Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-sh8wx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-20T05:21:16.801Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Theorist's Sense of History: Concepts of Contemporaneity in Composition and Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Arnold Whittall
Arnold Whittall*
Affiliation:
King's College, Lodon
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

My title is as much a play on words, or even a choreographic flourish, as the statement of a thesis. After all, to say that theorists have, or should have, a sense of history is rather like saying that composers, singers or instrumentalists tend on the whole to be able to read music. Having a sense of history is not just a necessary preliminary to adequate professional attainment in all branches of musicology: it is what being a theorist, and an analyst, is all about. And that is just as true for the theorist as practitioner - as pedagogue promoting the perception of structures - as it is for the theorist who is primarily an historian of theory. For the theorist, having a sense of history means knowing something of the past, and being able to interpret that ‘something’ in ways which may be judged uncontroversially orthodox or wildly idiosyncratic, but which in the end enable theorists to make worthwhile contributions to the state of the discipline in their own time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 112 , Issue 1 , 1987 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For Glarean on Josquin see the extract from the Dodecachordon in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, 2. The Renaissance (London, 1981), 29–37 For the Koch quotation see Koch, Heinrich C, Introductory Essay on Composition, ‘The Mechanical Rules of Melody’, sections 3 and 4, translated with an Introduction by Nancy Kovaleff Baker (New Haven and London, 1983), 197Google Scholar

2 For example, Burkholder, J. Peter, ‘Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music’, 19th Century Music, 8 (1984), 75–83Google Scholar

3 Webern, Anton, The Path to the New Music, ed. Willi Reich, trans. Leo Black (London, 1975), 54.Google Scholar

4 Stravinsky, Igor and Craft, Robert, Themes and Conclusions (London, 1972), 32, see also Dialogues (London, 1982), 129Google Scholar

5 Ouellette, Fernand, Edgard Varèse, trans Derek Coltman (London, 1973), 72Google Scholar

6 From a programme note by the composer, reprinted in part in The Writings of Elliott Carter, compiled, edited and annotated by Else and Kurt Stone (London, 1977), 298Google Scholar

7 Boulez, Pierre, Conversations with Céleslin Deliège (London, 1976), 25Google Scholar

8 Schiff, David, The Music of Elliott Carter (London, 1983), 13 ‘Elliott Carter makes music out of simultaneous oppositions’Google Scholar

9 See Schenker's ‘Resumption of Urlime Considerations’ in S. Kalib, ‘Thirteen Essays from the Three Yearbooks, “Das Meisterwerk in der Musik” An Annotated Translation’ (dissertation, Northwestern University, 1973), n, 212–14Google Scholar

10 Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues, 27Google Scholar

11 For example, Phipps, Graham, ‘Tonality in Webern's Cantata I’, Music Analysis, 3 (1984), 125–58Google Scholar

12 See Krasner, Louis, ‘The Ongins of the Alban Berg Violin Concerto’, and Constantin Floros, ‘Die Skizzen zum Violinkonzert von Alban Berg’, Alban Berg Studien II (Vienna, 1981), 107–17, 118–35Google Scholar

13 Jarman, Douglas, ‘The Secret Programme of Berg's Violin Concerto’, Musical Times, 124 (1983), 218–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 From ‘What is Atonality?’, a radio interview with Alban Berg of 23 April 1930, reprinted in Nicolas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900 (London, 1938), 565–71Google Scholar

15 See Schoenberg, Berg, Webern The String Quartets A Documentary Study, ed Ursula von Rauchhaupt (Hamburg, 1971), 90Google Scholar

16 See Charlton, David, ‘The Tragic Seascape Sapho and its 12-note Chord’, Jahrbuch für Opernforschung (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 46–72Google Scholar

17 Reprinted in Paul Griffiths, Peter Maxwell Davies (London, 1981), 171–4Google Scholar

18 Hall, Michael, Harrion Birtwistle (London, 1984), 98–103.Google Scholar

19 Henry James. English Hours (London, 1984), 32Google Scholar

20 Carter's programme note (see note 6 above)Google Scholar

21 Babbitt, Milton, ‘Remarks on the Recent Stravinsky’, Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed Benjamin Boretz and Edward T Cone (Princeton, 1968), 184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar