Jonathan Dunsby

Roland Barthes and the Grain of Panzéra's Voice

Roland Barthess perception of voice having a ‘grain’ is one of the best-known legacies of the last centurys history of ideas, especially in discussions of popular music. His evidence, the singing of Charles Panzéra, compared with that of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, is explored and illustrated here in the context of a discussion of the origin of ‘grain’ and its wider implications. It is only rhetorically that one may consider the ‘geno’-song separately from the ‘pheno’-song, but the implied interplay of structure and effect is a powerful critical resource, neglected to date because Barthess vision requires explanation, as proposed here.

The Case for a Schenkerian Semiotic

Attempts to establish a new discipline of music semiotics1 have suggested rich fields of inquiry in musicoloy, aesthetics, theory, and analysis. At the present stage, however, these attempts are far from settling basic issues, some of which are considered here. The aim is to point to an area of music theory and analytical practice that has not received the attention it deserves from semioticians.

The Science and Psychology of Music Performance: Creative Strategies for Teaching and Learning , edited by Richard Parncutt and Gary E. McPherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xii + 388 pp, £37.50 hardback

In our age of popular science, interdisciplinarity, global communication, but also professionalisation, the assertion of minorities, everyone being famous for 15 minutes – in an age, in short, when we are always being watched, and ever watchful – it is hardly surprising that ‘practice’ and ‘theory’ nowadays offer no place to hide. The editors and contributors to this volume revel in interaction, and one of the many merits of the result is that its commonality of purpose and method is far more than cosmetic. For example, every one of its 21 chapters is written by two authors, one ‘artistic’ (p. ix), the other a scientist: reading their biographies (pp. 353–62), most of them being already well-established researchers, it is clear that by and large they are themselves ‘interdisciplinary’ individuals, and the breadth of their enthusiasms and knowledge is infectious and stimulating. The chapters are partitioned into three areas, ‘The Developing Musician’, ‘Subskills of Music Performance’, and ‘Instruments and Ensembles’. In the first we find the generic categories that most readers are likely to expect: potential, environment, motivation, anxiety, the brain, and medicine. Perhaps it is easy game to pounce on fields that might have been covered in an integral way. Development, for example, in its clinical and psychological senses, is a possible stand-alone topic, as the literature amply testifies, and as does the index here to some extent (p. 376). And in a book that is partly, overtly psychological, a more sympathetic treatment of psychoanalytical aspects would have been interesting, even if only to flesh out Glenn Wilson and David Roland’s comments in ‘Performance Anxiety’ about ‘notions’ that ‘do not satisfy scientific criteria of evaluation’ (p. 52). The subskills in Part Two cluster around reading music, around practices (improvisation, ‘practice’ itself, memory, intonation), and around communication (‘structural’, ‘emotional’, and ‘body movement’). Part Three is perhaps more introversive for the music educational establishment, with its treatment of voice, choir, piano, strings, wind, and conducting, where again the reader may be tempted to second-guess even such a comprehensive approach and ask about ‘creative strategies’ concerning music technology (which is in the editors’ list of disavowals, pp. x–xi, along with gender, motor control, and percussion, as well as everything outside ‘Western tonal “art music”’).

Performing Music: Shared Concerns@@@The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation

Preface Part I. Fundamentals: 1. What do we perform? Roy Howat 2. Expression in performance: generativity, perception and semiosis Eric Clarke 3. Musical motion and performance: theoretical and empirical perspectives Patrick Shove and Bruno H. Repp 4. Deliberate practice and elite musical performance Ralf Th. Krampe and K. Anders Ericsson Part II. Structure and Meaning in Performance: 5. The conductor and the theorist: Furtwangler, Schenker and the first movement of Beethovens Ninth Symphony Nicholas Cook 6. A curious moment in Schumanns Fourth Symphony: structure as the fusion of affect and intuition David Epstein 7. Beginning-ending ambiguity: consequences of performance choices Janet M. Levy 8. Strategies of irony in Prokofievs Violin Sonata in F minor Op. 80 Ronald Woodley Part III. Performance and Process: 9. Performance and analysis: interaction and interpretation Joel Lester 10. Analysis and the act of performance William Rothstein 11. The pianist as critic Edward T. Cone 12. Playing in time: rhythm, metre and tempo in Brahmss Fantasien Op. 116 John Rink Index.

'A Slight Oversimplification': An Interview with Arnold Whittall

1995 sees the sixtieth birthday of Arnold Whittall, and 1996 his retirement from Kings College London. Contrary to what many have assumed over the years, I never studied with him, but became his junior colleague when I was appointed Lecturer at KCL in 1979, where I worked for six exciting years. I have long ago lost count of the number of projects he and I have worked on together, and indeed the number of my own projects about which I have sought his advice. The Editor of Music Analysis invited me to contribute a celebration to this issue and gave me carte-blanche on the form it should take. It hardly required prolonged or even deep thought for me to realise what it would be best to do. Rather than constructing some sort of biographical or simply historical tribute to celebrate his work, I thought it would be most appropriate to let Arnold speak for himself. It was reassuring when he readily agreed to this, seizing the chance perhaps of a mechanism guaranteed to prevent me from writing at my customary length. What follows is the result of a single interview conducted in July 1995. It is virtually unedited, shorn here and there (in the interests of good taste) of Whittalls cutting humour and Dunsbys sarcasm, but certainly not in any sense sanitised as will be indicated, if not exactly proved, by the frank moments below where some intended deceptions were, on reflection, not carried out. I have introduced a minimum of punctuation, and unfortunately it is unrealistic to try to record emphasis (but there is plenty of it on the tapes). My approach was simple enough to make a record of what the interviewee had to say, to some extent about himself, which will be of greatest interest to his hundreds of friends and former students (there is a lot of overlap in these categories!), but also about current issues in theory and analysis, which will, I am in no doubt, be of interest to the thousands who read this journal.