Anthony Pople

Theory, analysis, and meaning in music

Preface Acknowledgements Contributors Part I. Languages: 1. Metaphor in Roger Scrutons aesthetics of music Naomi Cumming 2. Competing myths: the American abandonment of Schenkers organicism Robert Snarrenberg 3. Rehabilitating the incorrigible Marion A. Guck Part II. Decisions: 4. Criteria of correctness in music theory and analysis Jonathan Dunsby 5. Ambiguity in tonal music: a preliminary study Kofi Agawu 6. Systems and strategies: functions and limits of analysis Anthony Pople Part III. Texts: 7. Debussys significant connections: metaphor and metonymy in analytical method Craig Ayrey 8. Music as text: Mahler, Schumann and issues in analysis Robert Samuels 9. The obbligato recitative: narrative and Schoenbergs Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16 Alan Street 10. Music theory and the challenge of modern music: Birtwistles Refrains and Choruses Jonathan Cross 11. Repons: phantasmagoria or the articulation of space? Alastair Williams Bibliography Index.

Introduction: trajectories of twentieth-century music

We have not even begun to tell the history of twentieth-century music. Susan McClary The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music ? What sort of a history of twentieth-century music might that be? The word ‘Cambridge’ is something more than a publisher’s imprint, for it locates this volume in a century-long tradition of Cambridge Histories and so emphasizes that this first large-scale, retrospective view of the twentieth century in music is a view from somewhere . As the title would lead you to expect, it is history written from a distinct and relatively homogeneous geographical, social, and cultural perspective: predominantly Anglo-American (though there are two authors from Germany and one each from South Africa and Australia), more male than female (gender representation in musicology, at least in the UK, remains far from equal), and white. That does not, of course, mean that our authors simply accept the traditional geographical, ethnic, and gender hierarchies of music history, for there is a strong revisionist strain in the book, one that attempts to contextualize and critique familiar narratives by juxtaposing them with alternative constructions of twentieth-century music. Like all historical writing, this Cambridge History is best understood as in essence a status report, a series of position statements in an ongoing dialogue, for no history can be more than a temporary stopping-point in a never-ending process of interpretation – which means that history is less a reflection of the facts than a construction of historians. What follows, then, is one particular set of constructions, the record of what a particular group of authors thought at a particular point in time.

Classic jazz to 1945

Precursors Jazz has proved to be one of the most significant forms of music to arise in the twentieth century. Aesthetic considerations aside, it has been the source for the two most important forms of popular music in the West, and to a considerable extent elsewhere: the big dance band, which dominated popular music from about 1925 to 1945, and what is loosely called rock, in its various manifestations. Without jazz neither of these forms could have existed. As for ‘classic’ jazz, this term arose in the last twenty years or so of the twentieth century as a catch-all to subsume a variety of forms of music that existed before the arrival of ‘modern’ jazz in about 1945. The word ‘classic’ is a loaded one, chosen for its overtones of prestigious classical music, and reflecting the pressure during this period to assimilate jazz within the academic canon of great music; in this chapter, however, it is employed simply as a convenient term to cover pre-modern jazz, including Dixieland, swing and their variants, all of which share harmonic and rhythmic systems that are significantly different from those of modern jazz. Jazz arose in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century out of a unique set of circumstances: the presence of a concentrated population of blacks and racially mixed ‘Creoles’ in the New Orleans area; rapidly developing systems of mechanical entertainment, including the player piano, sound recording, and radio; a craze for social dancing; and a dramatic shift in American attitudes occurring in about 1910–25.

To the millennium: music as twentieth-century commodity

In response to the new challenges created by the internet and the converging of communications media, the industry is working very hard on systems of encryption and watermarking and collaborates with the government to set up a strong legal framework and to educate the public about the value of music. Frances Lowe, Director, British Music Rights, The Performing Rights Society It is sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is. Lars Ulrich, drummer of heavy metal band Metallica There was this bloke and there was me and we really got along. Our friendship was founded on our mutual passions for pop music, indolence and substance abuse. We would sit around together, heroically stoned, and play records all day long: punk records, soul records, horny disco records like ‘Hot Stuff’ by Donna Summer … Dave Hill, music journalist Twentieth-century listening and its spaces Artists, fans, and the music business share an uneasy but symbiotic partnership. Dave Hill’s homosocial friendship, exploring music not through performance but through listening to purchased recordings, is a deeply twentieth-century subjectivity, reflecting the basic premise of much musical entertainment since the invention of sound recording. This involves a set of paradoxical relationships. For one thing, ‘music’ is a phenomenon that can and perhaps should be considered and enjoyed in and for itself – but to facilitate this enjoyment it has become a commodity, bought, sold, and consumed, to the regret of many composers and performers such as Lars Ulrich.

Innovation and the avant-garde, 1900–20

The first thing to grasp about artistic innovation and renewal is that it needn’t come from an avant-garde, which usually groups together artists who are just a bit more self-conscious about ‘progress’, and more theoretically aware of the nature of art (or at least of that which they don’t like). Nearly all the artists whose works still survive in the canon, however that may be institutionally or politically constituted, have made innovations, and even those who work within what is sometimes termed a ‘consensus practice’ will have been experimenting, more or less, with the boundaries of that consensus. Indeed that is what a serious paradigm allows you to do. I am using ‘paradigm’ here in a loose sense, to mean the framework of ideas which help to define what is normal or usual in a practice. It was ‘normal’ for Georg Grosz to be taught the paradigms for realist biblical and historical narrative painting at his art school, as it was for musicians at the beginning of the century to understand and reproduce sonata form, with, as Hepokoski puts it, its ‘melodic simplicity, squarely period phrasing, frequent cadences and balanced resolutions, symmetrical recapitulations’, repetitions and so on. Such textbook paradigms have a certain summarizing cultural authority, and this tends to be a property of those works which are part of the traditional canon, whether imitated in the life class or the counterpoint class. They are what comes before innovation, the traditional practice that confronts the individual talent.

Other mainstreams: light music and easy listening, 1920–70

Problems and definitions It should be stated at the outset that light music and easy listening are not diluted forms of heavy music and difficult listening prepared for those with delicate musical digestions. The music discussed in this chapter produces effects and valorizes moods, identities, and ideas that no other music does. When, for example, the crew of HMS Amethyst sailed down the Yangtse under fire from Chinese guns during the Second World War, they chose to demonstrate British composure by singing ‘Cruising Down the River’ (Beadell/Tollerton, 1945). Three types of easy listening need to be distinguished, and in none of these cases does that necessarily entail the meaning ‘facile’, nor imply that it is appropriate to describe the music as easy technically. First, there is the type that is often tightly controlled but perceived as cool, sophisticated, relaxed, and classy, which ranges from the crooners to the more varied song stylists like Frank Sinatra. Second, there is the type that evokes a nostalgic mood and whose present reception therefore differs from its original meaning (it is usually categorized as nostalgia or, in France, as retro ); an example would be a song like ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ (MacDonald/Carroll, 1913) sung by Laurel and Hardy, the corny and sentimental quality of which may now be valued as offering an experience of something vulnerable and human that high art generally guards against. Third, there is the apparently easy listening that proves emotionally difficult listening, as often occurs in the French chanson realiste .