Annegret Fauser, Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World's Fair (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005). xviii + 391 pp. £40.00

Abstract

devoted to pieces that seem to follow more in line with the conventions of nineteenth-century song. In his discussion of Kurtág's The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza, a song cycle that is more aptly described as a concerto for soprano and piano, Dunsby points to similarities that it shares with Schumann's Dichterliebe, particularly both cycles' distinct 'voice of the piano'. Dunsby's brief study of Goehr's song cycle, meanwhile, delves into the musical implications of the text fragments of Franz Kafka that Goehr chose to set. Although the chapter functions as a demonstration of words made to sing in diverse musical settings, Dunsby's often penetrating insights leave the reader wanting more than such brief studies can afford. Dunsby's penultimate chapter returns to more standard musical territory, with examinations of Aaron Copland's 'Going to Heaven!' and Schubert's 'Erster Verlust'. The author approaches each piece by way of examining each composer's response to poetic shifts; Schubert, in his setting of Goethe's poem, must deal primarily with temporal shifts between past, present and future in the poetic structure (which are musically mirrored in Schubert's choice of modality), while in Dickinson's poem Copland confronts rapid poetic shifts of time, place, person and object. The resultant music in Copland's case, Dunsby argues, is remarkable for its sense of motion (achieved through harmonic relationships) within a compressed musical environment. Drawing on literary and psychoanalytical studies, the author also considers Dickinson's words from a variety of viewpoints, thus creating a richer tapestry in which to consider Copland's response. If Dunsby's study seems far-reaching and at times frustrating in its lack of definitives [the author readily admits that his study suggests far more than it determines (p. 7)], it is necessarily so; musicological study that can simultaneously address composers as different as Brahms and Berberian is relatively uncommon, and Dunsby's search for vocality might also be seen as his attempt to find a critical language capable of examining the vast amounts of song literature of the past two centuries, or indeed, of any century. The author recognizes that the vocality of a piece of music will rarely provide the strict theoretical certainties available with instrumental music, but rather 'will always give rise to networks of interpretations, of implications, of inflection and nuance, and all of them, of course, structurally ambivalent because of divergences among musical and verbal structures' (p. 62). While Dunsby's concept of vocality may not immediately present itself, particularly given his occasionally verbose and idiomatic prose, it does take shape eventually over the course of Making Words Sing, leaving the reader to question how this understanding of vocality and the nature of song can be applied to further studies of song literature.