Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music.

Proksch, Bryan

Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music. Edited by Danuta Mirka and Kofi Agawu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. [ix, 345 p. ISBN 978-0-521-88829-5. $99]

This collection of ten essays contains some of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking musicological writing published in recent memory. Danuta Mirka and Kofi Agawu have presented a collection of articles on a range of topics falling under the broad umbrella of "communication" in late eighteenth-century music. Loosely based on a conference given in Bad Sulz burg in July 2005, the contributors to this volume include a number of well-known scholars.

Wye Allanbrook attacks generations of analytic opinion on Mozart's Piano Sonata in A major, K. 331/i, with complete success. One of the most scrutinized movements of music, K. 331/i has served as an analytic paradigm for numerous music theorists, including Heinrich Schenker and Hugo Riemann. Allanbrook posits that theorists have fundamentally misunderstood the work because they have overlooked its historical setting. She argues that the work cannot serve as a paradigm but rather, because it is at heart a stylized siciliano, is subject to a distinct set of expectations that stand at odds with many analytic approaches to music. After examining the ways in which a siciliano departs from conventional eighteenth-century cadential and phrase structures, she concludes that the work could never have been expected to conform to most theoretical models in the first place. This leads to the controversial if unoriginal conclusion that music analysis must take "historically grounded features" (p. 270), including topoi, into account. In essence she argues that musicology and music theory are so intertwined that both angles require consideration when attempting to understand a given piece of music. Allanbrook's argument provides a stark warning to those who would attempt to divorce music theory from music history.

William Rothstein also attempts a reconciliation of his own-now between Schenker and Riemann-in an essay on phrase structure that seeks to explain how weak-beat and strong-beat cadential patterns are both "proper." Schenker argued for strong-beat openings and weak-beat cadences, while Riemann forcefully argued for the opposite. Rothstein begins with the fairly benign observation that some late eighteenth-century phrases begin on an accented beat and cadence on an unaccented beat, and vice versa. Following Allanbrook's call to consider historical tendencies, he notes that the preferred accentuation changed over the course of the eighteenth century. Having re-grounded both Schenker and Riemann in reality, he argues that both theorists' views are compatible so long as the analyst acknowledges the metrical type actually used by the composer. He uses Haydn's Kaiserhymne as a case study. Haydn's original setting commenced with a two-beat pickup that placed cadences on strong beats. When Fallersleben prepared the melody as the German national anthem, he re-barred the music to begin on a downbeat with metrically weak cadences. This article has already changed the way in which I teach undergraduate music theory, and will undoubtedly stimulate much more work on cadence structures in the future.

Claudia Maurer Zenck addresses musical wit and humor in the music of Beethoven, with specific reference to his Piano Sonata in G major, op. 31/1. She makes a very convincing case that Beethoven composed the first movement of this work in such a way as to artfully mock inept composers and poor pianists. In an interesting twist, she notes that many critics have viewed the work unfavorably because they misunderstood Beethoven's intentions: taking Beethoven's irony for seriousness, they literally missed the punch-line of the joke. Oddly, Zenck makes no reference to the vast literature on humor in Haydn. David Young, for instance, has argued that Haydn's String Quartet in B flat major op. 33/4 is composed in exactly the same manner as Zenck's reading of op. 31/1. Never the less, Zenck has successfully opened the door to further research on Beethoven's sense of humor, are area of study that, beyond the early horn entry in the Third Symphony, has been largely neglected.

Mark Evan Bonds's essay addresses the problem of writing music for a heterogeneous audience. He demonstrates that Haydn, Mozart, and their contemporaries successfully found a way to compose music that would please both kenner (connoisseur) and liebhaber (casual) audiences at the same time. Bonds rereads Leopold Mozart's oft-quoted April 1784 letter to Wolfgang on Ignaz Pleyel as encouragement to write works that the casual listener could enjoy. His musical examples include the String Quartet in G major, K. 387, from Mozart's op. 10 set, which was, from early on, regarded as too complex for the casual listener. Yet Bonds argues that the finale of K. 387 bridges the gap between the two audiences in that it mixes kenner fugal passages with liebhaber homophonic phrases. I suspect that he could well have argued that fugato itself addresses both audiences: imitative entries are obvious to even the dullest listener, but fugal artifice becomes highly complex upon close study. He concludes the article by addressing instances in which composers criticized the works of others (e.g., Dittersdorf writing about Haydn) to show that the aesthetics of the time in fact expected compositions that were simultaneously--and paradoxically--complex and simple.

This collection also includes informative essays by William Caplin, Paul Cobley, Michael Spitzer, Lawrence Zbikowski, and the two editors themselves. Zbikowski discusses musical depictions of dance movements, Spitzer addresses functional difference in sonata-form expositions, and Caplin attempts to apply Schenkerian linear motion to bass lines. Cobley breaks down the chain of communication in music from composer to audience, then discusses how the "rules of genre" and public opinion can influence communication. Mirka addresses pulse and metric play in the music of Haydn. Agawu challenges the perennial problem of the larger significance of musical topoi to analysis, unfortunately without offering a clear solution. In sum, Cambridge University Press and the volume's editors have compiled an excellent and diverse collection of articles that is well worth reading.

Bryan Proksch

McNeese State University

Lake Charles, Louisiana