Emotion and Meaning in Music by Leonard B. Meyer

Author:Leonard B. Meyer [Meyer, Leonard B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1956-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

EXAMPLE 53

Notice that every feature of the music is changed in order to heighten our desire for return: rhythm and harmony are incomplete and, in the end, quite ambiguous, whereas earlier they were very clear and well formed; melodic motion, which in the opening phrase was strong and well patterned, is also destroyed; the tempo too is changed; and, finally, in measures 37–41 (Example 52) the distinction between figure and ground is almost completely annihilated.

But at the very moment when rhythm, harmony, texture, and even melody in the sense of pattern seem all but destroyed, the little figure which opens the movement and the first phrase raises our hopes and redirects our expectations of completion and return. Now we are certain as to what is coming. Expectation is definite and powerful, a fact which makes the delay created by the retard and fermata all the more forceful. Then in measure 45 there is a return to the opening theme, which is now completed; and the completion is emphasized by the measures which follow. The satisfaction created by this return is not merely a function of the incompleteness of the opening measures but also a product of the creation of further incompleteness in the middle part (measures 19–44).

What we experience at measure 45 is not simply the reiteration of a theme heard earlier. We have returned to a melody which almost had been destroyed, to a texture which is familiar, to a harmonic motion which is certain and regular, to a tempo which had been altered, and to a palpable unified Gestalt which had been disrupted. Indeed, the feeling of return, the pleasure of resolution, is so strong that the rather piquant flavor of the additional closing measures (51–54) goes almost unnoticed unless it is called to our attention. At all events, the effect of these measures would have been much more noticeable had this version of the theme immediately followed the opening phrase, as in the construction given in Example 53.

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