think denk

Like millions of other Americans, I find myself celebrating Christmas morning by immersing myself in the form and analysis musings of students at DePauw University. Only an insane man with a Venti drip in his hand (please, people: not “VENTAY,” “VENTEE”!) could possibly survive these multiple, deeply redundant analyses: except that the students seem to try to put a little bit of themselves in there, to be Cheeky with their Theory. I suppose there is no other defense.

To be fair, I don’t think this blog was meant to be read “for pleasure.”

For you non-music types: Form & Analysis is a REQUIRED COURSE for all “serious” music students at the Conservatory, something like Anatomy for medical students, except for the fact that the skeletons of music theory have almost no basis in any kind of observable reality. (I said “almost”! But I “almost” deleted it.) So while it may be useful for a doctor, say, to know the heart has a certain number of ventricles, musicians find themselves wondering why they need to know whether a section of a particular Chopin Mazurka is “terminative” or “developmental.” I am sounding terribly cynical on this Christmas morning; it is hard, I admit, to think of the baby Jesus as a music theorist, promising perfect authentic cadences in exchange for our sins (although in a way that is exactly what happens). And as you know I am actually a HUGE FAN of musical analysis, and I wouldn’t have brought up this mean-spirited topic at all except for one student’s little acts of revolution, which made me smile so very, very much.

Self-named “Snoop,” presumably one of the students, analyzes the Chopin Mazurka in e minor, Op. 17 #2. He begins in the traditional manner, carving up the pie heartlessly into pieces:

The piece is ternary - mm. 1-24 are the first A section, mm. 25-52 are the B section and the second A section is mm. 53 to the end.

Yawn. I was at the point of scrolling to the next analysis (why, oh why, on Christmas morning was I reading these at all?) But the beginning of the next paragraph arrested my scroll:

The first section is expository, like the beginning of most pieces.

I love these moments, when students bump themselves against the fairly obvious idiocies of music theoretical jargon; they bang their heads and wonder “is that all there is to say, other than putting it in fancier words?” Perhaps they don’t realize that at that very moment of pain and frustration they should scratch their bruised heads and look around; they are lost in the vicinity of truth. What tickles me about this little sentence is that I can’t quite tell whether the student is being sarcastic or not. I like to assume he/she is. You see, a great object of Form and Analysis is the reduction of vocabulary. Instead of whatever words the student comes up with, the textbook comes up with a limited set of words, which can be used “objectively,” so that the wishy-washy notions of the student can be measured. A great premium seems to be placed on making these words as heartless and scientific-sounding as possible, so that the student can experience the maximum disillusionment and pain in reducing his/her musical experience into them. Section B: is it “expository” or “developmental”? It’s gotta be one or the other. Choose, now!!! I can see this battle at work in the following passage from Snoop’s analysis:

In that sense, the B section could be considered to have developmental function - it starts off with previous motivic material, or at least a melody that is very similar. However, the second part of the B section (mm. 39-52) seems more like a transitional section, in that there’s a lot of agitation and harmonic activity. Basically, it’s a stretched-out, undulating passage that goes through lots of chords and eventually ends on the dominant, which leads into the return of the A section.

Snoop is trying to choose between “developmental” and “transitional” to describe this B section, both of which terms presumably are elucidated in the text. But between these generic terms, poor Snoop can’t help using more evocative ones: “agitation,” “stretched-out,” “undulating.” Danger, danger! Luckily, he is able to bring this veering ship to shore, with words like “dominant” and “A section.” A term like “harmonic activity” straddles this divide interestingly: it suggests something intriguing, some kind of unusual event; and yet it describes it in the most nonspecific possible manner …

Finally, Snoop delivers the coup-de-grâce:

The second A section has a terminative function - the extension to the final cadence reinforces the tonal center, which is the primary attribute of terminative sections, according to the text.

“According to the text”!!!!!! Fantastic, Snoop. Now that’s good stuff. What is this mysterious “text” to which the student refers? Presumably a book wherein “terminative sections” are defined. I’m sure all you readers, even the ones who are bored stiff by this whole post, can see how asinine it is to use a term like “terminative.” (Not just to use it, but to force it as a generic term for every analysis.) The connotations and associations are horrendous (termination, terminator, California, death, term papers, term limits, bringing to term, terminology, oy); and like expository it could be seen as just a fancier, uglier, meaner way of saying “ending.” And how tersely Snoop draws our attention to the reductive nature of this unspecified text! Reinforcing the tonal center is the “primary attribute” of terminative sections? Oh, REALLY? Magnificent, transcendent codas pile themselves into my mind one after the other; the endings of Beethoven Sonatas, the “Waldstein” Sonata, Op. 110, the final passage of the first movement of the Schumann Fantasy… and on and on. Life-changing conclusions which, while ending in the same old home key, leave everything else (connotation, meaning, affect) completely altered. But wait! this is not Music Theory.

“According to the text.” But not, perhaps, according to Snoop. Snoop delivers his skepticism in a little verbal pill, at once deferential and destructive, a bomb cleverly written in the very language of conformity (”According to Hoyle,” the gospel according to X, etc.) As I write this, I begin to wonder if Snoop intended this double meaning at all, whether I might be over-reaching. Haha. The muffled, affirmative snickers of blogreaders reach me even here. I have even gone so far as to muse on Snoop’s signature, “word out”: is it really a commentary on the nature of words, as applied to music? Really: kidding.

This post would seem to be an attack on Music Theory, but it most definitely isn’t. When I posted, a little bit ago, about the condescending tone of a particular concert review, I haplessly tapped into some deep-seated anti-critic sentiment, which I perused in the Comments section. Wow! Let me be clear: I disassociate myself from those comments (critics as frustrated performers, etc.) I feel sure that there will be some anti-theory people out there too, who may jump on my bitter bandwagon. But I want to preach a more positive Yuletide gospel. I do not feel that “talking about music is like dancing about architecture;” actually, I have always detested that quote, which I consider to be patently untrue. Moreover, I think dancing about architecture would be a very interesting thing to do. Let’s imagine the baby Jesus, analyzing the song of the Magi. I think he would love and tolerate talk of cadences, even Schenkerian diagrams. Why do I imagine him treating theorists as he did Mary Magdelene? This suggests a conception of theory as a particularly unsexy form of prostitution. No, wait, I can do better: the expectancy of the Christmas ritual, the presents wrapped under the tree, the smell of the tree, the candles, the late night, the early morning awakening, stumbling out to the family room in your pajamas, getting ready to convert the whole beautiful waiting thing into a storm of crumpled paper. Sometimes it seems Theory wants you to unwrap the gift, but not to see what’s inside. It is cold-hearted: it wants you to “understand” expectancy. But I assure you, Theory for all its jargon wants you to receive music’s gift too; to receive with gratitude the ingenuity of the composer, the generosity of invention, to appreciate the process of composition, a kind of wrapping and unwrapping of the human spirit. That is why, finally, we suffer through Form and Analysis. Mr. Spiegelberg’s students seem to be in good humor about the whole thing, interjecting irony, sarcasm, etc., which is a victory for both student and teacher.

I myself have caught the Christmas spirit lately too. I released something and allowed in myself the (imagined) possibility of light-heartedness (which I didn’t know I had forbidden), and somehow then the external world complied and “real” light-hearted things came into it, flooding my weird days. Yesterday (I am not kidding) I was thinking through the form of Op. 110 with a joyous spring to my step. Perhaps the danger is the conflation of Music Theory’s terms with the real. And is the music itself any more “real” than the Theory it has created, like a monster? Let’s toss reality and truth aside, and Merry Christmas.

As I walked past the Dive Bar on 96th and Amsterdam last night, a woman and her friend stumbled out those saloon-style doors, clinging to each other for balance. “Good night,” she said, “I’m headed to the liquor store.” He did not dissuade her. We won’t let these little sordid city moments, or a subway strike, cloud our Christmas cheer. Admittedly, the city in its profusion gives mixed holiday signals, and in this spirit I would like to do a little blog experiment, a first for Think Denk: a holiday reading list. ACTUALLY two lists: one for the optimist who wants his or her heart warmed (”Just what I need,” said Woody Allen, “hot cockles”) and another for the black-hearted Scrooge who wants to wallow in holiday depression. Choose your poison.

Anti-Holiday Reading List

1. Dostoevsky: The Idiot. I think Crime and Punishment is probably too heartwarming.

2. Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida. Perhaps the most nihilistic Shakespeare play? Certainly a contender. For instance: “… thou great-sized coward,/ No space of earth shall sunder our two hates./I’ll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still,/That moldeth goblins swift as frenzy’s thoughts.” Or how about: “O false Cressid! False, false, false!/Let all untruths stand by thy stainèd name, /And they’ll seem glorious.”

3. Baudelaire, Selected Poems. I am referring to my beloved Penguin Classics edition with ugly English literal translations in small print at the bottom of the page. Imagine waking Christmas morning as a family to read “La Squelette Laboreur”:

Are you trying to show … that even in the grave the promised sleep is not certain; That the Void betrays us; that everything, even Death lies to us, and that for all eternity, alas! we shall perhaps, in some unknown country, be obliged to flay the stubborn earth, and to push a heavy spade under our naked, bleeding foot?

4. Nabokov, Lolita. Lost laughter of childhood, incurable perversion, etc. (”Picnic, lightning.”)

5. Mann, Doctor Faustus. “In those days Germany, a hectic flush on its cheeks, was reeling at the height of its savage triumphs, about to win the world on the strength of the one pact that it intended to keep and had signed with its blood. Today, in the embrace of demons, a hand over one eye, the other staring into the horror, it plummets from despair to despair.” Etc.

6. Sebald, Austerlitz. Especially the passages about the futility of fortifications and the organization of Theresienstadt.

7. James, The Golden Bowl. For instance its final line: “And the truth of it had with this force after a moment so strangely lighted his eyes that as for pity and dread of them she buried her own in his breast.” Ahh, and they lived happily ever after.

8. Atwood, Cat’s Eye. More childhood cruelty, yippee!

9. Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I’ve never finished it, but I assume everything turns out horribly. Am I wrong? Have always enjoyed the first third of it though, before casting it away out of dread. Perhaps I got too caught up emotionally in the story; I am not the “ideal” reader.

10. (Of course) Kafka, the complete works, but if you had to select one: The Castle.

Okay enough enough. In the list above, with only one exception, I tried to choose books that I actually ENJOYED despite their high depressive quotients. But, on to the heartwarming recommendations:

1. Nabokov, Pnin. For just being beautiful: “Presently all were asleep again. It was a pity nobody saw the display in the empty street, where the auroral breeze wrinkled a large luminous puddle, making of the telephone wires reflected in it illegible lines of black zigzags.” Or for being tender: “… the little sedan boldly swung past the front truck and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of disance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle would happen.” Or both.

2. Chabon, Wonder Boys. No, not the movie. I will hold to my opinion that this is the best of his books. Its tale of renunciation and self-awareness, brilliantly plotted over the weekend of a writer’s conference, makes me happy again and again. How dare they cut the f**&()#$ tuba from the movie!

3. Capote, A Christmas Memory. How topical! How about this passage:

Three hours later we are back in the kitchen hulling a heaping buggyload of windfall pecans. Our backs hurt from gathering them: how hard they were to find (the main crop having been shaken off the trees and sold by the orchard’s owners, who are not us) among the concealing leaves, the frosted, deceiving grass. Caarackle! A cheery crunch, scraps of miniature thunder sounds as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet oily ivory meat mounts in the milk-glass bowl. Queenie begs to taste, and now and again my friend sneaks her a mite, though insisting we deprive ourselves. “We mustn’t, Buddy. If we start, we won’t stop. And theere’s scarcely enough as there is. For thirty cakes.” The kitchen is growing dark. Dusk turns the window into a mirror: our reflections mingle with the rising moon as we work by the fireside in the firelight. At last, when the moon is quite high, we toss the final hull into the fire and, with joined sighs, watch it catch flame. The buggy is empty, the bowl is brimful.

That’s what I call musical prose.

4. Proust, Time Regained. The catch of course is that there are six essential prequels, which makes the title of this last volume somewhat ironic.

5. Emerson, Essays: “We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young … In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial tomorrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be setlted; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” And more in that vein.

6. Frazier, Coyote v. Acme. The title essay alone probably worth the purchase price. Don’t forget Boswell’s “Life of Don Johnson,” however.

7. Thoreau, Walden. “Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the heaviest teams, and perhaps the snow covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then through a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlour of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”

8. Marianne Moore, Nevertheless.

The weak overcomes its
menace, the strong over-
comes itself. What is there

like fortitude! What sap
went through the little thread
to make the cherry red!

9. Oliver Sacks, Awakenings. I know it’s a bit of a stretch. How about this passage:

“I used to think of Hell as a place from which no one returned. My patients have taught me otherwise.”

Okay, so far, not so heartwarming. Going on:

“Those who return are forever marked by the experience; they have known, they cannot forget, the ultimate depths. Yet the effect of the experience is to make them not only deep but, finally, childlike, innocent, and gay.”

10. Cervantes, Don Quixote. What more needs to be said? If you own the new translation by Edith Grossman, my favorite passage is on page 145.

Okay, really got to get back to Beethoven now. So far behind, so much to do.