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Preface: [To Come] Definition of the subject matter of the book and
its historiographical method
Chapter 1: THE CURTAIN GOES UP
Literacy
How and why music in the West came to be written down; the
implications of literacy for music history-i.e., what happened-and for
for music historiography, i.e., the narrative representation of what
happened
The Romans and the Franks
The political alliance between the Roman popes and the Frankish kings,
concluded in 750 CE, that eventually caused the Roman chant to be
imported to northern Europe
The Carolingian Renaissance
The flowering of literacy in northern Europe under Charlemagne and his
successors; educational reform under Alcuin
The chant comes north
The Roman chant supplants the local chant dialects of northern Europe
and in the process becomes the first musical repertory to be written down
in a way that makes it possible to study it in detail
The legend of St. Gregory
Why we call that chant "Gregorian"; the role of politics in the creation of
musical canons
The origins of Gregorian chant
The prehistory of the Roman chant; its disconnection from Jewish
temple music; the re-introduction of psalm-recitation as the principal
musical medium of Christian liturgy
Monastic psalmody
Why and where the psalms achieved their preëminent status in
Christian worship
The development of the liturgy
The organization of the liturgical day and its reflection in musical style
The Mass and its music
The antiphonal and responsorial chants of the proprium missae
Neumes
Early principles of graphic musical representation
Persistence of oral tradition
Reminders that oral and literate traditions are not polar opposites, but
always coexisting; how oral tradition continues to function into our own
time
Psalmody in practice: the office
Analysis of a single psalm verse-Justus ut palma (Ps. 91:12)-as sung
in various liturgical contexts within the monastic office; the symbolic
significance of musical style
Psalmody in practice: the Mass
The same verse as variously used within the Mass
Evidence of "oral composition"
A theory of how elaborate melodies evolve over time in non-literate
cultures, and how that theory enables a speculative reconstruction of
musical prehistory
Why we will never know how it all began
The concept of the "diatonic pitch set" as a cultural universal and its
observable presence from the beginning of recorded musical history; its
implications for the "nature vs. nurture" debate
Beginnings, as far as we know them
Scattered deciphered remains of pre-medieval musical cultures:
Sumerian, Greek pagan, Greek Christian
Chapter 2: NEW STYLES AND FORMS
Longissimae melodiae
Testimony of Amalar of Metz, c. 832 CE, on the melodic expansion of the
liturgy on especially festive occasions; the neuma triplex
Prosa
Testimony of Notker Balbulus, c.852 CE, on the addition of words to
long melismas as a memory aid
Sequences
The development of prosulated melismas into free-standing, newly
composed liturgical songs
How they were performed
Methods of harmonizing chants in performance; Daseian notation
Hymns
Their Greek origin; their history in the Western church beginning
with St. Ambrose and the liturgy of Milan, IV century CE; their earliest
(Frankish) preserved melodies
Tropes
Explanatory prefaces and insertions to existing chants, chiefly
antiphons of the Mass proper; the use of dramatic dialogues for this
purpose
The Mass Ordinary
The fixed texts of the Mass as a site of especially fertile Frankish
composition; the conjunction of all three forms of liturgical
expansion-trope, melisma, prosula-within the newly
composed music of the Ordinary
Kyries
Their origin as syllabically texted "proper" chants; their evolution
into melismatic "ordinary" chants
The full Franco-Roman Mass
"Old Roman" and other chant dialects
The stylistic and functional relationship between Gregorian chant and the
repertories-Gallican, Ambrosian, Mozarabic-with which it contended;
the conundrum of the "Old Roman" chant: survivor of a pre-Gregorian
Roman repertory or the product of a post-Gregorian evolution?
What is Art?
Conceptual differences and contradictions between modern
conceptions of an artwork and the genres of medieval composition
Chapter 3: RETHEORIZING MUSIC
Musica
Concepts of music in early medieval treaties (Augustine,
Boethius); musica speculativa; music and the liberal arts
Tonaries
Practical theory as stylistic generalization; the classification of the
Gregorian chant repertory by intervallic "species"
A new concept of mode
Classification of melodies in terms of functional relationships between
scale degrees rather than formula-families; Aurelian of Réôme's Musica
disciplina; Hucbald's De Harmonica Institutione
Mode classification in practice
Analysis of melodies of the Mass proper by ambitus and final
Mode as a guide to composition
The influence of Frankish mode theory on the style of Frankish chant
melodies; laudes by Hucbald; famous hymn tunes; close analysis of Kyrie
IX ("cum jubilo')
Versus
Analysis of two Frankish sequences: Victimae paschali and Dies irae;
the late Frankish ("Victorine") sequence; the sequences of Hildegard of
Bingen
Liturgical drama
Hildegard's Ordo virtutum; Regularis Concordia of 973; Fleury Play-
book and Ludus Danielis [Play of Daniel]; theories of the evolution of
liturgical dialogues into church dramas
Marian antiphons
Late-medieval cult of the Virgin Mary; the four "anthems of the Blessed
Virgin"; their stylistic and formal relationship to contemporary vernacular
love songs
Theory and the art of teaching
Hermannus Contractus and the hexachord; Guido d'Arezzo and
solmization
Chapter 4: MUSIC OF FEUDALISM AND FIN' AMORS
Sacred and secular
On the futility and fallaciousness of conceptual oppositions ("binaries")
Aquitaine
Troubadours
The earliest notated body of secular song, from Aquitaine, XI-XII CE; its
relationship to feudalism and the ideology of courtly love; William IX
and the Crusades, Bernart de Ventadorn and his Can vei la lauzeta
mover
Minstrels
Reflection of social structures in musical practices; art as practice and as
artifact; music as pastime and profession
High (Latinate) and low ("popular") style
Giraut de Bornelh, Reis Glorios as an example of alba (dawn song); St.
Martial of Limoges as center for composition of versus; planctus for
Charlemagne and for Alfonso VIII of Castile; Pierre Abelard and Biblical
planctus; planctus becomes planh (Gaucelm Faidit, Fortz causa es);
"popular" styles: pastorela, balada; the trobairitz Beatriz de Dia
Rhythm and meter
Theories of performance for chant and courtly songs
Trobar clus
The tenso, or mock-debate song; the deliberate cultivation of "difficulty"
or "obscurity" in aristocratic art; the Albigensian Crusades and the end of
Provençal culture
France
Trouvères
The northern French inheritors of the troubadour tradition; Richard Lion-
Heart; Thibaut IV of Navarre; retrouenge and refrain forms
Social transformation
Narrative genres: chanson de geste, lai, chanson de toile; refrain forms
and town [bourgeois] culture; the Arras Puy (song contest); Moniot
d'Arras and Jehan Bretel as composers of town songs
Adam de la Halle and the formes fixes
Career of Adam de la Halle; his production of dance songs in fixed forms:
rondeau, ballade, virelai; his polyphonic settings in versus (or conductus)
style
The first opera?
Adam's Le Jeu de Robin et Marion
Geographical Diffusion
Cantigas
Spanish songs of devotion to Virgin Mary
A note on instruments
The illuminations in the main source of cantigas, and what they may-or
may not-tell us about performance practice; literary evidence for the use
of instruments to accompany dance songs; actual instrumental (?) dance
melodies as preserved in trouvère manuscripts
Laude and related genres
Italian religious songs; Italian flagellants and their German counterparts
Minnesang
German courtly songs, originally transplanted from France; Walther von
der Vogelweide and his crusade song, Palästinalied; Neidhardt von
Reuenthal; der Tannhäuser; "Pseudo-Neidhardt" songs including
Meienzit
Popularization, then and since
Assimilation of composed songs to oral tradition; their
monumentalization in later German art music from Wagner to Orff
Meistersinger
The latest cultivators of "medieval" song, XVI CE
Peoples and Nations
Anachronistic nationalist interpretations of the vernacular song repertories
of the middle ages
What is an anachronism?
Why genres and practices linger longer in some places than in others;
comparison of Adam de la Halle with Oswald von Wolkenstein (d. 1445),
his exact counterpart but not his contemporary; only interpretations, not
phenomena, can be anachronistic
Philosophy of History
"Autonomist" vs. contingent views on the history of art; essentialism; the
"value-free" posture; the fallacy of synchronicity
Chapter 5: POLYPHONY IN PRACTICE AND THEORY
Another renaissance
The written cultivation of polyphony receives a boost in the twelfth
century, and is from then on the norm for Western art music; the
proliferation of polyphonic composition, like that of Frankish chant
composition, begins in the monasteries and has its first great peak at the
cathedral schools of Paris, radiating thereafter throughout Western
Christendom
"Symphonia" and its modifications
The earliest parallel organum as found in Musica enchiriadis; the Musica
enchiriadis scale; the cadential occursus; the introduction of oblique and
contrary motion in Scolica enchiriadis
Guido, John, and discant
The treatises of Guido d'Arezzo (Micrologus) and John of Afflighem (De
musica); their relationship to the earliest practical source of organum
(Chartres); the resulting style of counterpoint (later termed discantus
Polyphony in Aquitanian monastic centers
Polyphonic versus settings at St. Martial of Limoges employ a new style,
with a pre-existing chant-or vox principalis-held out in long notes
while a newly-composed part-the vox organalis-proceeds in extended
melismas; another St. Martial style: discantus in which two newly-
composed voices, moving at the same speed, frequently cross in
elaborately symmetrical or sequential patterns
The Codex Calixtinus
An especially rich source of early polyphonic compositions, containing a
liturgy for St. James and kept since medieval times at his shrine at
Compostela, Spain; Congaudent catholici, once thought erroneously to
be a composition in three parts (the earliest such to survive), a
distinction that rightly belongs to Verbum patris humanatur, a twelfth-
century Aquitanian or French conductus
Chapter 6: NOTRE DAME DE PARIS
The cathedral-university complex
Urbanization and its effect on the institutional context of polyphonic
composition; the unprecedentedly ambitious corpus of such compositions
emanating from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, combining the
earlier discantus and organum styles in settings of music from the
"universal" Mass and office liturgy rather than local repertories of versus,
incorporating many compositions in three parts and even a handful in four
Piecing the evidence together
The difficulty of reconciling the preserved musical repertory of Notre
Dame with its description in treatises; theories as to the identity of the
main composers, identified in the treatises but not the manuscripts as
"Leoninus" and "Perotinus"
Measured music
The notation developed for Notre Dame polyphony: the first to specify
rhythm as well as pitch; how it worked
Whys and Wherefores
Theories of how and why such notation developed; mnemotechnics; the
continuing relationship between oral and literate cultures
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
Organum cum alio
Organum triplum and quadruplum-compositions in three and four
parts-and their style characteristics; the relationship between "artistic"
and functional criteria in shaping them; analysis of Viderunt omnes and
Alleluia: Nativitas, both attributed to Perotinus
Theory or Practice?
Treatise of Johannes de Garlandia (De mensurabili Musica) and its
scholastic models; the nature of scholastic theory and the relationship
between description and prescription
Conductus at Notre Dame
The problem of musica cum littera -syllabically texted music-for
notation
Chapter 7: MUSIC FOR AN INTELLECTUAL AND POLITICAL ÉLITE
A new class
Urban clerics with secular educations [literati] and their musical
spokesman, Johannes de Grocheio; Grocheio's De musica and its social
classification of musical genres
The nascent motet
Prosulated discant settings; their migration from larger liturgical contexts
to a status as free-standing compositions
"Franconian" notation
The solution to the problem of musica cum littera; motets of the
Bamberg Codex; Franco of Cologne and his treatise Ars cantus
mensurabilis
Confluence of traditions
The French-texted motet and its relationship to the trouvère repertory
A new trobar clus?
The problem of "polytextuality"
Tenor "families"
The reuse of a single chant-derived melisma as the basis for many
motets
Color and talea
Abstractly-patterned melodic and rhythmic ostinatos;
compositional tours-de-force
The art of mélange
The late thirteenth-century motet as intellectual entertainment par
excellence; the eventual use of secular tenors, loosening the genre's
dependence on the Gregorian chant
The "Petronian" motet
Petrus de Cruce and novel divisions of the breve; the demise of "modal
rhythm"
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
Chapter 8: BUSINESS MATH, POLITICS, AND PARADISE: THE ARS NOVA
A "New Art of Music"?
Technical progress vs. stylistic evolution; the early fourteenth-century
treatises of Jehan de Murs (Ars novae musicae) and Philippe de Vitry (Ars
nova)
Music from mathematics
The theory of harmonic numbers (Gersonides) and its relationship to the
Ars Nova
Putting it into practice
Rhythmic levels: modus, tempus, prolatio
Representing it
Ars Nova notation
Backlash
Jacobus of Liège and his treatise Speculum musicae
Establishing the prototype: the Roman de Fauvel
The earliest practical source to contain motets in the Ars Nova style: a
satirical mock-epic about the exploits of a mythical best whose name is
an acronym of all the vices
Taking a closer look
The emergence of Ars Nova notation out of the earlier innovations of
Petrus de Cruce
More elaborate patterning
Stratification and complication of musical texture with four rhythmic
levels, syncopation, hockets
Isorhythm
The independent organization of rhythmic and melodic cycles, producing
an allegory of the music of the spheres
Music about music
The playful side of the Ars Nova; artistic self-consciousness
Machaut: The occult and the sensuous
Analysis of Guillaume de Machaut's motet in honor of the Virgin Mary,
Felix Virgo/Inviolata/AD TE SUSPIRAMUS as a synthesis of the arcane
theory of the Ars Nova, and its symbolism in the tradition of late-
medieval love poetry
Musica ficta
Harmonic grammar and harmonic color and their relationship to notation
Cadences
A new definition of cadence involving progressions of harmonic
intervals; its impact on style and form
Ciconia: The motet as political show
Analysis of Doctorum principem/Melodia suavissima, Johannes
Ciconia's motet in honor of his patron, the Paduan statesman Francesco
Zabarella
Du Fay: the motet as mystical summa
A preliminary look at the great fifteenth-century composer as the
last major practitioner of the isorhythmic motet; analysis of his three
motets in honor of Pope Eugenius IV, especially Nuper rosarum flores,
composed for the dedication of (and symbolizing) the Florentine church
of Santa Maria del Fiore
A final word from Dante
Dante's use of the polytextual Ars Nova motet as a heavenly metaphor in
Il Paradiso suggests a solution to the "problem" of polytextuality
Chapter 9: MACHAUT AND HIS PROGENY
Maintaining the art of courtly song
Guillaume de Machaut's career; his revival of the fixed (refrain) forms in
a new aristocratic context
Redefining (and re-refining) a genre
The elevation of style through technical mastery
The top-down style
Machaut's virelais in one, two and three parts; a new style of melody,
composed with polyphonic accompaniment in mind
Cantilena
Three voices and full triadic harmony become the norm
Functionally differentiated counterpoint
The typical behavior of the three parts: cantus, tenor, contratenor
The luxuriant style
Four-part texture in rondeaux and ballades
What instrumentalists did
Arrangements of vocal pieces for organ performance in the Codex
Faenza
Machaut's Mass and its background
Mass Ordinary settings as a by-product of the church schism
Avignon
The papal court in exile and its musical repertory; the Apt and Ivrea
Codices; John XXII's bull (Docta sanctorum) on musical abuses
Votive formularies
Early complete (composite) polyphonic Mass Ordinary settings as
votive offerings to the Virgin Mary; the Mass of Tournai
Ci commence la messe de nostre dame
Machaut's Mass Ordinary setting, the first by a single author
Kyrie
The adaptation of the isorhythmic motet style to the setting of a single
text; alternatim performance
Gloria
Chant paraphrase in a cantilena style
Dismissal
Machaut's setting of the tiny dismissal formula in an especially elaborate
motet style with pansorthymic passages in which all the voices are
controlled by taleae
Subtilitas
Feats of technical refinement (e.g., the rondeau Ma fin est mon
commencement, a musical palindrome); yet another resurfacing of trobar
clus
Canon
Strict imitation; the chace
Ars subtilior
The generation following Machaut; Eustache Deschamps and his treatise
Art de Dictier et de Fere Chançons; Philippus de Caserta and his
Tractatus de diversis figures; "mannered" notation; extreme
complication of rhythm
Berry and Foix
Music at the "decadent" courts of southern France; Solage, Fumeux
fume
Outposts
Ars subtilior composition in Cyprus and Poland
Faux-naïveté
Bird-song and rustic imagery in the late fourteenth-century virelai
Chapter 10: "A PLEASANT PLACE": MUSIC OF THE TRECENTO
Vulgar eloquence
Fourteenth-century beginnings of Italian vernacular poetry and music
Madrigal culture
Jacopo of Bologna; Marchetto of Padua and his treatise Pomerium
A new discant style
Stylistic analysis of Giovanni de Cascia, Appress' un fiume
The 'wild bird" songs
Jacopo's Oselleto salvagio set as madrigal and as caccia
Ballata culture
Cultivation of dance songs documented in Bocaccio's Decameron;
Lorenzo da Firenze
Landini
Francesco Landini and Gallicization of trecento style; the "Landini sixth";
keyboard arrangements
Late-century fusion
Mixtures of French and Italian styles and genres; Landini's Sy dolce non
sono (madrigal in motet style); Carmen's Pontifici decora speculi (motet
in caccia style)
An important side-issue: Periodization
The logical and historical status of terms such as "medieval" and
"Renaissance"; the difficulty and the pitfalls of drawing boundaries;
essentialism
Chapter 11: ISLAND AND MAINLAND
The first masterpiece?
Sumer is icumen in as an example of insular stylistic evolution; its
historiographical status
Viking harmony
Early British polyphony; literary descriptions of preliterate musical
practice: twinsong (Nobilis, humilis; Edi beo thu; Jesu Christes milde
moder)
Insular fauna
Independent stylistic development of English music; its intermixture with
continental styles by thirteenth century; prevalence of voice-exchange
Pes motets and rondellus
Characteristic English genres and their stylistic traces in continental
sources; Walter Odington on rondellus
The Worcester fragments
Paucity of surviving English sources; their concentration at Worcester
Cathedral; Marian conductus Flos regalis virginalis as exemplary "West-
country" composition
Nationalism?
The relationship of stylistic distinctiveness to national consciousness;
implications of "insularity"
"English descant"
Stylistic characteristics of "Worcester School" as exemplified in full-
triadic sonority of Beata viscera (late 13th-century Marian conductus-
motet), Sancta Maria Virgo (late 13th-century Marian antiphon) and
Kyrie "Cuthberte" (late 14th-century troped Kyrie from Durham
Cathedral)
The beginnings of "functional" harmony?
The earliest "V-I" bass progressions (as in pes-motet Thomas gemma
Cantuariae/Thomas caesus in Doveria); debates as to their historical
significance;
Old Hall and Roy Henry
The repertory of the Old Hall manuscript; Gloria settings by Pycard and
Leonel Power; the identity of "Roy Henry"
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
Fortunes of War
The Agincourt carol; musical consequences of the Hundred Years'
War and the British military occupation of France
Dunstable and the "contenance angloise"
John Dunstable's prestige and his role as stylistic catalyst; Martin le
Franc's testimony; comparison of two isorhythmic motets: Tapissier's
Eya dulcis/Vale placens and Dunstable's SalveScema/Salve salus
Voluptuousness and how to acquire it
Dunstable's Quam pulchra es and other Song of Songs motets;
continental imitations
Fauxbourdon and faburden
Triadically-harmonized continental chant paraphrases in shorthand
notation and their relationship to traditional English methods of
extemporizing polyphony at sight; Du Fay's Missa Sancti Jacobi
Du Fay and Binchois
Their hymn settings in relation to the English style and to that of the
contemporary courtly chanson; new cadential formulas in the latter,
and their tonal implications; rhetoric and performance practice;
Binchois's Deuil angoisseux, after Christine de Pizan
Chapter 12: EMBLEMS AND DYNASTIES
The internationalism of the upper crust
Johannes Tinctoris and his encyclopedic treatises; stylistic
homogenization of European literate music in the early 15th century
The "Tinctoris generation"
Ockeghem, Busnoys, their mutual encomia; Regis, Caron, Obrecht;
Flemings in Italy
The cyclic Mass
Mass Ordinaries over a unifying cantus firms as highest 15th-century
genre; Tinctoris's Ciceronian classification of styles
Cantus firmus as trope of glory
English origins of cyclic Mass; its relationship to isorhythmic motet
and its association with royal and papal power; Leonel's Mass on Alma
Redemptoris Mater
"Caput" and the beginnings of four-part harmony
The Caput tenor and its use as cantus firmus; the author of the first
Caput Mass; expansion of texture to four parts; contratenors (altus
and bassus)
How controversies arise (and what they reveal)
"Modal" vs. "tonal"; their proper definition and the transition from
the one to the other
Patterns of emulation
The Caput family; the relationship of Ockeghem's setting to the original
The composer as virtuoso
Ockeghem's Missa Prolationum and Missa Cuiusvis Toni
Further along the emulation chain
Obrecht's Missa Caput; its relationship to both predecessors and its
unique (or original) features
The Man at Arms
L'Homme Armé and the dynasty of Mass settings it spawned; Charles
the Bold and the Order of the Golden Fleece; Busnoys's Mass
"Pervading imitation"
Later Masses on L'Homme Armé and their relationship to Busnoys's; a
new texture arises in the tenorless sections of cantus-firmus Masses; its
relationship to earlier chace and caccia, and its spread
An esthetic paradox (or, the paradox of "esthetics")
Ancient service music and the modern secular listener
Old and young alike pay tribute
Dufay's Missa L'Homme Armé and Missa Se la face ay pale; extension
of the emulation chain into the sixteenth century
Chapter 13: MIDDLE AND LOW
Hailing Mary
The cult of Mary and the fifteenth-century motet; Basiron's Salve \
Regina (formerly attributed to Ockeghem); Ockeghem's authentic Salve
Regina
Personal Prayer
Du Fay's Ave Regina coelorum and its derivative Mass setting
The English keep things high
Marian antiphon settings from the Eton Choir Book; Cornysh's Salve
Regina
The Milanese go lower still
Motetti missales; Gaspar van Weerbeke's Mater, Patris
Fun in church?
Loyset Compère and his Ave Maria
Love Songs
The 15th-century bergerette; Ockeghem's Ma bouche rit; emulations by
Busnoys and Josquin des Prez; secular cantus firmus in Milan-style
Motets
Instrumental music becomes literate at last
Two famous chansons (J'ay pris amours and De tous biens plaine) as
begetters of instrumental genres; the Glogauer Liederbuch; chamber
music in partbooks
Music becomes a business
The earliest printed music books and their relationship to the rise of
instrumental chamber music; Ottaviano Petrucci and his Odhecaton
"Songs" without words
The carmen as earliest independent instrumental genre; its relationship
to the tenorless Mass section and its consequent reliance on pervading
imitation; Isaac's Benedictus; Ghiselin's Alfonsina; Ile fantasies de
Joskin
Chapter 14: JOSQUIN AND THE HUMANISTS
What legends do
Josquin des Prez as humanist protagonist; his symbolic status and the
legends to which it gave rise; the social construction of cultural figures
A poet born not made
In consequence of humanist thought, music moves from the quadrivium
to the trivium: i,.e., from classification as an art of measurement to
classification as an art of rhetoric; Listenius and musica poetica;
Josquin as first musical "genius," and as chief protagonist and
beneficiary of the nascent music business
Josquin as the spirit of a (later) age
Sixteenth-century encomia (Luther, Coclico) associate Josquin with the
esthetic ideals of that century
Recycling the legend back into music
Glareanus and 16th-century mode theory; his anecdotes about Josquin
What Josquin was really like
Treatment of chant paraphrase in pervading imitation in Missa Pange
lingua; paired imitation technique in Memor esto verbi tui servo tuo;
difficulty of correlating stylistic evidence of his music with known
facts of his life; the sketchiness of the latter; his early career; Missa
Hercules Dux Ferrariae; his late style; Pater Noster
A model masterpiece
Ave Maria . . . Virgo serena as paradigm of text-music relationship
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Parodies
Polyphonic reworkings of Ave Maria . . . Virgo serena by Sennfl and
Févin (Missa super Ave Maria)
Facts and myths
Association of Ave Maria . . . Virgo serena by modern scholars with
Pietro Aron and his description, in Thoscanello della musica (1523), of
"simultaneous conception of parts"; association of simultaneous
conception in turn with revolutionary and emancipatory narratives of
the Renaissance; proposed redating of Ave Maria refutes connection
with Aron's description; reaction to the redating betrays tendency
within scholarhip to uphold myths over facts
Chapter 15: A PERFECTED ART
All is known
Zarlino and codification of the ars perfecta in sixteenth century
The triad comes of age
Full triad replaces discantus duo as conceptual norm of harmony
"Il eccelentissimo Adriano" and his contemporaries
Role of Adrian Willaert, Zarlino's Flemish teacher, in the
establishement of the ars perfecta style; ideal of fully controlled (and
subordinated) dissonance and seamless flow
Gombert
Fuga sciolta or "free imitation" exemplified in motet In illo tempore
loquente Jesu ad turbas by Nicholas Gombert; seamless flow achieved
through uniformity of rhythm
Clemens
Motet as Biblical cento (patchwork) exemplified by Clemens non
Papa's Qui consolabatur me; use of mixed signatures for
especially expressive harmonic effects; Souterliedekens
Willaert and the art of transition
Willaert's career; his motet setting of the sequence Benedicta es,
coelorum regina compared with Josquin's
The progress of a method
Perfected methods of 16th-century polyphony transferred to new
instrumental genres; two contrasting uses of the term ricercar; lute
ricercari of Spinaccino contrasted with organ ricercari of Cavazzoni;
Musica nova (1540)
Academic art
Art as display of technical mastery; ricercari of Buus
Spatialized form
Antiphonal polychoral writing at St. Mark's Cathedral, Venice
Alternatives to perfection
English preserve luxuriant melismatic polyphony; Ficino and musical
Platonism
Peeking behind the curtain
Persistence of unwritten traditions; improvised embellishment
("diminutions"); improvisation over cantus firmus and ground basses
Dances old and new
Bassadanza and basse danse; Il re d'Espagna and its literate traces;
Isaac, Missa super la Spagna; Ortiz, Tratado de glosas; dance tenors as
cradle of "tonal" harmony
Chapter 16: THE END OF PERFECTION
Palestrina and the ecumenical tradition
His career in service to the Holy See; his participation in "humanistic"
revision of Gregorian chant; his prolific output of Masses (140) and
motets (400+); his meager output of secular music, which he
actually recanted; his work epitomizes the ars perfecta goal of
standardization ("classicism")
Besting the Flemings; or, the last of the Tenoristas
Palestrina's early emulations of Josquin (Missa super Benedicta es) and
Ockeghem (Missa Repleatur os meum laude, Missa super Ut re mi fa
sol la); his two Missae L'Homme Armé
Parody pairs
Palestrina's parody Mass on his own paraphrase motet, O Magnum
Mysterium
Palestrina and the bishops
Bishop Franco's demand for intelligibility of sacred texts; Pope
Marcellus II's advice to the Sistine Chapel choir; Palestrina's Missa
Papae Marcelli and the Council of Trent; Vincenzo Ruffo's Missae
Quatuor (1570); the "rescue legend" and how it grew
Freedom and constraint
Missa Papae Marcelli as "freely composed" artistic response to
coercion; concealment rather than display of "art"
Cryogenics
Palestrina's cycle of Offertories as stylistic culmination; the freezing of
the ars perfecta as stile antico; its canonization and codification in
counterpoint texts like Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum
Byrd
The great line of Catholic church polyphony as musical "mainstream"
ends in the clandestine music of the English recusants
Church and state
The English reformation; persecution of Catholics and their "popish
ditties"; Thomas Tallis and the music of the Anglican church
The first English cosmopolite
Henry VIII as musical connoisseur; his patronage of foreign musicians:
Philip van Wilder, Alfonso Ferrabosco; the reign of Elizabeth; Byrd and
Tallis, Cantiones sacrae (1575); Byrd's later publications of motets
The music of defiance
Byrd's setting of the Mass Ordinary in Three, Four and Five Parts
(1593-95); Gradualia cycle of Propers (1605-7); the latter's precedents
(Isaac, Choralis Constantinus, Gallus, Opus musicum)
Musical hermeneutics
Interpretation of Byrd's recusant music in light of religious history and
his personal response to it
The peak (and limit) of stylistic refinement
Stylistic analysis of two motets from Byrd's Gradualia: Ave verum
corpus and Non vos relinquam
Chapter 17: COMMERCIAL AND LITERARY MUSIC
Music printers and their audience
Vernacular songbooks and the early music trade; new printing methods;
Pierre Attaingnant and musical typesetting; domestic and social
musicmaking
Vernacular song genres: Italy
The frottola; its relationship with oral culture; its main composers
(Cara, Tromboncino); intabulations (Franciscus Bossinensis, Silvestro
Ganassi); Josquin Dascanio, El Grillo
Germany: the Tenorlied
Kernweise, Liedweise, Hofweise; their relationship to folklore; Ludwig
Sennfl, Lust hab ich ghabt zür Musica
The "Parisian" chanson
Origins of the new French style; Claudin de Sermisy, Tant que vivray
Music as description
Janequin and onomatopoietical chanson; La Guerre, or "Battaille de
Marignano"
Lasso: the cosmopolite supreme
Career of Orlando di Lasso; his output of vernacular songs; Prophetiae
Sibyllarum
The literary revolution and the return of the madrigal
The Petrarchan movement; Pietro Bembo; Arcadelt and Verdelot
"Madrigalism" in practice
Gravità vs. piacevolezza; madrigals by Arcadelt (Il bianco e dolce
cigno) and Cipriano de Rore (Dalle belle contrade)
Paradox and contradiction
Petrarch settings by Luca Marenzio and Giaches de Wert (Solo e
pensoso); problems of representation
Exterior "nature" and interior "affect"
Claudio Monteverdi: A un giro sol, Cruda Amarilli; the objections of
Artusi; Carlo Gesualdo and "mannered" madrigal (Moro, lasso)
Postscript: the English madrigal
Byrd's partsongs; Dowland's ayres; Musica Transalpina; Morley's
Canzonets; Morley as translator/arranger of Italian wares; the English
madrigalists: Ward, Wilbye, Weelkes
Chapter 18: REFORMATIONS AND COUNTER REFORMATIONS
The challenge
Continental religious reformers: Luther, Calvin; their contrasting views
on music
The Lutheran chorale
Congregational singing; adaptations from the Catholic repertory and
from popular song; Johann Walther, Geystliche gesangk Buchleyn;
Newe deudsche geistliche Gesenge (1544); Lucas Osiander and the
Cantionalsatz; Praetorius, Musae Sioniae; Lutheran school music
(bicinium, tricinium)
The response
The Counter Reformation; St. Ignatius of Loyola; religious mysticism
and its musical expression: Gallus, Mirabile mysterium; Passion
settings; falsobordone
Augenmusik
Notation as representation
"Concerted" music
Venetian polychoral music; Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli; Concerti
ecclesiastici; basso continuo
The art of orchestration is born
Gabrieli's Sacrae Symphoniae (1597, 1615); In ecclesiis benedicite
Domino
"Songs" for instruments
The organ and ensemble canzona; Andrea Gabrieli's Battaglia;
Victoria's Missa pro Victoria; Venetian church concerts as tourist
spectacles; Giovani Gabrieli's Sonata pian'e forte and Sonata per
tre violini
Chapter 19: PRESSURE OF RADICAL HUMANISM
"Baroque" as term and concept; its disadvantages for music; the period from
1600 to 1750 best described as the "continuo age"
Academies
Girolamo Mei's research on the music of the ancient Greeks; his
correspondence with Giovanni de' Bardi and Vincenzo Galilei; Galilei's
Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna; Bardi's academy
(Camerata) as forum for musical humanism
The representational style
Imitation of speech as means of imitating the movements of the soul;
song to lute ("monody") as ideal expressive medium
Intermedii
Florentine wedding festivities of 1589 as first testing ground for the
new style
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
The "monodic revolution"
Cavalieri's Rappresentatione de Anima, et di Corpo (1600); Caccini's
Nuove musiche (1601); Viadana's Cento concerti ecclesiastichi (1602)
Madrigals and arias redux
Older genres converted into monody; aristocratic virtuosity: gorgia,
sprezzatura; Marco da Gagliano, Valli profonde (1615); noble
amateurs: Sigismondo d'India, Claudio Saracini; Caccini's and
Frescobaldi's Arie di Romanesca
Favole in musica
Jacopo Corsi and the earliest operas: Rinuccini and Peri's La Dafne;
their Euridice (1600)
Oratorio
The sacra rappresentazione and its antecedent genres; Lenten music
theater on Biblical themes
Chapter 20: OPERA FROM MONTEVERDI TO MONTEVERDI
From Mantua to Venice
Monteverdi's career; his madrigal cycles and sacred music; Scherzi
musicale and their preface, a manifesto of the seconda prattica;
Lettera amorosa as paradigm of the representational genre;
Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi (Madrigals of Love and War, 1619) and
the stile concitato; "Lamento della Ninfa" and new representational
conventions; "Gloria Concertata" and the application of
madrigalisms to sacred genres
Poietics and esthesics
The first public opera theater (Venice, 1637); the effect of public
spectacle on the nature of dramatic music; the relationship between the
making of an artwork (poietics) and its public reception (esthesics) and
their respective places in historiography
Opera and its politics
The esthetics of court opera, glorifying aristocratic patrons, vs. the
esthetics of public opera, courting a paying audience; the implicit
relationship of these contrasting esthetics to politics
Sex objects, sexed and unsexed
The castrato as the voice of the public theater; mixture of comic and
tragic genres; "carnivalism"
The quintessential princely spectacle
Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607); the dramaturgy of its second act
The carnival show
Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea (1642); its comic admixtures;
its amorality; its final duet (Pur ti miro) a fitting culmination, albeit a
later addition (and not by Monteverdi)
Chapter 21: MUSIC IN FAT TIMES AND LEAN
Some Organists
Frescobaldi; ground bass forms; Cento partite sopra passacagli
The toccata
Merulo; Michelangelo Rossi; Frescobaldi: Toccata XI, Fiori musicale
Sweelinck, his patrimony and his progeny
Sweelinck's career; his vocal music the tail end of the ars perfecta; his
kinship with English virginalists; The passus duriusculus; Sweelinck's
Fantasia cromatica; variations sets; Samuel Scheidt, Tabulatura nova
Lutheran adaptations: the chorale partita
Scheidt, Christ lag in Todesbanden
The chorale concerto
Praetorius; Schein, Banchetto musicale, Opella nova; concerti on
Christ lag in Todesbanden
Ruin
The Thirty Years War
A creative microcosm
Heinrich Schütz's career in symbiosis with political and economic
history
Luxuriance
Stylus luxurians; Figurenlehre; Christoph Bernhard's treatises; Schütz,
O quam tu pulchra es
Shrivelled down to the expressive nub
Schütz, Kleine geistliche Concerte: "Eile mich, Gott, zu erretten";
Chorale concerto: Erbarm dich mein, O Herre Gott; Symphoniae
sacrae: "Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich"; Schütz's oratorios
Carissimi: oratorio and cantata
Carissimi's career; service in Rome to Queen Christina of Sweden;
Jephte; Barbara Strozzi; her cantata Lagrime mie
Women in music: a historian's dilemma
Prejudices against women as composers; their effect on historiography;
strategies for counteracting them; career of Francesca Caccini as
interpreted by Suzanne Cusick
Chapter 22: COURTS RESPLENDENT, OVERTHROWN, RESTORED
Sense and sensuousness
Royal taste and royal authority in France; Raguenet's Parallèle des
Italiens et des Français
The politics of patronage
Opera imported to France under Louis XIV by Cardinal Mazarin; Luigi
Rossi; Giovanni Battista Lulli becomes Jean-Baptiste Lully; tragédie
lyrique
Drama as court ritual
Themes of sacrifice and self-sacrifice in Lully's Alceste, Campra's
Idomenée, Montéclair's Jephté; Quinault's librettos; French overture;
prologue to Rameau's Castor et Pollux; dances of the royal ballroom
reflected in concluding passacaille (Lully, Armide)
Atys, the King's opera
Dramatic and musical analysis of Lully and Quinault's Atys; Act III;
comparison with work of Campra and Rameau
Art and politics: some caveats
War of the Buffoons and its attendant issues; the political implications
of high art and the attendant (continuing) debate
Jacobean England
English prejudice against theatrical music; role of music in
Shakespeare's plays
Masque and consort
Music at the Stuart court; the Jacobean masque as French-style dance
entertainment; Ben Jonson and his composers: Johnson, Campion,
Alfonso Ferrabosco II, Cooper (Coprario); Lovers Made Men (music
by Lanier); gentlemen's domestic music; Roger North's testimony;
consort fantasias; the In nomine; Christopher Tye
Ayres and suites: harmonically determined form
William Lawes and consort suite; binary form and harmonic
complementation
Distracted times
Tomkins's "Sad pavin"; effects of the English Civil War on musical
life; music and Puritanism
Restoration
Music at the court of Charles II and the Restoration theater; Restoration
masques and "semi-operas"; Matthew Locke; John Blow's Venus and
Adonis; Shakespearian adaptations: The Tempest (Dryden), The Fairy-
Queen (anon., 1692)
Purcell
Career of Henry Purcell; his theatrical music; his contribution to The
Fairy-Queen
Dido and Aeneas and the question of "English opera"
Unusual circumstances of an unusual work; its single documented
contemporary performance; analysis of its various stylistic strains
The making of a classic
Nineteenth-century revival of Dido and Aeneas and its re- (or mis-)
interpretation; the "usable past"
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Chapter 23: CLASS AND CLASSICISM
Naples
The Neapolitan conservatories; Teatro di Santo Bartolomeo and its
repertoire
Scarlatti
The career of Alessandro Scarlatti; his defining contributions to two
genres, cantata and opera seria; establishment of da capo form as
standard for both genres; siciliana rhythm; standardization of sinfonia
avanti l'opera ("Italian overture")
Neoclassicism
Cardinal Ottoboni and the Arcadian Academy; politics of affirmation
and its effect on librettos; Apostolo Zeno and Venetian opera reform
Metastasio
Career of Pietro Antonio Trapassi (known as Metastasio) as librettist;
the structure of the opera seria libretto; Metastasio's Artaserse and
Attilio Regolo as exemplars
Metastasio's musicians
The chief composers of the opera seria and their duties; the hegemony
of Italian music
The fortunes of Artaserse
Settings by Vinci (1730), Hasse (1730 and 1760) and Broschi (1734)
compared
Opera seria in (and as) practice
Extremes of virtuosity; Farinelli; hierarchy of values exalts performer
(and virtually everyone else involved) over composer
"Performance practice"
Relationship between score and performance; audience expectations
and behavior; dual legacy of opera seria from court and public opera of
preceding century and how it reflected social mixture; necessity of
taking social factors into account in evaluating any form of art
Chapter 24: THE ITALIAN CONCERTO STYLE AND THE RISE OF TONALITY-
DRIVEN FORM
Standardized genres and tonal practices
Career of Arcangelo Corelli; his church sonatas and concerti grossi;
sonate (and concerti) da camera; comparison of Corelli's work with
that of other composers (e.g., Johann Fux)
What, exactly, is "tonality"?
Harmonic contrast and progression; degree identification; the circle of
fifths; earliest theoretical and practical examples of the latter; analysis
of the "Pastorale ad libitum" from Corelli's Concerto Grosso, op. VI no.
8 ("Christmas Concerto")
The spread of "tonal form"
Analysis of works by Alessandro Marcello (Venice) and Purcell
(England)
The fugal style
Coordination of old fantasia or motet style with new tonal idiom to
create standard modern "fugal" procedures; illustration in work of
Purcell
Handel and "defamiliarization"
Analysis of fugal movement in G. F. Handel, Concerto Grosso, op. VI,
no. 7, to illustrate the implementing of conventions in the breach as well
as in the observance
Bach and "dramatized" tonality
Analysis of J. S. Bach's Toccata in F major for organ to illustrate the
planning of large time spans and the dramatic delaying of closure, two
tonal strategies that greatly enlarged the expressive potential of
instrumental music; melodic elaboration through "Fortspinnung" as
comparable form-building device
Vivaldi's five hundred
Career of Antonio Vivaldi; his contribution to the standardization of
formal and tonal procedures around 1700; analysis of several concertos
"Concerti madrigaleschi"
Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" (1725) and the crossing of descriptive (or
"imitative") music with the newly potent instrumental style;
mechanisms of musical representation; rationalistic (i.e., French)
objections to non-representational music ("Sonate, que me veux-tu?")
Chapter 25: CLASS OF 1685 (I)
Contexts and canons
Three composers born in 1685-J. S. Bach, G. F. Handel and Domenico
Scarlatti-long represented the foundation of the standard performing
repertory and consequently loomed as a sort of barrier between music
living and dead; the reasons for that
Careers and lifestyles
Careers of Bach and Handel viewed as antipodes:
cosmopolitanism and free enterprise vs. provincialism and
traditional constraint
Roots (domestic)
Bach's family heritage; his models (Böhm, Reincken, Buxtehude; later
Kuhnau and J. C. F. Fischer); his career as organist; the culmination of
his traditional affinities (but also a culmination of his experimental and
speculative tendencies) in The Well-Tempered Clavier; his chorale
preludes compared with Buxtehude's
Roots (imported)
Bach's assimilation of contemporary French and Italian styles and their
synthesis with the German legacy; his suites for keyboard, for stringed
instruments, and for orchestra (and their constituent dances) as fruits of
French influence
Bach's suites
Bach's mid-career sojourn at the court of Cöthen; the Clavier-Übung;
galanteries; analysis of the French Suite in G major (No. 5)
"Agrémens" and "Doubles"
Bach's keyboard style compared with François Couperin's; French
ornamentation (agrémens) and embellished repeats (doubles);
Couperin's Le Rossignol-en-amour (14th Ordre, no. 1) contrasted with
Corelli's Adagio from the violin sonata in D, op. V, no. 1, as published
"with Corelli's graces"; the slow movement from Bach's Concerto
nach Italiänischen Gusto from the Clavier-Übung illustrates his
assimilation of the Italian style alongside the French
Stylistic hybrids
Analysis of several Bach compositions-most closely, the opening
movement of the Orchestral Suite No. 3-into their Gallic and Italianate
components
The "Brandenburg" Concertos
The synthetic culmination; analysis of the fifth concerto (D major) to
show both the sources of the Bachian synthesis and the unpredictable
uniqueness of the result
"Obbligato" writing and/or arranging
Bach's unusual writing for harpsichord in ensembles as a symptom of
his exceptionally creative approach to the mixture of genres, and the
interesting problems it poses for listeners
What does it all mean?
Comparison of various hermeneutic readings of Bach's stylistic and
generic syntheses
Chapter 26: CLASS OF 1685 (II)
Handel on the Strand
His orchestral suites as royal entertainment; his London operas as
commercial fare; analysis of "Vivi, tiranno!" from Rodelinda (1725),
compared with opera seria arias examined in Chapter 23; commercial
failure of serious operas in late 1720s; the reasons for it; The Beggars'
Opera as symptom of the genre's decline
Lofty entertainments
Handel saves his English career by crossbreeding the Italian oratorio
with the English masque to produce a new style of oratorio in English;
rather than stories of noble self-sacrifice they embody Old Testament
narratives of civic heroism and national triumph; thus their appeal,
despite their ostensible sacred themes, to British nationalism (the most
developed nationalism of its day); analysis of the episode of the Ten
Plagues from Israel in Egypt (1739); the essentially humorous nature of
musical illustration and the problem that poses
Messiah
The only Handel oratorio to be peformed in consecrated spaces, and one
of only two on New Testament themes; its distinction as the oldest
musical composition to be in continuous performance since its
première; the status of its performance tradition(s)
"Borrowing"
The fine line between "parody" and plagiarism; did Handel cross it?
Debates about the originality of his work; the arguments of prosecutors
and defenders; comparison of choruses from Israel in Egypt with their
sources, and of Biblical choruses in Messiah with erotic Italian duet
cantatas on which they drew; the two versions of "Who May Abide"
from Messiah
Back to Bach: the cantatas
How Bach's church music adapts the forms and styles of secular
dramatic entertainment to the needs of a religious audience and a
reflective, resolutely anti-secular purpose; Erdmann Neumeister's
sacred texts
The old style
The older chorale-concerto style exemplified by Christ lag in
Todesbanden (BWV 4), first performed at Mühlhausen in 1707
The new style
Bach's Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (BWV 61),
composed in Weimar in 1714, his earliest setting of a Neumeister text.
Musical symbolism, musical idealism
Ein' feste Burg (BWV 80), composed in Leipzig for Reformation
Sunday in 1724 and later arranged by W. F. Bach for a larger orchestra,
examined for its symbolic use of the chorale; Bach's "Short but Most
Necessary Draft for a Well-Appointed Church Music" and debates
about his performance practice
What music is for
"Enlightened" vs. religious concepts of musical value; examples of
deliberate ugliness in Cantatas BWV 13, 101, 178; deliberate
subversion of performance values in BWV 179, 104
Bach's "testaments"
Passions according to St. John and St. Matthew; Mass in b minor
The Bach revival
The 19th-century rediscovery of Bach's vocal music and his
contrapuntal tours-de-force; the Goldberg Variations and the 14 canons
discovered in 1970s; The Musical Offering and Art of Fugue; the
relationship between the Bach revival and German nation-building;
Forkel's biography
Cursed questions
Problems of musical revivals; universalization of the culturally specific;
anti-Semitism of St. John Passion text and attempts to address the
question; responsibility of historians to acknowledge the dilemmas of
historiography
Scarlatti, at last
Domenico Scarlatti's career; his removal to a provincial location and his
concentration on a peripheral genre, the solo keyboard sonata; music
for aristocratic amusement and the beginnings of Enlightened
("culinary") esthetics; Scarlatti's piquanteries: acciaccatura, folkish
(Flamenco) flavoring; remote modulation; the double return:
eccentricity or prophecy?
Chapter 27: THE COMIC STYLE
You can't get there from here
Famous historiographical riddle of accounting for "transition" from the
"age of Bach and Handel" to the "age of Mozart and Haydn"; various
proposed solutions; Heartz's revolutionary hypothesis
The younger Bachs
Careers of J. S. Bach's most famous sons: Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl
Phillipp Emanuel, Johann Christian; examination of their music for
traits they did not learn at home, beginning with WF's Sonata in F for
harpsichord (Falck no. 6)
Sensibility
The Empfindsamer Stil; source in Klopstock's Odes as set by CPE
Bach; Bach's Essay on the True Art of Keyboard Instruments ; his
"Prussian" and "Württemberg" sonatas; the C-minor Fantasia from the
Essay and Gerstenberg's Hamlet recitative; Sturm und Drang
The London Bach
JC Bach's Sonata in D, op. V, no. 2 (later a model for Mozart);
galanterie; double return and "sonata form"; keyboard textures (e.g.,
"Alberti bass")
Sociability music
"Accompanied" keyboard sonatas: Mondonville, JC Bach, Carl
Friedrich Abel; "ingenious jesting with art"
"Nature"
The cult of the natural; what that really means; new comic opera genres
(dramma giocoso, opera buffa) turn out to be the source of all the
developments observed above; Baldassare Galuppi, who composed
both comic operas and keyboard sonatas, as transitional figure
Intermission plays
Comedy sandwiched between the acts of opere serie in the form of
intermezzi; origins in Venice, quick spread, export to France;
Orlandini's Il marito giocatore; Diderot's theory of the polyp
The "War of the Buffoons"
Pergolesi's La serva padrona; Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Letter on
French Music" and the ensuing press war; Rousseau's Le devin du
village; connections between musical style and political philosophy
Chapter 28: ENLIGHTENMENT AND REFORM
Novels sung on stage
Piccinni and his La buona figliuola; Carlo Goldoni as librettist; comédie
larmoyante; comic plot and musical form
Noble simplicity
Gluck and his Orfeo ed Euridice; Calzabigi as librettist; Winckelmann
and neoclassicism; the preface to Alceste; abandonment of the
continuo; the Che farò question; Boyé's L'expression musicale mise au
rang des chimères
Another querelle
The Gluck-Piccinni debate; its easy resolution; two sides of naturalism
What was Enlightenment?
The false dichotomy of reason and sentiment; Rousseau's Social
Contract; Kant's sensus communis and Paine's Common Sense; the
Encyclopédie; Kant's Was ist Aufklärung?; Frederick the Great and
Joseph II
Mozart
Mozart's career as prodigy and icon of genius; his early operas
Idomeneo
Mozart's first operatic masterpiece a quintessential opera seria in a
Gluckian neoclassical style
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
The singspiel; Turkish "affect"; Mozart's theory and practice of
dramatic portraiture; the relationship between convention and
innovation
The "Da Ponte" operas
Mozart's collaboration with the Vienna court poet Lorenzo de Ponte; Le
Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosí fan tutte
Late works
The operas of 1791: Die Zauberflöte, La clemenza di Tito; false
fortuitous contrast between naturalism with its free mixture of styles
and stiff traditionalism
Don Giovanni close up
The opera's intense appeal to later (romantic) generations; a study of its
"action" music-the Introduzione to Act I and the two finales-in light
of Da Ponte's description of its devices in his memoirs; the overture and
its reprise in the second finale
Music as a social mirror
Continuation of preceding discussion; special emphasis on the episode
with the three orchestras in the first finale; Allanbrook's theory of
rhythmic gesture; Mozart's women
Chapter 29: INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC LIFTS OFF
Party music goes public
The rise of the symphony in conjunction with the rise of "academies"
(public concerts); vagaries of the term; the early free-standing
symphony of the 1720s and 30s was evening entertainment music (cf.
divertimento), often performed out of doors
Concert life is born
Early concert series in London, Paris, Vienna and Milan; Giovanni
Battista Sammartini the earliest specialist in the concert symphony
genre
An army of generals
The Mannheim orchestra and its specialist composers (Stamitz,
Cannabich, et al.); special orchestral effects
The Bach sons as "symphonists"
JC Bach's overture to Lucio Silla published as Sinfonia in Bb, Op.
XVIII, no. 2; CPE Bach's sets of Orchester-Sinfonien (1776, 1780);
their formal structure
Haydn
His status as founder (that is, standardizer) of the "classical" symphony
The perfect career
From court chapel choir to near-starvation in Vienna to employment
with Count Morzin, finally engagement by the Hungarian princely
house of Eszterh zy;Haydn's earliest symphonies and their already-
distinctive form
The Esterh zy years
The musical establishment that Haydn oversaw; the steady demand for
his work, from "baryton trios" to operas; how he became "original"
Norms and deviations: creating musical meaning
A close look at Symphony No. 45 in f# minor ("Farewell"); its
relationship to its historical circumstances; its formal eccentricities and
their communicative power
Sign systems
Semiotics; Webster's interpretation of the "Farewell" Symphony;
Haydn's mature style (from 1780s); the "Russian" Quartets and later
sets
Anatomy of a joke
A close look at the Quartet in Eb major, Op. 33, no. 2 ("The Joke");
mechanisms of musical wit
The London tours
Haydn's unprecedented contracts with J. P. Salomon; his concert series
in London (1791-92, 1795) and the new style of symphony he created
for them
Addressing throngs
A close look at the Symphony No. 94 in G major ("Surprise"), first
performed in London on 23 March 1792; relationship between musical
style and rhetorical function in the first movement
Variation and development
The Symphony's famous slow movement and the lessons it teaches,
both technical and expressive
More surprises
The minuet movement and its relationship to the "German dance" or
Walzer; the finale and its relationship to the contredanse ("country
dance")
The culminating work
Symphony No. 104 ("London"); the implications of its monothematic
first movement and the economy of its thematische Arbeit
Chapter 30: THE COMPOSER'S VOICE
Art for art's sake?
Mozart's last three symphonies and the aura of personal expression
Psychoanalyzing music
A close look at the slow movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 39 in
Eb, K.543; the relationship of its dramatic tonal plan to psychoanalytical
ideas about repression; the reasons why such an interpretation is not
necessarily anachronistic
The "symphonic" concerto is born
Haydn's relatively undistinguished output of concertos; Mozart's far
greater activity in this area related to the shape of his career; violin
concertos his earliest wholly characteristic works; adaptation of the
symphonic style to the earlier ritornello form via the "double
exposition"
Mozart in the marketplace
His career in the 1780s as freelance musician in Vienna; his own
"academies"; the Piano Concerto in G major, K. 453 as formal
paradigm
Composing and performing
Mozart's cadenzas; the fluid general relationship between text and
performance in Mozart's time and how it differs from presentday
expectations
Performance as self-dramatization
A close look at the slow movement of K.453; possible hermeneutic
"readings" of its harmonic plan;
The tip of the iceberg
Mozart's keyboard fantasias and their relationship to unwritten
improvisation
Fantasia as metaphor
The infiltration of fantasia style into other genres: Mozart's
"Dissonance" Quartet, K.465; Haydn's "Representation of Chaos" in
The Creation
The coming of museum culture
The formation of the musical canon; "masterpiece culture"; musical
classics, "classical music"
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Chapter 31: THE FIRST ROMANTICS
The beautiful and the sublime
Definitions of romanticism; Rousseau's Confessions and the value of
difference; E. T. A. Hoffmann and the esthetics of the sublime; Burke's
definition of the sublime; Mme. de Staël on Haydn's Creation
Classic or Romantic?
Early definitions of the dichotomy (Toreinx, Gelbcke); the role of
nostalgia in enunciating notion of classicism
Beethoven and "Beethoven"
The role of Beethoven as a culture hero in promoting Romantic musical
ideals
Kampf und Sieg
Beethoven's career up to the onset of his deafness; the latter as
metaphor for the dichotomization of composing and performing and the
removal of the composer from "real time"; the moral power of the
Beethoven story and its embodiment in actual musical "narratives"
The Eroica
A close look at the first movement of Beethoven's Third Symphony and
the momentous stylistic transformation it proclaimed; Beethoven's
"middle period"
Crisis and reaction
Beethoven's career from the time of the Eroica to that of the Missa
solemnis viewed against the backdrop of European history in the
Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic periods
The "Ninth"
The choral finale of the Ninth Symphony as a stylistic, generic and
technical watershed; its critical reception
Inwardness
The late quartets; Innerlichkeit; the "Cavatina" movement from the
Quartet in Bb, op. 130; the "Heiliger Dankgesang" from the Quartet in
A minor, op. 132
Chapter 32: C MINOR MOODS
Devotion and derision
Resistance to Beethoven as a cultural indicator; the "C-minor" mood (or
scenario), in which C minor emblematically gives way to C major, as
Beethovenian paradigm, expressing the Kampf-und-Sieg narrative in a
variety of guises and nuances; its relationship to Haydn's
"Representation of Chaos" and the moment of Creation
Transgression
The Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 1, no. 3 as earliest embodiment of the
emblematic scenario; its reception by Haydn
Morti di Eroi
The status of C minor as tragic key in contemporary music theory; its
use by Beethoven to mourn the death of heroes in the second
movement of the Eroica Symphony and in the Overture to Coriolan, a
Trauerspiel by Collin, in which the final move to C major is thwarted;
the completed emblematic scenario expressed most triumphantly in the
Fifth Symphony; the latter's formal and orchestral innovations;
Hoffmann's famous analysis
Germination and growth
The unification of the whole Fifth Symphony by the use of a single
four-note "germinal motif "; organic theories of musical form
Letting go
Beethoven's preoccupation with fugal writing, beginning with Der
glorreiche Augenblick (1815); its interpretation in light of
contemnporary politics; the last piano sonata (Opus 111) as final
embodiment of the emblematic scenario, but with triumph replaced by
quiescence and resigned affirmation; the Kantian "mathematical
sublime" and the possible influence of Schopenhauer
The music century
The nineteenth century as a golden age for public music making and
public discourse about music; the status of music as the art toward
which the other arts aspired; composers as culture heros and political
activists; the universalization of German tastes and values in the guise
of "classical" values for music
Chapter 33: REAL WORLDS, AND BETTER ONES
Deeds of music
Beethoven's dramatic music; the application of the "emblematic
scenario" to an actual dramatic one in Fidelio
The dialectical antithesis
Rossini's career and achievement; his reputation as Beethoven's inverse
counterpart in his own time and since
The Code Rossini
Rossini's very detailed and standardized modus operandi; its
transformation all the components of operatic form beginning with the
overture; romantic resistance to Rossini expressed in terms of
spirituality vs. sensuality (Geist vs. Sinnlichkeit)
Imbroglio
Rossini's comic arias and ensembles compared with Paisiello's via their
competing treatments of Beaumarchais's Barber of Seville; the Act I
finale of Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri
Heart throbs
Rossini's serious operas; the scena ed aria; the primacy of the
cabaletta; "Di tanti palpiti" (from Tancredi) as paradigm; Stendhal's
biography; Odoyevsky's "Hoffmannesque" criticism
"Realism"
Literal vs. artistic realism; the naturalistic casting of operatic roles by
gender
Bel canto
The next generation: Bellini and Donizetti; bel canto as a term implying
far more than "fine singing"; Rossini's nostalgic definition; Bellini's
"Casta diva" (from Norma) as paradigm; Felice Romani's role; the task
of the librettist; opera "vs." drama?
Utopia
Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor as paradigm of operatic romanticism;
the Act II finale (including the sextet "Chi mi frena"); the Act III "mad
scene" and its ironies
Chapter 34: THE MUSIC TRANCE
The I and the We
Romantic notions of truth; the authenticity of individual consciousness;
the corresponding collective counterpart: national consciousness;
making self-representation the subject matter of art
Private music
Domestic music making and the media that served it; artistic self-
representation through musical performance: the example of John Field;
Romantic "character pieces"-Beethoven's bagatelles, Field's
nocturnes, Tomaschek's eclogues-contrasted with earlier types of
descriptive music based on external imitation; the flat submediant as
emblem of subjectivity
Altered consciousness
The effect of harmonic modulation on musical "temporality" (the sense
or quality of experienced time); Field's Nocturne no. 4 in A analyzed in
light of contemporary theories of trance states
Salon culture
Aristocratic or haute-bourgeois social gatherings as primary venue for
romantic musical expression; Danhauser's Liszt at the Piano (1840);
machismo as bourgeois compensation for cult of sensibility; petit-
embourgeoisement of the salon and its tainting with the
connotation of social and artistic degradation that it retains to this day
Schubert: a life in art
Schubert's career; the obscurity in which four-fifths of his huge output
languaished during his lifetime
Privatizing the public sphere
Analysis of the published fraction of Schubert's output in terms of its
social function and the nature of the contemporary music business;
"Schubertiades"; the "secret" investment of the larger forms of musical
composition with private, subjective content; the belated influence of
Schubert's sonatas and symphonies following their posthumous
publication
Crossing the edge
Harmonic analysis of some of Schubert's character pieces-
impromptus, moments musicaux-in terms of the encroachment of
chromatic domains (bIV, bII) upon the diatonic norm to symbolize the
onset of the music trance (or "aria time")
Only connect
The impingement of "aria time" on larger musical arguments; analysis
of passages from the "Great" C-major Symphony and the Piano Sonata
in Bb (D.960)
New cycles
The sequential extension of the flat submediant gives rise to circles of
major thirds as an alternative route to the circle of fifths; a similar
circle of minor thirds arises by analogy, related to the diminished-
seventh chord as the circle of major thirds is related to the augmented
triad; examples from Schubert's Mass in Eb major and his Quartet in G
major, D.887; emergence of the whole-tone scale from the circle of
major thirds illustrated by the Octet in F major for winds and strings;
emergence of a scale of alternating tones and semitones from the circle
of minor thirds illustrated by another passage from the G-major Quartet
B-minor moods
A close look at Schubert's Symphony no. 8 in B minor ("Unfinished")
Constructions of identity
The second movement of the "Unfinished" Symphony a locus classicus
of "promiscuous" third-relations; hermeneutic readings of such
relations offered as confirmation of theories (founded on biographical
documents) of Schubert's "deviant" sexuality; the controversies to
which such interpretations have given rise, and why
Chapter 35: VOLKSTÜMLICHKEIT
The lied is born
Origins of the romantic setting of lyric poetry in 18th-century Berlin; the
role of CPE Bach; bonding of "I" and "We" (cf. previous chapter):
Empfindsamkeit (personal expressivity) crossed with Volkstümlichkeit
(folksiness); C. G. Krause, Von der musikalischen Poesie; Oden mit
Melodien (1753) and Anacreontic verse
The discovery of the folk
J. G. Von Herder, Über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772); linguistic
particularism; folk and nation; the brothers Grimm; collection and
imitation of folklore; Kalevala (1835) compared with Song of Hiawatha
(1855); Stimmen der Völker (1779); Des Kanben Wunderhorn (1808);
neoprimitivism
Kultur
Kultur vs. "civilization"; concept of "lore"; "Prince Charming" values;
Was ist deutsch?
Lyrics and narratives
Imitation dance-songs with refrains; imitation ballads; examples of both
by Goethe (Heidenröslein, Erlkönig) set by J. F. Reichert, later by
Schubert; the ballad a non-German form disguised as German
expressing a modern romantic sensibility disguised as immemorial folk
wisdom
The lied grows up: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven
The "Second Berlin School"; C. F. Zelter; Haydn's lieder, including the
Kaiserhymne; Mozart's, including Das Veilchen; Beethoven's An die
ferne Geliebte and the early Leiderkreis (song cycle); the song cycle
compared with the novel
Schubert and romantic irony
Schubert the first major composer to cultivate the lied as a major genre;
major/minor mixture as ironic device; infecting the Volkstümlich with
the sublime (via bVI); "Der Müller und der Bach" from Die schöne
Müllerin as ironic paradigm; other song cycles and collections
(Winterreise, Schwanengesang)
Representations of consciousness
Schubert's setting of Goethe's Erlkönig; Gretchen am Spinnrade; Der
Doppelgänger; Heine's sensibility and Schubert's
Romantic nationalism
Loewe's setting of Erlkönig; its telling differences from Schubert's; the
Waldhorn and the "forest primeval"
The liturgy of nationhood
From volkstümliches Lied to Vaterlandslied; E. M. Arndt, Des
deutschen Vaterland; rebirth of choral music; Männerchöre; H. G.
Nägeli and the Liederkranz movement; choral festivals
The oratorio reborn
The new German oratorio as by-product of the Bach revival; the role of
Mendelssohn; Loewe introduces Bachian chorales into a Handelian
context; their new significance, as momentous as it was ironic
Mendelssohn and civic nationalism
Mendelssohn's Paulus; his career as civic musician in Germany and
later England; his status as pan-German and pan-Protestant culture hero
despite his Jewish birth; imitation of his style in the music of Reformed
Judaism as well; the high-point of liberal (Vormärz) nationalism
Nationalism takes a turn
Wagner's Das Judenthum in der Musik and the rise of ethnic
nationalism
Epilogue: Two prodigies
The careers of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn traced from similarly
auspicious beginnings to vastly contrasting ends; their non-contrasting
musical styles; the limits of civic emancipation
Chapter 36: NATIONS, STATES, AND PEOPLES
I. Peasants (Germany)
Mr. Natural
The changing significance of peasants and rustics in art: from
representatives of a class to representatives of the nation; the
Zauberoper-> Mozart's Zauberflöte-> Papageno
Der Freischütz
Carl Maria von Weber's career; his early operas; exoticism in Turandot;
his Freischütz draws whole cast from peasant class; that plus the
circumstances of its première type it for ever after as the answer to Was
ist deutsch?; the overture with its thematic précis of the opera's content
and its "aria" for four Waldhörner; the Wolf's Glen and its gallery of
apparitions; phantasmagoria
II. History (France)
Opera and revolution
Opera as re-enactment of national history; the special status of the Paris
Opera; Eugène Scribe as librettist; Auber's La muette de Portici as
prototypical grand opéra; its reception; its role in the 1830 revolution
Bourgeois kings
Louis-Philippe, the "citizen king"; "Americanism"; social tolerance in
the name of economic expansion; Halévy's La Juive; Meyerbeer's
career
Grandest of the grand
A close look at Act IV of Meyerbeer and Scribe's Les Huguenots
Vagaries of reception
Meyerbeer as self-made "modern" man and target of anti-Semitic
abuse; his enormous influence; the "realistic" depiction of ugliness;
"natural artifacts" in art; why "realistic" and "natural" always need
quotes
III. Peasants and history (Russia)
A newcomer to the tradition
Russian consumption, then production, and finally export of music in
the secular literate European tradition traced from its 18th-century
origins; early folklore collections; Italian court opera; Fomin;
Verstovsky; Volkstümlichkeit and narodnost'; Russian "official
nationalism"; Glinka's eclectic career; A Life for the Tsar: its source in
history; its peasant cast; opposition of Russian and Polish styles;
"Russian song raised to the level of tragedy"; the concluding dynastic
hymn and its foreshadowing
Chapter 37: VIRTUOSOS
Stimulus
Democratization of taste; musical entrepreneurship; itinerant virtuosi;
Paganini's career; his diabolical persona; his technical secrets; his
concerti and Caprices; Variations on Rossini's Di tanti palpiti
Response
Liszt's career; his encounter with Paganini; "La campanella" and the
"Paganini etudes"; Liszt's theory of the social role of artists;
Réminiscences de Don Juan
The concerto transformed
The changing relationship between soloist and orchestra traced from
Mozart through Beethoven and Mendelssohn to Litolff's four-
movement Concertos symphoniques; Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy;
Liszt arranges it as a concerto and models his own concerti on it;
thematische Verwandlung
A divided culture
Controversies about Liszt and sui generic form; textbooks of "classical"
form; optimists and pessimists: history as perpetual progressive
evolution vs. history as decline from golden age
Chapter 38: CRITICS
The public sphere
The marketplace of ideas; the press as mediator of public opinion;
expertise as a source of power; the rise of specialized music
journals and newspaper criticism; the two roles of the critic: public
adviser vs. public spokesman; 19th-century composer-critics
What is a philistine?
Tensions between artists and the bourgeois public; romantic idealism
in conflict with music business; Robert and Clara Schumann; the
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and the "Davidsbund"; performative vs.
informative criticism
Literary music
: Schumann and the novels of Jean Paul; Dichterliebe; irony and
ambiguity; the listener's role in the construction of meaning
How music poses questions
Transfer of irony and ambiguity to the instrumental medium;
"Warum?' (No. 3 in Shumann's Fantasiestücke, op. 12); the
Phantasie, op. 17
Anxiety and recoil
From Fantaisie to Concerto; anticipating "thematic transformation";
fear of madness
Instrumental drama
Berlioz's career; the Symphonie fantastique and its program; idée fixe;
a five-act drama?; orchestral extravagance
The limits of music
The reception of the Symphonie fantastique; revised theories of
musical imitation
Varieties of representation
The last movement of the Symphonie fantastique; the Dies irae and
its progeny
Discriminating romanticisms
Schumann's review of the Symphonie fantastique; "French" and
"German" models of romanticism
Chapter 39: SELF AND OTHER
Genius and Stranger
Chopin as exiled and offended nationalist; linguistic hierarchies;
Eastern European vernaculars become literatures
National or universal?
Why distinguish? Nationalism vs. patriotism; Chopin's eclecticism:
from Bach to bel canto
Or exotic?
Chopin's career; his withdrawal from public concerts; his reliance on
publication
The pinnacle of salon music
Chopin's output; his emblematic but contradictory status; social
snobbery and social stigma
The Chopinesque miniature
Preludes [to what?], op. 28; the A-minor Prelude and
deconstructionist criticism
Nationalism as a medium
The mazurka: in life, in history, in Chopin
Harmonic dissolution
Opus 17, no. 2 and the esthetic of the fragment; Chopin's
"incompletion" compared with Schumann's, Heller's and Liszt's
Playing "romantically"
Tempo rubato and other performance issues
The Chopinesque sublime
The Sonata in Bb minor
Sonata later on
Chopin's G-minor Ballade as formal synthesis
Nationalism as a message
The G-minor Ballade as narrative of nationhood
Ameerica joins in
The career of Louis Moreau Gottschalk; his "Louisiana trilogy"
Art and democracy
Gottschalk as "liminal" figure; backlash against "Americanism";
artistic excellence vs. egalitarian politics; "high" and "low" culture
Stereotyping the other: "orientalism"
Artistic representation of exotics for home consumption; the inverse of
nationalism? Musical orientalism from Lully through Mozart,
Beethoven and Weber into 19th-century; art and imperialism; French
orientalism and Napoleonic conquests; Félicien David, Bizet, Saint-
Saëns
Sex à la russe
Contiguous vs. overseas empire; Russian musical orientalism as self-
construction as well as other-construction; Russian musical orientalism
as a trope of eroticism: Glinka, Balakirev, Borodin, Rachmaninoff
The other in the self
Bizet's Carmen; Chaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet
Chapter 40: MIDCENTURY
Historicism
Hegel and neo-Hegelianism; the dialectic; Franz Brendel and his
History of Music in Italy, Germany and France
The New German School
The Allgemeiner deutscher Musikverein; Liszt at Weimar; Liszt's
activity as critic
The symphony later on
The symphonic poem; Les Préludes
The new madrigalism
Novel harmonic paths; "emancipation" of the diminished-seventh
chord and augmented triad; whole-tone and octatonic scales; Bagatelle
ohne Tonart
Art and truth
Utopian theorizing; artist as prophet; the Weltgenie; beauty vs. truth;
metaphysicians and realists
Art for art's sake
Hanslick and Vom musikalisch-Schönen
Chapter 41: SLAVS AS SUBJECTS AND CITIZENS
Progressive vs. popular
Smetana's career; his relationship to the New German School;
historical operas in Eastern Europe
The nationalist compact
Rejection of Volkstümlichkeit; the role of reception; Mà vlast
Fluidity
Smetana's Vltava (The Moldau); the source and fate of its main theme;
hostility toward Smetana in Russia
Folk and nation
Smetana's Libu$e: nationalism without folklore; nationalism for export
and for home consumption
How the acorn took root
Glinka's Kamarinskaya and Balakirev's first Overture on Russian
Themes
National becomes nationalist
Balakirev's second Overture and invented traditions of harmonization
The politics of interpretation
Balakirev's second Overture and its various programs
Chapter 42: DEEDS OF MUSIC MADE VISIBLE (CLASS OF 1813, I)
The problem
Wagner as a cultural emblem and a magnet for controversy
Art and revolution
Wagner's career to 1849; the operas through Lohengrin
The Artwork of the Future, modeled (as always) on the imagined past
Wagner's theoretical treatises; music drama; Gesamtkunstwerk;
Gemeinschaft; mythology and politics
From theory into practice: the Ring
Mythological sources; attempts to write Siegfried's Tod; the need for "a
past in music"
Form and content
The influence of Schopenhauer; "Combination and ramification of
Thematic Motives" (Leitmotives); bidirectional genesis; Stabreim;
neonationalism
The texture of tenseless time
Leitmotivic analysis of the Prologue to Götterdämmerung
The sea of harmony
Representation vs. presentation; articulation of drama through
fluctuations in harmonic tension; "local" vagary vs. "global" control;
harmonic analysis of the Götterdämmerung Prologue
Desire and how to channel it
Delayed closure and the stimulation of desire; music and ethos
revisited; the climax of the Götterdämmerung Prologue
The ultimate experience
Tristan und Isolde as limiting case; the "Tristan chord"; the Tristan
Prelude
How far can you stretch a dominant?
Wagner as master-and subverter?-of tonal harmony; Wagnerian
harmony compared with Lisztian; articulation of Tristan and Isolde's
drama through fluctuations in harmonic tension: the Prelude
recapitulated at the end of Act I
When resolution comes...
The Act II love duet recapitulated solo in Isolde's Act III
Transfiguration
The problem revisited
Wagner's rhetorical power and resistance to it; music as threat to the
social order; Wagner's nationalism; anti-Semitism and anti-Gallicism;
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; French Wagner reception;
depoliticization
Chapter 43: ARTIST, POLITICIAN, FARMER (CLASS OF 1813, II)
Spooked
Wagner's influence; the darkened theater; Italian anxiety as a stimulus
to nationalism
The galley years
Verdi's early career; tinta; the Risorgimento
The popular style
Nabucco, I Lombardi, Ernani
Tragicomedy
Verdi and Piave; Shakespeare as dramatic ideal; Rigoletto, Il Trovatore ,
La Traviata; new vocal types; tenori di forza
Opera as modern drama
Rigoletto, Act III; realism and dramatic irony; the decline of standard
forms
A job becomes a calling
Verdi's retirement; his "post-career": the Requiem, Otello; Boito as
librettist
Compression and expansion
The Otello libretto compared with Shakespeare's play; the Act I love
duet; its recapitulation in Act IV; Verdi revisits Wagner; Parsifal and
Falstaff
Comedization
Realism and the comic style; Dargomïzhsky and his Stone Guest;
declamation in Falstaff
Chapter 44: CUTTING THINGS DOWN TO SIZE
Going too far
Musorgsky's career; naturalistic declamation and librettoless operas;
Marriage
Art and autocracy
Art and criticism as secret sites of political debate; "Aesopian
language"; Pushkin's Boris Godunov and Musorgsky's
Stalemate and subversion
Musorgsky's radical ("empirical") harmony compared with Liszt's and
Wagner's
Crisis
Revision of Boris Godunov and problems of musical genre; "St.
Basil's" vs. "Kromy"
Codes
Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and Chaikovsky's; semiotic markers
Lyric drama
Gounod and the opéra lyrique; Ambroise Thomas, Jules Massenet;
Bizet's Carmen at the extremes of the "comic" style; esthetics and
ethics
Satyr plays
Operetta; Offenbach and Orpheé aux Enfers; Johann Strauss and Die
Fledermaus; Vienna waltzes
Operetta and its discontents
Gilbert and Sullivan; essential social conservatism of the genre;
Offenbach's and Sullivan's frustrated ambitions
Verismo
"Letting the facts speak for themselves"; "Cav & Pag"; voyeurism and
titillation
Shabby little shockers
Puccini as emblematic figure and focus of debate; his career; La
Bohème, Tosca; Madama Butterfly; "Italietta"; opera and moving
pictures
Chapter 45: THE RETURN OF THE SYMPHONY
The dry decades
The eclipse of the symphony by programmatic genres; "The Age of the
Epigones"?
Museum culture
The rise of permanent orchestras and concert subscriptions; new and
bigger concert halls; the hardening of the canon as an aspect of
commercialization; the "permanent collection" vs. the "permanent
revolution"
New paths
Brahms's career; Schumann's encomium; opposition to the New
German School
Three "Firsts"
Brahms's First Symphony becomes a piano concerto; his next First
Symphony becomes a serenade; the Symphony in C minor; motivic
saturation
Struggle (with whom?)
Brahms's First and Beethoven's Fifth; Brahms and Wagner, Brahms
and Liszt
A choral (and a nationalistic) interlude
Brahms and early music; Ein deutsches Requiem; Triumphlied
Inventing tradition
Variations for Orchestra on a Theme by Joseph Haydn and its Bachian
culmination
Victory through critique
The finale of Brahms's First and the finale of Beethoven's Ninth
Reconciliation and backlash
Brahms and Bülow; the "Three Bs" ; Wagner and Brahms
Brahminism
Brahms's chamber music; Theodor Billroth and cultural elitism
Developing variation
Brahms Quartet in C minor, op. 51, no. 1; "tinycraft"; demands on
listeners; rewards and satisfactions; justification of "difficult" art
Chapter 46: THE SYMPHONY GOES (INTER)NATIONAL
Symphony as sacrament
Bruckner's career; "Wagnerian" symphonism in the wake of
Beethoven's Ninth; Bruckner's Symphony No. 7, II (Adagio)
A Bohemian prescription for America
Dvor k's career; Symphony No. 9 in E minor, "From the New World";
its relationship to "The Song of Hiawatha"; Native American and
African-American strains
An American response
MacDowell's career; the "Boston School"; Amy Marcy Beach and her
"Gaelic" Symphony
War brings it to France
César Franck's career; the Société Nationale de Musique and ARS
GALLICA; Franck's Symphony in D minor and cyclic form; music as
moral instruction
Symphonist as virtuoso
Saint-Saëns and his "Organ" Symphony
The epic style
Russian symphonies; Borodin's career and his Symphony No. 2 in B
minor
Symphonies of Suffering
Chaikovsky's Fourth Symphony and the rhetoric of genre; his Sixth
Symphony as autobiography
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Chapter 47: REACHING (FOR) LIMITS
Modernism
Fin de siècle; simultaneous malaise and optimism; irony and self-
consciousness; high awareness of history; urbanity;
continuation or rejection of romanticism (or both?); the emancipated
Jew as modernist icon; the autonomy of art
Maximalism
Intensification of means toward accepted or traditional ends; sonorous
and temporal amplification; Weltanschauungsmusik
Mahler: maximalizing the symphony
Mahler's career as conductor and composer
Is there or isn't there? (Not even the composer knows for sure)
Mahler's Second Symphony and its program (if any); its amplification
of means and scope; expansion of Beethovenian form and expression
High tension composing
Stylistic maximalism; exceeding limits of dissonance
Half-steps over fifths
The tonal plan of the first movement
Lyrisches intermezzo
"Elephantiasis" of the second theme; the pastoral as antidote
Folklore for cityfolk
Mahler and Des Knaben Wunderhorn; the finale(s) of the Second
Symphony
What then?
The dilemma of maximalism: getting there; Mahler's Tenth Symphony
(Adagio)
Decadence
The recondite becomes commonplace; Huysmans's A rebours; Oscar
Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley; maximalism as compression: Richard
Strauss, Stimmungsbilder, op. 9; Schoenberg, Erwartung, op. 2, no. 1;
Jugendstil
Strauss: maximalizing opera
Strauss's career through Salome; madwomen as "idols of perversity";
musical representations of (polymorphous) perversity; semitonal
matrices
Consummation
Salome's dance and death; "polytonality"
Another madwoman
Elektra; its plot compared with the Greek prototype; the ending
compared with Also sprach Zarathustra
Hysteria
Misogyny in modernist art; its social and historical origins
Chapter 48: GETTING RID OF GLUE
Denaturing desire
French modernism defined in opposition to German; the Rameau
edition; discourse of clarté et lumière; Ortega y Gasset and
"dehumanization"; aestheticism; Wagner parodies by Fauré and
Chabrier; Satie's Sarabandes and le style ancien; his Trois
Gymnopédies; disguising the very new as the very old
Halfsteplessness
Debussy's career; his "Sarabande" from Pour le piano; "functional
consonance"; suppression of dominant chord and leading tone; "Voiles"
from Préludes, Book I: anhemitonic (whole-tone and pentatonic) scales
Impressionism
"Painterly" music; "Nuages" from Nocturnes pour orchestre;
hypostasis; "modality"; a new concept of "tone center"
Symbolism
Baudelaire as esthetician; synaesthesia; the occult; "correspondences"
as pre-modern ("magical") world-view; Mallarmé and Prélude à
l'après-midi d'un faune; Maeterlinck and Pelléas et Mélisande;
Debussy's opera
Mélodie
Origin of the term (as "art song") in Berlioz; Proust, Verlaine and
Fauré; Le Parfum impérissable; La bonne chanson
"Essentially" (and intolerantly) French
Fauré's Requiem and its reception; Dukas and Ariane et Barbe-bleu; a
masterpiece of French music?
The exoticized self
Ravel's career; his settings of folk songs; Deux melodies hebraïques;
"octatonic-diatonic interaction"
The sensual surface
Ravel and Henri de Régnier; Jeux d'eau
Russian fantasy
Rimsky-Korsakov's "fantastic" style; Sadko; Shéhérazade; Ravel's
maximalization of Rimsky's octatonic legacy (Rapsodie espagnol)
Female competition
Modernism and (or as) machismo; the Boulanger sisters and the Prix de
Rome; Lili Boulanger's Pie Jesu
Chapter 49: ARISTOCRATIC MAXIMALISM
A missing genre
Theatrical dance (ballet) from its 16th-century origins; tragédie lyrique
revisited; romantic impatience with ornament and diversion
Ballet d'action
Noverre; Angiolini and Gluck's Don Juan; Beethoven's Creatures of
Prometheus; creative hierarchy of ballet and its devaluation of music;
the Paris Tannhäuser fiasco; "specialist" (hack) composers; two French
exceptions: Adam (Giselle), Delibes (Coppélia); typical ballet plots
Off to Russia
The only autocratic state left in Europe offers ballet a late 19th-century
haven; Petipa and the Mariyinsky Theater; the distaste of the
intelligentsia; Rimsky-Korsakov's letter on ballet; Taneyev's critique of
Chaikovsky's Fourth Symphony
Chaikovsky's ballets
The one major native composer to tackle the genre in Russia; Swan
Lake; the Mariyinsky ballets: Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker; ballet-
féerie; the "tasty" as an esthetic category; composing with colors; the
celesta
Ballet finds its theorist
Alexandre Benois and Mir iskusstva ("The World of Art"); anti-literary
esthetics; anti-utilitarianism; the Silver Age and resurgent aristocratic
taste; ballet vs. opera
Back to France
Sergei Diaghilev and his "export" campaign; Paris seasons of 1907-9
Stravinsky
The first(and still the only) composer to achieve "major" status via
ballet; his early career; Firebird, a ballet-féerie synthesizing the
Chaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov legacies, takes Paris by storm; his
innovations in "magic" harmony
Petrushka
Collaboration with Benois; maximalization of Russian modernist
legacy; harmony and tonality in the second tableau ("Chez
Pétrouchka")
The Rite of Spring
Collaboration with Roerich; neo-primitivism; maximalization of
neonationalist legacy; new octatonic usages
The ne plus ultra
The "Danse sacrale" and its rhythmic-metric innovations
The reaction
Succès de scandale; biologism; Adorno's critique
Chapter 50: EXTINGUISHING THE "PETTY 'I'" (TRANSCENDENTALISM, I)
Maximalism reaches the max
The inexorable drive to aggregate harmonies and its cultural
significance
Rush-to-the-patent-office modernism
Berg's Altenberg Lieder; its scandalous première; its conventionalism
as word-painting; asocial historicism; requirements for historical
prestige
From expression to revelation
Scriabin's career; "mystical symbolism"; theurgy and theosophy; nexus
of whole-tonism and octatonicism; the tritone axis; harmonic invariance
Extinguishing the "I"
Vyacheslav Ivanov's interpretation of Scriabin; neutralization of the
dominant function as neutralization of desire
Approaching the ultimate
Scriabin's symphonies; The Divine Poem compared with the Tristan
Prelude; the whole-tone collection as extended dominant chord
Ecstasy, and after
Le Poème de l'extase as solipsistic expressive gesture; its structural
congruence with Tristan und Isolde; its characteristic harmony inverted
to become the "chord of Prometheus" ("mystic chord"); the pleroma;
harmonic quiescence
Atonality?
Toward a definition of (a)tonality; Vers la flame and the possibility of
closure without triads; the /0369/ circle
The final burst
The Mysterium; sketches for the Acte préalable and its aggregate chords
A maximalist against the tide
Scriabin's few Russian followers; Messiaen's career; Technique de mon
Langage musical
"The charm of impossibilities"
Invariance in two dimentions: modes of limited transposition and
nonretrogradable rhythms
So old it's new
Messiaen's innovations compared with the 14th-century ars nova;
Quatuor pour la fin du temps; birdsong
The summa summarum
Turangalîla-Symphonie; its algorithms produce aggregate chords
Chapter 51: CONTAINING MULTITUDES (TRANSCENDENTALISM, II)
Maximalism, American style
American transcendentalism and its relationship to German
romanticism; Emerson and Thoreau
Two American careers
Charles Ives and Horatio Parker; the intersection of their careers;
Parker's Hora novissima and Ives's The Celestial Country; Ives
renounces a musical career but continues to compose
Sexual-and stylistic-politics
Ives's business career and political convictions; Quartet No. 2; "Nov. 2,
1920"; "From 'Paracelsus'" ; epiphany form
Terms of reception
The "Concord" Sonata; Gilman's review; Three Places in New
England; backdating?
Manner and substance
The sources of Ives's esthetic; the "Fifth Symphony" cipher; William
Lyon Phelps
Nostalgia
"Putnam's Camp"; quotations; polyrhythm; anti-modernist maximalism
Reaching-and transcending-the limit
The "Universe" Symphony as unfinishable torso; its aggregate chords;
going further yet: microtonality; its two strains
Accepting boundaries
Ives's "Three Quarter-tone Pieces"; its tonal idiom; Franco-American
solidarity
More patent-office modernism
Juli n Carrillo; his Preludio a Cristobal Colón
Transcendentalism vs. Futurism
Ruth Crawford, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, Leo Ornstein
Chapter 52: INNER OCCURRENCES (TRANSCENDENTALISM, III)
Rejecting success
Schoenberg's career; Verklärte Nacht; Gurrelieder; burnt bridges
Expression becomes an "ism"
Maximalized romanticism; the cult of authenticity; nature vs. culture
Art and the unconscious
Dream worlds; paradox of private language
"Emancipation of dissonance"
Harmonielehre; relativity of consonance and dissonance; drawing
extreme conclusions
Theory and practice
Color chords; renunciation of voice-leading; composer as
lawbreaker/lawmaker
Atonality?
Consideration of the term; Schoenberg's preference for "pantonality";
clarifying the relationship among tonality, dissonance, and
chromaticism; undesirability of negative definitions
"Contextuality"
Musical ciphers; "Eschbeg" set; "the air of another planet"
Tonal or atonal?
The Eschbeg set in the String Quartet No. 2, op. 10: "Entrücking";
fiddling with the focus knob; appoggiaturas remain appoggiaturas
A little "set theory"
Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19, no. 1; "working with the tones of a
Motive"; generalization and comparison; the relationship between
analysis and composition: some caveats
Grundgestalt
Another paradox: brainy organization in the service of spontaneous
feeling; expression, responsibility, instinct; organicism
Psychological realism
Erwartung, op. 17; another madwoman; her relationship to those of
Strauss and Wagner; critical hyperbole; following one's own rules
Atonal triads
The harmonic texture of Erwartung; its relationship to Stravinsky and
Ives; the final harmony
Crossing the cusp
The progress of a motive from Schoenberg's Am Wegrand, op. 6, no. 6,
to Erwartung, op. 17
Musical space
Maximalizing the sublime; Schoenberg and Kandinsky; Seraphîta;
music as representation of the divine; incompatibility of voice-leading
rules and integration of musical space
"Brahminism" revisited
"Why Is Schoenberg's Music So Difficult to Understand?";
"Vorgefühle," op. 16, no. 1
Maxing out
Die Jakobsleiter; its aggregate chords
At the opposite extreme
Maximalizing brevity and concentration; the aggregate projected in
time; Schoenberg's Kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19; Webern's Bagatelles,
op. 9; his Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10
The ivory tower
The Society for Private Musical Performances; art and society: some
stubborn questions
EPILOGUE: HOW MYTHS BECOME HISTORY
Schoenberg's Brahms
Schoenberg's Brahms analyses as self-justification; "Brahms the
Progressive"
Ontogeny becomes phylogeny
Teleological historiography; Webern's The Path to the New Music; the
"collapse" of tonality; the "tendency of the material"; myth and
propaganda
"Motivicization" in practice
Webern's orchestration of the six-voice ricercar from Bach's Musical
Offering; revelation or revision?
Chapter 53: SOCIALLY VALIDATED MAXIMALISM
What is Hungarian?
The status of Hungary within the Austrian empire; Hungarian political
and cultural nationalism; Magyar nóta and le style hongrois; Mosonyi
and Erkel; Liszt and the Gypsies
A change of course
Bartók's early career; Kossuth; Kod ly, Bartók and peasant music;
Magyar népdalok; idealization and authenticity; "The Influence of
Peasant Music on Modern Music"; liberal nationalism
A precarious symbiosis
Folklore and modernism; pedagogy; Bartók's Bagatelles, op. 6;
inversional symmetry; implying harmonic goals; a new harmonically-
directed form
A bit of theory
George Perle's theory of sums; odd and even arrays
Symmetrical fugue; symmetrical sonata
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
A new tonal system?
Bartók's Fourth Quartet; reconciliation of diatonic folk idiom with
symmetrical arrays
Retreat?
The rediscovery (re-imposition?) of "sonata form"; loss of faith in
historical determinism; its relationship to social conscience
The oldest twentieth-century composer?
Jan óek's career; unalienated modernism; not Czech but Moravian;
Jenûfa; "speech tunelets"; influence of speech even on instrumental
music; Kat'a Kabanova and From the House of the Dead
Research vs. communication
Jan óek's rediscovery; popularity vs. prestige; Bartók and Jan óek
allied and opposed
Chapter 54: PATHOS IS BANNED
The "real" twentieth century begins
Stravinsky's surprising new "objective" style; the persistence of
"neoclassicism," marking the beginning of 20th-century music as
something esthetically distinct from 19th century
Pastiche as metaphor
Neoclassicism not to be confused with stylistic pastiche; the history of
the latter, from the 16th century; its culmination in Richard Strauss (Der
Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos); trousers roles; libertinage and
decadence; the 19th-century orchestral suite culminating in
Chaikovsky's Mozartiana
Cracking (jokes) under stress
Modernist irony; tensions within maximalist art, especially
expressionism; Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire; melodrama; self-
mockery; Ortega's evaluation of 19th-century art as a detour
Breaking with tradition
Rejection of the immediate past; T. E. Hulme; Jacques Rivière's and
Boris de Schloezer's Stravinsky reviews; Stravinsky's anti-romantic
polemics
The end of the "Long Nineteenth Century"
Artistic responses to the trauma of the "Great War"; rejection of
rhetorical excess
Vital versus geometrical
Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfühlung; T. E. Hulme's
definition of classicism; revolution in performance style; interpretation
vs. execution; Stravinsky as esthetic and ethical arbiter
Some more troubling politics
The rise of authoritarian mass politics; Ortega and fascism; elitism
And now the music
Stravinsky's Octet; art as fun and games; eigthteenh-century
mannerisms as social comment; "Back to Bach"; influence of American
popular music
Plus some famous words about it
"Some Ideas About My Octuor"; discourse of objectivity; war on the
violin; Stravinsky's piano music
Chapter 55: LOST-OR REJECTED-ILLUSIONS
Breaching the fourth wall
Rejection of "illusionist" theater; Pirandello; Prokofieff's career; the
"Classical Symphony"
Art as plaything
Prokofieff's Love for Three Oranges, after Gozzi via Meyerhold
A new attitude toward the "classics"?
Hostile parodies of Beethoven; Satie's Embryons deséchées
"How" vs. "What"
Berg's Wozzeck; its popularity with audiences; its reliance on ironic
distance; the "inventions" of Act III
Putting things "in quotes"
Invention über eine Tonart; hidden messages in Berg's Lyric Suite; the
"master array" of interval cycles
Irony and social reality
Art of the Weimar Republic: Neue Sachlichkeit, Zeitoper,
Gebrauchsmusik; Hindemith
"Americanism" and media technology
Krenek's Jonny spielt auf; Hindemith's Neues vom Tage
Music for political action
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht; epic theater; Verfremdung; Die
Dreigroschenoper
Righteous renunciation, or what?
Weill's career; Lehrstücke; Der Lindberghflug
New-morality plays
Eisler and Brecht, Die Massnahme; Kampflieder; Weill and Brecht, Der
Jasager
The death of opera?
Opera and the marketplace; its place taken by movies
From Vienna to Hollywood
Korngold's career; Das Wunder der Heliane; film score for Anthony
Adverse and his violin concerto
A new stile antico?
Romanticist survivals; Rachmaninoff , Medtner; from autonomous to
utilitarian; definitions of Kitsch; the "Warsaw Concerto"; the joke's on
whom?
Chapter 56: THE CULT OF THE COMMONPLACE
The Anti-Petrushka
Satie and Cocteau's Parade; anti-realism, magic realism, dream
realism-->surrealism; Dada; Debussy's Jeux
"Lifestyle modernism"
Poulenc's Les Biches; Milhaud's Le Train bleu; Auric's Les Matelots;
musique d'ameublement; penance: Satie's Vexations; Entr'acte and
Relâche
Nakedness
Le style dépouillé; Satie's Socrate; Poulenc's career; Cocardes
Gender bending
Apolinnaire's and Poulenc's Les mamelles de Tirésias; from the
extraordinary as commonplace to the commonplace as extroardinary
From subject to style: surrealist "classicism"
Polytonality; Milhaud's career; Saudades do Brasil; Chamber
Symphonies and Opéras-minutes; desacralizing art
Groups
Virgil Thomson and the "lost generation"; Les Six; Les mariés de la
Tour Eiffel
Finding oneself
Collage; Thomson and Stein's Capital, Capitals; Four Saints in Three
Acts
Chapter 57: IN SEARCH OF THE "REAL" AMERICA
Americans in Paris, Parisians in America
"Jazz" meets the Old World; as "un-boche" as could be; Sidney
Bechet's tours; Josephine Baker; Milhaud in Harlem: La Création du
monde; Ravel and blues; his prescription-remember Dvor k?-for
America
Transgression
American composers and "jazz"; Henry F. Gilbert, Charles Ives;
Copland's career; Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra;
Music for the Theatre; Copland's Piano Concerto and its reception; its
rejection tinged with anti-Semitism; Daniel Gregory Mason
Redemption
Gershwin's career; Tin Pan Alley; fixed forms; Rhapsody in Blue
"Sociostylistics"
Gershwin's contrasting reception; his naivety preferred to Copland's
sophistication; elevating the popular or degrading the elite?
The Great American Symphony
Music and the Great Depression; Roy Harris; his career and his legend;
the Third Symphony; the "Sibelius school"; Howard Hanson; the
American academic establishment: Schuman, Piston, Sessions, Mennin
Ferment on the left
Marc Blitzstein and The Cradle Will Rock; the New York Composers
Collective; Charles Seeger and Elie Siegmeister; Copland's Piano
Variations; "Into the Streets, May First"
"Twentieth-Century Americanism"
The Popular Front; political folksongs: Earl Robinson, Pete Seeger;
cowboy anthologies; Thomson's Symphony on a Hymn Tune; his WPA
film scores; Copland's "populist" style: The Second Hurricane, Music
for Radio
Prairie neonationalism
Copland's frontier ballets: Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Appalachian Spring;
the mythology of the American West; the wartime works: Fanfare for
the Common Man, A Lincoln Portrait; socialist realism? who is a real
American?
Chapter 58: IN SEARCH OF UTOPIA
Progress vs. restoration
Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex; Schoenberg's reaction to it; Stravinsky's
"anti-modernism"; Schoenberg's rebuttals in word and musical deed
Discovery or invention?
Schoenberg's role in the post-war reaction; creative block after Die
glückliche Hand
Nomos (the Law)
Wellesz and Hauer; Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique; "Walzer," op.
23, no. 5
Giving music an axiomatic basis
Automatic Grundgestalten; musical idealism; Schoenberg's Suite for
Piano, op. 25; peculiarities of its tone-row and their musical
consequences; invariance relationships as formal unifiers
Irony claims its due
Schoenbergian neoclassicism; Serenade, op. 24: "Sonett No. 217 von
Petrarch"; more puns and jokes
Back again to Bach
Embedding of the BACH cipher; Variations for Orchestra, op. 31;
nationalism or revanchism?
Consolidation
Combinatorial sets; twelve-tone harmony; Klavierstücke, op. 33
Spread
Berg's twelve-tone music: Lyric Suite and Violin Concerto; the
beginnings of twelve-tone theorizing
Clarification
Webern's twelve-tone compositions: Variations for piano, op. 27 and
symmetry in two dimensions; palindromic and self-inverting rows
Epitome
Webern's Symphony, op. 21, and its canons; the String Quartet, op. 28
and the BACH tetrachord; the Concerto, op. 24 and its constituent
trichords; SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS; self-analysis;
Alpine affinities
Chapter 59: MUSIC AND TOTALITARIAN SOCIETY
Mass politics
Post-imperial states; Soviet and fascist regimes; Casella's apologia for
Italian fascism; Stravinsky's politics
Music and music-making in the New Italy
Mussolini as music patron; Respighi and his Feste romane; Toscanini
revolutionizes orchestral performance
Degeneracy
Nazi arts policy; Entartete Musik
Youth culture
Orff's career; Carmina burana and its sequels; Volksgemeinschaft
Varieties of emigration
Uprooting of Jewish musicians; Bartók's and Stravinsky's emigrations;
the case of Hindemith; Mathis der Maler; Hindemith's rules of
composition and self-revisions
Shades of grey
Karl Amadeus Hartmann and "inner emigration"; Webern's political
sympathies; twelve-tone music in Nazi Germany
Socialist realism and the Soviet avant-garde
Soviet arts policy; Zhdanov and socialist realism; creative unions;
Prokofiev's Pas d'acier; ASM and RAPM; Asafyev's theory of
Intonatsiya
Protagonist or victim?
Shostakovich's career; musical satire; Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk
District; its denunciation in Pravda
Readings
Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony; its many contradictory interpretations
Chapter 60: STARTING FROM SCRATCH
A new age
Artistic responses to the atomic age; existentialism; scientific
triumphalism; Copland's Third Symphony and its squeamish revision
The cold war
NATO and the Warsaw Pact; Europe as armed camp; "mutually assured
destruction"
Denunciation and contrition
Zhdanovshchina; Shostakovich and Prokofieff disgraced; coerced
optimism
Breaking ranks
Stefan Wolpe's career; his Kampflieder and jazz; his postwar style and
bebop
Zero hour
Resurgence of twelve-tone music amid rubble of defeated Germany;
Leibowitz, Schönberg et son école; Adorno, Philosophie der neuen
Musik
Polarization
Boulez and "Schoenberg est mort"; postwar controversy about Bartók's
legacy; Webern as chosen forebear
Darmstadt
International Summer Courses for New Music; role of American army
of occupation in their founding; symbols of (post-fascist and anti-
Communist) creative freedom; emergence of a twelve-tone party
line; paradoxes of freedom and coercion
Fixations
Music of the"Darmstadt School"; Messiaen, Mode de valeurs et
d'intensités and hypostatization
"Total serialism"
Serial organization of all parameters; Boulez's Structures; Ligeti's
analysis; paradox of total conceptual control vs. perceptual randomness
Disquieting questions
Cult of difficulty as protective shield; existentialist dilemmas: freedom
and necessity, freedom and contingency
Disquieting answers
Krenek's Sestina; the composer's analysis; acceptance of meaningless
results as price of freedom; Cavell, "Music Discomposed" ; compulsion
neurosis; medieval isorhythm as chosen "precedent for modern
research"
Solace in ritual
Stockhausen's career; Kreuzspiel; its relative popularity-a lapse in
purity?
Poster boy
Ligeti's early career as composer-refugee; reassessment of Bartók in
musicological word and compositional deed; Apparitions and
Artikulation; Ligeti and Panufnik compared; Stockhausen, Klavierstück
XI; coporate sponsorship replaces government sponsorship at Darmstadt
Chapter 61: INDETERMINACY
Means and ends
Cage's career; "The Future of Music: Credo"; Imaginary Landscape
No. 1; percussion ensembles; prepared piano; Bacchanale; The Perilous
Night
Whose Liberation?
Cage and Asian philosophy; discovery of I Ching and "chance
operations" as compositional method; Music of Changes; Cage's
influence on Darmstadt School and subsequent reaction
Ne plus ultra (Going as far as you can go)
Cage and German romantic philosophy; "purposeful purposelessness";
"Lecture on Nothing"; Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (for twelve radios);
4'33"; extreme questions and extreme answers
Purification and its discontents
Cage revises his creative autobiography; "big science"; HPSCHD;
fiasco of Atlas Eclypticalis; indeterminate art as social practice
Permission
Cage as influence and "guru"; Xenakis and "stochastic" composition;
Pithoprakta
Music and politics revisited
Cage's message of liberation consistently misread; Christian Wolff and
"parliamentary participation"; Frederic Rzewski and political activism
Internalized conflict
Cornelius Cardew; the Scratch Orchestra; "Stockhausen Serves
Imperialism"
Conflicts denied
Luigi Nono and the Old Left; Happenings; Fluxus; Nam June Paik;
Charlotte Moorman's arrest; Richard Maxfield's suicide
New Notations
Earle Brown, Carlo Bussotti, Eric Salzman; "performative" notation
Preserving the sacrosanct
Morton Feldman; graph notation; Extensions series; Piece for 4 Pianos;
ever longer, ever more ritualized expressions; metamorphosis of avant-
garde into a reactionary faction
Chapter 62: THE APEX
Conversions
Hindemith and Shostakovich (even Poulenc) dabble in serialism;
Copland and Stravinsky embrace it; a reaction to "McCarthyism"?
"Mainstream" dodecaphony
Copland's Piano Quartet, Piano Fantasy, Connotations
The grand prize
Stravinsky as serialist; aftereffect of the Rake's Progress première; the
Cantata and Stravinsky's creative crisis; the role of Robert Craft; moral
evasions?
The path to the new/old music
Stravinsky's approach to twelve-tone technique; cyclic permutation and
"verticals"; harmonic symmetry regained
Requiem for a heavyweight
Requiem Canticles, Stravinsky's last major work; deployment of two
rows in quest of maximum symmetry
Academicism, American style
The "Princeton School" answers the "Darmstadt School"; Milton
Babbitt's career; his Ph.D. dissertation; Three Compositions for Piano
An integrated musical time/space
Music and set theory; temporal "inversion"; Babbitt's Composition for
Four Instruments
Full realization
Composition for Twelve Instruments; durational and dynamic series;
simultaneous completion of multiple aggregates
Another cold war
Europeans vs. Americans within the avant-garde; rationalism vs.
automatism; rejection of existentialist analogies; "self-infinitization"
and absolute truth
Logical positivism
Scientism; insistence on rational deductions from "observables"; the
Soviet Sputnik and American educational policy
The new patronage and its fruits
"Who Cares If You Listen?"; the Princeton Ph.D.; new anxieties
Elites and their discontents
Edward Cone's essays; artistic elitism and social elitism; the fate of
academic serialism
Life within the enclave
Subsidized journals and performance venues; The Group for
Contemporary Music; Perspectives of New Music; Babbitt's time-point
theory (or system)
But can you hear it?
Reaction to excessive theorizing: Westergaard, Perle, Berry, Benjamin
Ultimate realization or reductio ad absurdam?
Anti-theoretical reaction as reassertion of "oral" values; what price
literacy? what price truth?; electronic media and their equivocal
relationship to literate culture
Chapter 63: THE THIRD REVOLUTION
Postwar technology; tape recorders as recreative and creative tool.
An old dream come true
Music and electric technology from the beginning; Busoni; the
musicisti futuristi
Generating synthetic sounds
The termenvox (Theremin); Grainger's Free Music; Ondes Martenot;
trautonium
A maximalist out of season
Varèse's career; Ionisation; his lapse into obscurity in 1940s
"Real" vs. "pure"
Varèse returns to life via postwar electronic technology; musique
concrete; Schaeffer and Henry; Darmstadt elektronische Musik; the
Radio Cologne studio; Stockhausen's Studien; a new Franco-German
rivalry; mixed genre: Gesang der Jünglinge, Kontakte
The new technology spreads
Luening and Ussachevsky in New York; Berio in Milan; Thema:
Omaggio a Joyce; Pousseur's Scambi; Cage's Williams Mix, Fontana
Mix
The Big Science phase
The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center; the Mark II
synthesizer; Babbitt's Composition for Synthesizer; Vision and Prayer
and Philomel
A happy ending
Varèse's electronic music: Déserts, Poème electronique
Big questions reopened
A new relationship between composer and work; a new problem:
electronic music and social settings; integrating electronic media and
live performance: Davidovsky's Synchronisms
Reciprocity
Instrumental emulation of "electronic" sounds; Ligeti's Atmosphères
Renaissance or co-option?
Warsaw Autumn Festival and Polish avant-garde; Penderecki's
Threnody
Chapter 64: STANDOFF (I)
History or Society?
The essential question of modern art; Clement Greenberg, "Avant-
Garde and Kitsch"; opera vs. instrumental abstraction::Benjamin
Britten vs. Elliott Carter
Some facts and figures
Britten's operatic career compared with Menotti's
A modern hero
Britten's career to Peter Grimes
Social themes and leitmotives
"Social problematics"; internalization of social judgment; its musical
symbolization Peter Grimes
Allegory (but of what?)
The title character and his critical reception; exposure of homosexual
subtext by Philip Brett; its "universal" resonance
Exotic/erotic
Falsetto, boy soprano, and otherwise "marked" voices; twelve-tone
music as exoticism; orientalism adapted; Death in Venice and gamelan
music
To serve by challenging
Britten's War Requiem and Aspen acceptance speech; the social
responsibility of the artist
Chapter 65: STANDOFF (II)
Explain nothing
Critical controversy over Britten's War Requiem; Stravinsky's
denunciation; his encomium to Carter's Double Concerto; Carter's
program note for the latter
From populism to problem-solving: an American career
Carter's stylistic evolution Eight Études and a Fantasy; "Canaries" for
Four Timpani
Theory: the Time Screen
"Metrical" (recte: tempo) modulation; its eclectic sources; Carter's
perception of compositional "issues"; representation of existence as
temporal
Practice: the First Quartet
Multiple problem-solving: polyrhythmic layers, tempo modulations and
all-interval tetrachords
Reception
Succès d'estime; asocial values; prizes and prestige; the Congress for
Cultural Freedom; the Fromm Foundation; inverse proportionalism;
money, snobbery, politics
A wholly disinterested art?
The Second Quartet; solutions to new compositional problems;
intervallic characterization; the Third Quartet as ne plus ultra
At the pinnacle
Embattled modernism; reckless adulation; Symphony for Three
Orchestras exceeds the complexity of the Third Quartet; Andrew
Porter's review; the most purely asocial definition of musical value?;
unexpected disclosures; elite art as ideal embodiment (or subverter) of
democracy?; Charles Rosen and asocial historiography
Chapter 66: THE SIXTIES
What were they?
Social division through social transformation; drives for social equality;
sexual liberation; protests against an unpopular war; social violence;
assassinations; "generation gap"; youth affluence and youth culture
The music of youth
Economic independence of youth; the invention of "teenagers"; their
commercial exploitation; the resulting music a transforming social
force; from crooners to rockers; Elvis Presley; passage to adulthood:
from pop to "classical," jazz and "folk"
The British "invasion"
The Beatles as cultural watershed; their unprecedented boundary-
crossing appeal; the loyalty of their audience defies former rites of
passage
Defection
Acceptance of Beatles by high-brow critics as "artists"; their
assimilation of avant-garde techniques and attitudes; popular music as
embodiment of protest; Ned Rorem's endorsement: an invitation to
defect; popular music as permanent alternative, giving rise to permanent
changes in the patterns of musical consumption
Rock'n'roll becomes rock
Alternative media; serious criticism; high-tech values; upward
sociostylistic mobility returns; Tommy, The Who's "rock opera";
progressive rock; art rock; Berio weighs in; Joshua Rifkin's critique;
specialist journals; heavyweight intellectual criticism; permanent rock
critics hired by mainstream press; Rockwell's All American Music as
symptom of egalitarian consumption patterns
Fusion
Rock repercussions in all genres; infiltration of "folk"; Bob Dylan at the
Newport Folk Festival; jazz-rock fusion; Miles Davis's late-sixties
albums and their stormy critical reception
Integration without prejudice?
"Third Stream" music and the melting-pot ideal; Brown vs. Board of
Education and racial optimism; Gunther Schuller as jazz critic and
historian; John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet; what was different
about jazz-rock fusion
Radical chic
"Classical" adaptations of rock; Hans Werner Henze from The
Bassarids to Musen Siziliens; Berio's Sinfonia; its second movement
("O King"); the old question of radical content and elite media; Tom
Wolfe's caustic answer
Chapter 67: A HARMONIOUS AVANT-GARDE?
New sites of innovation
Minimalism as term and concept; minimalism as first full-scale
response to the impact of twentieth-century technology; miminalism (or
reductionism) first manifested in visual arts; Michael Nyman's
appreciation of Cornelius Cardew its first musical application?
Legendary beginnings
LaMonte Young's career; his String Trio
Music as spiritual discipline
Young's utopian turn; Theatre of Eternal Music
A contradiction in terms?
Terry Riley's career; tape-loop composition; In C as allegory of social
utopia; its reception; rejection of pitch organization as site of
innovation; a popular avant-garde?
"Classical" minimalism
Steve Reich adds the subtactile pulse to In C; his career; "horizontal"
transmission of musical style; "world music"; Come Out and the legend
of its "discovery"; impersonal process
Secrets of structure
Pendulum Music as limit case; "phase compositions" and re-
humanization; their unforeseen structural properties; Clapping Music
as paradigm; Four Organs and its reception
"All music is folk music"
Drumming; its effect on audiences; Reich's ideas compared with John
Blacking's (in How Musical is Man?)
A postmodernist masterwork?
Music for 18 Musicians as emblem; the end of the avant-garde?
"Crossover": Who's on top?
Philip Glass's career; his collaboration and falling-out with Reich; his
relationship to rock and disco
Disco at the Met
Disco as controversial movement within rock comparable to
minimalism within "classical" music; Glass and Wilson's Einstein on
the Beach; its sensational (and polarizing) reception at the Metropolitan
Opera House; minimalism and Madison Avenue
Americanization
Minimalism as first American "classical" style to exercise a decisive
influence abroad; European minimalists; Louis Andriessen
Closing the spiritual circle
Arvo Pärt's career through Tabula rasa; Gorecki's belated success;
John Tavener
Chapter 68: AFTER EVERYTHING
Postmodernism?
Confusion between progressive and conservative as symptom of shifting
ideological ground; postmodernism as shorthand; first signs of it in
architecture; dystopian rumblings
Its beginnings for music
Contrary conversions; George Rochberg's career; Hesse's Steppenwolf
and Rochberg's Music for the Magic Theater
Parenthesis on collage
Zimmermann; Brant; Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony
Collage as theater
George Crumb's career; Ancient Voices of Children; Peter Maxwell
Davies and Eight Songs for a Mad King; the imperturbability of the
modernist audience and the impossibility of shock; Maxwell Davies
drops out of the race
Apostasy
Rochberg's Third Quartet delivers a shock after all; unironic pastiche?;
challenging historicism; public and private reasons
Aesthetics of pastiche
The impossibility of originality; Eco's recaptured irony; protests from
the Old Left; defense from a new left
Accessibility
Neoromantic swerves: Ligeti, Penderecki; Del Tredici and the esthetics
of glut
Cognitive constraints?
The new linguistics and its aesthetic implications; Chomsky vs.
Skinner; Lerdahl and Jackendoff vs. Babbitt
Where to go from here?
Bio-psychological universals? Lerdahl's arguments; "neotonalists"
ascendant
One proposal
Lerdahl's First String Quartet and de-emancipated dissonance; "master-
narratives" lose their credibility
The end of Soviet music
The fall of the complementary orthodoxy; post-Stalin "thaw";
Volkonsky and Musica stricta; Denisov and the Kiev troika
Polystylistics
Schnittke's career; his First Symphony; semiotics of contrast; reading
messages in bottles; Volkov's Testimony
Chapter 69: MILLENNIUM'S END
Grand old men
Modernism continues alongside postmodernism; pluralism as constant;
Boulez and Carter in old age; Babbitt's counteroffensive
Terminal complexity
Finnissy and Ferneyhough's New Complexity; why it will never be
exceeded
"Big Science" eclipsed
IRCAM; Boulez's Répons; battles over hardware; Boulez's isolation
Twentieth-century "orality"
Composing in real time; potential eclipse of written media
Hobo origins
Harry Partch's career; "seduced into carpentry"; maverick
Gesamtkunstwerke; rote transmission; Revelation in the Courthouse
Park; fatal ambivalences
Imaginary folklore
Meredith Monk's career; oral composition and dissemination; Atlas
A feminine redoubt
"Performance art"; Laurie Anderson's career; O Superman
Music and computers
Personal computers revolutionize electronic music and bring real-time
composing within everyone's grasp
The elite phase
Max Mathews and Bell Telephone Laboratories; the digital-to-sound
transducer; Music from Mathematics demonstration disk; Charles
Dodge; Earth's Magnetic Field and Speech Songs
Spectralism
Instrumental emulation of computer-generated sounds; Risset, Grisey,
Murail
"Then along came MIDI!"
Paul Lansky and the hardware revolution of the 1980s; Musical
Instrument Digital Interface; samplers
First fruits
Reich's Different Trains; video operas; Oswald's "Plunderphonics"
Modernists in postmodernist clothing?
John Zorn as emblematic composer of the media age; ethical
controversies; reconciliation of aesthetic and social worlds?
A glimpse of the future?
Computer interface and its effects on musical style and musical
performance; the coming nonliterate age; possible relationship of
postliterate to preliterate composition; revival of non-analytical or
additive thought processes; nonliterate listening
Back to nature?
Concatenationism; Levinson's Music in the Moment and its attendant
debates; interactive sound installations
Paying the piper, calling the tune
New patterns of patronage and the resurgence of new music in
traditional concert and operatic categories
A new topicality
Peter Sellars, Alice Goodman, John Adams: Nixon in China, The Death
of Klinghoffer; renewed ethical debate
A new spirituality
Sellars/Adams, El Niño; Glass's Fifth Symphony; the multicultural
millennial Passions: Rihm, Golijov, Tan Dun, Gubaidulina; the sacred
as marketable; Handelian precedents; bourgeois Bohemians ("Bobos");
coexisting strands of literate musical composition at the end of the
second millennium
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
Music -- History and criticism.