Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
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Music between nature and culture
Full text linkIn considering the titular opposition - music between nature and culture - we shall refer to such categories as time, with its levels and zones, and cultural communication. Conceptions of time. In an archaic situation dating from the Palaeolithic era, people lived, and cultures functioned, in sacred time, with no notion o f secular time. Another conception of time comes from the Bible, where we first encounter a ‘straightening’ of time, delineating its direction from the Creation to the Final Judgment (inopposition to ancient views on time, associating it with the wheel, with circular motion, dying and birth). Aristotle drew on Plato’s concept of time. He reduced it to the dimension of the human world, thereby initiating reflection on the ‘present’, which would endure in European thought through Saint Augustine to Edmund Husserl and our contemporary times. From this perspective, music is a process: playing, listening or participating in a musical event. Levels of time. These are as follows: atemporality (contains only simultaneity), prototemporality (contains temporal order, but also simultaneity), eotemporality (besides the features belonging to the aforementioned levels, also contains temporal intervals), biotemporality (as above, and also the present), and finally nootemporality (the human mind, awareness of time). The zones of time, meanwhile, comprise the zone of the psychological present (the motion of one’s own body, the perception of the sensory organs, natural language, musical language), the zone of performances of works (the shaping of form, including musical form), the zone of the temporal environment (three cycles: the diurnal, lunar and annual), and the zone of individual and communal life (the time from birth to death, and also memory, which reveals the sense of music from many perspectives). Cultural communication. In considering this phenomenon, we develop Roman Jakobson’s popular model of communication, expanded to encompass Karl Popper’s model of ‘three worlds’, through which we can propose a layered model of reality and, derived from that model, a concept of music as an efflorescence of nature in the culture of man. This is presented in detail in a series of figures (19-23 and especially 27)
Thesis and antithesis: Resolving the dialectique in the first movement of Debussy’s Violin Sonata
Full text linkThis article will offer a close reading of the first movement of Debussy’s Violin Sonata (1917), and will set forth to discuss its formal principles within a dialectical context. References to Hegelian philosophy will be made, and also to precursory dialectical structures. The work will also be studied in relation to sonata form, and by taking Mark DeVoto’s claim that this late work displays a “persuasive sonata form” structure into consideration, this analysis will in fact elucidate Debussy’s ostensible departure from archetypical sonata form. Examining Debussy’s correspondences and sketches will posit the Sonata initially within existing scholarship - both historiographical and analytical — paying particular attention to the composer’s “late” style in general. A discussion on the relationship between dialectic and symbolist aesthetics will then be necessary in order to promote the idea that the work is structured around a dialectical framework. The second section of this article will carry out an in-depth analysis of the movement, adopting and adapting a semiotic approach as developed by Nicolas Ruwet and Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s distributional methodology in order to study the work’s formal attributes and motivic construction. Use of this approach will bring to light the strong bond between the motivic thesis and antithesis in the first section of the Sonata, and also the conflation of material in the final section of the movement, which aims towards a dialectical resolution. Use of paradigmatic diagrams will illuminate the methods in which synthesis is achieved by different compositional strategies, including merging, completion, compression, combination and conjunction. Furthermore, the analysis will draw attention to Golden Section proportions in the middle section of the piece. In conclusion, it will be argued that Debussy’s conscious effort to avoid Teutonic principles has paradoxically brought his work closer to Germanic thinking. Amid a time of personal and social conflict, one could ultimately compare his approach to that of the Hegelian “free spirit” — a free spirit that transcends political boundaries by its occupation of a neutral ground. Whether or not this demonstrated Debussy’s conscious compositional intention to reflect Hegel’s philosophical principles remains unsolved. More certain, however, is the fact that the presentation of a thesis and a subsequent antithetical section clearly leads to a resolution of the dialectique in the first movement of this Sonata
From the reprise overture to Liszt’s B minor Sonata. Romantic creations in an eighteenth century formal ‘corset’?
Full text linkThe present paper summarises the general affinities that link the great romantic piano fantasies (Schubert’s Op. 15, Schumann’s Op. 17, Chopin’s Op. 49 and Liszt’s B minor Sonata) by means of the presence of dual structures of various kinds, including the tonal, formal and an extramusical, interpretational ‘false bottom’, the latest often of autobiographical nature. One of the most prominent dual structures present in all the above mentioned fantasies is a so-called ‘duble-function form’ (apart from far-reaching individualism in detailed solutions) which have no roots in the tradition of keyboard fantasia written by predecessors. As possible source of inspiration some oeuvres of Beethoven are often evoked. However, the paper juxtaposes them with the tradition of the so-called reprise overture, a particular kind of sonata form (called also ‘interpolated sonata form’ as its key element consists in an intrusion of slow movement within the course of sonata form) that emerged in the circles of Italian 18th century opera, widespread often in conjunction with the scope to link an operatic sinfonia with the rest of the drama. Examples by Salieri, Mozart and Haydn are briefly analyzed to show the variety of solutions and posing the hypothesis that reprise overture might be (as transferred well into the 19th century by many operatic composers and ‘kleine Meisters’ that used it in purely instrumental pieces) one of the possible - and unexpected - roots of the formal design of the greatest oeuvres in piano literature ever composed
Much ado about Chopin. Discussion in the Warsaw press from 1830
Full text linkDuring his Warsaw period, the music of the young Chopin was enthusiastically and even feverishly received. And it drew considerably interest from the critics. However, attention should be drawn to the crucial cultural factors that largely determined the quality of that critical reflection. Above all, this was a quite specific period in the history of the nation. The language o f criticism gives a fair reflection of moods in the country: growing patriotic emotions, freedom rhetoric and Romantic spirituality. Added to this, Polish music criticism (in contrast to German criticism) had yet to develop distinctive forms of discourse, but was still seeking a suitable language for the description of music. One may even gain the impression that music criticism was maturing together with the young virtuoso and offering a “youthful” discourse strung out between literary metaphor depicting the scale of listeners’ emotions and impressions and specialist description of playing and composition technique. One also notes a growing tension between “amateurs” and “professionals”, leading to polemic and discussion. It was a most interesting period in the history of Polish critical reflection, one which obliges the scholar to maintain a broad humanistic perspective over the many cultural phenomena of that time (philosophical, literary, artistic and political) which helped to forge the spirituality of Polish romanticism