While Mozart did not identify with self-styled classicists of
his day, most of whom worked in literature, architecture or the visual arts, he showed his
adherence to principle of restraint. Mozart’s letter indicates the precise point at which he felt
that excess could be intimated. He drew attention to issues of metre and modulation plan.
Mozart shifts from to an impetuous ‘Turkish’ 3/4. And, as he pointed out to his father, he
chose the mediant A minor over the closer key, the submediant D minor ( Musical Example
7.1 ). These changes of metre and key pushed at the boundaries of eighteenth-century style,
but not overly so. The mid eighteenth-century theorist Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1753,
99–104) distinguished between four degrees of distance in modulations, and the modulation
to the mediant counted in the first, closest group – that is, to modulations proper (
eigentliche Ausweichungen ). Mozart respected the boundaries of his contemporaries’
expectations and thereby showed his sensitivity to a collective common sense.

Musical Example 7.1 Mozart, Die Entführung aus dem Serail , ‘Solche
 hergelauf’ne Laffen ’

Some two centuries later, Igor Stravinsky insisted with equally famous words on the
restraint involved in his music, but he was far more radical. To pre-empt the surprise that he
imagined his Octet (1923) would evoke, Stravinsky wrote in an American journal:

My Octuor is a musical object. This object has a form and that form is influenced by the
musical matter of which it is composed…. My Octuor is made for an ensemble of wind
instruments. Wind instruments seem to me to be more apt to render a certain rigidity of
form I had in mind than other instruments – the string instruments, for example, which are
less cold and more vague. The suppleness of the string instruments can lend itself to more
subtle nuances and can serve better the individual sensibility of the executants in works
built on an ‘emotive’ basis. My Octuor is not an ‘emotive’ work, but a musical
composition that is based on objective elements that are sufficient in themselves.
(White 1979, 574–5)

Like Mozart, Stravinsky sees it desirable to limit emotion, but he goes far further than his
eighteenth-century predecessor. Where Mozart presented restraint as necessary for the
effective communication of the passionate state of Osmin, Stravinsky rejected emotion
altogether. He too draws attention to the stylization involved in his composition, but goes so
far as to present the work as a pure play of form. Formal restraint and the stylized utterance
become formalism and self-conscious play of style.
The letter of a composer speaking as a craftsman to an intimate is not the same as the
‘position paper’ (Walsh 1999, 375) of a composer speaking as a polemicist and propagandist
to an anonymous public. A truer point of comparison to Mozart’s Entführung would be
Stravinsky’s own opera, The Rake’s Progress (1951). Not only did Stravinsky self-
consciously reference Mozart’s operas, in particular Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte , but,
even given three decades development of a multifaceted composer, the work serves as a
better indication of the relationship of form to passion in Stravinsky’s music than the Octet.
It is not that the music cannot be heard as emotive, but rather that form masks and changes
the character of the emotion. Stravinsky makes one aware of the artifice involved in a
character’s expression of a passionate state.
In the brief duettino ‘Farewell for now’ ( Musical Example 7.2 ) sung by Tom Rakewell
and Anne Truelove, Anne is neither cold nor objective. Her music is touching. At the same
time, it is artificial. The duet resembles a strophic song and owes some of its pastoral
innocence to this cyclical form, though each strophe is highly manipulated. The instrumental
introduction (the first strophe) places a blithe duet of interwoven melodies at odds with the
accompaniment, as for example when a double leading tone in the two melodic voices
clashes with the harmony beneath (m. 4). Then, when Anne enters, she sings two phrases,
each one metrically akilter. The first sets up an anacrusis–crusis pattern (fare- well ) that
quickly swings awry as an anacrusis lengthens to a full measure. The second phrase places
poetry’s weak syllables on music’s strong beats and vice versa. Such play of form and text
emphasizes the staged character of the actions and passions presented in the opera. The
staged character makes one aware of the artificiality of the production at the same time one
feels the force of the drama. Indeed, the tragedy of Tom’s ‘progress’ owes its subtle but
potent force to the fact that the tale is told with the light style and stage buffoonery of
comedy .
 Musical Example 7.2 Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress , ‘Farewell for
now’, mm. 1–2 5

Definitions, philosophical stakes and historical scope

The dialectic of restraint and expression is only one aspect of the phenomenon of classicism,
though the one that perhaps touches most directly on listeners today. Some of the common
planks in definitions of classicism are as follows (Heartz and Brown 2001, 924; Finscher
1994–2007, 230):

1 disciplined posture or form, sometimes expressed as the maximal coexistence of radical

opposites: restraint and passion, unity and variety, simplicity and richness, individuation and
general comprehensibility, subjectivity and objectivity, etc.;
2 a model of excellence;
3 relation to an earlier age (i.e. Greek and Roman antiquity, though, as will be discussed, this
aspect of the definition obviously required revision for music);
4 opposition to mannerism or romanticism;
5 the idealization of nature and the belief that certain styles and genres serve as its expression;
and
6 metaphysics of embodiment in which an ideal finds a perfect physical manifestation.

As this list attests, the concept of classicality straddles a philosophical spectrum that governs
matters both mundane and metaphysical. While some aspects of classicality – those that
stand at the beginning of this list – govern pragmatic issues of artistic production,
organization and reception, others – those towards the end in particular, but potentially all of
them – entail metaphysical commitments or, at the very least, intense attention to the
difficult philosophical issues that beset the human interaction with the natural world.
Definitions of classicality thus vary according to philosophical taste. Originally,
metaphysics of perfection were essential to the phenomenon of classicism. Since the early
nineteenth century, artists and critics have edged away from metaphysics. Scholars on both
sides of the Atlantic have noted a discrepancy between Anglo-American empiricism
(grounded in analysis) and German philosophically inspired approaches that emphasize
reception history and critical theory (Webster 1991, 356; Finscher 1994–2007, 231).
The stretch of the spectrum between the pragmatic and the ideal is the source of many of
the controversies surrounding the concept of classicism. While it is relatively easy to argue
that Mozart served later generations as a classic – a model – critics disagree as to whether
Mozart’s position as a classic is due purely to his excellence (a value judgement with its
attendant difficulties of substantiation – see the section on Attitudes and values on pp. 164 –
6 ) or whether it might owe much to nationalist ideologies. Haydn (who lived for the most
part away from Vienna) and Clementi (who developed his career in London) were classics
in their own day, far outshining Mozart’s light, but since then have required scholarly
reminders to retain their classic status (Webster 1991; Gerhard 2002). At another level,
Mozart’s approach to eighteenth-century formal strategies may seem easy to capture in tight
formal models, such as sonata forms, functions, styles and principles (Caplin 1998;
Hepokoski and Darcy 2006), but the unifying impulse behind such music theory has also
been challenged. Did Mozart really aim at or achieve synthesis (Allanbrook 2002; Schmidt
2002)? The ostensibly empirical analysis has a strong strain of idealism to it.
In a way comparable to Mozart, Stravinsky has served as the measure of musical
neoclassicism (Cross 1998). He has also attracted controversy. Critics call attention to his
resurrection of eighteenth-century musical styles (‘classical’ styles), to his flippant attitude
towards subjective expression, to his rejection of meaning accessible through words and to
his mannerist deconstruction of formal synthesis. However, the controversy around
Stravinsky has been of an entirely different sort from that surrounding Mozart. While critics
contest the very ideal of classicality around Mozart, espying ideology in claims to perfected
synthesis, they have fewer difficulties with the ideal of neoclassicism. The self-conscious
attempt to resurrect past styles seems less metaphysically freighted and more mundane.
However, Stravinsky’s ostensible nonchalance vis-à-vis metaphysics has itself troubled his
waters. His avoidance of expressive utterance and formal synthesis has caused his fiercest
critics, notably Theodor Adorno, to doubt his humanity:

The renunciation of all psychologism, the reduction to the pure phenomena that appear
per se, is to disclose a region of indubitable, ‘authentic’ being…. [It] is a matter of the
chimerical uproar of culture against its own essence as culture. Stravinsky foments this
uproar not only in his aesthetic flirtation with barbarism but also his fierce suspension of
what in music is called culture, the humanely eloquent artwork.
(Adorno 2006, 107–8)

Classicism and neoclassicism are thus threatened by a double bind between the empirical
and the ideal. The utopian dimension of the concept of classicality arouses suspicion that it
serves as a cover for political ideology. At the same time, the rejection of these same utopian
ideals has been taken as a sign of disbelief in the power of humanity to better itself.
These weighty issues only gradually coalesced around the term ‘classic’. The term
originated in ancient Rome, where the classicus was a taxpayer of the highest status.
Eventually, the term was metaphorically applied to authors of high status as well (Curtius
1953, 247–51). However, ‘classical’ only came into its own after the twelfth century, once
writers began to delineate and fret at a decisive split between things ancient, venerable and,
in short, ‘classical’, and those things new and modern (Curtius 1953, 253–5). While any
modern writer can become venerable with the passing of a generation, the concept of the
classical depends on the decisiveness of the gap. Behind it lies a constantly retold tale of
high civilization lost and regained. With this gap goes the peculiar status and function of the
classic. The classic is not simply old. It is something old that retains its value in the present
(cf. Girard 2008: 240). While classicism owed much to the power of ancient Greece and
Rome to inspire new production, it could also be reconfigured around other perceived
historical breaks, even those of a few short decades, as can be seen in the reception of
Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven as classics beginning early in the nineteenth century (Gruber
2002).
While this basic historiographic structure of past models and present value stands at the
origin of the concept of classicism, just as the principle of restraint runs through its various
manifestations, it is best to approach the concept liberally. Classicism affords no single,
simple definition, and even the component parts of the idea can contradict each other. This
chapter will group these various components under three broad headings: practices, styles
and attitudes. The practices spill from musical production into reception. The styles concern
the musical results and the attitudes underpin the practices and resonate in the music.
There are three other widespread uses of the term ‘classical’ that need to be
acknowledged, although this chapter will not dwell on them. The term serves as a label to
designate the music composed roughly between 1720 and 1815 (‘classical period’), although
dates will vary (Webster 2004). It also denotes the genre or tradition of art music that
originated in Europe and has since spread internationally (‘classical music’). The period and
genre terms are, at best, but convenient monikers and, at worst, arid reifications and
simplifications of complex mediations between past and present, model and emulation, and
individual and society. The practices, styles and attitudes, by contrast, criss-cross history.
Third, one finds the term applied to other traditions of music that have developed
attitudes, styles and practices comparable to the Western art tradition, although they are also
distinct (e.g. Indian classical music, Japanese classical music, jazz, etc.). To visit the term
‘classical’ on such traditions is to run the risk of colonizing them with terminology
developed in a Western context, although to avoid comparison is to run the opposite peril of
failing to engage in intercultural dialogue (Schofield 2010). Nonetheless, there is good
reason to remember the specificities of the term within the Western musical tradition. As
noted, since early modernity musicians have lived in cultures that were in thrall to the
immense prestige and continuing presence of ancient Greece and Rome (Grafton et al .
2010). However, while musicians were affected by the unfolding and the fate of classicism
at large, they at the same time faced a unique situation. Because musicians inherited
information about ancient music, but no music itself, they were forced but also free to invent
their classicisms to a far greater extent than their colleagues in the other fine arts.

Practices
Practices of reception, in particular ones motivated by a desire for education, lie at the heart
of classicism. A person takes a cue from the past and uses it as a guide for current practice.
Yet this practice of reception is not a simple matter, especially in music. Not only can
musicians take various types of cue from the past – ethical, philosophical and stylistic – but
they must decide what constitutes the canon of models, what sort of lessons should be
learned from this canon of models and how new production should relate to old.
While musicians generally focus on issues of style, the ethical and philosophical
principles of antiquity were essential to the Western classical tradition and did play out in
musical traditions. Musicians learned models of ethical behaviour through their readings of
authors of antiquity, as well as through their readings of modern authors strongly oriented
towards antiquity. To take one example, the first-century Roman author Plutarch passed
through many hands in the eighteenth century. His Parallel Lives offered agreeably readable
biographies along with moral commentary on the protagonists’ virtues and faults. Although
a Platonist, Plutarch had integrated elements of Stoicism into his thought and writings, and
the mix of ethical and quasi-religious contemplation went down well with later readers.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, wrote in his Fourth Promenade :

Of the small number of Books I still occasionally read, Plutarch is the one that grips and
benefits me the most. He was the first I read in my childhood, he will be last I read in my
old age; he is almost the only author I have never read without gaining something.
(Rousseau 2000, 28)
 In 1801, a year before he penned the Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven also called
attention to Plutarch. To his friend Franz Wegler he confessed:

I have often cursed my Creator and my existence. Plutarch has shown me the path of
resignation. If it is at all possible, I will bid defiance to my fate, though I feel that as long
as I live there will be moments when I shall be God’s most unhappy creature….
Resignation, what a wretched resource! Yet it is all that is left to me –
(Anderson 1961, 1, 246; cited in Borthwick 1998, 269)

On the side of indirect influence, one might cite Mozart’s appreciation of the novel Les
Aventures de Télémaque . He read the book in Italian translation during his trip to Italy in
1770 (Mozart 2005, 5, 388 [8 September 1770]), and it later furnished the plot for his opera
Idomeneo (1781). The book also influenced the Abbé Terasson’s novel Sethos (1731), one of
the many sources for Die Zauberflöte (1791). The author of Télémaque was the Archbishop
François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, a decided adherent of ancient literature in the
Querelle des anciens et des modernes . The novel not only held up the loyalty, bravery and
moral fortitude of its eponymous hero up for praise, but also offered many episodes that
contrasted virtuous and lax behaviour. Idomeneo owes its plot to one such episode.
The great gap between Rousseau’s simplicity of style and Beethoven’s sophistication
indicates that ethical values can be transmitted musically in various ways. In both ‘Dans ma
cabane obscure’ from Rousseau’s Le Devin du village (1752, Musical Example 7.3 ) and
‘Gott! Welch Dunkel hier’ of Beethoven’s Fidelio (1805, rev. 1806 and 1814, Musical
Example 7.4 ), the male protagonist sings of his desire for his beloved, evoking a drama of
darkness and light to characterize current troubles and desired idyll. (Florestan’s vision of
Leonore is not included in the musical example.) The contexts are different, though. Colin
sings his romance in the final scene of Le Devin , after he and Colette have been reunited.
Florestan expresses himself in a scena from the depths of the prison and without any
knowledge that his beloved is literally on the doorstep.
In my dark hut
Dans ma cabane obscure
Toujours soucis nouveaux; Always new worries;
Vent, soleil, ou froidure , Wind, sun, or cold,
Toujours peine et travaux . Always difficulty and work.
Colette, ma bergère , Colette, my shepherdess,
Si tu viens l’habiter , If you come inhabit it,
Colin dans sa chaumière Colin in his thatched cottage
N’a rien à regretter . Has nothing to desire.
God, what darkness here!
Gott, welch Dunkel hier!
O grauenvolle Stille! O horrible silence!
Öd ist es um mich her , It is desolate around me,
nichts, nichts lebet auβer mir , Nothing, nothing lives except me,
o schwere Prüfung! what a harsh trial!
 Doch gerecht ist Gottes Wille! But God’s will is righteous!
Ich murre nicht, das Maβ I do not complain – the measure
der Leiden steht bei dir! of suffering is yours to determine!

The musical settings stand at opposite ends of their respective times’ stylistic spectrums.
Rousseau offers a simple romance, rather than the virtuoso arietta that his audience might
have expected at this point in a divertissement (Charlton 2012, 155). The simplicity of the
melodic line stands for the simplicity of the soul that produces it. Beethoven, on the other
hand, offers a fully developed scena , with orchestral introduction, accompanied recitative,
cantabile and cabaletta. In his accompanied recitative, the dialogue between the gruff turn
figures (lower strings) and plaintive rising figures (winds and first violins) emphasize the
pathos of the situation, while the subsequent atmospheric string tremolo offer an appropriate
backdrop for Florestan’s anguished response to the desolate cell. The shift from F minor
towards A major accomplished over the course of this recitative reflects Florestan’s
fortitude in solitude. He does not complain. While both composers wished to express
strength and the ethical stance of the self-reliant man – appropriately supported by a wife –
Rousseau found this expression of authenticity in moving simplicity, Beethoven in dramatic
intensity.
Musical Example 7.3 Rousseau, Le Devin du village , ‘Dans ma cabane
obscure’, mm. 1–1 5
 Musical Example 7.4 Beethoven, Fidelio , Act 2, Scene 1, ‘Gott! Welch
Dunkel hier’

Most musicians showed less interest in the philosophical legacy of antiquity than in the
ethical one, but they worked within a critical climate shaped by this legacy. There were
many philosophies in antiquity, and thus musicians and music critics could draw diverse
inspiration from their readings, from idealist thought on perfections to empiricist attention to
sensory experience. The latter is less commonly recognized than the former. Stephen
Greenblatt (2012) has argued that the Epicurean materialism of Lucretius’s De rerum natura
(first century BCE) had a decisive impact on pleasure-oriented aesthetics after it was
discovered in the fifteenth century. The philosophy of antiquity provided a counterweight to
the teachings of the Church. To ascribe empiricism and appreciation of pleasure in later
times solely to this ancient catalyst would surely be to exaggerate the weight of the classical
heritage. Nonetheless, empiricist sensibility sat well with classicist leanings. For example,
the Scottish moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith was attentive to ancient learning,
penning an essay on ‘The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries;
Illustrated by the History of the Ancient Logics and Metaphysics’ (Smith 1795, 112–29). The
materialism of his approach expresses itself in his approach to the arts. In the essay ‘Of the
Imitative Arts’, written some time between 1751 and 1764, he writes:

The mind being thus successively occupied by a train of objects [i.e., ‘a combination of
the most agreeable and melodious sounds’], of which the nature, succession, and
connection correspond, sometimes to the gay, sometimes to the tranquil, and sometimes to
the melancholy mood or disposition, it is itself successively led into each of those moods
or dispositions; and is thus brought into a sort of harmony or concord with the Music
which so agreeably engages its attention.
(Smith 1795, 163)

The tutelage in technique, style and genre is the most complex aspect of musical
classicism because of the peculiar situation of music already noted. Architects and visual
artists could look back to the temples and statuary of antiquity. Writers could emulate the
style and genres they recovered from libraries. Musicians, however, could only look back to
descriptions, prescriptions and idealizations of music, such as Plato’s discussion of the
modes in the Republic , Cicero’s Dream of Scipio or Boethius’s later synthesis of Greek music
theory. The music itself was missing. This situation caused musical classicism to develop
only gradually. One can define three stages, although the standard caveats about historical
schemas apply.
The first stage of musical classicism consisted in an emulation less of antique models than
of the practices of antiquity, along with the practices of other humanists. This second-hand
classicism began in the Renaissance, the time in which classicism first flourished. The
establishment of a canon of classic authors and the reformation of practices of imitation and
emulation was particularly important. In his Liber de arte contrapuncti (1477), Tinctoris
famously wrote that ‘it is a matter of great surprise that there is no composition written over
forty years ago which is thought by the learned to be worthy of performance’. Then, after
listing Ockeghem, Régis, Busnois, Caron and Faugues, as well as their teachers Dunstable,
Binchois and Dufay, Tinctoris remarked:

Certainly I never listen to them or study them without coming away refreshed and wiser.
Just as Virgil took Homer as his model in his divine Aeneid , so, by Hercules, do I use
these as models for my own small productions; I have, in particular, openly imitated their
admirable style of composition with regard to the placement of consonances.
(Weiss and Taruskin 2008, 68)

According to Peter Cahn (1989), Tinctoris drew upon Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria to
develop his vision of artistic practice. The book had become a central text for Renaissance
scholars after its first printing in 1470. Moreover, Rob Wegman (1996) has argued that this
practice of canonization and imitation was essential to the emergence of a modern notion of
the ‘composer’ – that is, an author in the strong sense of the word.
The second stage of classicism emerged over the course of the sixteenth century as writers
began to look more closely at the descriptions of ancient music and the values attributed to
it. Had the pursuit of harmony and grace perhaps silenced the passion described in ancient
texts? Did the sophisticated polyphony of the preceding hundred years have a proper
pedigree? Did the polyphony perhaps forget the centrality of the human individual in the
artistic endeavour? Always aware of Horace’s admonishment to poets to delight ( delectare
), to edify ( prodesse ) or to do both, humanists reasserted the importance of edification,
using their close readings of antiquity as a source of legitimization. As Vincenzo Galilei
wrote in the Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna (1581):

If the aim of modern practitioners is (as they say) to delight the sense of hearing with the
diversity of the consonances, … let this goal of delighting with the diversity of their
chords be left to these instruments, since being deprived of sense, motion, intellect,
speech, discourse, reason, and soul, they are not capable of anything else. But let men,
who have been given by nature all these beautiful, noble, and excellent abilities, seek by
their means not only to delight but, as imitators of the good ancients, also to be of use,
since they have the ability to do this.
(Berger 2006, 311–12)

As humanists rummaged through old texts and discussed their discoveries with musicians,
the aesthetic principles of antiquity rose in importance.
Most important was the principle of verisimilitude, or truth to nature. The point was not a
realistic imitation of nature, but rather the creation of an artistic statement that had the force
of nature. Although musicians by no means ignored delectation, they intensified their quest
for efficacy in a musical presentation of a verbal utterance (e.g. a cantata) or of a musical
action (e.g. an opera). The central question for verisimilitude was: Could one forget the
artificiality of the artistic statement and believe in the represented passions or actions? Such
classicism was fragile, as history was to tell. Opera may have been born from humanist
discussions about ancient drama and the verisimilitude of passionate song, but it was easy
for librettists and musicians to use music as an excuse to escape classical precedent, to
cultivate extravagant, illogical and highly pleasurable spectacle (Rosand 1991, 34–65).
Opera would forever after swing from spectacular profusion to classicist reform and back
again.
The third wave of classicism occurred in the eighteenth century, as musicians developed
strategies of phrase construction in such a way that they might mimic the fluid phrases of
classical rhetoric. This development can be traced through the efforts of music theorists.
During this century, they turned from the description of rhetorical figures towards the
elaboration of a system of phrase punctuation – that is, cadence (Bonds 1991; McCreless
2002, 872–6). In other words, they turned from an issue that addressed parts (the figure) to
one that concerned wholes (phrase organization). It may have been medieval music theorists
who first borrowed the term ‘period’ from rhetoric and baroque theorists who developed it
into a music-theoretical term of independent standing. However, it was not until the 1780s
that Heinrich Christoph Koch arrived at a sophisticated definition of the term that could be
applied to phrases of variable length, harmony and character (Blumröder 1971–2006 [1996],
1–7; Burnham 2002, 881–3). This led to the development of a musical syntax that permitted
the appropriation and successful application of classicist criteria of form, such as unity in
variety. While musical and verbal rhetoric functioned differently (Vickers 1984; Hoyt 2001),
musicians were inspired to develop fluid phrases that approximated those of classical
rhetoric.
Classicist formal criteria were not new, but for music to develop its own classicism it was
important that the formal arrangement of musical phrases bore comparison to that of human
speech, at the same time that they did not depend on the formal articulations of a text. This
allowed the music to appear ‘human’, rather than divine, to contemporaries. In the 1780s,
for example, Heinrich Christoph Koch justified cadences in psychological terms, as ‘resting
points for the spirit’ ( Ruhepunkte des Geistes ), and developed a theory that matched form
to the process of reception and compared it to necessary resting points to be found in
language (Koch 1782–93, 2, 342). If, by contrast, one looks back to the Renaissance, when
the premium placed on suavity also encouraged classicist formal criteria, one finds musical
structures of sophistication, formal balance and great harmony, but these structures were
considered divine, a manifestation of universal harmony. This remained true of other
contrapuntal, formally integrated forms well into the eighteenth century (Yearsley 1998).
Thus, musicians appropriated the elements of Western classicism in three stages, first
developing the basic practices of canon formation and emulation, along with the necessary
concept of the work, then appropriating the aesthetic principles of verisimilitude and
attention to ‘nature’, in particular human nature, and finally the stylistic means to realize the
formal criteria of balance and unity in variety, but in a way that bore a symbolic
resemblance to human speech. Once these three elements were in place, it was possible for
musicians to develop their own classical tradition, and it is perhaps no accident that
eighteenth-century style and practice remained the foundation for later pedagogy. Grounded
in a practice of canonization and respectful competition between generations, eighteenth-
century style aimed to remain true to human nature even as it developed the artifice of fluid,
variegated, yet also graceful musical utterances. Even when musicians challenged
eighteenth-century styles or aesthetics, they nonetheless took them as a point of departure
and as a standard by which their own efforts should be judged. In part for such reasons,
Friedrich Blume (1970) characterized eighteenth and nineteenth centuries together as a
‘Classic-Romantic’ period.
As they developed such canons of models and practices of imitation, musicians collected,
idealized, abstracted and imitated, but in different ways. While musicians up until the
eighteenth century imitated canons of styles, for example, thereafter musicians also
increasingly paid heed to a canon of works (Dahlhaus 1984, 49–50). It was less Palestrina’s
works than the style of music abstracted from it that served later generations as a model of
classical vocal polyphony. It was a simplified style, one that had been accommodated to the
vertical orientation favoured by thoroughbass polyphony and amenable to development in
very different stylistic situations (Heinemann 1994, 64–5 and 101–17). By contrast, the
classicism of the eighteenth and later centuries depended very much on the canonization of
works, first the operas of Lully in France (Weber 1990), then the concerti grossi of Corelli
and the oratorios of Handel in Britain (Weber 1992), then the operas, oratorios and
instrumental genres cultivated by Haydn, Mozart and eventually Beethoven in Vienna
(Gruber 2002), later to be joined by many others.
Canons of styles abstract general characteristics of music, while canons of works point to
particular characteristics. In other words, the former are canons of codifiable procedures that
provide lessons to later generations, while the latter are canons of inimitable works that offer
a standard of quality to be approached and hopefully matched, but that are also sui generis .
Classicist modelling and imitation generally takes a middle position between these two
poles. Thus, even nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists who sought the originality mined
their predecessor’s compositions for tricks of the trade (cf., e.g. Cross 1998; Thorau 1999;
Sisman 2000). Genre often mediated between the general and the particular. It was Corelli’s
concerti grossi that contributed especially to the canon (Weber 1975, 75–89), Handel’s
oratorios (Weber 1975, 103–42; Finscher 1987), Haydn’s string quartets (Krummacher
2005: 1, 147–77) and so forth. The mediating function of genre can be seen, for example, in
the organization of Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style (1971), where the classical style (in
the singular) of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven is broken down and analysed according to
the three composers’ respective composition in various genres .
Distinctions between the general (the codifiable) and the particular (the inimitable) point
to a significant difference in practices of classicism. In his magisterial overview European
Literature in the Latin Middle Ages , Ernst Robert Curtius (1953, 274) distinguished
between ‘standard’ and ‘ideal classicism’. Standard classicism refers to the respect for
regularity (or grammatical correctness in literature) and its canons are codifiable. Curtius
defends the necessity of standard classicism: ‘It is of advantage to the economy of a
literature if a large stock of such goods is available’ (1953, 274). Yet he also argues that
such classicism can ultimately weigh down artistic production if differences in quality are
ignored. Such differences of quality are often perceived as metaphysical differences, as
Curtius notes.

We feel the Classicism of Raphael and of Phidias as Nature raised to the Ideal. To be sure,
every conceptual attempt to circumscribe the essence of great art is a makeshift. Yet the
above formula would to some extent apply to what affects us as ‘classical’ in Sophocles,
Virgil, Racine, and Goethe.
(Curtius 1953, 273)

As Curtius construes it, the binary distinction between standard and ideal classicism may be
a metaphysical one, driving a wedge between ‘great art’ and the rest. It might be wiser to
acknowledge differences of quality, but also to treat the two forms of classicism as two
tendencies within practice, one now favouring regularity and strict control in the technical
means, the other aiming more for the force of the end effect. Many evaluative terms used to
regulate classicist practice (‘simplicity’, ‘harmony’ etc.) can apply to either means or ends
(Chapin 2008, 167–71). Depending on how they are applied, they can guide practice
towards either standard or ideal classicism.
Such differences – between canons of styles and works, and between standard and ideal
classicism – are related to the type of imitation taken up by an artist. An artist may relate to
past works or styles in a continuum of ways, from exact copying to paraphrase, imitation,
emulation, innovation and, at the vanishing point of the spectrum, utter originality. To
differentiate between different ways of mediating between past and present, Martha Hyde
has distinguished four different types of imitation of the past: eclectic, reverential, heuristic
and dialectical. Reverential imitation layers modern ornaments over faithful transcription
(Hyde 2003, 110). Eclectic imitation involves a montage of material of the past which is not
subjected to a logically developed plan (102). Heuristic imitation subjects this montage of
material to a plan that forefronts the self-conscious activity of the composer (114–15).
Finally, dialectical imitation stages a dialogue between past and present in which both model
and imitation critique and allow themselves to be critiques by the other (122). Hyde
exemplifies the categories on neoclassical works, and thus ones that self-consciously play up
the ‘anachronism’ between past and present. However, the four types of imitation could as
easily be applied to classicist imitation, which in general aims to dissolve anachronism
through an emphasis on what in the model is ostensibly timeless.

Style and form

If classicism involves practices of reception that could settle upon things of varying shapes
and forms, from extravagant myths to grotesque sculptures, it tended to privilege grace,
decorum, formal balance and integrity, or, especially in pedagogical practice, regularity and
uniformity. Historically, grammatical correctness constituted one of the chief classical
virtues and medieval writers recommended Latin forebears as models. Later, however, less
quantifiable but no less normative aesthetic ideals supplemented these principles of
regularity. They are the stuff of Curtius’s ‘ideal classicism’.
Classical stylistic qualities can be exhibited in many aspects of musical practice, from the
types of gestures favoured by performers and listeners, to the clothing chosen for proper
performance, to the styles of architecture favoured for performance venues. Thus, for
example, François Couperin recommended that keyboard players sit with their bodies turned
slightly away from the keyboard and towards the performers.

One must have a relaxed air when one is at the harpsichord. One should not fix one’s gaze
too much on any object, nor leave it too vague, and finally one should not look at the
company, if there be one, with a preoccupied air.
(Couperin 1717, 5–6)

However, despite the cultivation of classical style across musical practice, the issues of style
have been most finely debated with respect to musical works.
In most classicist practices there is a tension between what can be objectively ascertained
and what is accessible only to subjective intuition. In the musical domain, this tension can be
seen in the theories of phrase lengths. Music theorists, most famously Hugo Riemann, have
idealized the priority of four and eight-bar phrases ( Musical Example 7.5 ) and textbooks
will begin harmony by teaching students how to swing suavely from tonic to dominant and
back home again (e.g. Aldwell and Schachter 2003: 83–96; Kostka and Payne 2004: 102–3).

Musical Example 7.5 Riemann, Allgemeine Musiklehre (Katechismus der

Musik) , 2nd, revised edn, Leipzig: Hesse, 1897, 108

However, the power of a piece rarely lies in such regularity. In the first movement of
Mozart’s String Quartet in F major K. 590 ( Musical Example 7.6 ), the opening bars are
strikingly irregular. In the first nineteen measures, a rising triad in half notes starts phrases
four times, but metrical weightings and phrase lengths differ. First, all instruments
participate in a unison exposition of the rising triad and descending scale, but dynamics and
the three-bar phrase unit with metrically weak closure flaunt norms of phrase construction
(mm. 1–3). Second, Mozart retains the length of three bars, but differentiates the voices and
the harmony. The cadence is now clear, but the phrase nonetheless sits oddly. The rising
triad motive is metrically ambiguous, part measure-long extended upbeat, part phrase
beginning (mm. 4–6). Third, Mozart casts the rising triad motive as a measure-long upbeat,
though one hears it thus only in retrospect, thanks to the regularity of the four measures that
follow (mm. 7–11). Only in m. 16, the beginning of the bridge, is the rising triad motive
seamlessly integrated into a harmonious phrase unit, if one only three bars long. And so the
process continues. In other words, Mozart works with a constellation of gestures and phrase
norms, but never allows them to coalesce into a formation that affords exact description.
Too much of the effect depends on the metamorphoses, as well as such evaluative terms as
‘seamless’ and ‘harmonious’. In such cases, ‘unity’ may be too strong or too
undifferentiated a word to capture the integrity of this ‘variety’. Matthias Schmidt (2002)
has suggested ‘similarity’ [ Ähnlichkeit ] as a music theoretical category more appropriate to
Mozart’s music. Rose Subotnik (1991, 107–9) has put forward ‘analogy’. The point is that it
is hard to name Mozart’s game. ‘Constellation’, ‘similarity’ and ‘analogy’ lack the hard
sobriety of ‘unity’. They leave it to aesthetic intuition (or psychological study) to divine the
relationship of parts and the sense of the whole.
 Musical Example 7.6 Mozart, String Quartet K. 590, Allegro moderato,
mm. 1–18

To avoid the dangers of prescriptive or reductive definitions of classical style – standard

classicism – musicians and critics can model their efforts or be moulded in three ways. The
first is to describe synthesis as a meeting of extremes, even seemingly mutually exclusive
ones – that is, to emphasize the variety that is held constant in a style or work. Historians
might espy this in the meeting of styles – for example, in the Italian, French, Mannheim,
Viennese, North German, English (Handelian) and various personal styles that influenced
Haydn and Mozart (Finscher 1985a, 1985b). It is also possible to describe such synthesis at
a conceptual or philosophical level, often as the cohabitation of opposites. In the eighteenth
century, unity in variety was a popular catchphrase, but there have been others. In the early
nineteenth century, Hegel and his followers enthused over the harmony of content and form,
whereby the content was the Absolute and the form was the subjectively spiritual. Classic
works have also been described as rich in content, and thus finely detailed and highly
individual, but also generally comprehensible and thus utilizing conventions. Or they were
supposed to be intensely personal expressions (and thus ‘subjective’), yet at the same time
capture a common sensibility (and thus aspire to ‘objectivity’) (Schmidt 2002, 141–2).
To describe balance by pointing to opposite extremes may seem to evade or mystify the
midpoint. Yet the method has its advantages. Any aesthetic or style of balance, synthesis,
regularity or unity that does not include imbalance, variety, irregularity and disruption is
likely to bore through its very regularity. Indeed, regularity itself can be heard as a
mannerism, a departure from good practice through overemphasis on evenness. Helmut
Hucke (1990, 207) once pointed out that Palestrina’s even, euphonious polyphony could be
seen as another manifestation of the mannerist urges of the late sixteenth century.
A distinction between mannerism and classicism is a second way to circumscribe the
intuitive aspect of balance, regularity and harmony. Rather than point out the
incommensurables that are brought together and balanced, one points out that there is a
contrast between balance and imbalance, that one can define classicality in part by what it is
not. One can aim to make parts merge into a whole, or one can construct a whole in which
parts seem out of place, underdeveloped or exaggerated – that is, are mannerisms. The
method is attended by the same problem that besets the principle of balance: exaggeration is
as much intuited as it is denoted.
The difficulties of the situation can be exemplified on Mozart’s Symphony in C major, K.
551, ‘Jupiter’. The coda of the symphony contrapuntally combines the themes from the
movement in what might be heard as a summation of the movement ( Musical Example 7.7
). By definition, the coda occurs after the main tonal argument of the piece has concluded
(Caplin 1998, 179; Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, 281–2). Yet such is the excitement of the
coda that it pushes at the balance of the piece. One may hear the contrapuntal coda as did
Hermann Abert (2007, 1140), as an increase in tension that sets up the fanfare conclusion to
the movement and symphony – that is, as something that allows the symphony to achieve
harmonious closure, but one may also hear it as edging towards a different type of ending.
While the coda does develop previously heardm themes, it also functions in part as
accumulation. In other words, it rounds off the developmental counterpoint of the
movement, but it also overcomes the preceding music through sheer sound and mass. The
critical categories and formal analogies invoked by musicologists to describe the coda point
to the fine line that divides classical balance and mannerist extravagance in such cases:
Elaine Sisman describes the sublimity of the ‘mass of simultaneously writhing fragments …
with the relentless background of the four whole-notes’. The coda ‘creates a cognitive
exhaustion born of sheer magnitude’ (Sisman 1993, 79; cf. Subotnik 1991). Simon Keefe
and Wye J. Allanbrook, by contrast, stress the connection of the work with literary
conventions influenced by classical dramatic theory: denouement (Keefe 2007, 157–60) and
‘the lieto fine of an opera buffa’ (Allanbrook 2010, 268), though Keefe emphasizes the
phenomenal flourish of the end and Allanbrook (2002) contests the category of unity.
Splitting the difference between classicist and mannerist points of view, Stefan Kunze finds
classical completion realized precisely through the degree to which the contrapuntal section
of the coda does not fit in. The main motive is like a monad, inviting no continuation, he
argues. Yet the ‘artfully constructed simultaneity of the main motives’ of the movement,
precisely because the simultaneity does not sit well with normal procedures of closure in the
style of the time, produce the ‘epiphany of the work character, suspended from time’ (Kunze
1988, 115). This issue of balance has been at issue since Mozart’s own day. In 1798 Carl
Friedrich Zelter called the ‘Jupiter’ ‘tremendous’ but believed that Mozart ‘pushed things a
little far’ (Zaslaw 1989, 530).
 Musical Example 7.7 Mozart, Symphony K. 551 ‘Jupiter’, Allegro
moderato, mm. 387–92

A third way to describe the grace, harmony and integration prized by classicism appeals
even less to objective criteria. It is to address directly the conflict between codifiable means
and inimitable effect. A style or work should appear unstudied or ‘natural’, despite the
thought and effort that lies behind it. Famously, the Renaissance courtier Baldasar
Castiglione offered his readers the ideal of sprezzatura , or ‘a certain nonchalance which
conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless’
(1976, 67). The disappearance of artifice in art was a central goal of artists in many
centuries, and would ultimately underpin a variety of classicist ideals and catchphrases.
Verisimilitude , a watchword well into the eighteenth century, required artworks to have the
semblance of truth, that is, to seem plausible as a representation of a human utterance or
action, despite the fictional and consciously constructed nature of the work. The eighteenth-
century concept of the galant was naught but a new word to describe sprezzatura (Sheldon
1975, 1989; Seidel 1994–2007). Sublimity and genius , which supplanted galanterie and
verisimilitude in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved a process in which the
end effect (the feeling of sublimity) subsumes the material production of the effect into it.
One is taken by the experience. Just before Immanuel Kant described genius as the ‘talent
(natural gift [ Naturgabe ]) that gives the rule to art’ (2000, 186 [§46]), he emphasized that
art must appear as nature:

In a product of art one must be aware that it is art, and not nature; yet the purposiveness in
its form must still seem to be as free from all constraint by arbitrary rules as if it were a
mere product of nature.
(2000, 185 [§45])

He thereby opened the door to yet another ideal for the classicist whole: organicism . If an
art work were organic, it would appear as nature and even, when buttressed by a full
metaphysics of genius, the work would be the product of nature (Solie 1980; Schmidt 1990).
The survey suggests that a classical ideal of style and form inspires a variety of styles and
genres, including many not normally associated with classicism. Even as musicians in the
‘Baroque’ seventeenth century pursued emotional intensity at the expense of polyphonic
suavity, they sought to achieve verisimilitude. For their part, Romantics pursued the organic
integrity of the musical work. Twentieth-century modernists could also profess similar
ideals. For example, in 1927 Alban Berg discussed the formal design of his opera Wozzeck
(1925), only then to take up the classicist position that technique is subsumed into the effect:

No one in the audience, no matter how aware he may be of the musical forms contained in
the framework of the opera, of the precision and logic with which it has been worked out,
no one, from the moment the curtain parts until it closes for the last time, pays any
attention to the various fugues, inventions, suites, sonata movements, variations, and
passacaglias about which so much has been written.
(Berg 1989, 153)

Ideals of classical sheen are equally prevalent in performance. When visited by a pianist
in Vienna, for example, Mozart noted that the man played ‘a lot’ but in a rough and laboured
way, without any taste or sentiment. When the man exclaimed at Mozart’s facility as a
performer, Mozart replied, ‘Yes, I had to work too, in order now to be allowed not to work’
(Mozart 2005, 3, 312 [28 April 1784]). In other words, Mozart hid the high artifice of his
virtuosity, along with the work that he had put into it, behind a polish that made it all seem
effortless. The account is prophetic of Mozart reception in general. Contemporaries and later
generations have heard primarily the polish in his music, rarely the labour.
The classical ideal of art-as-nature was challenged most radically in the twentieth century
by neoclassical composers. Neoclassical composers might respect the ideal of artifice-as-art,
as for example in Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin (1918). Many, however, consciously worked
against the aesthetic illusion, often in the name of ‘objectivity’. Stravinsky, for instance, in
arguing against the illusion of humanity that strings might produce in the Octet, also wished
to exclude ‘all nuances between the forte and the piano’ (White 1979, 575). Not only do
abrupt shifts in dynamics contribute to the sense of disjuncture between parts, but they also
overturn the classicist model of synthesis at another level. Dynamics and other
‘performative’ nuances contribute to the appearance of artifice as art/nature.

Attitudes and values

Classicism and neoclassicism have been cultivated within a variety of political systems and
causes – aristocratic and liberal, totalitarian and revolutionary, and reactionary and
progressive. The fundamental attitudes can be directed towards diverse ends. While
classicism and politics mix in many ways, one can nonetheless trace tendencies. Restraint,
for example, comes in forms that reflect the difference between standard and ideal
classicism. While restraint that prides itself on reason may aim at the establishment and
cultivation of norms, codes and rules, a restraint grounded in good taste and judgement may
draw back from these norms as themselves examples of excess.
Restraint may be manifested in processes of reflection, in the maintenance of distance, in
the practice of self-control, and many other types of attitudes and behaviour. While some
people may actively practice restraint, others may cultivate it only in certain types of
activity, strive towards it as an ideal, or defer its expression to the work they produce. For
example, Mozart may not have had the control of his financial situation that his father or his
later biographers would have liked. Yet Mozart describes a vicious work schedule in a letter
to his father (Mozart 2005, 2, 198–9 [20 December 1770]). Although the letter certainly
played for his earnest father’s approval, the composition, performing, teaching and concert
organization that he did during a relatively brief life testify to his concentration and
dedication to musical activities. Disorganization in daily life was the flip side of the coin to
extraordinary powers of concentration and organization in matters of music.
Diversity of approach also runs through the various communities formed according to
classicist values. The culture of restraint within classical traditions had two points of origin,
the first in humanist circles and the second in the courts in which humanists moved. This
dual orientation, at once centripetally disciplinary and centrifugally political, would also
characterize later cultures of classicism, although they would often overlap. In one case, the
group develops its classicism in one particular domain, in the other it develops it as a life
style.
The disciplinary practice of restraint arose from the scepticism of humanists and artists
towards the scholasticism of medieval universities and the dogmatism of Church writers
(Fumaroli 2001). To throw off these institutionalized patterns of thought, humanists looked
back to antiquity for models and discussed their findings with each other. As they
corresponded, they formed a self-image as a Republic of Letters, with codes of behaviour
derived from their idealizations of ancient literary practice. This pride of a group in its own
specialized practices, as well as the distance it would cultivate from other groups, would
later be cultivated in intimate social surroundings such as the salon, but could also become
institutionalized in academies, universities and other institutions of learning and artistic
production. In such arenas, the classicist restraint could develop its own forms of pedantry –
that is, tend towards standard classicism. Such standardization is the persistent peril of
institutionalized classicism, but it is not its inevitable fate. The institutions depend as well on
the refinement over time of specialized practices, the considered use of these practices, and
the particular forms of sociability born of a shared love for sophistication, whether the
sophisticated play of artistic technique or the refined handling of themes both weighty and
light. One sees this pride in discipline and specialization in Mozart’s self-confident letter to
his father of 1777:

I cannot write poetically, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange styles of speech with such art
as to produce effects of shade and light, for I am no painter. Even by signs and pantomime
I cannot express my reflections and thoughts, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by
means of tones, for I am a musician.
(Mozart 2005, 2, 110–11 [8 November 1777])

When it inspires a community, the refinement of practice can be closely guarded and can be
treated as a bulwark against other practices or communities of the time. In such cases,
restraint expresses itself as a reticence to accept contemporaneous practices perceived as
either compulsive or impulsive – that is, practices marked either by too much rigour or by
too little. Both the self-confidence that derives from a long tradition and the ‘shock of the
ancients’ (Norman 2011) felt by a look back to the distant past can provide people with the
impetus to reject what had become comfortable in the present. Thus, classicist restraint can
be directed against the rigour of the academic and pedagogue, but also against practices
adopted without sufficient reflection from either the recent past (routine) or the present
(fashion). Such restraint can promote rejuvenation through a fresh look at the distant past, as
well as the refinement of technique over time, but also conservatism and resistance to
change.
In contrast to the cultivation of restraint found in the various disciplinary traditions of
classicism, the political culture of restraint grew from aristocratic courts (Fader 2003).
Castiglione’s sprezzatura was taught to an elite audience, and the manuals on etiquette,
behaviour and conversation that followed often developed this elitism into critiques of the
perceived faults of ‘lower’ social groups: the compulsiveness (i.e. the work ethic) of the
bourgeoisie, the pedantry (i.e. rigour) of academics and churchmen, the lack of moral values
(i.e. lack of aristocratic demeanour) of popular classes, the barbary (i.e. cultural alterity) of
foreigners, and so forth. However, sprezzatura and the implicit critiques that went with it
were also directed against the aristocracy itself, in particular against the feudal aristocracy
and their warrior values. The process of civilization that spread the ideal of sprezzatura
beyond the aristocratic milieu played out in many ways. As non-noble men of letters often
played a central role in the education and entertainment of the polite aristocracy, the
cultivation of grace opened the door to a degree of meritocracy within the political
establishment, especially as courts required bureaucracies and thus attracted educated
commoners into their orbits. However, the process of civilization also contributed to the
hierarchical organization of society and to the regulation of open competition (Elias 1981).
As restraint furthered the maintenance of political order even as it supported reflection,
classicism has been the aesthetic of preference for many political regimes, as well as
political players without power who hoped to install regimes of control. Thus, with the
French monarchs leading the way, absolutist rulers of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, imperialist nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth, and totalitarian regimes in the
twentieth have all favoured classicism. For reasons of both professional expediency and
political conviction, artists could find common cause with such regimes of control. Igor
Stravinsky expressed his admiration for the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. ‘He is
the savior of Italy and – let us hope – of Europe’ (Walsh 1999, 521).
Yet classicism, as often as it buttressed politics of control, also provided the means to
temper or subvert political authority. First, a person could always argue that the centre of
power had cultivated the wrong form of control, a control based on formalized rules rather
than good judgement. Thus, although artistic classicisms of good taste often participated
willingly in political classicisms of strict order, they could also be a critical voice. Daniel
Gordon has shown that French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conversation manuals
could be oriented towards the royal court at Versailles or towards the decentred world of
salons in Paris (Gordon 1994). The royal court and its politics were represented above all by
large, official works, in particular the operas of Lully, and by calls for the order represented
by genre purity. By the early eighteenth century, however, musicians often experimented
with style and genre mixture. This was not so much a fall from classical aesthetics, which
still dominated French discussion, as a tempering of norms that had become too rigid. These
musical experiments had a political resonance, as they were associated with the circles
around Philippe II, Duke of Orleans and Regent of France between the death of Louis XIV
(1715) and the ascension of Louis XV to the throne (1723). Genuinely enthused by Italian
styles, Philippe and those in his circle also found in them a symbolic critique of the
regimentation of French politics that two centuries of absolutism had wrought (Fader 2005,
2007; Cowart 2008, 191–252). Hardly a revolutionary or far-reaching critique, to be sure,
coming as it did from aristocratic circles and in the modulated tones of music, but a critique
it nonetheless was.

Conclusion: motives for classicism

If musicians developed their classicism in part because of a fascination with the legacy of
antiquity, in part because of a love of refinement and care for disciplinary skill, and in part
in order to move within and live off of social elites, they may also have cultivated their
classicism precisely because it provided a measure of balance to the world around them. In
other words, classicism and neoclassicism may involve aesthetics of restraint and
refinement, order and control, but their Apollonian fruits may have sprung from Dionysian
seeds. These Dionysian forces could generate large social movements. Helmut Lethen, for
example, has related the ‘cool conduct’ behind the German version of neoclassicism (New
Objectivity) to the trauma experienced by Germans during and after the First World War
(Lethen 2002). Dionysius could also operate on a more personal level. Before the
development of modern medicine, physical ailment and the proximity of death were
constants of life. Rüdiger Safranski relates that the doctors who performed an autopsy on
Friedrich Schiller after his death in 1805 were amazed at the state of his organs: the lungs
were like porridge, the heart without muscular substance, the gall bladder grossly swollen,
and the kidneys substantially dissolved and deformed (Safranski 2004, 11). German literary
classicism and philosophical idealism may owe a small debt to the intellectual fury of a man
who experienced nothing but disorder in his body and could do nothing about it. One
wonders how many musicians of classicist leanings were similarly driven, whether by
physical suffering or by psychological turmoil.
If classicism is at times a reaction to suffering, trauma and trouble, it may also owe its
strength to these causes. Just as mannerisms contribute much to works informed by a
classical aesthetic, so does the chaos of life provide energy to the classical attitude.

Note
1 Other notable conceptual introductions and historical studies of classicism and neoclassicism in music include Heartz and
Brown 2001; Finscher 1994–2007; Krummacher and Stephan 1994–2007; Danuser 1997; Gruber 2002; Taruskin 2005, 5, 447–
598. See the extensive bibliographies in Finscher 1994–2007; Krummacher and Stephan 1994–2007.

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 8
Romanticism/anti-romanticism
Sanna Pederson

Introduction
Like most other accounts of musical romanticism, this chapter centres on German thinkers and
composers. It is not a comprehensive, descriptive overview of romantic music, but rather a
narrative of how romantic ideology affected musical aesthetics over the course of the nineteenth
century. It proceeds hermeneutically rather than empirically, attempting to define a romantic
understanding of music rather than cobbling together a definition from musical characteristics of
individual works. Let us orient ourselves within the vast literature on romanticism around three
basic points. The first is the special relationship between music and romanticism, well expressed
in Nietzsche’s words: ‘I fear I am too much of a musician not to be a Romantic’ (1921, 335).
We can move directly from this conflation of music and romanticism to our second point,
which can be seen as a reaction, an interrogation of the first: surely not all music is romantic? A
chronological juxtaposition only muddies the waters; romantic theories of music, which arise in
the 1790s, do not coincide with the nineteenth-century repertoire commonly referred to as
‘romantic’. While musicologists divide the music of that century into early and late romantic
periods, placing the dividing line around 1850, scholars of German literature distinguish a ‘Jena
romanticism’, occurring around 1794–1808, from a literary late romanticism that flourished
during the first two decades of the nineteenth century (Prawer 1970). In contrast, composers of
the so-called ‘romantic generation’ in music, which includes Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann,
Liszt, Wagner and Chopin, were all born around 1810, after literary romanticism had reached its
peak (Dahlhaus 1988; Eggebrecht 1996: 590).
An appreciation of this chronological disjunction is necessary for my third point: romanticism
is not merely a neutral descriptive term; it is a stance or position taken by those who were either
very strongly for or against it. Therefore, anti-romanticism has had a major role in defining
romanticism.
For purposes of understanding romantic ideology, I will turn to an earlier generation, the poets
and philosophers born around 1770 in Germany. These creative men and women reacted strongly
against the Enlightenment’s belief in the rational design of a better world. Their most radical and
anarchic response to the modernization and rationalization of society was proclaimed in the first
decade of the nineteenth century by August and Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling and Novalis.
However, the aesthetic writings of this ‘Jena circle’ centred primarily on literature, leaving it to
Tieck, Wackenroder and E. T. A. Hoffmann to adumbrate a concept of musical romanticism .
Weimar Classicism, especially as expressed by Goethe and the aesthetics of Hegel, forms the
counterpart to this particular romanticism. These thinkers were the first to define romanticism in
opposition to classicism and to draw the analogy of sickness as opposed to health. They thus
inaugurated the polemical discourse that defines romanticism and also indicates how strongly it
has always functioned as a value judgement. As Carl Schmitt, himself an important critic of
romanticism, remarked, ‘The easiest thing to do would still be to follow Stendhal and simply say
that romantic is what is interesting and the classical is what is boring, or naturally the other way
around’ (Schmitt 1991, 4). By designating something as romantic, a critic often reveals ethical,
political or moral values rather than strictly aesthetic concerns.
These three points – the special bond between music and romanticism, the vagueness of a
chronological definition and the value judgement implicit in defining the ‘romantic’ content of
an artwork – go a long way towards explaining why it is so hard to pin down musical
romanticism. Musicologists place its beginnings anywhere from 1780 to 1830 and often see it
persisting well into the twentieth century (Samson 2001). For instance, a reader turning to
Richard Taruskin’s comprehensive history of Western classical music can find romanticism
invoked for music as early as Mozart and as late as Schoenberg (Taruskin 2005). Such an
expansive view leads observers like Dieter Borchmeyer to complain about ‘the musical concept
of romanticism, which denotes everything and nothing … and is applied to the entire
development of music from Franz Schubert to Richard Strauss, and so, ultimately, does not mean
anything at all’ (Borchmeyer 1994, 40).
In response, rather than concentrating on defining the chronological boundaries of
romanticism, we need also to fill in the comparatively neglected history of anti-romanticism.
This reveals a different picture: a history of music over the last two hundred years that can be
seen as cyclic. Instead of an undifferentiated ‘romantic period’, we observe a series of waves of
romanticism, separated by periods of vehement reaction that also ebb away. After the first
romantic era and a backlash to it around 1850, a second wave of romanticism, or ‘neo-
romanticism’, lasts until the First World War. The following period of anti-romanticism reaches
its peak in the 1920s. The cycle repeats once more, with the period after the Second World War
marking the most extreme version of anti-romanticism to date. From the current standpoint of the
early twenty-first century, it appears that, despite repeated attempts to kill it off, musical
romanticism lives on.
A detailed description of this history is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, I will
illustrate this premise by discussing romanticism and anti-romanticism in their primary locus, the
nineteenth or so-called ‘romantic’ century. I will also comment upon the question of the
persistence of romanticism and anti-romanticism in the musical modernism of the early twentieth
century. In the following section I will characterize the main themes of romantic ideology within
the framework of modern society and how they are manifested in music.

Romantic ideology in the first half of the nineteenth century: the

dualistic mindset

Real life versus art

Our current understanding of early romanticism has been tremendously influenced by the critical
theory of The Frankfurt School, a twentieth-century version of the dialectic method of Hegel and
the ideology critique of Karl Marx (Kohlenbach 2009). For instance, Georg Lukács used the term
‘Romantic anti-capitalism’ to emphasize Romantic thinkers’ negative reaction to their specific
economic and social circumstances, and to the increasingly competitive, market-oriented
mentality that they perceived (Sayre and Löwy 1984). By responding to the increased
differentiation of society and its consequent alienating effects, the Romantics took not only an
anti-capitalistic position but also a more comprehensive anti-modern stance. From this point of
view, romanticism is fundamentally about the relationship between art and life. They recognized
that the aesthetic now functioned as a privileged sphere within modernity; that the realm of art
had taken on the role of serving as the last refuge where one could experience the unity that was
denied in a functionally differentiated society. They argued that the potential of art was being
extinguished by its integration into this society, since it thereby functioned as a compensatory
realm in cooperation with other spheres of work and society. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it
in Dialectic of Enlightenment : ‘[Art] is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work
process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again’ (1972, 137).
The Romantics wanted to produce art that would not allow it to be used as compensation but
instead give an idea of what life might be like outside the structure of society itself. They saw the
aesthetic dimension as the way to access a higher truth, an alternate but just as legitimate reality.
Consequently, romanticism is marked by dualism, the portrayal of the ‘real’ world and the
imagined alternative. Of all the writers of this time, E. T. A. Hoffmann was the most vehement in
depicting the ‘horribly infuriating contrast’ between the banalities of music making in polite
society and his personal experience of music as overwhelming and indescribable. Perhaps more
than any other romantic artist, E. T. A. Hoffmann lived the double life he portrayed in his
writings. He was never able to decide in favour of the poetic or the prosaic world; he felt
compelled to live in both (Safranski 1992).

Rationality versus irrationality

The philosophical tradition that considers music as dangerously irrational goes back to Plato. The
Romantics challenged the assumption that knowledge is acquired only through rationality, mind
and thought. They wanted to explore more subjective routes, through the senses and the
emotions. They felt that the Enlightenment had dismissed supernatural, mystical, dark forces too
quickly. One could say that they opened themselves up to both ‘normal’ thought and
‘pathological’ thought, as described by Claude Lévi-Strauss: ‘normal thought continually seeks
the meaning of things which refuse to reveal their significance. So-called pathological thought,
on the other hand, overflows with emotional interpretations and overtones, in order to
supplement an otherwise deficient reality’ (quoted in Prawer 1970, 5).
The philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, in his lectures on the Aesthetics of Art, aimed to counter the
influence of romantic aesthetics. Consistent with Hegel’s general dialectical approach, his
aesthetics presents a broadly historical narrative of three stages: symbolic, classical and
romantic. The middle Classical age is equated with the Ancient Greeks, who stand for
moderation, beauty and serenity; they attain the perfect balance of content and form. The
subsequent Romantic age ends with Hegel’s own time period. The balance has shifted away from
outward form and toward subjective inwardness. For Hegel, who was not a musician, music was
the most extreme example of this imbalance between form and content. He described it as
‘sounds, as if they were feeling without thought’, and ‘expression without any externality at all’.
As such, music exemplified romanticism more than any other art (Pederson 1996). The
twentieth-century term ‘logocentrism’, which refers to an ideology that equates words with
thoughts, is pertinent here. Hegel’s logocentric assumptions made it difficult for him to imagine
that music could contain thought. Even if thought were somehow involved in music, Hegel
viewed it as naturally subsidiary to subjective feelings.
The fundamental basis for Hegel’s qualms about music was his difficulty with romantic art in
general. Romanticism, for Hegel, signalled the end of art as the bearer of Spirit. The next stages
for the Spirit were to be manifested in ways that were increasingly purified of materiality: in
religion and ultimately philosophy.
Hegel’s stature as a philosopher and his enduring influence have ensured that later critics
continue to struggle with the questions posed by his critique of music. His elaborate
philosophical framework does not need to be accepted or even understood to consider his
fundamental assumptions about music as a romantic art. First, he distinguished feeling and
thought as two completely separate processes. Second, he characterized music as subjective
feeling without thought. That this was a negative value judgement was self-evident to him.
Romantic aesthetics counters by asking: what is wrong with subjective feeling in art ? Isn’t art by
definition subjective? Doesn’t its value lie precisely in its aesthetic dimension, which imparts
that which cannot be expressed abstractly or objectively?

Eichendorff’s ‘The Marble Statue’

Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff’s literary fairy tale, ‘The Marble Statue’ (‘Das Marmorbild’,
1819) is a crucial example for scholars who deal with music and romanticism. From a literary
perspective, Eichendorff is a latecomer to romanticism; his writings appear after the most radical
ideas of the early romantics had proved unsustainable (Louth 2009, 80). ‘Late’ Romanticism is
usually identified by its subject matter as well as a more conservative ideology. Eichendorff’s
lyrical and narrative writings take place in vaguely medieval times, in a pre-modern society; the
action usually occurs outdoors in a beautiful natural landscape of trees, flowers and birds. His
narratives involve the pull of dark supernatural forces that are countered by Catholic Christianity.
‘The Marble Statue’ remains a favourite for literary analysis because of its ambivalence about
these forces: while the ‘moral’ of the story is clear enough – the hero prevails – there is a
remarkable blurring of seemingly stark binary oppositions (Hamilton 2009).
Eichendorff typically portrayed two kinds of music in his stories and poetry: the music of
dissolution, involving a loss of control, a loss of self; and the music of containment, which brings
desires under control and helps define a character as an individual. ‘The Marble Statue’ pits these
two kinds of music against each other. The story opens with the young protagonist Florio on the
road, although he literally does not know where he is going or what he wants to do with his life.
Innocent, vulnerable and emotional, he finds an outlet in song. There are nine songs interspersed
in ‘The Marble Statue’, making up about 16 per cent of the entire text (Hanss 1989, 23). Florio is
easily drawn into a state of intoxication by the music of a beautiful, mysterious woman.
However, at the crucial moment when Florio is about to ‘lose himself’ to her, he suddenly hears
‘an old song of pious bent, one he had often heard in his childhood and had since nearly
forgotten, with all the varied experiences and sights of his journey’ (Eichendorff [1819] 1983,
161). This song brings Florio ‘back to himself’ and the woman turns into a statue of Venus.
Florio thus resists the seduction by the Greek goddess of love; at the end of the story he finds
himself riding away with the pure young girl ‘Bianca’ and her father, symbolically on the path to
integration and containment within the conventions of family and religion .
Although the opposites are presented so clearly, with characters’ names hardly more than
designations of their symbolic function, Eichendorff complicates the picture by also portraying
them as doubles. For instance, Venus is the opposite of the ‘white’ Bianca, but Venus is also
described as white: she rides a white horse, wears a white veil, and ultimately becomes a white
marble statue. Florio has difficulty at times telling Bianca and Venus apart.
The story has other thematic elements that are easily distinguished in many romantic musical
works: nature and beauty, love and death, supernatural events and altered states of
consciousness. Perhaps Florio’s most remarkable quality is the questionable state of his
consciousness at any given time. His perceptions are frequently described in the subjunctive
mode (‘it seemed that’, ‘it was as if ’). Objective cognition is affected by his emotions, which are
always close to the surface. His point of view is so erratic that the whole story takes on the
irrational quality of a dream. Not only are his experiences described in a dream-like manner,
Eichendorff also recounts his actual dreams. Other characters are frequently described as ‘lost in
thought’, not fully present or conscious, as well. The attention given to such ‘altered states’ is a
hallmark of romanticism.

Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 38

‘The Marble Statue’ helps us identify the romantic aspects of Robert Schumann’s setting of
twelve selected poems by Eichendorff in his Liederkreis , Op. 38, of 1840. These poems were
selected by Schumann from various sections of the 1837 edition of Eichendorff’s poems; they
were neither in the same order nor grouped together by the author. Schumann’s himself asserted,
‘the cycle is my most Romantic ever’ (quoted in Thym 2004: 122). It appears initially that
Schumann did not so much assemble a story as emphasize recurrent romantic themes of nature,
darkness, loneliness and alienation, love and longing. However, the extensive secondary
literature on this cycle has analysed its musical structure and unity, and familiarity with the
narrative of ‘The Marble Statue’ helps fill in the gaps (Brinkmann et al . 1997; Ferris 2000). A
basic emotional trajectory lends the work the sense of a story. Threats and dangers are depicted
along the way, but the cycle ends happily with the beloved. Schumann also chooses poems
reminiscent of the fairytale setting of ‘The Marble Statue’. There is a wooded landscape in nine
of the twelve poems. ‘Mondnacht’, ‘Zwielicht’ and ‘Frühlingsnacht’ all take place in darkness.
The first and eighth songs, both called ‘In der Fremde’, emphasize alienation or unfamiliar
surroundings; the sixth song’s title is ‘Schöne Fremde’.
Eichendorff was primarily a lyrical poet. In ‘The Marble Statue’ as well as the poems of the
Liederkreis , descriptions of nature use onomatopoeia and invoke ‘natural music’: leaves
rustling, birds singing and water rushing. As one commentator puts it: ‘A key word for
Eichendorff is ‘lauschen’, meaning an intent, almost devout, listening, and it is answered by
‘rauschen’, a word that covers a greater range of sounds that any English word can, but denotes,
as in the poem ‘Lockung’ (‘Lure’), the sensual rustling of the natural world’ (Louth 2009: 79).
This ‘rauschen’ of nature, which appears in seven of the twelve songs by Schumann, will
resurface in Nietzsche’s later romantic celebration of the ‘Rausch’ of a Dionysian musical
experience.

Wagner’s Tannhäuser
‘The Marble Statue’ also illuminates significant romantic aspects of Richard Wagner’s ‘grosse
romantische Oper’, Tannhäuser (1845). One of the sources for Wagner’s opera was the
Tannhäuser saga in the 1806 collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn ; Eichendorff almost certainly
knew this saga and incorporated features of it into ‘The Marble Statue’ (Hanss 1989: 14).
Therefore, there are similarities between Wagner’s opera and Eichendorff’s story because they
have a common source. However, there are deeper connections. Like the story, the opera is based
on a stark dualism that is subtly undermined. Tannhäuser is an artist who is seduced by Venus,
and unlike Florio, succumbs. However, he escapes Venus in Act I by calling out to the Virgin
Mary. While Florio experiences a rite of passage and emerges ‘reborn’, Tannhäuser is torn apart
by his inner turmoil; unable to live with himself, he dies, albeit redeemed by the saintly
Elisabeth.
Musically, the dichotomy is presented at the outset in the Overture: chorale-style music that is
steady, predictable and traditional. The music of the Venusburg that follows is free flowing,
chromatic and more colourfully orchestrated. Musical keys are also used symbolically to
reinforce the opposition. The opera begins in E major with Venus in possession and ends in E
major, with the redemption of Tannhäuser by Elisabeth. The two keys are audibly juxtaposed in
the song contest, when Wolfram’s courtly love song is interrupted by Tannhäuser’s praise of
Venus and physical pleasure.
Although the portrayal of the powers in play is undeniably schematic, upon closer inspection
Tannhäuser can be seen to manifest an ambivalence that blurs the division between good and evil
(Dahlhaus 1979a: 25–7). Like ‘The Marble Statue’, the opposites also sometimes become
doubles. In performance, the roles of Venus and Elisabeth are frequently performed by the same
singer. Another way that Wagner departs from a strict bifurcation of good and evil is the
presence of a third kind of music, ‘natural’ music. In Act One, after being returned to the ‘real’
world, Tannhäuser experiences several extraordinary minutes of ‘natural’, ‘diegetic’ music,
meaning music that one could encounter in the real world, not in the theatre, but also sounds not
made by humans (Abbate 2001, 123–5). The orchestra (the extra-diegetic ‘soundtrack’) is silent
as a shepherd sings and plays his pipe, which overlaps with singing pilgrims passing by as they
make their way to Rome. The only accompaniment is the sound of cows shaking their cowbells.
In this opera about music, ‘natural’ music is portrayed and described; for instance, Tannhäuser’s
first speech recalls church bells. This spontaneous music represents something different from the
artful songs by Tannhäuser and his fellow musicians. The presence of a third, natural realm, set
off against the supernatural realm of Venus and the realm of social convention represented by
Elisabeth, lends some ambiguity to Wagner’s message.

More romantic oppositions

Masculine versus feminine

Following a basic assumption of modernity, the real, rational world for Eichendorff is a world of
men, while the irrational, subjective sphere is the domain of woman. Venus is not just a woman;
she is eroticism incarnate and the supreme possessor of the power of sexual seduction. Florio is
attracted by her beauty, but also by her music making. When her power over him is broken, he
recognizes that she is dangerous and evil. Tannhäuser’s relationship with Venus goes further
than Florio’s. She expands his horizons not only with regard to pleasure but also in respect to his
musical creativity, since he now has first-hand experience with the love he sings about .
Christianity versus the supernatural
Religion is treated as a field of struggle between forces of Christianity and pagan gods from
Greek mythology, or supernatural forces associated with evil, the Devil. In the ‘Marble Statue’, a
specifically Catholic Christianity is referenced by the descriptions of Bianca as a Madonna. Her
rival is the Goddess of Love herself, Venus. This opposition serves to articulate Florio’s warring
attractions towards nature versus culture: safety and containment versus danger and dissolution.
Tannhäuser is faced with the same choices. In Wagner’s opera, Catholicism takes the stage when
the pilgrims pass by, making their way to Rome. Pagan myths are given their scene at the
beginning with nymphs, sirens and bacchantes running wild. Venus again represents the danger
of losing oneself: Tannhäuser literally disappears from his companions during his time in the
Venusberg. As we shall see, Wagner’s last opera Parsifal also thematizes the pull of a
supernatural, seductive world on the knights, whose Christianity is depicted through their
celebration of the sacraments.

The first wave of anti-romanticism

The philosophical critique of romanticism stems primarily from socio-political considerations.
Romanticism, in the view of these critics, shirks responsibility for improving real life by
escaping into an alternative world. Analogously, music is understood as a rejection of rational
language in favour of the enjoyment of beautiful sounds. Music unleashes emotions, which can
hinder the pursuit of the ongoing goals of improving the mind through education and
understanding others’ point of view. This kind of anti-romanticism either attempts to minimize
music’s power or wants to add a political dimension to music.
The years around the 1848 revolutions marked the first groundswell of anti-romantic
sentiment in music criticism (Pederson 1996; Garratt 2010). Those who called for a realistic
politically engaged music directly addressed the question of whether music was inseparable from
romanticism. One radical proposal was to create a new kind of democratic music through
democratic procedures. Another solution, at the other end of the political spectrum, advised a
return to classicism. However, after the failure of the revolutions in Europe in 1848–9, plans for
the future of music similarly collapsed. Eventually, two main attitudes emerged to address the
anti-romantic critique. The first did not dispute that music was romantic and that it drew forth a
response that was primarily emotional; realistic content could be introduced, however, by
supplementing music with words and ideas. The contrasting attitude disputed the restriction of
music’s content to moods and feelings, and argued that art music also embodied structures that
needed to be perceived intellectually.
Richard Wagner adopted the former stance in his Zurich writings from 1849 to 1852. His
solution was not to question music’s essentially romantic nature, but to supplement it with what
it lacked, namely, ideas and political engagement. His presentation of this argument was laid out
most fully in his 1851 treatise Opera and Drama . Yes, music is only emotion, he declared, and
opera needs more than that to be intellectually and philosophically viable. Wagner’s Zurich
writings as a whole are the most extended anti-romantic polemic against music in the nineteenth
century.
Eduard Hanslick’s famous book On the Musically Beautiful (1854) exemplifies the other
response to anti-romanticism. He repeatedly and emphatically insisted that when we are
discussing music, we are not talking about feelings: ‘feeling is nothing more than a secondary
effect’ (1854, 5). As proof he pointed out that ‘the connection between a piece of music and our
changes of feeling is not at all one of strict causation; the piece changes our mood according to
our changing musical experiences and impressions’ (1854, 6).
Since they considered themselves enemies, it can be confusing to see similarities in the
arguments of Wagner and Hanslick. However, in the 1850s, they were more in agreement than
they realized. They both attempted to defend music while accepting the binary oppositions
(rational/irrational, thought/feeling, masculine/feminine) that situated music in a negative space.
Hanslick’s most notorious and judgemental chapter, on what he called ‘pathological listening’,
repeats charges against music that had been introduced by politically committed, anti-romantic
writers before the revolutions. He condemned the pleasurable response to music as ‘elemental’ –
that is, as an undeniably powerful but uncivilized and uncontrolled release of emotion. He
located habits of pathological listening in historically primitive cultures, savages in faraway
places such as ‘the South Seas’ and in music enthusiasts who used music as a drug for physical
pleasure. To counter this, he proposed that ‘contemplative hearing is the only artistic, true form;
the raw emotion of savages and the gushing of the music enthusiast can be lumped together in a
single category contrary to it’ (1854, 63). His description of contemplative hearing was less
detailed and did not go much further than calling for an alert mind that appreciated music for its
own sake, that took in its beauty by contemplation of ‘sounding forms in motion’. He insisted,
however, that contemplative listening, along with a scientific approach to the music itself and not
our response to it, would ward off ‘the oldest accusation against music: that it enervates us,
makes us flabby, causes us to languish’ (1854, 61).

Offenbach’s Orfeé aux enfers

Polemical anti-romanticism could be expressed in music as well as in music criticism. Jacques
Offenbach’s creation of opéra bouffe in the 1850s can be seen as such a musical critique, from an
angle that could be called neoclassical as much as anti-romantic. Rossini recognized this
classical aspect in dubbing Offenbach the ‘Mozart of the Champs Elysées’ and Offenbach
himself claimed kinship with composers of French opéra comique c .1760–80, especially Grétry
(Everist 2009, 72–98). The writer Max Nordau also associated him with the classical by dubbing
him ‘The Parisian Aristophanes’, referring to the ancient Greek dramatist who specialized in
political satire.
One way to see how strongly Offenbach rejected Wagner’s approach is to compare his
practice to the procedures proposed in Opera and Drama . Wagner’s solutions to romanticism are
countered by Offenbach doing the opposite (Janik 1991, 361–86). Whereas Wagner sought to
draw attention away from the music itself, Offenbach specialized in catchy tunes that could take
on a life of their own outside the dramatic setting. Wagner banned chorus and ensembles because
they detracted from the words. Offenbach’s operettas introduced choruses and ensembles purely
for the effect of musical variety. While Wagner wanted his audience to be spellbound, to suspend
disbelief, Offenbach’s musical style calls attention to the artificiality of musical and theatrical
conventions, with his parodies of other composers. Wagner’s theory of ‘Stabreim’ or
‘Versmelodie’ resulted in long passages of alliteration, sometimes unintentionally comical.
Offenbach’s operettas, in contrast, openly delighted in childish word play, including
onomatopoeia and vocalizations, such as the imitation of flies buzzing in Orfeé aux enfers . Other
famous examples include Hélène’s identification of ‘L’homme à la pomme’ in La belle Hélène , a
silly-sounding phrase repeated in mock dramatic style, and the militaristic General Boum’s
introduction of himself with words imitating gun fire, a ‘piff, paff, pouf, et tara, pa pa poum’ in
La Grand-Duchesse de Gérolstein .
Offenbach flouts Wagner’s serious and ambitious prescriptions most explicitly in his choice of
subject matter. Whereas Wagner’s requirement for opera to be philosophically important meant
that it should be based on myths, relevant for all times and places, Offenbach adapted myths to
his time period in order to satirize both antiquity and contemporary society. A comparison of
Offenbach’s breakthrough work, Orfeé aux enfers (1858), with Tannhäuser highlights some
striking similarities and significant differences. One scholar has argued that in the 1861 revision
Wagner intentionally made associations between Tannhäuser and the Orpheus myth in the
opening tableau (Revard 2009). Both Orpheus and Tannhäuser are legendary musicians.
Eurydice is dubbed in the operetta the ‘image of Venus’. Unlike Venus, however, Eurydice does
not find her lover’s music seductive. Rather than a god-given power, Orpheus’s music making is
nothing more than the job he goes to every day. Orpheus and Eurydice agree to split up in order
to pursue extramarital affairs. In contrast, Tannhäuser breaks with Venus in order to recover his
moral and religious integrity. Both works depict a bacchanale: it functions as the finale for Orfeé
and the opening scene for Tannhäuser . In Orfeé , the destination is hell because heaven is boring
and the gods want to try spicy food, wine and orgies. Tannhäuser begins in the Venusburg where
a bacchanale is underway, but the hero is already tired of the sensual pleasures on offer and can
hardly wait to leave.
Wagner provided a detailed description of the bacchanale for the 1861 Paris ballet version:

From the far background a train of Bacchantes approach, who rush in among the pairs of
lovers, inviting them to wild delights. By gestures of rapturous intoxication the Bacchantes
excite the lovers to increasing license. The revelers rush together with ardent love-embraces.
Satyrs and Fauns have appeared from the rocky clefts and now force themselves in their dance
between the Bacchantes and the pairs of lovers.
(Wagner 1916, 414)

Wagner represents the erotic frenzy and bliss musically by using extremes of orchestral colour,
texture and harmony. In contrast, the description of Orfeé ’s Fourth Tableau (finale) specifies
merely: ‘The Underworld. As the curtain rises, all the gods of Olympus and the Underworld are
gathered round a table. They are crowned with flowers and are drinking. Bacchanale’ (Crémieux
1936). Eurydice’s Hymn to Bacchus is set as a bouncy, cheerful strophic song with a chorus,
sung by a coloratura soprano. The bacchanale culminates in the energetic cancan: a duple metre
kick-step, regular phrasing, simple harmonic progressions and infectiously repetitive tune.

Neo-romanticism
In the second half of the nineteenth century, romanticism took on a new lease on life as a
consequence of the failure of the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe. The resulting defeatist
attitude about making the world a better place easily crossed over into a desire to escape from
reality into a subjective, inner world of feelings. This neo-romanticism acquired philosophical
legitimacy in the 1850s with the discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy of
will and his evaluation of music as the highest of the arts that had been originally published in
1819. Musical metaphysics in the later nineteenth century were inevitably coloured by
Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as filtered through the writings and music of Wagner. In 1854, after
he had closed out the series of his politically engaged Zurich essays (1849–52), Wagner first
encountered Schopenhauer’s writings. They became critically important to his artistic and
philosophical development because they enabled him to break out of his anti-romantic view of
music. Although the political and philosophical critiques of romanticism had certainly not been
refuted, they receded enough in importance to allow a resurgence of musical romanticism, or as
Carl Dahlhaus called it, ‘neo-romanticism’ (1979b). Schopenhauer also influenced the writings,
as well as the music, of composers whom Dahlhaus would call modernist. This is perhaps
because Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and others were all centrally
engaged with Wagner.
What was it about Schopenhauer’s writings that made them so relevant to musical thought
after 1850, decades after they were written? Naturally, composers would have been attracted to
his claim that music was the highest of the arts, but Schopenhauer went far beyond this, asserting
that music was on such a different level that literally nothing else in the world could compare to
it.

Music differs from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon, or,
more exactly, of the will’s adequate objectivity, but is directly a copy of the will itself, and
therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to
every phenomenon. Accordingly, we could just as well call the world embodied music as
embodied will.
(1966, vol. 1, 262–3)

These claims for music exactly fitted the cultural mood after 1850; the very aspect of music that
had traditionally been seen as problematic, its inability to represent through pictures or words,
came to be exalted as the quality that made it superior to mere representation of the world.
Instead of trying to change society, artists could escape into a philosophically defensible
alternative world through music.
Another particular passage in The World as Will and Representation transfixed composers in
the later nineteenth century:

The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest
wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic
somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is
awake.
(1966, vol. 1, 260)

Wagner quoted this sentence in 1870 in his long essay, ‘Beethoven’. It also appears in
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Mahler referred to it in his letters and it plays a key role
in the argument presented by Schoenberg in his famous 1912 essay, ‘The Relationship to the
Text’ (1975, 141–5).
Composers must have found this passage so compelling because, first, it told them that
musical creation revealed the innermost nature of the world. Music does not merely express
beauty or feelings; it expresses the profoundest wisdom. Second, this creative process is not a
conscious act, but rather something that occurs in an alternative state of consciousness, akin to
being put to sleep by being ‘magnetized’. Perhaps anxious to maintain their authority against the
emerging disciplines of musicology and music theory, composers were attracted to a view of
music as not something that can be theorized, analysed or evaluated by the reasoning faculty.
Schopenhauer’s description confers on the composer the importance that can hardly be claimed
by any other kind of person and relieves the composer of having to account for his importance,
because there is no way his music can be rationally explicated.

Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde

Schopenhauer’s theory of music as the most direct human experience influenced Wagner’s
changing understanding of how opera comes into being. He now proposed that dramatic action
was just a surface manifestation generated by music as emotion. Wagner thus directly challenged
the Hegelian framework that put thought before feeling: feeling is now privileged as the origin,
that which compels thoughts and action. In his 1860 essay ‘The Music of the Future’, Wagner
pronounced that in Tristan und Isolde ,

Life and death, the whole signification and existence of the external world, in this work
depend entirely on the emotions of the soul. The whole affecting action becomes prominent
only because it is demanded by the innermost sentiment and comes to light as it has been
prepared in the depths of the soul.
(1873, 40)

We might conclude that because of this inner emotional origin, not much takes place on stage in
Tristan – in terms of duration, the ‘action’ sequences (sword fights at the end of the second and
third acts) take only a few minutes, while the remaining four hours or so of the opera involves
working through the characters’ feelings through monologues, confrontations and discussions.
Tristan is romantic in other ways as well. All of these discussions of inner states concern love
and death and other familiar romantic binary oppositions. The real world versus the alternative
world is musically and verbally depicted as literally the difference between night and day. The
most traditional romantic imagery occurs at the beginning of the Act Two: King Marke’s hunt is
the occasion for off-stage horns making hunting calls, an effect Wagner also used in Tannhäuser .
There is a reference to the ‘natural’ music of a water fountain and Isolde attributes her situation
to the goddess of love, named ‘Frau Minne’ in the German medieval version. Even the
supernatural plays a role in the plot, with the drinking of the ‘magic’ love potion.
The dualistic framework of Tristan is just as strong as in Tannhäuser (love/death, day/night,
public/private), but Wagner musically undermines these oppositions with a more sophisticated
treatment that continues to elude definitive interpretation. One example is the vision/light
metaphor in the libretto and its corresponding leitmotif in the music. Although the ‘day’ leitmotif
obviously stands for the real world, it appears in other contexts that prevent us from
understanding it so simplistically. Tristan und Isolde also departs from some of the regular
devices of earlier romantic writings and from Tannhäuser . The power of music is not a theme
here; no singing contest or artists are involved. Perhaps most exceptionally among all of Wagner
operas, in Tristan redemption is not found in woman or religion, but rather in sexual love between
man and woman.
The radically new aspects of both the music and the libretto of Tristan und Isolde can be traced
to Wagner’s understanding of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic theory of the will (Chafe 2005). As
Schopenhauer described it ,

The nature of man consists in the fact that his will strives, is satisfied, strives anew, and so on
 and on; in fact his happiness and well being consist only in the transition from desire to
satisfaction …. Corresponding to this, the nature of melody is a constant digression and
deviation from the keynote in a thousand ways …. in all these ways, melody expresses the
many different forms of the will’s efforts, but also its satisfaction by ultimately finding again a
harmonious interval, and still more the keynote.
(1966, vol. 1: 260)

Here Schopenhauer equates musical cadence with satisfaction of desire or the will, so a musical
composition that mirrors life should never end, just as desires never ends until death (Bowie
2009: 247–9). Wagner’s imaginative musical portrayal of the will in the form of sexual arousal
constitutes the ‘sound world’ of Tristan .
Wagner also puts into practice Schopenhauer’s theory that music can represent more directly
than any other medium extreme mental and physical states. Especially in the Third Act, Tristan’s
final stages of life are portrayed in music: going in and out of consciousness, delirium,
hallucination, heart beats. Tristan’s music begins with reminiscences from Act Two, perhaps
representing an unconscious dream state that re-enacts his momentous coming together with
Isolde and his terrible loss of King Marke’s trust. Tristan refers to his time in another world
(unconsciousness) to the point of ‘Urvergessen’ (total lack of consciousness of the real world);
this is audibly depicted as a move to a remote key, here D major, and a soft-as-possible dynamic
marking ( ppp ). After a moment of almost silence, however, the desire motive (at ‘Wie schwand
mir seine Ahnung?’) returns for first time in this act; this leads to a build-up of chromaticism and
the music returns to full strength until Tristan collapses (‘Das Licht, wann löscht es aus?’). The
delirium that follows (at ‘Das Schiff! Das Schiff! Dort streicht es am Riff! Siehst du es nicht?’)
momentarily retreats into another dreamlike reminiscence section (‘Muss ich dich so versteh’n,
du alte, ernste Weise’) and a slow intensification of all parameters, until he imagines himself
blinded and burned by the sun (‘O dieser Sonne sengender Strahl’). A second collapse (at
‘Verflucht, wer dich gebraut!’) is followed by an ominous silence (‘was je Minne sich gewinnt’)
where Kurwenal believes that Tristan has died, and then the resumption of a heartbeat as the
desire motif finally returns (‘O Wonne, nein’).
Finally, Tristan’s next monologue, a full hallucination (‘Und drauf Isolde’), is portrayed in a
distinctly different way than the previous two states of altered consciousness. Rather than
steadily increasing in intensity, Wagner keeps the music slow and regular, but somehow eerily
unmoored through orchestration and tonality, until Tristan turns from a hallucinatory vision of
Isolde (‘Ach Isolde, Isolde, wie schön bist du’) back to Kurwenal. The importance of this opera
and the third act in particular cannot be underestimated as a source of inspiration for Nietzsche’s
Birth of Tragedy .

Nietzsche
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), heavily influenced by
Schopenhauer and Wagner, presents some of the familiar themes of romanticism, such as the
rejection of the ‘real’ world in favour of a fascination with dreams, intoxication and music. What
Nietzsche added to the mix was a characterization of modernity as the fatal embrace of scientific,
rational thought. Nietzsche put all his hopes in the Dionysian force of music, specifically
Wagner’s operas, to overcome modernity. The Birth of Tragedy is based on the assumption of
the downfall of civilization due to fragmentation of the individual, which itself was not a new
idea but central to the German concept of Bildung . He attacked the standard narrative, however,
by locating the ‘perfect’ era (i.e. before the fall) in archaic Greece up to the middle of the 5th
century BC, which he deemed an aesthetic culture. For Nietzsche, the downfall began with the
period that had hitherto been considered the peak of Hellenic achievement, the period of
Euripides and Socrates. Socrates is scandalously portrayed as the beginning of the fatal
‘disenchantment of the world’ – initiating an unhealthy, overly intellectual approach to the
central questions about the meaning of life.
Rather than Socrates, Nietzsche chooses Dionysus as his hero. Dionysus, the son of Zeus and
the mortal woman Semele, was the god of wine, worshipped by female followers known as
Bacchantes and male followers including satyrs (half-man, half-goat). Worshipping Dionysus
through music making and dancing resulted in frenzied intoxication, Rausch . For Nietzsche, the
significance of Rausch went far beyond pleasure. It dissolves the individual identity, which
involves unbearable pleasure and pain. It is made bearable through representation. In the 6th
century BC in Athens, festivals of Dionysus featured hymns called dithyrambs, which had
originally been sung and danced by choruses of men disguised as satyrs, wearing masks and
goatskins. These hymns had been performed in a circular area called orchestra (literally, ‘dancing
place’), and in about 535 BC a dramatic aspect was added to this choral performance by an
Athenian named Thespis, the ‘father of the drama’; in this sense one can say that theatre was
born out of the cult of Dionysus (Hatab 2001).
Nietzsche identified Dionysus with a fundamental irrationality essential to art. Raymond
Geuss characterizes this as acknowledging: ‘that destructive, primitively anarchic forces are part
of us (not to be projected into some diabolical Other), and that the pleasure we take in them is
real and not to be denied’ (Geuss 1999, xxx). He claimed that in his time, only music still had a
connection to Dionysus, as it had not yet succumbed to science:

Out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit a power has arisen which, having nothing in
common with the primitive conditions of Socratic culture, can neither be explained nor
excused by it, but which is rather felt by this culture as something terribly inexplicable and
overwhelmingly hostile – German music as we must understand it, particularly in its vast solar
orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner.
(Geuss 1999, 119)

Nietzsche further argued that Wagner’s music—specifically Tristan und Isolde —drew upon the
same Rausch as the forces that had brought Ancient Greek tragedy into being. This musical
polemic mystified and outraged his philological colleagues, who could only understand it as
inappropriate and off-topic. After its publication, Nietzsche’s career in philology was effectively
over before it even began.
In the following decade, Nietzsche resigned his position, became alienated from Wagner, and
repeatedly announced that he had turned against romanticism (Del Caro 1989). His Preface to the
second edition of The Birth of Tragedy , entitled ‘An Attempt at Self-Criticism’, excoriated his
first book as embarrassingly romantic. Indeed, the Preface explicitly contradicts his own book
and warns against

current German music , which is Romanticism through and through and the most un-Greek of
all possible forms of art; furthermore, as a ruiner of nerves it is in the first rank, a doubly
dangerous thing amongst a people who love drink and who honour obscurity as a virtue,
particularly for its dual properties as a narcotic which both intoxicates and befogs the mind.
 (Geuss 1999: 10)

Decadence
Nietzsche played a major role in the late nineteenth-century emergence of the concepts of
decadence and degeneration. In the Preface to The Case of Wagner (1967) he claimed: ‘nothing
has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence’. He used the French word,
décadence , but associated it mainly with Wagner (Borchmeyer 1983: 632). The relationship of
Nietzsche’s accusation of decadence to his earlier critiques of Wagner and romanticism is
difficult. One scholar recently summed up what many have concluded: ‘in Nietzsche’s
conceptual world and vocabulary, the terms romanticism, pessimism, modernity, and finally
decadence are related in such an intricate fashion that an attempt to define each term in its own
right seems an impossible or even useless enterprise’ (Gogröf-Voorhees 1999: 143).
In The Case of Wagner the emphasis again is on Wagner as a ‘sickness’ from which Nietzsche
says he has recovered: ‘My greatest experience was a recovery. Wagner is merely one of my
sicknesses’ (1967, 155). At this late stage in his writing, as the chronically ill forty-four year old
was approaching his final physical and psychological breakdown, he phrased the issue as a series
of emotionally charged exclamations: ‘Is Wagner a human being at all? Isn’t he rather a
sickness? He makes sick whatever he touches – he has made music sick’ (1967, 164).
Nietzsche presented a provocative alternative to Wagner in the famous first sentence of The
Case of Wagner : ‘Yesterday I heard—will you believe it? —Bizet’s masterpiece for the
twentieth time’ (1967, 157). Nietzsche had indeed attended Bizet’s Carmen several times, but he
had also rediscovered his passion for operetta. He had seen Offenbach’s La belle Hélène during
his student days and had planned to write an essay on Offenbach back in 1868 (Love 1979). Now
French operetta, especially Offenbach, took on a new significance as the opposite of everything
German, romantic, northern, serious, and turgid. One could argue that his epigraph, ‘ ridendo
dicere severum ’ (through what is laughable, say what is somber) applies better to Offenbach’s
satires than Bizet’s lurid drama. For Nietzsche, Offenbach also served as a classical alternative to
romanticism. Nietzsche’s love for what he called a classical style of music included that of his
friend Heinrich Köselitz, who composed under the name Peter Gast. Although this composer
never achieved success in his own day and has been considered a mediocre talent ever since,
Nietzsche valued him as a light, cheerful antidote to Wagnerian decadence. Nietzsche’s
enthusiasm for Gast reached its peak just before his breakdown in 1889. He lavishly praised
Gast’s opera Der Löwe von Venedig as Italian music for Germans and compared him favourably
to Mozart.

Degeneration
Nietzsche used both decadence and degeneration in his quasi-physiological critique of Wagner’s
music. Degeneration can be distinguished as the more ‘medical’ term, defined as hereditary
mental and physical traits that deviate from the norm. It was used quasi-metaphorically so that
various kinds of social groups and their cultural products could be described in the same manner
as an individual organism. From the perspective of biology, degeneration could be viewed as
atavism – the reversion to origins. It represents a shift from a more spiritual romantic organicism
to the many scientific and quasi-scientific theories of primitive origins that flourished in the
nineteenth century. Even music aesthetics was influenced by atavism, adding anthropological
theories of an Urmusik to its formerly purely historical interest in the origins of music. Pre-
linguistic expressive sounds, such as screaming, moaning, sighing, were studied as kinds of
Urmusik . From the perspective of romantic aesthetics, Urmusik was the one and only source to
draw upon for authentic, powerful music. However, for anti-romantics, all this inarticulate
moaning was regressive – ‘primitive’ rather than ‘primal’.
As early as 1860 the music historian Ambros used the term degeneration in relation to the
influence of Liszt and Wagner in the development of music, which he compared to symptoms of
a sick, superannuated organism (Ambros [1860] 1865, 174). Thomas Grey suggests going back
even earlier, to Hanslick’s 1854 description of ‘pathological listening’, as a precursor to theories
of a degeneration of music (Grey 2002). Max Nordau’s Degeneration ( Entartung ) from 1892
was the most popular ‘biomedical’ book on the downfall of art and culture at the end of the
century. A Jewish medical doctor who spent the most significant part of his career as a journalist
reporting to Vienna from Paris, Nordau wrote several popular books besides Degeneration .
Nordau blamed aesthetically reprehensible art on the degeneration of society. Individuals
succumbed to nervous illnesses as a consequence of the fatigue that came from the increased
pace of modern life and the increasing use of narcotics to deal with it. Nordau used and expanded
on Nietzsche’s complaints about Wagner as increasing exhaustion, causing overexcitement and
hysteria. Thomas Grey notes that Nordau’s book was so popular because, ‘like the related
concepts of hysteria and neurasthenia , that of degeneration provided the satisfaction of labeling,
with apparent medical-scientific precision, elusive but nonetheless very acutely felt anxieties
over the modern condition’ (Grey 2002, 87).
Nordau counted Nietzsche and Wagner as examples of decadent artists and thinkers, even
though he drew on Nietzsche for his understanding of decadence. This was just one example of
the paradox of critics of decadence being examples of decadence. As one writer recently put it,
Nietzsche’s critique of decadence and modernity ‘rests on the unresolved and unresolvable
paradox of being part of that which one condemns’ (Gogröf-Voorhees 1999, 139). In The Case of
Wagner Nietzsche acknowledged: ‘I am, no less than Wagner, a child of this time; that is, a
decadent’ (1967, 155).

Wagner on decadence and degeneration

Wagner also deplored decadence, although one could argue that his solutions only intensified the
problems. His late theoretical writings on regeneration and his last opera, Parsifal , represent this
aesthetic and moral quicksand. Wagner’s late writings appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter , a
journal founded in 1878 for the ‘friends of Wagner’. The journal’s concerns went beyond the
musical to advocate regeneration through a vegetarian diet to reverse the decline of nations due
to the consumption of meat. Wagner’s anti-Semitism was restated in biological terms, as a call to
prevent Jewish assimilation that would pollute so-called ‘Aryan’ bloodlines. Wagner claimed
that Jesus was Aryan and that the Jewish race’s blood had become tainted by mixed marriages
and meat. Wagner’s Jesus preached asceticism (renunciation of the will). At the same time,
Wagner himself continued to eat meat and apparently deny himself nothing. In general,
Wagner’s late works are typical of reactions to decadence; they had the effect of not correcting
the problem, but rather intensifying it. It was the emphasis on health, for instance, that led to
calls for racial purity and eugenics .
Wagner’s understanding of the problem of degeneration explains to some extent the scenario
for Parsifal . The ‘sickness’ in Parsifal is literal: Amfortas has a bleeding wound that won’t heal
and his fellow knights are dying out; their vitality is at stake. The extraordinary music written for
the character of Kundry represents and includes human pre-linguistic expressive sounds, such as
the scream and groan that mark her entrance in the first and third acts, respectively. Wagner
seems to have intended the end of the opera to point to the way to ‘redeem’ degenerate society.
Nevertheless, this opera had for Nietzsche and many others all the characteristics of decadence
(Dreyfus 2010). It also exhibits many traditional features of earlier romantic works. Cosima
Wagner noted in her diary that Wagner believed ‘Tannhäuser, Tristan , and Parsifal belong
together’ (quoted in Ashman 1988, 8). The traditional romantic aspects that these three operas
share include: a basis in medieval legend, supernatural elements and the stark distinction of the
world of man (represented by diatonic, rhythmically regular music) versus a world of seductive,
dangerous women who cause men to betray ideals of honor and duty (musically more chromatic
and free-flowing). Compared to Tannhäuser especially, further shared themes include the use of
chorales, men’s chorus and marches; a connection of the world of men with organized religious
communities; and a female character who serves as a composite of various qualities associated
with the feminine, primal and the sensual.
In terms of plot, furthermore, the most important ‘event’ in the opera occurs when Parsifal is
‘awakened’ by Kundry’s kiss. The kiss paradoxically has the effect of preventing the female’s
sexual seduction from being completed, and in this sense is comparable to the ‘song of pious
bent’ that saves Florio in ‘The Marble Statue’ and the miraculous effect of pronouncing the
names of the Virgin Mary and Elisabeth for Tannhäuser.

Late romanticism, decadence and the twentieth century

The concept of decadence helps us sort out a musicological controversy. Has nineteenth-century
romanticism run its course by 1890, with the works of Mahler and Richard Strauss ushering in a
new era of musical modernism? Or should the period 1890–1914 be viewed as a continuation of
late nineteenth-century romanticism in music? Carl Dahlhaus, the pre-eminent musicologist in
postwar Germany, vehemently defended the first position (Dahlhaus 1979b, 103–5). Speaking
from the perspective of a less Germanocentric musicology, Richard Taruskin, in his Oxford
History of Western Music (2005), has recently spoken out in favour of the second. Dahlhaus
downplays the importance of decadence while Taruskin uses it in only in a limited sense; he
prefers the concept ‘maximalism’ for music often called ‘late romantic’ (2005, Vol. 4, 5).
Certainly, within the terrain I have mapped out above, Taruskin’s representative ‘maximalist’
composer, Gustav Mahler, exhibits many romantic traits: a preference for romantic poets from
earlier in the century and for the familiar themes of nature, religion, the power of music, love and
death (Downes 2010, 194). Another romantic hallmark was Mahler’s commitment to the
irrational source of musical creativity, which was manifested in many statements, such as this
description of composing: ‘The inception and creation of a work are mystical from beginning to
end; unconsciously, as if in the grip of command from outside oneself one is compelled to create
something whose origin one can scarcely comprehend afterwards’ (Bauer-Lechner 1980, 30).
However, we need to keep in mind that Nietzsche and Wagner also served as harbingers of
modernism by laying bare the contradictions within romanticism. Although a passionate
spokesman for anti-romanticism, Nietzsche confessed that he was incurably affected by the
romantic worldview, and the same can surely be said for Wagner and Mahler. Taruskin may be
hinting at these contradictions when he describes the maximalist project as an ‘ultimate failure’
and connects Mahler and his contemporaries to a decadent phase (2005, Vol. 4, 22). Decadence
may therefore best be described as a double consciousness concerning the values and limits of
romanticism.

Two world wars, two waves of anti-romanticism

Within the terminological boundaries I have sketched out, elements of romanticism persist over
the entire twentieth century and into the present. On the other hand, the effect of the First World
War in dramatically deflating the giant romantic bubble can hardly be underestimated.
Modernism, neoclassicism and Neue Sachlichkeit can all be interpreted in varying degrees as
reactions to a romantic ideology whose irrational mystical powers seemed to bear some
responsibility for the war. Similarly, the Second World War produced an even stronger reaction
against musical romanticism. Post-war serialism can be seen as an attempt to eliminate all
perceived romantic elements of music. Anti-romanticism remained a strong force even through
the Cold War. It has only been in the last twenty years that musicologists have been rewriting the
history of the twentieth century and discovering a continuous tradition of romantic music that
survived all of these backlashes. Romanticism, it appears, cannot be stamped out. It continues to
spark debate as one of the foundational ideas in the aesthetics of music.

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—— 1994. Weimarer Klassik: Portrait einer Epoche . Weinheim, Germany: Belz Athenäum.
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 9
Jazz – avant-garde – tradition
Kenneth Gloag

Introduction
Jazz, since its first moments of emergence, has been intimately linked with, and described
through, images of progress, radical change and new frontiers. 1 Early forms of jazz were shaped
by the encounters between an essentially oral musical culture and modernity as defined by the
new technologies of recording. At various stages of the historical development of the music there
have been profound shifts, marked transformations and, most notably, ideological conflicts
around the tensions between the old and the new, tradition and innovation. The focus on
innovation in jazz generates a close interface between this music and a concept of avant-gardism
and poses questions about how the tradition of this unique musical context is both constructed
and interpreted. In pursuing questions of the relevance of a concept of an avant-garde in relation
to jazz this chapter will ‘improvise’ on some current literature on jazz and, more generally,
existing theoretical reflections upon, and models of, avant-garde cultural practices. Three
specific jazz musics that have been described as avant-garde – Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman
and Anthony Braxton 2 – are invoked as reflections of the processes and problems involved in
defining an avant-garde, a term that, when used in relation to jazz, ‘obscures as much as it
reveals’ (Kelley 1999, 136).
It is notable that some of the most meaningful attempts to outline a theory of an avant-garde
came at a historical moment – the 1960s – at which some jazz musicians were producing some of
the most intensely difficult and provocative avant-garde music imaginable as part of what very
quickly became known as the ‘new thing’, a new music in an avant-garde moment. 3 However,
this literature was, in effect, not listening. I refer in passing to Renato Poggioli’s The Theory of
the Avant-Garde , first published in English in 1968, and Peter Bürger’s similarly titled work
originally published in 1974, neither of which deals directly with music, but both, in different
ways, grapple with the problematic issues of defining any cultural practice or context as avant-
garde.
There is evidently some form of critical consensus as to what constitutes an avant–garde, with
the aforementioned qualities of radical change and progress forming integral parts of recurring
definitions based on what Jim Samson describes as ‘connotations of frontiers, leadership,
unknown territory and risk’, all of which are implicit in the original military terminology of the
advanced guard (Samson 2001, 246; see also van den Berg 2009). René Girard highlights
‘inconsistency’ as a ‘major intellectual virtue of the avant-garde’ and it is clearly feasible to
substitute creative practice for intellectual virtue (Girard 2008, 237). The sense of the
unpredictable that is implicit in Girard’s ‘inconsistency’, the element of shock, or at least
surprise, is a common presence in most creative contexts that have been described as avant-
garde, leading to an assumed rupture with the pattern of consistency implicit in tradition. This
rupture can be interpreted as a ‘state of rebellion against the cultural mainstream, a state
expressed in its dedication to provocation, controversy, and shock’ (Adlington 2009, 3). These
descriptions outlined above ‘accompanied the term as it was appropriated for and by artists’
(Samson 2001, 246). The process of appropriation highlighted by Samson is generally seen to be
located within twentieth-century culture following on from strong precursors in the nineteenth
century, 4 with specific moments and movements such as, for example, Dada and Surrealism in
the visual arts during and after the First World War, or the emergence of the post-Second World
War avant-gardism of composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen through their
association with Darmstadt, elevated as striking instances of an avant-garde moment in both
theory and practice. 5 While these moments, among others, share something in common through
their provocative stance in relation to history and tradition, there are profound differences. In the
case of Dada the essentially anti-art position it adopts becomes antagonistic towards art as an end
in itself and suggests a desire for a point of contact between art and life, a desire upon which
Bürger builds a great deal of his interpretation. In contrast, the high-art aspirations of an aesthetic
autonomy as enshrined in the music and polemics of Darmstadt positions an avant-garde practice
as effectively an end in itself.
That the same terminology of avant-garde can appear to work for very different examples,
such as Dada and Darmstadt, suggests something of the basic paradox that is situated at the
centre of any attempted theorization of an avant-garde, a paradox that suggests that the concept is
both more plural and pliable than is often suggested by the singular definition of the avant-garde
and that the co-existence of several, often very different avant-gardes will begin to subvert the
claims made by and for such a concept in both theory and practice. The polarity formed between
these two admittedly different avant-garde ideologies and practices, Dada and Darmstadt, and the
tension between the plural and the singular, is now available for reinterpretation through other
cultural and critical contexts, including jazz music.
How a construction of an avant-garde in either its singular or plural versions is situated in
relation to other concepts, primarily that of modernism, involves a much wider set of issues. For
Poggioli the avant-garde is effectively situated within modernism, using the terms almost
interchangeably: his somewhat standard response sees the avant-garde as that which leads
modernism but does nothing to critique the ideological essence of that concept. 6 In contrast,
Bürger makes a more complex and subtle move towards a differentiation between modernism
and the avant-garde. For Bürger, modernism perpetuated the hierarchical distinction between so-
called high and low culture and the ‘historically specific avant-garde’ 7 is therefore defined as an
attack on the institutions and ideas that underpinned this distinction, effectively situating itself as
a critical gesture towards modernism’s accommodation with prevailing ideological and
institutional orthodoxies. It is also notable that through his exclusive focus on Dada, particularly
the work of Marcel Duchamp, Bürger articulates a somewhat singular representation of avant-
garde cultural practices.
While wanting to resist falling into the trap of collapsing potentially different concepts –
avant-garde, modernism – into a singular totality, in contrast to Bürger’s positioning of an avant-
garde as a critical reflexive gesture towards modernism, the more seemingly routine view of an
avant-garde as effectively the sharp edge of modernism remains a feasible interpretive strategy.
This sharp edge helps give modernism its own sense of internalized difference and diversity, and
therefore places limitations around the conflation of modernisms into the alleged metanarrative
as claimed by some postmodern theory. This interpretation of the positioning of the avant-garde
on the edge of modernism generates its own critical distance from the interchange of terms active
in Poggioli’s account. However, this sharp edge, in itself, requires further comment. Richard
Murphy’s description of the avant-garde serving ‘as the political and revolutionary cutting-edge
of the broader movement of modernism, from which it frequently appears to be trying with
difficulty to free itself’ is an effective summary and, as will become evident, one that lends itself
directly to jazz music (Murphy 1999, 3). On this account, the avant-garde is again positioned on
the edge of modernism. It may try to escape beyond the edge, but this is a move loaded with
difficulties and may ultimately be conditioned by either failure or, alternatively, the ‘escape’
beyond modernism into a somewhat ‘uncritical’ postmodernism.
The initial image of an avant-garde that struggles to free itself from modernism is a vivid
reflection of the way in which jazz practices identified as avant-garde, particularly in the 1960s,
are closely intertwined with images of freedom, with that concept of freedom defined in musical
terms as the attempt to free the music from the conventions and expectations of a modern jazz. 8
However, the distinction that Bürger seeks to draw between modernism and avant-garde needs to
remain in play and will become relevant for jazz in that the critical noises made by some jazz
musicians, particularly in the 1960s, appeared at the time as a culturally dissonant gesture that
not only radically questioned its own musical practices but also critiqued the institutionalized
economic frameworks around the music in the form of jazz clubs, festivals, record labels, etc.
and looked to transcend that framework through wider notions of a cultural and musical freedom,
a process of transcendence that was already active in the mobility of jazz music between ‘low’
entertainment and ‘high’ art form. 9

Bebop: the ‘first jazz avant-garde’

The image that Murphy invokes, of an avant-garde practice that seeks, with great difficulty, to
extend itself beyond a modernist context and aesthetic is compelling when placed in relation to
jazz music, with the radical innovations of Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
for example, articulating a sense of excess in relation to what had become recognized as a
modern jazz in the form of bebop as defined by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in the 1940s
(see DeVeaux 1997). This suggestion of ‘excess’ in effect becomes the attempted move
‘beyond’. However, bebop was already situated as the foundational moment at which jazz
becomes modern and, in most accounts, by extension, avant-garde, with the two terms –
modernism and avant-garde – converging into the same interpretative process, a move that is, as
will be clear from the discussion thus far, consistent with the work of Poggioli and others. In the
words of Bernard Gendron, ‘it is bebop that gets credit in the jazz canon for being the first
modernist jazz, the first jazz avant-garde, the first jazz form in which art transcends
entertainment’ (Gendron 2002, 143). Bebop assumes this position on the basis of the new
complexity and sense of departure that this music articulates and is extended through its
influence on later musicians. The common, standard image of bebop is that of a music formed
away from the public gaze within a context of closed, private experimentation during the early to
mid 1940s. Jazz pioneers such as pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, drummer Max Roach,
trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, among others, redefined the
harmonic essence and rhythmic intensity of jazz ‘in the hothouse atmosphere of no holds-barred
competition’ (Gendron 2002, 143) during after-hours jam sessions in venues such as Monroe’s
and Minton’s in Harlem, New York, resulting in a highly romanticized image that repeats
recurrent stereotypical accounts of avant-garde performance moments and situations. 10 There is
also a certain mystique about this music that adds further to the construction of an image of this
particular set of jazz practices as a moment of avant-garde experimentation that could only be
fully comprehended and absorbed at some point in the future. Bebop can also be situated as a
point of convergence between conceptions of avant-garde and autonomy. Jazz may be an
essentially social music formed on human experience and defined by its search for freedom, but
this apparently sealed, self-reflexive context and practice generates a contrary position, that of
social isolation in conjunction with an introspective preoccupation with the radical
transformation of form and content. Modern jazz is an instrumental music, at times casually
referred to as ‘abstract’. In the case of bebop, and much of the music that comes after it, the
titling of specific compositions is often rather random, bordering on the arbitrary, which suggests
a certain lack of concern with external references and drives the attention towards the internal
characteristics of the music.
While Dizzy Gillespie would move into a mainstream jazz context, producing a modified,
accessible form of bebop and repositioning himself as more of an ‘entertainment’ figure than
avant-garde experimenter, it was Parker who sustained the aura of genius, one that was marked
by tragedy, 11 resulting in a personal identity that conspired with the complex nature of the music
to construct this now generalized image of an avant-garde art form. However, if the progressive,
boundary-pushing nature of Parker’s music suggests an avant-garde practice, this was always a
music already deeply marked by tradition and would remain so. All the key bebop musicians
were trained and developed within past and current jazz practices, and the dependency on
existing forms – 12-bar blues and the 32-bar chorus – as recurring jazz archetypes rooted the
music in the very conventions from which it seemed to be trying to break free. Any number of
specific recordings could be used to illustrate these points, but one telling example is Parker’s
‘Now’s the Time’ (1945). This track features Parker (alto saxophone) with a young Miles Davis
(trumpet) and the standard rhythm section. Following an interestingly dissonant exchange
between piano and bass as introduction, it settles into a 12-bar formal pattern and is set in a
relaxed swing-style tempo. While ‘Now’s the Time’ may be merely an interesting exception, it
does effectively highlight the powerful presence of a set of conventions – formal and stylistic –
that were already ingrained in a tradition of jazz music.
However, other recordings from the same period articulate a more powerful dialectic between
innovation and tradition, a process that begins to distance the music from any pure understanding
of it as avant-garde while still continuing to pose provocative questions of the tradition. One of
the most notable examples is Parker’s ‘Ko-Ko’, recorded at the same sessions as ‘Now’s the
Time’ in November 1945. ‘Ko-Ko’, as is widely known, is based on the reworking of an existing
song, ‘Cherokee’, a well-known jazz standard written by Ray Noble and successfully recorded
by Charlie Barnet in 1939, with this process of reworking highlighting the bebop practice of
radical reinvention of existing materials. 12 In this process of reinvention the formal structure,
which consists of a 64-four bar shape that is derived from the 32-bar chorus, is transformed
through daring chord alterations and substitutions, and played by Parker and Gillespie at an
intense and virtuosic tempo, with the original source reduced to a somewhat faint trace.
‘Ko-Ko’ is a recording for which great claims are made, with Garry Giddins, for example,
describing it as ‘the seminal point of departure for jazz in the postwar era’ (quoted in DeVeaux
1997, 365). The point of departure as defined by the individuality and originality of this
recording may be close to the essential avant-garde spirit of an intentional ‘inconsistency’ as
claimed by Girard, but, while it does work through this process of radical reinvention, it also
continues, through the now distant presence of the precursor, to situate both the material and the
practice within the evolving parameters of the jazz tradition. The instrumentation on this
recording: alto sax (Parker), with trumpet, rhythm section of piano, bass and drums, very quickly
became a regular modern jazz (bebop) ensemble that allowed for the rapid interchange of ideas
and heightening of intensity through a basic sequence of events defined as theme (‘head’) – solos
– theme. This form, material and ensemble rapidly became standardized, an instantly
recognizable framework that, rather than looking towards the continuing experimentation that is
synonymous with an avant-garde art, was very quickly nailed down within its own generic
boundaries. ‘Ko-Ko’ may be a definitive example of bebop, but in providing that point of
definition it also becomes the generic and stylistic marker. Of course, this in itself does not
invalidate the resulting music, and many of Parker’s recordings still sound highly original, nor
does it automatically deconstruct the aura of avant-gardism that accrues to it. However, if this
was an example of an avant-garde music, then it was so for a remarkably short time, a brief
moment at most. This music continued to exert a legacy of influence, a factor that has already
been alluded to and which remains of significance, with this influence, it could be argued,
shaping the future in a way that is consistent with most definitions of avant-garde. In exerting
this influence, however, it also looked to the definition and perpetuation of a musical tradition; in
doing so it formed a central part of the emergent jazz canon. 13 In itself this moment would seem
to suggest the possibility of an avant-garde art while resisting the teleological drive implicit
within the ideologies that define and envelop the concept through the establishment of its own
generic framework and stylistic identity that carried powerful traces and shaped future reflections
of the evolution of this music as tradition.

Free jazz
Although it articulates interacting patterns of similarity and difference in relation to bebop, alto-
saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s music emerged already different, complex, but also accessible
through the immediacy of the recording process. 14 Coleman himself seems to have been already
marked by difference. His early musical experiences were scarred by a sense of failure and
indifference, with only marginal contact with an older generation of jazz musicians or
participation in regular performance situations. This ‘outsider’ status operates in a way that is
similar to the figure of tragic genius as presented by Parker: Coleman as ‘other’. However,
Coleman’s emergence at the end of the 1950s presented a music that is being formed with
remarkable rapidity and results in an immediacy of impact. In fact, from a certain perspective,
this was a music that, complete in itself, seemed to come from nowhere. Coleman’s New York
debut performances at the Five Spot in November 1959 generated intense debate about this new
music, much of it acrimonious, with musicians and critics divided over the merits of Coleman’s
innovations. However, this impact was, for some jazz musicians, critics and listeners, highly
positive. According to Gendron, to Coleman’s ‘proponents’, he ‘represented a much-needed new
development in jazz, opening a new field of activity, after the great innovations of bebop had
turned into cliché (Gendron 2009, 211). The suddenness, the ‘inconsistency’ of the moment
projected against the consistency of convention and tradition, generated an aura of avant-
gardism, the shock of the new.
One of the most significant critical voices in the debates about this music in its own time, and
with a remarkable legacy, was Amiri Baraka, a radical writer and political activist whose
antagonistic response to a white cultural mainstream can be defined as avant-garde. In his book
Blues People , first published in 1963, and therefore providing an immediacy of response to
recent developments in the music, Baraka describes these developments as ‘for lack of a more
specific term, “avant-garde”’, and mentions Coleman as well as the pianist Cecil Taylor in this
context. According to Baraka:

The implications of this music are extraordinarily profound, and the music itself, deeply and
wildly exciting. Music and musician have been brought, in a manner of speaking, face to face,
without the strict and often grim hindrances of overused Western musical concepts; it is only
the overall musical intelligence of the musician which is responsible for shaping the music. It
is, for many musicians, a terrifying freedom.
(Baraka 1963, 224–7)

For Baraka, the free jazz of Coleman, and others, was a rejection of received notions about
musical forms and content, not just from within the jazz tradition but projected against ‘Western’
concepts, a proposal that positions the debate on Baraka’s own political terms. However, in the
context of this chapter, what is most immediately notable is his proposal that the resulting
freedom is ‘terrifying’. I read this as a statement about avant-garde art as sublime, the movement
away from normal modes of understanding and interpretation through the unpredictable yet
intentional ‘inconsistency’ of a new creative force.
Coleman’s music readily and quite deliberately identified itself with avant-gardist images of
change and progress through titles such as The Change of the Century, Tomorrow is the Question
and The Shape of Jazz to Come (all recorded in 1959), or project a declaration of otherness (
Something Else , 1958) and otherness in relation to ownership ( This is Our Music , 1960–1). 15
Coleman clearly sought to define himself as engaging in a process of ‘making it new’. For
example, in his liner notes to Change of the Century , he states:

Some of the comments about my music made me realize … that modern jazz, once so daring
and revolutionary, has become, in many respects, a rather settled and conventional thing. The
members of my group and I are now attempting a break-through to a new, freer conception of
jazz, one that departs from all that is ‘standard’ and cliché in ‘modern’ jazz.
(Coleman 1960)

However, while this may draw attention to the departure, or break, with the past, the fact that it
comes in the form of a self-legitimizing, self-reflexive statement, seems to begin to draw
attention to the highly constructed discourse around this music, a process of construction that
record companies and musicians conspired in through promotional images (cover art), titles and
descriptions (liner notes).
While it sought to depart from all that is ‘standard’ in modern jazz and position itself on the
sharp edge of modernism, Coleman’s music also still sounded as a meaningful reflection of an
evolving jazz tradition, even if this was not fully evident to some at the time. Three specific
tracks are now isolated for further discussion: ‘Lonely Woman’ (from The Shape of Jazz to Come
), ‘Blues Connotation’ and ‘Beauty is a Rare Thing’ (both from This is Our Music ).
‘Lonely Woman’, as the title already indicates, suggests a certain mode of isolation and
distance, and the music articulates the dialogic relationship between past and present through its
repositioning of the aura of alienation which envelops the blues, with the blues defined as the
source from which tradition is both defined and departed. This track begins with the bass firmly
grounding the music on D, and as the initial theme revolves around D minor it is possible to hear
this as a reflection of the repetition of the past in the form of a recognisable tonality. However,
the lines that Coleman and Don Cherry unfold across this bass give a very different perspective
to the overall effect of the track. This is, through its apposite title and sound, a music that
signifies its own sense of isolation, one that may be heard as an echo of the alienated subject of
modernity. However, the reference to the blues as a historical and cultural source brings the
problems of defining a jazz avant-garde back into focus. ‘Lonely Woman’ may form part of The
Shape of Jazz to Come but it is clearly marked by what it is claimed to be seeking to depart from:
tradition, in this instance, as defined as the source.
This sense of origin is present, and perhaps more clearly defined, in other Coleman recordings
from this period. For example, ‘Blues Connotation’ gives a clear indication of Coleman’s
relationship to the blues and its position as a contributing source to his own evolving musical
language, while ‘Bird Food’ (from Change of the Century ) can, in contrast, be heard as
Coleman’s appropriation of Charlie Parker as a precedent for his own project. Ajay Heble
accurately interprets these titles as reflecting Coleman’s relationship to the past and his own
sense of origin:

Coleman has always been paradoxically rooted in the very traditions from which he seems to
depart. This rootedness – exemplified in song titles such as ‘Blues Connotation’, ‘When Will
the Blues Leave’, ‘Monk and the Nun’, ‘Bird Food’, and ‘The Legend of Bebop’ –
problematizes any simple linear narrative of the music.
(Heble 2000, 51)

In other words, such retrospective glances prevent a straightforward positioning of Coleman as

post-bebop and pre-whatever might come next within a neat chronological narrative of jazz
history.
The sound of ‘Blues Connotation’ is clearly within the jazz tradition, with the consistent
tempo defined by bass and drums supporting the improvisations of Coleman and Cherry. The
track begins with the initial theme played by both. The second, and defining, element is a long
solo played by Coleman himself. Supported by Haden’s bass, this solo becomes increasingly
fragmentary, brief ideas are repeated and expanded, and the impression is created of a
developing fragility to the linear process. As the line develops, the absence of vertical harmony,
a defining absence of Coleman’s music, becomes increasingly evident. The physicality of
Coleman’s approach also comes more into focus as he explores the upper registers of the
instrument. If the opening gesture seemed to repeat an essential jazz sound and substance,
Coleman’s solo plays with the possibility of difference, or distance, to that essence. Coleman’s
solo does not seem to conclude; rather it is replaced by a very short trumpet solo by Cherry. The
brief duration of this solo adds to the fragmentary nature of the recording. Rather than
developing or extending the material, this solo acts as a moment of contrast, perhaps
interruption, following Coleman’s extended linear exploration. The sense of fragmentation and
juxtaposition is heightened further by Blackwell’s drum solo, which emerges suddenly from the
point at which Cherry’s trumpet line effectively disappears. The recording is completed by the
return of the original theme, which now provides a thematic frame to the improvised solos of
Coleman, Cherry and Blackwell. In doing so it returns the focus to the form and format of
Parker’s bebop within which this return to beginning was a defining characteristic. It is notable
that the improvisations on this track are individual rather than collective. Coleman is still
operating within the recognizable boundaries of modern jazz as defined by the role of the soloist,
while simultaneously representing difference through the interrogations of these boundaries, an
interrogation that, on ‘Blues Connotation’ is formed by juxtaposition, fragmentation and sonority.
In other words, although it acknowledges its tradition it leaves that tradition estranged,
defamiliarized.
When considered within the album ( This is Our Music ) as a whole, the position of ‘Blues
Connotation’ becomes more significant. It appears as the opening track on the album, with its
references to jazz history perhaps positioned as a moment of relative accessibility. However, the
power of contrast through juxtaposition active in ‘Blues Connotation’ becomes enlarged through
the contrast formed between it and the second track ‘Beauty is a Rare Thing’. If ‘Blues
Connotation’ projected a sufficient level of repetition to sustain a location within the
recognizable boundaries of jazz while constructing a dialogue between past and present, ‘Beauty
is a Rare Thing’ would seem to leave these boundaries far behind. In contrast, this track begins
with what sounds like an already improvised solo by Coleman but within the overall shape acts
as ‘theme’. This initial gesture is also free from any recognizable repetitive temporality.
Blackwell’s drums are effectively textural rather than rhythmic, while Haden’s bass plays long
sustained notes, thus suggesting a harmonic framework, but which also adds to the absence of
any rhythmic consistency. During Coleman’s solo statement Cherry introduces some
fragmentary gestures in the background, which then emerge as a dialogue with Coleman. This
track has no real audible sense of structure. It does not follow any pattern of theme/solo; rather it
is defined through its texture and dialogues. Ultimately what draws this music back into the
context of jazz is timbre, with the sound of saxophone, trumpet (albeit estranged), bass and
drums providing a certain timbral familiarity with the conventions and expectations of jazz
music.
‘Lonely Woman’, ‘Blues Connotation’ and ‘Beauty is a Rare Thing’ are all marked by
difference in the extent to which they represent varying degrees of distance to jazz as it was
commonly conceived at the time. Although in each case the precedent is suggested, in terms of
the musical material and its aesthetic stance, each example sounds and feels different, with the
music perhaps heightening, revising, its own self-reflexive alienation into a certain difference, or
otherness, to that which is actually repeated. In other words, there is still a clear signifying
presence of jazz as a historical, cultural discourse but Coleman is doing something very
distinctive with that presence, resulting in what can be defined as a music that, paradoxically,
acknowledges the presence of the tradition from which, in echoes of Murphy’s description of an
avant-garde, ‘appears to be trying with difficulty to free itself’ (Murphy 1999, 3).
It was with the recording titled Free Jazz (1960–1) that Coleman’s music was most readily
defined as avant-garde, with the absence of form, structure and thematic material creating a
chaotic collage of sound while the album cover featured a Jackson Pollock painting, a move
which said that this music was new, this music was art. If Coleman’s music up to this point had
been an avant-garde gesture that was taking music to the edge of modernism, Free Jazz looked
over that edge into the abyss. It is also notable that a major, mainstream record company,
Atlantic, released this recording, which suggests that the cutting- edge innovations of this avant-
garde music were already seen as having a potential audience and, by implication, could be
situated in relation to the economic frameworks of a culture industry. It could also be argued that
the presence of the Pollock painting, like the titles and liner notes of previous recordings, betrays
its own sense of construction and appropriation of image.
Free Jazz is subtitled a ‘Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet’.
This double quartet consists of two ensembles effectively projected against each other, resulting
in a dense, complex web of sound. There is no audible sense of form or pattern, rather ideas
come in and out of focus, in a way that is a fitting parallel to the spontaneity and intensity of the
abstract yet expressive visual art of Pollock. 16 However, while there is no relationship to the
theme – solo – theme form that Coleman inherited and reinvented, there is still some sense of
organization that does give, at least, a direction to the musical texture. If this is a music that
looks over the edge, it can be argued that it does not fall over it. It may, for its time, evince the
maximum distance from its tradition, but there is still a residual trace that is again defined
through the parameter of timbre: the sound of the instruments, individual and collective, position
this in relation to jazz, rather than any other musical context. It is also the case that the musical
experience of each individual musician is that of jazz and therefore their instinctive response to
liberation is based on that experience. 17
In relation to some of the more general ideas mapped out at the outset of this chapter, whether
we hear this recording as the ‘revolutionary cutting edge of modernism’ or as an avant-garde that
subjects the modernist nature of jazz, and the frameworks that surround it, to critical scrutiny
clearly remains open to interpretation. Through its negative force, however, defining a musical
practice through what it is not, it clearly articulates a critical stance in relation to what jazz was
assumed to be. And yet, having appeared with difficulty to free itself from a jazz tradition it still
projects, through its timbres and textures, a sound that continues to somehow signify jazz, even if
this signification is at times a rather distant one. However, it is as much an end as it is a
beginning in that it stands alone in the Coleman oeuvre , a project to which he worked towards
but did not extend or go beyond, and although it may pose questions about the nature of jazz it
does so from within the soundworld of that tradition, even if that position is now marginal and
was not always recognized by some critics, either at the time or since. 18

New jazz – in the tradition

In both theory and practice the music of Coleman (in conjunction with others, such as, for
example, the very different sound of pianist Cecil Taylor) might not have progressed towards
some notional goal, but, in retrospect, it can be seen to have opened up a space for further
developments in the 1960s and it is some of the music that came to occupy that space that is now
of most immediate concern in this chapter.
There are two simultaneously interacting and divergent paths that are pertinent here: one looks
towards the better interaction of music and politics in sympathy with Bürger’s notion of a
reintegration of the aesthetic (art) and the social (life), a proposal that originates from Bürger’s
analysis of Dada as avant-garde practice, while the second seems to leave any engagement with a
political reality behind and move into a condition that aspires to an aesthetic autonomy, an
aspirational move that is consistent with other modernist and avant-garde contexts and practices.
Of these two paths Coleman would seem to look towards the second – the aspiration towards
autonomy – in that he has worked in relatively isolated contexts, making his own music that is
constructed through its own hermetically sealed logic. 19 The title, and label, of Free Jazz also
suggests its own isolation in that it seems not to look beyond the music – free jazz – itself. It may
be ‘free’ of past constraints and conventions but it is equally bound by its own concept of
freedom that becomes potentially another stylistic and generic framework as reflected in the
realization that numerous free jazz recordings contained high levels of similarity, suggesting that
freedom did not necessarily mean the perpetuation of difference. The influence of Coleman and
Free Jazz would become evident in the mid to later 1960s with recordings such as Albert Ayler’s
Live in Greenwich Village (1965–7) and, most notably, John Coltrane’s Ascension (1965). This
recording reflected the larger ensemble sound of Free Jazz and celebrated the breaking away from
conventions of form and content. It was also the moment that Coltrane, ‘the ultimate post-
bopper’, ‘crossed over to free jazz after years of hovering on the sidelines’ (Gendron 2009, 219).
20
The black consciousness of the period did find a form of expression through the further
development of free jazz as a stylistic label, with its notions of a musical freedom providing a
correlation with the political aspirations of the period, resulting in a relationship that finds a
voice through the work of musicians such as Albert Ayler, Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp,
among others, with some musicians drawing a direct parallel between concepts of musical and
political freedom. It is the trend towards artistic control (freedom from the institutional
framework in both theory and practice) and the recognition of artistic ownership that becomes
symbolic, with the Chicago based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians
(AACM) seen to be a model for this process. 21
Ronald Radano, in his book on Anthony Braxton, describes the early AACM as fitting
‘Bürger’s definition of “avant-garde” as a movement that sought to distinguish itself
institutionally from the accepted social and aesthetic position of a dominant class’ (Radano 1993,
112). This description highlights the political nature of this particular context but also looks more
generally to the essentially critical orientation of any avant-garde project, set in opposition to
established social frameworks as well as cultural practices. However, in contrast, much of the
music produced at this time articulates a high level of self-reflection that aspires to an aesthetic
autonomy, a process that became evident through the division between developments in jazz
music and the community from which it emerged and the audience to which it might once have
connected. Anthony Braxton emerges as an interesting figure in this context, one whose music
would seem to be able to mediate between these two positions defined broadly as, on the one
hand, the reintegration of the aesthetic and social, and on the other as the aspiration toward an
aesthetic autonomy.
Coming from the politicized environment of Chicago and a black culture identified through
AACM, Braxton could be seen to form part of a meaningful reflection of Bürger’s reintegration
of art and life through the positioning within a collective identity and in relation to the specificity
of place. However, although Braxton becomes a politicized figure through personal experience
and social context, his early music could be heard as highly abstract, looking very directly
towards avant-garde, European ‘art’ music and its ‘art for arts sake’ identity. This identity is in
effect the representation of an aesthetic desire for self-reflection and reference that conspires
with the primacy of form towards the construction of an aura of autonomy.
Braxton’s first recording was the 3 Compositions of New Jazz , released on the specialist new
jazz label Delmark in 1968. The most immediately notable feature in this context is the title,
which self-consciously proclaims a ‘new jazz’, thus reflecting the presentational aspects of
Coleman’s work from the late 1950s and early 1960s. But also worth further comment is the
suggestion of composition. What had been ‘new’ in jazz was defined through the changing role
of improvisation, with the emergence of a so-called free jazz based on the freedom from
predetermined form and structure. Clearly Braxton’s use of this terminology in the title
problematizes the status of improvisation, even though the compositional dimension may be
essentially graphic, and is intended to suggest a convergence between a compositional practice
(art music) and improvisation (jazz). The multi-dimensional sonorities that Braxton produces
from a wide range of instruments – alto and soprano saxophone, clarinet and flute, as well as
various percussion instruments – is enhanced by the contributions of the other musicians
involved in 3 Compositions : Leroy Jenkins (violin, viola, etc.), Leo Smith (trumpet, plus
percussion, etc.) and Muhal Richards Abrams (piano, plus cello and alto clarinet). From this
wide range of instrumental timbres Braxton and his collaborators draw an imaginative spectrum
of sound. The prevalence of saxophone and trumpet within this spectrum may always draw the
music back into a recognizable jazz soundworld, but the absence of a ‘rhythm section’ of bass
and drums, sonorities which, even if in a different role, were still powerfully present in
Coleman’s music, is a significant absence that also generates a distance in relation to the
standard expectations of what constitutes a jazz music.
The first of the three compositions begins with voice, wordless, a sonority that is unusual in
this context and which, for this listener, still sounds ‘strange’. It also seems to exist without
shape or structure. In contrast, the second ‘composition’ has a much clearer audible sense of
form, one that equates more directly to the jazz tradition. It begins with a collective statement
that is fragmentary and disjunct but can act as ‘theme’. After this ‘thematic’ statement there is a
sequence of individual statements (‘solos’) projected against the continuity of Abrams’s piano
part before a return to the opening collective statement. This sequence of ‘theme’ –’solo’
–’theme’ may produce a set of sounds that are very distant at times to a modern jazz as defined
by bebop, but as a structure this is a quite direct reflection of that earlier moment: a structural
trace of an evolving tradition. Braxton, through recordings such as this, like Coleman, made a
fairly immediate impact on the jazz scene, but, also like Coleman, sharply divided opinion, with
some jazz critics describing 3 Compositions as ‘clinical’, ‘fragmented’, ‘Webernesque’ – often
good descriptions, but mistakenly loaded with negative value judgements (as quoted in Radano
1993, 147).

The shape of jazz to come: tradition(ing)

In relating the music mentioned in this chapter thus far to a concept of an avant-garde – and it
should be emphasized that this became the standard terminology for this music almost
immediately – we are still left with some highly resistant problems. If they are all examples of an
avant-garde jazz music, then does this suggest a succession of different avant-gardes, or are they
part of a continuum, different parts of the same process? Does Coleman emerge as a
consequence of Parker or is it a moment of rejection? Is the music of the 1960s an avant-garde
repudiation of what came before or, alternatively, might it form part of its perpetuation?
However one might choose to answer such questions, the implied teleological nature of any
avant-garde project as defined through images of the ‘future’ and the fact that this music can now
be conceived as historical, looks towards the question of where did this music progress to, did it
reach some goal, assuming we can know what that was? By way of response to such questions,
the music of Braxton again presents a useful case study. After 3 Compositions of New Jazz and
other early recordings such as For Alto (1969) his music has changed, evolved, but in ways that
might be seen to be not entirely consistent with this starting point. One perhaps surprising move
was the rather short-lived one from specialized jazz record labels, such as Delmark, to a
mainstream culture industry in the form of Arista records. Retrospective musical gestures also
began to appear, although not necessarily as a consequence of that move. Some of Braxton’s
recordings indicate a clearer recognition of a jazz tradition that was rather distant on 3
Compositions .
 If the title of 3 Compositions was thought-provoking, so equally is the recordings titled In the
Tradition from 1974, versions of familiar jazz material played in a broadly recognizable jazz
idiom. Tracks such as Mingus’s ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, Parker’s ‘Ornithology’ and Coltrane’s
‘Trane’s Blues’ are played by Braxton supported by a standard rhythm section of piano, bass and
drums. The thematic shapes, formal outlines and rhythmic drive of the tradition from which such
material emerged is left intact with only Braxton’s use of contrabass clarinet as a potential point
of difference from that tradition.
Of course, this recording need not necessarily signify a retreat from the avant-gardism of 3
Composition s; rather it suggests a musician who wants to pursue different possibilities in
relatively close proximity to each other. This sense of difference becomes potentially significant.
Braxton maintains a singular voice through many different projects, although the resulting music
can always be situated at the difficult, complex, edge of jazz and related improvised and
composed musics. However, it does also suggest a resistance to the straight line of progress
implicit within any avant-garde project and its related contextualization. Braxton’s music may
indicate this difference then on a relatively small scale but the larger picture begins to broaden in
a myriad of unpredictable ways. Coleman’s music of the late 1950s and early 1960s might have
been constructed as ‘The Shape of Jazz to Come’, but what did come was in effect many
different things, including the perpetuation of bebop and other, earlier jazz styles, processes that
have become increasingly intensified in more recent times through extensive reissues and
rediscoveries of recordings and performances, processes that articulate a historicizing gesture.
One element of this image is the continuation of free jazz, improvised musics, and the continuing
influence and legacy of what was perceived as an avant-garde jazz music in the 1960s. There
may be many interesting musicians now working within and in relation to jazz who acknowledge
the power of Coleman, for example, and both Ken Vandermark and John Zorn are relevant
examples here, both of whom could be described as avant-garde (and in the case of Zorn this
description is used routinely). 22 This acknowledgement of Coleman does not signify radical
change or progress, however; rather it suggests legacy and influence, reflecting Bürger’s claim
that avant-grade art ‘continues to exert influence precisely in its failure’ (Bürger 1998, 188) in
that the utopian aspirations of any such project are effectively beyond realization, or,
alternatively, and perhaps more accurately, the recognition that the now historicized avant-garde
is a potential source of musical material that is available for interpretation and reinterpretation.
The willingness of musicians such as Vandermark and Zorn to play with that past can be
positioned as a reflection of the postmodern condition that surrounds more recent developments
in jazz music, a condition that is partially formed around our incredulity towards the utopian
nature of an avant-garde and might, in some contexts, redefine the avant-grade as an object of
nostalgic desire and loss. However, Bürger also claims that ‘that which has failed has not simply
disappeared’ (Bürger 1998, 188).
The active presence of a tradition, against which an avant-garde projects itself in protest or
within which it is now assimilated, is central to much of what has been outlined thus far. Just as
the term jazz itself has been contested, so is the construction of its tradition – and there is a
degree of familiarity with the carefully constructed, ideologically driven view of jazz history
presented to us by, for example, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and virtuoso jazz trumpeter
Wynton Marsalis. This version of the jazz tradition seeks to exclude avant-garde forms of jazz in
favour of a highly essentialized set of ‘core’ values. 23 But clearly the avant-garde aspirations of
jazz music have ‘not simply disappeared’ but have now become part of a tradition, a tradition of
innovative, progressive boundary passing musics – Parker, Coleman, Braxton, among numerous
others – a process that may reflect David Ake’s terminology of ‘traditioning’. This proposal
brings the hermeneutics of Gadamer into the context of Jazz studies (Ake 2002, 174). 24
Commonly received notions of tradition may imply a permanence, continuity becoming
conservation and the survival of past values. This is pertinent in the jazz context through notions
of ‘preservation’, while the description of Marsalis’s own aesthetic stance as ‘neoclassical’
further enforces the negative implications of tradition (see Walser 1999, 334). However, the
recognition of what was once defined as an avant-garde music as now tradition need not see it as
a frozen, solid entity. Gadamer reminds us that tradition ‘is not simply a permanent precondition;
rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of
tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves’ (Gadamer [1960] 2003, 293; see also Ake
2002, 174). On the basis of this proposal, we might hear various different jazz musics from
bebop onwards as part of an evolving, meaningful engagement between the momentary,
immediate avant-garde nature of this music and the construction of a tradition that is formed
through an essentially performative, mutable, experience.

Notes
1 I would like to thank Sarah Hill for comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
2 The focus on these three musicians is based on their centrality within this particular discourse. However, I acknowledge that
this is in itself problematic, potentially being perceived as excluding other musicians or, through its exclusively North
American-centred context excluding relevant musics from other regions (Europe, for example), within which these issues can
be seen to have a continuing significance. However, the selection is based on the argument of a powerful presence of a jazz
tradition, of which all three selected musicians are part, whose significance will be considered in part of the conclusion to this
chapter.
3 The use of the term ‘new thing’ is evident in a number of different ways, including the titling of albums, the most notable
example being New Thing at Newport , featuring one side from John Coltane and the other by Archie Shepp. This recording
was released in 1965 on the Impluse label, which became heavily associated with the new music. For further discussion of the
‘new thing’, see Monson 2007, 262–3. See also Gendron 2009.
4 For a neat synopsis of the nineteenth-century origins of the term in relation to the emergence of Dada and other art
movements, see Hopkins 2004, 2–4.
5 This somewhat routine account of Darmstadt has been questioned. See, for example, Attinello 2007.
6 In an extended forward to Bürger’s book, Jochen Schulte-Sasse states: ‘Poggioli’s “theory” is at best a theory of modernism
that explains certain basic characteristics of artistic production since the middle of the nineteenth century … Yet, in his
tendency to equate modernism and the avant-garde – and to subsume both under the label “modernism” – Poggioli typifies
the Anglo-American tradition’ (Schulte-Sasse 1984, xiv). Schulte-Sasse goes on to give examples of how the terms are
conflated through reference to Weightman 1973, the title of which makes this interchange transparent. He also refers to the
work of Irving Howe in this context. However, although Schulte-Sasse’s initial response to Poggioli as prelude to Bürger is
notable, it will not be pursued further in this immediate context.
7 I use the term ‘historically specific’ in that the avant-garde artwork exists in the specificity of the moment, which is now
distant, and is perhaps both shaped by and definitive of that moment in time. For a useful summary of Bürger’s work in
relation to history, see Schulte-Sasse 1984, xxxii–xxxix.
8 Of course, the interrelationships between how the term modern jazz may be constructed and what is commonly understood as
modernism are formed and interpreted are clearly problematic. However, the general association between jazz and modernism
can be formed around the impact of technology (recording) and the fact that the chronological emergence and development of
jazz as an art form coincides with that of modernism through the twentieth century. This aspiration of freedom has more
direct political and social dimensions. On the issue of jazz in relation to a concept or concepts, of freedom, see Saul 2003.
9 This mobility forms a central part of Bernard Gendron’s examination of such engagements: ‘in the history of high/low
engagements, jazz is the music in between, the music of passage, the link between the earliest (cabaret music) and the latest
(rock)’ (Gendron 2002: 10).
10 However, the significance of this process and context is questioned by Alyn Shipton: ‘I remain skeptical about the degree to
which the jamming at Minton’s and Monroe’s genuinely moved jazz forward, beyond consolidating the changes to the role of
the rhythm section’ (Shipton 2001, 463). If Shipton is correct in questioning this significance, it may also look towards a
questioning of the mythology that has evolved around this particular aspect of bebop.
11 The description of Parker as tragic genius is based on his early death in 1955 at the age of only 34, a death that was the result
 of a long period of heroin addiction and alcohol abuse.
12 For a summary of this recording, including background and debates about who actually accompanied Parker on it, see Shipton
2001, 475–6.
13 Gendron effectively captures the passing of the moment and its role in the act of canon formation: ‘Although dead as a
movement and a fashion, bebop would soon acquire a new life as perhaps the most venerated component of the jazz canon
and performance repertory. Indeed, the emergence of a jazz modernism initiated by bebop, and thus of a jazz “art music,”
helped legitimatize the subsequent construction of a jazz canon in the 1950s’ Gendron 2002, 157.
14 For a good overview of Coleman and free jazz, particularly in relation to tradition as defined by a jazz canon, see Anderson
2007. For an account of Coleman’s career in general, see Wilson 1999.
15 Avant-gardist images of future, progress and change were also evident in the titling of recordings by other jazz musicians.
Notable examples include Cecil Taylor’s Jazz Advance (1956) and Lennie Tristano’s Descent into the Maelstrom (1953), both
of which predate the emergence of Coleman in 1959.
16 The specific Pollock painting that was used is titled White Light (1954) and forms part of the collection of the Museum of
Modern Art New York.
17 All musicians involved worked within a jazz context. However, there is some degree of difference of background and
experience among the musicians. For example, Eric Dolphy (bass clarinet) was already engaged in a radicalization of jazz
while Don Cherry (trumpet), Charlie Haden (bass) and both Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell (drums) were familiar with
Coleman’s music and the direction it was taking. In contrast, Freddie Hubbard (trumpet) and Scott LaFaro (bass) were less
familiar with this new music, with both coming from more immediately accessible jazz contexts and this may be reflected in
their contributions to the collective improvisation.
18 For contrasting examples of the reception of this recording, see Walser 1999, 253–5 and 395–400.
19 It is notable that Coleman’s discography consists exclusively of his own recordings. Although he has worked with regular
collaborators, this has always been on the basis of his own leadership, with this authorial presence, in the context of a
‘collective improvisation’, being potentially problematic. The suggested association between Coleman and autonomy is
further reinforced if mention is made of Coleman’s harmolodic system, his own private, technical lexicon, the details of
which are not directly relevant to the present discussion, but the extent to which it suggests a highly personalized perspective
underlines the interpretation that is being offered here.
20 Coltrane’s acknowledgement of the importance of Coleman is evident through his recordings of Coleman compositions with
musicians who were most directly associated with Coleman – Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell. Originally recorded
in 1960, the resulting album was not released by Atlantic until 1966 under the bold title of The Avant-Garde .
21 For a wider discussion of the significance of AACM, see Lewis 2008. The development of AACM as a forum of self-
organization had been preceded by the Jazz Composers Guild (JCG), led by trumpeter Bill Dixon, and coexisted with similar
organizations in other locations, including the Black Artist Group (BAG) in St Louis. Interestingly, Gendron in his discussion
of the JCG situates this trend within what, paradoxically, had become an avant-garde tradition of organization: ‘The Jazz
Composers Guild (JCG) followed in a long tradition of avant-garde self-help and self-advertising organizations in the art
world, dating at least as far back as Zürich Dada, the Italian Futurists, Bauhaus, and what for [Bill] Dixon was the most
salient model, the artist-run galleries on 10th street in the East Village’ (Gendron 2009: 213). For further discussion of JCG
and the issues of avant-garde organization, see Piekut 2011: 102–39.
22 Relevant recordings include The Vandermark 5, Free Jazz Classics Vols 1 & 2 (2000), on which Vandermark and his
collaborators interpret ‘classic’ material from Coleman, Braxton, Cecil Taylor, among others; and John Zorn, Spy v. Spy
(1989), on which Zorn leads a series of reinterpretations of Coleman material. Both projects could be seen to effectively
repeat Braxton’s In the Tradition , but now it is Braxton who is, among others, positioned historically in relation to a tradition
as interpreted retrospectively by other, younger musicians.
23 See Ward and Burns 2002 and Jazz – A Film by Ken Burns (dir. Ken Burns, DVD, 2001). The point here is that the highly
accessible version of jazz history presented by Burns, particularly in the TV/DVD format, deliberately marginalizes what was
perceived as avant-garde jazz practices from its representation of a jazz tradition. This exclusive view of the jazz tradition has
been perpetuated by Marsalis in a number of different contexts, including his role in the Lincoln Centre Jazz program, which
was a source of cultural power, and in his own music.
24 Ake’s discussion is based on the use of ‘standards’ – recurrent, familar material within a jazz context. The point of
comparison is between Wynton Marsalis’s use of recognizable standards such as Gershwin’s ‘Embraceable You’ and Cole
Porter’s ‘What is this Thing Called Love?’, among others, on his Standard Time Vol. 2: Intimacy Calling album (1991) as an
attempt to effectively solidify the tradition into a singular construct and Bill Frisell’s use of material from an eclectic range of
sources, including Ives, Copeland, Madonna and Bob Dylan on his Have A Little Faith album (1993). If Marsalis can be seen
to present a reductive, singular view of a tradition, then Frisell’s pluralistic approach can be seen to continue to ask pertinent
questions about both the performance of standards and the tradition within which such practices evolved. See Ake, 2002,
chapter 6.

Bibliography of works cited

Adlington, Robert. 2009. ‘Introduction: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties’, in Robert Adlington (ed.), Sound Commitments:
Avant-garde Music and the Sixties . New York: Oxford University Press, 3–14.
Ake, David. 2002. Jazz Cultures . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press .
Anderson, Iain. 2007. This is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture . Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Attinello, Paul. 2007. ‘Postmodern or Modern: A Different Approach to Darmstadt’, Contemporary Music Review , 26: 25–37.
Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones). 1963. Blues People: Negro Music in White America . New York: William Morrow.
Bürger, Peter. [1974] 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde , trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1984. (Originally published as Theorie der Avantgarde . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974.)
—— 1998. ‘Avant-Garde’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics , Vol. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 185–9.
Coleman, Ornette. 1960. Liner notes to Change of the Century . LP album. Atlantic.
DeVeaux, Scott. 1997. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. [1960] 2003. Truth and Method , 2nd revised edn, translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall. New York and London: Continuum. (Originally published as Wahrheit ünd Methode . Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1960.)
Gendron, Bernard. 2002. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde . Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
—— 2009. ‘After the October Revolution: The Jazz Avant-garde in New York, 1964–65’, in Robert Adlington (ed.), Sound
Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 211–31.
Girard, René. 2008. ‘Innovation and Repetition’, in Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism 1953–2005 .
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Heble, Ajay. 2000. Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance and Critical Practice . New York: Routledge.
Hopkins, David. 2004. Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kelley, Robin D. G. 1999. ‘New Monastery: Monk and the Jazz Avant-Garde’, Black Music Research Journal , 19: 135–68.
Lewis, George E. 2008. A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music . Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Monson, Ingrid. 2007. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Murphy, Richard. 1999. Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity .
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Piekut, Benjamin. 2011. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits . Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Poggioli, Renato. [1962] 1968. The Theory of the Avant-Garde , trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press. (Originally published as Teoria dell’ arte d’avantguardia . Societa editrice il Mulino, 1962.)
Radano, Ronald M. 1993. New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Samson, Jim. 2001. ‘Avant-Garde’, in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , 2nd edn, Vol. 2, edited by Stanley Sadie
and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan, 246–7.
Saul, Scott. 2003. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Schulte-Sasse, Jochen. 1984. Foreword to Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde , trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, xii–xivii.
Shipton, Alyn. 2001. A New History of Jazz . London: Continuum.
van den Berg, Hubert F. 2009. ‘Avant-garde: Some Introductory Notes on the Politics of a Label’, in Robert Adlington (ed.),
Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the Sixtie s. New York: Oxford University Press, 15–33.
Walser, Robert, ed. 1999. Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ward, Geoffrey C. and Burns, Ken. 2002. Jazz: A History of America’s Music . New York: Knopf.
Weightman, John. 1973. The Concept of the Avant-Garde: Explorations in Modernism . London: Alcove Press.
Wilson, Peter Niklas. 1999. Ornette Coleman: His Life and Music . Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books.
 10
Narrative
Nicholas Reyland

A campfire story
The histoire is the what
and the discours is the how
but what I want to know …
is le pourquoi .
Why are we sitting here around the campfire?
(Le Guin 1981, 188)

Once upon a time, a very long time ago now – about 1990 – an intermittently fiery debate
ignited around the question of whether music could tell stories. With so much of the world’s
music employed at least partly in the service of storytelling – from songs, operas, ballets,
programmatic symphonies and musicals to films, plays, video games, music videos, sacred
rites and other social rituals – musicologists asked whether it was also possible to conceive
of instrumental music from traditions such as Western art music (i.e. music without voices,
lyrics, programmatic texts, illustrations, dramatic accompaniments, dance, explanatory titles,
etc.) as being somehow, at least some of the time, some kind of a narrative. Could music –
just music – tell stories?
Fiery debates are rarely spontaneous; indeed, they are rarely that original. Like the seven
basic plots Christopher Booker identifies as underpinning the entirety of human storytelling
(Booker 2004), academic discussion in any given field often replays familiar concerns,
albeit filtered through contemporary issues. Furthermore, discursive campfires were flaring
up everywhere in musicology around 1990, with interest in narrative taking its place
alongside the ‘admixture and dissemination of new or borrowed methodologies, ideologies,
and buzz-words’ during the period of theory transfusions which invigorated music criticism
in the 1980s and 1990s – the ‘New Musicology’ later caricatured by Nicholas Cook and
Mark Everist as a ‘curiously serial process in which theoretical positions were taken up and
cast aside’ (Cook and Everist [1999] 2001, ix).

Geertzian thick description, narratology, Annalisme , and the Bloomian ‘anxiety of

influence’ were all explored and then discarded in turn. Multivalency – the
acknowledgement of the possible equal validity of multiple interpretations … – itself
seems to have emerged as a passing phase, to be replaced by the next critical position.
 (Cook and Everist [1999] 2001, ix)

Yet Cook and Everist’s summary discarded some of these positions too hastily. For instance,
narratological approaches to music, rather than being cast aside by the community at large,
have developed into a stable feature of the musicological landscape. Today, narrative
approaches offer a broadly coherent body of methodologies blending music analysis
(practised in ways that productively blur boundaries between formalism and hermeneutics)
and broader historical and cultural concerns aligned with the once ‘New’, now firmly
established, critical-theoretical musicology.
One reason for the survival of music narratology beyond the 1990s was that it rekindled a
longer standing tradition. The quest to read music as narrative, Joseph Kerman has noted, is
‘one of music criticism’s most persistent and persistently controversial projects’ (Kerman
1999, 47). The controversy stretches back to nineteenth-century flashpoints concerning the
value of programmatic music versus absolut Tonkunst , but its roots go much deeper.
Consider, for instance, Byron Almén’s critique of Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny’s 1805
analysis of Handel’s ‘Fugue’ from the Harpsichord Suite No. 6 in F minor (Almén calls it
‘an important historical attempt to supplement a descriptive structural account of an
instrumental work with an interpretative account of that work’s expressive features’), which
surveys Momigny’s reading of the piece as the representation of a three-way argument
between a love-stricken daughter, romance-forbidding father and ever-loving mother
(Almén 2008, 16–20, citing and translating Momigny 1805). ‘The two-part canon’,
Momigny wrote (mm. 63–6; see Musical Example 10.1 ), ‘is a portrayal of mother and
daughter lamenting their inability to soften the heart of the wrathful father’.

Musical Example 10.1 Handel, Suite No. 6, Allegro (fugue), mm. 63–
66

Yet actually – indeed crucially – this is not, as Almén notes, precisely the story that
Momigny claims the music is telling or otherwise representing. In framing his interpretation,
Momigny becomes prudently provisional: ‘This, or something like it, is the range of feeling
that we believe Handel might have experienced, or the image that he might have had in
mind, as he composed this fugue.’ For reasons explored below, it might be better to
reformulate this statement along the following lines. This, or something like it, is the type of
story that this particular musical discourse’s intimation of a plot of events invites suitably
predisposed listeners to call into mind; the final interpretive result of that process may or
may not relate to the creative intentions of a composer; the emplotment and interpretation,
however, will probably broadly resemble interpretations by other listeners within the same
cultural community, while contributing to the tales that the music is telling about when it
was created, those who have played it, and how it has been received. For musical narratives
have an intriguing quality: any particular telling or representation ( discours ) of a plot of
musical events (i.e. any live, recorded or imagined performance) can tell a markedly
different story ( histoire ) to different interpreters; collections of those different stories,
though, tend to form productively fuzzy networks of interpretive coherence. Some scholars
consider this ambiguity to be the great failing of musical narrative; for others, it is le
pourquoi .
Fred Maus has described how explorations from the late twentieth century onwards of

the possibility of narrativity in non-texted, non-programmatic music from European

concert traditions … [lay] at the intersection of many disciplines, not just narratology and
music criticism, but historical interpretation, technical music theory, philosophical study
of expression and representation, and semiotics.
(Maus 2001, 642)

Musicologists reignited their enquiry into music and narrative with sparks borrowed from
narratologists, linguists, philosophers and semioticians specializing in literature, film and
history. Hayden White, for instance, had recently suggested that a narrative possesses ‘a
certain content prior to any given actualization of it in speech or writing’ (White 1987, xi);
before him, Roman Jakobson had explained that it is possible to translate a narrative poem
like Stéphane Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune into ‘music, ballet, and graphic art’
because ‘certain structural features of [its] plot are preserved despite the disappearance of
[its] verbal shape’ (Jakobson 1960, 350). As the music and narrative debate began to
generate heat, scholars gathered around the campfire, excitedly sharing fresh stories about
music and the new theoretical perspectives from which one could tell such stories, and
thereby participating in the wider ‘narrative turn’ pirouetting through the arts, humanities,
and beyond (see Phelan and Rabinowitz 2005, 1–16).
Adaptation was a common initial approach. A number of musicologists pursued the
question of whether music could express narrative via theoretical approaches adapted from
literary narratology – an understandable starting point, but not without its problems. For
example, Anthony Newcomb, influenced by Vladimir Propp’s work on folk tales, argued for
paradigmatic plot archetypes in Schumann and Mahler’s music (Newcomb 1992); Patrick
McCreless searched for contrapuntal-harmonic enigmas in Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio, Op.
70, welding Roland Barthes’s codes from his theorizing of narrative to a Schenkerian
analytical framework (McCreless 1988); Maus identified how the agents and actions
suggested by the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Serioso’ String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95
express the qualities Aristotle deemed central to the success of a well-made play in his
Poetics (Maus 1988); Robert Hatten explained how Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism
and heteroglossia in the novel help make sense of disruptive moments in Beethoven (Hatten
1991); and Eero Tarasti adapted A. J. Greimas’s semiological approach to the grammar of
narrative in an analysis of Chopin’s G minor ballade (Tarasti 1992).
Broadly construed, these efforts illuminated two models of musical narrativity that drew
on literary narratology’s approaches to the play and the novel. One might call these two
models the mimetic and diegetic hypotheses. The mimetic hypothesis considers music’s
capacity to represent agents and their activities in the manner of a play or other narrative text
that unfolds as a real-time imitation of events. The diegetic hypothesis considers music’s
capacity to project a narrator to recount a plot involving agents and their activities in the
manner of a novel or epic poem. In time, a synthesizing hypothesis emerged, positing
musical narratives as representations of the experiencing consciousness of a persona (see,
for example, Karl 1997 and Klein 2004). The experiencing consciousness hypothesis had the
benefit of linking back to a well-spring of much work on music and narrative, Edward T.
Cone’s influential The Composer’s Voice , which explored the notion that some music
induces listeners to posit ‘a musical persona that is the experiencing subject of the entire
composition, in whose thought the play, or narrative, or reverie, takes place’ (Cone 1974,
94). As the experiencing consciousness model was a synthesis of the other two, however, it
remained vulnerable to doubts raised about both the diegetic and mimetic hypotheses by
scholars less enamoured with the idea of musical narrativity.
The most instructive objections were presented by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Carolyn
Abbate, who arrived like fire wardens to dampen the flames of the music narratology
campfire, just in case it was about to get out of hand (see Nattiez 1990 and Abbate 1991; see
also Abbate 1989). It was Nattiez who bluntly pointed out that ‘it is not within the
semiological possibilities of music to link a subject to a predicate’ (Nattiez 1990, 244). In
other words, instrumental music cannot unambiguously signify, describe or interconnect
representations of agents and their actions; such interpretations are only possible if the
listener is guided by an extra-musical prompt, like a program note or interpretive
predisposition. This bids farewell to overly literal applications of the mimetic hypothesis.
For instance, Nattiez writes of Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche that ‘with the help
of the title, I can readily agree that it concerns the life and death of a character. I certainly
hear that he moves, jumps, etc. But what exactly does he do? I don’t know’ (Nattiez 1990,
244). Music can hint – through gestures, style topics, iconic and indexical semiotic
conventions, and other means – at types of action, mood and atmosphere; instruments and
ensembles can approximate different agents (e.g. a clarinet as a lusty prankster); listeners
primed to listen for concretely signified agents and actions via a program note or evocative
title can fill in the gaps. Music alone, however, cannot specify the fine grain of narrative
detail. The gap to be traversed by the interpreter’s imaginative input in such ‘narratives’
therefore appeared, to Nattiez, prohibitively wide.
Abbate’s wet blanket stressed, in turn, an upshot of music’s semiological limitations with
ramifications for the diegetic hypothesis: music cannot posit a past tense.

In terms of the classical distinctions, what we call narrative – novels, stories, myths, and
the like – is diegetic … It is a tale told later, by one who escaped to the outside of the tale
… Music’s distinction is fundamental and terrible; it is not chiefly diegetic but mimetic.
Like any form of … temporal art, it traps the listener in present experience and the beat of
passing time, from which he or she cannot escape …
(Abbate 1991, 53)

This, in turn, bade farewell to overly literal claims about music based on the diegetic
hypothesis. As Nattiez and Abbate’s objections still register regarding the experiencing
consciousness model, the issues raised can profitably be explored through a discussion of
Gregory Karl’s narratological analysis of the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’
Piano Sonata, Op. 57 (see Karl 1997).
Karl’s interpretation of the role of the movement’s insistent D –C motif pivots around
perceiving this musical idea as an antagonist interrupting the reverie of a protagonist
represented by Beethoven’s more voluble opening theme (see Musical Example 10.2 ). How,
though, can one identify when those intrusive notes do or do not represent the antagonist?
The first few appearances of the motif, for example, tally neatly with this reading; the
composing out of the motif in the ensuing transition seems to call for alternative strategies.
Yet this is actually a creative misreading of Karl’s argument. Viewing the work through the
experiencing consciousness hypothesis (i.e. as a fictional representation of a persona’s
mental life), he suggests that the musical discourse is akin to an intellectual reverie (the
opening idea) on which a darker thought (the D –C motif) intrudes. The composing out of
the motif during the transition might thus be recovered for a narrative reading as some kind
of mulling over of ideas en route to the persona’s next significant thought (the second subject
group).

Musical Example 10.2 Beethoven, Sonata, Op. 57, No. 1,

‘Appassionata’: Allegro assai , opening

A crucial point for Karl is the dramatic function of these ideas within a wider system of
primarily oppositional relationships: the idea that the D –C motif antagonizes the main
theme, not that it represents an actual antagonist. Even so, Nattiez’s basic objection remains
unresolved. It is not within the semiological capacity of music explicitly to say when the D
–C motif represents an antagonist or an intrusive thought, nor specifically to state who or
what that antagonist or thought might be. Yet the possibility emerges that this is not so much
a theoretical problem as an analytical opportunity. Slightly more generally construed, the
movement might be conceived as an allegorical tale about antagonistic or intrusive events or
ideas, and how they might be dealt with, rather than about a more specific antagonism or
character – in turn bringing to mind, perhaps, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s depiction of music as
‘myth coded in sounds instead of words … and provid[ing] the comforting illusion that
contradictions can be overcome and difficulties resolved’ (Lévi-Strauss 1981, 659–60; cited
in Nattiez 1990, 241).
Yet reading the Beethoven transition as a narrational gloss on preceding events raises the
specter of Abbate’s objection to the diegetic hypothesis. How is a musical persona being
projected to present events, direct the perceiver’s attention towards salient details, or
encompass those details within a narrational commentary? Vera Micznik has argued that
there is no need ‘to appeal to external agency’ and posit a narrator outside of some musical
texts because ‘narrational knowledge’ is communicated, ‘the “possible story” is enacted and
at the same time told by its own materials’ (Micznik 2001, 243). Narrative music, in other
words, enacts both a tale and its telling, like a film or a play. This neat idea echoes Adorno’s
notion that ‘music recites itself, is its own content, narrates without narrative’ – a concept to
which this chapter returns below (Adorno [1960] 1992, 76). Yet the argument that one can
talk of narrative in music if only one recognizes, as William Kinderman discusses, the
correct ‘configuration of audible elements inherent in the work of art’ (Kinderman 1992,
143) (these signify the story, say, and these the narration) imposes a dangerous circularity of
logic. Prior to having formed an interpretation of a piece as a particular narrative (i.e. as a
telling or representation of a specific story), it may prove tricky to differentiate between the
elements representing moments in a story and elements narratorially framing those
moments, due to the semantic imprecisions outlined above.
It would be a mistake, however, to read too much into these counter-arguments. For a
start, they were not countering claims that scholars interested in musical narrative had ever
made – at least not with much force or so simplistically. Maus’s discussion of music as
drama in Beethoven’s Op. 95, for instance, is certainly an example of a scholar thinking
through the diegetic hypothesis, but the results are light years away in theoretical
sophistication and critical nuance from Momigny’s assertions about Handel’s family drama.
Brazen attempts to read narrators into instrumental music are also few and far between, with
most scholars reflecting Abbate and Nattiez’s most valuable shared objection: not to the idea
of musical narrativity per se but rather to the idea of music narrating (i.e. speaking or
otherwise concretely signifying) through instrumental or other untexted musical means, the
semantically specific utterances of the teller of a tale. Where scholars have engaged
productively with the possibility of a musical narrator, it has been in sophisticated work like
Hatten’s adaptation of Bakhtin to Beethoven analysis, or John Rink’s historically
contextualized discussions of the performer as narrator (see Hatten 1991 and Rink 2001).
Those gathered around the musical narratology campfire have thus been overheard
muttering to each other that the fire wardens’ objections, ultimately, seemed ‘slightly weird
– who needs to be told such things?’ (Maus 2005, 467). Rather than abandoning intuitions of
commonality between, for instance, the way in which ‘the sequence of musical events in a
composition … invites comparison to the unfolding of a narrative plot’ in a play or novel,
some scholars have chosen to consider ways in which musical narratives deploy ‘special
means’ to achieve related yet distinctive structural and symbolic goals (Maus 2005, 467–8).
When music adopts a narrative register, it is not seeking to become a simulacrum of the
novel or the play (or a film, a comic book, etc.). Music has its own ways and means of being
narrative, some of which imply the types of plot central to many acts of musical analysis.
Recall, for instance, Heinrich Schenker’s assertion that, in music as in life, the reversals,
disappointments, delays and obstacles represented by a voice-leading reduction’s
middleground and foreground form an almost dramatic course of events (Schenker 1979, 5).
Crucially, however, once one considers, as Almén urges, music’s relationship to other
narrative media as sibling rather than descendental (see Almén 2008, 12), new connections
emerge, while highlighting each medium’s unique contribution to storytelling. Novels, for
instance, can posit a past tense; films concretely link subjects and predicates; music does
neither convincingly. However, neither film nor the novel has the means to invoke embodied
responses mirroring an agent’s physical travails akin to music’s powers in this domain – to
feel, to adapt Roland Barthes’s words, the bodies that beat in the text (Barthes [1982] 1985,
299). For in musical narratives, perhaps more than in any other narrative form, Vladimir
Nabokov’s ‘telltale tingle’ is felt, not in the brain or the heart, ‘but with [the] spine’
(Nabokov 1980). Distinctive narrative media perform narrative distinctively, requiring
perceivers to bridge the gap between discourse and story in different ways.
So the well-meaning intervention of the camp authorities only briefly dimmed the music
narratology flames, which in the main were already being carefully tended by those gathered
around them. Rather than fleeing in the manner of Cook and Everist’s serial theorists, many
scholars had remained at the fireside, bringing together the glowing coals of parallel ideas to
build a self-sustaining fire; a number of these reliable theoretical constants inform the
discussions in this chapter. As the campfire regained strength it also began to function, once
more, as a beacon. New scholars, attracted by the glow, arrived to offer assistance with the
fire’s tending, but also seeking answers to tough new questions. What about narrativity in
rock and pop music, or non-Western musical repertoires (Nicholls 2007; Negus 2012)?
What about Western art music after common-practice tonality (Meelberg 2006; Klein and
Reyland 2013)? Do other repertoires with primarily instrumental music, such as jazz, have
distinct forms of narrativity (Harker 2006)? And how might these new questions and
repertoires shed light, reflexively, on music narratology’s critical concerns?
The investigation of music and narrative is clearly an unfinished tale. The remainder of
the present chapter explores aspects of the story so far by examining interconnected ways of
speaking about musical narrative and offering a couple of new perspectives. Some of these
tales are my own; others are tales I have heard around the campfire and found useful to retell
elsewhere, especially when considering musical narrative with my students. Both the tales
and the accompanying analytical sketches are therefore offered as toasted marshmallows –
not a substantial meal, for sure, but hopefully enough to tempt the reader closer to the
campfire, to toast a few new ideas herself. After all, something similar to this invitation – to
play, to imagine, to create – lies at the heart of music’s offer when it takes the narrative
register.

Synecdoche narrativity
It is not that music wants to narrate, but that the composer wants to make music in the
ways that others narrate.
(Adorno [1960] 1992, 62)

Scholars responding to objections to the idea of music as narrative have often advanced
music’s lack of linguistic specificity as a positive. Maus, for instance, has stressed the role
of perceivers in hearing ‘musical successions as story-like because they can find something
like actions, thoughts, and characters in music’ and are therefore tempted to imagine those
moments as going ‘together to form something like a plot’ (Maus 1991, 6). He also eschews
the idea of music signifying a finely detailed story, stating that ‘there is no single
determinate underlying story to be recovered from a text’; subsequently, ‘retellings or
paraphrases’ of compositions (i.e. interpretive narrativizations) ‘are constructed by readers
or hearers in the service of various interests they happen to have’ (Maus 1991, 7). For Maus,
this is not a problem but an opportunity: analysing those different interpretations offers a
window on to the performative stories people tell about themselves. A musical plot thus
permits, indeed encourages, ‘the play of different interpretations’ (Maus 1991, 33). Kerman,
similarly, argues that music bears its narrative potential ‘as a mnemonic field with markers
rather than a preset matrix for narrative’ (Kerman 1999, 47) and, for Karl, music’s plot-like
structures are coherent not ‘because [a musical narrative] embodies a specific meaning or
tells a particular story, but because its abstract dramatic plan possesses an inner logic
capable of suggesting any number of stories of a particular type without telling any of them’
(Karl 1997, 32).
The key phrase here is ‘stories of a particular type’. When music can be interpreted as
narrative, the plot of events presented bear what Cone termed an expressive potential: ‘the
wide but not unrestricted range of possible expression’ opened up by a composition’s
temporal succession of sensuous, congeneric and extrageneric signifiers (Cone 1974, 166).
Other ways in which listeners may experience music as narrative, however, involve
alternative ways of hearing music, some of which eschew the kind of structural listening
required if musical emplotments are to shade into narrativizations of a piece’s expressive
potential.
White asserted that narratives have some kind of essence independent of their specific
iterations (White 1987, xi). What is the nature of music’s relationship to that essence? One
way to think of musical narrative – an approach that may chime with a broad range of
listener experiences – is to consider music’s putative plots as the representation of
narrativity’s essence, i.e. of the experience of narrativity itself, rather than specific stories.
Given that humans spend so much time imagining, listening to, performing and decoding a
form of organized sound – i.e. language – that narrates, it is unsurprising that music, with its
similarly expressive flow of sonic ideas, can often be heard as something like a narrative: a
narrative simulacrum.
Picture the following scene. A musicologist is working through her e-mail inbox first
thing in the morning. As on many previous occasions, she complements that dull yet
stressful task with the second disc in a 1991 CD reissue of Alfred Brendel’s early 1960s
Viennese recordings of Beethoven’s late piano sonatas for the Vox label. The CD begins
with the first of the last five sonatas, the A major, Op. 101. Around the music narratology
campfire, the musicologist has heard persuasive tales about this composition’s story. Hatten,
for example, long ago persuaded her that the first movement’s ‘progress from pastoral
through the threat of tragedy and back to pastoral affirmation’ is not only a valid
interpretation of the Allegretto ma non troppo ’s specific plot of events, but is also ‘replicated
at the level of the four-movement sonata as a whole’, when ‘the triumphant affirmation of
the heroic topic elevated to a transcendent plane’ is signified by music that repairs
potentially catastrophic breaches and, in doing so, raises ‘the pastoral to a spiritual level’
(Hatten 1991, 85–6). Perhaps the musicologist briefly indulges her ego by imagining that, in
Brendel’s realization of Beethoven’s musical narrative, one can hear a synecdoche for one
scholar’s struggle towards the transcendent goal of no unanswered emails. The truth,
though, is probably less fanciful. The musical narration is keeping the musicologist
company; its musical voices comfort her with the spirit of human communication, but not
with the demands of specific conversation.
Clearly, even musicologists who remain committed to the irreplaceable productivity of
what Eric Clarke calls the ‘vanishingly rare’ experience of structural listening are usually
doing no such thing when listening to music (Clarke 2005, 144). Some of music’s functions
in everyday life, however, may still involve notions of narration. Like Nipper the dog
listening intently to His Master’s Voice emerging from the horn of a gramophone, the voices
of Brendel and Beethoven function, in this imaginary but familiar instance, as a calming
influence. As the first two measures shape a gestural rise and fall – so ‘emblematic of the
pastoral’ (Hatten 1991, 82) should the musicologist care to pay attention to such things
(which she does not, presumably, unless unconsciously she is associating the pastoral, as
topos, with the maternal, and so indulging in dubiously gendered fantasies of music as
quasi-parental protection) – she may, at most, catch herself demonstrating the verifiability of
Arnie Cox’s ‘mimetic hypothesis’ (Cox 2011). The musicologist’s breathing in and out,
mirrored in the slight raising and then drooping of her head, mimics the contour of the
musical gesture, as if her body is responding to another person’s utterance with an
intimation of interest. The overall gesture is a gently affirmative nod. ‘How interesting,
Brendel-Beethoven’, she seems to be replying: ‘Do go on.’
Yet is this really where music’s relationship to narrative ends? Nattiez certainly suggested
that music only imitates ‘the outward appearance’ of narration (Nattiez 1990, 251). Moving
from general similarities between music and language (as alluded to, for instance, by the
Greek designation for lyric poetry, mousikê ) to the work of recent phoneticians, he argued
that, because ‘music and language share the linearity of discourse and the use of sound
objects … [m]usic is [only] capable of imitating the intonation contour of a narrative’
(Nattiez 1990, 251). As an example, Nattiez suggests that ‘it is not necessary to have read
the motto which heads the finale, ‘Muss es sein? Es muss sein’, in order to recognize from
the outset’ of the last movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet, Op. 135 ‘that we are in the
presence of a question’ (see Musical Example 10.3 ): the ascending fourth connotes a
question, the descending fourths a pair of responses. ‘And from then on’, Nattiez claims, one
can interpret the movement as ‘a musical transposition of a dialogue’ in which we do not
know what is being said; instead, ‘Beethoven depicts the character of the exchange, rather as
if we catch the inflection of it from the other side of the wall’ (Nattiez 1990, 251). Yet
because one might be tempted to fill in the gaps with speculation – as when one strains to
catch specific words in an argument happening in a next-door household – this is the type of
moment at which listeners make the ontological mistake of believing that ‘since music
suggests narrative, it could itself be narrative’ (Nattiez 1990, 245). And listeners should resist
that impulse, Nattiez admonishes, lest they stoop to superfluous metaphor.
 Musical Example 10.3 Beethoven, String Quartet in F major, Op. 135,
fourth movement: motto

Adorno’s ostensibly similar claim (cited in Nattiez’s essay) that music is ‘a narrative
which relates nothing’ arises from a concern, in his Mahler monograph, to explain how that
composer created music ‘emancipated in novel-like fashion from fixed schemata’, as in the
Third Symphony’s liquidation of the recapitulation in its sonata form first movement
(Adorno [1960] 1992, 83). Yet this is not merely an issue of creative or even ethical
intentions. Mahler’s music ‘often sounds’ as if it is seeking to call to mind ‘the great novel’:
‘The curve it describes is novelistic’, Adorno writes, ‘rising to great situations, collapsing
into itself’ (Adorno [1960] 1992, 69). In a manner Nattiez later paralleled, Adorno therefore
argues as follows:

The ear is carried along on the flow of the music as is the eye of the reader from page to
page; the mute sound of the words converges with the musical mystery. But the mystery
is not solved. To describe the world to which epic music alludes is denied to it: the music
is as clear as it is cryptic. It can make the ontological category of objective reality its own
only insofar as it screens itself from objective immediacy; it would remove itself from the
world if it tried to symbolize or even depict it.
(Adorno [1960] 1992, 70)

This elegant statement reminds one that Adorno’s desire to protect the cryptic in music was
motivated by something more profound than Nattiez’s theoretical objections. Elsewhere,
Adorno rejected the ‘false impression that the world outside is such a well-rounded whole’
as those created, for instance, by pre-modernist novels, and also the notion that music might
reproduce that false impression, as in Lévi-Strauss’s perspective on music offering the
‘comforting illusion that contradictions can be overcome and difficulties resolved’ (Lévi-
Strauss 1981). Such texts offer ‘the existing world a kind of solace’ but in doing so shape a
form of false consciousness that one should seek to resist, not least through encounters with
music that respect music’s otherness – its imperviousness to concrete storytelling and other
forms of interpretive specificity – and which thereby celebrate music’s ‘power to resist
society’ (see Adorno 1970, 2, 73, 321). Such objections lend a heroic air to attachments to
the idea of music’s anti-narrativity.
Yet it is difficult to square such a view with the possibility that, surfacing even
momentarily from her overflowing inbox, our Brendel–Beethoven-admiring musicologist
might respond virtually mandatorily to the intimations of the pastoral style topic and also to
its subsequent troubling by the tragic (see Musical Example 10.4 ). She might thus begin
emplotting, with little more conscious effort than it takes to read an e-mail anecdote from a
friend, a reading of the music that, while ultimately impervious to the literal, leads her
towards an abstract but not hopelessly unspecific story told at the broad-brush level of a
series of moods or states of being. Such hearings might even go a little further.
 Musical Example 10.4 Beethoven, Piano Sonata in A major, Op. 101,
Allegretto ma non troppo , mm. 35–40

Returning to Mahler, for instance, consider the manner in which those grand novelistic
curves traverse the ‘symbolic landscape’ mapped by Constantin Floros in his three-volume
study Gustav Mahler , and the ‘primary role’ of these abundant and varied ‘cultural symbols
… in shaping and maintaining [Mahler’s] musical discourse[s]’ (Almén 2006, 135; see also
Floros [1977] 1994). Hence, in Almén’s readings of the Wunderhorn symphonies, which pair
narrato-logical close analysis with interpretation of the mythologies surrounding iconic
symbols in Mahler’s music, the first movement of the Third Symphony is not merely an
audacious sonata deformation. Pairing the work with the Fourth Symphony, it becomes the
beginning of a ten-movement ‘ascent through … layers of being or self to an experience of
the divine’ (Almén 2006, 165) .
Extrageneric symbols, though, are not the only way that music beads its narration-like
threads with somewhat less ambiguous content. Music can also articulate plots of congeneric
ideas. As Barthes argued, echoing Nabokov’s ‘telltale tingle’ but further evoking the
intercon-nectedness of affective, emotional and intellectual responses to a plot’s ‘veritable
‘thrilling’ of intelligibility’:

‘suspense’ accomplishes the very idea of language: what seems the most pathetic is also
the most intellectual – ‘suspense’ grips you in the ‘mind’, not in the ‘guts’.
(Barthes 1977, 119)

Sensuous, extrageneric and congeneric signifiers braid together in musical discourse, and
once one begins to attend to how the ideas they articulate follow and relate to one another –
particularly if one is then moved to consider the structure thus emplotted in terms of its
potential revelation of an overarching pattern – one may swiftly find oneself tingling all over
in response to music that can profitably be investigated as narrative because, put boldly,
aspects of that music are narrative.

Listening for the plot

In the end we are all of us in a sense experts on stories, because nothing is closer to us
than to see the world in the form of stories. Not only are our heads full of stories all the
time; we are each of us acting out our own story throughout our lives.
(Booker 2004, 701)

Like many approaches to music analysis, reading pieces as narrative involves segmenting a
musical experience into a hierarchy of more or less significant moments and then
interpreting the relationships between them. Unlike some approaches to music analysis,
narratology engages with the transformation of ideas over time, rather than the gradual
revelation of an essentially static unity. Narratives, after all, present stories, and stories are
temporalized disunities. Frank Kermode spoke of a narrative’s tick-tock, Aristotle of a
drama’s beginning, middle and end, and Tzvetan Todorov of plot’s movement from stability
to disruption, recognition, repair and, finally, a new form of stability (Kermode 1967;
Aristotle 1996; Todorov 1971). In every case, the essential narrative component is change
over time. So what changes in a musical narrative?
Different music scholars have focused on different parameters in order to codify different
aspects of musical narrativity. The following discussion introduces three such approaches to
listening for the plot (archetypes, agency and enigmas), all of which can be considered, in
turn, in relation to an overarching quality of most musical narratives: transvaluation. All four
topics, furthermore, reveal the interpretive proteanism manifested by analyses of music as
narrative, which render explicit or even promote the slippage between observation and
interpretation, analyst and text that is present, albeit sometimes unacknowledged, in acts of
musical analysis.

***
Given narratology’s focus on change over time, it is unsurprising that musicologists have
sought to define it as the sine qua non of musical narrativity. An early pioneer of music
narratology, Jann Pasler, argued that the ‘ultimate reason narrative events are directed and
connected is that they undergo or cause transformation, which is probably … narrative’s
most important and most illusive characteristic’ (Pasler 1989, 241); Vincent Meelberg’s
more recent theorizing of musical narrativity, which draws on the work of narratologist
Mieke Bal, is founded on the notion of narrative as ‘the representation of a temporal
development’ (Meelberg 2006, 39); and for Almén, James Jacób Liska’s concept of
transvaluation is the most productive expression of this concept.
A transvaluation is a significant change of state that occurs over time and alters the
ranking of different components in a narrative’s system of values. Obvious non-musical
examples include the changing fortunes of characters in a story. Given the centrality of
conflict to its storytelling, for instance, George R. R. Martin’s fantasy epic A Song of Ice and
Fire might almost have been retitled Game of Transvaluations on its adaptation for television
(HBO, 2011–). A memorable peak in season one of Game of Thrones occurs when a young
and twisted king, Joffrey, orders the shock public execution of one of his lords and servants,
Ned Stark, in front of members of Stark’s own family. It is not merely the unexpectedness of
the twist, or the violence, that creates this scene’s affective charge: there is a nauseating
lurch in character rankings as Joffrey usurps symbolic power by ruthlessly killing Ned.
Transvaluation, though, is just as central to the everyday power struggles of soap operas like
Eastenders as it is to prestige television dramas like Game of Thrones . Transvaluations are
everywhere in narrative, Liszka writes, ‘playing out the tensions between the violence of a
hierarchy that imposes order and the violence that results from its transgression’ (Liska
1989, 133; quoted in Almén 2008, 65). In music, Almén clarifies, ‘transvaluation involves
reversals that either upset or reaffirm the prevailing order, leading to a variety of outcomes’
(tragic, comic, romantic or ironic) through the victory or defeat of the hierarchy or
transgressor and the manner of its achievement (see also Almén and Hatten 2013, 75–82).
 Chopin’s G major Prelude, Op. 28, No. 3, the first example of transvaluation provided in
Almén’s A Theory of Musical Narrative , offers a conflict that is subtle, its ‘violence’
conceptual rather than visceral. The piece unfolds as ‘a gentle dialogue, a dance of
possibilities’ between musical elements, with ‘an initial hierarchy of relatively distinct
motivic elements’ being succeeded by an act of integration (Almén and Hatten 2013, 77).
The first melodic phrase of the prelude divides into two subphrases (see Musical Example
10.5a ), which Almén’s close reading identifies as motives setting up an ‘opposition
between the potential for relatedness and the potential for separateness’ (Almén 2008, 5)
through their articulation of various similarities (e.g. shared intervals), differences (e.g.
contrasting registers) and continuities (e.g. an interconnecting melodic descent across the
registral divide). Almén suggests that one might interpret the motives as agents: dramatis
personae sharing kinship but prevented from fully realizing their interconnection. The
possibility of sensing familiar (or even familial) narrative trajectories, a degree of suspense
and even sympathy or empathy is thereby glimpsed: will the second motive’s individuality
flourish, transgressing the hierarchical dominance of its predecessor, or will their kinship be
more fully revealed, leading the music back towards order?
The overall ‘harmony-with-nature’ expressive context established for this dialogue by the
accompanimental ostinato’s allusion to the Romantic Spinnerlied means that ‘the listener
might be inclined to prefer’, or at least to expect, ‘a synthesis or mediation’ (Almén 2008,
7). And that is what the Prelude’s narrative duly supplies. In measures 20–7, after various
attempts at conciliation, ‘the longest unbroken melodic span of the piece’ forms a ‘melodic
descent combin[ing] the rhythmic profiles of [the two motives] into a single, extended line’
while ‘an active return to [the] tonic’ finalizes the resolution of any sense of conflict (see
Musical Example 10.5b ). The shift in values, following Almén, could be read to blend irony
with romance: the closing synthesis replaces the initial hierarchy (irony), while preserving
aspects of its diversity of elements and style (romance).

Musical Example 10.5a Chopin, Prelude, Op. 28, No. 3, opening

 Musical Example 10.5b Chopin, Prelude, Op. 28, No. 3, mm. 20–7

A tragic post-tonal transvaluation, by contrast, can be heard in Witold Lutoslawski’s

Fourth Symphony. Like the hero of all good tragedies, the materials of this music
(considered from the experiencing consciousness perspective) seem set to escape into order
inverting ‘comedy’. The hierarchical dominance of gloom, created by the first subject area’s
rhapsodic melodies and minor-third saturated chromatic harmonies, is twice interrupted by
glimpses of transgressive ebullience – the fizzingly inventive second thematic area. In the
music’s developmental phase, ebullience and inventiveness then dominate, and it seems as if
the music is on the cusp of a permanent transformation for the better, with the transgressor
materials emerging as victor – until, that is, the sorrowful opening material returns with
unmistakable violence and tragedy strikes. The reversal proves fatal, executing hopes of
longer range transvaluation: the piece’s tragedy resides in the transgression’s defeat by the
order-imposing hierarchy. To speak of different types of story, however, is to begin slipping
beyond a relatively objective ranking of musical values and into interpretive classification –
and a topic, plot archetypes, which has intrigued many music narratologists.
In a musical world far removed from Lutoslawski’s galling catastrophe, Mahler’s Ninth
Symphony begins with pastoral D major rustlings, its first subject area extending its melodic
sinews like a cat stretching in a sunbeam. As a narratological account of the piece by
Newcomb has demonstrated, however, instability is then introduced (Newcomb 1992). The
B in measure 13, the score’s first chromatic alteration, tilts the music towards the D minor
development of the theme at Fig. 2. The modal destabilization is then recognized, recalling
Todorov’s plot phases, when the music convulses, as if in shock, two measures later. What
follows is an attempt to repair the situation by working through the chromatic problems
afflicting D major: for instance, a melodic line for violins and violas (see Musical Example
10.6 ) presses the transgressive F and B back into their ‘proper’ places (forcing them into
the conventional role of chromatic neighbour notes to the F and B necessary for modal
stability in the home key), before the original thematic statement returns, now back in the
‘correct’ mode. This is not, though, an entirely convincing restoration of the order of the
opening hierarchy. Bucolic rustling has given way to nervous restlessness, as signified
through the busier texture at the a tempo from Fig. 3 and the thickened scoring of this
redeclaration of thematic intent. The robustness establishes a new period of equilibrium, but
its show of strength undermines the melody’s original charm. Like a cat settling down after
a shock to its system, the symphony’s hackles stay up.
This analytical story is not, of course, the entirety of Mahler’s Ninth – it represents just
the opening series of plot events in the first movement – but it is arguably a presentation, in
miniature, of the broadest brush strokes of the composition’s novelistic curve: corruption
and the struggle to return, for Newcomb, are the essence of the entire symphony. And while
this struggle relates to archetypal tensions between order and transgression like those
theorized by Almén, the symbolic charge of the music demands, from Newcomb’s critical
perspective, another type of story. Thus Newcomb connects the Mahler to the archetypal
plot of the Bildungsroman (a story of early life and education), citing the example of Charles
Dickens’s Great Expectations . In that novel, the young Pip is corrupted by Magwick, an
escaped convict who terrifies Pip into helping him evade rearrest. Pip tries to put the
shocking episode behind him and return to his simple (if hardly idyllic) pastoral life, yet
remains unsettled. Further waves of instability then arrive, and the trajectory of Pip’s life
reveals a relationship between the opening shock and a larger scale structure. Once stability
is unsettled, change proves inevitable; ultimately, Pip cannot return. So it will prove in the
Mahler, too. Newcomb was not arguing, of course, that Mahler modelled his music on
Dickens, or any other specific novel. His carefully contextualized reading nevertheless
highlights how listeners can embellish the experience of musical transvaluation by linking it
to the symbolic resonance of story types assimilated through their broader cultural
experience.
 Musical Example 10.6 Mahler, Symphony No. 9, first movement,
Andante comodo : Fig. 3, mm. 20–4 (detail)

Alongside tragedy and comedy, for instance, Booker’s seven basic archetypes have other
obvious musical analogues, revealing aspects of narrativity in fundamental compositional
processes. The voyage and return plot – in which heroes and heroines ‘travel out of …
familiar, everyday ‘normal’ surroundings into another world … where everything seems
disconcertingly abnormal … [before] (usually by way of a ‘thrilling escape’) they are
released and can return to the safety of the familiar world where they began’ (Booker 2004,
87) – could be identified as a plot archetype lending meaning to experiences of pieces
exploring the basic dynamics of tonality. It may not be the story of Chopin’s G major
Prelude, for instance, but it is certainly a contender in readings of Scriabin’s response to
Chopin, his Prelude No. 3 in G major, Op. 11. The Chopin remains closely moored to G
major; the Scriabin’s voyage takes a spin around the harmonic harbour before returning to
its moorings, having experienced several ‘abnormal’ harmonic waves en route; Bach’s
opening prelude in the Well-Tempered Clavier makes an understated epic of its departure
from and eventual return to C major, via music including wholly logical (in terms of
harmony and voice-leading) yet sensuously ‘abnormal’ measures of chromaticism (mm. 22–
3) which, marvellously, also prepare the ‘thrilling escape’ of the dominant pedal beginning a
measure later; and some pieces, such as Steve Reich’s Variations for Winds, Strings and
Keyboard , set sail and never return, revelling in ‘the strangeness’ of each new wave of a
harmonic process and its diverting ‘freaks and marvels’ (Booker 2004, 87) – but then, the
problematizing of narrativity in modernist and postmodern music is often predicated on
breaking with the archetypal expectations instilled in listeners by music and other narratives
dating from, or indebted to, earlier epochs and practices.
One of the origins of narrative approaches to music – the reception history of the Andante
con moto from Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58 – further demonstrates
how listeners make intuitive, or rather culturally conditioned, links between musical plots
and narrative archetypes. As Kerman has documented, associative interpretations of this
movement’s opposition between stern string statements and calmer piano refrains have often
alighted, independently, on the story of Orpheus trying to quell The Furies (Kerman 1992).
Booker’s theories suggest why this should be unsurprising. His ‘Overcoming the Monster’
archetype – a tale concerning a ‘terrifying, life-threatening, seemingly all-powerful monster
whom the hero must confront in a fight to the death’ – is another storytelling constant, with
examples ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Dr No and including, arguably, many
concertos in which the soloist is pitted against powerful orchestral opposition (Booker 2004,
22). It is thus within the expressive potential of Beethoven’s particular plot of events to
sound generally orphic to any listener whose cultural experience includes tellings of the
Orpheus myth or similar stories of monsters challenged and, perhaps, overcome.
Yet such associations are not merely picturesque diversions from the search for the ‘truth’
of abstract musical structures and neither are the two forms of enquiry unrelated. Archetypal
and other forms of cultural association enable listeners to access both the ‘easy’ (in
Kerman’s term) content of Beethoven’s concerto and the representation of a changing
relationship between different musical parameters writ large in the interactions of soloist and
orchestra. Scott Burnham makes a similar point regarding the insights of programmatic
readings of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. Where Schenker reduced
away the famously transgressive horn call before the recapitulation as a cadential trifle, for
instance, Burnham meticulously charts how the ‘syntax of the passage’ brings about ‘the
unanimous programmatic response that something both momentous and mysterious is afoot’
(Burnham 1992, 14). To a Schenkerian, the horn call is not a significant plot event; to
narrativizing interpreters, it is a turning point. Burnham encourages rapprochement:

[P]ractitioners operating from a range of critical and analytical standpoints notice similar
things in this music and express them in the different languages available to them. There
remains, however, a fundamental aspect of the Eroica Symphony that is addressed
exclusively through programmatic criticism.
(Burnham 1992, 18)

For some interpreters of the Eroica , the horn call represents the summoning or return of
the music’s hero. In such readings, the movement’s main theme represents a protagonist or,
in the term generally favoured by music narratologists, an agent. Important studies of
musical agency have included accounts exploring musical genres in which characters are
explicitly represented, such as the concerto (Kerman 1999) or the mid twentieth-century
genre Philip Rupprecht calls instrumental drama (Rupprecht 2013). In most music, however,
such as the Eroica , agency is less explicit because soloists are less prominent. There may be
a general sense of agency (as when one speaks of ‘the music’ doing something, such as ‘the
Eroica ’s main theme returning’) but no clear-cut agent (recall Nattiez’s objections to overly
literal applications of the mimetic hypothesis). In other cases, musical agency may be more
like a secret agent, slipping in and out of the shadows cast between musical lines, performers
and interpreters, with its identities, locations and disguises exploring a range of
combinations. Whatever one’s sense of a musical experience’s agents or agency, that sense
may be central to one’s subsequent experience of empathy, sympathy or music-induced
emotions (Robinson and Hatten 2012) .
An important examination of this aspect of musical agency – Maus’s aforementioned
essay on the first seventeen measures of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95 –
grapples with these theoretical challenges. In the course of his analysis, Maus also identifies
a pitch-organizational issue that, following a different strand of music narratology, one
might identify as a plot enigma: a mystery that the quartet’s agents enact and then seek to
resolve. Maus argues that the opening two measures of the quartet do not solely invite
reduction to the backdrop of an implied i–V–i progression in F minor. The metrical
placement of what might otherwise be an unproblematic passing tone (D ) on a strong beat
– its accentuation intensified by the melodic unity of the quartet voices and expressive
commitment of their forte gesture – transgresses the basic harmonic order. Maus writes of
the awkward incompleteness of this figure, which, following McCreless’s work on
Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio, one might also conceptualize as a musical enigma. How will the
piece solve the problem of this transgression?
The enigma in the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio is certainly presented with
theatrical flair. While other Beethoven movements and indeed pieces revolve around
chromatic enigmas and their overcoming (such as the ‘antagonistic’ D Karl discusses in the
‘Appassionata’), the process rarely begins quite so brusquely (see Musical Example 10.7 ).
McCreless describes as ‘the most arresting moment in the opening of the first movement of
the ‘Ghost’ Trio … the arrival of the chromatic F in m. 5 and the ‘subposition’ of the B in
the following measure; all the rhetorical features of the music draw this moment to our
attention’ (McCreless 1988, 17).

Musical Example 10.7 Beethoven, Piano Trio No. 5 in D major, Op. 70

‘Ghost’, opening enigma

McCreless’s article identifies the similarity between the goal-directedness of

contrapuntal-harmonic tonal structure, as theorized by Schenker, and Barthes’s theorizing of
plot as an irreversible sequence of functional and catalyzing (i.e. transitional) events, the
most important of which present questions to be resolved over the course of a story (e.g. who
bequeathed Pip’s great expectations?). Both the general goal-directedness and specific plot
of a story’s events help to generate the ‘suspense’ that, for Barthes, grips one in the mind
when engaging with a narrative. Hence, in the ‘Ghost’, ‘given the strong tonal orientation of
the work, we know that ultimately the rhetorically emphasized enigma of the F and B will
be recuperated into the background tonal structure’ (McCreless 1988, 21) – just as, in the Op.
95 quartet’s Allegro con brio , the conventions of common-practice tonality dictate that the
chromatic knot around D and C must somehow be disentangled.
The first response to Op. 95’s D enigma is a firm yet ineffective attempt to overpower
the problem. Maus stresses the rupture and repetition of the increasingly manic V–i
cadences that follow the three beats of rest in measure 2: the high Cs in measure 3 and
accelerating density of cadences in measures 4–5 create a sense, he suggests, of ‘hysteria’.
The emphasis on V here, as if mm. 1–2 had merely been an unproblematic tonic
prolongation, is music that doth protest too much. However free of chromatic impediments
these Cs may be, the accentuated D cannot simply be forgotten: its transgression was too
significant. Measures 3–5 thereby turn a moment of musical drama into a full-blown
structural crisis; reinstalling the hierarchy will take a larger scale process of reasoning. Yet
who is doing the reasoning and responding in this music, and to whom or to what?
As Maus explains, most music embodies ‘a pervasive indeterminacy in the identification of
musical agents … [and] as the listener discerns actions and explains them by psychological
states, various discriminations of agents will seem appropriate, but never with a determinacy
that rules out other interpretations’; instead, every ‘listener’s experience will include a play
of various schemes of individuation, none of them felt as obligatory’ (Maus 1988, 122–3).
The expressive trajectory interconnecting those discriminations, though, may be less
problematic to identify (like the generally orphic quality of the slow movement of the Op.
58 concerto). Indeed, Maus’s judgement on agency echoes the manner in which musical
narratives invite acts of emplotment and imaginative engagement that liberate perceiver
creativity while injecting each narrativization with a degree of indeterminacy, the experience
of which is part and parcel of the pourquoi of musical narrativity.
Measures 6–17 are the Serioso ’s first well-reasoned attempt to resolve its enigma.
Gesturally, the music’s body language feels calmer, and so veering into G does not feel like
another rupture. Instead, it suggests a way of rethinking D (as V of G ), which permits the
enigma its moment in the sun (m. 16) before, rather like the passage from the start of
Mahler’s Ninth, tonal progressions and voice-leading press the chromatic transgressors back
into their proper place in the hierarchical order (G resolves to F, and D to C, as the music
arrives on the dominant before a developmental reprise of the opening). This is not,
however, the full resolution of the enigma. Rather, one might hear the passage as a point
conceded in a longer range process of arbitration: ‘If D is permitted space to be, eventually
it may cease to be’, or even, ‘D muss sein ’.
While not the type of detail that leads some to listen for a nascent musical plot, for music
narratologists this is the kind of specificity that grounds the suggestiveness of musical
narrativity. Indeed, one could even make such a case in relation to the opening of the finale
in Beethoven’s Op. 135 and the gesture Nattiez dismisses as naught but a muffled intimation
of discourse. As Michael Spitzer has suggested, by way of Christopher Reynolds, ‘E is so
salient’ both to local dramas in Op. 135 (such as ‘the farcical interruptions in the Vivace’)
and that quartet’s longer range processes (such as its working through of a tetrachordal F–E
–D –C pattern) ‘as to suggest that the finale’s famous ‘Muss es sein’ conundrum is a pun
on the German word for E ’ (Spitzer 2006, 180, citing Reynolds 1988, 190). In Op. 95, to
move beyond the measures covered by Maus’s analysis, the enigmatic D becomes the key
of the second thematic area and, in the recapitulation (m. 129), even takes a turn as the key
of the first theme. Its problematic nature is further neutralized, en route , by nuances such as
mm. 121–2’s transposition of mm. 41–2’s B –A–A motif – a ‘marvel’ permitted by the
movement’s voyage towards D , but which, when later transformed into D–D –C, assists
in normalizing the aberrances and achieving a secure return. The vanishing echoes of the
opening two measures at the movement’s close, however, remind one of the seriousness of
the breach (niggling D s remain in the cello line as the final cadence is approached). This
forestalls a more triumphant arrival, not least because, by this stage, a deeper enigma has
emerged: F minor now sounds strange, as if the movement’s forces of order have been
duped into adopting the role of transgressor by the music’s Game of Tones .

***
When certain plot types pile up in a creative oeuvre – Beethoven’s chromatic enigmas,
Dickens’s Bildungsromane , the concerto genre’s multitudinous monsters – the temptation to
interpret the broader biographical, cultural or historical significance of their recurrence can
be overwhelming. It may seem appealing, for example, to consider whether overcoming
transgressive chromatic enigmas, not by rhetorical force or charm alone but also with the
full weight of music-developmental intellect, is a token of Beethovenian heroism, and thus
of his music’s embodiment, as decreed by broader processes of reception, of Romantic
notions concerning mastery and subjectivity. Yet as Nicholas Cook and Lawrence Kramer
have argued regarding music and meaning, albeit from rather different critical perspectives,
the shift from the suggestive indeterminacy of a piece’s signifying structures to the
specificity of social context will be actualized differently, if also potentially
interconnectedly, by different interpreters (see Cook 2001 and Kramer 2004).
As Maus has demonstrated in a sensitive exploration of the synergistic relationship
between analytical narratives and the respective personalities, institutional positions and
intellectual concerns of the scholars who proposed them, narratological actualizations
heighten the degree of performativity already inherent in the act of reading music as a plot
(Maus 2005). Should one therefore seek to disentangle the theoretical and musicological
strands of such an enterprise? Not necessarily. Spitzer argues, after Adorno, that ‘a musical-
critical theory attends both to [music’s] implicitly social character and to its adequacy to the
irreducibly musical part of musical experience’ (Spitzer 2006, 263), or what Max Paddison
calls the ‘dual-character of music: as self-contained, self-referential structure and as social
fact’ (Paddison 1996, 23). Musical narratives, by emerging at the intersection of
compositions, performances and interpretations, all of which are shaped by historically and
culturally situated agents, demand attentiveness to music’s dual-character and thus to the
development of critical-analytical approaches to music akin to James Hepokoski and Warren
Darcy’s call for an analytically grounded ‘hermeneutic understanding of music as a
communicative system, a cultural discourse implicated in issues of humanness, worldview,
and ideology’ (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006). Together with the focus that music narratology
invites on the actualization of meaning as a temporalized phenomenon in music – a vital
annex to recent theorizing of musical meaning – this may, in fact, be the approach’s most
significant contribution to musicology, and one of the most important sites for future
investigations in this area. The stories we tell about music are functions of the only
meaningful tale most of us will ever participate in telling around the campfire – the one that
we tell about ourselves .

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 11
Music and the moving image
Jeremy Barham

Introduction: once more between ‘diegetic’ and ‘non-diegetic’

It is arguable whether the theoretical and aesthetic study of screen music 1 has come of age. If it
has, that moment perhaps could be dated to the appearance of Rick Altman’s special issue of
Yale French Studies entitled ‘Cinema/Sound’ (Altman 1980) to which Claudia Gorbman
contributed the article ‘Narrative Film Music’ as well as a bibliography listing over 160 existing
items on the screen music topic alone; or it might date from Gorbman’s own subsequent ground-
breaking investigation (Gorbman 1987) and the contemporaneous anthology Film Sound: Theory
and Practice (Weis and Belton 1985), or to the English translation of Michel Chion’s L’Audio-
Vision and the contribution of Royal Brown (both 1994), or to a range of collections and
monographs that emerged around the beginning of the new millennium (Buhler et al . 2000;
Donnelly 2001; Kassabian 2001). It might yet take place thanks to the recent appearance of two
substantial edited compilations: David Neumeyer’s The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies
and The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics edited by John Richardson et al ., both
of which offer wide-ranging theoretical coverage. Locating such a moment of scholarly ripening
may not be possible, important or necessary, but part of what interests me here is the way in
which the supposed development towards maturity in screen music studies has been preoccupied,
diverted and sometimes driven by the theoretical issue of diegesis (and more specifically the
diegetic/non-diegetic music classification 2 ), from the time of its first serious appropriation by
Gorbman in 1980 to its possible, final dismantling in 2013 by Annahid Kassabian in the face of
new media. While this concern has been voiced and explored at length in screen music
scholarship, I believe that there remain important areas and ramifications to be considered.
It is well known that the labels ‘diegetic’ and ‘non-diegetic’ are not industry terms, but rather
theoretical constructs arrived at after the fact. This in itself is not problematic unless an attempt is
made to retro-fit the terms inflexibly into a discussion of the practicalities of screen production,
or conversely to extrapolate analytical or aesthetic critique directly from industry processes, both
of which approaches tend to result in terminological and technological confusion. 3 As one
industry commentator put it: ‘In the thirty years of conversations I’ve had with co-workers on
feature films in the USA and Britain, nobody has ever used the word diegetic except to deride it
as an academic term of little practical use’ (Thom 2007, 1). He goes on to make a much more
radical claim: ‘the question of whether a sound in a given scene is diegetic or not is often
irrelevant to the effect the story has on its audience’ ( ibid ., 2), coining the phrase ‘acoustics of
the soul’ to suggest that most screen music, however it is classified, is an embodiment of some
kind of profound emotive affect, whether obvious, hidden, congruent, incongruent, determined or
undetermined in relation to the represented scenario. If, in the interests of aesthetics, I am thus
advocating for screen music studies something of a separation between issues of technical
production and critical-analytical understanding (which I suggest have a highly compromised
relationship), I do not recommend the same between issues of the public-facing presentation and
the critical-analytical understanding of the received product. This is because the manner and
environment of screen consumption since the silent era have been integral to the development of
screen music as creative art form, and in many respects closely determine how we may formulate
its aesthetic, and especially how we may scrutinize the notion of diegesis. Relationships of
continuity or discontinuity in the passage from silent to sound film between, for example, music
that is live/recorded, improvised/fixed, constant/intermittent, holistic/fragmented,
sympathetic/indifferent, synchronous/non-synchronous, visibly sourced/invisibly sourced,
coupled with contexts of theatrical presentation, are crucial to how a represented world is
creatively established, in other words to the construction and experience of a diegesis.
No sooner had Gorbman proposed the aforementioned framework than it was subjected to
repeated critical assaults for its inflexibility and its over-determined rigidity, which did not seem
to reflect the reality of the aesthetic perception of screen music. 4 To be fair to Gorbman,
however, right from the outset she acknowledged that music, almost uniquely among the
elements of a screen work, ‘freely crosses the boundary line’ between nondiegetic and diegetic
contexts, and that it would be completely wrong to ascribe expressive capabilities only to music
belonging to the former (1980, 196, 198). Similarly, it was more the case that the adoption of the
binary structure without the nuance that Gorbman always bore in mind or without doing anything
significant with it, were justifiable targets of critique (let alone the ignoring of the idea
completely). 5 All that said, certain philosophical problems have been left lingering by
Gorbman’s model, and these centre on its implicit acknowledgment of the subservience or
secondary nature of music within the screen context, and a certain lack of clarity about the very
nature of diegesis, its relationship to narrative, music’s role in determining either, and its
perceived or assumed aesthetic location therein. 6

The dialectical problem

Over the years, it seems to have been hard for commentators on screen and screen music,
unwittingly or not, to resist invoking the paradox that the latter is completely indispensable but at
the same time inevitably subordinate – necessary, even defining, but ever contingent. In 1930
Béla Balázs distinguished between Begleitmusik (accompanying music) in film as a ‘new form of
programme music’, and an organic fusion of ‘pure music’ with film, in which ‘music would not
be an accompaniment to the images, but the images would appear as accompaniment to the
music’. In this context ‘music would be the reality, images their subconscious resonance. Not
sound film, but filmed sound’ ([1930] 2001, 134, 135). To some degree Balázs may have been
responding to contemporary experimentation in so-called ‘visual music’ genres, but similarly
Eisler’s and Adorno’s subsequent modernist repudiation of commerce and cliché, at times
drawing critically on Eisenstein’s montage theories, on the one hand took it as a ‘fundamental
postulate’ that ‘the specific nature of the picture sequence shall determine the specific nature of
the accompanying music’ (Adorno and Eisler [1947] 1994, 69), 7 while on the other hand held
that ‘[screen music’s] aesthetic effect is that of a stimulus of motion’ (in other words, one that is
active, determining) (ibid ., 78). They further claimed that while screen music ‘should not behave
indiscreetly with regard to its object’ (ibid ., 129), nevertheless ‘[i]ts whole structure … must
become visible’, for ‘renounc[ing] its claim that it is there … is … its cardinal sin’ (ibid ., 132,
133). Almost identical arguments about the ‘inaudibility’ of screen music have been conducted
ever since.
Such contradictory impulses with regard to the ontological status of screen music can be found
across much of the more recent literature, to the extent that one might diagnose a pervasive sense
of voluntary or involuntary misreading impelled by the forces of both industry and academia
alike. It was a ‘cardinal rule’ for Prendergast’s utilitarian screen composer, for example, that ‘the
visuals on the screen determine the form of the music written to accompany it’, and yet
frequently, film music – for Prendergast a ‘neglected art’ – ‘can imply a psychological element
far better than dialogue can’, indeed ‘music can and does serve just this function better than any
other element of film’ (1977, 215, 204, 205). For David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, non-
diegetic ‘mood’ music ‘has no relation to the space of the story’ (1985, 199), and yet for Ron
Mottram, writing in the same volume, ‘music is part of the whole fabric of expression, more
expressive than words alone, and far more than merely a background for the dramatic action. It
actually becomes a second level on which the narrative develops meaning’ (1985, 223). Though
such music ‘is never supposed to compete for our attention’, in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil
(1958; music by Henry Mancini) ‘our awareness of music is so intense that it takes on an
ideational quality’ (Mintz 1985, 294). In relation to sound in general, music in the Hollywood
film ‘is usually of subsidiary importance’, and yet that sound of which it is a part ‘fills the space
of the theater, while the image … remains confined to the rectangle of the screen’, and the
spectator/auditor is ‘always aware of the disparity between the limited space of the image and the
“unlimited” space of the sound’, according to Fred Camper (1985, 371). 8 Though sanctioning
the composer Leonard Rosenman’s idea of music’s ability to establish ‘a different kind of reality
than what is apparent … a “supra reality”’, George Burt denies that the ‘subtle, abstract, and
symbolic’ voice of music ever attains primacy over the film (1994, 7, 8). In a quasi-reversal of
this formulation, Russell Lack contends that while music ‘by itself has no content, no
entailment’, nevertheless (calling on Eisenstein) ‘the musical soundtrack … becomes a vital
element in the construction of the narrative ’ (1997, 68, 72; my emphasis). Even Michel Chion’s
notion of music’s ‘added value’ in screen works inescapably inscribes an aesthetic hierarchy in
which music is contributory, secondary.
Problems of this nature remain evident in writings of the last decade, where, for example,
Kevin Donnelly can claim that ‘the celestial voices of film music … are not “substantial” or do
not constitute part of what audiences cognize as important in the film’, while for him certain
aspects of scoring practice such as ‘synch points’ suggest that ‘screen music should no longer be
conceived as simply the “accompaniment” to the unerring primacy of the image’ (2005, 8, 11).
In recent histories we read that screen music is ‘an outside element … not part of the story itself’,
and though it plays a ‘powerful and often critical role’, its presence is often ‘secondary to
dialogue and sound effects’ (Hickman 2006, 35). James Wierzbicki’s study is predicated on the
belief that screen scores ‘almost by definition are responsive, subordinate and derivative’ –
factors which nevertheless ensure their ‘rich semiotic content’ and ‘subtle power’ – a conviction
for which Wierzbicki enlists the support of no less an auteur than Fellini, for whom ‘in a film,
music is something marginal and secondary, something that cannot occupy the foreground
except in a few rare moments and … must be content to support the rest of what’s happening’
(2009, 2, 3, 4), an opinion that seems more than a little ironic coming from the director of the
musically rich and evocative La Dolce Vita (1960; score by Nino Rota). 9 Most recently, Buhler’s
critique of neo-Lacanian theory in application to the screen soundtrack suggests a beginning and
endpoint of discussion:

Without a frame to contain it, the soundtrack both simultaneously embodies the diegesis in its
entirety and denies the possibility of its appearing. The soundtrack is the point at which the
impossibility of sound film’s diegesis assumes positive form … the soundtrack cannot serve to
guarantee the image’s fantasy of completion.
(Neumeyer 2014, 409) 10

The questions raised by this brief survey are presumably similar to those that prompted three
direct interventions in what might be termed the ‘Gorbman protocol’: Kassabian (2001), Stilwell
(2007) and Winters (2010), along with some other follow-up discussion in Davis (2012), Winters
(2012) and Yacavone (2012). The first, larger question might ask whether it would be beneficial
and indeed possible to resolve or escape from this apparent dialectic cul-de-sac (screen music as
part of/separate from the diegesis; screen music as non-narrational in a predicative sense/screen
music as constructing narrative; screen music as inevitably subordinate mode of response/highly
powerful determining agent in the context of screen works) and, if so, how this could be done.
The answer may come in stages. Prior to the interventions named above, Royal Brown provided
a critically sophisticated, if ultimately ambiguous, perspective while at the same time retaining
the diegetic/non-diegetic framework. With reference to the films Duelle and Noroît by Jacques
Rivette (both 1976 11 ) and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958, music by Bernard Herrmann) he posited
the ability of non-diegetic screen music to become ‘another form of fiction’ whose mythic
qualities allow it somehow to transcend synchronically the diegetic time of the film, and even the
cultural-generic frame of cinema itself, partly because audiences ‘confuse … narrative and
diegesis’, where the latter is the perceived reality of the film and the former is its story structure
that Brown suggests operates in a similar way to music (1994, 71, 84) – fabula and syuzhet in
David Bordwell’s formulation (1985). Brown insists that in such cases, music offers a parallel
narrative (thus external to the film, and with ‘metacinematic’ potential – a term that remains
undefined, but seems to be a stronger version of Gorbman’s meta-diegetic, extra narrating voice),
which, in the case of Vertigo and Bernard Herrmann’s score, the main character Scottie can
inhabit (or even produce) while in a state of obsession and psychological neurosis. The way that
such a parallel narrative or fiction (defined by Brown as ‘the illusory permanentization and
essentialization of a set of structural relationships’ (71)) is inserted into the diegesis gives this
film its peculiar expressive power. We can perceive here a tentative and somewhat tortuous
attempt to redefine the nature of a represented diegesis by identifying additional layers of
musical ‘fiction’ (problematically both external to and within the screen diegesis) and yet
determinedly holding on to the Gorbman model, and allowing characters to traverse the
cinematic ‘fourth wall’ in a kind of eternally regressive set of nested illusions. The flipside of
this type of complex aesthetic argument is exemplified in David Neumeyer’s extreme taxonomic
approach, which attempts to account prosaically for every conceivable type of music and sound
in the world of a screen work (1997). Here, the diegetic/non-diegetic pairing takes its place
among a range of other categories of what he calls ‘cinematic musical codes’ (see his figure 3,
n.p.), in a detailed parsing of screen sound components. Extremely useful though such an
approach is in a lexical sense, it is of less immediate benefit to the present discussion since
Neumeyer consciously demotes the issue of diegesis so that it appears on the same operational
level as, for example, ‘vocal/instrumental’, ‘musically closed/open’, and ‘thematic/motivic
referentiality’, a ploy that I would argue unduly divests it of its ontological and aesthetic
significance. 12
The first substantial theoretical challenge to the Gorbman protocol came from Kassabian who,
at least to begin with, seemed wisely to divorce considerations of aesthetic value and function
from processes of production in screen works. In addition to her protest, shared by several
scholars, against the reductive nature of the binary, more importantly she reiterated and expanded
on Lack’s view: ‘[t]he distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music … obscures music’s
role in producing the diegesis itself ’ (Kassabian 2001, 42; my emphasis). This crucial step was
nevertheless somewhat hampered by then falling back on Hagen’s tripartite industry-led model
(see fn. 4) and attempting to map it on to the diegetic/non-diegetic framework. Robynn Stilwell
(2007) operates firmly within the Gorbman model, but focuses on the points of strain that it can
barely contain. Referring to a variety of films, including René Clair’s Sous les Toits de Paris
(1930; music by Raoul Moretti and Vincent Scotto), King Kong (1933; dir. Merian C. Cooper and
Ernest B. Schoedsack; music by Max Steiner), The Wizard of Oz (1939; dir. Victor Fleming;
music by Harold Arlen, George Stoll, Herbert Stothart, and Robert W. Stringer), Lifeboat (1944;
dir. Alfred Hitchcock; music by Hugo Friedhofer), Casablanca (1942; dir. Michael Curtiz; music
by Max Steiner et al .), The Killing Fields (1984; dir. Roland Joffé; music by Mike Oldfield), The
Silence of the Lambs (1991; dir. Jonathan Demme; music by Howard Shore) and The Insider
(1999; dir. Michael Mann; music by Pieter Bourke and Lisa Gerrard), she examines more
directly than most the fluid interface between the two poles of the binary, and importantly, if
only in a preliminary sense, proposes what she calls the ‘metadiegetic sublime’, a Romantic-
idealist philosophical epigone at work when screen music, ‘soaring above the diegesis’, ‘takes
the foreground’ and can ‘literally and metaphorically, seem to spill out over/from behind the
screen and envelop the audience, creating a particularly intense connection’ (2007, 197), rather
like Brown’s extruding yet affecting metacinematic fiction. Ben Winters takes a more
theoretically robust approach, and, calling on Daniel Frampton’s ‘filmind’ neologism (a film’s
own ‘organic intelligence’, the ‘film itself’; Frampton 2007, 7, cited in Winters 2010, 233),
attempts to restore the Gorbmanesque category of non-diegetic screen music (which after all, is
the most widespread of screen music types) to the ontological fold of films’ narrative space,
coining for such music the term ‘intra-diegetic’. There are problems with Winters’s intervention
both terminologically (the proposed use of ‘intra-diegetic’ while retaining ‘diegetic’ seems
uncomfortable and open to confusion), and conceptually (the higher level duality he proposes
between ‘extra-fictional’ (overture and intermission screen music) and ‘fictional’ (all other
screen music) is somewhat underdeveloped and again open to misunderstanding in terms of
where the boundaries of the screen work’s fictional space lie ( vis-à-vis opening and closing
credit sequences, for example) and how these relate to narrative and diegesis). Nevertheless, the
greatest value of Winters’s contribution lies in his persistent differentiation between the act of
narrating and the narrated act , between music as producer and as product of narrative: ‘To assume
that music functions primarily as a narrating voice in a narratological sense, rather than as an
indicator and occupier of narrative space, is perhaps to misunderstand the broader nature of
cinematic diegesis’ (2010, 225). 13
Given the highly problematic notion of ‘the film itself’, which is dangerously reminiscent of
Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s semiological chimera ‘neutral level’ or ‘material trace’ in music (1990,
28), it would be relatively simple, and might indeed be necessary, to reconceive the ‘filmind’ as
an amalgamation of Jerrold Levinson’s ‘implicit fictional presenter’ (1996) or the ‘implied
filmmaker’ (discussed in Carroll and Moore 2011) (after all, the film has to have been created by
someone), and the individual consuming subject who for Gorbman (with reference to the
‘Kuleshov effect’) ‘infer[s], reconstruct[s] the diegesis’ (1980, 15) and who for Winters
‘construct[s] cinematic diegesis … with reference to the conventions of film’ including
‘“background music”’ [which] plays a constitutive role in shaping our construction of the
diegesis’ (2010, 243). However, does this, and the attendant transference of narrative agency to
the ‘filmind’, do enough to account for/legitimize the difference between music as ‘narrating
voice’, from which Winters is keen to distance the debate, and music as an ‘indicator … of
narrative space’? If the ‘filmind’ inevitably combines both poietic and aesthesic agencies of
narrative construction (and it should be remembered that the latter is just as external as, if not
more than, the former), can or should that difference be sustained? Winters’s argument hinges on
asserting a distinction between, and indeed the complete independence of, narrative (the
constructive process) and diegesis (the product that just ‘is’) in screen works, and in
understanding the (as-yet-undefined) ‘broader nature of cinematic diegesis’. As he notes, this
distinction – or rather ‘the relative autonomy of the narrative and diegetic principles’ – was
proposed by film theoretician Noël Burch who inferred it in a preliminary sense from, on the one
hand, the difficulty uninitiated audiences have identifying with the diegesis of silent films, but,
on the other hand, the ease with which they cope with the ‘standard narrative codes’ of the same
films (1982, 18). 14 Burch, however, toes the standard line contra Winters that music (of the type
commonly classified as non-diegetic) has an ‘essentially narrative role’ and ‘remains an extra-
diegetic signifier’ (26), and he also crucially suggests that in the ‘iconic hegemony’ of the sound
film, ‘ narrative and diegetic processes tend to fuse , causing … frequent heuristic confusion
between them’ (20; my emphasis). Moreover, where Roland Barthes, according to Burch,
identified ‘the apparent fusion between connotational and denotational levels of signification in
the still photograph’, Burch himself claims that ‘[i]n the talking cinema the (con)fusion between
these two levels is far more complete’ ( ibid ., fn 7). In the light of this, as an alternative to
prising open and maintaining a distinction between screen music as narrator (mostly denied by
Winters) or as narrated, I am more interested in exploring this fusion or collapse of narrative and
diegesis, denotation and connotation, even diegesis and mimesis (and the resultant breakdown of
the dialectic outlined previously), a process in which music is fully implicated, or which music
may even embody.

Aesthetic models from Weimar Germany

Findings from recent archival research I have undertaken into the earliest sound films in Weimar
Republic, Germany, 1928–33, may serve to illustrate some of what I am suggesting here. 15 A
body of well over 500 generically diverse sound films was produced during this period, one of
the most fertile in German cinema’s history, between the decline of the silent era and the
installation of the Third Reich. This was the time not just of notable socio-politically trenchant
works such as Der blaue Engel (1930; dir. von Sternberg, music by Friedrich Hollaender) and
Kuhle Wampe (1931; dir. Dudow; music by Hans Eisler), but also a plethora of adventure films,
dramas, thrillers, historical films, comedies, film noir, romances, literary adaptations, sport films,
musicals, so-called Tonfilmoperetten , documentaries and experimental films. This repertoire is
doubly significant given the complex relationship between the two cinematic powerhouses of the
period, Hollywood and Germany. Detailed discussion will not be possible here of, on the one
hand, cultural and technical influence and cross-fertilization, or, on the other hand, resistance and
protectionism, between the two entities. Suffice it to say that the post-First World War influx of
Amerikanismus into Europe on the back of US economic expansion coincided with Germany’s
development of its domestic film product. Despite increasing American control and infiltration of
the German film industry, as Thomas Saunders writes ‘[a] significant indigenous alternative to
Hollywood survived throughout the Republican era’ (1994, 5) and this was characterized not so
much by works related to expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit but by the range of populist
genres just mentioned. In an ambiguous cultural, economic and personal game of borrowing,
rejection, bans and boycotts, the German film industry, primarily through UFA and the Tobis-
Klangfilm company, took the arrival of sound as an opportunity to compete successfully for
domination of its own markets. However, despite a reputation for earnestness and angst largely
bequeathed by the writings of Siegfried Kracauer ([1947] 2004) and Lotte Eisner [1952] (1969),
it arguably produced just as much kitsch as its American counterpart.
Among feature films, for example, by far the most prevalent genre was the light-hearted
Musikspektakelfilm with its two subgenres, the Operettenfilm (film versions of operettas and comic
operas) and, most common of all, so-called Tonfilmoperetten – that is, original films combining
comedy and performed music in differing proportions. Through their generic dexterity, films of
this last category significantly challenge screen music ontologies. For example, the 1930 film Die
vom Rummelplatz (directed by Carl Lamac; music by Jára Benes) contains virtually no singing
but partially aligns with the film musical aesthetic by including excerpts of a ‘live’ vaudeville
stage performance within the represented story (concerning the rise to fame of a lowly family of
musical entertainers). Although, significantly, the characters in the film do not break into song as
in the standard genre of the musical, they are embedded in:

1 their world of music, since they are entertainers and take part in a stage act;
2 the musical world supplied by the implied filmmaker, since they move, act and gesture (often
theatrically) in time to:
a music, performed in the story, that they are not participating in, and/or that occurs in a
different physical location;
b music that cannot be related to any live or recorded performance in the story;
c music of an ambiguous ontological nature that can be heard by them (and viewers) backstage
during the live performance, but to which they ‘impossibly’ move at times in complete
synchrony, or which seems aesthetically to veer away from the live performed music to
provide an emotive contour for human interaction;
3 by extension, the world of music constructed by the viewer.

Traditional models would describe 2 (c) above as a case of diegetic music shifting into fulfilling
a non-diegetic function, with suspension of disbelief, or perhaps the ‘filmind’, obviating any
need for realistic points of reference, as the music helps to construct the film’s narrative space.
Neumeyer’s recent categorization (2009b), as far as it is possible to ascertain, would take this
music to be (1) narratively plausible, (2) realistic, (3) musically closed, and (4) off-screen, but
arguably would not be able comfortably to situate it as diegetic or non-diegetic. These
descriptions do not do justice to the level of pervasive ‘musicalization’ in evidence here in a
screen work that cannot securely be categorized as a ‘film musical’. Backstage romance and
intrigue become the ‘front-of-stage’ performance by means of the relatively seamless continuity
and ebb and flow of off-screen stage music. At one point, for example, the troupe exit the stage
after a performance, and the continuation of the music (perhaps into what Neumeyer calls a
‘quasi-background “limbo”’; 2009b, 51), as well as the ongoing physical interaction of the
characters with it backstage, together with a cutaway to stage hands, reinforce the sense that the
boundary between backstage and onstage is dissolved; and, if all the world is a stage, then
poietically derived acts of narration, aesthesically received narrated acts, denotation and
connotation, diegesis (telling) and mimesis (showing) tend to fold into one another to form a
musicalized über -diegetic totality. 16
That this distinctive aesthetic was not confined to Musikspektakelfilme is demonstrated in the
better known drama Abschied (1930), the first UFA-made sound film. A serious, slice-of-life film,
Abschied boasts an impressive line-up of co-creators: director Robert Siodmak, scriptwriter
Emeric Pressburger, cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, music by Erwin Bootz. The story, set in
a Berlin ‘hostel for homeless bourgeois people’, concerns the misunderstanding between a young
couple (Peter and Hella) that over the course of one evening leads them unnecessarily to part
company. Knitting the whole series of events together is the intermittent piano music (a mixture
of popular dances, the poignant title song and some pre-existent music), performed, sometimes
visibly, by another resident of the hostel played by Erwin Bootz, the composer of the original
music. After the opening credits (during which the title song is heard), the premise is set up very
early and obviously in the film that its piano music is ‘diegetically’ legitimated through visible
performance. However, on many subsequent occasions this music apparently is narratively
motivated in ways that counter its ‘realistic’ basis, and this ontological tension generates a highly
ambiguous and expressive musicalized screen aesthetic. At times the piano (being played
elsewhere in the building) ‘impossibly’ responds to hesitant looks and pregnant pauses in
dialogue at moments of melancholy between the two main characters (Peter is about to leave to
take up a job in another city). Elsewhere it helpfully ‘drops out’ during phone calls, or Hella
‘impossibly’ starts singing to it at exactly the moment it reappears. In Neumeyer’s terms it might
be said of this last case that she could be singing to off-screen diegetic music as ‘onscreen non-
diegetic music’, in ‘an expression of [her] subjectivity’, perhaps not even knowing that she is
performing (2009b, 46). However, it might be much easier for us to accept that, suspending the
‘rules’ of a normative realism, and accepting a form of musicalized diegesis that circumvents
diegetic legitimation and aligns in part with the film-musical aesthetic, the Hella character
somehow just joins in naturally and fully consciously with the diegetic piano playing because
this is the magical fictional world that such musicalization engenders.
Moments of affection are sometimes directed by changes in musical style or sound level, as
when the couple begin to dance a slow waltz to the title music, which seamlessly emerges, now
much louder, from previous popular dance music heard very faintly. Right on cue, the piano
music ends at an awkward moment in the conversation when Peter asks Hella if she has been
unfaithful to him, and the dance ceases. At one point Peter’s frustration and suspicion are
musicalized in the pianist’s obsessive practising of successively shorter parts of the Animato
section from the opening movement, ‘Preambule’, of Schumann’s Carnaval Op. 9 (1834–5) – a
work which, rather like the hostel, is populated by a ‘cast’ of imaginary characters mediated
through music, and, in relation to the couple, calls upon the trope of the masked ball where
hidden, secret or mistaken identities are the order of the day. The ever-tightening spiral of the
Schumann excerpt finishes at exactly the moment when Peter finds what he wrongly takes to be
conclusive incriminating evidence of Hella’s infidelity, the name and address of another man
hidden in a book. After Peter has left the hostel, Hella eventually at the end of the film finds the
engagement ring he was going to give her which bears the engraving: ‘Wear it always; forget me
never’, whereupon a slow track around the now-empty room begins, and the principal theme
returns now augmented by strings and voice, which sings ‘Everything in life ends like a song,
fades and flies away when you say farewell’. This turn to what would traditionally be termed
non-diegetic underscore for the first and only time in the film does several things: it adheres to
the convention of supplying ‘outro’ music at the end of a film; it expressively and sonically
enhances the principal musical theme for greater emotional impact and audience involvement; it
fuses or collapses narrating and narrated modes, telling and showing, ‘knowing about’ and
‘being there’ to allow the deepest audience immersion in the physical and mental space of the
film world; and it lends a clinching coherence to the entire integrating musical fabric of the film,
an aestheticized state intimated in the evocative song lyric. The music that has been organically
permeating through the walls of the hostel and temporally through the scenes of the film (via the
pianist both as character and as the film’s real-world composer) as an aesthetic embodiment of
the mutual collapse of narrative (space) and diegesis, is now revealed to have pervaded, even
incarnated the entire inner consciousness of the character Hella all along: to have been the
‘acoustics of her soul’. Abschied ’s aesthetic contests the Gorbman protocol since its music
becomes the film’s fictional space of integrated fantasy in such a way as to be inseparable both
from any narrating mechanism and from what is narrated. It takes on the imaginative character
and function of their conjoined identity.

An aesthetics of psychosis
To an extent, my thinking here aligns with recent investigations of screen music ontology in the
context of philosophical analysis and/or more wide-ranging repertoire. Among many other
things, these investigations have pointed out the misapplication to film of the original Greek term
‘diegesis’ (the relating of a story in the teller’s own voice), when ‘mimesis’ (the acting out of a
story) is more appropriate (see Taylor 2007 and Yacavone 2012). Winters talks of characters in
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946; dir. William Wyler, music by Hugo Friedhofer) ‘moving not
just through a narrative space, but a musicalised narrative space’ (2012, 48). Yacavone posits for
screen works an ‘aesthetic world-space’ that is ‘beyond narrative’ (2012, 35), 17 and, using the
model of the Klein bottle to build on Winters’s argument, Nick Davis holds that ‘it is distinctly
unhelpful to treat “story” and “discourse” as if they were formally separable for purposes of
analysis’; that in conjunction with other screen elements, music ‘becomes simultaneously “story”
and “discourse”’ and is thus able to ‘generate narrativity by forming part of narrative’s
characteristic troping without being, qua music, narrating action’ (2012, 14, 10, 18). Alessandro
Cecchi reminds us of the subjectively mediated nature of both narration and diegesis, the latter
all the more so because it is ‘the result of a (subjective) act of inference based on a construction
which has itself been mediated from a subjective viewpoint’ (2010, 5). These levels of mediation
render it impossible to distinguish at an ontological level between either the purportedly
‘objective’ contents and ‘subjective modalities of the narration’ (ibid ., 4), or the diegetic and
non-diegetic, including the case of music whose function remains ‘broadly independent of its
topology’ (ibid ., 5), which at best remains peripheral to the aesthetic experience of audio-visual
media.
While it is true, as Winters points out, that it would be unreasonable to consider screen music
as ‘the creator of all the narrative we experience’ if this idea is used as an explanation for how it
might form ‘an extra-diegetic layer of narration’ or how it might ‘narrate the events of the
diegesis’ (2012, 43), this does not preclude music from having the extremely powerful capacity
to usurp, subsume or embody the very dissolution of the dialectic previously outlined. To talk of
an entirely musical or musicalized diegesis might nevertheless be a step too far (even in the genre
of the screen musical, though perhaps not in some experimental contexts) since for one thing it
conjures up a late-Wagnerian operatic aesthetic of only partial applicability to screen works, and
is exclusive to the point of risking aesthetic blindness. In any case, it is an inaccurate way of
describing the process, for which the solidity of concepts and their dialectic frame have become
perilously insecure. Though addressing screen sound rather than music specifically, James
Buhler suggests:

A profound uncertainty follows from the attempt to substitute the continuity of the soundtrack,
which has no formal limit, for the image as the ground of diegetic representation. In many
films today, sound takes the place of the establishing shot, and it loses the promise of
plenitude that had always been the opening of desire marked by the frame edge.
(Buhler 2014, 411)

Citing Žižek, Buhler perceives a sense of deep psychological disturbance in this:

The soundtrack gives us the basic perspective, the ‘map’ of the situation, and guarantees its
continuity, while the images are reduced to isolated fragments that float freely in the universal
medium of the sound aquarium. It would be difficult to invent a better metaphor for psychosis
… we have here the ‘aquarium’ of the real surrounding isolated islands of the symbolic.
(Žižek 1991, 40, cited in Buhler 2014, 411)

However, the world of screen works (including the documentary genre and especially the
‘reality TV’ genre) has always been predominantly one of a fantastic, magical detachment from
reality. In this sense, then, ‘psychosis’ seems a perfectly apt term for a medium which does not
strictly obey the rules of logic or of physical time and space, despite – or perhaps because of –
the emergence of classic continuity editing. Far from this being a new phenomenon, however, I
suggest that it is as old as the screen medium itself, and something that we as viewers naturally
accept. If, for Žižek, screen sound by the 1990s had become the ‘“aquarium” of the real’ in
which symbolic images float as isolated fragments, in the silent film era the presence of live
musical accompaniment, coupled with that musical repertoire’s denotational-connotational
malleability, had already both wedded the fictional with the real, and at the same time
highlighted their ontological separation: the ‘real’ of the ‘unreal’ screen images is less accessible
than the ‘unreal’ of the ‘real’ music. If there was any historical and aesthetic continuity between
the silent and sound eras, then I suggest it lay somewhere within this perceptual quandary of yet
further mutually collapsing tendencies.
Although I took two little-known early European examples to illustrate my thinking, the
mutual influence of American and German filmmakers in the vital formative years of the
medium and beyond, is a topic worthy of more detailed examination. 18 I contend also that even
the most commercial of mainstream Hollywood repertoire partakes of the same kind of ‘mass-
psychotic’, dialectic-overcoming aesthetic. To take one example: the opening of the first Star
Wars film (1977; dir. George Lucas, music by John Williams), perhaps unusually has no credit
sequence beyond the two logos of ‘20th Century Fox’ and ‘Lucasfilm’. 19 There is thus minimal
framing of the screen work. The following intertitle ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away
…’ is an unproblematic narrating act, lying exterior to the world of the film as story, but inside
the film as created work. The film title and scrolling explanatory text receding into the distant
black of space appear approximately two seconds later together with Williams’s music. It is
arguable that without the stirring score, this textual element could also be taken as an exterior
narrating device (although it also has strong connotational content). 20 In the final moments of its
disappearance and for a further ten seconds, overwhelmingly black screen is gradually populated
by faint stars before the first substantial image (of a small planet) appears, the most obvious
visual signal of the mimetic beginning of the films’ story. However, I would claim that the
presence of music throughout this passage – and music that is initially replete with militaristic,
heroic, emotively striving and wild-west-pioneering allusions 21 – has the effect of shifting the
mimetic beginning of the film’s story earlier to the appearance of the title ‘Star Wars’ on screen.
It is from this point that perception of a work being narrated is strongly encouraged to dissolve
into a much less resistant identification with, and immersion in, an unfolding ‘performed’ story
that for the time being is predominantly musical. The boundaries between the film as work and
as story, between diegesis and mimesis, and between narrating and the narrated are collapsing
through the presence of music that would traditionally be described as separate from the diegesis,
and by implication an exterior narrative voice, but which adopts a mimetic function. If one
accepts Aristotle’s classification of diegesis as a subset of the overarching mode of poetic
creation – mimesis – then here the music as ‘showing’ or ‘enacting’ completely overwhelms the
scrolling text as ‘telling’ and dominates the minimal visual content emerging at the end of this as
well. In this paradoxical sense, while not narrating, it nevertheless creates or embodies narrative.
Although the genetically secondary status of the music in relation to the image in the process of
production might elicit corresponding kinds of aesthetic evaluation, I maintain that the music
assumes primacy here as a determining screen agent both expressively and structurally: during
the period of primarily black screen the downward semitonal shift from the diatonic major home
key to minor and to unstable chromatic decoration, coupled with the thinning of orchestral
texture to high-tessitura sonorities in woodwind and celeste, and the less marked metrical
identity, serve to blend mimesis with diegesis (if not to subsume the latter) by lending
expectancy to our interpretative experience of the neutral void of distant space and by opening
out a structural space within which the film’s first substantial visual element appears. Such a
‘katabasis’, or downward trajectory of intensity, is common in, for example, the symphonic
music of Mahler where it often signals a structural or expressive turning point. 22 In these two
minutes of screen time at the opening of an audio-visual experience that in many ways
epitomized a historical turning point in the socio-cultural relationship between viewer and sound
film spectacle, the binary oppositions of (1) music’s inevitable separation from/essential
implication in screen diegeses, (2) its non-narrational/narratively constructive function, and (3)
its responsive/directive activity, are dissipated, and continue to be so to varying degrees
throughout the film.
We live in an increasingly musicalized screen world as Kassabian explores in her diagnosis of
the ‘end of diegesis as we know it’ (2013). In current hyper-mediatized ipod, music-video and
public as well as online environments, either by choice or imposition, non-musical portions of
human existence are becoming gradually scarcer. Whether this is a symptom of the final
psychotic, dialectic collapse (between screen worlds and real worlds) or whether it is just another
case of life imitating art for all our collective enrichment, remains to be seen and heard.

Notes
1 A field variously referred to as film/screen music (studies), film/screen musicology, studies of music (sound) and the moving
image, musical multi-media, or the audio-visual. In this discussion I will generally use the terms screen work or screen music
 for the object of study, and screen studies or screen music studies/screen music scholarship for the practice of this study.
2 This classification, derived by Gorbman from the 1950s/1960s narrative theory of Gérard Genette and film theory of Étienne
Souriau, divides screen music into that which can be heard by the characters within the represented scenario (diegetic) and
that which cannot (non- or extra-diegetic). A third category, meta-diegetic, was adapted by Gorbman to label music that
seems to be projected by the inner psychological state of a character who thus ‘“takes over” part of the film’s narration’
(Gorbman 1987, 23). The term meta-diegetic has since been applied more widely to any diegetic music that can only be heard
in the imagination of one character in the scenario.
3 David Neumeyer has usefully explored the interaction between production process technology and theoretical understanding
of film music (Neumeyer 1997 and 2009b).
4 See Winters 2010, 225 for a summary of this critique, to which should be added Neumeyer 1997, 2009b; Cecchi 2010; Davis
2012; Winters 2012; Yacavone 2012.
5 See, for example, Kalinak 1992, Burt 1994, Lack 1997, Timm 1998, Hickman 2006 and Kalinak 2010. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, authors of theoretical books on screen music that pre-date Gorbman, or of practice-based/industry-led guides
from any era, do not use the terms diegetic and non-diegetic (see, for example, Hagen 1971, Bazelon 1975, Evans 1975,
Prendergast 1977, Sonnenschein 2001). Hagen’s tripartite formulation of source music, source scoring and pure dramatic
scoring is among the most nuanced of categorizations in the industry sector (1971, 190–206), and was, in fact, taken up by
Annahid Kassabian in her critique of the diegetic/non-diegetic binary (2001, 42–9).
6 There is disagreement about the latter, even in discussions of silent-era music. For Rick Altman, the producers of sound or
music operate ‘implicitly within the space implied by the image’, sound is not ‘a rhetorical addition to the image’ but ‘a form
of ventriloquism’ (Altman 2004, 92 (original emphasis); see also 370). Donnelly by contrast suggests that ‘the music of silent
cinema … was … predominantly “non-diegetic”: emanating from outside the world constructed by the film, as if appearing
from heaven’ (2001, 6).
7 The reverse is also acknowledged but regarded as ‘today largely hypothetical’ (Adorno and Eisler [1947] 1994, 70).
8 It was this, according to Camper, that inspired experimental film maker Stan Brakhage to make silent films, ‘because sound
tends to dominate image’ (1985, 378)
9 Citing Federico Fellini, Fellini on Fellini (New York: Dalacorte, 1976), from Nat Shapiro (ed.), An Encyclopedia of
Quotations about Music (New York: Doubleday, 1978), p. 319.
10 I am very grateful to James Buhler for allowing me access to pre-publication versions of parts of this volume.
11 Duelle has a team of composers: Jean Cohen-Solal (composer: effect music), Robert Cohen-Solal (composer: effect music),
André Dauchy (composer: improvised music (as Dauchy), Roger Fugen (composer: improvised music), Daniel Ponsard
(composer: effect music) and Jean Wiener (composer: improvised music) Noroît also has a team of composers: Original
Music is credited to Jean Cohen-Solal, Robert Cohen-Solal and Daniel Ponsard.
12 A related taxonomy had been earlier proposed in Percheron and Butzel 1980, while extensions, glosses and differing
perspectives on this approach have been subsequently offered in Neumeyer 2009a, 2009b and Smith 2009.
13 This distinction is re-emphasized by Winters in a more recent article, of which it forms the basic premise (Winters 2012).
14 The deciding factor for Burch was the absence of lip-synch sound in the silent era.
15 I am grateful to the British Academy and DAAD for funding three research visits to the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, and the
Friedrich Murnau Stiftung in Wiesbaden during 2013.
16 In technological terms, Neumeyer notes that ‘before 1932, when post-production re-recording was first generally used,
background music was more likely to be employed in a musical than in a dramatic feature’ (2009b, 43–44), quoting Kathryn
Kalinak’s adherence to established nomenclature: ‘In The Love Parade (1929), for instance, diegetic music in the production
numbers spills over as nondiegetic music for ensuing scenes’ (Kalinak 1992, 68). The precarious generic affiliation of
German Tonfilmoperetten at this time, of which Die vom Rummelplatz is a particularly challenging example, does not
necessarily invalidate, but certainly complicates these observations. For example, outside of any performed music in the film,
simple acts such as knocking on an office door, are integrated rhythmically with music. I would argue that the musically
dominated aesthetic context clearly favours this mode of understanding over the theoretically more conventional one in which
the music would be described as having been synchronized to the image/action.
17 Though Yacavone’s model of nested phenomenological ‘wholes’ existing as ‘parts’ within that film world is at best unclear.
His aim, with regard to ‘the represented, fictional world of a film’, contra Winters, is to ‘reconfirm its distinct denoted
character, and … fully recognise and chart, to the extent possible, the irreducible symbolic, aesthetic, and phenomenological
whole within which this represented world of characters and their lives and stories (together with the represented space and
time as a setting for these) is itself contained as but one part of a film’s presentation’ (2012, 36).
18 Existing, primarily historical, studies in this area include Erich Angermann, ‘Die USA in den “Goldenen Zwanziger Jahren”’,
in George Eckert and Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf (eds), Deutschland und die USA, 1918–1933 , Braunschweig: Albert Limbach,
1968, 53–64; Douglas Gomery, ‘Economic Struggle and Hollywood Imperialism: Europe Converts to Sound’ in Altman
1980, 80–93; Eric Rentschler, ‘How American is It? The U.S. as Image and Imaginary in German Film’, German Quarterly
54 (1984), 603–620; Anton Kaes, ‘Mass Culture and Modernity: Notes Toward a Social History of Early American and
German Cinema’, in Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (eds), America and the Germans , Philadelphia, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1985, 317–31; Frank Trommler, ‘The Rise and Fall of Americanism in Germany’, in Trommler and
McVeigh, 332–42; Victoria de Grazia, ‘Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to European Cinemas,
 1920–1960’, Journal of Modern History 61 (1989), 53–87; Jan-Christopher Horak, ‘Rin-Tin-Tin erobert Berlin oder
Amerikanische Filminteressen in Weimar’, in Walter Schatzberg and Uli Jung (eds), Filmkultur zur Zeit der Weimarer
Republik , Munich: Saur, 1992, pp. 255–70; Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign. The North Atlantic Movie Trade,
1920–1950 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Thomas Saunders, ‘Comedy as Redemption: American Slapstick
in Weimar Culture’, Journal of European Studies 17 (1987), 253–77; Saunders 1994; and the essays in Laurence Kardish
(ed.) Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares , New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010.
19 Given the narrative/diegetic ambiguity of opening and closing screen title sequences, investigating why they almost
invariably involve music would seem an important project. Such sequences are beginning to be explored further in the
literature, for example, Stanitzek 2009, Davison 2013a and 2013b, Powrie and Heldt forthcoming.
20 Although it imparts information (however negligible), the denotation of the text is complemented by connotational content
through its movement, its perspective, and its cultural allusions to adventure serials of many types from a bygone era.
21 For the last of these one could point to the distinctive harmonic progression at the end of the first phrase – tonic – flattened
7th – dominant – tonic – (itself a collapsing in of a modal/diatonic harmonic dialectic) that can be found in various earlier
scorings of cinematic and TV Westerns, for example Jerome Moss’s theme from The Big Country (1958), Harry Sukman’s
theme to the TV series The High Chaparral (1967–71; this theme extends the progression with intervening chords on the
flattened 3rd and flattened 2nd before the perfect cadence), and Williams’s own score for The Cowboys (1972) which features
related tonic – subdominant minor — tonic, and flattened 6th –flattened 7th – tonic progressions. Interestingly, Williams and
Sukman shared the scoring for the TV spin-off series which aired in 1974.
22 See Adorno [1960] 1992, 45, where such episodes are described as ‘collapsing passages’, and Schmierer 2005 for application
of the term katabasis in a discussion of the first movement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde .

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 12
Irony
Julian Johnson

Introduction: how can music be ironic?

Since music says nothing definite, as philosophers from Kant to Kivy have argued, it surely
does not have the capacity for the semantic double-take of irony – to say one thing while
meaning another. Such sophisticated play would presume a precision of denotative meaning
that, philosophers tell us, music simply does not possess. But consider a sad waltz – such as
Chopin’s Waltz in A minor, Op. 34, No. 2, whose opening inverts the usual associations of
the waltz by turning its collective and up-beat nature into something solitary and downcast.
Or take a piece like ‘The Royal March’ from Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat , displaying the
musical signs of a grand ceremonial march but undermined by its threadbare instrumentation
for seven instruments and its constant play with the pattern of metrical accents. In both
examples, the expected sense of the music is inverted by presenting the familiar conventions
of a genre (waltz, march) but conspicuously deformed. A familiar example of the same
technique can readily be found in the horror film cliché in which the innocence of a child’s
song jars against a situation of malign threat. The powerful expressive effect arises from the
cognitive dissonance of normative meaning in a non-normative context. 1
While literary irony has a long history stretching back to ancient sources like Longinus
and Socrates, the idea of musical irony is not obviously significant either to composers or
the aesthetics of music until the latter part of the eighteenth century. Only with the
development of the idea of instrumental music as a kind of wordless language did music
come to be thought of as possessing the discursive and semantic properties that make irony
possible. The use of irony in music since has certainly had much to do with the aesthetic
preferences and disposition of individual composers: Mahler’s music is readily associated
with an ironic voice, but Bruckner’s hardly ever; Stravinsky’s music often foregrounds the
idea, while Webern avoids it completely. However, if a composer’s use of irony is partly a
question of individual character and background, it is also a product of the cultural
positioning of different musical repertoires and includes a strong historical dimension. On
the whole, irony tends to be precluded by all-encompassing belief systems, which may be
religious (as in the Catholicism of Bruckner, Webern or Messiaen) but elsewhere is simply a
faith in the adequacy of musical language to fulfil its presumed purpose (as the expression of
emotion, for example, or the representation of a dramatic situation, or the working out of a
formal and technical idea, such as a fugue). By contrast, irony is generally found in music
that adopts a position of cultural or self-critical questioning – as in Mahler, Schoenberg,
Prokofiev or Shostakovich. It tends to arise from a self-awareness of the gap between
musical language and the task to which it aspires – as in the bitter irony of Pierrot’s attempts
at self-expression in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire .
One position does not preclude the other; musical irony is often found in close proximity
with music that exhibits no ironic deformations. Mahler provides powerful examples of this,
not only juxtaposing ironic and non-ironic movements (like the Rondo Burleske and the
Adagio Finale of the Ninth Symphony), but also placing apparently sincere and ironic
versions of the same material side by side within a single movement. In the Rondo Burleske ,
for example, the hectic tempo and succession of diverse materials is interrupted by a slow,
expressive theme that anticipates the Finale ( Musical Example 12.1a ). Almost
immediately, the apparently authentic expression implied by the trumpet version (m. 352),
taken up ‘with greater expression’ by the violins (m. 394), is parodied by a deformed
version in the clarinets, given at double the speed, in raucous tone, and with the last two
intervals of the original (a falling fourth and ascending octave) painfully stretched to a
diminished fifth and a major ninth ( Musical Example 12.1b ).

Musical Example 12.1a Mahler, Symphony No. 9, third movement,

mm. 352–5 (trumpets)

Musical Example 12.1b Mahler, Symphony No. 9, third movement,

mm. 444–5 (clarinets)

This chapter explores the idea of musical irony as a historical phenomenon, rather than
merely a matter of individual composers’ taste. In doing so, it suggests that irony might be
understood as part of the broader musical modernity of the post-Enlightenment age,
stretching from the eighteenth century to the present. Notwithstanding the fact that many
significant composers had little interest in irony, this longer view shows irony to be not just
a symptom of musical modernity but also a key device through which music expresses a
critical awareness of its own conventions and aesthetic status; as Lawrence Kramer suggests,
in modernity ‘nothing can be read without irony, or at least the possibility of irony’ (Kramer
2011, 231). That said, compared to the numerous explorations of irony in literature, there are
remarkably few studies devoted to musical irony; of those there are, almost all are written in
relation to individual composers. 2 Perhaps the lack of any overview tells its own story: until
quite recently, it seems, discourse about music has been unwilling, to the point of denial, to
treat music as anything less than a form of sincere, authentic and direct expression. Yet
music itself, from Mozart to Mahler, Schumann to Stravinsky, and Haydn to Ligeti, has
proposed a far greater degree of self-critical and reflective awareness of its own expressive
capacities. It is this history of musical self-reflection, highlighted in musical irony, which
forms the focus of the rest of this chapter.

Music as language: irony in the Classical style

The first great musical ironist was undoubtedly Joseph Haydn. During his own lifetime he
was compared to the author Laurence Sterne, whose novel The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen (1759–67) was one of the key texts of literary irony in the
eighteenth century. Jean Paul Richter singles out Haydn as an example of musical irony in
his Vorschule der Ästhetik (1804):

something similar to the audacity of annihilating humor, an expression of scorn for the
world, can be perceived in a good deal of music, like that of Haydn, which destroys entire
tonal sequences by introducing an extraneous key and storms alternately between
pianissimo and fortissimo, presto and andante.
(Richter [1804] 1973, 93)

Today, we might not hear Haydn as expressing ‘scorn for the world’ but commentators have
often remarked on the capacity of Haydn’s music to subvert listeners’ expectations, playing
with the possibilities of sudden changes of musical direction in ways generally heard as
humorous. This became possible in Viennese Classicism because of its imitation of the
grammatical and rhetorical patterns of language, an idea explored in eighteenth-century
music theory as well as musical composition. 3 By establishing a sense of musical grammar
and syntax that implied a logic akin to that of language, composers opened up rich
possibilities for a playful subversion of that logic. It was thus the outward predictability of
conventional procedures in the Classical style that enabled its subtle and sophisticated level
of discursive play.
More recently, a number of scholars have drawn attention to this dimension of Classical
instrumental music. For Daniel Chua, irony ‘is the distinguishing feature’ of the Classical
style, exemplified in the music of Haydn whose forms ‘explore an ironic gap in their
constant preoccupation with their own dislocated structures’ (Chua 1999, 209–10). Mark
Evan Bonds locates the link between Haydn and literary irony in the late eighteenth century
in the way that ‘art-works overtly call attention to their own techniques of artifice’ (Bonds
1991a, 68). Scott Burnham similarly suggests that Laurence Sterne’s meta-novel finds a
parallel in Haydn’s meta-music; both, he comments, ‘foster an ironic sense of aesthetic
detachment’ (Burnham 2005, 74). Burnham’s analysis of Haydn’s musical humour draws
out specific techniques by which this is achieved – exaggeration, parody, incongruity,
discontinuity, and musical ‘punch lines’ at points of return and endings. As Gretchen
Wheelock underlines, such strategies not only depend upon a knowing audience, but
actively draw the listener in ‘as highly self-conscious participants in a process of completing
the jest’ (Wheelock 1992, 13). 4 In Burnham’s words, Haydn’s ironic humour requires the
listener:

to be caught out and then brought back inside, to move from being fooled to being
informed, from being manipulated to being aware of being manipulated, from enacted
object to understanding subject – this shift in perspective forces a sudden recognition of
consciousness. And this brief shock of recognition is not a vertiginous glimpse into a
solipsistic abyss but rather a surging confirmation of the self-transcending diversion of
self-consciousness.
(Burnham 2005, 75 )

In demanding the listener’s interaction in this way, Haydn thus embodies something of
the alternating flow of thought and counter-thought by which Friedrich Schlegel
characterized the new ironic literature of his time (Behler 1990, 83). These might seem like
grand claims to make of the often light-hearted humour of works like Haydn’s Op. 33
Quartets (1781), nicknamed gli scherzi on account of the Minuet movements being recast as
scherzi (literally, jokes). For the generation writing on art and literature around 1800,
however, the category of the ernster Scherz (the serious joke) was central to the broader idea
of ‘Romantic irony’, most frequently associated with early romantic literature, in the works
of Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Schlegel, Jean Paul Richter and E. T. A. Hoffmann. The same
attitude of mind can be found in Classical music of the same period – and, indeed, in
musical techniques that closely parallel literary ones. Haydn’s play with musical
conventions, as later with the young Beethoven, embodies the attitude of Romantic irony by
foregrounding the self-consciousness of the creative subject (not just the composer, but also
the performer and the listener).
Romantic irony is more than simply ‘humour’, as Rey Longyear insists in distinguishing
between the ‘playfulness’ of Haydn and the Romantic irony of Beethoven. The latter, he
suggests, is found in the arresting juxtaposition of the poetic and the prosaic, as between the
Adagio movement of the Violin Sonata, Op. 96 and the Scherzo that follows it, or the
similar contrast between the third and fourth of the Bagatelles, Op. 126 (Longyear 1970,
655). The aesthetic intention in Beethoven’s musical irony, Longyear argues, is to expose
music’s own artifice, to reveal the illusion of the aesthetic construction. He offers as an
example the Finale of Beethoven’s Quartet in F minor, Op. 95. This was dubbed by the
composer as a ‘Quartetto serioso’ yet, in the coda of the Finale, its high seriousness is
undermined by a turn to the musical comedy normally associated with opera buffa . The
light-hearted Allegro ending, Longyear suggests, ‘exemplifies many of the other
characteristics of romantic irony which Schlegel described: paradox, self-annihilation,
parody, eternal agility, and the appearance of the fortuitous and unusual’ (Longyear 1970,
649). 5 The ironic turn of Classical music, though it may provoke no more than a wry smile
from the informed listener, is thus also an affirmation of self-consciousness; it draws the
listener into the self-contained world of the musical work, while simultaneously
acknowledging itself as a fictive activity, a work of pure artifice and artful construction. The
sudden digressions, interruptions, non sequiturs and inappropriate exaggerations exhibited in
musical humour are thus the musical corollaries of the literary devices of Romantic irony,
summarized by Lloyd Bishop as a ‘frequent recourse to oxymoron, paradox, parabasis,
parataxis, montage, or other staccato effects such as sudden changes of mood, theme or
stylistic register’ (Bishop 1989, 17). They constitute a musical version of what happens
when an actor steps ‘out of character’ by moving towards the audience to comment on the
play of which he is part.
This is exactly what Friedrich Schlegel meant when he described irony as ‘a permanent
parabasis ’ (Schlegel 1963, 85) a term that refers to the moment, in ancient Greek drama,
when an actor steps across the threshold that separates the theatrical space to communicate
directly with the audience. In works of romantic literature it is most frequently found in
novels in which characters comment upon the progress of the narrative or on their own
fictional status. Richter, in the Vorschule , points both to Tieck’s Prinz Zerbino and also to
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy . In the latter, he says, the author ‘several times speaks lengthily
and reflectively about certain incidents, until in the end, he concludes: “all the same, ’tis not
a word of it true”’ (Richter [1804] 1973, 93), 6 a sentiment that the ending of Beethoven’s F
minor Quartet, Op. 95 (discussed above), might be heard to parallel. The serious business of
humour (the ernster Scherz ) was thus to do with foregrounding the gap between the
mundane world of the particular characters and their story and a sense of a far broader
perspective. Humour was a tool for dissolving the finite boundaries of the everyday world of
objects in order to project a sense of infinitude, exactly the sense of a ‘constant alternation of
self-creation and self-destruction’ found in the philosophy of Schlegel (Behler 1990, 84).
This idea of parabasis in music can be seen most immediately in opera buffa , the comedy
of which is founded upon a kind of complicity between the audience and key characters on
stage, at the expense of those whose folly will be exposed. Both Schlegel and Richter talk
about irony in terms of a ‘transcendental buffoonery’ and ‘Italian buffoonery’, referencing
the critical capacity of the Italian commedia dell’arte that also informs the origins of opera
buffa . Consider Mozart’s Don Giovanni , an opera in which parabasis is deployed to puncture
the fiction of the drama observed by the audience, but also as part of the sudden and
uncomfortable turns in this opera between its dark and serious subject matter and the light-
hearted comedy of its telling. In the final scene of the opera, as the Don awaits his
mysterious dinner guest, the on-stage band plays contemporary operatic hits as a comic nod
to the audience that underlines the fictive and theatrical nature of the tale they are watching.
As the band plays an excerpt from Mozart’s own Le nozze di Figaro , Leporello’s wry
comment ‘I know this one rather too well’ is typical of the way he constantly bridges the gap
between stage and audience. It provides one example among many of how opera buffa ,
filtered through writers like Marivaux, Goldoni and Gozzi, took from commedia dell’arte a
kind of critical anti-naturalism that opposed the otherwise generally mundane quality of its
subject matter.
This critical anti-naturalism is precisely why a fascination with the ironic stance of opera
buffa resurfaces so powerfully in the early twentieth century and why Mozart’s Così fan tutte
, vilified, ignored or rewritten for much of the nineteenth century, fascinated the twentieth
century because of its ‘modern’ tendencies to break its own narrative frame, decontextualize
its own conventions and insist that identity is performed not given (see Hunter 1999, 45).
However, the real test of the possibility of musical irony is found in instrumental music. As
Charles Rosen and others have shown, the development of the Viennese Classical style was
indebted to the influence of opera buffa , absorbing into the symphony, string quartet and
sonata not only the clarity and pacing of comic opera, but also clear dramatic types and
modes of interaction. Haydn’s Op. 33 Quartets, Rosen underlines, were written at the end of
a decade that Haydn had spent supervising comic opera productions at Esterháza. Mozart’s
new set of quartets, written between 1782 and 1785 and dedicated to Haydn, were composed
while he waited for his first opera buffa libretto from Da Ponte. Mozart’s set provides an
excellent and sophisticated example of how irony can work in Classical instrumental music.
Published in 1785, these six quartets mark a move from the innocence of the Enlightenment
logic of Mozart’s earlier music to the far more contradictory world of Romantic irony. The
hallmark of this new style is the way in which Mozart creates a disjunction between the
simplicity of his chosen material and the sophistication of its treatment; nowhere is this
clearer than in the humble Minuet. In Mozart’s ‘Haydn Quartets’, this most conventional of
genres is constantly undercut by musical materials that become too complex – harmonically,
rhythmically, contrapuntally and emotionally.
The Minuet of the A major quartet, K. 464, provides a good example and is worth
examining closely ( Musical Example 12.2 ). Ostensibly a short and simple little movement,
its combination of sparse, fragmented textures and unprepared tonal juxtapositions produce
music of solitary introspection rather than the innocent collective dance implied by the
genre. The harmonic twists are highly subtle. The modulation to the dominant in m. 13 is
made by a substitution chord (the sudden C major triad, mm. 11–12) approaching the
dominant key by means of its flat submediant. The preparation for the strong cadence at the
end of the first section of the Minuet is diverted by a further substitution, so what should be
a simple IV–V six–four/five–three preparation in m. 23 leads instead, via the B in the bass,
to C minor in m. 24. In the second half of the Minuet the return of the tonic and main theme
(m. 55) is almost instantly derailed by the harmonic sequence beginning in m. 59. The
highly chromatic bass line (given by cello and viola in parallel octaves) leads to a repeated
diminished 7th chord, left hanging in the air (mm. 63–4), before the quiet resumption of the
tonic is picked up in m. 65. The aftermath of the diminished 7th chord still echoes in the
substitution chord in m. 69.
 Musical Example 12.2 Mozart, String Quartet in A major, K. 464,
Minuet, mm. 55–72

These harmonic twists, too complex for the simple Minuet, are heard alongside an
emphasis on the simple repeated crotchet figure, first heard in mm. 5–8, which uses an
element of repetition central to the genre but exaggerates it until it sounds more like a fugal
exercise. The result is something that appears to present the elements of an innocuous
Minuet but implies something different by means of their treatment. What should be festive
music becomes oddly melancholic, introverted and subdued; motivic economy, outwardly
the vehicle of creative strength, here becomes rather obsessive and inward. Heard in such a
way, this simple Minuet by Mozart anticipates a modernist inversion of generic signification
that connects this music to Mahler .
Elsewhere, Mozart presents Minuets and Trios where the latter are not just contrasting but
radically dissociated from their Minuets. In the D minor Quartet, K. 421, for example, the
Minuet presents agitated contrapuntal music in D minor, shot through with sliding
chromaticism and an obsessive use of a dotted rhythm, quite at odds with the simplicity of
the genre. However, the Trio that follows in the subdominant major, utterly diatonic and
monodic, is breathtakingly naive. As if to underline its complete inversion of the world
hitherto presented, it reverses the little dotted-note figure of the Minuet. Something similar
can be heard in Mozart’s later String Quintets. In the G minor Quintet, K. 516, for example,
the wistful simplicity of the Trio seems to present the classical ideal as something lost,
sandwiched between the alienated Minuet and its repeat, and in the D major Quintet, K. 593,
the Trio contrasts so strongly that it sounds like a piece of theatrical make-believe, its ultra-
high 1st violin and pizzicato accompaniment drawing attention to its own artificiality.
Mozart’s late chamber music anticipates Stravinsky in the melancholy of its ironic beauty
(the term is Scott Burnham’s, 1994). Self-aware of its own fictitiousness, it seems to
acknowledge that the self appears only where it is performed in language and that, outside
such moments of social performance, the subject becomes inaudible, even to itself. At the
same time, however, it counters this acknowledgement with nostalgia for an identity that
might still lie outside of such language games. This music thus recurrently stages a kind of
overstepping of itself through elaboration that is too rich for the material and the form; by
breaking free from the conventional space in which it must move, the expressive voice
necessarily alienates itself. Irony is thus its default position, or else it lies; therein lies the
modernity of Mozart’s music.

Plural voices: divided identities in romantic music

Given the importance of irony to the Classical style, its apparent absence in much
nineteenth-century music is striking. Whereas eighteenth-century composers often drew
attention to the artifice of their art, many nineteenth-century composers affirmed a
remarkably non-ironic tone. The latter reaches a peak in the music of Richard Wagner which
epitomizes the aesthetic claim of romantic music to embody directly a metaphysical truth
that somehow bypasses the conventionality of language. This position, articulated in the
aesthetic philosophy of Schopenhauer before Wagner, became not only normative for much
nineteenth-century music, but has remained so for the popular reception of classical music
ever since. However, against this assumption of direct and authentic musical expression the
cultivation of musical irony sounds an important counter-note, appearing in quite different
musical traditions, from German lieder to French operetta.
A quality of ironic self-consciousness is definitive of the German lied from its first major
works. Consider, for example, Schubert’s ‘Frühlingstraum’, the eleventh song of his
Winterreise cycle (1827). The major key opening and gently flowing accompaniment in a 6/8
metre seem to complement perfectly the dream of springtime described by the words (‘I
dreamed of colourful flowers/such as blossom in May/I dreamed of green meadows/and the
merry calling of birds’). The first stanza, however, is followed by a sudden turn to the minor
(m. 15), a faster tempo, far more chromatic harmony and a broken, uneven texture ( Musical
Example 12.3 ). This is the protagonist’s wintry reality, waking from his dream of spring to
a cold grey morning and the harsh calls of the crows. Within the poetic world of the song
cycle, the opening of ‘Frühlingstraum’ is false: its illusion of spring is broken by the sudden
return of the reality of winter in the second stanza. In fact, heard in the context of the whole
cycle, it is the untroubled major-key opening that sounds dissonant. Schubert’s music often
proceeds by such juxtapositions, oscillating between two kinds of music that, as here, seem
to propose a dreamlike or ideal vision only to contrast it with a harsher reality. This is a long
way from the humour and play of a Haydn quartet and yet depends on the same ironic
double-take, on not taking an initial musical proposition at face value. Unlike Beethoven,
who sets up oppositions in order to resolve them, Schubert often declines to resolve his
musical antinomies. Instead, he allows extended movements to proceed by a process of
constant alternation, a musical embodiment of a divided ironic consciousness that sees the
world in double vision.
 Musical Example 12.3 Schubert, ‘Frühlingstraum’ from Winterreise ,
mm. 1–26.

The tradition of German Lieder running from Schubert to Mahler is built on this
fundamentally ironic double-take by means of the contrast between the simplicity of its
materials and the sophistication of their treatment. The simplicity of the material comes
initially from the cultivated folk tone ( Volkston ) of the poetry it sets, evincing a similar act
of musical pastiche. Schubert, like Mahler seventy years later, uses simple musical means to
evoke a folksong style – melodies based on simple triads, repetitive motifs, especially
rhythmic ones, and simple strophic forms. At the same time, both mark this material as not
folk music, by subtle deviations from it – twists in the harmony, interruptions,
exaggerations, a disjunction between text and music. The fundamentally ironic turn thus
derives not from the more modern aspects in themselves, but precisely the difference between
a collective folk voice in which the individual is not essentially separate from the collective,
and the harmonic, melodic and dramatic twists that highlight the protagonist’s distance from
this ideal unity. In other words, Schubert’s evocation of an older, simpler past , is part of the
means by which he highlights a present alienation.
This divided consciousness is often explicitly thematized in songs as, for example, in
‘Wehmut’, from Schumann’s Eichendorff lieder, Op. 39 (1840). ‘It is true, I can sing at times
as though I were happy’, begins this deceptively simple song, ‘but secretly tears well up to
relieve my heavy heart’. Schumann achieves his exquisite balance of conventional
simplicity and inward disclosure by taking the form of a naive little song, but subtly
inflecting it. The symmetrical phrase structure and major key denote outward calm and
contentment, but the turn to the relative minor for the answering couplet (mm. 5–6) drives a
sharp but subtle wedge between outward sense and ironic difference. This is one of
Schumann’s most telling devices, inherited directly by Brahms and Mahler. The power and
poignancy of German lieder is located precisely in this gap (Brauner 1981; Rosenberg
1988).
Both Schumann and Mahler were fascinated by the key literary figures of German
romanticism for whom irony was such a central strategy. In the case of Schumann, as John
Daverio underlines, irony is not only indebted to literary models, but conceived in literary
terms, making Schumann ‘perhaps the first [composer] in Western musical history to view
the art of composition as a kind of literary activity’ (Daverio 1997, i). His models were most
obviously E. T. A. Hoffmann and Jean Paul Richter, but where other composers adapted
Hoffmann’s stories or took on some of the insights of his music criticism, Schumann’s
music demonstrates a real kinship in terms of narrative technique and aesthetic form. 7 Their
shared sense of aesthetic self-awareness is manifest in the ways in which texts problematize
themselves – as in various forms of authorial intrusion into the apparently autonomous
world of the story itself, moments when the fictional world is broken into by the normally
invisible author.
Schumann has several ways of achieving this effect of a divided voice. One is his use of
quotation, either literally (as with the return of the opening theme of Papillons Op. 2 in the
middle of the ‘Florestan’ movement of Carnaval Op. 9) or else by presenting a section of
music as if it were a quotation (as in Davidsbündlertänze , Op. 6, No. 15, where a piano
introduction is followed by what is clearly a song, aspiring to something non-pianistic
despite the fact that both are actually played by the piano). A second clear strategy for
creating ironic distance is Schumann’s use of abrupt structural discontinuities as a way of
questioning the music’s own formal propositions. Just as Hoffmann’s narratives are marked
by sudden, violent moments of breakthrough between the everyday world and a fantastical,
spirit world, so Schumann’s music shows a parallel fascination with formal dislocation. The
opening sequence of pieces in Papillons (1831), for example, presents a series of tiny pieces,
disjunct with respect not only to key but also to musical style, gesture, texture and tempo.
The sequence of separate sections imposes a kind of form and implies a certain logic but at
the same time suggests something contingent, as if these fragments might have been ordered
quite differently. By such strategies, as Heinz Dill underlines, ‘the creative process itself
becomes thematic, i.e., the content of the work of art is art itself, or, more precisely, the
making of art’ (Dill 1989, 178). This structural discontinuity is often marked by Schumann’s
designation of a passage as an ‘intermezzo’, sometimes functioning like a ‘trio’ by being
combined with a scherzo. It thus corresponds to the original idea of an intermezzo as an
episode that ‘comes between’ other sections, but its provenance in opera buffa is significant
here, and thus its direct link to the appearance of commedia figures in eighteenth-century
operatic intermezzi . In his Intermezzi , Op. 4 (1832), Schumann presents a whole collection
of short pieces that were traditionally understood to come between larger more serious
pieces, signalling a deliberately tangential perspective, avoiding direct statement in favour of
displacement. In this insistence on diversion, Schumann’s music famously signals a
preference for allusion, masks and fictional identities, a play with language that is explicitly
historical. The first piece of the Intermezzi , for example, begins with a grand, rather sombre
piece of quasi-canonic baroque counterpoint, complete with double-dotted rhythms.
However, its studied historicism is answered by an unequivocally modern passage and, on a
larger scale, the piece juxtaposes this ‘baroque’ first section with a whimsical ‘Alternativo’
section replaying the same basic musical material in modern dress. One musical manner
calls the other into question; neither can safely be taken at face value.
The dangers of explaining musical irony as a product of a composer’s individual
disposition rather than in cultural and historical terms are underlined by the case of Mahler.
Although his own strategies of irony are indebted to the music of Schubert and Schumann
(most obviously the lieder), Mahler’s ironic tone has repeatedly been explained away as a
result of his own psychology, often elided with his ‘Jewish’ nature in a manner that borders
on a crude racial stereotype. This was certainly the tone of much musical criticism in
Mahler’s own time, though it now provides some fascinating historical insights for all its
distasteful elements. When, for example, the critic Max Kalbeck referred, in 1900, to
Mahler’s First Symphony as a Sinfonica Ironica he unwittingly drew attention to a tension
between genre and material in the late nineteenth-century symphony that far exceeds Mahler
as an individual; the implied contrast with Beethoven’s Eroica , intended to denigrate
Mahler’s work, points instead to a historical process (as Richard Strauss also did, with
wonderful self-irony, with his Sinfonia Domestica ). 8 Mahler was not unaware that his use
of folk materials, from his settings of poetry from Des Knaben Wunderhorn to his use of
these ‘naive’ materials in the early symphonies, would cause consternation among his
critics, to say nothing of his importing into the most hallowed form of Austro-German
instrumental music aspects of urban popular music, operetta and military marching bands. If
ever proof were required that Mahler and Bruckner took an antithetical approach to music, it
is found here, in Mahler’s multi-voiced symphonic tapestries, music (in the words of Peter
Franklin) ‘that demands to be read as if between quotation marks’ (Franklin 2001, 615). As
we saw in the example from the Rondo Burleske of the Ninth Symphony, however, the
peculiar character of Mahler’s musical irony is that the affirmation of the ideal of authentic
expression and the self-mockery of that ideal appear side-by-side (see Hefling 2001;
Johnson 2009).
For Mahler’s Viennese contemporary, the writer, editor and critic Karl Kraus, irony was a
sharp tool for cutting through the tangled undergrowth of social, political and journalistic
lies that flourished in lazy thinking and the misuse of language. For him, the negativity of
irony was not an end in itself, but a means of clearing the space to allow a more careful and
purer use of language. In his later years, one of his most popular ways of using the material
of the world to indict itself, was his ‘recital’ of Offenbach operettas (half-sung, half-spoken
performances by Kraus himself, with piano accompaniment). 9 In this way, half a century
after Offenbach’s heyday, a rather unmusical Viennese critic thus reactivated the ironic force
of Offenbach’s music which, in its own time, had attracted the admiration of no less a
philosopher than Nietzsche (who saw it as a counterbalance to Wagnerian music drama). 10
Largely ignored by the course of Austro-German music, Offenbach (a German abroad)
signals a specifically Parisian kind of musical irony which stands at the head of a long
French tradition. Debussy once referred to his ‘transcendental irony’ (Janik 2001, 113);
Saint-Saëns acknowledged him in Le carnival des animaux (1886) where the tortoise is
depicted by a massively slowed-down version of the ‘Galop infernal’ from Offenbach’s
Orphée aux enfers (1858).
Like all comic opera, Offenbach plays with the disjunctions of style and substance,
material and context. His use of the characters and iconography of classical antiquity (as in
La belle Hélène , 1864) was a tool to expose the historical pretensions of the Second Empire
of Napoleon III. His sensitivity to the comic potential of the deliberate mismatch between
contemporary popular dance music and his mythic and grand historical characters
undoubtedly follows in a long tradition of comic opera (back through Rossini to Mozart and
beyond). Amid all the satirical comedy, however, Offenbach’s work tells some incisive
truths about its age by means of its musical irony. In Orphée aux enfers , the polarization
between the state of boredom that seems to affect everyone in the opera and the ‘infernal’
headlong rush to oblivion of the dance music points, with telling accuracy, to the
contradictions of modern urban life – to its sense of accelerating time and technology
coupled with a state of emptiness and boredom. La vie parisienne (1866), which begins in a
Parisian railway station, makes this paradox its theme.

Spleen and ideal: irony and modernism

Offenbach’s upbeat ironic jollity might seem a long way from his Parisian contemporary,
Charles Baudelaire, though both are products of the same world. The first part of Les Fleurs
du mal , published in 1857, titled ‘Spleen et Idéal’, is one of the most powerful statements of
the cognitive dissonance in which modern irony is located though it found no parallel in
music until Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire of 1912. Schoenberg’s texts may be translations
of poems by Albert Giraud but, like Baudelaire’s, they explore the gap between ideal vision
and unbearable reality, an impossible psychological tension that results in a kind of madness
(Alban Berg would go on to explore something similar in Wozzeck , just a few years later).
There are many levels of irony in Pierrot Lunaire (derived from the tension between the
‘expressionless’ blankness of the Pierrot mask and the intensity of inward expression) but
the most powerful way in which Schoenberg articulates a sense of the unbridegeable gap
between experience and representation is in the breaking of the musical voice – literally in
the case of the singer, who famously relin-quishes a conventional singing tone for
Sprechstimme , and figuratively in a musical style whose violently expressionistic gestures
generate a musical delirium utterly at odds with the ordered musical forms through which
Schoenberg deploys them.
A quite different, altogether cooler and more detached form of irony is found in the
neoclassicism of Stravinsky. After the aesthetics of romantic expression, this ironic stance
was taken to be a hallmark of modernism, but as Stravinsky’s music underlines, through its
preoccupation with eighteenth-century music, the modernism of his music was in part a
recuperation of an earlier ironic self-consciousness, subsequently obscured during the
nineteenth-century. Indeed, the irony of neoclassicism is less a response to earlier music and
more a critical swipe at the contemporary reception of music, dominated by the assumption
that music could be a direct and authentic expression. Stravinsky’s oft-quoted comment that
‘music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all’, generally taken
as a modernist dismissal of the aesthetics of romanticism, is thus more generally a statement
of the self-awareness of music’s conventionality, one that connects Stravinsky back to
Haydn (Stravinsky 1975, 53). This, more than a rejection of the modernist idea of progress,
constitutes not only the irony of Stravinsky’s music but also the overtone of melancholy that
accompanies it. The Histoire du Soldat (1918) is ironic in a similar way to Schoenberg’s
Pierrot Lunaire , in that the attenuated musical resources (reduced ensemble, popular dance
forms and repetitive rhythmic patterns) seem disproportionately meagre to the import of the
story, but neoclassical works like the Octet (1923) or the Concerto for Piano and Wind
Instruments (1924) stage a distance between themselves and the eighteenth-century
materials on which they draw, which call both into question.
Stravinsky’s play with eighteenth-century music and contemporary popular music was
anticipated by Erik Satie. Two years before Stravinsky’s Pulcinella , Satie’s Sonatine
bureaucratique (1917) presents the essential gap at the heart of musical irony, between
material and treatment, basing his own composition on Muzio Clementi’s Sonatina in C
major, Op. 36, No. 1 (1797). Clementi’s simple, almost mechanical lines and proportions are
subtly deployed and distorted at the same time, while Satie’s accompanying textual
commentary suggest a modern-day narrative about the idle thoughts of an office-worker
completely at odds with the usual associations of Classical instrumental music. Quotation
and allusion similarly abound in the Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois
(1913), with their mixing up of a Tyrolean dance and Mozart’s alla turca in the first
movement, a play with the popular ‘danse nègre’ in the second (with a nod to Stravinsky’s
Le Sacre du Printemps ) and a swipe at Chabrier in the third movement, titled Españaña .
Esti Sheinberg underlines that what is foregrounded in such music is a new role for the
musically banal, where deliberately simple, repetitive and, in conventional terms
‘unexpressive’ musical types are used as a counterweight to assumptions of expressive
potency (Sheinberg 2000, 87).
Satie’s verbal texts highlight the gap between the musical text and the meaning presumed
by an earlier aesthetic. His target is thus the hermeneutics of romanticism, the assumption of
composers, audiences and critics that the music ‘carries’ some other meaning. Half a century
before John Cage (one of his most significant successors), Satie used irony to question one
of the most fundamental assumptions of musical aesthetics. Such provocation naturally met
with angry response; in The Musical Quarterly in 1919, Rudhyar D. Chennevière agreed that
Satie was a musical ironist but went on to ask angrily, ‘Yet has irony any musical value? Is
not the phrase “the music of irony” absolutely meaningless?’ (Chennevière, 1919). Satie, he
suggests, is ‘the representative in music of an intellectualism’ that is utterly opposed to the
essential value and nature of art, by which, of course, he means art conceived as capable of
the unproblematic expression of a true, authentic subject. However, the simple binary of
‘intellectualism’ and a notion of expressive truth (somehow by-passing the intellect) is
precisely what irony calls into question and deconstructs. Far from being opposed to the idea
of expression, irony is bound up with it – testing its assumptions, collapsing its conventions,
most obviously as a way of implying something more adequate rather than dispensing with
the idea altogether. It is, in the words of Louis Andriessen, ‘a very profound form of
philosophy in art’ (interview in Cross 2003, 255).
 Satie’s modes of childlike innocence and naivety, though certainly not confined to French
music (examples abound from Schumann and Mahler to Britten and Ligeti), were also key
for Fauré, Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc. The proposition of their ostensibly childlike music
is always more complex than it appears. In the ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ from the Children’s
Corner (1906–8), for example, Debussy famously quotes a passage from Wagner’s Tristan
und Isolde . Sheinberg suggests that Debussy here ‘satirises not just the over-complication
of Wagner’s harmony but also the over-simplicity of popular music’ (Sheinberg 2000, 144–
5) but it surely does more than just poking fun at both. Debussy’s sad doll, like Stravinsky’s
Petruschka and Schoenberg’s Pierrot, is also torn between mechanical and collective dance
rhythms and a memory of the subjective yearning of erotic love. The double-voicing points
to an awareness of being caught between two linguistic or stylistic modes, each of which is
called into question by the other. Ravel’s childlike vision, epitomised in L’enfant et les
sortilèges (1925), is embodied in a musical style that hinges on a deliberate naivety and an
art of understatement for which his music is a kind of touchstone (see Kaminsky 2000). 11 It
signals a definitive irony because its obliqueness is, implicitly, a questioning of the ‘truth’
statements on which German romanticism, and its reception is founded. ‘I consider sincerity
to be the greatest defect in art’, Ravel famously remarked in 1924, ‘because it excludes the
possibility of choice’ (quoted by Kaminsky 2000, 186). Or again, on another occasion: ‘isn’t
it better at least to be fully aware and acknowledge that art is the supreme imposture?’
(Orenstein 1990, 38).
Foregrounding an instability and plurality of stylistic voice is often taken to be key to the
neoclassicism exemplified, in different ways, by Satie, Stravinsky, Ravel and Poulenc, but it
is, more broadly, a key sign of musical irony. From Haydn to Shostakovich, the mixing of
‘high’ and ‘low’ musical styles serves an expressive function that runs from the merely
playful to the bitingly sarcastic. No discussion of musical irony would be complete without
mentioning Shostakovich, although his music has been extensively discussed from this angle
by Esti Sheinberg (2000, 2008). Key to understanding the ironic potential of Shostakovich’s
music is, of course, the social and political situation in which his music was composed and
first performed; the musical techniques themselves (of quotation, exaggeration, distortion
and parody) are familiar ones. More ‘shocking’ from a stylistic point of view is the work of
Shostakovich’s successor, Alfred Schnittke, in which a bewildering musical heteroglossia
becomes the primary material of the music. In the context of the essentially historical
practice of classical music, Schnittke’s ‘carnivalesque’ mounts an assault on the idea of an
authentic musical voice. It is striking that this polystylism was developed in the 1960s and
1970s, at the same time as the music of Mahler came to occupy a central place in the
orchestral repertoire that it has held ever since. However, whereas Mahler’s contemporary
popularity hinges on a specific mix of affirmation and doubt in the ideal of authentic
expression, Schnittke seems to foreground its impossibility.
Schnittke’s music has often been cited as an example of postmodern irony in music,
mixing up and juxtaposing musical styles from quite different periods of music history and
thus subverting the expressive authenticity presumed by any one of them. A good example
is found in the Concerto Grosso No. 1 (1976–7) for two solo violins, harpsichord, prepared
piano and string orchestra. The opening slow Prelude presents a kind of musical ruin frozen
in time, accentuating the gap between natural tones and alienated ‘prepared’ sounds in the
piano, and between the quasi-baroque materials and their fragmentary presentation. The
second movement (Toccata) similarly begins with a baroque pastiche (the two solo violin
lines in canonic imitation) but is followed immediately by the twelve orchestral violins in a
proliferation of canonic entries that quickly produces a dense, chromatic micropolyphony,
like the acceleration of a dysfunctional machine. In the final movement (Rondo), the two
solo violins once again set off in patterns of baroque imitation, given over a stock harmonic
sequence heard in rolling harpsichord arpeggios, only for the lines of the orchestral strings to
multiply in an over-dense texture that occludes the soloists. In turn, this gives way to a tango
and subsequently to a rich, late-romantic lyricism reminiscent of Richard Strauss’s
Metamorphosen , before returning to the sounds of the prepared piano heard in the opening
Prelude. This is music that proceeds like a kind of historical self-analysis; its ‘shock’ is that
it presents voices from within the classical tradition but places them within its carnival scene
in ways that necessarily decentre them, uncouple them from the authenticity they presume.
The list of composers referenced in this way by Schnittke is extensive, from Lassus and
Beethoven in the Second String Quartet (1983), to Bruckner in the Second Symphony
(1979), Mahler in the Piano Quartet (1989), and Schütz, Bach, Handel, Scarlatti and Berg in
the Concerto Grosso No. 3 (1985).
Sheinberg underlines that the single term ‘irony’ is often used to refer to a range of quite
different practices which she divides principally between the idea of satire (which always
implies the assertion of a non-ironical message or value) and non-satirical forms of irony
(which share a common scepticism towards the possibility of any single, unitary voice)
(Sheinberg 2000, 61–2). The heteroglossic music of Schnittke makes a quite different
proposition to that of the Schubert and Schumann Lieder we considered earlier, songs which
intensify the expression of an ‘unexpressed’ idea by the ironic presentation of its opposite. It
is different again to the romantic irony at work in Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, where the
self-conscious play with the formal and stylistic expectations of music becomes a vehicle for
the affirmation of a self-conscious and free subjectivity. In Schnittke, as also in some works
by Berio (like the Sinfonia of 1968) or Ligeti (the Aventures of 1962), the plurality of musical
voices is less the assertion of the sovereign subjectivity of the composer than an
acknowledgement of a subjectivity found only amid such plurality – lost and found,
dissolved and reconstituted in a host of borrowed voices – a shift in postmodern culture both
celebrated and lamented in equal measure.

Music, irony and the limits of language

One hundred and fifty years after Friedrich Schlegel characterized irony as ‘a permanent
parabasis’, Stravinsky’s Epilogue to The Rake’s Progress (1951) offered one of the most
famous of operatic examples, as the house lights go up and the principal characters step to
the front of the stage to draw the moral from the tale they have just enacted. The men are
without their wigs and Baba without her beard. Real life, the actors now warn us, does not
always turn out like fiction. Stravinsky’s ending echoes that of one of his models, Mozart’s
Don Giovanni , in which, after the Don’s descent to hell, the remaining principals assemble
to decide on their own futures before singing together the final moral, a similarity that neatly
underlines the high degree of ironic self-reflection in eighteenth-century opera. Hermann
Danuser has drawn out the fascinating parallels between meta-operas of the late eighteenth
century and those of the early twentieth, throwing a bridge between Salieri’s Prima la
musica, poi le parole and Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos . The first version of the latter was
written in 1912, the year in which Schoenberg completed Pierrot Lunaire ; for all their
obvious differences, both works juxtapose attempts at authentic expression with self-ridicule
at the impossibility of doing so. From Pierrot and Stravinsky’s Petrushka to Birtwistle’s
Punch and Judy , but also back to Schumann’s Carnaval , musical modernism’s concern
with the mask, the puppet and the tragic clown is the recurrent vehicle for an exploration of
the impossible gap between private experience and public representation.
Musical irony runs through the music of the last few hundred years as a counterweight to
the notion of authentic musical expression, binding the so-called classical era to the so-
called modernist, and suggesting that we might better understand both as part of a broader
idea of a singular musical modernity. The significance of this extends beyond questions of
musical style or taste since, in its aesthetic exploration of the play of identity and non-
identity, music anticipates a central theme of modern philosophy. In the Vorschule der
Ästhetik , Jean Paul Richter set out a poetics of romantic art centred on the philosophical
seriousness of the comic – the ‘ ernster Scherz ’ we encountered earlier. In humour, Richter
argues, the ironic consciousness achieves a kind of ‘inverted sublime’ ( umgekehrte
Erhabene ); by foregrounding the gap between the finite world of objects and the infinite
world of ideas, between linguistic representation and what lies outside language, humour
confounds the understanding and thus breaks it open (Richter [1804] 1973, 88). Richter talks
of the ‘audacity ( Keckheit ) of annihilating humour’; Schlegel talks of irony as a
‘transcendental buffoonery’ (Schlegel 1968, 126) that produces a derangement of the natural
order of things whose moment of cognitive dissonance is, at the same time, both comic and
sublime. 12
This moment of cognitive dissonance is a central idea for Lydia Goehr in an essay on
music, philosophy and humour. What links all three is what she calls the performance of
thought, its necessarily dynamic character in moving from one moment to another, from an
initial proposition to a ‘cognitively dissonant moment’ that occasions a reappraisal of the
world (Goehr 2005, 312, 317). This moving away she relates to the idea of exile in modern
philosophy – a literal exile for the philosophers she discusses (Adorno and Wittgenstein) but
also a figurative one at the heart of modern philosophy, expressed in Novalis’s aphorism
that philosophy is ‘really homesickness … the drive to be at home everywhere’ (cited by
Bowie 2007, 39). The same might be said of the quest of modern art more generally; Georg
Lukács, in his study of the novel as the key literary form of modernity, finds at its heart the
‘transcendental homelessness’ of the modern subject, the legacy of a world in which – since
a harmony of subject and world is no longer possible – can be represented only through a
fundamentally ironic consciousness of the gap between the ideal and the real, the contingent
particularity of the material and the abstract sense of the whole (Lukács 1917, 93).
Andrew Bowie sums up the crisis in German romantic thought around 1800 as ‘the
uneasy coexistence of the desire to be able to say what it is in thinking that is unlimited
[and] an accompanying sense of the impossibility of saying it’ (Bowie 2007, 66). In the face
of such a double-bind, he underlines, romantic thinkers looked increasingly to music. It may
well be that, in their enthusiasm for the apparent ineffability of music and their readiness to
assume that music might speak a kind of truth inaccessible to language, writers within
German romanticism were more interested in projecting on to music what philosophy
lacked. My point is rather different – that music was already exploring, and had been doing
so for some decades, the dynamic thought of ironic self-consciousness. Bowie suggests that
Schlegel’s idea of a ‘transcendental literature’ – one that embodies reflection upon its own
process of composition, its own nature as writing – prefigures the key philosophical systems
of Schelling (the System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800) and Hegel (the Phenomenology
of Mind of 1807; Bowie 2007, 82). Schlegel’s conception, however, owed much to the
example of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy , originally published in nine parts between 1759 and
1767, by which time music was already exploring, most obviously in the work of C. P. E.
Bach, what Schelling would later call ‘the beauty of caprice’, in fantasias and capriccios that
employed the kind of shock effects that would later be lost to music, only to be rediscovered
by Schumann via German romantic literature.
In his brief Monologue of 1798, over a century before Wittgenstein, Novalis made the
radical proposition that language is no more than a ‘game of words’ and ‘only concerns
itself with itself’; like mathematical formulae, he suggested, words ‘constitute their own
world’, so it is a mistake to imagine that language speaks cogently about anything other than
itself (Bowie 2007, 65). Hegel would hardly have concurred, and yet he argues something
remarkably similar in the Introduction to the Logic , in his defence of philosophy against the
charge of those who maintain that it is unintelligible.

Their difficulty lies partly in an incapacity – which in itself is nothing but want of habit –
for abstract thinking; i.e., an inability to get hold of pure thoughts and move about in them
… When people are asked to apprehend some notion, they often complain that they do not
know what they have to think. But the fact is that in a notion there is nothing further to be
thought than the notion itself … The mind, denied the use of its familiar ideas, feels the
ground where it once stood firm and at home taken away from beneath it, and, when
transported into the region of pure thought, cannot tell where in the world it is.
(Hegel 1987, 7)

Hegel famously dismissed instrumental music, as Kant had before him, as similarly
unintelligible, yet this passage is striking in that it characterizes philosophy in ways that
suggest a remarkable parallel with the intellectual play of a musical tradition that not only
surrounded him, but had been sounding forth even before his birth.
It is no coincidence that the idea music might be like a language arose at the same time
that modern philosophy questioned its own adequacy as language. By the same token, the
self-conscious questioning of the limits of musical language in the twentieth century needs
to be understood in conjunction with the philosophical Sprachkritik of Mauthner, the Vienna
Circle and Wittgenstein. Bowie’s study of the relationship between music, philosophy and
modernity argues persuasively that music has a critical relationship to philosophy that
hinges precisely on its non-linguistic aspect. Musical irony may be understood as a
particular version of this, taking on attributes of language in order to bring them to self-
conscious scrutiny. This is, of course, quite different from philosophy itself, because music’s
principal means of doing this is to stage the disjunction between grammatical conventions
and their performance in particular, individual works rather than to work with concepts.
There is no better demonstration of this than the non-conceptual particularity with which
Beethoven’s music challenges the totality of the systemic whole in which his music works.
The Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106 (1818) announces the definitive move to a ‘late style’
even as it attempts to recoup the affirmative tone of Beethoven’s early music. The ‘heroic’
fanfare that begins the first movement reappears in quite different guise at the start of the
Scherzo, foreshortened into a simple anacrusis figure whose sequential repetitions saturate
the movement. The transition from its central Trio section is effected by a buffa interlude
(Presto, mm. 81–112) whose faux drama accentuates the comic nonchalance of the Scherzo
theme when it returns (one could imagine Leporello whistling it to himself). It is the Coda of
this movement, however, which presents the most startling act of authorial intrusion. The
peremptory close in the tonic, B major (m. 160) mirrors that of the original scherzo (m. 46),
but is now answered by an elongated play with the concluding figure in which the repeated
B s (forte) are answered, in a lower octave, by repeated B s (piano). The enharmonic
change from B to A implies a new modulation, before the bare repetition of the B in
multiple octaves becomes (apparently through sheer force of repetition) a flattened-
supertonic and falls back to B for the concluding measures. The innocuous motif, nothing
more than a weak cadential figure, is heard three times, transposed an octave higher on each
repetition until it simply evaporates (pianissimo) .
 Musical Example 12.4 Beethoven, Piano Sonata, Op. 106,
‘Hammerklavier’, Scherzo, mm. 153–7 5

These few bars are emblematic of the nature, depth and significance of musical irony.
Cast in comic form, they nevertheless make audible the gap that breaks open the illusion of
the artwork as an autonomous whole. The authorial interruption of the music’s formal and
grammatical logic inscribes the presence of a divided self-consciousness, one that both
creates the work and, at the same time, underlines its own awareness of the fictive and
constructive nature of that creation. The significance of this far exceeds questions of musical
style or familiar accounts of idiosyncratic composers ‘playing’ with musical conventions.
The narrow gap between the B and the B marks a defining moment of historical slippage
between language and subject, a fissure that opens up between the functioning system and
the subject’s self-awareness of it. As such, this momentary break in musical grammar,
passed off as ironic humour, is the audible manifestation of a far deeper and more significant
fracture – one that runs all the way down to the fault-line of modernity itself.

Notes
1 The importance of genre in this respect is discussed by a number of writers, including Dubrow 1982, Kallberg 1988, Samson
1989 and Micnik 1994.
2 The most extensive study is Sheinberg 2000. There are a few book-length studies of musical irony devoted to specific
composers, including Zank 2009, Johnson 2009, Castagné et al . 2001, Celestini, 2006, and a collection of articles and
chapters (mostly referenced in the course of this article) addressing the use of irony in Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert,
Schumann, Mahler, Ravel, and Prokofiev.
3 Principally in the theoretical works of Mattheson, Koch, Sulzer, Forkel. This is discussed by Bonds 1991b and Spitzer 2004,
207–75.
4 The title of Wheelock’s book derives from a phrase in the preface to Domenico Scarlatti’s Essercizi per gravicembalo
by which the composer describes his own music.
5 The most sustained example, Longyear suggests, is the Scherzo of the Quartet, Op. 59, No. 1.
6 The Sterne quote is from Book 8, Chapter 27 of Tristram Shandy .
7 The idea of narrative in Schumann has been discussed by a number of writers, notably Newcomb 1987.
8 Max Kalbeck, Neues Wiener Tagblatt , 19 November 1900.
9 Kraus gave 124 ‘readings’ of Offenbach between 1929 and 1935. See Janik 2001, Chapters 5 and 6. See also Botstein 2009.
10 Letter from Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde, cited by Janik 2001, 113. For the original citation, see Janz 1972, 120.
11 Kaminsky suggests that the Histoires naturelles of 1906 are ‘the exemplar of literalism and irony’ in Ravel (Kaminsky 2000,
171). See also Zank 2009.
12 For more on the inverted sublime, see Downes, ‘Beautiful and Sublime’, this volume, pp. 95–7.

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Behler, Ernst. 1990. Irony and the Discourse of Modernity . Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
Bishop, Lloyd. 1989. ‘What is Romantic Irony?’, in Romantic Irony in French Literature from Diderot to Beckett .
Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Bonds, Mark Evan. 1991a. ‘Haydn, Laurence Sterne, and the Origins of Musical Irony’, Journal of the American
Musicological Society , 44: 57–91, 68.
—— 1991b. Wordless Rhetoric: Music Form and the Metaphor of Oration . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Botstein, Leon. 2009. ‘German Jews and Wagner’, in Thomas S. Grey (ed.), Richard Wagner and His World . Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 151–200.
Bowie, Andrew. 2007. Music, Philosophy, and Modernity . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brauner, Charles S. 1981. ‘Irony in the Heine Lieder of Schubert and Schumann’, The Musical Quarterly , 67: 261–81.
Burnham, Scott. 1994. ‘Mozart’s “felix culpa”: Così fan tutte and the Irony of Beauty’, The Musical Quarterly , 78: 77–98.
—— 2005. ‘Haydn and Humor’ in Caryl Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Haydn . Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 61–76.
Castagné, Andre. et al . (eds). 2001. Gustav Mahler et l’ironie dans la culture Viennoise au tournant du siècle . Montpellier:
Éditions Climats.
Celestini, Federico. 2006. Die Unordnung der Ding: Das musikalische Groteske in der Wiener Moderne (1885–1914) .
Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Chennevière, Rudhyar D. 1919. ‘Erik Satie and the Music of Irony’, The Musical Quarterly , 5: 469–78.
Chua, Daniel K. L. 1999. Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
Cross, Jonathan, ed. 2003. The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Daverio, John. 1997. Robert Schumann: Herald of a ‘New Poetic Age’ . New York: Oxford University Press.
Dill, Heinz J. 1989. ‘Romantic Irony in the Works of Robert Schumann’, The Musical Quarterly , 73: 172–95.
Dubrow, Heather. 1982. Genre . London: Methuen.
Franklin, Peter. 2001. ‘Mahler’, in Stanley Sadie and John Tyrell (eds), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
, 2nd edn. London: Macmillan, 15, 615.
Goehr, Lydia. 2005. ‘Philosophical Exercises in Repetition: On Music, Humor, and Exile in Wittgenstein and Adorno’, in
Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (eds), Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity: Essays . Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 311–42.
Hefling, Stephen E. 2001. ‘Techniques of Irony in Mahler’s Oeuvre’, in Andre Castagné et al ., Gustav Mahler et l’ironie
dans la culture Viennoise au tournant du siècle . Montpellier: Éditions Climats.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1987. Logic , trans. William Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunter, Mary. 1999. The Culture of
Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Janik, Allan. 2001. Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Janz, Curt Paul. 1972. Die Briefe Friedrich Nietzsches: Textprobleme und ihre Bedeutung für Biographie und Doxographie
. Basel: Editio Academica.
Johnson, Julian. 2009. Mahler’s Voices, Irony and Expression in the Songs and Symphonies . Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Kallberg, Jeffrey. 1988. ‘The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin’s Nocturne in G Minor’, 19th-Century Music , 11: 233–61.
Kaminsky, Peter. 2000. ‘Vocal Music and the Lures of Exoticism and Irony’, in Deborah Mawer (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Ravel . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 162–87.
Kramer, Lawrence. 2011. Interpreting Music . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Longyear, Rey M. 1970. ‘Beethoven and Romantic Irony’, The Musical Quarterly , 56: 647–64.
Lukács, Georg. 1917. The Theory of the Novel , trans. Anna Bostock. London: Methuen Press.
Micnik, Vera. 1994. ‘Mahler and the Power of Genre’, Journal of Musicology , 12: 117–51.
Newcomb, Anthony. 1987. ‘Schumann and Late-Eighteenth-Century Narrative Strategies’, 19th-Century Music , 11: 164–
74.
Orenstein, Arbie, ed. 1990. A Ravel Reader . New York: Columbia University Press.
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1963), trans. Margaret R. Hale as Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetic . Detroit, MI: Wayne State
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Samson, Jim. 1989. ‘Chopin and Genre’, Music Analysis , 8: 213–32.
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Struc. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
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—— 2008. ‘Jewish Existential Irony as Musical Ethos in the Music of Shostakovich’ in Pauline Fairclough and David
Fanning (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 350–67.
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 13
Propaganda
Jim Samson

Preamble
All art, irrespective of how it is intended or received, has elements of autonomy character and
elements of dependency character. This is not an either–or. And likewise, all art has elements of
intrinsic value and elements of instrumental value. We may enjoy it or loathe it, but either way it
has some capacity, small or great, to transform us. There are four separate categories here, and
the balance between them constantly shifts. Yesterday, the instrumental value of an artwork may
have seemed all-important; the poet might save the world. Today, its intrinsic value may be
foregrounded; we appreciate what we now take to be its inspired pointlessness. Here, the artwork
seems to have broken the chains binding it to the social world; the painter makes her own
statement. There, its ecology is all too obvious; the social determinants of that same statement
stare us in the face. A little distance, temporal or spatial, can make all the difference.
Propaganda, more or less by definition, places the emphasis firmly on one of these four
categories, instrumental value, but not to the exclusion of the others. For one thing, any art may
be propagandized, including art that originally aspired to an autonomy character. Propaganda is
certainly about intentions, but not always the intentions of the author, nor even the intention of
the text, to borrow a formulation of Umberto Eco (1991). And for another thing, those who read,
view or listen are not bound by anyone’s intentions. However explicitly encoded, the message
may be decoded quite differently.
Even if we focus exclusively on instrumental value, we must allow a further complication. Just
where does propaganda begin? When Dickens depicted the prisons, schools and workhouses of
Victorian England, he had a mission of social amelioration; he set out to make a difference. Is
this propaganda? If we resist the label here, it may be because we have drawn a line somewhere
on the spectrum between intrinsic value and instrumental value. On one side of the line – the
Dickens side, let us say – the artwork may engage with and reflect upon a social and/or political
subject matter; it may be intended as a force for social and/or political change. Its primary
business, however, we believe, is art. On the other side of the line that subject matter is not just a
material to be elaborated; it has become the substance or content of the artwork. And to that
extent intrinsic value is occluded.
Just where we place this line is so much a matter of individual judgement that we might
reasonably question if it can have any explanatory value at all. Is it not less restrictive to accept
the relativism implicit in my opening remarks? Thus, Dickens, like Shakespeare, depended on
something like a mass market, and openly catered for that market (dependency character). Yet the
afterlife of his novels has demonstrated that they transcended this commodity status (autonomy
character). Likewise, there is no contradiction between the propaganda function of his novels
(their instrumental value) and their demonstrable aesthetic qualities (their intrinsic value).
If we consider the pedigreed usage of the term ‘propaganda’ and the connotative values it has
acquired, we may find further arguments against including Dickens, notably that propaganda is
conventionally deemed to present a one-sided, partisan picture of whatever reality is at stake; in
other words, there is an exclusion of alternative points of view. In this habitual understanding of
propaganda, the bias and selectivity in the message are tantamount to deliberate falsification.
Propaganda is viewed as antithetical to truth; it is on the wrong side of the moral argument. It
hardly helps that it is commonly associated with the manipulative strategies of mass
communication, with the traumas of war, and with the abuse of power, notably through a politics
of dictatorship, whether of the right or the left.
This negative image is so all-pervasive that it has become part of the modern definition of the
term, at least for ‘primary’ forms of propaganda, by which I mean the distortion, suppression or
censorship of information by various (usually mass) media, as well as proscriptive education and
other forms of institutionalized persuasion. Yet artworks stand at something of an angle to this
explicit manipulation of information. However much they proselytize, they represent a
‘secondary’ form of propaganda, though there may be an ontological grey area here. This chapter
will nod towards ‘primary’ forms at the end, but its principal concern will be with music and
music-making per se. Within that constraint I will try to explore the concept in a rounded way,
recognizing that negative connotations were neither there from the start nor suggested by the
etymology, where the essential link is with the propagation of values. And I will also identify
and discuss elements of propaganda avant la lettre , bearing in mind that the term entered the
language as late as the seventeenth century, that it gained widespread currency only in the mid
nineteenth century, and that a key stage in its subsequent dissemination occurred as recently as
the First World War.
It is time to take an example from music. When Beethoven composed his ‘Eroica’ Symphony
he intended it, inter alia , as cultural support for ideas of liberal humanism that were part of the
climate of social romanticism in the arts at that time; even the title has instrumental value here. 1
Thomas Sipe has demonstrated that the ‘Eroica’ was understood in just this way by many of
Beethoven’s contemporaries (Sipe 1998). Yet later in the nineteenth century the same symphony
could be read as a paradigm of ‘absolute music’. And in a present-day performance by Daniel
Barenboim and the East–West Divan Orchestra it can become propaganda for the Middle East
peace process (this before we have heard a note; it is enough to recognize who is performing and
who is on the podium). These multiple readings draw attention to a key paradox about music and
propaganda. Since it lacks referential acumen, wordless music ought to be poorly equipped to
serve as propaganda. Yet precisely that lack of specificity makes it all the easier to appropriate
for one cause or another.
We are helped in negotiating these ambiguities by terms of reference already present in the
poetics of antiquity. In particular, the concept of propaganda might be grounded in theories of
mimesis and rhetoric. Theories of mimesis allow that music may convey a message, including a
subliminal message. Yet this already introduces a problematic of meaning and of value, where
music may be either a degenerative copy of noumenal forms (incapable of truth) or an imitation
of the soul (incapable of lies); these, very roughly, represent Platonic and Aristotelian positions
respectively. Theories of rhetoric, meanwhile, shift the focus to questions of agency and
persuasion, taking us even more directly into the territory of propaganda. The devices of rhetoric
confront us directly with the space that can exist between substance and style, and between idea
and presentation. Moreover, a further consequence of this, also recognized by the ancients, is that
music – because of its affective power – can be both enabling and subversive, and thus invites
both appropriation and censorship.

Panorama
Appropriation or censorship may serve any number of causes, and only some can be explored
here. 2 Music may be appropriated or censored by a faith, and the earliest uses of the term
‘propaganda’ appeared in just this context. It may advance the interests of a nation or a would-be
nation, and did so often and volubly in the nineteenth century, at which point ‘propaganda’
began to acquire its pejorative associations. It may act as the mouthpiece of a controlling ethnic
majority, or as part of the cultural capital accrued by an ethnic minority (in which case it works
to enhance visibility). What all these have in common is that they are concerned with the play of
power, either by those who exercise it or by those over whom it is exercised. However, our
present age of mass media has found yet other uses for music. It may promote a product, sell a
lifestyle, improve our health and productivity, and recruit a cohort, to name but some. Such
blatantly commercial propaganda is also about power, but it is more about persuasion.
While the term ‘propaganda’ was coined in a modern European setting, the concept knows no
boundaries, either of time or of place. Even the most ancient empires of today’s Middle East
used cultural forms as modes of propaganda, as we know from the explicitly proselytizing stone
carvings found in the Assyrian palace of Nineveh, a celebration of royal power and a stark
warning of the price of dissent. Music leaves a less obvious material trace, given that only a
limited number of ancient civilizations and societies developed notational systems, but there is
an abundance of secondary evidence, in both written and oral histories, attesting its importance
to the powerful in earlier times, most obviously as a means of social control. In some cases,
especially in pre-modern societies, such evidence can be illuminated further by means of present-
day ethnographies.
Two brief case studies, located in different continents, will make the point. Henry Stobart has
drawn our attention to the use of music by the Incas as a means of ‘orchestrating’ the year, a
practice that continues among rural communities in the Bolivian Andes to this day (Stobart 2006,
ch. 3). He further points out that these musical calendars, determined by the selection of genres,
instruments and tunings, and closely tied to climate and crop production, were by no means
neutral. They were intimately related to mechanisms of social and religious control, and to the
reinforcement of political order and ancestral authority. The monthly ceremonies of the Inca
rulers, marked by particular song genres, instrumental groups and dances, contributed to the
establishment and maintenance of distinct social hierarchies among the subjects of the empire. In
other words, the imposition of calendars was also an imposition of power. Even today, Stobart
tells us, music continues to play a role in defining ethnic, territorial and class identities in the
Bolivian Andes, and it can further articulate a sense of an idealized past and a degenerate
present, a theme that is common to many cultures.
Compare this with Thomas Hale’s account of the Griot or Jali musicians of West Africa. Hale
informs us that the many roles of Griot musicians included praise singing as a means of
celebrating the power and ancestry of the rulers, of whose entourage they formed an essential
component (Hale 1998). Praise singing has been well documented elsewhere in Africa (Gleason
1984), but the practice of the Griots has a notably ancient pedigree in the great sub-Saharan
kingdoms to the west, and especially the gold-rich kingdom of Mali. Hale refers to written
sources that stretch back a good seven centuries to the writings of the Moroccan traveller Ibn
Battuta, who encountered Griot praise singers at the court in Mali in 1352. He goes on to
illustrate historical continuities by referencing European travel writings from the sixteenth to the
twentieth centuries. Throughout this period the musicians remained close to those who exercised
political power, and they stand as testimony to the perceived efficacy of music as a means of
upholding authority.
In authoritarian states in the modern world this role is commonly associated with an official
state style and aesthetic, with roots in either a classical or a ‘folk’ culture. This is starkly
exemplified by the changing phases of North Korean music since the political division of the
peninsula. Keith Howard identifies three such phases (Howard 1996, 2006). In the early days of
the new state, dance troupes and related orchestras, on a familiar Soviet model, functioned not
just as celebratory ballast for state occasions, sports events and mass rallies, but also as
‘propaganda squads’ designed to energize the workforce. Then, in the late 1950s, these
performance troupes yielded to the so-called Galloping Horse Movement, which worked to
eliminate all traces of elite culture and to promote indigenous creativity based on demotic
traditions, as understood and arbitrated by Kim Il Sung. Finally, from the 1970s onwards, the
juche movement formalized the ideological element in North Korean official music, such that
artists were required to reflect state policy through a ‘seed policy’ in which an ideological
element formed the kernel.
This is an extreme form of an official aesthetic, broaching no counter culture and no dissent,
and employing strict censorship to maintain the status quo. It testifies to the truism that the more
repressive the dictatorship, the more omniscient the dictator; Kim Il Sung was an expert on
music, as on everything else! However, persuasion can be more nuanced, as music history in
South Africa illustrates. Grant Olwage demonstrates how missionary choralism was used during
the colonial age as a (Foucauldian) disciplinary tool (Olwage 2005), for example, while Johnny
Clegg and Michael Drewett document and discuss some of the censorship later employed by the
apartheid state (Clegg and Drewett 2006). There was resistance to that censorship, of course, but
the resulting counter-propaganda could often be articulated safely and effectively only from
without the state; witness, with Shirli Gilbert, the role of music in ANC (African National
Congress) projects in diaspora, and in particular ensembles such as Mayibuye in the 1970s and
Amandla in the 1980s. Here a subversive black South African popular music flourished in exile
(Gilbert 2007).
Where counter-propaganda was fostered at home, it could involve both musicians and
audiences in a precarious – even a dangerous – balancing act, and it could also misfire.
Christopher Cockburn’s reception history of Handel’s Messiah in 1950s South Africa illustrates
that the musico-political tightrope was as real for white liberal audiences as for the black singers
involved in the performances of the Johannesburg African Music Society (JAMS) (Cockburn
2008). One of his conclusions is that ‘instead of helping to turn back apartheid, the JAMS
performances eventually became its victims’. In another essay in the same collection, Brett Pyper
demonstrates comparable ambivalence within the institution of the State Theatre in Pretoria
during the later stages of apartheid (Pyper 2008). In particular, he exposes the space that can
exist between the monolithic propagandizing agenda of ‘official’ institutions and the diverse,
nuanced and constantly shifting cultural practices they host.
Such reversals and ambiguities are the story of music in repressive regimes. Consider Iran.
Between the 1979 Revolution and the electoral victory of Mohammad Khatami in 1997 there was
relatively little opportunity for a culture of dissent, but Laudan Nooshin informs us that after the
legalization of popular music enacted by the reformist Khatami regime, a grass-roots
‘alternative’ music, influenced by Western rock, developed alongside the newly legalized
mainstream movement. This music acted as a channel for political dissent, and in doing so
displaced an earlier black market in ‘imported diaspora pop’ (Nooshin 2009). Nooshin discusses
this in relation to developing ideas of a civil society, the emergence of a distinctive youth culture
and the spread of the internet, but she further points out that an officially sanctioned culture
industry found ways to absorb and neutralize this critical dimension. Her case study is Arian
Band, which steered a cautious path between conformism and dissent, somehow gaining official
approval while simultaneously speaking to the concerns of disillusioned youth. In a discreet
propaganda, Arian Band, it seems, gives public voice to a promesse de bonheur . There is no
preaching, but simply by ‘reclaiming public space in the name of civil society’, the band offers a
cultural model of what a society might be.
It is worth stressing the importance of both popular music and traditional music to
propagandizing agendas, whether official or dissenting. By definition, popular music reaches the
widest possible public and it cultivates the direct emotional appeal in which propaganda tends to
trade. There are certain global patterns here. Typically, radical elements of mass culture will be
neutralized through appropriation by the status quo, and that in turn will prompt alternative
forms of subversion. Popular music, in other words, can serve several masters, but traditional
music (so-called ‘folk music’) is no less versatile and can exert a no less powerful ideological
charge. Since it supposedly embodies the voices of the ancestors, the fathers, it can stand for
stability and history in ways that can be useful to those in authority, but equally to those who
protest. Propaganda, then, often involves a play on the different meanings that can arise from
state, traditional and popular styles.
Something of this play of meanings emerges from Anna Morcom’s online article on Tibetan
music and dance since the 1950s (Morcom 2007). Morcom’s starting point is the official, heavily
‘sinicized’, state music that represented Tibet through to the 1980s, but she proceeds to
demonstrate that the relaxation of censorship during that decade led both to a revival of
traditional styles and to the importation of popular styles. In the late 1980s and 1990s this all
added up to a genuinely radical counter-culture, where music could reinforce a sense of
‘authentic’ Tibetan identity extending well beyond official prescriptions. However, the real
fascination of Morcom’s account is her suggestion that not only was this popular music
appropriated by the state in due course; a reverse appropriation also took place, in which state
styles were in turn redirected by ‘the people’, becoming forms of desirable modernity. There is
continuous slippage between style and idea in this surface play of meanings; it is a modern
version of that ancient counterpoint of which theories of rhetoric speak.
A similar play on state, traditional and popular styles has been demonstrated by ethno-
musicologists working on music in China and in its related territories. Nimrod Baranovitch, for
example, has discussed how pop/rock music was appropriated by the Chinese state through
Chinese MTV and state-sponsored pop concerts, effectively neutralizing its subversive charge
and absorbing it increasingly into the world of ‘state performing arts’, where it could acquire an
explicit propaganda role (Baranovitch 2003). Yang Mu likewise shows how traditional music has
been appropriated for propaganda purposes in China, with the academic world heavily
implicated (Yang Mu 1994; for a parallel study in Singapore, see Tan Shrz Ee 2005). The other
side of the coin is that both these genres have been able to retain a dissenting role in those
territories whose relation to China has been problematized historically. In this connection, several
scholars have examined how music has been hijacked by identity politics to generate a counter-
culture. We see something of this already in Morcom’s work on Tibet, but Nancy Guy has
presented comparable sequences for Taiwan, and Barbara Mittler for Hong Kong (Guy 1999;
Mittler 1996, 1997).
This brief global tour begs some further questions about music and propaganda. Returning for
a moment to mimesis, and to the views of Plato and Aristotle, we may note that to invoke
distortions is also to invoke essences; in other words, to examine ideologically motivated
transformations of meaning is also to interrogate truth content or authenticity. Traditional music
has been especially susceptible to the quest for authenticity. The idea that this music has survived
for centuries gives it a powerful emotional charge as a representation of strength and stability,
encouraging nostalgia for a mythic-pastoral world of conservative values, where older moral and
social orders are preserved. Yet such views risk essentialism. Lying behind them is perhaps a
fear of change, a rejection of the contemporary world and of an associated commercialism that
can be conveniently represented by highly generalized understandings of popular music. Acts of
recovery, in short, can distort the lens just as much as acts of appropriation.

Faith and nation

On the European continent, faith, nationhood and ethnicity – more or less in that order – were
among the principal arenas for negotiating identities until relatively recent times. Faith trades in
perceived truths, but faith and Church are by no means synonymous, and the Church was from
the start enmeshed in a decidedly earthly politics of institutions, a politics in which music was
heavily implicated as a mode of propaganda. This point could be illustrated via the encounters of
Islam and Christianity in early modern Europe (note how music in the tekke -s helped acclimatize
the Ottoman world to local cultures in southeastern Europe); 3 it could be pursued by way of
dialogues and synergies between Eastern and Western Christianity (compare the politically
motivated reforms of elaborately melismatic repertories within both traditions); and it could be
refined further by exploring music and politics in the Eastern Church itself (observe how the
chant was harnessed to the rival political agendas of separate nations).
For present purposes, however, I will focus on Western Christianity, and specifically on music
and confession in sixteenth-century Germany. 4 It is a good moment to do this, given that recent
scholarship has illuminated the topic in new ways. The broad outlines of the history, as of an
analogous history in England, are familiar enough. Where liturgical music is concerned, it is a
story of vernaculars versus Latin, and more broadly of theology versus art. Thus, for
Reformation theologians the degree of comprehensibility ensured by the vernacular and by a
conservative, ‘one syllable one note’ idiom was all about the propagation of values
(propaganda); echoing Plato, we might say that beauty should not distract from truth. However,
this maxim might apply equally to the Catholic rejoinder, as articulated in the debates of the
Council of Trent. In other words, very similar desiderata – the simplification and ‘purification’ of
sacred polyphony; clarity of text declamation – were proposed for Reformation and Counter-
Reformation music alike.
This broader picture has been nuanced and revised in recent years. In the first place, the
spotlight has shifted from sacred polyphony to what might be termed popular music, whose role
has been understated in the past, partly because of the hierarchies firmly cemented into cultural
histories, but also because this stratum of music-making presents obvious pragmatic difficulties
to the researcher. In the second place, there have been detailed site-specific studies that have
deconstructed pedigreed narratives about music and confession. We learn that even with
cultivated polyphonic repertories there was relatively little uniformity in musical responses to
either the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation. We are cautioned about some of the bias
found in our historiographical inheritance, notably a tendency, deeply rooted in stories about
Germany and nationhood, to associate Lutheran cultural forms with modes of modernity.
Rebecca Oettinger has demonstrated that Lutheran propaganda was disseminated more widely
through music than was previously thought (Oettinger 2001). The importance of Protestant song
as a symbol of the new Church has long been acknowledged, but Oettinger’s work opened up a
little-researched world of ‘mass media’ communication in which polemical song played a key
propaganda role in an age of limited literacy. The contrafactum (exchanging sacred and secular
texts, and fitting sacred texts to popular melodies) was of special importance here. It has a
lengthy cross-confessional history (see Perris 1985, 144–5), but its characteristic intertexts came
into their own during the German Reformation, parodying, challenging and disrupting Catholic
belief in a manner that could easily be assimilated by the common folk. Oettinger documents the
spread of such songs during the first half of the sixteenth century, and she notes their importance
as a mode of resistance during the Augsburg Interim, when bi-confessionalism was monitored
from a position of Catholic strength. Her work testifies to some of the special qualities of music
as propaganda: direct appeal, egalitarian accessibility to literate and non-literate alike, immunity
from material loss and the durability of the intangible.
By looking in close detail at music and confession in specific German cities, other scholars
have been able to take a thicker slice across repertories, faiths and social communities. Thus,
Alexander Fisher’s discussion of music in bi-confessional Augsburg during the Counter-
Reformation addresses several ‘layers’ of music and confession. There was the counter-
propaganda role of the Jesuits, backed by wealthy families, and involving not just vernacular
songs and ‘school dramas’, but a body of devotional polyphony suitable for amateurs (Fisher
2004). There was the continuing tradition of Lutheran polemical song, associated especially with
the ‘calendar controversy’ of 1584 and fuelled by a strong sense of socio-economic disadvantage
(Fisher documents several of the criminal trials that resulted from the proscription of such songs
up to the Edict of Restitution in 1629). There was also the Catholic liturgy as practised at the
cathedral, the Benedictine monastery and the leading churches, notably involving the
introduction of the Roman rite in the late 1590s. We gain a clear sense here of how the
pendulum-like changes to confessional and musical fortunes were linked, and of how they were
driven by politics.
Every German city had a unique profile, of course, and when we turn to Heidelberg, one of the
lay Electorates of the Holy Roman Empire, we encounter confessional tensions of a rather
different order. In the second half of the sixteenth century, indeed right up to the sacking of the
city in 1622, official doctrine alternated between Lutheranism and Calvinism according to the
(largely political) interests of respective Electors. Thus, an anti-Catholic – anti-Habsburg –
orientation could be more clearly signalled by Calvinism than Lutheranism, and for a time
Heidelberg became a major Calvinist centre, despite its status within the Empire. Catholicism,
meanwhile, maintained a subordinate presence, but one that increasingly broke surface in the
years immediately prior to 1622. Matthew Laube’s research on Heidelberg problematizes these
confessional identities, partly by examining different social layers (court, university, ‘common
folk’) and partly by using music as an index of the internal coherence of faith communities
(Laube 2014). The familiar musical codes certainly apply, but we learn from Laube’s work that
whatever the directives from above, the confessions and their associated musics were much less
discrete, much more fluid, in Heidelberg than conventional historical narratives allow.
Propaganda, we are reminded, pits itself always against the built-in inertia of established praxes,
in this case religious, social and cultural.
Let us stay with Heidelberg but leap forward some two centuries to the early 1800s. Faith was
still an important marker of identity in early nineteenth-century Heidelberg, but among the
intelligentsia it was now rivalled by nationhood and (increasingly) ethnicity, even if it took some
time for an awareness of these identities to trickle down to the population at large. In particular
we find, for a brief period, a group of writers (among them Clemens Brentano and Achim von
Arnim) engaged in the publication of folksong collections and related essays that would resonate
in German culture through to the early twentieth century. By depicting in idealized form an
image of ‘old Germany’, at times associated with a no less idealized image of Classical antiquity,
these men constructed a modern myth of Germany, often involving a poeticized nature
symbolism in which the Rhine was an emblem of nationhood. It was a movement that would
culminate in a remarkable outpouring of Rhinelieder in the 1840s (Porter 1996), in the work of
the Nazarene painters and in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen .
The distance separating these two ‘historical moments’ in Heidelberg measures a step change
in Germany more generally as nineteenth-century cultural nationalism began to take hold. What
distinguished this nationalism from earlier varieties is that ethnies (embodied in language,
customs, rituals, traditional cultures, even landscape) were forged into nations by the
homogenizing effects of emergent bourgeois high cultures, due partly to a strengthening
industrial-technological base in European societies (Gellner 1983), and partly to the influence of
developing ideals of popular sovereignty and egalitarianism. However, Liah Greenfeld further
points out that nineteenth-century nationalism took on the character of a belief system,
‘sacralising the secular’ and substituting ‘the social and political relations between men for the
bond between man and God’ (Greenfeld 1996). In doing so, it promoted the nation not just as a
community, meeting deep-seated human needs for bonding and belonging, but as a sacred
community or congregation, worthy of self-sacrifice and, more pertinently for present purposes,
of proselytism.
Defining and then selling the nation was the job of intellectual and political elites in the
nineteenth century. Although constantly invoking nature and ‘the folk’, it was a project firmly
grounded in the cities and unfolding in the realm of high rather than popular culture (but see
Bohlman 2004). At its heart was a prevailing belief that nations had a clear sense of cultural
identity, investing them with an image of authority that might challenge even that of the Church.
In the first place, cultural nationalism demanded the validation of nationhood by history. Roots
became all-important, and if necessary they could be refashioned, or created afresh, for myth and
history were intertwined in the job of building the cultural nation. In this way ‘Germany’ was
propagandized musically by a potent blend of neo-medieval imagery, classical homologies, a
folk ethos and nature worship. It was further promoted by an emergent, genealogically conceived
national canon, firmed up in festivals, conservatory syllabuses, concert life and publishing
enterprises, and by the historicism and organicism around which a good deal of idealist thought
was gathered. All this worked to forge a concept of the nation as a cultural unity.
The familiar category ‘classical music’ was thus linked from the start to ideas of the German
nation, but it also functioned more broadly to construct roots for a bourgeois social and political
ascendancy. This was a development associated mainly with the charismatic cultural capitals of
Western and Central Europe, where an ‘innocent’ music – music from a different era, notably
Bach and ‘Viennese’ Classicism – served as propaganda for a new social order. Conversely, in
the eastern half of Europe, and more generally around its edges, a very different ‘innocent’ music
– music from a different social stratum, specifically traditional agrarian repertories – served as
propaganda for would-be nations (in established states such as France, such music tended to
promote regionalism rather than nationalism). In other words, intellectual elites from this part of
Europe, including composers, chose to make symbolic capital from the culture of the ‘folk’. 5
There was nothing new in composers turning to traditional music. What was new was the
spirit in which it was deployed from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Even when presented
in the form of simple transcriptions, traditional music became an agent of nationalist propaganda.
This kind of cultural nationalism exhibited a paradoxical condition. It staked its claim on a
respected contribution to a generalized high culture. Yet at the same time it asserted its
distinctiveness by drawing elements of sanitized rural folk culture into a synthetic national
tradition. In a sense, then, each nation displayed a variant of a single bourgeois culture, while at
the same time competitively elevating, asserting and promoting its uniqueness. In practice, a
repertory of generalized folk idioms served as all-purpose musical signifiers, inflecting what
Philip Bohlman calls the ‘aesthetic centre’ (Bohlman 2007), while specificity resided in a poetics
of intention and reception. The musical materials themselves, like the liquids in Zygmunt
Bauman’s ‘liquid modernities’, flowed freely across the boundaries (Bauman 2000).
This is a narrative that began (at least symbolically) with Chopin’s Op. 6 and Op. 7 mazurkas
and ended with a cluster of latter-day nationalists in the early twentieth century. One such was
the Greek composer Manolis Kalomiris, whose ‘manifesto’ of 1908 speaks for the agenda of
romantic nationalism more generally in its proposed symbiosis of peasant music and
sophisticated art music. An authentic national school, Kalomiris claimed, should be ‘based on the
music of our unspoiled, authentic folksongs … embellished with all the technical means … of
the musically advanced peoples’ (Little 2001, 96–8). Setting aside the vast space between
rhetoric and reality here, note that this represented a kind of ‘last gasp’ of romantic nationalism
in music. In the early twentieth century composers such as Béla Bartók really did invest in ‘our
unspoiled, authentic folksongs’, but they did so in a very different, essentially modernist, spirit.
This was no longer a story about cultural nationalism, even if that was in some cases the initial
publicity. In the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the triumph of nations over
dynasties, such stories were no longer an imperative.

The ‘necessary lie’

The modality and ‘mentality’ of war changed in 1914. Paul Fussell has described how the
collective experience of the Great War changed sensibilities and divided generations, promoting
a new, harsher ‘cohort thinking’ about the ‘topos of inevitable war’ (Fussell 2000). This war was
not in the mould of earlier professional conflicts, unfolding at some remove from most people’s
lives. Rather it promoted the idea of war as a self-sacrificing collective struggle, and for that very
reason propaganda came to be assigned a role of unprecedented importance. Rachel Moore has
examined its discourses in France, from localized interventions at the beginning of the war to
wider national directives under the auspices of the Service de faction artistique à l’étranger (in
which Alfred Cortot played a leading role) by 1916 (Moore 2012). Her case studies include
Saint-Saëns’s Germanophilie , read in the context of both official and populist debates (the
Académie , the daily press), ‘national matinée’ concerts, which – like many other wartime
concerts – often included propagandistic speeches, and ‘national’ publishing enterprises. By the
end of the war the machinery of centralized state propaganda was already of an order, or
approaching an order, that would become familiar in later twentieth-century conflicts. Yet
Moore’s findings remind us that propaganda, however insistent, can often struggle to impose
itself in practice. Whether in concert life or in publishing, she tells us, the centrality of German
music in France was not so easily undermined. Here, in the Great War, at a defining moment in
the history of propaganda, an important lesson was learned. The story will be more persuasive if
you work with – if you harness – existing musical tastes than if you seek to forge and impose
new tastes. It was a lesson that would not be lost on the protagonists of the Cold War.
The Treaty of Versailles marked the culmination of a century-long competition between
dynastic government and the nation state, a competition reinforced in its later stages by
developing tensions between racial identities: German, Slav and Latin. As noted earlier, its
principal outcome was the defeat of dynasties by nations, but even as this played out in Europe a
new global politics was emerging, to be formalized in the aftermath of the Second World War by
the ascendancy of two superpowers and of their associated ideologies. The subsequent battle of
ideologies dominated global politics for more than forty years, and although it was directed – and
largely funded – by the superpowers themselves, much of it was outsourced to a divided Europe.
And since this was a ‘cold’ war, propaganda was advanced right to the front line, where music
played its part.
I will examine the musical coding, and specifically the code switching, that enabled this
propaganda. Under Communism two categories that were considered antithetical within
bourgeois culture – modernist music and commercial popular music – formed an unlikely
alliance. Both were deemed to be part of the cultural–political armoury of the United States, and
were condemned by the Soviet Union and its client states as anti-humanist and decadent. There
was further code switching associated with classical music. A creation of bourgeois Europe, this
was an elite culture, but when appropriated by socialist realism it lost these associations and
became the property of the people, expressive of universal human values. It also became a site of
competition, an assertion of cultural prestige on the world stage. Opera was part of this, but it
was also a special case. Its elitist origins conveniently forgotten, the ‘Soviet opera project’ had
prestige, signalling a sophisticated culture, but when translated into a people’s art it had
propaganda value too. 6
Folk music, meanwhile, was eagerly appropriated by socialist realism. Its propaganda value as
a putative music of the masses had not been lost on the Nazis, and there are similarities between
the folklorist projects of 1930s Germany and those of post-war Communist states. However, the
pedigreed associations of folk music with bourgeois nationalism became problematical for these
states. Links with the nation were not eliminated, but in a sense they should have been, given that
national states should wither away in the new order. Instead, Stalin’s classic formulation –
national in form, socialist in content – tied nation building to the class struggle, so that the nation
not only prevailed but gained enhanced status. What seemed more crucial was that folk music
should lose another of its bourgeois associations, this time with the primitive. To a modernist, the
primitive could be a valued category; to a socialist realist, it was a mark of inferiority and
regression. Hence the ‘classicizing’ of folk music in state ensembles and its migration from
village square to concert platform.
Choirs were a mainstay of musical life under state socialism, with a repertory that relied
heavily on folksong arrangements, on mass songs – usually propagandistic – and on socialist
cantatas composed to a blueprint provided by the Soviet Union. It was the choral medium that
most successfully bridged the gap between classical music and folk music, and often the choirs
were formally linked to dance troupes with a mission to promote the culture of ‘the people’. This
was part of a sustained attempt to democratize musical life, while at the same time raising
standards to a professional level, and it was closely linked to the proliferation of showcasing
competitions and mass festivals. This ethos of progress, where even amateur musicians were
encouraged to develop the highest professional standards, also informed the investment in music
education, the government-subsidized publishing houses, the recording companies and the radio,
for it goes without saying that the Eastern bloc was alive to the importance of dissemination, and
to the even greater importance of controlling that dissemination.
As for composers, the official unions, under the aegis of Ministries of Culture, had the job of
censoring their work through ‘adjudication panels’, as well as ‘self-criticism’ and ‘purge’
sessions, and also of commissioning new works, notably mass songs and socialist cantatas. A
careful eye was kept on union membership, with émigré composers characteristically excluded,
and with the activities of the membership closely monitored. In liaison with security networks
and the agitprop of the Central Committee, the unions had a major say in who would attend this or
that festival, for example, and in particular who would be allowed to make visits overseas. Senior
figures in the unions – leading composers or musicologists, who effectively created the official
art and the official artistic discourse – could wield a powerful influence on the course of musical
life, often based on little more than personal likes or dislikes. Careers could be made or broken.
Samuel and Thompson remind us that both positive and negative myths were projected by this
socialist–realist propaganda (Samuel and Thompson 1990). There was the myth of socialist man,
a progressive figure there to be celebrated by artists, and there was the myth of his political
enemies, there to be demonized, for, as Tzvetan Todorov has remarked, ‘the totalitarian state
cannot live without enemies’ (Todorov 1999, 7). Those enemies included artists and intellectuals
who refused to accept, or whose work was deemed to mystify, the new reality. No one was left in
any doubt about the official line on demons. There was typically a ‘hunt for opposition’,
followed by the co-ordinated ‘denunciations’ that had become formulaic within the Bolshevik
Party back in the 1930s. The activities of journalists, writers, artists and musicians were all
brought under the aegis of agitprop sections of the Party Central Committees.
Until relatively recently it was usual to contrast these ideologically freighted cultural practices
with the apolitical modernisms of Western Europe. However, it now seems clear that the avant-
gardes of the West, far from cutting loose from a political establishment, were themselves
institutionally grounded and subject to political influence as modes of counter-propaganda.
When (in 1966–7) the New York Times and the journal Ramparts broke the story of CIA cultural
propaganda in Europe, major questions arose about just how far European artists and
intellectuals, mostly with explicit leftist sympathies, were aware of what George Kennan,
architect of the Marshall Plan, called the ‘necessary lie’. We learned at the time about the
funding of Nabukov’s Congress of Cultural Freedom (Saunders 1999; see also Carroll 2003),
about CIA backing for the magazines Preuves, Der Monat , and Encounter , about ‘quiet
channels’ such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and about networks or ‘consortia’ of
ex-Communists all over Europe.
There is now an extensive literature dealing with the place of music within these post-war
campaigns, 7 telling us about US orchestras on tour, scholarships, American House programs and
so on. What remains more of an open question, however, is how far there was an ideological
charge attached to particular kinds of repertory. It is tempting to see a mirror image of the code
switching in the Soviet bloc, with the avant-garde acting as an insignia of the Free World. In the
case of France and occupied West Germany, this is not without foundation, but it needs
qualification. What one might say is that the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the radio stations of
the occupied zones in West Germany and other US-sponsored activities made room for an avant-
garde to develop, but that propaganda was only part of the story. Local agendas surfaced and
there are convincing alternative narratives for the ideology of post-war avant-gardes. In the case
of Greece, strategically of vital importance to NATO, the sponsorship was arguably more
crucial. It is no exaggeration to claim that the explosion of post-war modernism in Greece was
only possible because of US and West German sponsorship. Modernism was a badge of Greece’s
allegiance to the West.
On both sides of the divide, Cold War propaganda was at its most intensive during the ‘dark
decade’ following 1947, when the hard-line Stalinist position established by Andrei Zhdanov
was in its heyday. Following the Kruschchev ‘thaw’ in the late 1950s, there were new cultural
initiatives in the Eastern bloc, with the reinstatement of previously proscribed works by
Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and the rehabilitation of figures such as Myaskovsky and
Khachaturian. A younger generation of Soviet composers also emerged at this time, and several
of them managed to forge a musical career at some distance from the officials of the Composers’
Union. Subsequently, there were various pendulum swings, but the overall trajectory was clear.
The codes were losing their signifying power, and especially so in the client states. Formerly
proscribed repertories – avant-garde, jazz, progressive rock – were rehabilitated, and in some
cases became part of ‘official’ culture. They were now a property of East and West alike, and in
due course the USSR itself was unable to stem the eastward flow of the new.

The ‘destruction of alternatives’

The price paid for new freedoms in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War was a high one, and
especially in former Yugoslavia. An industry of books has been devoted to this subject, but for
present purposes we may note that, where music was concerned, propaganda again relied on
codes, albeit now entirely within the field of popular culture. We may begin with ‘newly
composed folk music’, or ‘neo-folk’. As Ljerka V. Rasmussen has demonstrated, this emerged in
Yugoslavia in the 1960s in a context both of urbanization and of ‘(r)urbanization’ (the
‘ruralizing’ of urban culture by those who moved to the towns but found themselves unable to
adapt) (Rasmussen 2002). These (r)urbanites were widely known as primitivci (primitives) and,
along with returning gastarbajteri (guest workers), they made up much of the audience for
neofolk. The contrary pole of attraction within Yugoslav popular culture was a thriving rock
scene, linked to the West, and implicitly or explicitly critical of state socialism. 8 It
oversimplifies the picture to suggest that these two traditions were utterly separate, or to
associate neo-folk with Serbia–Bosnia–Macedonia and rock with Croatia–Slovenia. The taste
publics for the two traditions were defined more by social background than by nationality.
Likewise, the ‘New Wave’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s resulted in significant
interpenetration.
One aim of the ‘New Wave’ was to transfer to neo-folk, typically perceived as culturally
regressive and still stereotypically associated with rural, (r)urban or émigré traditions, something
of the prestige associated with a more internationalist rock and popular music scene. The most
famous band associated with this modernized neo-folk was Goran Bregovic’s Bijelo Dugme
(White Button), established in 1974 in Sarajevo, and soon immensely popular all over
Yugoslavia. That it was situated in Sarajevo was no accident. The Bosnian capital was a site of
remarkable creative energy in popular music, right up to the Yugoslav wars. It has become
conventional to speak of a ‘Sarajevo pop-rock school’ and Bijelo Dugme was a leading part of
this.
Yet even as one branch of neo-folk was modernized, another was commercialized,
culminating in the successor genre known as turbo-folk. This was characterized by escapist
narratives, ‘star’ singers, kitsch lyrics and above all oriental idioms that could be read as both
local (Ottoman legacy) and global (MTV exotic). It was turbo-folk that became closely
associated with the xenophobic policies of the Milošević regime. It was endlessly promoted by
state-controlled media as part of a propaganda machine that entered into private and leisure space
– truly a case study in the uses and abuses of power and with media technologies all-important.
In truth, it is not immediately obvious why turbo-folk should have been of propaganda value to
the Serbian regime. Ljerka Rasmussen quotes Tomislav Longinovic’s seductive hermeneutic, in
which he argues that ‘techno rhythms … embraced from the colonial cultures of … Europe
proper [are] markers of racial/cultural superiority’, while ‘the wailing voice of the singer
articulates a suppressed, shameful legacy of one’s slavery to the Turks who are regarded as a part
of inferior cultures and races of the East and South’ (Rasmussen 2007, esp. 78–9).
That may be a touch over-imaginative, but what is not in doubt is that the musical propaganda
was remorseless during a period of increasingly polarized politics in Yugoslavia. Eric Gordy
documented it in the terms of a ‘destruction of alternatives’ (Gordy 1999). He noted that rock
culture was marginalized under Milošević in the early nineties, and that the more it critiqued the
association of turbo-folk with the regime, the more it was ghettoized. (The whole process,
associated with the independent radio station B-92, was also described, more anecdotally, in
Collin 2001.) B-92 carried on what has since become a legendary rearguard action against turbo-
folk by promoting both Western rock and an indigenous anti-establishment rock. When its
airwaves and its physical property were hijacked by the regime in the early stages of the NATO
bombing of Belgrade in 1999, there was outrage among the intelligentsia, expressed through a
major campaign of support that culminated in a ‘Free B-92’ concert involving several of the
leading progressive bands.
If we look more closely we see other strands. In the early 1990s, for example, rap and hip-hop
subcultures found their way to the local discos, with the potential to foster feelings of social and
political disadvantage but also to carry the sense of a faddish interest in the most recent Western
trends. Homemade varieties of these movements were then established, notably by the
Montenegrin Rambo Amadeus, whose early albums combined rap and pop-folk, but whose
parodic play on styles became increasingly anti-establishment and politically activist after the
outbreak of war. Then, in sharp contrast, there was a self-consciously sophisticated
countercultural avant-garde, often incorporating elements of classical music, and best
represented by the elite Slovenian group Laibach, whose subversive political satire has proved to
be notoriously open to misreading. If neo-folk, and its progeny turbo-folk, represented the most
inward-looking tendencies of Yugoslav popular culture, then Laibach was the most outward-
looking. This was a blatantly cosmopolitan Balkan critique that came from within but as though
from without.
Throughout these years, the engagement between popular music and politics took multiple
forms. Music functioned as an ‘unknowing’ index of social and political change; witness the
emergence of neo-folk from social disadvantage. It was an unwitting prey of political agendas, as
with the appropriation of traditional music by the Communist regime and of turbo-folk by
Milošević and – in a different way – by some Muslim groups in Bosnia (Hogg 2005). It was an
active agent of political subversion in the last days of Communism, exerting a powerful counter-
cultural charge; some Roma repertories acquired these connotations as early as the 1970s, but in
the late 1980s rock bands such as Riblja Corba (Fish Chowder) likewise qualified. Finally, it
functioned as propaganda for militant, celebratory ethnonationalist agendas, as with some of the
explicit pro-war messages articulated by Serbian and Croatian musicians alike in the early 1990s.
Rather later – and this is really another story – pop-folk and Eurovision generated yet another
mode of propaganda, one that renegotiated national identities, even to the point of reinscribing
Yugoslavia.

Epilogue
These various case studies may enable some useful generalizations about music and propaganda.
It is clear that one mode of propaganda relies on the capacity of music first to arouse emotions
and then to channel and energize them. The issues involved in affective response are beyond my
brief in this essay, but several psychologists believe that music has the capacity to catalyze both
reductive and polarizing tendencies (positive or negative) within emotional arousal when it is
allied to particular social or political goals. 9 This is germane to propagandistic music in North
Korea and to celebratory music everywhere. Unpromising though it may seem, a comparison of
the Xenakis’s Mycenae Polytope , performed on location in 1978, and the Opening Ceremony of
the 2012 London Olympics is very much to the point; in both cases music and spectacle
celebrated nationhood by underlining historical continuities.
This mode of propaganda is no less germane to the singing of Protestant songs and hymns in
Reformation Germany. However, Protestant hymnody also reminds us that propaganda can
depend on ‘prototypicality’, meaning an appropriate ‘fit’ between music and setting, and that this
in turn can promote conformity and compliance. As Steven Brown puts it, music can thus
homogenize social behaviour within groups (Brown 2006). The success of the Xenakis polytrope
in Mycenae likewise depended on an appropriate fit and, in a rather different way, so did those
JAMS performances of Messiah in South Africa. Even the translation of traditional music into
folk music within state socialism (the folk ensembles in the Soviet bloc) might be understood in
these terms. In each case the aim is, or was, to strengthen and unify group ideologies.
Prototypicality helps the powerful to use music as a means of behavioural control: by welding
music to ritual (the Incas), by exploiting existing tastes to direct social action in determinate
ways (popular music in China) and, conversely, by censoring supposedly subversive repertories
(Apartheid in South Africa). In such instances subjects may well be unaware of the persuasion;
the propaganda may be subliminal, and this is all the more important given that it has to
overcome the inertia of pedigreed responses. One US national security directive of July 1950
spelled this out: the most effective propaganda, it reads, allows ‘the subject [to] move in the
direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own’ (Saunders 1999, 4). Music can
be supportive, and the Cold War politics to which the directive refers is by no means the only
relevant context. Of course, behavioural control is not always exercised subliminally. At the far
extreme from hidden persuasion we have music as humiliation and torture. This is a big, dark
and increasingly topical, subject. It can only be hinted at here, but has been discussed at length
by Joseph Moreno and Suzanne Cusick in the contexts of (respectively) the holocaust and
Guantanamo (Moreno 2006; Cusick 2006).
Propaganda may also depend on music’s emblematic value, which allows it to affirm or
reinforce the attitudes and prejudices associated with particular (e.g. counter-cultural or
subcultural) identities. By functioning as an emblem, a badge, music can play a role in
movements of protest and dissent (Western pop in Tibet and Iran). However, it can also allow
propagandists to manipulate the stereotypes, targeting particular social groups, age ranges or
genders. Almost by definition propaganda counters individuation in musical taste and encourages
a sense of pride in the group, as well as a sense of hostility towards non-members. To an extent,
‘traditional music’ and ‘classical music’ worked in this way in nineteenth-century art music, just
as ‘popular music’ works in that way in certain totalitarian regimes in the Far East today. This
was also the role of neo-folk and turbo-folk in former Yugoslavia, where group identities were
further cemented by associative links (through lyrics and videos) with negative stereotypes of
permissive sexuality and gansta violence.
In today’s world there is music ‘round the clock’. This has a bearing on propaganda, if only
because of the conventional wisdom that it numbs the senses or empties the mind, leaving us
open to subliminal suggestion. Some psychologists add a sophisticated sheen to the conventional
wisdom by referring to ‘double arousal’, where – it is argued – there is a compensatory
dimension to arousal by music and arousal by the context in which the music is experienced; if
one is high, the other will be low (North and Hargreaves 2008, 90). This might have relevance to
some of the political contexts already discussed (at a time of high tension or war, does music
need to be simple and direct?), but it is more pertinent to a dimension of propaganda that has not
been discussed at all in this chapter: music as a commercial and advertising tool. Here we invoke
what I earlier called primary propaganda, where music’s role is either entirely catalytic or
entirely parasitic. Many of the categories discussed above – prototypicality and compliance,
subliminal persuasion and group identities – map onto this context without difficulty; but
perhaps none is more apt than ‘double arousal’. We learn from empirical studies that low
involvement in the product (any toothpaste will do) allows music to propagandize efficiently.
The converse also holds, however. If we are genuinely interested in the product (I really want the
best toothpaste), we will be less swayed by the propaganda.
One of the most entertaining accounts of music in commercial environments concerns two
wine-buying studies summarized by North and Hargreaves (2008, 280). In the first study, set in a
supermarket, French wines outsold German when typically French music was played, while
German wines outsold French when typically German music was played. In the second study, set
in a specialist wine shop, sales of the more expensive wines were significantly higher when
classical music was played than when the Top 40 was played. In both studies we witness
subliminal persuasion with a vengeance. Our purchasers made a good ‘fit’ between the music
and the wine; they were suitably compliant and conformist; they subscribed to a strong sense of
group identity; and they valued the emblematic status that allows music to define the group. If
music can sell wine, it can also sell democracy, religion, nationhood and war.

Notes
1 Beethoven’s title is modest in ambition compared to a whole rash of late twentieth-century titles designed to prick our social
consciences, or – the cynic might say – to ensure that we are ‘on side’ before the music begins. A case in point is Krzysztof
Penderecki, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima .
2 I am grateful to Anna Morcom, Henry Stobart and Tan Shzr Ee for helpful advice on this section.
3 The Bektashi order in particular drew on local traditions of music and dance. For a case study of acculturation in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, see Aščerić 2004.
4 I am grateful to Stephen Rose for advice on this section.
5 Dahlhaus 1980 has reminded us of the spurious basis of this association.
6 Frolova-Walker 2006 exposes the contradiction at the heart of this project.
7 In addition to Saunders 1999 and Carroll 2003, one might cite Beal 2006, Thacker 2007 and Monod 2005.
8 For an account of the rise and fall of Yugo-Rock, see the chapter ‘Rock Music’ in Ramet 1996.
 9 Relevant here is the ‘circumplex model’ outlined by North and Hargreaves 2008, 128ff.

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 14
Virtuosity and the virtuoso
James Deaville

True virtuosity gives us something more than mere flexibility and execution; a man may
mirror his own nature in it.
(Schumann [1841] 1891, 171)

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There
is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.
(Debussy 1921, 54) 1

The virtuoso slaughters the piece of music in the name of the spellbound community as an act
of atonement … in a concert, as in our dreams, the actors in the rites may exchange their roles.
Frequently we may no longer know who is being sacrificed: the work, the virtuoso or
ourselves.
(Adorno 1963, 66)

Seventy-six trombones led the big parade

With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand.
They were followed by rows and rows of the finest virtuo-Sos,
the cream of ev’ry famous band.
(Wilson Meredith, ‘Seventy-Six Trombones’, The Music Man (1957), Act I, Scene 5)

Introduction
Studying the aesthetics of virtuosity brings the researcher into direct contact with a host of
contradictory meanings and interpretations that not only cut across centuries of music-making
and virtually every style type, but also play out in other disciplines and professions, ranging from
dance and theatre to jurisprudence and theology. 2 Given this permeation of society past and
present by notions of ‘virtuoso’ and ‘virtuosity’, such an investigation must necessarily exclude
substantial plots of territory in order not to become uselessly general. In this survey of aesthetic
issues, the field of enquiry limits itself to instrumental art music, to which the lion’s share of
aesthetic contemplation has been dedicated in the last two centuries. 3 Furthermore, the chapter
invokes Liszt’s name and activities frequently: he is the jumping-off point if not focus for most
historical and current investigations of virtuosity and thus the greatest number of documents has
been assembled around his virtuosic performances; his abilities as technician and interpreter
were recognized by friend and foe alike; and the ‘Lisztomania’ of the 1840s is taken as the
progenitor of late twentieth-century crazes over virtuosi in the realm of popular music. 4

Towards a definition
Upon first consideration, the task of defining the term ‘virtuosity’ for music would appear
straightforward, for which purpose a standard music-lexical might suffice. However, the
researcher quickly becomes aware of hurdles that require negotiation. First, English-language
music dictionaries seem to possess an aversion towards addressing the practice called
‘virtuosity’, while the person of the ‘virtuoso’ receives attention (see Jander 2013; Randel 1986,
925) – more about this imbalance below. General dictionary definitions, like that in the Merriam-
Webster Dictionary – ‘great technical skill (as in the practice of a fine art)’ – do not address the
diversity and complexity of the practice. 5 However, the general public seems to know
instinctively what it should mean, so that Hollywood was able to entitle an action film Virtuosity
without any extra explanations. 6 Indeed, the concept seems to be rooted in the habitus of
Western civilization: we use it to describe artistic and sport performances, the public
presentations of teachers, clerics and other speakers, accomplishments in work contexts, and
even love-making.
Thus one might be tempted to posit that virtuosity after all does represent ‘great technical
skill’, which attaches it to a person. However, if we consider it from the perspective of
performativity, we must ask, what is the real site of virtuosity? In music we must ask, is it a
quality that a performer possesses, is it a feature of the music, or does virtuosity inhabit the act of
exercising it? In other words, is it ontological or phenomenological? Or something else again?
(See Hennion 2012, 125.) These questions have preoccupied philosophers, aestheticians,
musicologists and performance theorists from the time of Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie
universelle (1636) to Vladimir Jankélévitch (1979) and Lawrence Kramer (2001).
The historical consideration of virtuosity makes apparent another complicating issue: the
practice has not received the same valuation over the years and among its assessors. What was
initially perceived as a designation for virtue became the subject of derision in the nineteenth
century, as a powerful critique against virtuosity and its alleged shallowness – i.e. lack of
aesthetic substance – arose. The stigma associated with it has persisted in academic circles
through to the end of the twentieth century, when scholars from various performative humanistic
disciplines, including dance, theatre and music, came to realize the significance of the practice
for cultural modernity and identity formation (Smith 2002, 76). The public, however, has always
seemed to appreciate its qualities and effects, and not just as passive spectator/auditors: 7 as we
shall see, the virtuoso concert hall/stage has historically served as the site for a transfer of power
between performer and audience.
A final difficulty in defining the concept resides in the praxis of virtuosity, the exercise of the
skill that seems to characterize it. Must the virtuoso performer necessarily overcome the
limitations of his/her instrument/voice through display that invokes tropes of excess, e.g.
prestidigitation or coloratura? Or can the performance of a slow movement elicit the designation
of virtuosic, through the mastery of control and expression? Investigating the aesthetic and
practical meanings behind the concept should shed light upon its applications in such varied
contexts .

History of the concept

As Hanns-Werner Heister suggests, individuals who have demonstrated elevated skills have
existed since the dawn of collective human endeavour (Heister 1998, cols.1722–32). High regard
for virtuosi in music is first documented in Greek Antiquity (Pincherle 1961, 9), and has
continued as a thread throughout musical history.
The term ‘virtuoso’ was introduced first in Italy of the sixteenth century, where it was used to
designate an individual distinguished in any humanistic field (see Jander 2013). The concept
seems in wide circulation in the English language by the mid-seventeenth century, 8 to the extent
that Thomas Shadwell could publish in 1676 a satirical play under the title The Virtuoso , albeit
about the evils of the leisured aristocracy (Shadwell 1676). As Gillen D’Arcy Wood observes,
the figure of the amateur virtuoso persisted in England well into the eighteenth century, for
Samuel Johnson proffered the definition of the virtuoso (1751) ‘as an amateur devoted to
“subjects of study remotely allied to useful knowledge”’ (Wood 2010, 2). It was this
identification of the virtuoso with the monied idle class that – as argued by Wood – led to the
British ‘virtuosophobia’ in the nineteenth century (Wood 2010, 182). In contrast, ‘virtuosity’
appears in only a handful of English-language publications prior to 1700, and then only
sparingly; French writers would develop the concept behind the practice.
The first lexical definition of virtuosity occurs in Sébastien de Brossard’s Dictionnaire de
Musique of 1703, under the term ‘virtu’. He participates in the tradition of ‘distinguished ability’
when he describes virtuosity as ‘that superiority of genius, skill or ability that causes us to excel,
be it in the theory or the practice of the fine arts’ (Brossard 1703, np). 9 Brossard applies it to ‘an
excellent painter, a skilled architect’ 10 as well as to a superior musician.
Over the course of the eighteenth century the musical application of the concept came to
predominate in French literature – still, the 1835 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie de
France allows for a broader use when it presents ‘Virtuose’ as a ‘word borrowed from Italian that
mean a man or a woman who possesses talent for the fine arts, especially for music’. 11 Indeed,
Paul Metzner’s study Crescendo of the Virtuoso historically applies the designation ‘virtuoso’ to
chess masters, chefs, police detectives, automoton builders and musicians of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Paris. In keeping with a more comprehensive definition of the practice,
Metzner defines virtuosi as ‘people who exhibit their talents in front of an audience, who possess
as their principal talent a high degree of technical skill…. In general they showed their technical
skill through the overcoming of difficulties’ (Metzner 1998, 1–2).
The English more slowly developed the concept beyond Johnson’s aforementioned usage. In
specific application to music, Charles Burney still relied in 1771 upon the originary Italian
definition when the glossary to his The Present State of Music in France and Italy links practice
and practitioner as follows: ‘Virtù, talents, abilities; hence Virtuoso, a performer’ (Burney 1771,
vii). Thomas Busby’s Dictionary of Music from 1817 divides these meanings in two separate
entries:

Virtu. (Ital.) Taste and address in performance.

Virtuoso. (Ital.) One who feels delight in, and possesses taste for, the musical science.
(Busby 1817, 326)

It is less surprising to discover the same wording in Busby’s Complete Dictionary of Music
(1827) than to find it reprinted in the Complete Encyclopedia of Music that John W. Moore
freely adapted from Busby and published initially in 1854 (Moore 1854, 964), which was then
reissued by American publisher Oliver Ditson in 1880 (Moore 1880).
German musical lexicography presents an advanced understanding of the concept at an early
date. Thus Johann Adolph Scheibe wrote the following in 1738:

The word virtuoso is too general, for one uses it for everyone who excels in a science or an art,
and thus you always have to say a musical virtuoso or a virtuoso in music. Moreover, when
used in music, the word virtuoso usually is appropriated only for those who are excellent in
singing or playing.
(Scheibe 1745, 206) 12

German philosophers and aestheticians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
accommodated virtuosity within their respective aesthetic systems, which at the same time laid a
rational foundation for its critique. The list of contributors to the discussions is impressive:
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Theodor Mundt and
(later) Friedrich Theodor Vischer, among others. These figures had to account for a practice that
developed from an aesthetic ideal to a popular cultural phenomenon, occasioning a general shift
from a position that tended to regard virtuosity as a component of genius to one that vilified it as
superficial and self-serving. Thus if Karl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz, writing in 1807, could demand
of the artist of genius that he ‘be fully technically capable [and] accordingly possess artistic
virtuosity’ (Pölitz 1807, 23), Mundt argued in 1845 that ‘an age of virtuosity has broken out
instead of an age of art’ (Mundt, 1845, 27).
With regard to music, Gustav Schilling’s definition from 1840 typifies the term’s eventual
firm identification with performance in German-speaking Europe:

We generally use the term virtuosic for those musicians who make it their primary task to
present compositions that have already been composed, and to which end they have attained
an especially high degree of proficiency on an instrument or in singing.
(Schilling 1838, 780) 13

This was written at a time when virtuosity had become firmly established as a popular musical
practice in the concert halls and opera houses of Europe. Music from the era increasingly
reflected and encouraged the development of technical skill, although composers from earlier
periods already had challenged the practical and interpretive boundaries of contemporary
performers, with Bach’s organ virtuosity as one aspect of his activity that was noted during and
remembered after his lifetime (see Schulenberg 2013). Among others, Jane O’Dea maps out a
progression of virtuoso talent from Mozart through Paganini (O’Dea 2000, 4) whose activity as
‘violoniste extraordinaire’ (d’Ortigue 1837, 3) occupies a watershed position in the literature
about virtuosity and served as an inspiration for Liszt (Metzner 1998, 143). And, of course, it
was Liszt’s performance and music that came to define virtuosity for generations.
Arrival at a semantic consensus about the practice and practitioner of virtuosity does not imply
its widespread acceptance, however. As already observed, English critics and audiences
demonstrated general opposition to the phenomenon, even as exercised by a commanding figure
like Liszt (Wood 2010, 180–214), and certain German and French critics and aestheticians also
developed antagonistic attitudes towards the exercise of virtuosity. The opposition helped to
define its aesthetic parameters, whereby notions of excess and transgression came to define the
practice .
Literature review 14

Post-war phases
Given the critique, it stands to reason that scholarly engagement with virtuosity would defer its
appearance until such a time that performance, and in particular the performing body, would
occupy a position of respectability or at least acceptance within the academic community. Thus
Marc Pincherle’s pioneering book Le Monde des virtuoses (1961) remained an isolated
publication, even though his discussion of the phenomenon remained focused on individuals
through historical information and anecdotal accounts, in other words, did not essentially stray
from what Bronwyn Davies and Susanne Gannon and others have termed the principle of
‘collective biography’ (Davies and Gannon 2006, 1–15). Virtuosity would remain the purview of
the public sensationalist and curiosity seeker and the journalist until after the poststructuralist
turn of the 1970s, when formerly marginalized areas of investigation and the role of the body in
culture entered into scholarly discourse.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the earliest serious examinations of virtuosity arose (1) in
response to Liszt, (2) in France and (3) at the hands of aestheticians. Jankélévitch published the
remarkable book Liszt et la rhapsodie: essai sur la virtuosité in 1979, which assisted in the
acceptance of Liszt as a serious topic for aesthetic consideration, while at the same time
appreciating and advocating ‘the transcendence of virtuosity’ (Davidson 1998, viii). At the
beginning of the decade, musicologist/historian Robert Wangermée had already drawn attention
to the traditions governing the virtuoso in the early nineeteenth century, in the sense of a contract
with his or her public, to be manipulated by a network of interlocking interests (Wangermée
1970; see also Wangermée 1987).
Virtuosity by and large entered into German-language musical scholarship of the late
twentieth century through the study of the concerto in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 15 Most
notable among the early investigations was Tomi Mäkelä’s dissertation from 1989, which
demonstrated how virtuosity influenced compositional thought and how its immanence grounded
it within the concept of the musical work (Mäkelä 1989). Widening the field of investigation to
concerto virtuosity in all eras, Konrad Küster followed in 1993 with Das Konzert: Form und
Forum der Virtuosität (Küster 1993).
Scholars from the Anglo-American academic communities appeared reluctant to take the issue
of virtuosity up into scholarly discourse, and even more so in musicology, for quite differing
reasons, however; on the one hand, the post-war years in North American musical studies
witnessed an ever-increasing trend towards positivistic research, 16 while British musicologists
seem to have relegated such research to the work of biographers (see Allsobrook 1991; Walker
1983–96, esp. vol. 1, 1983). It is indicative of anglophone musicology that the first serious
monographs about virtuosity by a musician did not appear in print until Jim Samson’s Virtuosity
and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt (Samson 2004) and the publication of
Dana Gooley’s dissertation as The Virtuoso Liszt (Gooley 2004). 17
However, an American scholar from the field of history, William Weber, laid the foundations
for the study of virtuosity in any genre through his pioneering study Music and the Middle Class:
The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna Between 1830 and 1848
(Weber 1975). Drawing on historical and sociological methodologies in interpreting the material
culture of the time, Weber established the role of the ‘popular’ virtuoso concerts in the musical
life of the newly formed alliance of the aristocracy and the upper-middle class within those three
cities. As such, he provided the first empirically based insights about the social role of the
virtuoso, anticipating later research into the history of keyboard virtuosity. 18
Moreover, two North American scholars working in disciplines outside musicology, Paul
Metzner in history and Susan Bernstein in comparative literature, authored dissertations
respectively in 1989 and 1991 that introduced poststructuralist perspectives to the figure of the
virtuoso (Metzner 1989; Bernstein 1991). 19 Metzner explored the multivalence of the term for a
wide variety of cultural activities in which the subject of the French Enlightenment could excel,
while Bernstein situates virtuosity in a nexus between music and literature, arguing for the
writings of Heine, Liszt and Baudelaire as virtuosic productions on the basis of linguistic and
literary theory. Lacking in historical details, these two studies nevertheless reflect how the
discourse around virtuosity profited from the poststructural turn – they both argued for it as a
cultural practice of far-reaching social relevance.
The 1990s brought widespread recognition of virtuosity as a key consideration in performance
studies, even as that field began to exert its influence over musicology. The interest in virtuosity
has not only persisted to the present but has intensified, with monographs, conferences and
research collectives dedicating themselves to understanding the phenomenon in theory and
practice. All but the most popular literary manifestations of the new academic ‘virtuosomania’
have shared the common feature of some degree of dependence on interdisciplinarity, i.e. on
approaches and insights from other fields of enquiry and not just the performing arts: researchers
from history, anthropology, even theology have joined the ongoing discussions.
Certain academic publications and scholars after 1990 played key roles in the development of
virtuosity as a topic for serious aesthetic study. An amalgam of historical musicologists
(especially Liszt specialists), sociologists and cultural theorists, the list of authors includes Jim
Samson, Dana Gooley, Richard Leppert, Lawrence Kramer, Cécile Reynaud, Bruno Moysan,
Antoine Hennion, Tomi Mäkelä and Thomas Kabisch. The anglophone musicological studies,
potentially the most fruitful for the aesthetics of virtuosity, fall into a rough chronology of
research that builds upon successive publications, albeit generally to the neglect of the French-
and German-language secondary literature.

Anglophone interpretations
Liszt predictably served as the starting point for the evolving discourse. After Alan Walker
established a biographical basis for his activities as touring virtuoso (Walker 1983–86)
collections of documents about his performances in various locations followed, creating a
foundation for the analysis and interpretation of his activities. Above all, Geraldine Keeling
gathered reviews of his Parisian concerts (Keeling 1986, 1987), David Allsobrook collected
documents from his English tours (Allsobrook 1991) and Michael Saffle published the copious
documentation for his concerts in Germany (Saffle 1994). The aforementioned studies by
Metzner and Bernstein would encourage and inform the interpretive work of Kramer and
Gooley, even though the Liszt chapter by Metzner amounts to little more than a critical
biography. Virtuosic musical performance (and writing about music) above all helped to
destabilize the romantic aesthetic that privileged the ineffability of music over literature in
Bernstein’s interpretation.
Bernstein’s study appeared too late to serve as a source to inform Richard Leppert’s 1999
investigation. As an Adornian, Leppert engaged with the social conditions and material culture
that shaped the virtuoso as a ‘modern’ figure who embodied and mobilized such paradoxes as
looking/hearing, passive/active, male/female, superhuman/machine and charlatan/genius. He was
particularly concerned with period representations and the visuality of the virtuoso’s performing
body, for ‘the abstract quality of artistry and paradoxical immateriality of sonority itself were
experienced and made concrete by the presence of performers and their physicality in producing
sound’ (Leppert 1999, 258). Virtuoso bodies were texts to be read by the emerging bourgeoisie,
with personal identity staged as a spectacle. Thus for Leppert virtuosity played a crucial social
role, at least during the period of the Vormärz.
In 2001, Kramer published his interpretation of Liszt’s virtuosity as the chapter ‘Franz Liszt
and the Virtuoso Public Sphere’ in his important text Musical Meaning: Toward a Cultural
History , which stresses the lived experience of music (Kramer 2001). Gooley calls Kramer’s
perspective ‘a broadly new-historical approach’ (Gooley 2004, 4) that interprets the phenomenon
through such diverse cultural practices and historical contexts as visuality, theatricality, the bal,
the carnivalesque, star celebrity and musical excess. His primary thesis argues for virtuosity as a
manifestation of the bourgeois public sphere: ‘Mingling aesthetics, entertainment, and social
transformation, virtuoso performance both summons a large public into being and pleasurably
resists social domination by replacing it with the masterful but self-expending charisma of the
artist’ (Kramer 2001, 99).
Over ten years later, Kramer would expand on the last point, elaborating on the ‘self-sacrifice’
of the virtuoso, ‘which is also his [ sic ] self-aggrandizement’ (Kramer 2012, 239). Here Kramer
develops his reading of the virtuoso body and its communicative power, although as a symbolic
body, a simulacrum that ultimately manifests itself in the listening body, i.e. the audience. This
material substance of what he calls ‘social force’ enables the public to experience the pleasure of
the Other (the performing body of the virtuoso). The concept of virtuosity as excess most
prominently links Kramer with other aesthetic models for the practice.
The texts by Bernstein, Leppert and Kramer individually – yet clearly interconnectedly –
introduced poststructuralist thought to the study of Liszt’s virtuosity – the authors regarded his
‘excessive’ performances as the sites for important cultural work among his audiences. Such
interventions would in turn stimulate further cultural interrogations of the phenomenon within
the Anglo-American academic community, although still ostensibly centred on Liszt.
Samson’s and Gooley’s more comprehensive studies of Liszt followed in the wake of this
anglophone efflorescence. That they originated independently of each other is borne out by their
thoroughly contrasting approaches and emphases: Samson provides the first detailed
interpretation of virtuosity on the basis of composition(s), in his case focusing on the
Transcendental Etudes of Liszt, while Gooley undertakes a close investigation of the contexts in
which Liszt’s publics assigned meanings to his performances. Distancing himself from Leppert
and Kramer, Samson posited that ‘a direct, close-to-the-text engagement with musical materials
is likely to prove more revealing than the seductive hermeneutics of the 1980s and 1990s’
(Samson 2004, 2).
Samson presents one of his primary tasks as that of exploring the relationship between the
event-status and the work-status of music, which underlies the tensions behind the practice of
virtuosity. His approach advocates a balance between the earlier musicological emphasis on
work-status and the more recent privileging of event-status, recognizing that in the Études Liszt
inscribed the virtuosity in the music itself. Where Samson agrees with his ‘new musicological’
predecessors (without admission) is over the aesthetics of the concert hall :

Audiences mold it [virtuosity] to their own needs. And in this respect the public concert
tapped into a rather fundamental human need, the need to admire and applaud, to experience
 extremes of emotion vicariously, through a kind of secret identification with epic motifs …
(Samson 2004, 78)

Already before the appearance of his book Gooley had published an article about virtuosity,
‘Warhorses: Liszt, Weber’s Konzertstück , and the Cult of Napoleon’, in which he investigated
the military dimension of Liszt’s performances and issues of violence on the virtuoso stage
(Gooley 2000). The subsequent monograph studied the diversity of meanings that attached to his
person through a series of case studies that interrogate canonic moments from or aspects of his
performing career: the 1837 duel with Thalberg, his martial performance style, the Pest concert
of 1840, the German performances of the early 1840s, and the Berlin concerts of 1842. In each
case he situates virtuosity within a complex of cultural discourses that were in circulation in a
given place at a given time. For example, the ‘Lisztomania’ of 1842 Berlin reflected the ‘social
unwellness’ of the city’s inhabitants, which expressed itself in the excessive responses at the
virtuoso events. Gooley posits the roots of these public displays in the repressive rule of
Friedrich Wilhelm IV – the Berliners found a release in Liszt’s performing body. It is important
to remember that Gooley’s observations base themselves upon Liszt’s practice of virtuosity –
since they are so specifically geohistorically grounded, such readings may not apply to other
virtuosi of the time. 20
In Franz Liszt and His World (2006), Gooley revisits (Liszt’s) virtuosity, this time in terms of
the journalistic critique of the practice from the 1830s and 40s (Gooley 2006). There he extends
the enquiry to encompass the growing conflict between the rise of German symphonic music and
the cult of the virtuoso: an elite group of critics, informed by emerging notions of self and ego,
encouraged bourgeois perception of the individual performer’s eccentricities and of the audience
excesses he or she empowered in contrast with the collectivity and proper social decorum of the
symphony. These findings extend beyond Liszt, laying the foundations for contemporary
discourses against virtuosity.

French-language interpretations
In comparison with the American musicological approaches to virtuosity that have been
informed by cultural studies and have centred on Liszt, French scholars have further cultivated
the socio-aesthetic path of Jankélévitch in particular. Liszt may serve as a focal point, but in
general he functions as an index of the relationship between virtuosity and Romanticism.
Moreover, if Anglo-American specialists tend to produce individual studies on virtuosity, the
work of continental Europeans – especially German scholars – has appeared in anthologies,
typically conference proceedings volumes.
Indeed, the first substantial French contribution to the subject after Wangermée and
Jankélévitch was a wide-ranging collection of essays, Défense et illustration de la virtuosité
(Penesco 1997). The volume’s pioneering comprehensive approach to virtuosity established a
precedent that no ensuing anthology was able to match, in terms of time frame (from the Middle
Ages to the end of the nineteenth century), nationality (French and Italian), performance vehicle
(piano, voice, violin) and mode of reception (composition, theoretical writing, press review) .
Cécile Reynaud’s scholarly activity has interrogated virtuosity from diverse perspectives,
including its meanings for French Romanticism and its critical reception and social impacts. The
monograph Liszt et le virtuose romantique (Reynaud 2006) follows her 2001 dissertation and the
special ‘virtuosity’ issue of the journal Romantisme: Revue du dix-neuvième siècle (2005) that she
edited. Like Bernstein’s work, the dissertation examines the encounter of music and literature as
realized through the figure of the virtuoso, with special emphasis on the aesthetics of
instrumental music and the emergence of autonomy. Reynaud regards the virtuoso (and
virtuosity) as the product of a singular conjunction of an aesthetics, a technology (the instrument
of the piano) and a type of individual. In discussing Liszt, Reynaud extends the concept of
virtuosity to non-performance contexts, so that for her he also occupies the role of virtuoso
composer, transcriber and reader.
The aforementioned collection reflects Reynaud’s own wide-ranging interest in the early
nineteenth-century in France, especially with regard to cultural Romanticism. Her contribution
argues for a reading of virtuosity that regards it as an escape for Liszt and Paganini away from
the critique of the times and towards a transcendent Romanticism (Reynaud 2005). Other authors
profitably examine literary constructions of virtuosity: Éric Bordas argues for the application of
the designation to French novels of Romanticism (and not just poetry; Bordas 2005); Sylvie
Jacq-Mioche reads the early nineteenth-century literature on ballet virtuosity as a balancing act
between aesthetics and moral concepts (Jacq-Mioche 2005), and Moysan finds in it contradictory
elements of modern subjectivity (solism and decentredness; Moysan 2005).
Moysan, who has devoted most of his academic career to Liszt research, developed his
thoughts more fully in the study Liszt virtuose subversive (Moysan 2009). This sophisticated
analysis of Liszt’s virtuosity draws upon the advances of American cultural studies approaches,
but focuses on the concept of ‘fantaisie’ as the nexus for music, politics and social life, played
out through a negotiation between performer and audience. According to Moysan, Liszt
introduced a set of codes that subverted those in force at the time, thereby adopting the role of
social reformer – at the same time, the ambiguity of instrumental music allowed him to practice a
hidden commentary on stage.
Most recently, Antoine Hennion has produced a set of reflections on virtuosity that reintroduce
certain fundamental questions to the discussion (Hennion 2012): is it in the performance, or in
the music, or somewhere else? Does it serve its own purposes or is it in service of a work? Does
it ‘hide art by very art’ (Hennion 2012, 128)? After reviewing the aesthetic terms for the
possibility of virtuosity, he comes to the conclusion that the traditional, classical separation of
work and performance will not allow for a viable virtuosity. Rather, its effects should be sought
in the fusion of creation and execution, whereby he points to jazz as the quintessential virtuosic
art form.

German-language interpretations
It is interesting to observe how the most substantial German contributions to the discussions over
virtuosity after 1990 adopted the form of essay collections and a major research project. This
situation undoubtedly arose from several different factors, both aesthetic and practical: German
musicology historically undervalued Liszt and virtuosity (for the reasons Gooley articulated in
2006), the Habilitation requires a study on a topic other than that of the dissertation (thereby
discouraging continued research on a given subject), and the Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschaft
has traditionally promoted larger projects and conferences .
Just one year before the appearance of Penesco’s collection, the Basler Jahrbuch für
historische Musikpraxis published its 1996 issue as ‘Virtuosität und Wirkung in der Musik’. A
scholarly journal devoted to historical performance practice suited the topic of virtuosity quite
well, and the issue did introduce specialized perspectives on the practice and its practitioners,
although the coverage was uneven (two essays on Clara Schumann) and the publication lacked
any broader engagement with the topic. Perhaps most significant for the aesthetic question was
Erich Reimer’s essay ‘Der Begriff des wahren Virtuosen in der Musikästhetik des späten 18. und
frühen 19. Jahrhunderts’ (Reimer 1996).
Starting five years later, three other anthologies appeared in succession, none of them
representing an effort to systematically examine the topic (such a collaborative study remains a
desideratum for musicological literature). The earliest, Virtuosen: Über die Eleganz der
Meisterschaft—Vorlesungen zur Kulturgeschichte (2001) resulted from a series of lectures at the
Herbert von Karajan Centrum, Vienna (Fleiß and Gayed 2001), and the broader topics adopt a
wide-ranging set of methodologies in the hands of five authorities from divergent disciplines (see
Riethmüller 2001; Saïd 2001). Most relevant and innovative is the contribution by Albrecht Betz,
who calls on Adorno and Canetti to respond to Nietzsche’s severe critique of virtuosity in
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches ( Human, All too Human ) (Betz 2001).
However, by virtue of the number and diversity of contributions, Musikalische Virtuosität from
2004 covers the most substantial territory among these German-language collections. Above and
beyond the case studies for the practice in the hands of individual composers such as Chopin,
Schumann and Mendelssohn (and not Liszt), the volume’s authors present virtuosity in its
historical, social and cultural contexts, largely in central Europe. Musikalische Virtuosität
significantly expands the sphere of topic areas in the academic discourse around virtuosity:
Cornelia Bartsch (2004) considers the historical gendering of performers, virtuosi and the
concert experience; Linde Grossmann (2004) queries the factors behind the pedagogy of
virtuosity; Reinhard Kopiez (2004) empirically explores the relationship between virtuosity and
human physiology; and Peter Wicke (2004) changes the conversation to deal with popular music.
As such, the volume reflects the array of traditional and newer interpretive approaches the
researcher can bring to the topic, each invoking a different set of aesthetic premises.
Its breadth of topics notwithstanding, Musikalische Virtuosiät remains grounded in the musical
practice and practitioner. In contrast, Virtuosität: Kult und Krise der Artistik in Literatur und
Kunst der Moderne (Arburg et al . 2006) returns the discussion to an interdisciplinary level, and
more evenly represents the field of inquiry. While the essays do not interject new viewpoints into
the ongoing academic debates about virtuosity, the wide chronological span affords observations
into the twentieth century, especially from the turbulent years of the Jahrhundertwende.
Possibly the most ambitious and most broadly interdisciplinary research undertaking regarding
virtuosity was the subproject ‘Die Szene des Virtuosen: Zu einer Grenz-Figur des Performativen’
within the Sonderforschungsbereich Kulturen des Performativen of the Freie Universität Berlin.
Established in 1999 (and terminated in 2010), the special research area sponsored a variety of
activities in connection with its overall theme and its individual subprojects, which included the
topic of the virtuoso. The collaborators on virtuosity presented conferences, workshops and
publications, the most significant results of which was the final conference and its proceedings
(Brandstetter 2012). Topics of contributions ranged from chess and cooking to hiphop and
‘Guitar Hero’, reflecting the all-embracing conception of the organizers: ‘What is virtuosic?
Everything that so elevates that for one it leads to self-improvement, the other is stunned,
enthusiastic, and motivated to break out into applause – or into pandemonium and protest.’ 21
That not the star performer alone but the performance of virtuoso and audience serves as the site
for both affirmation and contestation of tastes, values and ultimately politics across disciplines
and their practices emerges as one of the group’s most significant contributions to the discussion:
 Last but not least, this dynamic of attestation or contestation of excellence makes apparent
how the proof of the virtuoso never establishes itself through the singular figure alone, but
rather always in a scene of reciprocal experiential intensification with an audience. 22

Aesthetic issues
The review of literature reveals high levels of aesthetic contestation over the concepts of
virtuosity and virtuoso, which precludes any essentialist definition or even agreement on
common features. Indeed, cultural contradictions seem to underlie the aesthetics of virtuosity, to
the extent that it thrives in a set of dialectics between dualisms such as centre and periphery, high
and low, and spirit and substance. That the emergence of paradoxical terms like these
accompanied the historical rise of virtuosity is understandable, for it challenged traditional
aesthetic concepts of value, constructions of identity and modes of social propriety. Yet just this
contested practice has also resulted in pleasure and empowerment among its audiences, and (to a
limited extent) has contributed to the democratization of the concert hall.

Nature and role of the practice and practitioner

The nature of virtuosity and the function of the virtuoso became significant aesthetic issues in
tandem with the rise of the musical work and of the professional performer in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries (Hunter 2005, 357). For the early Romantic German theoreticians
of virtuosity, the qualities described by the term nevertheless resided in the performer, not the
piece. This correlates with the evolving recognition of ‘genius’ in a certain category of
performer, who could stand on a level equal to that of the composer, and indeed, becomes a
surrogate for the same in the aesthetic discourse of the time. Hegel provides the most extended
treatment of the virtuoso performer in an oft-cited passage from his Aesthetics :

If the composition has, as it were, objective solidity so that the composer himself has put into
notes only the subject itself or the sentiment that completely suffuses it, then the reproduction
must be of a similar matter-of-fact kind. The executant artist not only need not, but must not,
add anything of his own, or otherwise he will spoil the effect. He must submit himself entirely
to the character of the work and intend only to be an obedient instrument … If … art is still to
be in question, the executant has a duty, rather than giving the impression of an automaton …
to give life and soul to the work in the same sense that the composer did. The virtuosity of
such animation, however, is limited to solving correctly the difficult problems of the
composition on its technical side and in that process avoiding any appearance of struggling
with a difficulty laboriously overcome but moving in this technical element with complete
freedom. In the matter not of technique but of the spirit, genius can consist solely in actually
reaching in the reproduction the spiritual height of the composer and then bringing it to life.
(Hegel, cited in Hunter 2005, 362 )

Here, in rather clear and concise formulation, we encounter the ideal of virtuosic performance
that would predominate musical discourse to the present: the submission to the composition, the
merging with the composer’s spirit, the genius of communicating that spirit to the audience, the
deployment of technical skill (in the service of the work) and the avoidance of extraneous
additions. The seeds of the critique of virtuosity are readily evident in the passage; such were the
standards by which future virtuosi would be assessed and by which many, including Liszt, would
fail for subsequent generations of aestheticians and critics.
Carl Lommatzsch’s transcriptions of Schleiermacher’s aesthetic lectures (published in 1842)
likewise associated virtuosity (in any art) with a high degree of accomplishment, but regarded
the work as occupying a position of productive tension between ‘genius’ ( Genialität ) and
virtuosity. Schleiermacher’s thought moreover accounted for a ‘one-sided’ ( einseitige ) and
‘mechanical’ ( mechanische ) virtuosity, concepts that would prominently figure in the censures
of the practice. Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s Aesthetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen: Die
Kunstlehre from 1851 maintains the dialectic between creative genius and reproductive virtuosity
(‘the virtuoso is not a producing artist’; ‘Der Virtuos ist nicht produktiver Künstler’), yet allows
for a bridge through performance, whereby ‘he immerses himself fully in the spirit of the
composition and, through all of the moments and motions of his performance, brings it to full
expression’ (Vischer 1846, 117).
This perception of virtuosity as the domain of the reproductive artist has dominated the
popular and academic discourses surrounding it for over two hundred years. Attempts to dislodge
the phenomenon from this artist-centred position have concentrated on reintroducing the work
concept into performativity, which ‘draws the performer right into the heart of the work’
(Samson 2004, 2). Such a construction recognizes and ostensibly eliminates the prospect of
technical proficiency masquerading as virtuosity, a concern articulated by aesthetician and critic
alike since the late eighteenth century. While it is possible to push virtuosity from music’s event-
status towards its work-status (see Samson 2004), one runs the risk of reducing the practice to
velocity and associated techniques, which leads Hennion to aver that ‘Schumann’s pieces or, in a
less unambiguous way, those of Chopin are not virtuosity pieces’ (Hennion 2012, 131).
However, if virtuosity consists in a high degree of facility and interpretive ability, why should a
moving, fully proficient presentation of a slow movement – devoid of ornaments – not be
considered virtuosic? For example, Liszt’s (concert) transcriptions of songs by other composers
like Schubert and Robert Franz often hewed close to the originals, i.e. without extraneous
ornamentation, and yet are reported to have exercised a profound effect on their auditors. 23
With regard to the audience, Brandstetter, Bandl-Risi and van Eikels compellingly argue that
virtuosity and the virtuoso only acquire meaning when, ‘in a scene of reciprocal experiential
intensification with an audience’, practice-room heroes must prove themselves on stage. 24 The
high-level performer not only pleases the public through mastery of the notes and their
expression, however; audience members have historically reported some form and degree of
corporeal and/or psychic empowerment through the experience of virtuosity. 25 Few
aestheticians or musicologists have considered the actual dynamics of the virtuoso concert hall,
with the exception of Kramer. Popular music scholars may have more intensely studied the
practice, yet other than Rob Walser’s studies in which he addresses physiological responses to
volume and distortion, 26 their tendency as well has been to regard dexterity, precision and
amplitude (among other features) as markers of a virtuosity that mysteriously impacts its
listeners. Kramer explains ‘ecstatic fandom’ through the public’s co-experience with the artist,
who disseminates him- or herself as a gift to the audience and ‘through whose body and its
appendages each spectator [ sic ] sees and loves himself [ sic ]’ (Kramer 2012, 241).
Thomas Wartenberg provides an alternative interpretation for audience-celebrity interactions,
a transaction of power that can apply to the virtuoso experience as well: the public ultimately
responds to the virtuoso’s exercise of power, as personality, as technician, as interpreter
(Wartenberg 1990). Sociologists conceptualize relations of power as a continuum, ranging from
domination to liberation (see, for example, Freire 1985). Wartenberg’s paradigm identifies what
he calls transformative power relationships, which rely on the development of trust within the
subordinate agent (person acted upon) towards the dominant agent (actor):

Trust is central to the establishment of a truly empowering relation … The point of a

transformative power relationship is to empower the subordinate agent to such an extent that
she can transcend her relationship to the dominant agent … Any social practice can be
engaged in a manner that opens up the possibility of engaging in transformative power
relationships with others.
(Wartenberg 1990, 211–14, 221)

In this power relationship, the dominant agent encourages the subordinate agents to develop their
own potential, empowers them. This also describes the power of virtuosity, wherein audience
members give themselves trustingly over to the dominant agent of the virtuoso, for the purpose
of their own transcendent empowerment. Wartenberg uses the concept of ‘superposition’ of
agents to describe these relationships, which for virtuosity can metaphorically join dominant and
subordinate agents (performer and listener) in the experience of musical performance. This
translates not only into narcissistic jouissance , but also into social outcomes; as Kramer
suggests, ‘The audience becomes a material embodiment of social force as such but only insofar
as its members surrender themselves unconditionally to the virtuoso’s transfiguring
presence’(Kramer 2012, 219). Richard Taruskin posits an enunciatory role for the virtuosic artist
of the romantic era: ‘The virtuoso would become a sublime, rabble-rousing orator on behalf of
social progress’ (Taruskin 2009, 265). 27
The same transformational experience has occurred since the nineteenth century in the face of
virtuosity. Although the effect on the audience may be transitory – much like Bakhtin’s carnival
(Bakhtin [1941] 1984) – its social benefits cannot be disavowed, at least as a temporary
liberation from oppressive economic, social and cultural conditions at a given time (Deaville
1998). Whether the professional observer (i.e. critic, composer, performer) labels the results
‘ravishing virtuosity’ (Bie 1899, 75) or marks the presentation of a ‘tawdry virtuoso’ (Britten
[1952] 2003, 116), the success or lack thereof ultimately inhabits the domain of the audience
whose response – contingent upon multiple factors within individuals – will arbitrate in a given
context, and then not uniformly. Most commentators presume a unitary crowd reaction to a
virtuoso performance, yet between the antipodes of approval or disapproval exists a whole range
of responses available to each person in the hall, even if fellow audience members may influence
a collective response.
Undoubtedly, the salutary effects of virtuosity upon the general public have led to its
continuing popularity, even at times when the mandarins of taste have inclined to renounce the
practice as shallow and vainglorious, as in the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. 28
The reception of virtuosity has also varied according to the vehicle of dissemination; the attitudes
in the daily press reflect those of its consumers, which are generally favourable, while those in
music journals and professional publications are apt to adopt a more cautious position on the
virtuosity of an artist. The most critical voices may have been those in the scholarly literature
until about 1990, when such performance began to come into its own as a historical (and current)
cultural practice.

Critique and paradoxes

The critique of virtuosity originated early in its public existence, as already discussed; it was
perceived as threatening the established order. The fears articulated by its critics have been
multiple and persistent over time – ostensibly over aesthetic issues, the criticisms have arisen
within particular social and political contexts, as Gooley (2006) has demonstrated for Germany
of the early nineteenth century. Perhaps the most prevalent issue conflates self-promotion and
display with lack of depth and empty technique, which has resulted in accusations of
charlatanism that cut across style boundaries. Thus the ‘false virtuoso’ does not enter into the
spirit of the composition or composer that characterizes ‘genuine’ virtuosity with its aura of
authenticity, whereby the audience likewise fails to enter into the more profound immersion
beneath the surface of the notes. The emphasis on interiority as the basis for aesthetic experience
has not limited itself to the classical musical canon: jazz performers, for example, have long
worked under a similar regime of expectations. Yet the critique seems as much a manifestation
of the anxiety of elite gatekeepers over a potential loss of control as a desire to maintain
performance standards, for ‘ecstatic fandom’ can also mobilize social and political action. While
uncontrolled bourgeois bodies in concert halls may have occasioned concern among ruling
powers in pre-1848 Europe, the same could be said for African-Americans making music in
public places the late twentieth century. 29
Indexical for the ongoing debate over virtuosity is a range of paradoxes that has prominently
figured in the various position-takings over the years. Leppert identified the following
contradictory meanings that attached to Liszt and can mark the virtuoso in general, as ‘the
epicenter of the cultural and social issues that characterize modernity’: artist/businessman,
inspired superhuman/machine, sincere/calculating, authentic/fake, masculine/feminine, Byronic
hero/fainting aesthete. To that list could be added such related binaries as transcendent/materially
grounded, model of success/charlatan, body/mind, diseased/healthy, non-normate/normate. That
these paradoxical interpretations still contribute to the assessment of a new star performer reveals
itself in the case of an artist like Lang Lang, for whom the issue of ethnic identity adds another
layer to the evaluation (see Hung 2009).
The critics may well privilege one side of the duality over the other, depending on their
response to an individual practitioner or the practice in its entirety. Yet such paradoxical
constructions can also create productive tensions that enable the expression and even working
out of cultural anxieties. During Liszt’s time, the concern over the machine – here embodied in
the piano – was assuaged by its mastery at the hands of the flesh-and-blood virtuoso, who could
even ‘out-machine the machinery’ (Leppert 1999, 273). Jimi Hendrix’s uncanny control over and
manipulation of the sounds of the electric guitar helped to ‘viscerally communicate the
experience of modern, technological warfare’ (Kramer 2013, 145), whereby listeners could
obtain to a (temporary) sense of personal empowerment through the transformational capacity of
his performance.
Needless to say, the most debated of the dualities has been the complex of characteristics
embracing sincerity, authenticity and substance over manipulation, fakery and shallowness.
Various meanings have attached to the virtuoso on the basis of his or her communication in
concert: a model of success, a conquering hero, a spiritual presence and a sexual force, among
others. These and other meanings implicate the exercise of power in the hall, which may result in
the empowerment or the overpowerment of the participant subject – in the case of sexual force,
the effects of virtuosity have been variously interpreted either as release or as domination over
women spectator/auditors. 30 However, according to traditional applications of the term, the ‘true
virtuoso’ dispenses self to the onlookers and ‘onlisteners’ in a benevolent act of body and mind
together: the mutual, profound experience of the musical work.
Yet success for the virtuoso performer has required calculation, both off- and on-stage. The
privileging of interiority in German idealist aesthetics notwithstanding, the virtuoso has never
immersed him- or herself so deeply in the music as to become insensate to the audience, for the
goal of such presentation should be communication. Moreover, the professional instrumentalist
or vocalist has traditionally acquired and cultivated gestures and behaviours in performance that
serve the purpose of drawing spectator/auditors into the musical experience. 31 The failure of
these somatic signs to hail members of the public may have manifold reasons, ranging from the
performer’s inability to master or control them to the spectator/auditors’ frames of mind, but if
they do misfire, the tendency among observers has been to dismiss the performer as a charlatan –
at least if he or she appears to be manipulating the audience. At the same time, evident visible
and audible ease in performance has been valorized as a sign of virtuosity, within the paradox
that only hard work could produce such apparent effortlessness.
If certain paradoxical characteristics inhabit the virtuoso, it is also possible to attribute
potentially contradictory terms to the audience for the virtuoso experience – for example,
looking/hearing, active/passive or attentive/inattentive. Unlike the paradoxes evidenced in the
body and performance of the artist, however, those for the public are not mutually exclusive and
indeed, such opposing behaviours may equally manifest themselves during one and the same
concert visit. And these physical and psychic states can arise (be aroused) in response to the
performance, as already noted for specific artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Excess and disability

Samson observes that one of the early (i.e. late eighteenth-century) criticisms of virtuosity
dismissed the practice on the basis of the ‘pejorative connotations of excess’ (Samson 2004, 4).
This reading of the phenomenon could only gain momentum as performers ratcheted up their
display and the public increasingly responded through physical demonstrations of enthusiasm
that have remained at high levels. The attributed losses of control and of propriety have firmed
up the observations of hysteria and even disease among audiences, and have justified the
critiques of artist fakery; after all, interiority remains the standard among performers and
audiences in the classical genre. Kramer, whose discussion of virtuosity from 2012 represents the
most detailed exploration of the concept of excess, seems to aim more at the popular-music
concert when he uses the designation ‘ecstatic fandom’. As he remarks:

The virtuoso performer also performed a self, a public persona uniting expressive power and
sensitivity with celebrity. The result of this union was to incorporate excess into the very field
of social relations meant to restrict excess: the excess on the one hand of the performer as a
charismatic exception to whom all things are permitted and the excess on the other hand of the
spectator drawn into the licensed intoxication of ecstatic fandom.
(Kramer 2012, 231 )

He proceeds to explain the process whereby the transfer of power and pleasure takes place, a
transaction and communication that call to mind Wartenberg’s transformational power, only here
involving an undifferentiated mass audience in the sense of a ‘social totality’: 32

The virtuoso body is like a battery charged with the shock of the unknown; the function of the
 virtuoso performance is massive discharge – a public transference of cathexis, understood to
pass from the interior of the virtuoso to the interior of the audience … The body of the
Lisztian virtuoso pushes its capacity to channel overwhelming force to the outer limit of
possibility … The virtuoso’s self-sacrifice, which is also his self-aggrandizement, allows the
audience in some degree to possess the performer by focusing on bodily part-objects and thus
to take possession of the Other’s pleasure.
(Kramer 2012, 238–9)

In a discussion of the dancer Oguri, Judith Hamera draws on a different metaphor to embody
the excess of virtuosity: the monster. ‘The virtuoso as sacred monster rewrites plots of possibility
for other bodies even while demonstrating the inability of other bodies, including those of critics,
to execute this virtuous discipline themselves’ (Hamera 2000, 149). Yehudi Menuhin first
described the extraordinary body of the virtuoso as a ‘sacred monster’ 33 , and that image well
captures another paradox of the virtuoso – superhuman/freak.
While the trope of ‘virtuosity as excess’ dominates the interpretive realm for somatic cultural
practices, within that discourse resides another potential reading of the literary and visual
records, quite the opposite to the virtuoso as superhumanly endowed hero: the virtuoso as non-
normate in the sense of a ‘freak’ and a model of disability. Some performers were visibly
disabled, which invited comment: Maria Theresia Paradis ‘was presented as a freak – a
performer who was young, female, foreign, and blind – in her tours to Paris and London. The
public that paid to hear and gawk at these performers connected their prodigious musical abilities
to something “alien” about them – their nationality or youth or handicap’ (Parakilas 2002, 65).
Of course, the tortured, deteriorating body of Paganini with all of its virtuosic skill performed the
freak-genius paradox of virtuosity, in his case enabled and empowered by a mythical allegiance
with the forces of darkness. In contrast, able-bodied virtuosi like Liszt came to represent physical
excess in performance that transcended the corporeally possible, and thus likewise satisfied the
voyeuristic demands of his audience, yet were coded as disabled in various cultural for a; for
example, caricatures regularly presented virtuosi like Liszt, Thalberg and Gottschalk as
possessing too many fingers or hands. Whether displaying and performing bodies of lack or
excess, the extraordinary body of the virtuoso has become the site for verbal or visual images
drawn from the rhetoric surrounding disability, like the Washington Post review of Hilary Hahn
that compared her to a ‘freak of nature’ (Battey 2011) or the commentator from the BBC who
wrote about the ‘virtuoso contortions’ of jazz saxophonist Courtney Pine (Longley 2012).

Closing remarks
As this chapter has revealed, the phenomenon of virtuosity is revealed in performance; whether
recording can capture that aura remains to be determined, Glenn Gould’s practice and aesthetics
notwithstanding. The polysemous nature of virtuosity has ensured that generations of performers
and audiences will assign it diverse meanings, according to collective contexts and individual
identities. Its paradoxical character bears out the innate multivalence of the concept, which,
despite over three centuries of reflection, still resists clear definition. Still, the study of the
practice and practitioner does suggest some common ground, even if delimited by its contested
aesthetic status. Virtuosity is a product of performance, bringing one or more exceptional
interpreting bodies into communication with an audience that undergoes an extraordinary
experience through that mediation.
 A number of virtuoso- and virtuosity-related issues remain to be explored by the academic
community. First among them is the ‘Liszt problem’: until we move away from Liszt and his
audience as the templates for analysis, 34 we will not be able to arrive at a more comprehensive
understanding of the phenomenon. Gooley and Moysan stress the unique character of Liszt’s life
and activity as virtuoso, and yet his practice becomes the standard by which the meanings behind
that designation are studied. What about Kalkbrenner, Pixis or Hummel, among many other
‘average’ piano virtuosi of his day, let alone the thousands since then, in different styles and on
diverse instruments and voices and as conductors?
Questions of gender and sexual identity have scarcely entered into discussions of the topic,
where Clara Schumann may be mentioned from an historical perspective, but any possible
inherent differences encoded in the performance and the reception of female virtuosos have not
yet received attention, across style boundaries. This also applies to women audience members
and their responses to male and female virtuosic performers/performances, again, whatever the
style.
Indeed, the audience of virtuosity remains a fruitful field for study, and this includes in
particular cognitive research in performance venues, whereby somatic responses could be
empirically measured and compared. One question that such a methodology could help answer
would address differing abilities of perception among audience members, which could reflect
varying levels of listening ability or attentiveness and lead to identifying a ‘virtuoso
spectator/auditor’ if such exists. Another aspect of audience research is the extent to which
technology mediates and modifies the experience of virtuosity. Are recorded audio-only
performances truly regarded as less virtuosic? Do older audio recording techniques hinder the
listener’s appreciation of exceptional talent? Do video tapes and DVDs (and televised
performances) also provide a reduced experience?
Finally, researchers should seriously examine figures who have historically occupied the
borderland between virtuosity and charlatanry (and not Liszt, whose superior talents were never
a matter for debate). Liberace, for example, billed himself as ‘Liberace – the most amazing piano
virtuoso of the present day’ (Pyron 2000, 79), while the followers of saxophonist Kenny G like
to brand him as a saxophone virtuoso. 35
This last topic leads back to the narrative of the virtuosic as solitary, Byronian artist,
struggling against the elements and the gods, who disperses his/her remarkable favours over an
undifferentiated mass of humanity. As Hamera remarks, however, ‘there is another possibility.
That is: to abandon the singular hero-story of virtuosity entirely in favor of a bracing love story
between artist and critic [i.e. public] in which each remakes the other’ (Hamera 2000, 151).
Therein may reside the true mystery and miracle of virtuosity.

Notes
1 ‘L’attrait qu’exerce le virtuose sur le public parait assez semblable à celui qui attire les foules vers les jeux de cirque. On
espère toujours qu’il va se passer quelque chose de dangereux …’
2 My sincere gratitude to those who have directly and indirectly assisted in the preparation of this chapter, including editor
Stephen Downes (Royal Holloway), colleagues Dana Gooley (Brown University) and Richard Leppert (University of
Minnesota), and particularly graduate student Agnes Malkinson (Carleton University), whose expert bibliographic work
facilitated the study’s completion. Unless indicated otherwise, the translations are by the author.
3 Hennion 2012, Miller 2009, Walser 1993 and Wicke 2004 have established the aesthetic parameters for virtuosity in jazz and
popular music, which differ in significant aspects from those for art music.
4 Ken Russell’s 1975 film Lisztomania makes the connection tangible through the casting of Roger Daltrey as Liszt.
5 ‘Virtuosity’, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary . Available at: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virtuosity
 (accessed 23 January 2013).
6 The film was released in 1995, directed by Brett Leonard and featuring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe.
7 Since looking and listening are equally crucial components of the virtuoso experience, this chapter will adopt the compound
term ‘spectator/auditor’ for the audience act of consuming virtuosity.
8 See, for example, Alsted 1664 in which he observes in the unpaginated ‘To the Reader’, ‘I know that all Virtuoso’s will
encourage those things which conduce to the Improvement of any ingenious art’.
9 ‘Cette Superiorité de genie, d’adresse ou d’habilité, qui nous fait exceller soit dans la Théorie, soit dans la Prattique des beaux
Arts.’
10 ‘un excellent Peintre, un habile Architecte’.
11 ‘mot emprunté de l’italien, qui signifie, Un homme ou une femme qui a des talents pour les beaux-arts, et particulièrement
pour la musique’. Institut de France, Dictionnaire de l’Académie française , 6th edn, Vol. 2 (Firmin-Didot frères, 1835, 941).
This definition represents a version of one already in circulation in France during the mid-eighteenth century, as exemplified
by Supplément au dictionnaire universel français et latin … (Nancy: Pierre Antoine, 1752): ‘Mot emprunté de l’Italien, pour
dire, Un homme ou une femme qui ont des talens pour les Arts, comme la Musique, la Peinture, la Poésie, &c.’, col. 2309.
12 ‘Das Wort Virtuose ist zu allgemein/denn man sagt es von allen, die sich in einer Wissenschaft oder Kunst besonders hervor
thun; und man müste also allezeit sagen/ein musicalischer Virtuose, oder ein Virtuose in der Music … Ueber dieses wird auch
das Wort Virtuose, wenn es in der Music gebrauchet wird, am meisten nur denjenigen beygeieget, welche etwan im singen
oder spielen vortreflich sind.’
13 ‘Virtuos nennen wir gewöhnlich denjenigen und jeden solchen Musiker, der sich vornehmlich den Vortrag bereits
componirter Tonstücke zur Aufgabe macht, und zu dem Ende einen besonders hohen Grad von Fertigkeit auf einem
Instrumente oder im Gesange erworben hat.’
14 The following review surveys publications in three language groups – English, French and German – which correspond to the
most substantial bodies of primary and secondary sources about virtuosity. As will become apparent, they also represent
distinct cultures of reception for the practice.
15 Already in the 1970s Friedhelm Krummacher had published a short essay on this approach to the topic (Krummacher 1974).
16 Leon Plantinga did publish an article about Clementi’s virtuosity and the ‘German manner’ in the Journal of the American
Musicological Society in 1972, but there the practice represents an ostensibly shallow approach to music from which the
composer Clementi developed into a style of harmonic and contrapuntal complexity (Plantinga 1972).
17 Gooley’s Princeton dissertation from 1999 was entitled ‘Liszt and his Audiences, 1834–1847: Virtuosity, Criticism, and
Society in the Virtuosenzeit ’.
18 Both Weber and Kenneth Hamilton would carry on the investigations into virtuoso repertoire as reflected in concert
programs. See Weber 2009, in particular Ch. 5: ‘Convention and Experiment in Benefit and Virtuoso Concerts’, 141–168, and
Hamilton 1998.
19 Bernstein’s dissertation appeared under the same title from Stanford University Press in 1998.
20 Although it may sound oxymoronic, the ‘average virtuoso’ finds no place in the work of Gooley or other anglophone authors.
21 ‘Was ist virtuos? Alles, was sich so sehr steigern lässt, dass jemand es darin zu einer Vortrefflichkeit bringt, die andere
verblüfft, begeistert, dazu motiviert, in Beifall auszubrechen—oder auch in Tumult und Protest.’ ‘Prekäre Existenz’ Call for
Papers, 2010. Available at: www.bewegungsforschung.de/pdf/ankuendigung_szene_des_virtuosen.pdf (accessed 23 January
2013).
22 ‘Nicht zuletzt wird in dieser Dynamik der Attestierung und Bestreitung von Exzellenz sichtbar, dass sich die Evidenz des
Virtuosen nie durch die singuläre Figur alleine, sondern immer in einer Szene wechselseitiger Steigerung mit einem Publikum
herstellt.’ Ibid .
23 The best source about Liszt’s transcriptions is Kregor 2012. Even Liszt’s nemesis Eduard Hanslick has to recognize that his
transcriptions were ‘epoch making’ (Hanslick 1869, 336).
24 This raises the question of whether a performer can acquire the reputation of a virtuoso exclusively from the recording studio,
which seems unlikely in the modern performance tradition: even Glenn Gould initiated his career as a concert artist.
25 See Williams 1990 for a compendium of reports about the ‘transcendental’ effects of Liszt’s virtuosity, and not just from
published reviews; he also includes diary entries and letter passages by the virtuoso and his contemporaries among the
documents.
26 Walser 1993, 45. His third chapter, ‘Eruptions : Heavy Metal Appropriations of Classical Virtuosity’ (57–107) is particularly
noteworthy for its detailed examination of specific virtuosic practices in heavy metal and their effects.
27 Taruskin’s invocation of ‘the sublime’ may or may not reference David Nye’s work on the ‘technological sublime’, but Nye’s
concept of a sublime that ‘permitted both the imagination of an ineffable surplus of emotion and its recontainment’ certainly
could apply to the experience of virtuosity (Nye 1994, 282).
28 As Burk 1918 noted, ‘[the] public flocks to the lure of billboards and world renown, pays enormous sums, and beholds, in
puerile wonderment and delight, feats which dazzle, and leave in their wake little more than a tingle of stupefaction.’
29 See, for example, Bohlman 1993, especially 411–13, where he discusses the role of rap during the Los Angeles riots of 1992.

30 In their publications from the early 1990s, Susan McClary and Rob Walser appear to occupy opposing perspectives on this
 issue: see Deaville 1997, 181–2.
31 Borsszem Jankó , 6 April 1873 published the set of eight caricatures of the performing Liszt by János Jankó, which illustrate
his wildly contrasting demeanours at the keyboard.
32 This concept is foundational in the social thought of Adorno.
33 Yehudi Menuhin, interview with Sixty Minutes , 21 March 1999, cited by Hamera 2000, 148.
34 For a discussion of this issue, see Deaville 2007.
35 Popular websites, including those for Kenny G himself, www.kennyg.com , and for ticket services like Ticketmaster,
http://reviews.ticketmaster.com/7171/736524/kenny-g-reviews/reviews.htm?page=24&sort=rating , document the enthusiasm
of the public, which contrasts with the dismissive tone in reviews by jazz/sax professionals.

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 Contributors

Stephen Downes (editor) is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. He

was previously Professor and Head of Music and Sound Recording at the University of Surrey.
He is the author of six monographs: Szymanowski as Post-Wagnerian (1994), Szymanowski,
Eroticism and the Voices of Mythology (2003), The Muse as Eros (2006), Music and Decadence
in Central and Eastern Europe (2010), Hans Werner Henze: ‘Tristan’ (2011) and After Mahler:
Britten, Weill, Henze and Romantic Redemption (2013). He won the Wilk Prize for Research in
Polish Music (University of Southern California) and in 1999 was awarded the Karol
Szymanowski Memorial Medal. He is a co-editor of Music & Letters and treasurer of the RMA
Music and Philosophy Study Group.

Jeremy Barham is Reader in Music at the University of Surrey. He researches in the areas of
Mahler and early modernist culture, screen music, and jazz. His publications include Rethinking
Mahler (Oxford), ‘Mahler: Centenary Commentaries on Musical Meaning’ (guest-edited issue of
Nineteenth-Century Music Review ), The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, Perspectives on
Gustav Mahler , as well as studies of screen music in 19th-Century Music, Music and the Moving
Image and The Musical Quarterly . He is series editor of Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz , and
is currently working on two monographs: Music, Time and the Moving Image (Cambridge
University Press) and Mahler, Music, Culture: Discourses of Meaning (Indiana University
Press).

Keith Chapin is Senior Lecturer in Music at Cardiff University. He has taught at Fordham
University (New York) and at the New Zealand School of Music (Wellington). He specializes in
issues of critical theory, music aesthetics and music theory in the seventeenth through twentieth
centuries, and in particular on issues of the sublime and counterpoint. He has been Co-Editor of
Eighteenth-Century Music and Associate Editor of 19th-Century Music . The collection of essays
Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous , co-edited with Andrew H. Clark, appeared with
Fordham University Press in 2013.

James Deaville is Professor in the School for Studies in Art and Culture: Music at Carleton
University, Ottawa. He has published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society,
Journal of the Society for American Music and 19th-Century Music Review (among others), has
contributed to books published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press,
Princeton University Press, Ashgate and Routledge (among others), and is editor of Music in
Television: Channels of Listening (Routledge, 2011). He has published essays about virtuosity
since 1997: ‘The Making of a Myth: Liszt, the Press, and Virtuosity’, in Analecta Lisztiana II :
New Light on Liszt and His Music (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997, 181–95); ‘Liszt’s
Virtuosity and His Audience: Gender, Class, and Power in the Concert Hall of the Early 19th
Century’, in Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft (1998, 281–300); ‘La figura del
virtuoso da Tartini e Bach a Paganini e Liszt’, in Enciclopedia della musica , Vol. 4: Storia della
musica europea , ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Einaudi: Torino, 2004, 803–25); Review-article of
Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt , in Journal of the American Musicological Society , Vol. 60,
No. 3 (2007): 666–677; and ‘A Star is Born? Czerny, Liszt and the Pedagogy of Virtuosity’, in
Beyond the Art of Finger Dexterity: Reassessing Carl Czerny , ed. David Gramit (Rochester:
University of Rochester Press, 2008, 52–66).

James Garratt is Senior Lecturer in Music and University Organist at the University of
Manchester. His publications include two monographs: Palestrina and the German Romantic
Imagination: Interpreting Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002) and Music, Culture and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). He has written widely on nineteenth-century
German music, aesthetics and culture, and has published numerous articles and reviews in Music
and Letters, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 19th-Century Music Review, 20th-
Century Music , and the American Historical Review .

Kenneth Gloag is Reader in Musicology at Cardiff University. His publications include a

monograph titled Postmodernism in Music (Cambridge, 2012) and he has published on the music
of Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Nicholas Maw and Michael
Tippett. He is co-author of Musicology: The Key Concepts (2005) and co-editor of Peter
Maxwell Davies Studies (Cambridge, 2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett
(2013). He was inaugural reviews editor of Twentieth-Century Music (2004–12).

Thomas Grey is Professor of Music at Stanford University. He is the author of Wagner’s

Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (1995), as well as editor and co-author of the Cambridge
Opera Handbook on Wagner’s Flying Dutchman (2000), the Cambridge Companion to Wagner
(2008) and Wagner and his World (Princeton University Press, 2009). Among other topics, he
has also written on Beethoven, Mendelssohn and other (non-Wagnerian) nineteenth-century
opera. Recent projects include the painting of Hans Makart in relation to Wagner criticism in the
late nineteenth century, the idea of ‘absolute music’, ecocritical perspectives on landscape and
nature in nineteenth-century music, ‘Richard Wagner’ for Oxford Bibliographies Online, music
and the ‘Gothic’ and American musical theatre.

James Hepokoski is Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music at Yale
University. Exploring new ways of synthesizing the once-separate domains of music history,
music theory, and music as cultural discourse, he is the author or co-author of seven books and
has written several dozen articles on a broad range of musical topics. His book from 2006, co-
authored with Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in
the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata , won the 2008 Wallace Berry Award from the Society for
Music Theory. This was followed in 2009 by a joint dialogue with William Caplin and James
Webster entitled Form, Forms, & Formenlehre: Three Methodological Reflections (University of
Leuven Press). His most recent book is a collection of fifteen of his musicological essays from
1984 to 2008, Music, Structure, Thought (Ashgate 2009). While his current work primarily
involves exploration into Late Beethoven, his recent essays include a study of the first movement
of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto (in Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and
Meaning , ed. Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith (Indiana, 2012)) and a contribution, ‘Ineffable
Immersion: Contextualizing the Call for Silence’, to the Vladimir Jankélévitch Philosophical
Colloquy that appeared in JAMS 65 (2012). A discussion of Carl Dahlhaus’s concepts of text
and event, and their ever-persistent variants in more recent anglophone musicology, was
published in 2013 under the title The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography,
Analysis, Criticism , ed. Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge University Press).

Julian Horton is Professor of Music at the University of Durham. He has taught at University
College Dublin, King’s College, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he held a
Research Fellowship. His research focuses on the analysis of nineteenth-century instrumental
forms, with special interests in the symphony, the piano concerto and the theory of sonata form.
He is author of Bruckner’s Symphonies: Analysis, Reception and Cultural Politics (Cambridge
University Press, 2004), editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Symphony (Cambridge
University Press, 2013) and has published in The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, Music and
Letters, Musical Quarterly and Music Analysis . In 2012, he was awarded the Westrup Prize for
his work on first-movement form in the early nineteenth-century piano concerto.

Julian Johnson is Regius Professor of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London. He has
published widely on Viennese modernism (Mahler, Webern, Berg and Schoenberg) but his
research interests extend across the broad period of musical modernity from the late eighteenth
century to the present. His historical studies of music are always shaped by questions of musical
meaning, evident in an engagement with the philosophy of music, ideas of nature and landscape
in music, and the relation of music to the other arts (literature and painting). He was for many
years an active composer and his music has been professionally performed in Europe, the USA
and Japan. His Three Pieces for Orchestra (1992) was performed by the BBC Symphony
Orchestra and broadcast on BBC Radio 3, as was his choral work, The Kingfisher (1993),
performed by the BBC Singers. He is a regular speaker at international academic conferences –
most recently speaking in London, Cologne, Vienna, Graz, Frankfurt, Toronto, Seattle and New
York – but he has also given frequent public talks to a wider audience for the Royal Opera
House, Glyndebourne Opera, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta and on BBC
Radio 3. In 2009, he acted as Series Consultant to the Philharmonia Orchestra for City of
Dreams: Vienna 1900–35 . In 2005, he was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical
Association for ‘outstanding contributions to musicology’.

Sanna Pederson , who specializes in German music history and culture in the nineteenth
century, has been the Mavis C. Pitman Professor of Music at the University of Oklahoma since
2001. Her most recent work has been engaged with the aesthetic theories of Richard Wagner and
has eleven articles in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia related to that topic. She has also
been working on the history of the term absolute music. ‘Defining the Term “Absolute Music”
Historically’ appeared in Music & Letters in 2009 and she has published elsewhere and given
many conference papers on the subject in recent years. In 2005–6 she was a Charles A. Ryskamp
Research Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies, and was on the editorial board
of the Journal of the American Musicological Society 2007–13. Earlier work focused on the
reception of Beethoven, on which she has published with regard to nationalism, gender studies,
narrative theory and historiography. Her dissertation from the University of Pennsylvania was on
‘Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800–1850’.

Nicholas Reyland is Senior Lecturer in Music at Keele University. His research interests include
the life and music of Witold Lutosławski, narratology, screen music, affect, emotion and
embodiment, and, more broadly, the theory, analysis and criticism of music since 1900. He
published his first two books in 2012: Zbigniew Preisner’s ‘Three Colors’ Trilogy: A Film Score
Guide (Scarecrow Press) and the co-edited collection (with Michael Klein, Temple University)
Music and Narrative since 1900 (Indiana University Press). He has also published essays on
music and narrative in Music & Letters, Music Analysis, Music Sound and the Moving Image and
Witold Lutosławski Studies . He has given invited research seminars at prestigious venues,
including Cornell University, the Fryderyk Chopin Institute and the Institute for Musical
Research, written for The Guardian , been interviewed on BBC Radio 3 and appeared as a
preconcert speaker at the BBC Proms. His present projects include edited collections on analysis
and the body, and on Lutosławski’s life and music, an analysis textbook, and a series of essays
on affect, emotion and narrativity in a range of musical repertoires.

Jim Samson is Emeritus Professor of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London. He has
published widely (including eight single-authored books and seven edited or co-edited books) on
the music of Chopin, and on analytical and aesthetic topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
music. His books have been translated into German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese. He is one of
three Series Editors of The Complete Chopin: A New Critical Edition (Peters Edition, in
progress). In 1989 he was awarded the Order of Merit from the Polish Ministry of Culture for his
contribution to Chopin scholarship, and in 2000 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
His publications include The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge
University Press, 2002), Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt
(Cambridge University Press, 2003), which was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Book Prize in
2004, and most recently Music in the Balkans (Brill, 2013). He edited a textbook with J. P. E.
Harper-Scott, An Introduction to Music Studies , and is currently preparing a co-edited volume
on ‘Greece and its Neighbours’ (with Katy Romanou) and an edited volume on Music in Cyprus.
His edition of the Chopin Ballades (Peters Edition) was named ‘2009 Edition of the Year’ in the
International Piano Awards . He is currently writing a novel set during the Greek War of
Independence.
 Index of musical works, composers and performers

Alpert, Herb 34
Andriessen, Louis 251
Arian Band (Iran) 264
Ayler, Albert 197

Babbitt, Milton 10 , 58
Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel 254
Bach, Johann Sebastian 29 , 44 , 50 , 52 , 253 , 266 ; The Art of Fugue , BWV 1080, 54 ; Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, BWV 1050,
; Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542, 98 ; The Well-Tempered Clavier 47 , 52 – 3 , 58 , 217
Barenboim, Daniel 260
Bartók, Béla 267 ; Kossuth 67
Beach Boys, The 32 , 35 ; ‘God Only Knows’ 37 – 8 ; Pet Sounds 32 , 34 – 8
Beatles, The 34 ; Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 33 , 36 – 7
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 7 , 12 , 25 , 29 , 32 , 34 – 6 , 45 – 6 , 51 – 2 , 69 , 87 , 93 – 5 , 112 , 118 , 150 , 151 , 157 , 205 , 247 , 253
Bagatelles, Op. 126, 242 ; The Creatures of Prometheus , Op. 43, Overture 44 ; Der glorreiche Augenblick , Op. 136, 34 ; Egmont
Overture, Op. 84, 63 , 66 ; Fidelio , Op. 72, 151 – 4 ; Piano Concerto No. 4 in G, Op. 58, 217 – 18 ; Piano Sonata in D minor, Op.
32, no2. ‘The Tempest’ 15 , 112 , 120 – 7 , 129 , 135 , 139 – 41 ; Piano Sonata in A, Op. 101, 210 – 12 ; Piano Sonata in B , Op.
106 ‘Hammerklavier’ 18 , 255 – 7 ; Piano Sonata in C, Op. 111, 52 – 3 ; Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 2, No. 1, 117 ; Piano
Sonata in F minor, Op. 57 ‘Appassionata’, 206 – 7 ; Piano Trio in D, Op. 70, ‘The Ghost’ 205 , 219 – 20 ; String Quartet in F
minor Op. 95 ‘Serioso’ 205 , 207 , 219 – 20 , 242 ; String Quartet in F, Op. 135, 211 , 220 – 21 ; Symphony No. 3 in E , Op. 55,
‘Eroica’ 35 , 37 , 57 , 70 , 218 , 249 , 260 ; Symphony No. 5 in C, Op. 67, 35 , 36 , 42 , 86 , 89 ; Symphony No. 6 in F, Op. 68,
‘Pastoral’ 64 , 71 , 79 n.4 ; Symphony No. 9 in D, Op. 125, 14 , 43 – 4 , 47 , 87 – 90 , 94 , 135 ; Thirty-Three Variations on a Waltz
by Diabelli, Op. 120, 58 ; Violin Sonata in G, Op. 96, 242 ; Wellington’s Victory , Op. 91, 34 , 58 , 69
Benes, Jára: Die vom Rummelplatz (dir. Lamac), 230 – 1
Berg, Alban 253 ; Lyric Suite 67 ; Piano Sonata, Op. 1, 112 , 135 – 40 ; Wozzeck 164 , 250
Berio, Luciano 18 ; Sinfonia , 253
Berlioz, Hector 49 , 170 ; Harold en Italie 78 ; Symphonie fantastique 63 , 67
Berry, Chuck 7
Bejelo dugme (‘White Button’) 270
Biber, Heinrich: Battalia 69 ; Sonata violino solo representative 69
Binchois, Gilles 155
Birtwistle, Harrison: Punch and Judy 253
Bizet, Georges: Carmen 183
Blume, Friedrich 157
Bootz, Erwin: Abschied (dir. Siodmak) 231 – 2
Boulez, Pierre 10 , 58 , 189
Brahms, Johannes 54 , 63 , 112 , 118 , 248 ; Symphony No. 3 in F, Op. 90, 51 , 56 – 7 , 127 ; Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98,
Braxton, Anthony 17 , 188 , 197 – 9
Brendel, Alfred 210 – 12
Britten, Benjamin 251
Brown, James 10
Bruckner, Anton 52 , 54 , 112 , 239 , 249 , 253 ; Symphony No. 1 in C minor 31 ; Symphony No. 2 in C minor 128 ; Symphony No. 3
in D minor 128 ; Symphony No. 5 in B 112 , 127 – 35
Busnois, Antoine 155
Buus, Jacques 49 – 50
Byrd, William: ‘The Battle’, from My Ladye Neville’s Booke 69

Cage, John 1 , 48 , 251

Caron 155
Chabrier, Emmanuel 251
Cherry, Don 194
Chopin, Fryderyk 44 , 170 , 285 , 287 ; Ballade in G minor, Op. 23, 205 ; Mazurkas, Op. 6 and Op. 7, 267 ; Prelude in G, Op. 28 No.
3, 214 – 17 ; Waltz in A minor, Op. 34 No. 2, 239
Clapton, Eric 56
Clementi, Muzio 58 , 148 ; Sonatina in C, Op. 36 No. 1, 251
Coleman, Ornette 17 , 56 , 188 , 190 , 192 – 6 , 198 – 9
Coltrane, John 56 , 196 – 7
Corelli, Arcangelo 157
Cortot, Alfred 267
Couperin, François 47 , 159

Davis, Miles 191

Debussy, Claude 18 , 250 , 251 , 276 ; ‘La cathédral engloutie’ ( Préludes , book 1 ) 65 ; ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk’ ( Children’s Corner
) 252 ; La mer 66 , 68 ; ‘Reflets dans l’eau’ ( Images , series 1 ) 65
Delius, Frederick 69
Dufay, Guillaume 155
Dunstable, John 155
Dvořák, Antonín: Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70, 127
Dylan, Bob 36

Earth, Wind and Fire 11

Eisler, Hans: Kuhle Wampe (dir. Dudow) 229

Farina, Carlo: Capriccio stravagante 68

Faugues, Guillaume 155
Fauré, Gabriel 251
Franck, César: Symphony in D minor 55
Franz, Robert 287
Friedhofer, Hugo: The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. Wyler) 232

Gabrieli, Giovanni: Canzoni i sonate 49 – 50

Gillespie, Dizzy 190 – 1
Gottschalk, Louis 291
Gould, Glenn 291
Griot musicians of West Africa 261 – 2
Grofé, Ferde: Grand Canyon Suite 58

Hahn, Hilary 291

Handel, George Frideric 157 , 253 ; Messiah 262 , 272 ; Suite No. 6 in F 204 , 207
Hanon, Charles-Louis 50
Haydn, Joseph 18 , 44 – 6 , 69 , 148 , 157 , 240 – 3 , 247 , 251 – 3 ; The Creation 65 ; String Quartets, Op. 33, 242 – 3 ; Symphony in F
, ‘The Farewell’ 127
Hendrix, Jimi 56 , 289
Herrmann, Bernard: Vertigo (dir. Hitchcock) 227
Herz, Henri 58
Hollaender, Friedrich: Der blaue Engel (dir. von Sternberg) 229
Hummel, Johann Nepomuk 292

Janequin, Clément: La Battaile de Marignan; La guerre 69

Kalkbrenner, Frédéric 292

Kalomiris, Manolis 267
Kenny G. 292
Khachaturian, Aram 270
Kirnberger, Johann Philipp 32
Koch, Heinrich Christoph 32 , 156 – 7

Laibach 271
Lang Lang 289
Lassus, Orlande de 253
Liberace 292
Ligeti, György 18 , 240 , 251 ; Aventures 253
Liszt, Franz 19 , 48 – 9 , 63 , 112 , 170 , 276 , 279 – 85 , 287 , 289 – 92 ; Dante Symphony 78 ; Die Ideale 67 ; Mazeppa 51 – 2
Lully, Jean-Baptiste 157
Lutosławski, Witold: Symphony No. 4 216

McCartney, Paul 37
Mahler, Gustav 18 , 66 , 79 n.6 , 179 , 185 – 6 , 205 , 211 – 12 , 234 , 239 , 244 , 247 – 8 , 251 , 253 ; Des Knaben Wunderhorn 249
Symphony No. 1 249 ; Symphony No. 3 212 ; Symphony No. 4 212 ; Symphony No. 6, 127 ; Symphony No. 9, 127 , 216 – 17 ,
240 , 249
Mancini, Henry: Touch of Evil (dir. Welles) 22 6
Marsalis, Wynton 199 – 200
Mendelssohn, Felix 44 , 170 , 285 ; ‘Hebrides’ Overture, Op. 26, 65 ; Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Op. 21, 77
Menuhin, Yehudi 291
Messiaen, Olivier 69 , 239
Meyerbeer, Giacomo: Robert le diable 94
Monk, Thelonious 190
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 18 , 44 – 6 , 90 , 103 , 144 – 6 , 148 – 9 , 157 , 164 – 5 , 171 , 183 , 240 , 250 – 1 , 253 , 279 ; Così fan tutte
146 , 243 ; Divertimento for String Trio K. 563, 57 ; Die Entführung aus dem Serail 144 – 6 ; Don Giovanni , 146 , 243 , 253 ;
Idomeneo 151 ; Le nozze di Figaro 243 ; Piano Sonata in C minor, K. 457, 120 – 1 ; Piano Sonata in C, K. 545, 101 ; Serenade, K.
320 ‘Posthorn’ 50 – 1 , 57 ; String Quartet in D minor, K. 421, 245 ; String Quartet in A, K. 464, 243 – 4 ; String Quartet in F, K.
590, 159 – 61 ; String Quintet in D, K. 593, 245 ; String Quintet in G minor, K. 516, 245 ; Symphony No. 39, K. 543, 57 ;
Symphony No. 41, K. 551 ‘Jupiter’ 31 , 161 – 3 ; Die Zauberflöte 151
Musorgsky, Modest: Boris Godunov 48
Myaskovsky, Nikolay 270

Ockeghem, Jean de 155

Offenbach, Jacques 16 , 18 , 249 ; La belle Hélène 177 – 8 , 183 , 250 ; Orfeé aux enfers 177 – 8 , 250 ; La vie parisienne 250

Paganini, Nicolò 279 , 284 , 291

Palestrina 157 , 161
Paradis, Maria Theresia 291
Parker, Charlie 17 , 188 , 190 – 2 , 194 , 198 – 9
Penderecki, Krzysztof: Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima 273 n.1
Pine, Courtney 291
Porter, Cole 2
Poulenc, Francis 14 , 251 – 2 ; Les biches 103 – 5 ; Concerto for Organ, Timpani and Strings 98 – 9 , 101 ; Pastourelle 96 – 7 ; Sextuor
101 – 3
Prince 10 – 11
Prokofiev, Sergei 239 , 270

Rambo Amadeus 271

Rautavaara, Einojuhani: Cantus arcticus 69
Ravel, Maurice 18 , 69 , 251 – 2 ; L’enfant et les sortilèges 252 ; Le tombeau de Couperin 164
Régis, Johannes 155
Reich, Steve: Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboard 217
Respighi, Ottorino 69
Riblja Corba (‘Fish Chowder’) 272
Riemann, Hugo 14 – 15 , 159
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay: Sheherezade Op. 35, 30
Roach, Max 190
Rodgers, Richard 48
Rolling Stones, The 34 : Their Satanic Majesties Request 33 , 36
Rossini, Gioachino 34 , 87 , 89 , 93 – 4 , 127 , 177 , 250
Rota, Nino: La Dolce Vita (dir. Fellini) 227
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 150 ; Le Devin du village 151 – 2

Saint-Saëns, Camille 267 ; Le carnival des animaux 250

Sanders, Pharaoh 197
Satie, Erik 18 , 105 , 252 ; Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois 251 ; Sonatine bureaucratique 251
Scarlatti, Domenico 47 , 253
Schenker, Heinrich 29 , 54 , 205 , 208 , 218
Schnittke, Alfred 18 , 252 ; Concerto Grosso No. 1, 252 – 3 ; Concerto Grosso No. 3, 253 ; Piano Quartet 253 ; String Quartet No. 2,
253 ; Symphony No. 2, 253
Schoenberg, Arnold 10 , 15 , 18 , 62 – 3 , 65 , 71 , 111 , 117 – 19 , 123 , 171 , 179 ; Pierrot lunaire 119 , 239 , 250 – 3 ; Verklärte Nacht
Schubert, Franz 18 , 129 , 171 , 249 , 253 , 287 ; ‘Erlkönig’ 70 ; ‘Frühlingstraum’ ( Winterreise ) 245 – 8
Schumann, Clara 285 , 292
Schumann, Robert 18 , 44 , 50 , 112 , 170 , 205 , 251 , 253 – 4 , 276 , 285 , 287 ; Carnaval , Op. 9, 231 , 248 , 253 ; Davidsbündlertänze
 Op. 6, 248 ; Intermezzi , Op. 4, 249 ; Liederkreis , Op. 24, 16 , 174 ; Papillons , Op. 2, 248 ; Paradies und die Peri , Op. 50, 51
‘Wehmut’ ( Eichendorff Lieder , Op. 39) 248
Schütz, Heinrich 253
Scriabin, Alexander: Prelude in G, Op. 11 No. 3, 217
Sessions, Roger 10
Shepp, Archie 197
Shostakovich, Dmitri 18 , 239 , 252 , 270
Smetana, Bedřich: Vltava 67 , 78
Sousa, John Philip: Washington Post 7 0
Stockhausen, Karlheinz 189
Strauss Jr., Johann 50
Strauss, Richard 67 , 171 , 179 , 185 ; Also Sprach Zarathustra 78 ; Ariadne auf Naxos 253 ; Don Quixote 63 ; Metamorphosen 253
Sinfonia Domestica 249 ; Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche 206
Stravinsky, Igor 15 , 18 , 29 , 58 , 117 – 19 , 129 , 146 – 9 , 166 , 239 – 40 , 245 , 250 – 1 ; La baiser de la fée 103 ; Concerto for Piano
and Wind 103 , 251 ; L’Histoire du soldat 239 , 251 ; Octet 146 , 164 , 251 ; Petrushka 119 , 252 – 3 ; Pulcinella 103 , 251 ; The Rake’s
Progress 146 – 7 , 253 ; The Rite of Spring 119 , 251

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr 14 , 103 ; 1812 Overture , Op. 49, 69 ; Francesca da Rimini , Op. 32, 78 ; Rococo Variations , Op. 33, 103 – 4
The Sleeping Beauty , Op. 66, 103 – 4 ; Symphony No. 6, Op. 74, ‘Pathétique’ 127
Thalberg, Sigismond 291

Van Morrison 36
Vandermark, Ken 199
Vivaldi, Antonio: The Four Seasons 63 , 67 , 69
Volkmann, Robert 51

Wagner, Richard 29 , 43 – 9 , 53 – 4 , 56 , 58 , 63 , 66 , 69 , 71 , 87 , 90 – 1 , 94 , 170 , 176 – 9 , 183 – 6 , 233 , 245 ; Der Fleigende

Holländer , Overture 78 ; Der Ring des Nibelungen 266 ; Parsifal 16 , 176 , 184 – 5 ; ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ 70 ; Tannhäuser
, 174 – 6 , 178 , 180 , 185 ; Tristan und Isolde 14 , 16 , 90 – 3 , 180 – 2 , 185 , 252
Weber, Carl Maria von: Conzertstück , Op. 79, 67 , 283 ; Overture to Der Freischütz 78
Webern, Anton von 198 , 239
Williams, John: Star Wars (dir. Lucas) 233 – 4

Xenakis, Iannis: Mycenae Polytope 272

Zorn, John 199

 Index of terms in aesthetics

absolute 5 , 8 , 12 – 13 , 27 , 32 , 42 – 59 , 64 , 86 – 7 , 91 , 95 , 113 – 14 , 161 , 260

alienation 116 – 17 , 174 , 193 , 195 , 248
anti-romanticism 12 , 16 , 169 – 70 , 176 – 7 , 185 – 6
Apollonian 93 , 167
authenticity 9 , 13 – 14 , 35 – 6 , 56 , 84 – 5 , 98 – 9 , 116 – 18 , 149 , 152 , 184 , 240 , 245 , 249 – 53 , 263 – 4 , 267 , 289
autonomy 4 – 11 , 25 , 32 , 45 , 49 – 50 , 54 , 56 – 7 , 62 , 98 , 100 – 1 , 116 , 189 , 191 , 196 – 7 , 229 , 259 – 60 , 284
avant-garde 7 , 11 , 12 , 17 , 25 , 84 – 5 , 188 – 200 , 269 – 71

beauty 4 – 6 , 8 , 13 , 23 , 26 , 29 , 34 , 45 – 6 , 53 – 4 , 57 , 84 – 6 , 90 – 5 , 99 – 106 , 172 , 174 – 5 , 177 , 179 , 245 , 254 , 264

classicism 12 , 15 – 16 , 31 , 33 , 42 , 45 , 47 , 49 , 51 – 5 , 84 , 101 , 105 , 112 , 118 , 120 , 123 , 137 , 144 – 67 , 171 – 2 , 183 , 241
253 , 266 , 268 , 284 , 290
comedy 11 , 14 , 95 – 9 , 105 , 146 , 214 , 216 – 7 , 230 , 242 – 3 , 250 , 254 – 5 , 257

dialectics 6 , 7 , 9 , 12 , 14 – 16 , 46 , 52 , 89 , 93 , 111 – 41 , 148 , 158 , 171 – 2 , 191 , 225 – 9 , 232 – 4 , 286 – 7

Dionysian 16 , 93 , 167 , 174 , 181 – 2

formalism 1 , 4 , 7 , 26 , 56 , 146 , 204

gender and sexuality 10 – 12 , 56 – 7 , 86 – 7 , 89 , 175 – 6 , 180 – 1 , 185 , 211 , 273 , 285 , 290 , 292
genre 4 , 12 , 15 , 16 , 24 , 32 , 34 , 37 , 43 , 46 – 8 , 50 , 56 , 64 , 72 , 74 , 76 , 78 , 87 , 127 , 135 , 144 , 148 – 50 , 155 , 157 , 163
gothic 14 , 94 , 96 – 9 , 105
grotesque 14 , 95 – 8

hermeneutics 3 , 6 , 17 , 64 , 68 , 75 – 9 , 199 , 204 , 251 , 282

history 2 , 7 , 9 , 14 – 18 , 25 , 46 , 62 , 64 – 5 , 70 , 75 , 77 , 87 , 111 – 17 , 123 , 127 , 141 , 148 , 150 , 156 , 171 , 186 , 189 , 194
, 217 , 229 , 252 , 262 – 6 , 268 , 278 , 280 – 1

idealism 6 , 14 , 95 , 105 , 112 , 127 , 148 , 167 , 254

ideology 4 – 9 , 11 , 23 – 8 , 42 – 3 , 56 , 62 , 77 , 84 – 6 , 100 , 105 , 111 , 118 , 148 – 9 , 170 – 3 , 186 , 188 – 9 , 192 , 199 , 203 ,
4 , 268 – 70 , 272
imitation 48 , 53 , 64 , 69 , 84 , 155 – 8 , 177 , 205 , 241 , 260
irony 5 , 9 , 12 , 17 – 18 , 87 , 90 , 95 , 214 , 216 , 239 – 58

judgement 8 , 12 , 15 , 23 – 33 , 37 – 9 , 100 , 148 , 164 , 166 , 171 , 173 , 198

kitsch 30 , 36 , 84 , 100 , 230 , 271

meaning 2 , 5 , 7 – 11 , 47 , 51 , 56 – 7 , 64 – 6 , 68 , 70 – 2 , 74 – 5 , 96 , 116 , 119 , 128 , 134 , 149 , 172 , 210 , 217 , 221 , 226 , 239
, 263 – 4 , 282 – 3 , 289 – 92
memory 11 , 70 , 74 , 91 , 252
metaphor 2 , 12 , 14 , 52 – 5 , 57 , 64 – 5 , 71 – 8 , 89 , 101 , 140 , 211
modernism 6 , 8 – 9 , 11 , 14 , 18 , 24 – 5 , 29 , 54 , 56 , 58 , 84 , 86 , 89 , 99 – 100 , 111 – 12 , 115 , 163 , 171 , 179 , 185 – 6 , 189
195 – 6 , 217 , 225 , 244 , 250 – 57 , 267 – 70

narrative 12 , 13 , 15 , 17 , 29 , 49 , 52 , 56 – 7 , 62 – 3 , 66 , 70 , 72 , 74 , 76 , 78 , 98 , 111 , 117 – 9 , 127 – 8 , 135 , 140 – 1 , 194

224 – 34 , 242 – 3 , 248 , 251 , 271 , 29 2
nation 30 , 56 , 69 , 93 , 127 , 148 , 166 , 184 , 261 , 264 – 73 , 291
neoclassicism 12 , 15 , 53 , 119 , 144 – 9 , 158 , 164 – 7 , 177 , 186 , 200 , 250 – 2
Neue Sachlichkeit 186 , 230
objectivity 6 , 29 , 32 , 54 , 75 , 77 , 117 – 19 , 135 , 146 , 148 , 159 , 161 – 4 , 167 , 173 – 4 , 179 , 212 , 216 , 232
organicism 5 , 8 , 29 , 36 , 50 , 54 , 119 , 163 , 184 , 225 , 228 , 232 , 266

pastoral 68 , 70 , 71 , 104 , 146 , 210 , 212 , 216 , 264

perception 53 , 64 , 66 – 7 , 225 , 234
pleasure 10 – 11 , 20 n.17 , 26 – 8 , 35 , 53 – 4 , 84 – 7 , 91 , 95 – 7 , 100 – 3 , 144 , 154 , 175 – 8 , 182 , 282 , 286 , 291
poetics 4 , 6 , 254 , 260 , 267
politics 5 – 9 , 56 , 85 , 100 , 112 , 164 , 166 , 196 , 260 , 264 – 5 , 268 , 271 – 2 , 284 , 286
postmodernism 4 , 6 , 8 , 9 , 11 , 14 , 15 , 17 , 24 – 5 , 56 , 86 , 89 , 97 , 111 , 141 , 189 – 90 , 199 , 217 , 252 – 3
primitivism 11 , 49 , 177 , 182 , 184 , 268 , 270
program music 12 – 14 , 42 – 52 , 56 , 57 , 62 – 80 , 203 – 6 , 218 , 225
propaganda 12 , 18 , 100 , 259 – 74

romanticism 1 , 8 , 12 , 14 , 16 , 18 , 31 , 90 , 145 , 148 , 170 – 86 , 248 , 251 – 2 , 254 , 283 – 4

semantics 10 , 43 – 7 , 55 , 57 , 64 , 68 – 71 , 208 , 239 , 279

sensuousness 7 , 34 – 5 , 62 , 77 , 97 , 210 , 213 , 217
sentimentalism 5 , 14 , 26 , 96 , 99 – 106
somatics 10 – 11 , 19 , 290 – 2
subjectivity 1 , 7 , 36 , 50 , 75 , 86 , 97 , 105 , 117 , 119 , 127 , 148 , 221 , 231 , 253 , 284
sublime 4 , 6 , 8 , 11 , 12 , 14 , 53 , 84 – 106 , 193 , 228 , 254 , 288

taste 15 , 18 , 24 – 8 , 35 , 99 – 100 , 164 – 6 , 254 , 268 , 270 , 272 – 4 , 278 , 286 , 288
topic 11 , 14 , 26 , 51 , 64 , 68 – 78 , 120 , 128 – 30 , 133 – 4 , 206 , 210 , 212 – 13 , 216
tradition 117 – 9 , 145 , 149 – 50 , 157 , 165 , 172 , 175 , 179 – 80 , 185 – 6 , 188 – 96 , 198 – 200 , 203 , 205 , 245 , 247 , 249 – 50
255 , 262 – 7 , 270 – 2
tragedy 48 , 95 , 97 , 119 , 127 , 146 , 182 , 191 – 2 , 210 , 212 , 214 , 216 , 217 , 253
transcendentalism 5 , 8 , 24 , 32 , 42 , 46 , 63 , 86 – 9 , 93 , 97 , 103 , 114 – 16 , 210 , 243 , 250 , 254 , 284 , 288 – 9
trivial 7 , 31 , 34 – 5 , 64 , 87 , 97 , 99 , 140
truth 4 , 8 – 10 , 23 , 34 , 36 , 48 , 79 , 85 , 90 – 1 , 95 , 98 , 100 , 114 , 116 – 18 , 134 , 140 , 156 , 163 , 172 , 218 , 245 , 250 – 2 ,

value 5 , 7 – 9 , 11 , 12 – 13 , 15 , 18 , 23 – 39 , 44 – 5 , 51 – 5 , 58 , 86 , 95 , 99 , 148 – 9 , 151 , 155 , 164 – 5 , 171 , 198 – 200 , 204

216 , 226 , 228 , 251 , 253 , 259 – 60 , 264 , 268 , 271 – 3 , 286
virtuosity 10 – 12 , 18 – 19 , 34 , 56 , 87 , 119 , 151 , 164 , 191 , 199 , 276 – 92
 General index

Abbate, Carolyn 20 n.17 , 206 – 8

Adorno Theodor W. 2 , 3 , 9 , 14 – 15 , 25 , 30 , 35 , 84 , 94 , 99 – 100 , 111 – 12 , 115 – 20 , 123 , 127 – 8 , 135 , 137 , 140 , 149 ,
211 – 12 , 221 , 225 , 254 , 276 , 285
Agawu, V. Kofi 2 , 69 , 120
Allanbrook, Wye J. 163
Allsobrook, David 281
Almén, Byron 204 , 208 , 212 , 214 , 216
Altenburg, Detlef 64
Altman, Rick 224
Apollinaire, Guillaume 97
Aristotle 29 , 79 , 205 , 213 , 234 , 260 , 264
Armstrong, Isobel 5 – 6
Arnim, Achin von 266

Bakhtin, Mikhail 205 , 208 , 288

Bal, Mieke 214
Balázs, Béla 225
Baraka, Amiri 192 – 3
Baranovitch, Nimrod 263
Barthes, Roland 205 , 208 , 213 , 219 , 229
Bartsch, Cornelia 285
Baudelaire, Charles 95 , 250
Baudrillard, Jean 12 , 24
Bauman, Zygmunt 28 , 267
Baumgarten, Alexander 4
Beardsley, Monroe C. 29
Beiser, Frederick, 113
Benjamin, Walter 9 , 85 , 115 , 117
Bernstein, Susan 281 , 282 , 284
Bérubé, Michael 5
Betz, Albrecht 285
Bishop, Lloyd 242
Blainville, Charles Henri 53
Boethius 155
Bohlman, Philip 267
Bonds, Mark Evan 46 , 55 , 86 – 7 , 241
Booker, Christopher 203 , 217 – 18
Borchmeyer, Dieter 171
Bordas, Éric 284
Bordwell, David 226 , 227
Born, Georgina 10 , 28
Bourdieu, Pierre 12 , 25 , 27 – 8
Bowie, Andrew 1 , 6 , 181 , 254 – 5
Boyé 53
Brendel, Franz 14 – 15 , 112
Brentano, Clemens 266
Brooks, Peter 4
Brossard, Sébastien de 278
Brown, Royal 224 , 227
Buhler, James 227 , 233
Burch, Noël 229
Bürger, Peter 17 , 188 – 90 , 196 – 7 , 199
Burke, Edmund 84 , 97
Burney, Charles 278
Burnham, Scott 89 , 90 , 218 , 241 , 245
Burns, Ken 199
Burt, George 226
Busby, Thomas 278

Cahn, Peter 155

Camper, Fred 226
Canetti, Elias 285
Caplin, William 124
Castiglione, Baldasar 163 , 165
Cecchi, Alessandro 232
Chabanon, Guy de 53
Chennevière, Rudhyar D. 251
Chion, Michel 224 , 226
Christgau, Robert 35
Chua, Daniel 241
Cicero 155
Clair, René: Sous les Toits de Paris 228
Clarke, David 6
Clarke, Eric 74 – 5 , 21 0
Clegg, Johnny 262
Cockburn, Christopher 263
Cocteau, Jean 99
Colbert, Stephen 9 – 11
Collins, Matthew 271
Cone, Edward T. 205 , 209
Constant, Benjamin 95
Cook, Nicholas 65 , 72 , 73 , 203 , 209 , 221
Cooper, Merian C. and Ernest B. Schoedsack: King Kong 228
Corcoran, Stephen 26
Cox, Arnie 211
Currie, James 11
Curtius, Ernst Robert 15 , 149 , 158
Curtiz, Michael: Casablanca 228
Cusick, Suzanne 272

Dada 189
Dahlhaus, Carl 3 , 7 , 12 , 15 , 29 , 31 , 56 , 63 , 66 , 88 – 9 , 111 , 115 , 120 – 1 , 123 , 126 – 7 , 135 , 140 , 179 , 185
Danto, Arthur 1 , 85
Danuser, Hermann 253
Darcy, Warren 221
Daverio, John 248
Davies, Bronwyn 280
Davies, Stephen 1 , 3 , 68
Davis, Nick 232
Dell’Antonio, Andrew 8
Demme, Jonathan: The Silence of the Lambs 228
DeNora, Tia 28
Derrida, Jacques 86
Dickens, Charles 259 – 60 ; Great Expectations 216 – 7 , 221
Dill, Heinz 248 – 9
Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock 100 – 1
Ditson, Oliver 279
Donnelly, Ken 226
Drewett, Michael 263
Duchamp, Marcel 189
Dudow, Slatan: Kuhle Wampe 229

Eagleton, Terry 5
Eastenders 214
Eco, Umberto 259
Eichendorff, Joseph von 16 , 173 – 5
Eichhorn, Andreas 89
Eisenstein, Sergei 225 – 6
Eisler, Hans 225 , 229
Eisner, Lotte 230
Epic of Gilgamesh 218
Everist, Mark 203 , 209

Fauconnier, Gilles 14 , 72 – 3
Fellini, Federici 226 – 7
Feuerbach, Ludwig 54 , 115
Fink, Robert 89
Fisher, Alexander 265
Flaubert, Gustav 99
Fleming, Victor: The Wizard of Oz 228
Floros, Constantin 212
folk music 36 , 69 , 248 – 9 , 262 – 3 , 266 – 8 , 270 – 3
Frampton, Daniel 228
Franklin, Peter 249
Freud, Sigmund 96 – 7
Frith, Simon 8 , 28
Fubini, Enrico 4
Fukuyama, Francis 141
Fulcher, Jane 105
funk 10 – 11
Fussell, Paul 267

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 199 – 200

Galand, Joel 4 – 5 , 8
Galilei, Vincenzo 156
Gannon, Susanne 280
Gautier, Théophile 95
Gendren, Bernard 190 , 192
Genette, Gérard 14 , 67
Gilbert, Shirli 263
Girard, René 188
Giraud, Albert 251
Goehr, Lydia 1 , 32 , 62 , 254
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 171
Gooley, Dana 19 , 280 – 4 , 288 – 9 , 292
Gorbman, Claudia 224 – 5 , 227 , 228 , 229 , 232
Gordon, Daniel 166
Gracyk, Theodore 8 , 30 – 1 , 34 , 37 – 8
Greenfeld, Liah 266
Greimas, A. J. 205
Grey, Thomas 184
Griffiths, Steven 33
Grossmann, Linde 285
Guy, Nancy 264

Habeneck, François-Antoine 94
Habermas, Jürgen 115
Hale, Thomas 261 – 2
Halm, August 52
Hamera, Judith 291 – 2
Hamilton, Andy 2 – 3
Hanslick, Eduard 43 – 6 , 48 , 50 – 7 , 63 , 89 , 90 ; On the Musically Beautiful [ Vom Musikalisch-Schönen ] 14 , 16 , 26 , 29 , 44
– 5 , 91 , 176 – 7 , 184
Harrison, Daniel 37
Hatten, Robert 14 , 68 , 74 – 5 , 205 , 208 , 210
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1 , 2 , 16 , 45 – 6 , 52 , 54 , 94 – 5 , 111 – 18 , 123 – 4 , 127 , 135 , 140 – 1 , 161 , 171 – 3 , 180 ,
 ; Lectures on Aesthetics 172 , 286 ; The Phenomenology of Mind 14 – 15 , 113 – 15 , 254 ; Science of Logic 113 – 14 , 140
Heidegger, Martin 77
Heine, Heinrich 281
Heister, Hanns-Werner 278
Hennion, Antoine 19 , 277 , 281 , 284 , 287
Hepokoski, James 124 , 221
Hesmondhalgh, David 11
Hinton, Stephen 87 , 89
Hitchcock, Alfred: Vertigo 227 ; Lifeboat 228
Hoeckner, Berthold 115
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 32 , 35 – 6 , 42 – 3 , 46 , 53 , 57 , 86 , 88 – 9 , 94 , 103 , 170 , 172 , 242 , 248
Hooper, Giles 6
Horace 155 – 6
Horkheimer, Max 99 – 100 , 115 , 172
Howard, Keith 262
Hucke, Helmut 161
Hugo, Victor 95
Huyssen, Andreas 99
Hyde, Martha 158

Jacob, Max 97
Jacq-Mioche, Sylvie 284
Jakobson, Roman 205
Jameson, Frederic 86
Jankélévitch, Vladimir 19 , 277 , 283
jazz 1 , 17 , 56 , 150 , 188 – 222 , 270 , 284 , 289 , 291
Jean Paul see Richter
Joffé, Roland: The Killing Fields 228
Johnson, Mark 72
Johnson, Samuel 278
Joughin, John J. 6

Kabisch, Thomas 281

Kalbeck, Max 249
Kant, Immanuel 1 – 3 , 5 , 8 , 12 , 48 , 63 , 90 , 93 – 7 , 100 , 112 – 14 , 163 , 239 , 255 ; Critique of Judgement 26 – 8 , 33 – 4 , 38
84 , 86 – 7 ; Critique of Pure Reason 114
Karl, Gregory 206 – 7 , 209
Kassabian, Annahid 224 , 227 , 228 , 234
Keats, John 85
Keefe, Simon 163
Keeling, Geraldine 281
Keller, Hans 99 , 100
Kennan, George 269
Kerman, Joseph 204 , 209 , 218
Kermode, Frank 213
Kim Il Sung 262
Kinderman, William 208
Kivy, Peter 1 , 3 , 46 , 64 – 7 , 90 , 239
Klauwell, Otto 63
Kopiez, Reinhard 285
Korsyn, Kevin 6 – 7 , 9 – 10 , 54
Kracauer, Siegfried 230
Kramer, Lawrence 4 , 11 , 19 , 29 , 56 – 7 , 67 , 75 , 221 , 240 , 277 , 281 – 2 , 287 – 91
Kraus, Karl 249 – 50
Kretzschmar, Hermann 57
Krims, Adam 4
Kristeva, Julia 86
Krushchev, Nikita 270
Kunze, Stefan 163
Küster, Konrad 280

Lacan, Jacques 227

Lack, Russell 226 , 228
Lakoff, George 14 , 72 , 74
Lamac, Carl: Die von Rummelplatz 230
Langer, Suzanne K. 66
Lamb, Charles 42 – 3
Laube, Matthew 265
Leppert, Richard 7 , 19 , 281 – 2 , 289
Lethen, Helmut 167
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 172 , 207 , 212
Levinson, Jerrold 1 , 3 , 14 , 67 , 228
Lippman, Edward 3 – 4
Liska, James Jacób 214
Lochhead, Judy 86
Lommatzsch, Carl 287
Longinus 85 – 6 , 90
Longyear, Rey 242
Lucas, George: Star Wars 233 – 4
Lukács, Georg 171 – 2 , 254
Lyotard, Jean-François 8 , 84 , 86 , 89

McClary, Susan 7 , 10 – 11 , 56 – 7 , 89
McCreless, Patrick 205 , 219
McKay, Nicholas 64
Mäkelä, Tomi 280 – 1
Mallarmé, Stéphane 56 , 95 , 205
Malpas, Simon 6
Man, Paul de 85
Mann, Michael: The Insider 228
Marpurg, Friedrich Wilhelm 145
Martin, George R.R.: Game of Thrones 214
Marx, A. B. 15 , 63 , 77 , 94 , 123
Marx, Karl 14 , 115 – 16 , 171
Maus, Fred 205 , 208 – 9 , 219 – 21
Meelberg, Vincent 214
Meltzer, Richard 33 – 6
Mersenne, Marin 277
Metzner, Paul 278 , 281
Meyer, Leonard B. 29
Michaelis, Christian Friedrich 33 , 50 , 89
Micznik, Vera 207 – 8
Middleton, Richard 8
Milbank, John 86
Milošević, Slobodan 271
Modiano, Raimonda 95
Momigny, Jérôme-Joseph de 204 , 208
Monelle, Raymond 14 , 70 – 1
Moore, Allan F. 8
Moore, John W. 278 – 9
Moore, Rachel 267 – 8
Morcom, Anna 263 – 4
Moreno, Joseph 272
Moritz, Karl Philipp 50
Mottram, Ron 226
Moysan, Bruno 281 , 292
Mundt, Theodor 279
Murphy, Richard 190
Mussolini, Benito 166

Nabokov, Vladimir 209 , 213

Nägeli, Hans-Georg 31 , 34
Nancy, Jean-Luc 85
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 206 – 8 , 211 – 12 , 218 , 220 , 228
Neubauer, John 53
Neumeyer, David 224 , 227 – 8 , 230 – 1
Newcomb, Anthony 205 , 216
Ngai, Sianne 24
Nietzsche, Friedrich 23 , 56 , 170 , 174 , 181 – 5 , 250 , 285 ; The Birth of Tragedy 16 , 93 , 179 , 181 – 3 ; The Case of Wagner 183
Nooshin, Laudan 263
Nordau, Max 177 , 184
Novalis 170 , 254 – 5

O’Dea, Jane 279

Oettinger, Rebecca 265
Olwage, Grant 262

Paddison, Max 119 , 221

Pasler, Jann 213
Peirce, Charles Sanders 69 , 71
Pincherle, Marc 280
Plato 54 , 95 , 155 , 260 , 264
Plutarch 150
Poggioli, Renato 188 – 90
Pölitz, Karl Heinrich Ludwig 279
Pollock, Jackson 195
Prendergast, Roy 226
Propp, Vladimir 205
Pyper, Brett 262

Quintilian 155

Rasmussen, Ljerka V. 270 – 1

Ratner, Leonard 14 , 68 – 70
Reimer, Erich 285
Reynaud, Cécile 281 , 284
Reynolds, Christopher 220
Richter, Hans 51
Richter, Jean Paul 86 , 94 , 97 – 8 , 241 – 3 , 248 , 254
Ricoeur, Paul 85
Rink, John 208
Rivet, Jacques: Duelle 227 ; Noroît 227
Rochlitz, Friedrich 33 , 34 , 36 – 7
rock 7 – 8 , 12 – 13 , 25 , 32 – 9 , 47 , 209 , 263 , 270 – 2
Rodano, Ronald 197
Rosen, Charles 112 , 157 , 243
Rupprecht, Philip 218

Saffle, Michael 281

Safranski, Rüdiger 167 , 172
Samson, Jim 189 , 280 – 3 , 287 , 290
Saunders, Thomas 230
Schelling, Friedrich 170 : System of Transcendental Idealism , 254
Scheibe, Johann Adolph 279
Scherzinger, Martin 8 – 10
Schiller, Friedrich 23 , 27 – 8 , 32 , 85 , 89 – 90 , 101 , 167
Schilling, Gustav 279
Schlegel, August Wilhelm 86 – 7 , 170
Schlegel, Friedrich 170 , 242 – 3 , 253 , 254
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 1 , 279 , 287
Schmalfeldt, Janet 123 – 4 , 135 – 8
Schmidt, Matthias 161
Schmitt, Carl 171
Schopenhauer, Arthur 1 , 16 , 52 – 6 , 63 , 91 , 178 – 81 , 245 ; The World as Will and Representation 47 – 8 , 84 , 179 , 181
Scruton, Roger 2 – 3 , 25 , 30 , 57 , 63 , 66
Seidl, Wilhelm 50 , 53
Shadwell, Thomas: The Virtuoso 27 8
Shakespeare, William 259
Sheinberg, Esti 253
Shusterman, Richard 10 – 11
Siodmak, Robert: Abschied 231 – 2
Sipe, Thomas 260
Sisman, Elaine 162 – 3
Smith, Adam 154 – 5
Solomon, Maynard 89 – 90
Solomon, Robert C. 100 – 1
Spitzer, Michael 3 , 15 , 120 , 220 – 1
Staël, Madame de 94 – 5
Stalin, Joseph 268 , 270
Steiner, Wendy 85
Stendhal 171
Sternberg, von: Der blaue Engel 229
Sterne, Laurence: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 241 – 2 , 254
Stilwell, Robynn 217 – 18
Stobart, Henry 261
Strohm, Reinhard 50
Subotnik, Rose Rosengard 8 , 10 , 161
Sulzer, Johann Georg 32 , 88
surrealism 189

Tan, Shzr Ee 263

Tarasti, Eero 205
Taruskin, Richard 7 – 8 , 49 – 50 , 58 , 87 , 103 , 111 , 141 , 171 , 185 – 6 , 288
Taylor, Charles 111 , 115
Thompson, Kristin 226
Tieck, Ludwig 46 , 53 , 170 , 242
Tinctoris 155
Todorov, Tzvetan 213 , 216 , 269
Tomlinson, Gary 4
Turner, Mark 14 , 72 – 3

Vattimo, Gianni 23
Vischer, Friedrich Theodor 95 , 279 , 287

Wackenroder, Wilhelm 46 , 53 , 170

Walser, Rob 287
Walton, Benjamin 93 – 4
Walton, Kendall 67 , 74
Wangermée, Robert 280 , 283
Wartenburg, Thomas 287 , 291
Watkins, Holly 36
Weber, William 280
Wegman, Rob 155
Welles, Orson: Touch of Evil , 226
Wendt, Amadeus 33 , 36
Weiskel, Thomas 95
Wheelock, Gretchen 241
White, Hayden 205 , 209
Wicke, Peter 7 – 8 , 285
Wierzbicki, James 226
Wilcox, John 95
Williams, Alastair 3
Williams, Paul 35
Williams, Raymond 5
Willis, Ellen 33 , 37
Winckelmann, Johann 95
Winters, Ben 226 , 228 – 9 , 232
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8 , 254 – 5
Wood, Gillen D’Arcy 278
Wurth, Brillenberg Kiene 86
Wyler, William: The Best Years of Our Lives 232

Yang Mu 263
Young, Terence: Dr No 218
Zangwill, Nick 1 – 2 , 3
Zbikowski, Lawrence 72
Zelter, Carl Friedrich 163
Zhdanov, Andrie 270
Zich, Otakar 1
Žižek, Slavoj 93 , 233