The Birth of Music out of the Spirit of Drama: An Essay in Wagnerian Formal Analysis

Newcomb, Anthony

doi:10.1525/ncm.1981.5.1.02a00040

Cited by 29 publications

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“…Nor would I deny that Wagner often privileges specific keys as framing devices or recurring dramatic anchors for whole scenes or large portions thereof. But I share Anthony Newcomb's (, p. 49) view that this kind of structural and referential priority (which is often coordinated with motivic and dramatic design) should not be mistaken for the perceptual priority of a transcendent, syntactically reinforced tonic pitch – though the two may coincide at times.…”

Section: Exmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…Though few would credit such cynicism nowadays, history has hardly proved Adorno wrong: analysts of Wagner's music have indeed tended to adopt either a telescopic or a microscopic lens, focusing on either grand organisational schemes or chordal minutiae, with only the occasional suggestion of how the two might be linked. There are exceptions, of course, such as Newcomb's () and Matthew BaileyShea's (–3) treatments of small‐ and mid‐level forms, Lewin's () fiercely idiosyncratic Parsifal analysis and Schenkerian approaches of all stripes . But my sense is that we are still a long way from explaining how Wagner's more adventurous music works so convincingly at the level of entire phrases and phrase groupings – in other words, at the level that makes the greatest impression upon the attentive listener.…”

Section: Looking Ahead: Kdms and A Broader Theory Of Wagnerian Gesturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Newcomb's () study of Wagnerian form remains the outstanding English‐language text in this tradition; it also contains a fair critique of Dahlhaus's reactionary analytical myopia.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Voice‐leading Energetics in Wagner's ‘Tristan Idiom’

Monahan¹

2015

Music Analysis

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Recent theories of musical energetics have typically given tonality – often a powerfully synthetic, prolongational monotonality – a decisive role in accounting for sensations of musical tension, force and attraction. Though well‐suited to music of the common practice, these models fare less well in certain repertoires of the later nineteenth century, where tonal centres are often fleeting and traditional syntax is weakened or even annulled—as is often the case in Wagner's late music, where dissonant tertian tetrachords are combined in new and sometimes confounding ways. This study offers a new perspective on tonal tension and relaxation in such passages – which I call Wagner's ‘Tristan idiom’ – by focusing on voice‐leading contour. Taking a broad cue from Ernst Kurth, it asks what might be gained by bracketing questions of chord identity and structure to focus instead on the voice leading that produces and interconnects them. Using a tool called kinetic displacement metrics (KDMs), it assigns emergent psychokinetic tension values to chord pairs based on the directions that their voices move, both in pitch‐ and pitch‐class space. Of special interest throughout is a phenomenon I call ‘directional variance’, where opposing contours in a single passage (between abstract and real voice leading, for example, or between the harmonic layer and the melodic one) seem to have psychodramatic relevance for the stage action. After a brief exposition of the theory and its uses (and limitations), with brief examples from all of Wagner's post‐Lohengrin operas, it then moves to a series of longer vignettes on excerpts from Tristan und Isolde: the opening of the Act I Prelude, the closing of the same, and the entirety of the Act III Prelude.

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Section: Exmentioning

confidence: 83%

Section: Looking Ahead: Kdms and A Broader Theory Of Wagnerian Gesturementioning

confidence: 99%

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Voice‐leading Energetics in Wagner's ‘Tristan Idiom’

Monahan¹

2015

Music Analysis

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“…The harmonic fabric of Tristan , for example, is woven of chords which perpetually defer a tonic resolution. Although such a tonic may be forever elided in the fluctuating modulatory current of something akin to Newcomb's ‘wandering tonality – recitative secco’ (Newcomb 1981, p. 50), a single local tonic is generally implied at any given moment. For instance, subscribing to the Anglo‐American reading of the Tristan chord as a French sixth accented by appoggiaturas, the opening bars of Tristan adopt the tonic of A 24 .…”

Section: Drive In Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Science of Tonal Love’? Drive and Desire in Twentieth‐Century Harmony: the Erotics of Skryabin

Smith

2010

Music Analysis

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Leonid Sabaneyev attested that Skryabin's compositions contained within them ‘a science of tonal love’, and Skryabin himself described his two Op. 57 pieces –Désir and Caresse dansée– as ‘new ways of making love’. But what makes this music so erotic in nature? The composer theorised about the nature of desire and sexuality in his writings, but this discussion rarely spills over into analysis of his compositional system. Given that Skryabin was so steeped in psychology throughout his life, I appeal to the work of Freud and Jacques Lacan, and particularly to their distinction between drive and desire (essentially, the fundamental instinct of the id versus its imaginary representation), a distinction found in Skryabin's own philosophical writings. But the progression between these two states bears comparison with both his philosophy and his harmonic processes, and I thus focus on the function of the dominant chord, exploring ways in which it can replicate the structures of drive and desire. In so doing, I scrutinise several piano miniatures to show that part of Skryabin's method of embodying drive in music lays out ambiguous chord structures which bear simultaneous tendencies to move in a number of different directions, as multivalent as the drive in the human subject. Further, I attempt to show that, out of mystical sonorities, Skryabin temporally unfolds a dialogue of different dominant ‘drives’, and eventually selects and nurtures a single one at the expense of others, a motion equivalent to desire.

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Brünnhilde's immolation scene and Wagner's “conquest of the reprise”

Daverio

1991

Journal of Musicological Research

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The Birth of Music out of the Spirit of Drama: An Essay in Wagnerian Formal Analysis

Cited by 29 publications

References 0 publications

Voice‐leading Energetics in Wagner's ‘Tristan Idiom’

Voice‐leading Energetics in Wagner's ‘Tristan Idiom’

‘A Science of Tonal Love’? Drive and Desire in Twentieth‐Century Harmony: the Erotics of Skryabin

Brünnhilde's immolation scene and Wagner's “conquest of the reprise”

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