Studies in Music with Text (review)

2008

While music theory has historically employed physical and formalist instruments or tools to aid its exploration of musical structure and experience, in this talk I discuss how historical music theories can be leveraged as instruments for music-theoretical exploration. I focus on a model of historiographical instrumentality employed by David Lewin, which I explicate using Nietzsche’s three historiographies: the antiquarian, critical, and monumental. I read an origin myth in Lewin’s account of Fétis’s “intuition” at the emergence of tonalité: an origin myth for Lewin’s own historiographical and theoretical practices. While Lewin felt emboldened to embrace Riemann’s theories in his 1987 Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations (GMIT), published in the same year as his brief article on Fétis, this embrace led to Lewin’s overcoming of Riemann, to Lewin’s use of Riemann’s transformations for his own music-theoretical (self-)actualization. Lewin’s appendices to GMIT serve as sweeping explorations of the music-theoretical past, and yet propose a future. Although appreciative of historical music theories on their own terms, Lewin invariably put those theories to use. I argue Lewin’s was a sporadic, non-narrative though teleological use of the past in the present for the sake of the future Nietzsche theorized as the monumental mode of historical writing. Historical music theories became for Lewin instruments for his own theorizing, which he played alongside his exploratory work. Lewin felt himself the equal of these theories; his own theories he conceived in moral terms, as life-changing. Reading Lewin’s treatment of historical music theories as instruments of his own theoretical practices enables us to understand how the history of music theory could become instrumentalized, leveraged for music-theoretical speculation and musico-moral betterment.

Musicologica Olomucensia, 2016

Hans Mersmann (1891–1971), an outstanding German musicologist, addressed music from several points of view. While his early career started with works on pre-classical music, in the 1920s he became a prominent spokesman of New Music. In a study from 1919 2 he outlined some concepts forming a part of his later synthetic views of music: his study of the history of musical style foreshadowed his studies, which were both theoretically and historically well informed, and in which he elaborated a structural apprehension of a musical work. He formulated this approach comprehensively in Angewandte Musikästhetik in 1926, where he pronounced the tenets of the general methodological stance which should be exploited in musicology (phenomenology), and where he defi ned structural elements of music and the way they were integrated into the musical structure of the historical style periods of classical music. 3 He found the point of departure for understanding the organization of music in force and its dynamic transformations occurring within a certain context. Music encompasses two dimensions which form a background for something happening. The fi rst dimension can also be treated as horizontal and as temporality, the other as vertical and leading to spatiality. The horizontal dimension is expressed by the force which drives the musical fl ow towards its continuation in the direction of the future and towards greater power (centrifugal force). The vertical dimension bestows restrictions upon the pushing fl ow (centripetal force). If a place appears in the musical structure which divides the musical fl ow, reduces its intensity, and makes it regular (for example, cadence, metre, repeated

Although historically informed performance practice has come to encompass the music of the 19th century in the past decades, Romantic music still presents many challenges for performers, especially in musical shaping and timing. This paper tries to shed light on these interpretative issues by combining aspects of analysis and performance in the opening movement of Robert Schumann’s D minor Piano Trio Op. 63 (1847). The main analytical methods are Schenkerian harmony and voice-leading analysis, which are flexibly combined with formal and narrative aspects, among others. The analytical discussion begins with the distinctive, harmonically unstable opening phrase, which reaches the structural tonic only at the end of the phrase together with a local culmination. The analytical insights lead the author to suggest two alternative, yet equally justifiable, ways how to shape the phrase in performance. The second example is the surprising new episode in the development section, which raises many interpretation issues for committed performers. With its powerful returning in the formal coda, the episode eventually has a far-reaching influence on the whole movement both in the voice leading and the musical narrative. As a conclusion, the article suggests that analysis and performance are able to communicate with each other on many levels. By taking another look at the musical work, analysis can offer choices for musical interpretation and give performers a “second opinion” without being excessively authoritative over performance. At the same time, the experience gained from performance can inspire analytical insights.

Music Analysis, 2002

Philosophical Forum, 2016

David Lewin’s “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception” is a touchstone for phe- nomenologically influenced music theory, yet something puzzling remains about the role of perception in Lewin’s phenomenology. On the one hand, Lewin emphasizes the embodied nature of perception by arguing that perception is itself a type of skill, a “mode of response,” which manifests itself in an infinite number of creative acts. On the other hand, he explicitly employs phenomenology in only a limited manner; in Parts I–III of his essay, he sets up his phenomenological “p-model,” and then, in Part V, critiques it as ultimately inadequate for forging a link between perception and creation. In this essay, I offer a solution to this puzzle by examining Lewin’s sources. I argue that he is indebted to the school of West Coast phenomenology in two respects: (1) that Lewin’s style of phenomenology is influenced by the Fregean interpretation of Husserl, which supports the ontological and categorical split between perceptual sense and reference presented in the p-model; (2) that the general argument presented in Lewin’s essay, which moves from the p-model toward a critique of disembodied percep- tion, is modeled on Hubert Dreyfus’s two-stage argument against Artificial Intelligence.