SMA
Society for Music Analysis
TAGS
Day
Postgraduates
for
King’s College London
Saturday 5 May 2007
In association with British Postgraduate Musicology
Generously supported by the Institute of Musical Research
Music
0930 Registration
St David’s Room
1000 Parallel Sessions
St David’s Room
Lecture Room
Philip Purvis (Lancaster): ‘Les
Mariés de la Tour Eiffel: the case for
musical surrealism’
Miriam Quick (KCL): ‘A sense of
“sense”: performance and analysis in
Webern’s Variations for Piano’
Adam Greig (Lancaster): ‘The
Tailleferre waltz: genre
development and performance
readings’
Carlos del Cueto (Clare, Cambridge):
‘Progressive theory in practice: an
analysis of Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden’
1100 Coffee
Blackwell Room
1130 Plenary Session
St David’s Room
Matthew Pritchard (RHUL): ‘Beethoven’s difficulty: melodic resistance in his
late style’
Anne Hyland (King’s, Cambridge): ‘Linearity and motion across the Schubertian
landscape: a reappraisal’
William Lockhart (KCL): ‘“The Angel of History”: Walter Benjamin and
Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente’
1300 Lunch
Blackwell Room
1400 Parallel Sessions
St David’s Room
Lecture Room
James Olsen (RHUL): ‘Auguries of
the “Augurs” chord’
Tristian Evans (Bangor): ‘Musical
cataclysms? analysing (post)modernist
responses to the atomic age’
Inessa Bazayev (CUNY): ‘Voiceleading symmetries in the late
works of Alexander Scriabin’
Emma Gallon (Lancaster): ‘“A labyrinth
of implications”: Earle Brown’s December
1952 and approaches to indeterminate
music’
Michael Byde (Leeds): ‘William
Walton’s later orchestral works:
musical languages and analytical
methodologies’
Jonathan De Souza (RHUL): ‘Postwar
indeterminacy and the potentiality of
analysis’
1530 Tea
Blackwell Room
1600 Society for Music Analysis AGM
St David’s Room
1645 Keynote Address: Scott Burnham (Princeton)
St David’s Room
1800 Close
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1000-1100 PARALLEL SESSIONS
St David’s Room
Philip Purvis (Lancaster University): ‘Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel: the case for musical
surrealism’
The relationship between art, literature and the French surrealist movement of the
1920s–30s has been well documented (Chenieux-Gendron. 1994), yet the position of
music has always been questioned (Breton, 1928). Identification of collage and
automatism in 1940s music from the New York School began to analyse music from a
surrealist perspective (LeBaron, 2002). However, any musical correspondence to the
other artistic domains of 1920s–30s France focuses on musical familiarity within
dissonant multimedia relationships, and lacks any specific musical detail (Albright,
2000). Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, a collaborative work written in 1921 by Jean Cocteau
and ‘Les Six’ (without Durey) has been widely acknowledged as a surrealist work
(Watkins, 1994; Albright, 2002), but analysis of the music in its own right has so far
been neglected.
By taking ideas from artistic and literary theory and intermeshing them with familiar
analytical methodology (such as formal, tonal and motivic interpretations), a surrealist
musical criterion which explores the use of collage, montage, quotation, the grotesque,
semblance of improvisation and temporal and atemporal relations, accesses the extent
of dislocation. Four works from Les Mariés, ‘Marche nuptuale’ and ‘Fugue du massacre’
by Darius Milhaud along with ‘Valse de dépêches’ and ‘Quadrille’ by Germiane
Tailleferre, act as case studies and a prototype for identifying musical surrealism in
wider repertory. This approach also serves as a model that draws attention to notions
of temporality and correspondence across artistic domains.
Adam Greig (Lancaster University): ‘The Tailleferre waltz: genre development and
performance readings’
As a particularly malleable genre the waltz has been employed in many contexts
outside its origins as a social dance. However, risqué connotations of its scandalous
beginnings have permeated these transformations. Critiques of the dance centred on
the sexual and physical corruption of the female partner; against such societal
disapproval, it is little wonder that the genre was avoided by the majority of female
composers during the nineteenth century. A more liberal 1920s Paris did not hold the
same sentiments although traces of the old associations lingered on. Combined with
France’s continued attempt to free itself from the Austro-German influence, waltz
music became riddled with contentious undertones.
Against such a backdrop, Germaine Tailleferre’s Deux Valse (1929) emerges as a
fascinating synthesis of conflicting social, aesthetic and nationalistic factors that I argue
can only be understood and fully appreciated in conjunction with performance.
Through an investigation of the waltz from its dance steps, its zenith in the Viennese
ballroom, and, finally, composers’ adaptation of waltz figures for the concert platform
Tailleferre’s usage of waltz traits and her intentions in this work will be elucidated.
The majority of Tailleferre’s compositions existed for piano before they were
developed for larger ensembles. This intimate relationship suggests that the
performance of her piano music is instrumental in discovering her musical language.
The culmination of this paper is an analysis of possible performance readings
formulated from both the analytical tracing of the waltz and her implied intentions
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through the manipulation of these traits.
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Lecture Room
Miriam Quick (King’s College, London): ‘A sense of “sense”: performance and analysis
in Webern’s Variations for Piano’
In 1948, Adorno attacked Webern’s Op. 27 Variations for Piano for its ‘row fetishism’.
Performances, he wrote, must therefore remove themselves from the rigidity of the
notation, especially in terms of rhythm, in order to lend the bare notes even the
merest ‘shadow of sense’. Nonetheless, many performers in the 50s and 60s, probably
influenced by the serial fervour of Die Reihe and the prevalent view of the ‘sense’ of
Webern’s music as mysteriously obscured, lying somehow behind the notes (Schnebel,
1952), tended to reproduce the works in a rigidly ‘faithful’, yet, to our ears, brutally
unmusical way (Day, 2000; Hill, 2002). Only after the publication of Peter Stadlen’s Op.
27 ‘performance score’ in 1979 was it widely accepted that Webern’s own conception
of this work – indeed, all his works – could only be realised through a hyperexpressive, ultra-romantic style of rubato in performance.
Here I explore Stadlen’s striking idea of a ‘dialectic’ between structural and
expressive levels in Op. 27 by analysing aspects of rhythm and timing in two radically
different recordings of the first movement: by Yvonne Loriod and by Stadlen himself.
Using Rink’s (2002) notion of ‘performer’s analysis’, I conceive of performance as the
process of meaningfully characterising musical forms through gesture. Each performer
communicates a particular musical understanding grounded in often wildly different
basic assumptions about what the piece is. Far from merely lending the notes a
‘shadow of sense’, a convincing performance, I argue, ‘makes complete sense’ by ‘recreating’ the work anew.
Carlos del Cueto (Clare College, Cambridge): ‘Progressive theory in practice: an
analysis of Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden’
Even though Schoenberg composed Friede auf Erden [Peace on Earth], op. 13, during
the very creative period that culminated with his arrival to free atonality, the a cappella
chorus remains unpopular and even neglected, dismissed as a ‘regressive’ composition.
After all, at its most essential level Friede auf Erden is an unequivocally tonal and triadicbased piece in sonata form. However, a thorough Schenkerian, structural, and
harmonic analysis reveals that the musical procedures that underlie the unfolding of
the work embody many of Schoenberg’s ‘progressive’ compositional and harmonic
theories as expressed in his Harmonielehre only a few years later. To study this chorus
in light of Schoenberg’s treatise is illuminating in itself, given that four-part harmony
(SATB) is the dominant paradigm for Schoenberg’s discussions of harmony. Particularly
relevant to Friede auf Erden are his views on tonal regions, non-harmonic tones, and
the emancipation of dissonance. Also of great interest is the way in which the sonata
structure is manipulated in such a way that it both exemplifies Schoenberg’s
progressive theories and is charged with deep expression. This piece further elucidates
Schoenberg’s compositional preoccupations in the period before free atonality. Striking
parallels with the Second String Quartet also show that Friede auf Erden was not a oneoff work, but in fact very much a part of Schoenberg’s evolution as a composer.
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1130-1300 PLENARY SESSION
St David’s Room
Matthew Pritchard (Royal Holloway, University of London): ‘Beethoven’s difficulty:
melodic resistance in his late style’
This paper begins with a discussion of a common feature in contemporary reviews of
Beethoven’s late works – the identification of their style as ‘difficult’. ‘Difficulty’
inevitably has several dimensions: clearly, it can drastically affect performers, but it may
also manifest itself in the choice of ‘difficult’ compositional forms and procedures
(fugue and canon), or in a material shaping of the music that resists easy apprehension
by the listener (whether on the level of form, texture, melody or harmony). The
analytical part of the paper will, however, for both historical and phenomenological
reasons, focus in on difficulty as a melodic attribute presenting itself to the listener, and
attempt to ground its “materiality” in the music by an application of Eugene Narmour’s
theory of melodic contour to specific passages from Beethoven’s opp. 101 and 102. A
framework for the semantic mediation of Narmour’s hypothesised melodic units and
their psychological effects is then outlined, making reference to stylistic, structural and
affective contexts for listening. To conclude, I return to the historical sphere, asking if
and how the relationship between musical structure and difficulty was constructed
differently by Beethoven and his contemporaries from its formulation in the writings of
twentieth-century high modernists such as Schoenberg, Adorno and David Lewin; and
posing the question of what implications this difference might have for our own critical
readings, both of Beethoven’s music and its ideological appropriations over the past
two centuries.
Anne Hyland (King’s College, Cambridge): ‘Linearity and motion across the
Schubertian Landscape: A reappraisal’
The concept of motion has recently become prominent in discussions of Schubert’s
treatment of sonata form in his instrumental works. It would appear not only that this
music does not strive forward, mimicking the ‘classic’ Beethovenian paradigm, but that it
in fact looks back, reminisces, and, in its remote self-containment, knows no future, and
often, paradoxically, no past. The hegemony of this view is evident in two recent
symposia related to Schubert: ‘Memory and Schubert’s Instrumental Music’ (The
Musical Quarterly 2000), and ‘Schubert and Adorno’ (Nineteenth[-]Century Music 2005).
Fundamental to these studies is a tacit, yet generally accepted concept of musical
‘linearity’ that claims unidirectional and contiguous movement as paramount. Such a
consensus has not been reached in relation to motion in Schubert’s sonata forms,
however, and can therefore not act as a basis for judgment. Thus, continuing to
portray Schubert’s sonata forms as aberrant in relation to an idealised paradigm of
teleology, requires an examination of the meaning behind this most championed
metaphor.
By addressing recent theories of musical teleology and motion, this paper aims to
establish a more effective definition of these terms as they relate to Schubert. I arrive
at this through consideration of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s recent
definition of Sonata Theory, and how teleology may be differently understood through
the work of Jonathan Kramer (1988) and Edward T. Cone (1968) respectively. I hope
to demonstrate how the concept of ‘multiply-directed linear time’, which relies neither
on continuity nor contiguity, may be successfully applied to some of Schubert’s
notoriously ‘anti-teleological’ passages. Ultimately, through tonal and thematic
examination of the first movement of Schubert’s A-minor String Quartet, D.804, I shall
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illustrate the linear yet stratified construction of the piece, which offers a new
understanding of teleology that relies predominantly on memory for its realisation.
William Lockhart (King’s College, London): ‘“The Angel of History”: Walter Benjamin
and Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente’
Gyorgy Kurtág’s early style, coupling a predominantly expressionist tone with a
transhistorical plurality of older styles, has been interpreted as exemplifying the
composer’s ‘ambivalent’ attitude towards the tonal tradition. This interpretation relies
on the work’s apparent manifestation of dialectical tensions between wholeness and
fragmentation, tonal and atonal processes, and tradition and modernity. Under this
view, Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente bring these supposed dialectics to a head, transplanting
the early Romantic preoccupation with the Fragment and aphorism into a shattered
late-twentieth century syntax. However, textual and motivic analysis reveals that the
Kafka-Fragmente possess a unity which threatens to destabilise this dialectical
suspension. Consequently, I suggest that rather than analyzing the work in terms of
these (outdated) binary oppositions, we would do better to consider it from the
standpoint of Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism. I argue that Benjamin’s view
that modernity is forged through the antinomy of tradition maps point-by-point onto
Kurtág’s compositional aesthetic. I also contend that their shared interest in Kakfa
provides another significant aesthetic meeting point. Finally, I conclude by suggesting
that Kurtág can be seen as personifying what Benjamin called ‘The Angel of History’,
that figure who in, looking at the past, ‘sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage’ while ‘the storm irresistibly propels him into the future’.
1400-1530 PARALLEL SESSIONS
St David’s Room
James Olsen (Royal Holloway, University of London): ‘Auguries of the “Augurs” chord
Although The Rite of Spring has been the object of numerous analytical endeavours,
each has run aground on the famous ‘Augurs’ chord. Some analysts have sought to
explain its existence, whereas others have insisted that it bears no relation to any
governing system. In this paper I argue that both these approaches are unsatisfactory in
that the first explains the chord away by stressing continuity while the second
privileges discontinuity such that it must admit defeat and accept that analysis will
never understand the ‘Augurs’ chord. I suggest that analyses of the chord will always
founder so long as they refuse to consider its relation to the preceding music.
Although shocking, the chord is not absolutely unrelated to the Introduction; the task
of analysis is to understand this relation so that it is not dismissed as either insignificant
or inexplicable. I draw on a variety of analytical methods to highlight the ways in which
the ‘Augurs’ chord is anticipated (or ‘augured’) in the Introduction without necessarily
being determined by it. In particular, I consider the significance of the enharmonic
disjuncture between the recurring E major triad sonorities in the Introduction and the
F major triad sonority in the ‘Augurs’ chord. I conclude by suggesting that the notion
of ‘augury’ might be a helpful alternative analytical model which overcomes the binary
opposition of continuity and discontinuity.
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Inessa Bazayev (City University of New York): ‘Voice-leading symmetries in the late
works of Alexander Scriabin’
Early studies of Scriabin’s late works (those after Op. 58), both in Russia(Sabaneev
1923; Dernova 1968) and abroad (Perle 1984), offered various explanations of its
harmonic language, the most common of which was to use the mystic chord (a
member of sc 6-34 [013579]) as a source of its harmonic material. However, none of
them deals with the overall harmonic syntax. Recently, Callender (1998) goes beyond
the confines of the mystic chord. He discusses the presence of other collections (e.g.,
octatonic and whole tone) and relates them through FUSE and SPLIT operations.
In the current paper, I extend Callender’s approach and shift the focus from the
harmonies to the voice leading that connects them. I use pc-space voice-leading graphs
and three operations—a generalized version of Callender’s SPLIT and FUSE, and a new
operation, MOVE. Callender’s SPLIT sends, for example, C# to C and D while FUSE
does the opposite, sending C and D onto C#. My MOVE sends C# onto either C# and
C or C# and D. All of these transformations involve voice leading by minimal
distances. These voice leadings are both internally consistent throughout much of
Scriabin’s music, but they also bring in their wake a reasonably consistent harmonic
vocabulary. I analyze Opp. 63/1, 69/2, and 71/2 to demonstrate that symmetrical voice
leading is a source of unity in its own right and a generator of harmonic recurrence.
Michael Byde (University of Leeds): ‘William Walton’s later orchestral works: musical
languages and analytical methodologies’
William Walton’s later orchestral works (those after Troilus and Cressida) have received
little analytical attention in the literature, perhaps because they have been considered
by a number of critics to represent only ‘the mixture as before’. In fact, in several of
these works, there is an interesting and novel confluence of modern and traditional
tendencies.
This music presents a methodological challenge, for the diversity of musical languages
employed (even in a single movement), and the manner of their presentation,
undercuts the hierarchy of diatonic scale degrees sufficiently to challenge the
interpretative value of Schenkerian prolongational claims. Diatonic, octatonic,
hexatonic and serial structures can all be found in Walton’s later music. On the other
hand, approaches developed for post-tonal music (notably set-class theory) risk
insensitivity to the music’s tonal heritage.
Two case studies from Walton’s later orchestral works, the opening movement of
the Cello Concerto (1956) and Capriccio Burlesco (1968), serve to illustrate these
points. Thematic analysis, pitch-class set theory, and sonata deformation theory,
amongst others, illuminate different aspects of the music, but considered individually,
the explanatory power of each perspective would be weak.
Walton’s music resists interpretation from any single theoretical perspective. In this
respect, the guise of exclusivity that is evident in a number of theoretical paradigms is
unhelpful. The methodological pluralism employed in this work reflects the plurality of
musical languages and influences in Walton’s later music.
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Lecture Room
Tristan Evans (University of Bangor): ‘Musical cataclysms? analysing [post-]modernist
responses to the atomic age’
Reginald Smith Brindle once proclaimed that the course of ‘new music’ had been
indirectly set out by two significant historic events of the twentieth century: the
emergence of the atomic bomb and mankind’s expeditions to the moon. Indeed, a
significant number of modernist and post-modernist composers (particularly in the
area of minimalism) have responded—and continue to respond—to both occurrences
during the last half-century.
In contrast to Penderecki’s avant-gardist approach to nuclear annihilation in his
Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, in this paper I propose to study post-modernist
treatments of the subject. My analyses will include Terry Riley’s music for Bruce
Conner’s motion picture, Crossroads, Philip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi (in relation to a recent
television commercial by the Carbon Trust) and Steve Reich’s ‘Bikini’, from his
multimedia opera Three Tales.
These composers have chosen to focus on certain aspects of the nuclear process,
such as the preparation, detonation and aftermath of an atomic explosion. My paper
will begin by studying how these specific events are musically recounted, with
particular regard to structure and temporality. Two other key issues will also be
addressed: first, an examination of the various musico-visual interrelationships formed,
and their applicability to Nicholas Cook’s ‘three basic models of multimedia’; secondly,
the employment of ‘found’ (i.e. intertextual) visual, sonic or textual materials. Finally, I
wish to supplement Rebecca Leydon’s ‘typology of minimalist tropes’ by postulating an
additional form of repetitive effect, which I have called the ‘cataclysmic’ trope.
Emma Gallon (Lancaster University): ‘“A labyrinth of implications”: Earle Brown’s
December 1952 and approaches to indeterminate music
If an indeterminate composition can be defined as a piece in which an infinite number
of viable realizations can be derived from the written score, then is it possible, or
indeed worthwhile to analyse such music? ‘December 1952’ is perhaps Earle Brown’s
most visually recognizable indeterminate piece. The graphic score consists of thirtyone vertical and horizontal lines of varying weights and lengths to be approached from
any direction, and is intended to allow classically trained musicians to explore
improvisation. This paper outlines a model for the analysis of indeterminate music in
performance, which draws on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and
Tarasti. Brown’s score is initially reconceived as a form of Deleuzian rhizome, the signs
of which are constantly in a process of differing and being deferred from this written
trace. However, it is the addition of Tarasti’s concept of musical ‘becoming’ that
distinguishes this model. As ‘becoming’ refers to the unfolding of musical material over
time, this key notion underlies the analysis of three realizations of ‘December 1952’, in
the context of Brown’s own assessment of it as ‘musical activity’ rather than Work. By
mapping analytical processes onto performance processes, it will be demonstrated that
the analysis of ‘December 1952’ as temporal activity is an appropriate method to
discuss indeterminate music, though as with the role of the performer, the role of the
analyst must be re-established.
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Jonathan de Souza (Royal Holloway, University of London): ‘Music at the border:
Postwar indeterminacy and the potentiality of analysis’
Music with indeterminate performance, also known as aleatory or aleatoric music, is
not prominent in contemporary music analytical discourse. Due to its variability from
performance to performance, some scholars have claimed that indeterminate music is
not susceptible to analysis. Meanwhile, those who have engaged in analysis of
indeterminate works have done so on an ad hoc basis, often focusing on the
idiosyncrasies of a single composer and working without an explicit theoretical
foundation. This paper attempts to address this gap in our understanding of post-war
composition.
Following a brief survey of existing attempts to categorise different kinds or degrees of
indeterminacy, I propose a bipartite framework that separates indeterminacy of
components or ‘content’ from indeterminacy of construction or ‘form’, specifying
factors that contribute to each domain. Analytically, I suggest a strategy of working
from determinate to indeterminate elements, incorporating and modifying existing
methodologies where appropriate. This is put into practice in detailed analysis of
compositions by Pierre Boulez and Morton Feldman.
Ultimately, my goal is to open indeterminate music to analysis by reconceptualising it
in a clearer and more satisfying way. My new theoretical perspective, removed from
the vague or misused terminology commonly associated with this music, enables
precise description and comparison of the ways in which indeterminate compositions
vary. It, therefore, demonstrates the potentiality of music theory and analysis,
extending our understanding and perception of this engaging and challenging repertory.
1645-1800 KEYNOTE ADDRESS
St David’s Room
Scott Burnham (Princeton University): ‘The A Word’
Over the past quarter century in Anglo-American musicology, analysis has been
treated at times as a scapegoat, at times as a universal solvent, and almost never
without either apology or disdain. With the able assistance of the first movement of
Beethoven's Tempest Sonata, my address will assay our ambivalence about the A word
and other lettered preoccupations.
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The conveners of the 2007 TAGS Day would like to thank the following
for their generous support in sponsoring and organising this event:
British Postgraduate Musicology
Institute of Musical Research
Music Analysis Development Fund
Music Department, King’s College London
Amanda Bayley
John Deathridge
Katharine Ellis
Nicholas Reyland
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Robert Witts
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