The Secular Commedia: Comic Mimesis in Late Eighteenth-Century Music by Wye Jamison Allanbrook

Author:Wye Jamison Allanbrook
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520274075
Publisher: University of California Press

EXAMPLE 11. (continued)

Chabanon could have been describing the first movement of K. 332, constructed of “music made out of music”—a mobile mosaic of familiar musical types. Two kinds of minuets, horn calls, the act of singing, imitative counterpoint: the movement’s particular profile is formed by strings of these referential units, which are functional as well as expressive—functional in that the dark and restless music dramatizes the motion to the new plateau, the rounded minuet consolidates arrival at that plateau, and so on. The first movement of K. 332 could be seen as a chapter in Mozart’s own commonplace book, recombining musical commonplaces into fresh juxtapositions—a pathetic aria morphing into pomposo counterpoint, emerging in a country landscape as imagined in the salon (with the difference that late eighteenth-century compositional procedures introduce additionally the notion of “reading for the plot,” in the resolution of the powerful harmonic polarity that drives almost every movement). These expressive gestures form the contours of the surface, which consists of contiguous expressive gestures, one yielding to the next, each time with a moment of pleasant shock at the distance traveled over a single bar line. They are all properly musical allusions, every one of them a reference to a definite musical genre, and therefore escape Chabanon’s strictures against the violence done to art by mimesis. Little did Chabanon suspect that, by exempting “imitation of songs” and allowing the practice of “giving one melody the character of another melody,” he was letting the whole world back in, for the whole world could be conjured up in musical gestures.

Yet as remarked earlier, many modern critics have found it difficult to recognize the ubiquity of these gestures. At next to worst (after acute formalism, which does not even grant the need for an account of expression), topoi are understood as an ancillary compositional device employed on certain special occasions, just one step away from local color. Themes are still analyzed for their pitches and intervals alone, with topoi acknowledged as occasional picturesque vignettes dotting an otherwise monochrome thematic landscape—haunting horn calls, crude peasant drones, fierce Turkish marches, points of interest for tourists, more apt for the nationalist codes of romanticism.

One is no longer trained to expect the musical material that accompanies the transition from the tonic to the dominant in the exposition to amount to anything more than neutral figuration, mere musical noodling.94 For evidence to the contrary, one has only to consider the unequivocally expressive agitato music that provides the transition from the first “theme group” of K. 332:I to the minuet period that acts as “second theme” (see example 11, mm. 23–40). Because, given its function, the material is open-ended rather than rounded off into a period like the material surrounding it, in a modern analysis it would be passed over as “transitional,” as not participating in the major thematic activity of the movement. On the contrary, this passionate flight of diminished sevenths is indeed a topos, by no means neutral, whose affect allows it to function also as an agent of mobility—as “traveling music.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.