The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification

Esti Sheinberg, William P. Dougherty, Esti Sheinberg, William P. Dougherty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351237512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification captures the richness and complexity of the field, presenting 30 essays by recognized international experts that reflect current interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to the subject.

Examinations of music signification have been an essential component in thinking about music for millennia, but it is only in the last few decades that music signification has been established as an independent area of study. During this time, the field has grown exponentially, incorporating a vast array of methodologies that seek to ground how music means and to explore what it may mean. Research in music signification typically embraces concepts and practices imported from semiotics, literary criticism, linguistics, the visual arts, philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology, among others. By bringing together such approaches in transparent groupings that reflect the various contexts in which music is created and experienced, and by encouraging critical dialogues, this volume provides an authoritative survey of the discipline and a significant advance in inquiries into music signification.

This book addresses a wide array of readers, from scholars who specialize in this and related areas, to the general reader who is curious to learn more about the ways in which music makes sense.

PART I

Music signification and philosophy

1

“Musik ist das nicht”

On Romantic incomprehensibility in Chopin

Jamie Liddle

Assume, for example, that some provincial cantor came to a metropolitan music centre to buy music. He is shown the newest things, but he will have none of them. Finally, some bright fellow shows him a “sonata.” “Aha,” he exclaims, “that is something for me, an echo of the good old days!” He buys it and tries it out at home. I should be gravely mistaken if, after laboriously negotiating the first page, he were not to swear by all the musical saints that this was no proper sonata and probably godless at that. But Chopin will have achieved his objective. He will have got into the cantor’s house. Who can tell whether, under the same roof, and years later, a romantically inclined grandson may not come upon it, dust it off, play it through, and think to himself: “The fellow wasn’t so wrong after all!”

(Schumann [1841] 1988, 173)

The incomprehension of Schumann’s “provincial cantor” seems to have been a common critical response to nineteenth-century music. Incomprehension suggests a failure in the process of signification—a breakdown in communication—the fault for which, most contemporaneous critics imply, lies with the composer, the text, or both. Later writers, in contrast, tend to assign culpability to a lack of critical sophistication in listeners; hence, apparent difficulties and ambiguities are typically rendered “comprehensible” by stressing new-found thematic or harmonic unities. This schema reflects the significant change in listening strategies throughout the nineteenth century, from music understood as rhetoric to music as text, a change recently considered by Mark Evan Bonds (Bonds 2017, 329–32). This shift refocuses the semiotic process—the burden of comprehensibility—from composers as originators of messages towards listeners. The responsibility for signification rests with the recipient of the message and listening emerges as hermeneutic. The transition from rhetorical to hermeneutic modes subsequently accentuated the importance of music criticism: it became a key element in the construction of musical meaning, effectively the complement of the compositional process. The critic, as an active participant, wrests some control of “meaning” from the composer and as a result, failure of comprehension reflects a failure in interpretation.

Romantic “incomprehensibility,” however, breaks this schema. In early-Romantic literary aesthetics, incomprehensibility was understood as arising not from a failure of critical interpretation, but rather from a deliberate aesthetic stance. As will be seen, Romantic incomprehensibility uses an apparent semiotic failure—the failure of signification—as a means of communicating the incommunicable. Incomprehensibility thereby paradoxically forms an important aspect of the “meaning” of Romantic texts. Incomprehensible Romantic texts occupy an unusual position between the rhetorical and the hermeneutic: they are understood as actively resisting determinate meaning by requiring continual re-interpretation. Text and reader engage in a continual reflective dialogue that the Romantics viewed as an analogue of subjective consciousness and as a way of approaching the Infinite.

The development of Romantic aesthetics is, as Bonds describes and analyzes (2017, 302–8) contemporaneous with the shift in mode of perception and reception of music; perhaps it was also, at least partially, responsible for it. This essay explores the way in which the discourse on incomprehensibility can inform not only Romantic literature, but also music: it addresses music signification by considering what the perceived absence of musical meaning signifies—it attempts, in other words, to comprehend musical incomprehensibility. Two contemporaneous works, which are both read as “incomprehensible,” are examined here. The first is musical: the finale of Chopin’s Piano Sonata in B♭ minor, op. 35 (1839); the second is literary: Schumann’s infamous review of the sonata in his own periodical, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The review is one of the best-known instances of ostensible critical incomprehension in the face of ambiguous new music, but the interpretation I offer addresses it as a Romantic text that deliberately resists determination. Schumann’s critique ironically endorses the perceived incomprehensibility of Chopin’s work, implying that the music’s avoidance of full comprehension is part of its aesthetic.

Schumann extends this important aspect of Romantic aesthetics, and my aim in the following readings is to locate both his review and the music within one philosophical context, producing a type of double hermeneutic at the intersection of the two texts—artwork and review. Inevitably, creative misreadings involved in criticism inform the resulting interpretive dialogue, but the semiotic concerns related to Romantic incomprehensibility reside precisely in such hermeneutic interactions—even miscommunications—between readers and texts. I will, therefore, consciously risk over-interpretation to reconstruct some elements of the interpretation of an important Romantic critic: the goal is to recapture Romantic incomprehension, the perceived suspension of musical meaning, and its analogous relationship to subjectivity.

Chopin, Piano Sonata in B♭ minor, op. 35

Schumann’s critique of Chopin’s op. 35 portrays the Finale as an exceptionally problematic ending to the sonata:

What we then get in the last movement under the heading of “Finale” is more mockery than music. And yet one must confess that from this songless and cheerless movement there breathes a special and dreadful spirit, suppressing with resolute fist every inclination to resist. We hear it through, spellbound and without complaint—but without praise, too, for music it is not. Thus the sonata ends as it began, enigmatically, a sphinx, smiling, mocking.

(Schumann [1841] 1988, 174)

The twice-made assertion that this Finale is not even music appears to be the root of the problem: such “non-music” is surely the antithesis, or negation of “music”; it is songless and thus, by implication, perhaps even inhuman. This striking characterization might be a response to the unusual degree of equivocation to which every element that normally structures music—harmony, melody, texture, rhythm—is subjected throughout the movement. Although the music is not incoherent, the comprehensibility of its structure is significantly reduced; this “non-music” cannot be comprehended in a conventional way.

The parallel octave motion throughout the entire movement, for example, all but removes the sense of textural hierarchy that commonly differentiates melody, bass, and figuration. This feature alone is strikingly dissociative, almost a negation of conventional pianism, but its combination with the reduced function of both melodic and rhythmic structures heightens this effect. The continuous moto-perpetuo triplets have suggested parallels with the Prelude from Bach’s Suite for Cello in D major, BWV 1012 (Leikin 1992, 175) and Chopin’s own Études op. 10, no. 2 and op. 25, no. 2 (Samson 1985, 130). In these works, however, while figuration certainly replaces melody, its consistency tends to create a coherent sense of “line” that is supported by clearer harmonic contexts. Even in the most obvious model for the Finale, the E♭ minor Prelude op. 28, no. 14—which Kramer considers as an “extreme attack on compositional wholeness” (1984, 104)—the coherence in the figuration and underlying tonic-dominant opposition helps differentiate melodic motion from harmonic context. This movement, in contrast, never settles on a stable figuration: once a pattern is established it is almost immediately altered, creating continual disorientation. Scalar motion and quasi-sequential repetition provide movement and direction, with hints of fragmented melodic anchors throughout, but none of these are established for any sustained period. Such momentary coherence never produces a sense of consistent line; it never allows for melodic comprehension. Instead, this prominent lack of tangible melodic or motivic figures results in ambiguity—incomprehensibility—throughout.

These melodic fragments also unsettle the metric structure. The frequent shifts of melodic direction tend to coincide with metric alteration; the “line” does not occur consistently within the same subdivision of the beat. These shifting emphases introduce strong elements of cross-rhythm and hemiola, so that although the movement is ostensibly in a compound meter, its rhythmic structure is often unclear. This metric ambiguity is replicated in the macro-rhythmic structures: periodicity is a casualty of the absence of consistent figuration, preventing the emergence of any clear phrase structure.

The harmonic structure intensifies this impression by resisting standard comprehension as well, since the reduction in textural hierarchy undermines bass function, which significantly affects harmonic clarity; through much of the composition there is little to contextualize either consonance or dissonance. On a surface level, the tonal center is deliberately occluded in favor of extensive tonal ambiguity: the off-tonic opening gives four measures of rising diminished harmony, acquiring dominant function just prior to the first appearance of the tonic in measure 5. This arrival, however, immediately moves away into a sequential repetition on A♭, undermining the sense of an established tonal center: indeed, the rising chromatic lines lead to the first semi-stable tonality that is actually heard—the A♭ major chord in measures 15–16. But even this hesitant tonality remains clear for only a couple of measures before more chromatic sequential motion leads further away. The remainder of the movement is similar: throughout, passing moments of harmonic stability and lucidity arise out of tonal ambiguity created by chromatic and sequential motion. These more comprehensible moments, however, prolong individual chords rather than key areas, giving temporary tonal centers but little sense of harmonic progression or larger-scale harmonic rhythm. Sequence and larger-scale repetition give some structure, with moments of more settled harmony around the relative major (D♭, mm. 24–30), preceded by its dominant (mm. 15–16). Nevertheless, there is an absence of tonal opposition driving an underlying harmonic direction. While Chopin commonly delays the arrival of the structural dominant until later in a movement, here it is delayed to the point where the sense of tonal goal is lost, undermining its closing function. There is, in short, little conventional harmonic structuring, resulting in a weakened, ambivalent sense of key definition.

The ending brings the process of tonal obfuscation into sharp focus, problematizing both gestural and functional closure precisely at the point where harmonic resolution should produce maximal comprehension. Measures 69–74 settle towards B♭ minor, with a stepwise descent to tonic over an implied dominant prolonged from the preceding six measures, albeit still obscured by volatile figuration and chromatic inflection. Closure is cued by the broken figurations in the final measures, but stable tonality only occurs in the last measure, with the low bass note and forte chord finally producing a clear B♭ minor. The sudden clarity of tonality and return of conventional piano textures, however, juxtaposed with clear dynamic indications, produces a gestural shock: an unequivocal but completely self-conscious closing gesture. While this would normally be a perfectly acceptable ending, here, the unexpected, conspicuous comprehensibility is incongruous; the ending sounds forced rather than achieved. Instead of resolving the preceding ambiguities, the imposed clarity and foregrounding of the closural index exacerbates the problems posed by the movement, resulting in a disjunction between the closing gesture and the extensive ambiguities of the movement; closure is syntactic but hardly semantic.

The functional location of the movement extends the issues of this closure to the entire sonata. Samson (1985, 129–33) views the preceding movements as a succession of genres developed or adapted by Chopin during his earlier years, accommodated within a conventional sonata schema. Thus, the opening sonata-form movement reinterprets the tonal dialectic of the classical sonata as a contrast of “relatively self-contained thematic characters” (Samson 1985, 132–33); the second movement presents one of Chopin’s genre-redefining scherzos, rather than one based on the Classical model; the Adagio blends the funeral march and nocturne and, as the most substantial movement, it forms the focus of the whole work. In this schema, the Finale is related to the Études and to the Prelude noted earlier, a problematic assertion, not only because the comparisons are unsustainable, but more because of the scale of the movement: compared to the earlier movements this is little more than a fragment (Rosen 1995, 50–51). The juxtaposition with the expansive Funeral March foregrounds this strongly: the Finale seems an unsatisfactory conclusion to such an extensive sonata.

The conventions of the sonata-form genre make this apparent. This work represents Chopin’s first mature engagement with the defining genre of the Austro-German tradition, but its Finale cannot be readily located within sonata practice: it avoids both the Beethovenian teleological drive towards a substantial finale and the lieto fine of the Mozartian galant style—nothing in Mozart is so fragmentary or thoroughly ambiguous. Thus, while ending the work, this movement hardly functions as a sonata finale: the constant equivocation reduces established musical function and meaning, resulting in a certain incomprehensibility of language, where each parameter signifies only through its absence. The problematizing of closure self-consciously negates generic “norms,” producing a paradoxical movement that is simultaneously closed and unfinalized. Resisting determinate meaning in favor of indeterminacy, this Finale minimizes musical comprehensibility to provoke incomprehension; its elements, functioning as a complex, signify their own negation or antithesis—they become “non-music.”

Schumann’s review

Schumann presents two possible responses to this “non-music,” cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of musical examples
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Music signification and philosophy
• PART II: Music signification and semiotics
• PART III: Music signification and topic theory
• PART IV: Music signification and narrative
• PART V: Music signification and society
• PART VI: Music signification and emotion, cognition, and embodiment
• PART VII: Music signification and education
• PART VIII: Music signification and intermediality
• Bibliography
• Index of names
• Index of terms and concepts