Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Units of expression, defined in reference to topoi, are shown here to interact with, confront, and merge into units of structure, defined in terms of the rhetorical conventions of beginning, continuing, and ending. The book draws on examples from works by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven to show that the explicitly referential, even theatrical, surface of Classic music derives from a play with signs. Although addressed primarily to readers interested in musical analysis, the book opens up fruitful avenues for further research into musical semiotics, aesthetics, and Classicism.
Originally published in 1991.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691601922 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1169 |
| Pages: | 168 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.80(w) x 9.80(h) x 0.40(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Playing With Signs
A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music
By V. Kofi Agawu
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09138-9
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
I
How do composers reach their audiences? If we accept as valuable the traditional distinction among composers, performers, and listeners—roles that are not mutually exclusive of one another—then we might say that the search for an answer to this question forms an essential component of the activities of various musicians, irrespective of their individual callings as historians, theorists, analysts, and critics. The subject is just as relevant today as it was in 1781 when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, writing to his father from Vienna, described in fascinating detail the composition of portions of his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail. I will begin the present study by drawing attention to certain passages from this well-known letter, because the "communication problem" is succinctly captured here by one who not only understood it very well but developed successful, if individual, solutions to it. An analysis of Mozart's words can therefore provide a framework for studying some of the ways in which composers reach their audiences.
The specific subject of Mozart's letter is operatic composition. There is, first of all, the usual concern with singers and their particular voices. The composer is to take advantage of Herr Fischer's "excellent voice" for the part of Osmin. Similarly, Constanze's aria has been "sacrificed" a bit to accommodate the "flexible throat" of Mile. Cavalieri. Mozart then anticipates the likely impact of certain passages of music. He plans to use "Turkish music" to inject a note of comedy into the scene in which Osmin expresses his rage. There is no question that the composer bears his audience very much in mind, for he is certain that this strategy will "have a good effect." In other words, Mozart expected his audience to be able to identify Turkish music and its traditional associations, and to react accordingly. And such a response was, in turn, possible because among the communicative codes he shared with his audience was one constituted by elements of an eighteenth-century affinity with the exotic, of which "Turkish music" formed a category. In addition to this kind of "extramusical" competence, Mozart exploits an assumed level of intramusical competence in the matter of the perception of closure: he seeks to surprise his listeners with a change of key and meter at the end of this aria. The crucial phrase, "when the aria seems to be at an end," presumes that the audience would recognize certain generic signals of closure, and would therefore be "fooled" into thinking that the piece was about to end. Other aspects of compositional manipulation are also alluded to by Mozart. Harmonic distance is one such issue; Mozart decides in favor of a modulation from F major to "the more remote A minor," rather than to "the nearest D minor." He also includes an element of the learned code, "a fairly respectable piece of real three-part writing" in the Trio at the end of Act 1 "because the words lend themselves to it." Elsewhere, he considers broader aspects of the thorny problem of music and words.
Mozart was, of course, writing to his mentor, so it may be argued that these comments are of no more than biographical interest—"shop talk" in today's parlance. Yet the numerous references to the audience found throughout his letters are, at the very least, an indication that strategies for effective communication were of more than average interest to him. This was a preoccupation that he shared with several of his contemporaries, including Franz Joseph Haydn and, to a lesser extent, Ludwig van Beethoven. These composers, perhaps more explicitly than any others in the history of Western music, wrote decidely listener-oriented music. It is this public music of the later eighteenth century, commonly referred to as the Classic era (roughly 1770–1830), that forms the subject of this book.
My point of departure is an implication drawn from Mozart's letter: if a central task of the composer is to reach his audience, then a central problem for the analyst is to uncover the various dimensions of this communicative process. Framed this way, the task is potentially forbidding. On one hand, it calls for a historical account of the psychology of audience response, and on the other, it requires the formulation of a critical apparatus that is both internally coherent and properly authorized by this historical interpretation. But even if the attainment of such an ideal seems difficult, it must not prevent us from taking a few steps in that direction. My broad aim, then, is to examine in detail a handful of works from this repertoire, paying particular attention to their meaning and significance as communicated through two channels, describable as "structural" and "expressive" attributes. I hope not only that the individual analyses will enhance an appreciation (or at least clarify the nature of our understanding) of these particular pieces, but also that the approach developed will contribute to the development of a theory of meaning for Classic music.
The analytical approach adopted in this book, broadly described as "semiotic," is defended more fully below, but it is worth noting the sense in which this semiotic interpretation draws on traditional categories of theory, analysis, and criticism. To analyze is to take apart and to show how constituent elements interact with one another to create a larger, not necessarily unified, whole. To criticize is to spice this analytical activity with evaluative comment, to return the clinical dissection to a humane environment. Both these activities, however, retain a dialectical relationship with theory. To analyze or criticize is necessarily to invoke certain theoretical postulates, whether or not these are made explicit. There is no such thing as a "neutral" analysis, an analysis free of theoretical prejudice. When people sometimes complain in the face of analytical orthodoxies that they are interested only in illuminating "the music," they all too often forget that their discourse cannot possibly be neutral even if they wished it to be. A semiotic interpretation uses the descriptive mechanism of semiotics to forge a reading of a particular work. Since this reading falls within the purview of both analysis and criticism, it is clear that a semiotic interpretation necessarily retains bonds with traditional analysis.
It is this play of critical modes that has dictated the shape of the book's argument. Chapter 1 outlines the broad parameters of the study. In Chapters 2 and 3,1 defend theoretically the two central tools of my subsequent analyses. Chapter 2 deals with the referential or expressive aspects of Classic music as embodied in the notion of "topic," and Chapter 3 takes up notions of syntax and formal structure, proposing a simplified but, I believe, effective model for the analysis of harmonic rhetoric. The interpretive exercise in Chapters 4,5, and 6 is conceived as an explication de texte, but, to mitigate the potential boundlessness of such an exercise, I have slanted my readings in particular ways to reflect what I perceive to be essential in each work analyzed. Chapter 7 sets out in abstract and summary form the theory underlying the analyses, and an Epilogue speculates on some possible applications of the method pursued here to Romantic music.
The recurring question for me throughout these pages concerns meaning in Classic music—not "what does this piece mean?" but, rather, "how does this piece mean?" In other words, it seems more useful, in the face of the multiplicity of potential meanings of any single work, to frame the analytical question in terms of the dimensions that make meaning possible; only then can we hope to reduce away the fanciful meanings that are likely to crop up in an unbridled discussion of the phenomenon, and to approach the preferred meanings dictated by both historical and theoretical limitations. This is one reason why I have borrowed certain concepts from semiotics, for semiotics provides a useful searchlight for understanding the nature and sources of meaning, even if it ultimately evades—or declares irrelevant—the "what" question.
While acknowledging the usefulness of semiotics, I should also point out that this book is addressed first and foremost to the musical community. Linguists and literary critics will not find any advances in theory or methodology here; nor will they find rank definitions of basic musical terms for amateurs. It will be apparent that I operate within a familiar tradition of music analysis, and this discovery may even lead my critics to argue that the appeal to semiotics is a private one, one that need not be brought out into the open. To this charge I plead guilty, but offer the defense that because the present attempt to engage literary-critical discourse forms part of the contemporary history of music theory (whose antecedents, in any case, include borrowings of concepts as well as terminology from grammar, rhetoric, logic, and other areas), any attempt to suppress this affinity is likely to have been motivated by a resistance to theory—which should be construed as patently ahistorical. But this is where and why we need to be specific about the usefulness of semiotics. The best way for me to discuss this issue—indeed to demystify the supposed novelty of semiotics—is to re-create the context of previous studies of Classic music (which means essentially summarizing the approaches of Charles Rosen and Leonard Ratner), and to extract from the nature of these discourses an explicit concern with language. We will then be in a position to show the extent to which a semiotic awareness is already implicit in these and other efforts.
II
According to Rosen, the classical style is to be seen and heard in the works of its three major exponents, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Theirs is a profoundly dramatic musical style based on the strategic exploitation of certain potent tonal relationships. These relationships were established in the works of earlier eighteenth-century composers such as Bach and Handel, but exploited for their own sake in the works of later eighteenth-century composers. The explicit concern with the dramatic element in a work's beginning, middle, or end was, Rosen implies, quite without precedent and has since been without rival in the history of Western music. The most fundamental source of dramatic tension in this style is the tonic-dominant polarity, which serves to sustain the power of musical discourse in genres as diverse as opera, concerto, string quartet, and symphony. Rosen's way of justifying his hypothesis is to cite numerous passages, some typical, but most atypical, to support his single recurring point that the music of the late eighteenth century is overtly dramatic in intent, and that the apprehension of this drama constitutes the most valuable challenge for the listener. His method may be described as critical insofar as his observations are always spiced with evaluative comment. The net effect of such an approach, however, is that the classical style, ostensibly the subject of the book, is left undefined. Its normative features are taken as axiomatic, rather than stated in the form of abstractions. Rosen invites us to see the style in action, not to seek a comprehensive definition of it.
Although there are points of contact between their respective books, the approaches of Rosen and Ratner differ significantly in their ultimate emphases. Ratner's aim is "to describe the stylistic premises of Classic music" from its simplest to its most elaborate manifestations. The normative thus assumes an important role in his study, and there is a constant invocation of various formulas culled from the prescriptions of numerous eighteenth-century theorists. More important, the analytical principles extracted from these theoretical works are applied to various pieces. Thus, "expression," without which "no [Classic] piece was fit to be heard," is described in terms of conventional topics or "subjects of musical discourse," and illustrated by excerpts from a wide range of works by the three major composers of the period, as well as by several minor ones. Similarly, "musical rhetoric" is defined with respect to the norms of periodic organization, which include harmony, rhythm, texture, melody, and performance. The same approach is extended to "form" in its myriad manifestations as sonata form, couplet forms, forms of the learned style, aria, concerto, and fantasia. Normative national styles are also isolated, as are high and low styles reflecting the stratification of eighteenth-century society. Ratner's book closes with a description of three major compositions—Mozart's Don Giovanni, Haydn's Piano Sonata in El Major, Hob. XVI: 52, and Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 59, No. 1—chosen not because they typify the classical style, but because they utilize, challenge, and thereby affirm its premises.
If we can assume that the studies by Rosen and Ratner are representative of the range of methodologies followed by students of Classic music, we can go on to observe that the specific concern with normative procedures—whether these are treated axiomatically as with Rosen, or spelled out in the form of formulaic recipes as with Ratner—grows out of the feeling that the classical style approximates a language "spoken" by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries. Most scholars acknowledge the exemplary and polished nature of this music, hence the terms "Classic," "classical," and "classic," even where attempts are made to dispense with the label altogether. The uniformity of intent necessary for this style to attain the status of a language can therefore be inferred from this characterization. But inference is weaker than explicit demonstration—hence my reference to a "feeling," by which I mean a persistent current that informs these writings in the form of a subtext; it guides the formulation of the authors' concepts but it is never made explicit. What is the precise nature and the extent of the linguistic analogy in writings about Classic music? To answer this question, we need to examine a few characteristic descriptions of the music.
Descriptions of music in terms of language or language-based disciplines are commonplace in the musicological literature. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rhetoric provided a useful model for such discourse, and theorists freely borrowed the language and terminology of rhetoricians. Thus Joachim Burmeister, in his Musica Poetica of 1601, drew on literary concepts to characterize compositional strategy as a threefold process—exordium, confirmatio, and conclusio. Johann Mattheson also relied a great deal on rhetorical terms in characterizing the process of a piece of music. In his Vollkommene Capellmeister of 1739, Mattheson extended Burmeister's three-stage model to a six-stage one as follows: exordium (introduction), narratio (report), propositio (proposal), confirmatio (corroboration), confutatio (refutation), and peroratio (conclusion). Later in the century, Heinrich Koch continued, on the one hand, to borrow from rhetoric while, on the other hand, showing a decisive shift from rhetoric to (or, more accurately, back to) linguistics, from rhetorical terms to grammatical ones. These trends have continued to the present day, both informally in music criticism, and more formally in the recent theories of Allan Keiler, Mario Baroni, David Lidov, and Lerdahl and Jackendoff, among others.
What distinguishes writing about Classic music from that about other music is not merely a general awareness of the affinities between music and language, but a persistent concern with a shadowy linguistic analogy at all levels. Is it perhaps the case that Mozart and Haydn "spoke one language" whereas Brahms and Wagner, Schumann and Chopin, or Bach and Rameau spoke different languages? Certainly a hasty response to this question might cite the fact that it is, at least superficially, easier to mistake, for example, Haydn for Mozart (and vice versa) than it is to mistake Brahms for Wagner or Rameau for Bach. One might then go on to cite sociological factors—such as the presence of a certain societal uniformity in the late eighteenth century, which was then overthrown in the nineteenth, leading to a profound individualization in artistic expression—to support such a viewpoint. Yet our hasty response will still have left many questions unanswered.
I have assembled a number of passages from the writings of Rosen, Ratner, and Friedrich Blume to buttress my claim for a "persistent concern with a shadowy linguistic analogy," by which I mean that extensive use continues to be made of an analogy whose meaning and significance are anything but clear. The ensuing exercise is, however, strictly a look at the nature of the authors' discourse, not an evaluation of their specific viewpoints.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Playing With Signs by V. Kofi Agawu. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- PREFACE, pg. ix
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xi
- ONE. Introduction, pg. 1
- TWO. Extroversive Semiosis: Topics as Signs, pg. 26
- THREE. Introversive Semiosis: The Beginning-Middle-End Paradigm, pg. 51
- FOUR. A Semiotic Interpretation of the First Movement of Mozart's String Quintet in C Major, K. 515, pg. 80
- FIVE. A Semiotic Interpretation of the First Movement of Haydn's String Quartet in D Minor, Op. 76, No. 2, pg. 100
- SIX. A Semiotic Interpretation of the First Movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132, pg. 110
- SEVEN. Toward a Semiotic Theory for the Interpretation of Classic Music, pg. 127
- EIGHT. Epilogue: A Semiotic Interpretation of Romantic Music, pg. 135
- REFERENCES, pg. 145
- INDEX, pg. 151