Music, Art, and Metaphysics by Jerrold Levinson

Author:Jerrold Levinson [Levinson, Jerrold]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2011-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

The point I am making here is that a good deal of interest in instrumentation in the period in which it emerged from the “ad lib” stage had to do not so much with “color” as “construction”; not so much with the timbre of instruments as with their capabilities of realizing sound structures; with, that is, their ranges, and the varieties of musically complex figurations they could, with advancing technique, produce.64

What Kivy is adducing here is highly interesting, worth emphasizing, and to a large extent true. But does this point—that the driving force behind instrumental choice, starting in the late eighteenth century, was often technical—show that instrumentation is not truly integral to musical works conceived in the last two hundred years? I think not. First of all, the fact remains that timbral qualities per se, and expressive effects dependent on the presupposed gestural repertoires of instruments envisaged (see Chapter 16, below), become progressively more and more considerations in their own right guiding such choices. (We will return to this shortly, when we consider Kivy’s most direct confrontation of this fact, in discussing examples from Brahms and Berlioz.) Second, in some cases it is not even clearly intelligible to think of sound structure as preceding, and independent of, instrumental designation. Double-stopping is a good example of this. If taken, as Kivy does, as part of the envisaged sound structure needing realization, it already implicates a certain kind of instrument and performing action. (Double-stopping is not just sounding two notes simultaneously on one instrument: pianos cannot double-stop.) A similar point could be made about pizzicato; ideas for pizzicato passages do not first occur to composers and then, only later, what will serve, for the nonce, to realize them.65 Third, when instruments are chosen for passages whose notes are, let us say, already set, there will in the grand majority of cases remain alternatives—e.g., xylophone vs. flute, bassoon vs. cello—which could have equally well sounded the note sequences in question. Are the composer’s choices between these alternatives to be regarded as completely arbitrary, as reassignable at will so long as the notes are clearly sounded?66 This is incredible.

But this still leaves the central force of Kivy’s observation, which is that instrumentation was in many cases determined not by coloristic or expressive objectives but by structural needs and technical constraints. What shall we say to this? I think the best response, beyond what we have already essayed, is this. The fact that such may have been the decisive reasons for these choices, even in a great many cases, does not mean that, the choices having been made, the instrumental/timbral aspects of those choices did not in fact become integral generators of the aesthetic and artistic content of those works. To ascertain whether this indeed happened we must consult critical reaction, the subsequent course of musical composition, and our own considered experience of what counts in such music. I think when we do this, we see that as soon as composers began to call unequivocally

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