Simon Perry

Agonising over orthography: Aspects of notation from Tristan to Opus 11, number 1

Abstract Problematising the orthography of the transitional music of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe provides insight into aspects of its composers’ increasingly individualised harmonic and tonal conceptions. Examples from the works of Wagner, Liszt, Skriabin and Schoenberg are considered.

Composition, Chromaticism and the Developmental Process: A New Theory of Tonality

Abstract In this book, Henry Burnett and Roy Nitzberg present an innovative theory of tonality. The theory makes rather strong claims for universality (which many will find contentious) and the book begins with a fairly extensive justification for the new approach, in which its authors touch base with a number of important theorists, including Riemann, Schoenberg, Schenker and a host of later figures. Central to the rationale for this work is the final element of the main title—the ‘developmental process’. The authors (not unlike some of the theorists just mentioned) challenge traditional notions of development, seeing discussions bound up in thematicism or, pace Reti, the ‘thematic process’ as highly limited in chronological scope and, therefore, unfairly privileging of the Classical/Romantic canon. In this new text, ‘development’ is viewed as something more intimately bound up with pitch organization, on ‘the working out [of] specific diatonic and chromatic pitch-class relationships that encompassed entire movements, if not entire compositions, and which resulted in a narration of carefully controlled events that guided the listener from one end of the composition to the other’ (p. 3). Needless to say, the text is quite unapologetically formalistic in approach and will offer little comfort or interest to those ensconced in more culturally based modes of our broad discipline. For those interested in theory ‘pure and simple’, read on.

Defining Russia musically: Historical and hermeneutical essays by Richard Taruskin

Few who are interested in Russian music can be unaware of the work of Richard Taruskin. This recent offering which does recycle some material) is near compulsory reading for those of us who share this interest, and is highly recommended to those who do not. In this and another recent collection of essays Taruskin’s motivation has been the correction of long cherished, quasi-traditional views on aspects of Russian music. In his essays on Musorgsky (Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993)) Taruskin’s corrective was vigorously applied to the Stasovian and, later, Soviet ʼneo-Stasvoian’ image of Musorgsky as radical populist. In the book under review here, Taruskin’s dominating theme is one of debunking the ‘myth of otherness’ that has dominated Western perceptions of Russian music. In particular, he targets Western tendencies to ghettoize Russian music, to apply inappropriate standards of absolutism in making value judgements about Russian music, to measure it (meaninglessly, he implies) against the Western European canon, to fetishize its difference, to make simplistic, laboratory- like segmentations of its form from its content, to construe it in terms of an inferior, or subjective ‘other’ studied from the vantage point of a privileged, objective ‘self’. This book may be read very much as a product of the ‘New Musicology’, and its redress welcomely fills a void in an area that has long been dominated by more conservative streams within Western music scholarship.