Spitzer - Metaphor and Musical Thought

MICHAEL SPITZER

Metaphor and Musical Thought

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2004 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2004.

Paperback edition 2015

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 2 3 4 5 6

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76972-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27313-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27943-5 (e-book)

10.7208/chicago/9780226279435.001.0001

A publishing subvention from the American Musicological Society is gratefully acknowledged.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spitzer, Michael.

Metaphor and musical thought / Michael Spitzer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-226-76972-0 (alk. paper)

1. MusicPhilosophy and aesthetics. 2. MusicHistory and criticism. I. Title.

ML3845 .S684 2004

781.1'7dc21

2003012634

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Karen

Acknowledgments

Inspiration for writing a book about musical metaphor came from a conversation I had with Richmond Browne at a UK Music Analysis conference in Lancaster in 1994, continued a couple of days later during a car journey from Durham to Whitby in Yorkshire. Richmond called Durham Cathedral the best building in the world, and it was in the adjoining music department of Durham University that I have had the privilege of trying out my ideas on generations of unsuspecting students and staff. Thanks, and apologies, to you all! I have particularly benefited from sharing innumerable, and enlightening, conversations with my colleague Max Paddison in the various coffee houses of Durham. I have also sought his advice on some knotty details of seventeenth-century German syntax. Several people found the time to read and comment on my chapters, for which Im very grateful: Peter Burt, Ian Cross, Robert Hatten, Adam Krims, Raymond Monelle, Carl Erik Khl, and Eero Tarasti. My thanks to Richard Bruce for his tips on Mrchen and Novalis, and to Carl Humphries, who read the entire manuscript and labored, probably in vain, to keep me philosophically honest. Long-overdue thanks also to Bill Drabkin, for teaching me how to hear. Thomas Christensen and an anonymous reader made invaluable comments on my first draft. I am most grateful to Barbara Norton for her careful copyediting and many helpful suggestions. The music examples were expertly set by Jrgen Selk of Music Graphics International. Production of this book was facilitated by a generous subvention from the Dragan Plamenac Publication Endowment Fund of the American Musicological Society, which helped defray the cost of the many plates and music examples.

I would like, finally, to express my profound gratitude to Kathleen K. Hansell of the University of Chicago Press for her encouragement and expert guidance at every stage of this projects completion. I have been patiently supported in the writing by two families: the Spitzers and the Irwins, and in particular my mum and dad, John and Angela. This book would not even have been possible without the faith and love of my wife, Karen, to whom it is dedicated.

METAPHOR AND MUSICAL THOUGHT

Frontispiece engraving from Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico, o sia Idea delle argvtezze heroiche vulgarmente chiamate imprese. Et di tvtta larte simbolica, et lapidaria contenente ogni genere di figure (1st ed., Turin, 1654). Metaphor, defined by Aristotle as a an eye for resemblance, is depicted by Tesauro as an optical devicean Aristotelian telescope.

Part I

The Metaphorical Present

The Aristotelian Telescope

To think, talk, or write about music is to engage with it in terms of something else, metaphorically. Music moves, speaks, paints an image, or fights a battle. It may have a beginning, middle and end, like a story, or have line and color, like a picture. Music can even be a language, with a lexicon and syntax. Are these metaphors mere figments of our imagination, or do they really bring us closer to music in itself?

The seventeenth-century literary theorist Emanuele Tesauro likened metaphor to a telescope, in particular an Aristotelian telescope, after the philosopher who coined the most influential definition of the term.a model or a picture of something to which we can never have direct access. The metaphorical telescope seems to me a rather good analogy for the uses of music theory.

Calling discourse about music metaphorical inevitably suggests that there is a more literal mode of engagement, one generally associated with technical music theory. And yet an argument that music theory brings us closer to music would cut little ice with the overwhelming majority of listeners, who actually find arcane categories such as tonics and dominants, voice leading, retransition, hemiola, and so on, rather alienating, and for whom such metalanguage interferes with the cherished immediacy of the musical experience. Disbelief, already suspended, is stretched to incredulity when we climb from the foothills of basic terminology to the mountain peaks of analytical systems such as Schenkerian analysis, the most important music-theoretical approach of the twentieth century. Heinrich Schenker is to modern musical thought roughly what Noam Chomsky is to linguistics and Claude Lvi-Strauss and Jean Piaget were to structuralism. Schenkerian reduction is essentially a transformational theory of musical structure worked out in terms of contrapuntal level. While most people have no problem with the idea of generative models in social science, they may find their application to aesthetics, especially to an art form that elicits such a high degree of personal emotional investment as music does, rather offensive. Yet music theory only makes it worse when it claims for itself the status of a science, for how then can it justify its interest in history? Work on historical theorists such as Zarlino, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Heinrich Koch, and Hugo Riemann is currently resurgent, in the teeth of the established view, based on the work of Karl Popper, of scientific progress, where models continuously supersede one another. Why resort to Galileos instrument when we have the Hubble telescope?

We do not look through the Aristotelian telescope for ourselves; we gaze at an image of Poesis. Music theory is admittedly poor at describing how music is composed or heard, and even more suspect when it attempts to prescribe these practices. But it has a third dimension, in addition to the descriptive and prescriptive: the imaginary. We can look at music theory as a picture of an imaginative act that is, in some ways, just as creative as a work of composition. Theorists build models by drawing on domains of human experiencea knowledge of language and culture, but also the experience of what it is like to have a body that is contained, that can move through a landscape, that can grasp and manipulate objects, and so on. In short, music theory is human, just as to create and receive music is human. Theorists have one advantage over composers and listeners, however: they are in the business of blending tones, concepts, and words, and do so more articulately than most musicians, and more expertly than nearly all philosophers. In this respect, they really do bring us closer to the meaning of music.