Music Analysis and the Avant-Garde Compositions of Post-World War II: Four Case Studies (original) (raw)
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Approaching the Analysis of Post-1945 Music: Pedagogical Considerations
2016
In this article I propose a conceptual and pedagogical framework to organize a course or a fragment of a course on the analysis of post-1945 post-tonal music, in a way that brings together the phenomenological understanding of music as an objective entity on the one hand, and the historical and social contexts needed to provide the necessary perspective to our conceptual understanding of a musical work on the other. The discussion focuses on seven general issues that I recommend addressing as part of this organizational framework:(1) the value of understanding the music through analysis; (2) the value of understanding, in particular, the historical and social contexts of artistic movements and styles; (3) preference for a roughly chronological organization; (4) the multiplicity of styles in the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century; (5) the lack of a unified methodology; (6) the need to rely on existing theoretical and analytical scholarship; and (7) th...
At the Origins of Music Analysis
University of Virginia, 2019
This dissertation chronicles the early history of music criticism over the course of the long eighteenth century, focusing on the emergence of the interpretive close-reading of musical works-what is now called music analysis, a practice ubiquitous across the academic discipline of musicology. The first music analysts were a wide-ranging group of intellectuals and critics who collectively formulated a science of music, complete with a set of scholarly practices and institutions that continues to influence scholarship today. To catalogue and evaluate new music publications, critics interpreted music's complex structures by fracturing the compositions into parts and attempting to figure out how they related to the whole, resulting in the first structural interpretations-or, in a modern sense, a "critique"-of musical texts. Analysts carved a space for themselves in the emergent disciplinary discourse of musicology, establishing and developing the proprietary knowledge necessary for rationalizing music as a coherent system and playing a pivotal role in establishing its new epistemology.
On the Musicological Necessity of Musical Analysis
The Musical Quarterly, 2020
Assessing musical analysis's prospects in 2004, Kofi Agawu struck a tone of cautious optimism. 1 Noting that the new musicology's critical "bid for power" had subsided into an uneasy truce, Agawu diagnosed "a sharply delineated pluralism," in which the increasingly aged new musicology coexisted with a theoretical renaissance he called the "New American Music Theory," a diverse movement encompassing neo-Riemannian theory, the new Formenlehre, a rejuvenated Schenkerian theory, novel approaches to the history of theory, growing interest in cognition and perception, fresh attitudes to the theory of rhythm, and a distinctive embrace of World music and non-canonical repertoire. 2 Speculating about the future, Agawu observed that "these and other formalist ventures are alive and very well, and have as good a chance of survival as any other musicological practices." 3 The fifteen subsequent years have, in one sense, validated Agawu's prognosis: the fields under the new theory's banner have flourished and acquired siblings in diverse areas, including the analysis of pop music, music and emotion, Romantic form, topic theory, and musical narrativity. 4 The question of how the new theory interacts with the now-old new musicology, however, remains underinvestigated. Although Agawu noted a grudging musicological acceptance of the pluralist settlement, 5 the periodic commentary that musicologists have offered since the turn of the millennium suggests that the cessation of hostilities results more from a belief in total victory than an acknowledgment of the pluralist world order. The idea that analysis now exists as little more than a defunct ideology's lingering shadow continues to be an enabling musicological thesis, notwithstanding analysis's manifest vitality. This vigor is, to be sure, geographically variable. In North America, theory's relative prosperity has been guaranteed by its institutional status, as a discipline often occupying its own distinct academic structures, supported by a mature professional infrastructure. The overarching European
EXCESS. FORUM FOR PHILOSOPHY AND ART (4.-7.8.2016) 48th International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt Jörn Peter Hiekel, Dieter Mersch, Michael Rebhahn and Fahim Amir (CURATORS) This forum, consisting of an opening, a closing discussion and three panels, seeks to probe the current state of the relationship between music and philosophy, as well as the mutual consonances and dissonances. With a view to the present, it is of particular interest to ask what questions are stimulating New Music today, what challenges it faces, and what shared themes or »contemporaneities« unite and separate philosophy and New Music today. In this way — and very much following on from earlier discussions in Darmstadt — the forum will attempt to show how compositional strategies and concepts exemplify reflections on changes within the whole of contemporary culture. The forum, which will take place in two languages (German and English, with simultaneous interpretation), defines itself as an open-ended discussion whose topics will be introduced in keynote speeches. In each case, one composer and one philosopher will act as hosts and play the part of structuring and further developing, with their guests, the discussion that already started before the course. PANEL 1: SURPLUS Dieter Mersch ChristianGrüny, Jennifer Walshe, Ashley Fure, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Michael Pisaro, Bernhard Waldenfels The term»surplus, «which is also implied in the over- all title EXCESS, allues to today’s increasing expansion of the compositional through approaches like intermediality, heterogeneity of material, body/performance, theatricality, etc. Thus the term »surplus« relates on the one hand to the »derestriction« of the arts towards different forms of expression, representation and production; but, on the other hand, also to a political aspect between the critique of art as a productive force in modern capitalism and the surplus of the aesthetic as something that does not submit to the cycles of economic exploitation. PANEL 2: THE POLITICAL Michael Rebhahn Douglas Barrett, Dror Feiler, Fahim Amir, Chaya Czernowin, Harry Lehmann, Mathias Spahlinger The political dimension touched on in the first group of themes will be explicitly foregrounded in the second complex. It addresses the ever pressing question of the relationship between art, reality and politics, which constantly arises in new ways for music too. Just as the »worldrelation« of music is being intensely debated at the moment, the concern is at once a far more fundamental analysis of the relationship be- tween the aesthetic and all that characterizes and constitutes the polis, the political and lastly the »community«. What is the role of art in this, especially if the practice of art identifies itself first and foremost as critique, as an element of resistance or subversion against claims to political power? A substantial element of this fundamental problem also encompasses the interplay between music and the historical, as expressed in notions of »contemporaneity« and »witness.« Intervention: Fahim Amir and Tomás Saraceno Every work of art is an uncommitted crime After the critique of Eurocentrism new approaches demand to also »provincialise the human«. If dogs are indeed the new feminists as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of dOCUMENTA (13), famously stated in relation to the seminal work of Donna Haraway, what is there to be done in the realms of aesthetics, production and politics? Philosopher Fahim Amir and artist Tomás Saraceno engage in a conversation about challenges and promises of multi species constellations in art starting from both Saracenos work with spiders and Haraways Companion Species Manifesto (2003). A Cyrtophora citricola spider will join the conversation as guest speaker. PANEL 3: MUSIC AS PHILOSOPHY Jörn Peter Hiekel, Simone Mahrenholz, ManosTsangaris, Brian Ferneyhough, Patrick Frank, Gunnar Hindrichs, Albrecht Wellmer Music, like art in general, constitutes its own form of thought and insight that is every bit as advanced as philosophy, but uses other means and follows different »logics.« It is not only a matter of initiating a dialogue between music and philosophy in order to evoke mutual tensions or proximities, but rather of showing how music, or the musical and »compositional,« can be viewed as »a form of philosophy« — and of attributing to it an »epistemic« power of its own. On the one hand, this raises such time-honored questions as that of »truth« in art, which after Hegel was taken up most significantly by Heidegger and Adorno; and on the other hand, it needs to be readjusted to the present conditions. One must therefore interrogate the »self-will« of aesthetic thought and ask what music — especially New Music, as the most »abstract« and at once the most emotional art — »knows,« or how it organizes and reveals its knowledge.
Musicology Today, 2022
My study is an attempt to philosophically account for the competing influence in the 20th century musical understanding and practice of two radical and opposed aesthetics: the ideal of transgressive art (defined by Anthony Julius) associated with the avant-garde and the ideal of recovering the original and authentic art associated with extreme nationalism. My thesis is that these perspectives, under their extreme formulations, are, in fact, kindred sides of the broader philosophy of Modernity as developed since the Enlightenment. Also, as a consequence, by deconstructing the historical meaning and justification of these aesthetic forms of radicalism, one can reinterpret the artistic profiles of personalities such as Arnold Schönberg, thought of either as a revolutionary who totally rebelled against the musical past (as Theodor W. Adorno considered), or as not revolutionary enough (as Pierre Boulez thought). My historical methodology is based on using the two key-terms, “originality” and “transgression”, as regulative concepts within the constellation (a concept proposed by Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectics) of musical modernism. Thereby, I will show how these key-terms are connected to a network of other romantic concepts: organism, authenticity, aura (Walter Benjamin’s sense), integrity, folklore, and contemplation, in order to reveal how the structural and social meaning ascribed to this set of concepts greatly influenced the process of redefining musical thinking and musical reception. The main philosophies I will use as conceptual landmarks to clarify these interconnections are Martin Heidegger’s remarks about the work of art and Theodor Adorno’s critique of Heideggerian terminology and presuppositions. My overall conclusion will point towards the necessity of going beyond such radical modern oppositions with the aim of finding new types of theoretical principles and perspectives, more adequate as conceptual tools for dealing with contemporary artistic realities. LINK: musicologytoday.ro/49/MT49studiesStoicescu.pdf
Inter-structures: rethinking continuity in post-1945 piano repertoire
journal of interdisciplinary music studies, 2009
Background in history and philosophy of music. The challenge of delineating complex, discontinuous structures has characterised both the evolution of post-1945 piano music, and the radical theoretical shift towards post-structuralism in contemporary philosophy. While references to music as composed and heard are evident in the writings that constitute this theoretical shift (e.g. Deleuze 1980), the particulars of performance have remained disproportionately underrepresented in post-structuralist discourse . Considerable mileage thus remains to be covered in the study of non-structuralist views on performance practice, both as historical documents, and as emerging paradigms in the philosophy of music. Background in music performance. To interpret post-tonal music one is often faced with a quintessentially practical line of questioning: If structure equals divisibility , how can the learning process adapt to compositions that seem to resist fixity and segmentation? Can the structuring of a performance reflect the structure of the music performed, when the latter resists a linear interpretation? Aims. By exploring the notion of continuity as one of the first challenges brought about by the postwar re-definition of musical structure, we identify concepts and modes of navigation that address the processes and physical details of interpretation as well as unveiling historically resonant appropriations of philosophical terminology and conceptual imagery Main contribution. This approach synthesizes history, philosophy and performance practice. Its outlook is practical in that it addresses the small-and large-scale issues of performative continuity. Its scope is historically construed, as it focuses on the redefinition of such concepts as "reading" and "structure" and their implications for compositional and performing practices. Its conceptual basis is philosophically argued, as it employs the tropes and concepts that emerge in post-structuralist thinking and extends their application towards a new framework. Implications. The proposed set of structural approaches can assist performers as well as musicologists in grappling with complex formations. It can also foster a practical exploration of post-structuralist ideas in music, strengthening the associations between philosophical, musicological and performance studies scholarship. The typology proposed here operates inbetween categories, and in so doing, it proposes inter-structures which retain the fluid character of the compositions discussed.