In this part of the thesis, I present a technical analysis of each of the Boston and ASKO
concertos. What I do not do in these analyses is engage with the material as mediated social critique, wanting to keep a distance between technical and critical interpretation at first. I reserve the critical interpretation for Part 3: Second Reflection. In this sense, Part 2 is a “first reflection” that looks at the pieces without social or historical
interpretation but nonetheless with a critical reflection on analytical methodology. The
analyses are not full pitch analyses (although I do analyse some pitch relations). They are not attempts to account empirically for structural coherence or unity on a
background level (although I do suggest that large-scale processes unfold which give the pieces coherence). Nor are they comprehensive analyses in the sense of trying to capture the whole experience of the music through technical means. In this sense I heed Agawu’s warning discussed in Chapter 1 about retaining the provisional and the
speculative in the analytical process in an attempt to access, or at least not to ignore, what Adorno considers the “surplus” left after technical analysis, and what other have described as that aspect of the music that lies “just out of our reach” or with which we
play “catch-as-catch-can.”417
While my analyses have remained firmly rooted in the musical object, its materials, and their relationships, I have nevertheless tried to gain a critical understanding of the
systems of interpretation and narrative that we project onto the material findings. To be
more precise: in one simple sense, the polyrhythmic background structure of Carter’s Fourth Quartet (for example) is there as a fact, as much as the opening twelve-tone
chord of the Boston Concerto or the ASKO Concerto is there, without doubt. However,
it is the architectures of meaning that we build as we try to define these object and as we look further into the piece trying to describe the significance that chord or rhythm has
417 Agawu, “What Adorno Makes Possible for Music Analysis.” Quotes from Paddison, “Immanent
Critique or Musical Stocktaking?,” 217; and Marion C. Guck, “Analytical Fictions,” in Music/Ideology: resisting the aesthetic, ed. Adam Krims (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1998), 172. See also Edgar, “Adorno and Musical Analysis,” 448.
for the experience of the music which are of interest to me. As Agawu states
“[d]escription is never neutral, innocent or objective. For Adorno, the site of description
becomes the site of provocation.”418 This is very powerfully illustrated by Suzanne
Cusick in her “Feminist theory, music theory, and the mind/body problem,” where she convincingly shows that it is possible to construct almost any sort of narrative one likes
about a musical experience to different effect.419 Cusick models, in her search for the
source of the gender encoding that she experiences in Fanny Hensel’s Trio in D minor, op.11, that the challenge of analysis is to find an approach that captures the truest sense of the listener’s experience. Cusick demonstrates that this challenge becomes
complicated by the social situatedness of the analyst themselves, and requires constant reflection on the modes of knowledge that are being sought or produced. What we are left with, I propose, is a group of analyses that stand in a dynamic relationship to each other producing different types of understanding.
My analytical approach in this study makes use of a range of narratives and post-tonal analytical tools responding to the kind of musical process I am attempting to bring to light in my analysis. This approach acknowledges Adorno’s notion that “the sustained attempt to follow the movement of the object under discussion and to help it find
expression” involves using methods fitting for that object.420 To try and specify in more
detail how I approach the question of analytical methodology, I would like to make use
of the metaphor of a circle of analyses and I would like to categorise three nodal points
on this analytical circle—descriptive, interpretive, and critical—although without closing off the circle to understandings that sit in the interstices between the ones I’ve
chosen to represent, nor to others understanding which oppose these.421
Within the process of descriptive analysis I include a representation of the listening experience that arises through a reading, or in this case a close reading, of the musical object (score and performance). Both David Temperley and Mark DeBellis, in their respective explorations of the purpose and nature of music analysis, have made a distinction between an analysis that seeks to make a representation of what a listener
418 Agawu, “What Adorno Makes Possible for Music Analysis,” 53.
419 Suzanne G. Cusick, “Feminist theory, music theory, and the mind/body problem,” in Music/Ideology:
resisting the aesthetic, ed. Adam Krims (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1998).
420 Adorno, Sound Figures, 145. See discussion in Chapter 1.3.e. and also Wilson’s discusses of Adorno
and analytical methodology in “An Aesthetics of Past-Present Relations,” 23-24.
421 See Jim Samson’s wonderfully clear articulation of the notion of “categories”, their limits and
can hear or perceive in a piece of music, and an analysis that seeks to add information to
enhance or change the hearing of a piece of music.422 Temperley labels the former
“descriptive” and the latter “suggestive.” Both Temperly and DeBellis argue that the two are mutually exclusive. My use of the term descriptive differs to some extent. By
descriptive I mean a description of musical materials and their relationships informed by
my pre-analytical hearing but not exclusive to it. I believe that my (pre-analytical) hearing of the two Carter pieces analysed here forms the base on which I have built new
or other ways of hearing the piece while consulting the score.423 In other words, I started
with a representation of my listening experience —an experience that came prior to the analysis; then, I added to that experience, by way of my close reading of material features of the musical text aided by the score.
I further added to that experience by re-interpreting my material findings through other intellectual understandings—in this case, music aesthetics and philosophy, feminist
musicology, and historical insights into musical modernism.424 These bodies of
knowledge have helped me make sense of the musical findings beyond the experience of the individual piece. This process falls within what I’ve called interpretive analysis.
Within the process of interpretive analysis I include the knowledge we bring to bear on the creating of a narrative that helps to make sense of the material features that we have isolated in the initial process of descriptive analysis. To explore what “creating a narrative” might mean, I turn to feminist influenced scholars, starting again with Cusick’s illuminating essay mentioned above.
422 According to Temperley “… the objective of doing theory and analysis is to find and present new
ways of hearing pieces [“suggestive” approach], not to describe the way people hear pieces already [“descriptive” approach].” David Temperley, “The Question of Purpose in Music Theory: Description, Suggestion, and Explanation,” Current Musicology 66 (Spring, 1999): 70. Compare with DeBellis: “In particular, what I am interested in are cases in which the analysis is said to capture a way of hearing that was enjoyed prior to the production of, or encounter with, the analysis (a hearing which the analysis then articulates). To be sure, musical analysis commonly has other functions, such as that of suggesting new ways of hearing and thereby changing the ways we hear, or so it is usually asserted.” Mark DeBellis, “The Paradox of Musical Analysis,” Journal of Music Theory 43, no. 1 (Spring, 1999): 84.
423 Both authors would consider this to be “suggestive” analysis. While it is important to Temperley’s and
DeBellis’s logical reasoning that these are mutually exclusive processes, in practice I’m not sure that the lines are so clearly drawn between an analysis that describes what “everyone” hears and that which “adds” to that hearing, for reasons explored in the next two categories that I define. In other words, I’m not convinced there is an empirical basis for the division.
424 See for example Agawu’s discussion in relation to Adorno’s analysis: “…there are different kinds of
musical knowledge, and ... these are constituted in a complex variety of ways.” “Analyzing Music under the New Musicological Regime,” 298.
Cusick begins with a hearing of Fanny Hensel’s Trio in D minor, op.11, and briefly outlines analytical strategies she could drawn upon to help her explain “where this
work’s gender subtext (and real drama) lay.”425 She first imagines “a historical
argument exploring analogies” between instrumental roles in the piece and gender roles of the period. Moving on to find a strategy that would help explain more about the role
of gender in the formal tension of the piece, Cusick considers but rejects the fruitfulness
of a thematic reading of “sonata form as gendered discourse” (from feminist
musicologists Marcia Citron and Susan McClary) as well as a “pitch syntax” narrative, as these aspects of the piece did not seem particularly remarkable and thus not likely to be the locus of the subtext. She then engages positively with the ideas of gender
metaphors being performed in all types of discourse acts (from historian Joan Scott) as
well as gender itself being a performance (from philosopher Judith Butler), and arrives
at the idea of an analysis that “considered the movement’s tonal, thematic, and
relational scripts in tandem … from the situation of the piano’s role” leading to “a
narrative that moved me in just the way and just the places that the music moves me.”426
However, Cusick also ultimately rejects this line of investigation too: while it provides an explanation for her intuitions about gender in the piece, it excludes the physical bodily act of performance that motivated her in the first place to take up such a line of
investigation.427 Her final proposal is a speculation on the possible form of a feminist
analysis of the piece which takes the body (performance) rather than the mind (score) as its starting point. What is so important in this essay is that through the process of her search, Cusick demonstrates that the facts of the piece do not need to change with each analytical strategy; rather it is the types of knowledge used in the interpretation that give access to different understandings of the experience of these musical fact. In other words, the narrative of the musical experience need not be singular.
Marion Guck’s “Analytical fictions” touches on a related aspect of “narrative” namely the language itself. Guck argues that “language conveying a personal involvement with musical works pervades, indeed shapes, even the most technically oriented musical prose.” In it she illustrates how specific grammatical use of “technical, conventional,
and novel language” tells a “story of involvement” about the analyst.428 The analyst’s
425 Cusick, “Feminist theory, music theory, and the mind/body problem,” 42. 426 Ibid., 44.
427 Cusick goes on to outline how the denial of features of bodily performance in music also restricts
access to an understanding of gender metaphors in music. She also outlines questions to ask if wanting to develop a mind/body approach to music theory.
use of even commonplace ways of expressing analytical ideas about music can in fact attribute agency variably to the music, to words, to the analyst, the listener, and the composer. The resultant “fictional narrative” invites the reader into this world created by the analyst, to be convinced by the story that presumably tells us something new and worthwhile about the musical experience. Importantly, Guck shows:
that we can create many kinds of portrayals of involvement with musical works, which themselves are depicted as many different kinds of entities—some of them human representations, some not. More importantly, it is clear that there is no one, right story. Different individuals engage pieces in different ways; they therefore find different language congenial to that engagement.429
Guck acknowledges the cultural element determining some of this difference, and we also can trace a link back to Cusick to indicate that gender, race and other contextual factors obviously play into language choice. Furthermore, Guck observes that analysts do not necessarily hold to one vocabulary to tell a single narrative fiction about the music, rather as analysts we swap and change vocabularies and stories to find the one that best represents “our sense of the music before us, secure that these shifting stories
will be understood by our community of readers.”430 The reason Guck gives for this
need to roam about linguistically when writing about music is that:
Language more readily expresses what is concrete than what is immaterial. Shifts in musical vocabulary recognize that for all our erudition, evident in analytical texts, the musical work lies not under our finger, but just out of our reach. Our language about music is rightly secondhand, after the fact—and catch-as-catch-can. As such, it reflects what the interaction with music is like.431
It is interesting to reflect on this comment in relation to Adorno’s analytical prose, which in fact uses language in such a way as to try to access precisely that sense of understanding that escapes us, not through greater precision in rational language but through greater poetic language. Guck, by contrast, calls for analysts to be more explicit about their own stories of involvement:
I think that the practice of analysis would be improved if stories of involvement were less often subliminal, more often … explicitly stated, because music analysts are not simply communicating the musical facts by way of a neutral, transparent language.
429 Ibid. 430 Ibid., 173. 431 Ibid., 172.
We choose words, and thereby shape texts in particular ways in order to persuade our readers or listeners … to adopt our way of looking at things.432
Guck’s call for linguistic transparency and Adorno’s attempt to make language speak beyond the rational exemplify the tension within the difficult marriage of empirical and speculative analysis.
An outstanding example of analytical interpretation that holds firmly to empirical analysis while offering much in the way of speculative interpretation through the lens of
gender is Ellie Hisama’s book Gendering Musical Modernism.433 What is particularly
exemplary about Hisama’s work is the way she achieves great clarity in her prose about what are “technical” observations and what is a “narrative” interpretation of those observations, convincing us in the process of both her analytical arguments and her own story of “involvement” with the music. The essays range across a number of pieces by Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer and Miriam Gideon. Hisama uses different strategies to
present “analyses that are inflected by historical and social context.”434 Informing all her
analyses is biographical information gained from various sources about the situation of these women as women and as women who composed within the social reality of their historical period. Importantly, this information motivates Hisama’s choice of analytical tools for her close readings, and specifically her particular “attention to various aspects
of contour” as an apt way to access the gendered structures she hears in the music.435
The narratives that she weaves about the relationships of musical voices, melodies, arrangements of the two hands of the piano player, and part arrangements all tell a story about how the musical materials are organised in ways that can be read as
“intentionlessly” reflecting gender concerns facing these three women.436 Hisama’s
analyses model a way of allowing the music to remain “self-contained” while
simultanenously locating within itself the traces of the social and it is in this process that Hisama’s analyses also flow over into my category of critical analysis.
To summarize so far, my category of interpretive analysis can be understood as a process of translating the musical experience from an internal mental experience to one that can be shared with others through the “situated knowledge” that we choose to
432 Ibid., 174.
433 Ellie M. Hisama, Gendering Music Modernism: the music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and
Miriam Gideon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
434 Ibid., 9. 435 Ibid., 8. 436 Ibid., 10.
engage as metaphor for our musical knowledge of the piece, gained in turn from listening as well as from identifying material features (from the score) salient to that listening. Descriptive analysis as a prior step helps select the concrete material features
of the music for interpretation.437 However, in my own experience there is a movement
back and forth between these two processes, and as such I don’t conceive of them as fully discrete steps but rotatable categories on the analytical circle. Similarly, as already indicated, interpretive analysis flows over into the process of critical analysis.
My category of critical analysis constitutes a reflection on method, materials and subjects. In this present study, critical analysis is reserved in its fullest for Part 3. It is here that the foregoing descriptive, interpretive analysis is reconsidered in the light of the notion of mediation—how musical content might mediate the social in the
organisation of the materials themselves. The work of Martin Scherzinger and of Martin Brody discussed in Chapter 1 represent some of the finest examples of critical analysis in the way that they engage with existing stories of the music (by Schoenberg and Webern and by Wolpe respectively) and re-tell them through the dialectical lens of mediated social content, imbuing the music with a critical potential that other accounts
have denied.438
In Chapter 7: A critical interpretation of the Boston and ASKO concertos I present a
“second reflection” along the lines that Paddison describes in his essay “Music and Social Relations: Towards a Theory of Mediation.” Here Paddison theorizes about musical mediation of the social on three levels: the level of a dialectic between musical form and content, between historical materials and their social context, and between
music as autonomous artefact and as commodity.439 It is important to note however, that
in its use of metaphor these notions of mediation are equally “interpretive” in the sense of my second category on the analytical circle. The over-aching metaphor in this case is
one of dialectical relationships which may also be seen as a “story of involvement”
437 The relationship between my descriptive and interpretive categories is captured by Samson in the
following observation about the changing direction of analysis over the latter part of the twentieth century: “Analytical insights increasingly took their place within a much larger ‘implicative complex,’