Browsing by Author "Todd, R Larry"

Art music and folk music are all too often perceived as opposing concepts. The educated, elite practitioners of a notated art seem to have little in common with musically illiterate commoners who weave an oral tradition. However, these two modes have much to say to each other when brought together in dialogue. This dissertation traces the use of Swedish folk themes in nineteenth-century art music—the era of a widespread interest in folk culture that quickly enthralled much of Europe, thanks to Johann Gottfried von Herder’s many disciples such as the Brothers Grimm—and provides a framework through which to understand the musical expression of a culture that has thus far been rendered largely invisible to non-Swedish-speaking scholars.

Though Sweden’s modern sovereignty dates back to 1523, the kingdom’s boundaries shifted dramatically early in the 1800s, as the eastern territory of Finland was lost to Russia in 1809 and the western land of Norway became linked with Sweden via union in 1814. Correspondingly, the question of what it meant to be “Swedish” demanded reevaluation. One response was to transcribe, edit, and publish collections of traditional songs and instrumental tunes as supposed treasure troves of cultural history. These arrangements, which were filtered through musical notation and given newly composed harmonic accompaniments, say more about educated perceptions of folk music and expectations of acceptable performance than they do about actual folk performance practices. Through the medium of print, these “cleaned-up” songs found wide circulation in print and formed the basis for many later compositions. I take a genre-based approach and analyze stages of development of the use of folk melodies in piano-vocal arrangements, male choral settings, theatrical works, piano literature, and chamber and orchestral music.

The political scientist Benedict Anderson writes of “imagined communities,” in which people who never meet nevertheless imagine themselves as part of a single group due to a deep sense of innate comradeship. I argue that, in Sweden, shared knowledge of the most popular traditional songs, and the recognition of the use of these songs in other compositions, helped facilitate the “re-imagination” of the Swedish nation-community during a time when cultural and political allegiances were in flux.

Similar phenomena have been widely observed with respect to other European countries, but Swedish music has not yet been studied in equal depth, likely because there was no figurehead composer of national and international prominence. To date, no systematic investigation of compositions based on Swedish folksong has been carried out. This dissertation draws on extensive research of little-known archival sources, including manuscript and rare published scores, letters, and contemporary newspaper reviews. In addition, it contributes to the field by entering into dialogue with existing Swedish-language scholarship, which has hitherto been inaccessible to most scholars outside Scandinavia. With this dissertation, I join a scholarly community spanning both sides of the Atlantic.

Fanny Hensel wrote much of Felix Mendelssohn's music. Or so goes the popular misconception. It is true that Felix did publish six of his sister's Lieder under his own name, in his Op. 8 and Op. 9, but there is no evidence that anything else he published was actually by Fanny. The perpetuation of this idea is by no means new to our century; even during her lifetime, Fanny received letters alluding to the possibility that some of her music was masquerading as Felix's. But how could this supposition even be possible?

Complicating our reception of Hensel's works and our knowledge of her influence over him, and perpetuating our misconception (and perhaps hopes) that some of Felix's music was by Fanny was the unavailability of her music to the general public. For most of the twentieth century, she was known mostly by her eleven published opera (five of which were released posthumously). Before she was able to plan and accomplish any sort of systematic publication of her works, she died suddenly, at the age of 41, leaving behind upwards of 450 unrevised, unpublished works.

Clearly, we need to reconsider the term "Mendelssohnian," and bring Hensel to the foreground as an equal partner in forming the Mendelssohns' common style. I examine the roots of the "Mendelssohnian" style in their parallel musical educations, their shared enthusiasm for the music of Bach, and their simultaneous collision with Beethoven's music (and the diverse ways each responded to his influence). I explore in detail the relationship between Fanny, Felix, and her fiancé Wilhelm Hensel through the methodology of kinship studies, to contextualize what some have viewed as a quasi-incestuous sibling relationship within the norms for sibling communication in the nineteenth century. Finally, I discuss how deeply their separation after 1829 affected both Fanny and Felix, and how Fanny negotiated her changing life roles and ambitions as a composer and performer.

One work that Fanny never released, and, indeed, one work that has remained a mystery, is the Ostersonate (Easter Sonata). Believed lost since it was first mentioned in correspondence in 1829, the sonata resurfaced in the twentieth century, when it was recorded and attributed to Felix, and then disappeared again without a trace. In the absence of any identifiable manuscript, it had been impossible to definitively challenge this attribution. My research represents a major breakthrough: I traced the manuscript to a private owner and positively identified it as the work of Fanny Mendelssohn.

Lurking behind the popular misconception is a broader truth: Fanny Hensel can be heard in much of Felix Mendelssohn's music. In other words, what audiences have recognized as Felix Mendelssohn's music for nearly two hundred years would not have existed as such without the influence of Fanny Hensel. This idea in itself is hardly new, but by revising this line of reasoning, we see that it is equally possible that much of Fanny Hensel can be heard in Felix Mendelssohn's music. In the end, neither composer could have existed as we know them today without the other, and their shared musical style stands as a lasting testament to their shared identity as Mendelssohns.

Arnold Schoenberg’s theory of Klangfarbenmelodie (timbre-melody) is one of the most important yet least understood compositional innovations of the twentieth century. Critical reexaminations of his writings reveal that it is a textural principle, a way to combine the homophonic and polyphonic forms of presentation. In other words, Klangfarbenmelodie is another means to accomplish what Schoenberg eventually realized in composition with twelve tones—a way forward for new music.

In many respects, the twentieth century was the era of chromaphony: timbre-based music. In addition to chronicling the emancipation of timbre, this dissertation emancipates timbre in scholarly discourse by offering a new analytical method with the flexibility to be a powerful tool for all musical parameters—planal analysis. In conjunction with auditory scene analysis and music cognition, planal analysis enables new ways of studying musical elements by placing them in separate analytical planes.

Direct precedents of Klangfarbenmelodie can be traced to Gustav Mahler, whose music had a profound influence on Schoenberg. Clarity of musical line in Mahler’s massive orchestras was often accomplished through his refined control of timbre. In his music, we begin to see timbre treated as part of the thematic material—that is, timbre developed in similar ways as pitch content. While Mahler’s practice is still pitch-oriented, his functional orchestration represents a type of proto Klangfarbenmelodie.

Schoenberg’s “Farben,” the third of the Fünf Orchesterstücke, Op. 16 (1909), predates his discussion of Klangfarbenmelodie in Theory of Harmony. Nonetheless, this music is rightfully considered a seminal moment in the development of the technique. Through close analysis and sketch studies, timbral processes are revealed as part of the musical logic alongside pitch processes.

Anton Webern took up the mantle of Klangfarbenmelodie after Schoenberg’s early experiments with it. Contrary to popular reception, Schoenberg and Webern had similar approaches to this new way of composing music with timbre. In 1911, Webern elevated Schoenberg’s theoretical declaration of timbre’s independence to a fully realized practice in his compositions. Through analyses of Webern’s Opp. 9 and 10, this dissertation shows that Webern’s aphoristic works are governed by well-formed and logical timbral processes. His chromaphonic works of 1911 display fully formed Klangfarbenmelodie in both of its definitions: (1) a timbre-melody and (2) a textural style of presentation.

The evocative term ‘Brahmsnebel,’ appearing in German music criticism during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, aptly depicts the nebulous haze of composers throughout Europe who emulated Brahms’s compositional aesthetic in the years before and after his death. A pervasive, yet impalpable force by nature, Brahms’s influence has yet to be adequately probed in academic research. This dissertation, therefore, presents a series of case studies exploring a mix of representative and neglected composers from five regions: Austria (Webern), Hungary (Moór and Dohnányi), Italy (Martucci and Busoni), the UK (Stanford, Parry, and Smyth), and the United States (Amy Beach). By adopting a two-pronged historical and musical analysis approach, the questions answered concerning the Brahmsnebel include, what factors contributed to the spread of Brahms’s music throughout Europe and the Americas in the final quarter of the nineteenth century? How were aspects of Brahms’s musical language influential, if not, foundational to the creative output of composers operating beyond Austro-Germanic regions? What distinguishing characteristics of Brahms’s influence are present in a composer’s oeuvre? To chart the Brahmsnebel and its spatial movement, I rely on concert programs and archival materials to offer an empirically-supported narrative of Brahms’s performance history, of which conductors, performers, pedagogues, as well as institutions play direct roles. Similarly, these statistics vis-a-viz Brahms’s contemporaries offer the reader a barometer for comparison as judging his stature. As for individual composers and works reflecting Brahms’s influence, I highlight direct and indirect references to Brahms as a compositional model as a means to buttress the repertoire’s musical analysis. These references take the form of composers’ writings: textbooks, writings, diaries, memoirs, and reminiscences form a basis of these connections. My dissertation thus contributes to our understanding of Brahms’s historical positioning within the Western canon. On one hand, my research probes the nature and origins of how his stature was formed from a historical vantage point. On the other hand, discussions of influence, assimilation, and borrowing further ground our knowledge of Brahms’s stature, and by illuminating a number of neglected composers against the backdrop of Brahms, we come to recognize the transcultural effects of the Austro-German tradition among a variety of regions across the Western hemisphere. Finally, the selection of composers, specifically between 1875 and 1910, highlight an important transition within our music histories between the gap of late Romanticism of the nineteenth century and the early modernism of the twentieth.

Abstract

Exploring two main lines of inquiry, this dissertation investigates the style and aesthetic of the music of Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) and its references to composers such as Brahms, Liszt, Schumann, and Beethoven. First, rather than simply accepting the image of Joachim as the great nineteenth-century violinist and collaborator of Johannes Brahms who advocated the "canonization of the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms," I ask who Joachim was in light of his own compositions and literary circle. Especially significant was his "soul mate" Gisela von Arnim (daughter of Bettine von Arnim), from the second generation of two major literary "institutions" - the Grimm brothers and Arnim/Brentano, the Des Knaben Wunderhorn-collectors. Joachim and Gisela's literary role-play throws light on her function as his inspiration and muse. Second, each chapter investigates Joachim's works as "psychological music," the term he himself applied. Given that psychology was not yet an established academic discipline in the 1850s, Joachim's use of "psychological" is all the more intriguing.

Sources including archival letters, manuscripts, and Joachim's published correspondence, as well as his compositions from (or begun) in the 1850s, reveal that "psychological music" was both a compositional approach and an aesthetic. Extensively using ciphers, anagrams, song quotations, literary titles and allusions, and occasionally melodramatic elements, Joachim's compositional aesthetic conflicted with his "absolute" aesthetic as a violinist in the later 19th century.

Joachim's relatively strict use of form, his idiosyncratic use of "motivic transformation," and his expressive studies of literary/historical characters in his overtures separated him from Liszt. Furthermore, while Joachim navigated harmony in ways criticized by Louis Spohr and contemporary critics as "ear-tearing harshness" (1852), the composer maintained an almost consistently symmetrical ("four-square") syntax. Joachim's "psychological" aesthetic was typified by idiosyncratic, individual stylistic features like "trapped motives," captured by (sometimes obsessive) repetition, and he applied ciphers much more conspicuously than did Schumann. In the end, Joachim's "psychological music" displays three overarching features: first, extramusical programs from autobiographical and/or literary contexts; second, the implicit or explicit dedication of the works to Gisela von Arnim; and third, supporting correspondence marking the work as an "outlet" for Joachim's self-perceived, psychological inner turmoil.

Narrative symphonic music dominated much of Mahler's compositional output during his early career. His early symphonic cantata,Das klagende Lied (1880-1901), and the Wunderhorn Symphonies (Nos. 2-4, 1888-1901) incorporated instruments and voices in non-operatic settings, and relied in various ways on narrative elements to tell a story. And as a highly visible opera conductor, Mahler was of course familiar with narrative strategies in the context of the opera house. That said, Mahler's approach to narrative in his own symphonic music evolved over the course of his career. This dissertation explores that evolution by examining Das klagende Lied and the Eighth Symphony (1906) in terms of narrative and formal structure, and the broad significance they held for Mahler's compositional trajectory from 1880 to 1906.

I propose that the original, tripartite version of Das klagende Lied, divided into Waldmärchen, Spielmann, and Hochzeitsstück, betrays its origins in the genre of the Romantic symphonic cantata, typified in the German repertoire by a Märchen storyline and defining narrative goal. Using concepts of linear narratives to examine Mahler's poetry and music, I consider the cantata in terms of its narrative purpose, character, and formal structure. In the original version of Das klagende Lied, Mahler employed the technique of genderless, omniscient narration to present the storyline. By deleting Waldmärchen, in 1893, Mahler disrupted the narrative flow, leaving a bipartite composition that was less linear and one that offered an alternative to the generic structures of Romantic symphonic narratives that he had inherited as a composer. In addition to Waldmärchen's elimination, Mahler reconceived his use of omniscient narration by diffusing the narrative voice among various vocal parts.

As Mahler continued to revise Das klagende Lied, his career as a conductor flourished. He wrote the Wunderhorn Symphonies while making dramatic changes to Das klagende Lied. In his concerts, he programmed concert overtures, opera arias, and song cycles, but rarely did he program other 19th-century symphonic cantatas. In these years, he moved away from conventional genre, demonstrated in the vocal-orchestral efforts of the Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies.

Narrative themes of mortality and a child's vision of heaven pervade the texts of the Wunderhorn Symphonies, while in the meantime Mahler struggled with his own views of spirituality, society, and politics in fin-de-sièecle Europe. By its creation in 1906, the Eighth Symphony presents from the outset a starkly different narrative approach than Das klagende Lied and the Wunderhorn symphonies. Maurus' hymn Veni, creator spiritus positions the listener immediately in the heavenly realm, then, with Goethe's final scene from Faust II, the music plummets vertiginously to earth, focusing intimately on Faust's soul and its steady ascent back to heaven. The Eighth Symphony then becomes a journey narrative: how the soul itself returns to the ecclesiastical realm of Veni, creator spiritus. Faust travels up a high mountain, greeted along the way by saints, anchorites, angels, and Una poenitentium, who was formerly Gretchen, Faust's discarded mistress. Along with themes of vertical ascent and redemption, Mahler explores the eternal feminine in the Eighth Symphony, creating a complex view of sociopolitical spirituality that placed the female in the role of Redeemer.

This study not only explores the linear narrative structure of Das klagende Lied but also examines how Mahler modified conventional narrative throughout the creation of the Wunderhorn symphonies and finally constructed a vertical narrative - from heaven to earth and back again - in the Eighth Symphony.

Much of our understanding of Schoenberg and his music today is colored by early responses to his so-called free-atonal work from the first part of the twentieth century, especially in his birthplace, Vienna. This early, crucial reception history has been incredibly significant and subversive; the details of the personal and political motivations behind deeply negative or manically positive responses to Schoenberg's music have not been preserved with the same fidelity as the scandalous reactions themselves. We know that Schoenberg was feared, despised, lauded, and imitated early in his career, but much of the explanation as to why has been forgotten or overlooked. As a result our own reception of Schoenberg's music is built upon inherited fears, hopes, and insecurities that are now nearly a century old. In order to more fully approach these musical works and their composer it is necessary to attempt to separate his reputation from the sound of the music.

This dissertation, which studies Schoenberg's reception from 1908 through 1924 in the United States, Britain, and Austria and German through select works (Opp. 10, 15, 16, 17), contributes to the field by uncovering additional primary sources, including previously unknown performances and reviews. My work interacts with larger trends in musicology, including questioning the narrative of atonality, assessing the value of social and artistic movements (i.e. expressionism) as applied to music, and examining how the reception of a work is the combination of many factors - from the aural to the political - which intertwine to form our idea of a musical text. Ultimately, through a study based on close musical analysis employing elements of set-class theory, the methodology of Rezeptionsästhetik, and a focus on historical context, I present an interpretation in which Schoenberg's reception is strongly determined by early critical responses from Vienna, where conservative views of music's role in society combined with undercurrents of anti-Semitic thought to brand Schoenberg as mentally unstable and his music as socially detrimental.