Eco and Culler on Interpretation

To the proliferation of interpretations (readings, hearings) in this blog:

Umberto Eco illustrates a point about the "difference between interpreting and using a text" by listing ways in which a poem by Wordsworth might be appropriated: "for parody, for showing how a text can be read in relation to different cultural frameworks, or for strictly personal ends (I can read a text to get inspiration for my own musing)," but Eco separates these uses from the special category of interpretation: "if I want to interpret Wordsworth's text I must respect his cultural and linguistic background" (1992, 68-69; his emphasis). Eco regards interpretation as a process of constructing or reconstructing the text at hand, but in a particular way: "The initiative of the reader basically consists in making a conjecture about the text's intention," or, to put it slightly differently, "a text is a device conceived in order to produce its model reader" (64).

Interpretation, then, is an active process of trying to find out what a text is about. "Use" is a default category that includes what is not interpretation, what is not – or what is more than – the reader's "conjecture about the text's intent": it leads out of the text rather than into it, as a thesis leads out of a text to the rhetoric of the interpreter/reader.

Eco's goal is to make a clear distinction between interpretation and overinterpretation, but for Jonathan Culler there is a direct parallel between originality in a text and overinterpretation in criticism: "Interpretation itself needs no defence; it is with us always, but like most intellectual activities, interpretation is interesting only when it is extreme. Moderate interpretation, which articulates a consensus, though it may have value in some circumstances, is of little interest" (1992, 110).

What Culler means by "extreme" is not merely associations that push well beyond the plausible, which he says are worth exploring even if most may be "judged unpersuasive or redundant or irrelevant or boring" (110): he especially extols an attitude that shows objective distance (the critic's analogue to defamiliarization in the artwork), that aims past the simple giving and receiving of information, that acknowledges that, for example, "it is useful from time to time to stand back and ask why someone said some perfectly straightforward thing such as, 'Lovely day, isn't it?'" (113). Culler concludes that "what Eco calls overinterpretation may in fact be a practice of asking precisely those questions which are not necessary for normal communication but which enable us to reflect on its functioning" (113-4; his emphasis); for the practice of interpretation of texts his point might be translated as "What questions does the text forget to ask?" (Culler's position is consistent with late post-structuralism; he was writing in the early 1990s.)

If Culler does highlight the fact that an unbridgeable gap between texts and their possible contexts enables the proliferation of interpretations (but also the weakness of its endlessness), he does not thereby succeed in undermining the strengths of certain priorities in interpretive practice as Eco describes them: focusing on textual intent rather than authorial intent, on economy in evidence for interpretation, on doublechecking interpretations against textual coherence, and on respect for "cultural and linguistic background."

In other words, each author wins a point or two here, but the tensions between text and context are not erased by merely asserting the priority of one or the other.

References:

Eco, Umberto, ed. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Culler, Jonathan. "In Defence of Overinterpretation." In Eco 1992, 109-24.

Recomposition as analysis

Kofi Agawu rebuts Joseph Kerman's critique of "formalist" analysis and call to replace it with a model based on (literary) criticism and belles lettres by pointing to the affinities of music analysis not only with criticism but, as importantly, with music performance and composition. Of the latter, Agawu says: "composition as the art of making, of putting together, shares with analysis the speaking of music as a language" (280). That is to say, "when analysis is realigned with composition, we restore to it a measure of improvisation, liberate it from the requirement of making propositional statements, and reconfigure its epistemological requirements to privilege play. In short, the link with composition encourages more thinking in music about music" (279).

Agawu describes recompositions (perhaps the simplest and most obvious way in which analysis can be carried out as composition) as "fictions" and reminds us that such "imaginary constructions [are] designed to persuade, titillate, amuse, entertain, lead in a certain musical direction or mislead" (279). When he says that "we need an ethical attitude towards constructing these fictions," his argument can be said to apply more broadly to any kind of analytical construction, any interpretation, any "fiction," and it aligns well with a self-conscious practice of (musical) interpretation but also with David Lewin's warning about rewriting theoretical models indiscriminately (when he says that we should "think long and hard before subjecting a received theoretical discourse to fundamental modification" (91)).

Along these lines, I rethink the waltz by adding a new trio (below). This addition suggests a process by which the hierarchy of design is upended -- or at least unexpectedly influenced -- and a background can be shaped or "colored" by the middleground, in this case the principal melodic tone as "engineered" by a newly-composed Trio.

Considering only Schenkerian readings, I hear the waltz by itself very readily and convincingly as a three-part ursatz with a rising upper line from ^5 (post forthcoming), but Carl Schachter’s reading from ^3 (see this entry) becomes stronger in combination with this new trio, as it very unambiguously highlights ^3 in the upper voice with the cover tone ^5 appearing only in subordinate formal positions: that is to say, the trio follows convincingly the path into which Schachter cannot very easily force the waltz itself, and it influences us to hear the waltz in the same way (during the reprise at least, if not during the initial presentation).

All of this is straightforward enough: it merely reflects the fact that, whatever we may think about the priorities of hierarchies, the local can influence the general -- a decision may be made about large-scale features based on an influential nuance (at the abstract level of the background, a newly added trio is a nuance). This is always the danger of the "promissory note" -- that it may not merely act as an expressive marker but insist on its own influence over design, and the hierarchy may be flattened out (to something like a network) or even inverted.

I have added another element to make this point even more blatantly: an intertextual reference that draws the waltz out of Vienna, indeed out of Europe altogether: my bogus trio is a version of one of the most famous nineteenth-century American songs, written by a man who opened a music publishing company in one of the most prosperous cities of the old Northwest Territories, Chicago: the composer was George Root, the song is “The Battle Cry of Freedom," and my reason for including it is the resonance it still has thanks to a plaintive rendering heard several times in Ken Burns's video documentary of the American Civil War. We could explore the binaries generated for quite a long time -- Schubert and Root, Vienna and Chicago, old Europe and young America, the urban and the wilderness, Metternich and the democratic authors of the Northwest Ordinance, the revolutions of 1848 and the secessions of 1861, etc.

My point, however, is simply to show how powerful an intertextual reference can be -- made all the more obvious here because an association was deliberately manufactured. And -- perhaps my greater point -- the "creative analysis" of arrangement or recomposition can manage these kinds of shifts with ease.

References:
Agawu, Kofi. "How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back in Again." Music Analysis 23/ii-iii (2004): 267-86.

Lewin, David. "Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception." In Lewin, Studies in Music with Text, 53-108. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

D779n13 in Ab major

From my Music Analysis review-article, 215:

It is even possible that the A major Waltz was originally in Ab major, as are the first thirteen numbers in D. 365; the waltz that immediately follows in D. 365 (No. 14 in Db major) displays a similarly abrupt chromatic shift (I– bVI) that is "corrected" by means of an augmented-sixth chord (the same pattern also appears on a smaller scale in No. 2, the famous Trauerwalzer).

The version here is in 16 bars, not 38; it's the "preliminary" version for improvisation cited in this post: sixteen bars and embedded in the "suite" put together for yesterday's blog entry.

The embedding of this version of D779n13 in D. 365 is easily justified, as the total time elapsed is no more than 5-6 years and there is substantial overlap -- that is, the earliest versions of a number of waltzes in D. 779 are contemporary with (and chronologically prior to the publication of) D. 365. I think one can assert with confidence that these waltzes--or versions of them, at any rate--were played alongside one another in late evening sessions where Schubert played for dancing.

As promised in at least one earlier entry, I will write about Kofi Agawu's views on recomposition as analysis in a subsequent post. For now, the citation is "How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back in Again." Music Analysis 23/ii-iii (2004): 267-86.

D779n13 embedded in D. 365

Instead of imagining performance conditions in which D779n13 might have acted as a trio to n12 (see trio), we can take the opposite tack and construct a new "suite" of waltzes by inserting the simplified 16-bar version into D. 365, to take the place of the waltz of which it may well be a variant.

In the graphic at the end of this post, I have assembled an excerpt from a "false" Opus 9: the actual waltzes, nos. 4 & 5, then the 16-bar recomposition of the A Major Waltz (transposed down to Ab major), then number 6, and the beginning of number 7. The recomposition fits comfortably in the set I am constructing, as all of the Ab major waltzes in D. 365 are in the most basic 8+8 design, with brief (or no) pickups.

The earliest extant manuscript for D365n4 (from 1817) is an incipit in A major, not Ab. The Trauerwalzer (D365n2), also in A, is included in that set of incipits, and it is only in several Albumblatt-style copies from the following year that this waltz is transposed down to Ab (to make it more "traurig," perhaps?); then, a manuscript from later the same year or early in 1819 has D. 365 nos. 1-4, all in Ab, as they were finally published in 1821 (Brown, 228, 230-31, 291-2).

Postscript: After Schott reissued the Trauerwalzer under Beethoven's name and with the title "Sehnsuchtswalzer" (Kinsky, 727), the little piece's fate was sealed, and it was republished any number of times throughout the nineteenth century. As we saw in another post, Schumann knew it in 1835 as Le Désir (it was also called Mon Désir in some editions). Already by 1831, it had acquired English words (under the title "The Maid of Elsmere"). By 1870, American publishers had attributed as many as seventy waltzes to Beethoven; a very small number were actually his, including WoO11n7, a Ländler that was Americanized as the "Cactus Waltz" (Kinkeldey, 245-46).

In the musical example below, n1=D365n4; n2 = D365n5; n3 = D779n13 (16-bar version in Ab); n4 = D365n6; and n5 = D365n7.

References:

Brown, Maurice. Essays on Schubert. London: Macmillan, 1966.

Kinkeldey, Otto. "The Beginnings of Beethoven in America." Musical Quarterly 13/2 (1927): 217-48.

Kinsky, Georg. Hans Halm, ed. Das Werk Beethovens: Thematisch-Bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner Sämtlichen Vollendeten Kompositionen. Munich-Duisburg: Henle, 1955.

D779n13 and dancing

In Schubert's major published collections of dances, the only piece to bear an affect label--apart from the occasional dolce in early sets--is D. 779 no. 13 (zart), but because there is no extant holograph, we cannot be sure the label is actually his.

I have noted several times already that this waltz has a distinctive design. All the numbers of D. 779 are in small two-reprise forms of either sixteen or twenty four bars; the A Major Waltz is thirty eight bars (18 + 20). The first reprise would be eight bars if it had a repeat sign, but the repetition of the first reprise is written out to simplify the overlap of the ending and return of the opening phrase; the introduction adds two additional bars. The second reprise would be sixteen bars, but Schubert's abrupt harmonic shifts oblige him to smooth things over with analogues to the introduction, adding two bars to each eight-bar phrase.

Thus, there is tension between this waltz as music for dancing and as a small-scale piece for listening. Like the peculiar scherzo-like pieces in the posthumous Letzte Walzer (D. 146)--most of which were composed not as waltzes but rather as minuets or scherzi with trios--the A Major Waltz threatens to burst the boundaries of its genre on the scale of the individual waltz, just as Weber's Invitation to the Dance and the concert waltzes of Chopin and others broke the boundaries of the functional dance environment and moved the waltz to the salon recital and, eventually, the concert hall.

Eric McKee argues that it is problematic to use this shift as an excuse to cut off these dances from their social origins and treat them merely as autonomous artworks (155) -- that is to say, he disagrees with Margaret Notley (see the score post). Although Chopin began to introduce non-dance elements into his waltzes after 1830 (when he left Warsaw), still "many of [his] Viennese and Parisian waltzes are eminently danceable, and the distinction between functional and stylized was largely a matter of how they were used in their social context" (121).

The A Major Waltz does remain invested in the social culture of dancing (despite its hypermetric peculiarities); to go even farther, more than any other waltz of the early 1820s, it is easily heard as a miniature portrait of a couple dancing. (This again follows McKee, who argues that Chopin's waltzes are "musical visions of the dancers on the ballroom dance floor" (122) and that the composer tends to focus his musical gaze, as it were, on the woman (141).)

Schubert did not have Chopin's ability, gained from his own experience, "to translate [dancers'] bodily motions into an artistic musical vision" (McKee, 121), but from everything we know about Schubert's extensive activities as an improviser for social dancing, we can assume a similar skill from him even if he did not dance himself.

The bass figures provide the necessary metric contexts, and the two "empty" bars (1-2) depict the dancers setting themselves and internalizing meter and tempo. The two upper voices are continuously paired, soprano and alto, leader and follower, mirroring each other's figures in the two-bar pattern of the waltz step (in the graphic below, "W" is "woman," "M" is "man," "L" and "R" are left and right foot, respectively, and "p" is the pivot made without a new step). What we hear once these voice leading parts acquire voices, as it were--once they become agents or personae--is what we might see in the valse à trois temps, a common waltz figure known before the turn of the century and common through the 1830s (Aldrich 1991, 19-20; Aldrich 1997, 134; McKee, 123-4.): not simply alternation of figures, but, in the eighth-note gestures, the waltz's trademark circling or whirling.

And what we sense is not so much desire as it is the piquant charm of sublimated desire (flirting, in a word): two persons in a social setting accept one another as partners and dance. One would normally dance with a number of partners through an evening in, say, a house ball, but it is clear from statements in contemporary sources that a couple's sexuality was always a potential diversion of the dance from its social purpose. (For additional context and description, see my discussion of D779n13 and dancing in Neumeyer 2006, 217-220.)

The A Major Waltz, under those terms, might even be taken as a portrait of a couple in love and of the power relations that obtained in their intimacy during the era at hand. The effect would be very like the one David Gramit describes as arising near the end of Schubert's song "Seligkeit" (D. 433), whose Ländler rhythms and strict four-bar phrase design at first seem "allegorical-a symbol of worldly pleasure standing in for heavenly ones." In the final strophe, however, the poem's narrator reveals his willingness to abandon heaven for the favors of his earthly lover; thus, "what we initially hear like a dance turns out to be dance itself; the hoped-for pleasure is not spiritual but embodied" (222; his emphasis). (A similar use was cited by Hoorickx in "Hänflis Liebeswerbung," D. 552, but in this case a deutscher (D. 972 no. 3) is quoted intact as the introduction. Hoorickx also notes that in the same year (1817) Schubert quoted all of the Cotillon, D. 976, as the second theme in the finale of the Violin Sonata, D. 574.)

References:

Aldrich, Elizabeth. "Social Dancing in Schubert's World." In Raymond Erickson, ed. Schubert's Vienna, 119-40. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Aldrich, Elizabeth. From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991.

Gramit, David. "Between Täuschung and Seligkeit: Situating Schubert's Dances." Musical Quarterly 84/2 (2000): 221-37.

Hoorickx, Reinhard van. "Schubert's Reminiscences of His Own Works." The Musical Quarterly 60/3 (1974): 373-88.

McKee, Eric. "Dance and the Music of Chopin: The Waltz." In Halina Goldberg, ed. The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries, 106-61. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Neumeyer, David. "Description and Interpretation: Fred Lerdahl's Tonal Pitch Space and Linear Analysis," review-article, Music Analysis 25/1-2 (2006): 201-30.

Proto-background 4: the third ^1-^3

Also see the proto-background introduction.

The third-interval rooted in the tonic is a rich source of linear figures, although, like the ^3-^2-^1 of Schenkerian analysis, these figures almost seem too obvious; they have a clichéd or generic feel about them, as if someone were to say that the theme of a story, poem, or film was "love." In the graphic below, I have followed this line in interpreting the second level or "middleground" as a neighbor note figure aligned with the harmony of opening-plus-final-cadence (I------V7-I).

More interesting are the details in the third and fourth level. Interval inversion converts the initial third (in the alto) to a sixth in the cadence, then ultimately inverts the inversion, so to speak, in the truncated reprise. (Strictly speaking, I suppose, the second motion inverts upwards (as shown), then shifts the resulting third down an octave.) The fourth level shows further details of the registral play.

The tonal space of the third ^3-^1 is also used in Schachter's traditional Schenkerian reading of the waltz, of course. I have reproduced the background (strictly speaking, first middleground) form an earlier posting along with my notation of the first strain.

Schachter favors the (inner-voice) descent A-G#-G-natural-F# in the contrasting middle. My own reading of the second strain is close to his but I prefer to emphasize the mixture of E-E#-E.

Differences between the traditional Schenkerian reading and the proto-background can be suggested by aligning both versions with the consequent of the 16-measure theme (mm. 11-18). (b) is the proto-background; (c) is Schenkerian.

Level (c) allows a simplification of the voice leading that is not available without overt doubling in level (b). On the other hand, the bias against register (or, to put it another way, in favor of single-octave solutions) means that (c) must cut across the clearly articulated parallel sixths in the cadence.