Expressive Intersections in Brahms

Essays in Analysis and Meaning

Heather Platt, Peter H. Smith

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780253005250
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

"This exceptionally fine collection brings together many of the best analysts of Brahms, and nineteenth-century music generally, in the English-speaking world today." — Nineteenth-Century Music Review Contributors to this exciting volume examine the intersection of structure and meaning in Brahms's music, utilizing a wide range of approaches, from the theories of Schenker to the most recent analytical techniques. They combine various viewpoints with the semiotic-based approaches of Robert Hatten, and address many of the most important genres in which Brahms composed. The essays reveal the expressive power of a work through the comparison of specific passages in one piece to similar works and through other artistic realms such as literature and painting. The result of this intertextual re-framing is a new awareness of the meaningfulness of even Brahms's most "absolute" works. "Through its unique combination of historical narrative, expressive content, and technical analytical approaches, the essays in Expressive Intersections in Brahms will have a profound impact on the current scholarly discourse surrounding Brahms analysis." — Notes

Part One

1 “The Wondrous Transformation of Thought into Sound”: Some Preliminary Reflections on Musical Meaning in Brahms

Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith

From where he sat, Clive tried to prevent his attention from being drawn into technical detail. For now, it was the music, the wondrous transformation of thought into sound. . . . Sometimes Clive worked so hard on a piece that he could lose sight of his ultimate purpose—to create this pleasure at once so sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating air this nonlanguage whose meanings were forever just beyond reach, suspended tantalizingly at a point where emotion and intellect fused.

Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

Although the omniscient narrator of Ian McEwan’s novel Amsterdam attributes these thoughts to a fictional late twentieth-century British composer, Clive Linley, contemplating his own composition, Linley’s reflections capture something of the universal mystery of music. The dualities the narrator develops between technical detail and wondrous transformation, between thought and sound, between hard work and sensual pleasure also resonate strongly with the unique musical persona of Johannes Brahms, a composer whose works have long been admired for their highly wrought craftsmanship as well as for their expressive immediacy. So, too, do the narrator’s words capture something of the challenge faced by the music scholar dedicated to the close study of Brahms’s compositions. How does one remain attuned to Brahms’s abundant compositional craft—the fruits of the composer’s hard labor and a self-conscious emblem of his works’ individuality—without losing sight of the music’s sensual beauty? Moreover, how do we engage a musical language that, while not strictly referential, nevertheless possesses deep meaning?

Despite the acuity of McEwan’s narrative voice (not to mention the beauty of his prose), the thoughts this voice attributes to the composer Linley remain somewhat marred by an abundance of potentially false dichotomies. Rather than accept the assumption that emotion and intellect stand at odds in Brahms—that we, like Clive Linley, need to avoid being drawn into technical details in order to appreciate the wondrous transformation of thought into sound, to appreciate musical meaning, in other words—the authors in this volume see these characteristics as inextricably linked. Our view and a premise underlying each essay is not that Brahms’s music is meaningful in spite of its organizational intricacy but rather that meaning and technical complexity form an intimate bond. These two conceptions of Brahms’s music—as a manifestation of powerful intellect and of passionate expressivity—interact dialectically, with meaning poised, as McEwan/Linley would have it, at the intersection of emotion and reason.

Our volume brings together eight perspectives on how meaning may be interpreted in Brahms’s compositions, spanning a variety of genres, including works for solo piano, chamber music, and a concerto movement of symphonic proportions, as well as texted works for either solo voice (lieder) or chorus and orchestra. During his lifetime and even throughout much of the twentieth century, Brahms was viewed as a composer of absolute music, that is, music of an abstract or purely formalist character.¹ In more recent decades, historians have uncovered a wealth of documentation demonstrating that neither he nor the members of his circle heard his compositions in this way. Many theorists nevertheless continue to approach his music with something akin to scientific objectivity, apparently, like Linley, finding themselves unable to avoid being drawn into technical detail. Expressive Intersections in Brahms argues that a more thorough understanding of Brahms’s music emerges when issues of meaning are considered in conjunction with those of structure—indeed, that these aspects of the aesthetic experience are inseparable.

Issues of structure, and the complex ways in which Brahms intertwines all the various musical elements, have been at the heart of the theoretical approaches that have proliferated following Allen Forte’s 1983 call for more rigorous analysis of Brahms’s music, in his study of the String Quartet in C Minor, op. 51, no. 1.² Even now, nearly thirty years later, we find both a steady stream of systematic analyses and a variety of theoretical approaches designed specifically to address the structure of Brahms’s music.³ To a great extent, many of the publications first responding to Forte’s challenge focused on technical explanations of motivic, formal, and tonal organization; their positivistic rationality reflected academic culture in many disciplines during, and considerably before, that part of the twentieth century.⁴ From an historical perspective, the formalist response to Brahms was in some ways anticipated by Felix Weingartner’s 1897 description of the composer’s “scientific music” as well as by earlier critics who similarly remarked on this music’s technical intricacies.⁵ Although works such as Forte’s analysis of the C-minor string quartet offered significant new insights, the general trend tended to push the more subjective (or slippery) topic of expressivity to the margin.

The persistence of the image of Brahms as a pure formalist was in part aided by what many have come to understand as a misreading of Eduard Hanslick to the effect that “music was to be understood in exclusively structural terms while issues of meaning were ruled out of court.”⁶ Aside from the fact that this approach meshed with the pseudoscientific methods of the emerging discipline of music theory, Hanslick had particular relevance because of his friendship with Brahms and his vigorous endorsement of the composer in the nineteenth-century press.⁷ Gradually, however, as musicologists sifted through the writings of nineteenth-century critics and documents from Brahms and his circle, it became clear that the formalist label represented an historical distortion. A wide variety of nineteenth-century listeners, including Brahms’s closest friends, described his music quite evocatively, and Brahms himself often associated specific instrumental pieces with poems or other extramusical references.

A significant number of recent musicological studies have approached the issue of meaning in Brahms’s music through a focus on literary connections or Brahms’s habit of alluding in tones to either other composers’ works or his own. Other scholars have delved into nineteenth-century German aesthetics, politics, nationalism, and religion to speculate on the degree to which Brahms’s music reflects these aspects of his milieu.⁸ Despite the insights of these approaches—and they are substantial—there is sometimes a tendency to focus on isolated musical passages, with an emphasis on how such passages may relate provocatively to Brahms’s cultural milieu but without a fuller account of how a passage or its cultural references interact with a composition’s global organization. For those who hear structurally, these publications, despite their great merits, do not seem to tell the whole story.

By comparison with both the number and prominence of these musicological publications, theorists have seemed somewhat more reluctant to confront questions of Brahmsian meaning. The one major monograph on the topic is Peter H. Smith’s Expressive Forms in Brahms’s Instrumental Music. Smith is nevertheless not the only theorist to discuss Brahmsian expressivity from a technical standpoint. Since the start of the new century, two of our authors—Ryan McClelland and Frank Samarotto—have probed the intersection of structure and expression in Brahms’s music.⁹ The recent volumes exploring musical meaning by Robert Hatten, Michael Klein, and Kofi Agawu also include interpretations of some of Brahms’s instrumental compositions.¹⁰ These interpretations of Hatten, Klein, and Agawu, however, tend to be brief, while the more detailed analyses of McClelland and Samarotto have appeared in such a wide range of international publications that it can be difficult to appreciate the extent to which analytical approaches to Brahms’s music have evolved in recent years and, moreover, to grasp the full potential of these approaches to contribute to a deeper intellectual understanding of musical meaning in Brahms. Indeed, the possibilities have scarcely been exhausted. Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning aims to build on these theoretical studies, and also on recent musicological work, to place at center stage the interpretation of expressive meaning from the standpoint of close technical analysis.

Aside from their common assumption that structural analysis has the potential to illuminate musical meaning and make it available for reflection, all the essays illustrate that hermeneutic interpretation is inseparable from hearing with one’s imagination. Each of the authors draws creative links between a close reading of a composition and aspects of either cultural history or more purely musical traditions—or a combination of the two. The authors’ strategies range from references to studies of art and literature to intertextual forays that compare a specific passage or compositional technique with similar ones in other works by Brahms or his predecessors. These comparisons illustrate that meaning may arise when a composition or passage enters into a dialogical relationship—an expressive intersection—with related genres and forms, a theme that unifies the volume. An additional common thread is the recourse, in a number of the analyses, to semiotic concepts such as markedness, developed by Hatten and other theorists of musical meaning, in which a gesture such as a dramatic melodic leap, a rhythmic disruption, or an ambiguous harmonic progression may signal the expressive crux of a piece. A number of our authors also draw on the tradition of topical analysis to facilitate hermeneutic interpretation and on such concepts as “temporal shifting,” a term Hatten uses to denote passages in which a “continuous idea is broken off, or its clearly projected goal is evaded, as in certain rhetorical gestures or shifts in level of discourse.”¹¹

While some of our contributors imply that Brahms intended his pieces to have the meanings they experience, and some build interpretations based on impressions of Brahms’s contemporaries, the main thrust is not a concern for authorial intention.¹² Moreover, our argument is not that some pieces of Brahms have extramusical meaning and others do not. Rather, all his compositions have the potential to carry meaning for particular listeners. Inevitably, the techniques for assigning meaning as well as those for parsing the structure of a piece are subjective, and, following Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1975), we acknowledge that each author’s methods are contingent on his or her background, experience, training, aesthetics, and so forth. Among other consequences, this authorial subjectivity and diversity of background may prove decisive in whether an individual writer engages musical meaning with a greater focus on historical context or more purely technical concerns.

Leo Treitler has argued that “meaning in music is a function of the en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part : 1
• Part : 2
• Part : 3
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index
• General Index