Mahler, Hermeneutics and Analysis John Williamson Music Analysis, Vol. 10, No. 3. (Oct., 1991), pp. 357-373. Stable URL http: flinks.jstor-org/sici?sici=0262-5245% 281991 10%2910%3A3%3C357%3 AMAA G3E2.0.CO%3B2-1 Music Analysis is currently published by Blackwell Publishing, Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at bhupulwww.jstororg/about/terms.hunl. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of « journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial us. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use ofthis work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hutpy/wwww jstor.org/journals/black html Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission, JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to ereating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @jstor.org, hupswwwjstororg/ Mon Nov 13 17:31:07 2006CRITICAL FORUM JOHN WILLIAMSON MAHLER, HERMENEUTICS AND ANALYSIS Analytical writing on Mahler is in some ways a relatively recent phenomenon. This is not to denigrate the carly Mahler champions, who constructed Thematische Fiver with the composer's sometimes reluctant blessing, nor such currently unfashionable figures as Paul Bekker (1921), who had the ungrateful task of convincing hostile critics that Mahler’s music had a valid place within the tradition of the nineteenth-century symphony. They established a form of Mahler scholarship which passed over into ambitious studies of life and works, leaving @ residue of often detailed thematic and motivic study which obstinately refused to detach itself from an admittedly fascinating biographical and cultural constellation, Mahler's time came (to resort to the most pious article of the Mahlerian’s faith) at the point when scholarship in general was prepared to take Karl Kraus’s vision of the Viennese apocalypse seriously. Biography and interdisciplinary studies found in Mabler’s music, and the traditions of explaining it, a readily understandable method of working which combined motivic analysis and a seductively verbalized ‘content’. This method bequeathed to Mahler studies a curiously particular character at a time when music analysis was coming increasingly under the influence of American-based theoretical systems. A tentative reaction inevitably took place, largely in analysis journals rather than in sustained expositions of the systems themselves; itis idle to look for references to Mahler in the pedagogical Music ANALYSIS 10:3, 1991 397works by Cook (1987) or Dunsby and Whittall (1988). Yet the opportunities for on-motivie analysis without reference to programmatic oF interdisciplinary elements, which was stl a significant case for Christopher Lewis's special pleading (1984:1), already resided within graduate programmes, with their inevitable zeal to. expand and redefine theory. Asa result, the last decade has seen a number of books appear, founded in doctoral projects, which may be said to inaugurate a new phase of Mahler research, just a9 its “heroic” age draws to a close with the near-completion of the works of La Grange (1979-85), Mitchell (1958-85) and Floros (197-85). Tis not quite accurate to depict this new Mahler literature as uniformly aligned behind analysis as it is currently perceived in the English-speaking world. In Germany and Austria, research at doctoral level into Mahler had already begun before the Nazi period, and the work of Hans Tischler (1937) in particular has survived remarkably well s an object of debate, and even as a taxonomy of local harmonic effect (1951). In later decades, however, the writings of Adorno (1960) have been paramount, and few have escaped thei influence; where writers have tried to do so, discussion of Mahler has often hinged on confrontation with, and exorcism of, Adomo’s little monograph (for example, Eggebrecht 1982: 8). This has tilted the emphasis in German research away from the exegesis of programmes towards hermeneutics as demonstration of ‘the interest that is bound together with Knowledge’ (Gadamer 1976: 92). Hermeneutics of this kind (which mects a rather narrower definition of the term than in Nattiez 1990: 162-3) is rather Gifferent from. the notion that a consistent ideology derived, say, from Schopenhauer or Nietzsche may underline Mahler's output, an extreme example of which is provided by Eveline Niels (1989). Constantin Floros has remained the major exception in his belief in a form of semantic study which, in its seeptical attitude to Adomo, has now come to constitute one of the grand set-pieces ofthat relatively recent phenomenon, the international Mahler conference. The clash of Floros and the post-Adomians has been characterized by Manfred Wagner (speaking from the floor of a conference in Rotterdam) a8 alate manifestation of the nineteenth-century debate within German music on the status of Gmplicty Lisztian) programmes, and hence a rather parochial affair. But the writings of Franklin (197), Hefling (1988) and Abbate (1991: 119-55) on Todtenfier suggest that. semantics and hermeneutics have their atractions for writers in. English, particularly ata point where analytical systems themselves are becoming the focus Of increasingly subtle critiques. The relative status of analysis and hermeneutics i the point of a debate which the new Mahler literature demonstrate, but as yet has hardly begun to discuss, "As a result, Mahler studies these days have come to resemble a case study of national traditions. What gives the analytical and hermeneutic approaches their Common ground is the extent to which both are aware of the peculiar historical Position occupied by Mahler's music in the “late” period of common-practice tonality. Perhaps the word ‘historicist’ catches the flavour of this strain in Mahler Studies, for they have not yet thrown off their belief in justification by the Subsequent course of events, ‘This is particularly strong in analytical studies founded on tonal considerations, where it is regularly taken as axiomatic that Mahler's symphonies ‘exemplify the gradual breakdown of tonal syntax’ during the late nineteenth century (Hopkins 1990: 1). Admittedly, this sentiment has increasingly taken on the character ofa ritual chant as scholars have come to See post:Wagnerian harmonic praxis as something which may contain its own logic 358 MUSIC ANALYSIS 10:3, 1991Robert G. Hopkins’s reiterated belief in his recent study Closure and Mahler's ‘Music (1990: 1, 65), that ‘many passages in (Mahler’s} later works ... are difficult to relate to a tonal centre’, is well worth subjecting to detailed examination. For the moment, however, I cite it merely as a symptom parallel to the more Germanic preoccupation not with the breakdown of tonality but with the the end of the symphonic tradition. A writer such as Peter Revers (1985: viii) takes as his starting-point the ‘dissolution’ of the symphony (a concept susceptible to as many objections and refinements as the ‘breakdown’ of tonality, but which may be accepted under mild protest as referring to a specifically Austro-German kind of symphony at a particular time). This reflects the extent to which German analysis hhas been genre-specific in its hermeneutics, while American analysis has been syntactically orientated. The contrast between Hopkins and Revers is particularly interesting, since they approach a common nexus of ideas, and here and there analyse common extracts from Mahler's symphonies. Even the terms in which they speak overlap, particularly on the concept of ‘liquidation’. Both go back to Schoenberg, though Hopkins (1990: 84) isolates ‘dissolution’ rather than ‘liquidation’ from the ‘Gedanke Manuscript’; Revers locates ‘liquidation’ (the central concept of his study of the late works) in Fundamentals of Musical Composition (1967). But whereas Schoenberg speaks there of liquidation as a ‘condensing technique’ at the level of theme and motive ( :58), Revers is aware of what Adorno, Amo Forchert (1975) and Martin Zenck (1975) have made of it. Where Schoenberg referred to ‘liquidation’ in motivie-textural terms and at the ends of musical periods, Adomo spoke of dissolution of traditional formal schemes and techniques of composition (1960: 203) and Zenck of paralysis which extended into ‘Auflosungsfelder’ (1975: 209) in sharp contrast to Webern’s policy of contraction (Revers 1985: 19-20). As a result, Hopkins remains closer to the Schoenbergian origin, since his object of study frequently addresses the ends of periods (to take the crudest view of his central, Meyer-derived concept of closure). It is not entirely flippant to say that, whereas the hermeneutic approach gravitates to ‘musical prose’, Hopkins analyses the punctuation, Liquidation as form-principle Revers’s book boasts a neutral tite, but its true focus is caught in the title of the thesis from which it sprang, ‘Die Liquidation der musikalischen Struktur in den spiten Symphonien Gustav Mahlers’ (Salzburg, 1980). The process of expansion through liquidation that he describes is founded partly on the reduction and dissolution of motives hinted at in Schoenberg’s not very systematic discussion of the subject, but more strikingly on the proliferation of the resulting fragments into complexes which rest outside the conventional formal areas (viewing structure here as a kind of glue, often motivic, which holds specific formal schemes together). The dialectic of negation of form as principle for constructing form is already present in Adorno’s picture of the Mahlerian symphony as narrative; it is Revers's achievement to have refined a point of Adorno’s critique at a time when other writers have tended to sit back and applaud his theory of variants (e.g. Julg 1986; 54-5). The latter, as Schmitt (1983: 40) noted, is indeed a dangerously extendable and transformable idea, which operates on both formal and thematic levels. The characteristically Mahlerian process of thematic transformation was deflected by Adorno (doubtless to the delight of Brahms scholars) from ‘developing variation’ towards a technique that emphasized not model, variation ustc aNaLysts 10:3, 1991 359and unity, but model, genre and deviation. Thematic variants were the characters of the Mahlerian novel or drama, actors in scenes rather than cells in a unified organism (which may, however, have been how Mahler saw them himself). The thematic or motivic variant, subjected to the various genres which course through Mabler’s movements (march, chorale, waltz, Lindler and so on), became the means of organising ‘Felder’; the ‘Auflsungsfeld’ of Zenck is ‘close to the “Erfallungsfeld’ of Adomo (1960: 65), Running through this whole nexus of ideas is the desire to sce generic material not so much as rhetoric (an increasingly familiar idea in Anglo-American analysis) as in some sense constitutive of form itself (Forchert 1975: 87). By reading characteristics as characters (as the word Charaktere permitted), the latent content of Mahler's music could be brought to light, the music could be made to speak, though the message would not be the glib positivism of Mahler’s programmes, nor indeed of some of the early Mahler writers. Thus Jilg (1986: 56) defined the inevitably negative dialectic in his amazement that Paul Bekker (1969: 210) had once looked upon the opening of the Sixth Symphony in a reasonably positive spirit. The emphatic major conclusion of its opening movement has always required the Adorno tradition to cling to the scarcely definable idea of ‘musical positivism in indirect speech’, positivism as it might be if only it were possible; the deciphered message of the work becomes apparent in the destruction of the Formimmanenz in the finale. Reading Julg’s paraphrase of such ideas in his otherwise valuable study of the Sixth Symphony is to become uncomfortably aware of the extent to which critique hhas become gospel in some German Mahler studies. Revers transcends this limitation by his awareness of the more radical implications of liquidation, which has the potential to be more than just the shattering of the immanence of forms. Liquidation, having become a ‘central substantial category” in the epilogue of the Sixth Symphony (Revers 1985: 54), moves to ‘auskomponierte Zeitlosigkeit’ in “Der Abschied’ (: 78): ‘Das Lied von der Erde organizes liquidation of the musical structure both as pparticularization of the material in the timbral coralty of natural sounds and as dissociation of motivic shapes, as well as through the passing of melodic structures into Klangkomposion which expresses itself above all in the... phenomenon of extension of motives (: 185). Klangkomposition here points to what is described as Klangflachenkomposition composition with sound planes’) in Wagner, Mahler and Zemlinsky studies (Lichtenfeld 1970, 1977; Gruber 1976), and may be defined in terms of stasis generated through absence of well-defined progressions, the choric differentiation of instrumental groups, as well as disintegration and parataxis (Revers’s chosen word) of motives. But motives tend to remain uppermost in Revers’s account, as becomes particularly apparent when he addresses related procedures in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony. The music speaks here of the liquidation of expressive categories, farewell (embodied in the descending step, 3-2, referred to variously as the ‘Leb’ wohl’ or ‘Abschied’ motive) and reminiscence (the echo of, the younger Johann Strauss’s “Freut Euch des Lebens’). Revers writes here of a semanticization, and later suggests that this has both biographical and historical significance (1985: 186). In this he reveals the multi-level approach of the hermeneutic tradition in contrast to the simpler semanticization of programmes. ‘Motives and genres may speak for themselves, but what they have to say is not 360 Music ANALYSIS 10:3, 1991simply a revelation of the composer's point of view. Potentially, the music deconstructs that very point of view, revealing not only a cultural critique but also (particularly in such positive works as the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies) the extent to which the composer is embraced by that critique. If motives and genres may speak for themselves, then so too can the larger formal entities of which Adorno speaks, the material form categories which have formed a debated area in his theory. The language of the material theory of form is rich in categories with programmatic resonance, suspension, realization, Durchbruch and collapse, which is diversified into Einsturs and Zusammenbruch. Terms which explicators (and indeed simply writers) of programmes strew around innocently bristle with an energy in Adorno that speaks of categories expressive of themselves and not of naive positivism. Herein lies a vital difference between the hermeneutic tradition of semantics plus critique and the theoretical orientation of Hopkins. For if a collapse can speak for itself, we need no longer hear it merely as a downward plunge from a climax; it ceases, as Revers notes (1985: 12), to be transitional. It speaks of the abyss into which a Dostoevskian hero may plunge (to employ the sort of analogy with which Adorno sought to illustrate his theory of narrative). In Hopkins’s study of closure, collapse and transition are often close to being synonymous, Closure, transition and profongation ‘The notion of collapse is placed by Hopkins in a taxonomy of abating closure that is itself part of a higher taxonomy of closure founded on discrimination between parameters. Melody, tonal harmony and rhythm represent the primary parameters which define closure, and Hopkins’s attitude to them is shaped by concepts found in Meyer, notably the implication-realization model and the ideas of congruence and non-congruence found in the chapter ‘Hierarchic Structures’ in Explaining ‘Music (1973: 80-105). The rather transparent psychological elements of Meyer's theory are also present, but with an awareness of the problems posed by the relationship of cultural and learned factors in perception (Hopkins 1990: 10). The specific focus of the book is an area which Hopkins regards as neglected, the secondary parameters (such as durational patterns, register, timbre and dynamics) as factors in closure. The urgency of the inquiry is largely dictated by Meyer's familiar emphasis on a comprehensive approach to analysis embracing as many Parameters as possible. But a problem that underlies the whole book is the extent to which secondary parameters can actually create, as opposed to reinforce, closure; it is all very well to say that the ‘primary focus will be on examples of closure produced by several corresponding secondary parameters, one or more of, which implies and reaches a specific point of repose’ (1990; 86), but in practice many of Hopkins’s examples overlap extensively with closure in melody and tonality. Nor is it clear how timbre, for instance, can adequately be described or clearly related to closure, as Hopkins is candid enough to admit (1990; 56-7). It is not surprising to find that ‘processes in simple and compound duration [that is, durational patterns for the leading voice, and for the overall texture] in Mahler's music create closure far more frequently’ than other secondary parameters (1990: 86); nor is it remarkable that they seldom operate without reinforcing primary, or without reinforcement from other secondary, parameters, ‘The resultant classification is thus rather more slippery than the admirable presentation of author and press would suggest. A fundamental presupposition is MUSIC ANALYSis 10:3, 1991 361that a form of non-cadential closure exists in Mahler that may be defined as abatement of secondary parameters. This is not identical with any of the definitions of ‘liquidation’ presented by Revers, though it may address similar passages, Neither isi clear how far this may be viewed as syntactic, since there are strong hints that syntax and primary parameters are more or less the same (1990: 22). Hopkins is quite sure, however, that ‘syntactic relationships are style Gependent’ (1990: 20) and ‘that stylistic shifts in Mabler’s music affect the character of closure. This i illustrated in the first of two triparttions which form ‘much of the basis of the book's organization: 1) ‘abatements in secondary parameters ... terminally synchronized with cadential closure’ 2). post-cadential abatement of a tonic prolongation; 3) closure carried out primarily in terms of secondary parameters (1990: 68). Here the belief in a gradual weakening of tonality in later Mahler serves to sustain the expectation of a corresponding increase in the third type. And yet such expectations all 100 often are founded upon a curiously statistical approach to such tonal weakening, as though the relative infrequency of authentic closures in ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ somehow detracted from the force of such authentic cadences as do occur, most notably from bs 53-9 (1990: 65). This is not unrelated to another point of confusion, exactly how abatement of secondary parameters can ‘reduce the tensive effect of a dominant harmony” (1990: 66); the example chosen from the Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony is a good instance of how the basic distinction, primary and secondary, which is surely qualitative, is sometimes sacrificed to a quantitative approach’ implying that perception withers during brief silence. ‘These and other objections can casily tum into rather more radical disagreement over the nature and relative status of prolongations, which is not an explicit object of Hopkins’s book. His chief interest resides in a further tripartition ‘of abatement into collapse (rapid), fragmentation and subsidence (gradual), all carried out with singular lack of reference to the hermeneutic tradition, an ‘omission which surprises me considerably more than it does Zychowicz (1991: 62- 3). Although subsidence is the largest single instance of abatement, collapse inevitably attracts the most attention precisely because of its place within Adorno’s theories. It is fairly clear from Hopkins’s treatment of it that it is to be conceived either as prolongation of a syntactic closure (in other words, as what a Schenkerian ‘might prefer to call an epilogue) or as transition, thus flying in the face of the notion that itis form-constitutive in a more immanent sense, though one example Of a recurring collapse in ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’ (bs 94-9) might have prompted greater consideration of its structural status, given the weight accorded to conformant patterns by both Meyer (1973: 44) and Hopkins (1990: 90-4). Exactly what status critical hermeneutics might have in Hopkins’s approach ‘emerges more clearly in the section ‘Fragmentation’ (1990: 94-7), when he turns to the conclusion of the first movement of the Ninth Symphony. Hermeneutics seems to be the province of an unmediated subjectivism, expressed in some words of Leonard Bernstein which oddly enough seem also to point to ‘timelessness composed out’, albeit couched in rather more sentimental terms than the German tradition would tolerate. There is no real technical follow-up to this, which might 362 Music ANALYSIS 10:3, 1991have caused Hopkins to address the problem of stasis more extensively than as a final tonic prolongation, perhaps by moving into the sphere of Klangflichen. But perhaps this would require a greater ability to discern texture as a unified ‘field than is reasonable within the confines of Meyer’s school of analysis; for all the demand for an all-embracing approach, the result too frequently is particularization; the quest for simple durational patterns in a principal voice (e.g. 1990: 79-82 and Ex. 4.6) illustrates the difficulty of assessing Mahler’s polyphony as texture, Defining texture is of course a slippery exercise. Hopkins makes a clear distinction between components, ‘the number of identifiable and differentiated strata in the musical fabric’, and texture, ‘the way in which listeners organize the lines into a ground, a figure or figures with a ground, or concurrent figures’ (1990: 58). Texture as organization would seem in this account to be a matter for the listener, which may explain why one has to search long and hard for a definition of texture in Nattiez’s ‘neutral’ discipline. But in Hopkins’s work, texture quickly becomes entangled with other parameters to the point where one understands why the components of texture bulk larger than their collective effect upon the listener. Just as the Meyer concept of closure stands too often, at least in this book, for Particularization as sectionalization (in spite of the recognition of the transitional aspect of abatement), so the relationship of simple to compound duration remains undefined in terms of background harmonic rhythm, so the collective effect of texture is dissipated into parameters. The rewards of Hopkins’s approach tend to be correspondingly particular (though not to be devalued) on the level of characteristics purely as stylistic fingerprints. Thus the ends of sections tend to be marked by durational and concordant closure (with concordance defined in terms taken from Helmholtz), the end of movements by durational and dynamic closure (1990: 156). Prolongation in a chromatic norm Since prolongation plays an important part in Hopkins’s argument in a variety of ways, it is worth considering the problem of what may be prolonged. But this remains rather nebulous as a consequence of the desire to discern a ‘weakening of tonal syntax’ (1990: 65) in the mature Mabler. Many of the causes of this weakening are familiar from the work of Tischler (1937, 1951), which hardly now requires recapitulation. But what needed to be polemically sharpened in Tischler in the interests of wider awareness of Mabler’s work may no longer look quite so appealing. It may well be possible to agree with Christopher Lewis (1984: 7) when he takes it as ‘axiomatic that later nineteenth-century chromaticism is structural rather than decorative’ without seeing Mahler's forms of tonal prolongation as syntactically weak; it may simply be that the periods are longer (as the earlier example from ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ illustrates). More radically, the basis for the prolongations may have been reformulated, though this is also more problematic and has been the source of a debate that overrides my earlier distinction between older and newer writing on Mabler. ‘The main area of controversy has been the tonal framework that Mahler provided for his symphonies and for their original prolongational techniques, in Particular his practice of sometimes ending in a key other than that in which he started. ‘This, it must be said, is a practice which principally affects whole works rather than individual movements. Each of the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Seventh and Ninth Symphonies ends in a key other than that of the opening, as does Das Lied MUSIC ANALYSIS 10:3, 1991 363von der Erde. But although several of Mahler's songs, like some of Wolt’s, follow this practice, individual symphonic movements on the whole tend to remain in the same key. There are obvious exceptions. The finale of the First moves from F minor to D major, the finale of the Second from C to Bs the opening movement of the Third begins in D minor before settling down in F major, and the finale of the Fourth moves from G to E. The pattern relates principally to final movements, though to speak of pattern is perhaps misleading. The move in the case of the First Symphony restores D major, the key of the first movement, whereas the Second and Fourth Symphonies open new perspectives in their final sections which had been hinted at in earlier movements. Frustratingly for those secking to read a gradual move towards a breakdown of tonality in such internal structures, the instrumental trilogy (Symphonies 5, 6 and 7) actually approaches more closely to common-practice monotonality within individual movements. Admittedly, the finale of the Sixth opens with the key signature of C minor, but all we hear ‘in’ that key is an augmented-sixth chord; neither tonic nor dominant of C minor is sounded before Mahler veers into A minor, the tonic of the whole symphony. The only other movement which seems to move from its opening key is the first ‘movement of the Seventh Symphony. Here the initial B minor is supplanted by E minor as early as the beginning of the Allegro risoluto, As I have tried to show elsewhere, B minor is really little more than a large dominant upbeat to the main key, a procedure with structural analogies in the slow introduction to the first movement of the First Symphony (Williamson 1986, 1990). The problems of ‘musical structure raised by the shift in tonality over the whole symphony in the cases of the Fifth and Seventh need not necessarily affect the traditional picture of, musical structure which is posited on the individual movement; indeed it might be argued that there is music by Schubert and Chopin that questions more radically the norms of monotonality. ‘Such a conclusion is apparently contradicted by the rush of theories in post- war Mahler research. Of late, such concepts as ‘progressive tonality’ (Newlin 1947, 1979: 129) and ‘dramatic key symbolism’ (Tischler 1949) have had a fairly bad press (e.g. Lewis 1984: 2-3). They now seem to be yielding to Robert Bailey’s, ‘double-tonic complex’, which usually operates with two tonalities linked by the interval of a third. The theoretical consequences of this are considerable and are somewhat handicapped by the rather informal way in which Bailey has disseminated his ideas through public lectures, unpublished papers, and undergraduate and postgraduate teaching that has taken on something of a legendary quality. Lewis (1984) has acted as a conduit for material from an unpublished paper on Das Lied von der Erde, perhaps the most familiar and striking example of infringing the monotonal norm in Mahler's output, with its initial A minor giving way to the C minor and C major of ‘Der Abschied’. But inasmuch as each movement retains one overall key centre, it remains less problematic for the analyst than some of Mabler’s songs or the first movement of the Third ‘Symphony, where it is legitimate to wonder whether Mahler himself thought of D minor or F major as the tonic key. To such examples could be added one which Mabler found in a work he came to admire, the D major String Quartet of Hans Pfitzner, which takes the idea of a pairing of relative keys to a point further than Das Lied. Although the first movement of this work contains few surprises in exotic chord forms or unfamiliar melodic elaborations, it does hold D major and B minor in constant equilibrium. If one were to attempt an analysis in Schenkerian terms of this movement, it would only be possible for the B minor in which it concludes 364 MUSIC ANALYSIS 10:3, 1991(not the D major in which it starts, and in which the whole work concludes). In such a tonal scheme, Mahler must have recognized a kindred spirit. Yet if the idea of a tonal pairing is seductive, then it has to be pointed out how litle the keys of A minor and C major come into direct contact in Das Lied von der Erde. Ye would be possible to look on Bp as another near-structural entity, the tonic of "Von der Jugend’, the triad of the climax to the ape's section in ‘Das Trinklied vom Jammer det Erde’, and the key of the most substantial song-scction in ‘Der Abschied’. But a problem of metaphor arises. Perhaps By could be explained in terms of tonal ‘conflict’, while the relationship of the pairing, A minoe/C major, in Bailey and Lewis should be taken as a substitute organicism for Schenker’s Ursatz (as is obviously intended). The notion of tonal conflict is central to many depictions of the unfashionable progressive tonality, as in Simpson's analyses of Nielsen, while dnganicism is central to others. Assessing the relative validity of such metaphors is difficult to the point of arbitrariness. Perhaps itis incurably wilful to long for analyses of Nielsen's Fifth Symphony that do not require the listener to place D and Ab in irreconcilable conflict, and for analyses of Das Lied von der Erde that enable one to discover symphonic dynamic as opposed to an all-embracing organicisms the latter might then resolve the continuing problem of whether the work realy isa symphony “The need for a substitute onganicism resides in a perceived weakening of the Schenkerian Unatz. Lewis draws attention to the weakening of the ‘structaral dominant’, which is a phenomenon worthy of consideration in a major-mode ‘movernent (and, to be fair, three movements of the Ninth Symphons, the object of his studs, are in the major mode). The implied discrimination is necessary simply because ‘Schenker’s picture of sonata form in the minor mode leaves one wondering how strong a structural dominant in the Ursatz needs to be, even at the height of the period of common-practice tonality. The graph of the fist movement of Beethoven's Sonata in C minor, Op. 10, No. 3, presented by Schenker (1979: 134 and Fig. 154/3) exhibits a division at 2 and Vno stronger than many such divisions in Mabler. Ifa stable modulation is the criterion for formal division, then E} major makes a quite unsurprising appearance in the exposition and. is ‘maintained until the start of the development. Its not my intention to attempt t0 measure Bailey and Lewis against such common practice for _minor-mode movements. But some first movement structures in Mahler suggest quite strongly a transference of procedures associated with minor-mode structures and forms t0 the major. There is room, of course, in the traditional picture of sonata form for key relationships by third as well as more conventional relationships involving the dominant, ‘There are cases in Mahler's immediate predecessors, Brahms and Bruckner, of such models as FIV (as in the opening movement of Brahms’s Second Symphony), with V being attained at the end of the exposition (Schachter 1983: 62-8). Adjastments of Schenker’s theory in the light of such passages is probably desirable (as suggested by Schachter 1987: 307), particularly for the structural neighbouring note and various ways of treating III in both modes. Schachter rescues ‘keys" from the foreground to allot them structural standing in a more resonant middleground. Is it then necessary for Bailey and Lewis to £0 further by making third-relationships into a substitute background? Tt is not easy to sce clearly whether this emphasis on structurally prominent plagal and third based areas is actually a revolt against the idea of according structural primacy f0 a V thar does not achieve status as.a key in any real sense. Whatever the motive, Lewis is quite explicit in granting importance to the dominant ‘Frequentiy at the Music ANALYsis 10:3, 1991 365foreground, occasionally at the middleground, and only rarely ~ in the classical sense ~ at the background’. In Mahler, the ‘non-linear harmonic and tonal idea’ that serves as background ‘always has 0 do with paired tonics’ (1984: 8). ‘The specific tonal schemes that Lewis discerns in the Ninth Symphony are largely concerned with equal-interval cycles, D-B-F}-D in the first movement, though in the later movements what seemed like a penetrating idea takes on something of that vagueness pinpointed in analytical concepts of derivation by Cone (1987: 253-4). The finale’s coda seeks triadic substantiation by a parallel procedure that sacrifices chromatic alteration to a schema of dangerously transformable extension; as in the most wide-eyed measuring of triads, isolated ‘moments in prolongations are wrenched out of context for exhibition (1984: 116- 17). But such pinpricks can be tolerated for the wealth of incidental detail that Lewis provides. My real area of doubt lies in the defiant universality of paired tonics and third relationships. The first movement of the Seventh Symphony is a g00d example of the way in which a strong tonic-dominant relationship (E and B) can act as a frame for third-relationships in equal-interval cycles (Williamson 1990; 35-6); while the motion around I-V frames the movement, the development builds such a cycle on B. The C major which is the plausible candidate for a ‘double-tonic complex’, however important for the later movements of the work, is 4 structural neighbouring note, though not quite composed out in the manner recognized by Schachter. In general, the Seventh Symphony makes out a strong. case within movements for retaining the strong dominant of the Schenkerian schema, though in the concluding rondo, an orthodox structural graph has a curiously ill-formed appearance (Ex. 1), arising from the frequency with which the tonic returns, and from the limited space allotted to the dividing dominant, whose importance is masked later by cycles of thirds and much else that is stranger (Ex. 1 can give only the sketchiest outline of the chromatic voice leading between b.446 and b.517). If this be put down to the generic garrulity of rondo form, then the finale of the Sixth Symphony presents an even more repetitive tonal structure, which discursively treats of A minor in relation to subdominant, chromatically altered mediant and jII before the eventual dominant interruption, whose placing, relegates the second subject’s recapitulation to the status of an episode in the development (Ex. 2). But the problem for analysts in Mabler’s handling of the dominant area is perhaps best encapsulated in the second movement of the Fifth Symphony, where traditional tonal and formal schemata are dislocated, as is most ‘easily seen in the holding-back of a structural dominant to the point of thematic recapitulation. The graph in Ex. 3 is in a sense even more radical than those for the finales of the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies; but if we are looking for ‘long- range tonal connections at a level of abstraction not so far removed from perceived surface events’ (Lewis 1984: 5), then the relationship of tonic and dominant is as near to the surface as the motion from A to F which embraces the subject groups. Chromatic prolongations Whatever the ultimate value of the ‘double-tonic complex’ and third-relationships (whose implications for Schenkerian analysis seem more clearly considered in Stein 1985: 91-7), they do not necessarily negate or weaken the tonic, but rather prolong it more discursively. Hopkins’s work fails to convince when it touches, however tentatively, on the framework for prolongation. Occasionally there are passages in his analyses where the much-prized sense of closure seems missing or 366 Music ANALYSIS 10:3, 1991Ex, 1: Mahler, Seventh Symphony, Rondo Fry moron et mw we tan Beery Ex, 2: Mahler, Sixth Symphony, Finale sotiter wehjecr NMAEROEWELORENT manometer subjecr ‘rae ist 396 see ae age neato sete as ras boxy gg soy bow Gos Music aNatysts 10:3, 1991 367Ex. 3: Mahler, Fifth Symphony, second movement ‘even weak, as in a passage from ‘Der Abschied’ (Hopkins 1990: 134-5); the point fof closure described here seems to be overridden by a § chord which acts as inverted commas for the words “Er sprach", This raises the question: What if closure of secondary parameters does not follow on, of coincide with, primary closure; do they override the prolongation? As it tums out, Hopkins provides & partial answer in a passage ffom the finale of the First Symphony; "high-level dissonance’ (which denotes a chromatically enriched dominant) vitates strong closure (1990: 142-1). ‘The answer is partial because the chromatic dissonance may be sustained but isan agent of prolongation rather a chromatic resource itself prolonged. A more interesting. problem, however, is precisely the question of ‘whether Mahler's music, with its conceivably structural chromaticism, requires ‘chromatic prolongations that are not simply to be rationalised as the products of Voice leading. Iris my belief that itis through chromatic models for prolongation that many of the passages regarded by Hopkins as non-tonal (@ wild over Statement) can Be integrated into an extension of common-practice tonality. The “crisis of tonality” which Tischler (1951) discemed is at least in part the result of piecemeal consideration of chromatic phenomena, a procedure which Mahler's Imusic encourages by its resort to highly chromaticized enclaves within diatonic Sections, such as bs 309-22 in ‘Der Abschied’, where chromatic resources such 28 the hal-diminished seventh are disguised by Mahler's peculiar approach to heighbouring-note dissonance. But if such enclaves are extreme cases in Mahler's usc, there is @ related but more diffused phenomenon. Discussion of Mahler's voice leading must make acknowledgement of the fundamental datonicism of his style. He knew how to handle the full repertoire of nineteenth-century chromaticism, including diminished and half-diminished Sevenths, Neapolitan and augmented sits, the augmented triad and 30 on. What distinguishes him from many contemporaries isthe simplicity of much of his bass movernent, especially but not exclusively in his first period. A composer who deals, in conic pedals and fonic-dominant altemations and drones will inevitably tend t0 treat chromaticism initially as a surface phenomenon. This should not blind us to the need to shape theories of voice leading to specifically chromatic prolongations ifthe need arises. Examples da and 5a provide foreground detail of two notorious 368 Music ANatysis 10:3, 1991comers of the finale of the Sixth Symphony, together with somewhat abstract reductions (Exs 4b and 5b), as relatively informal analyses of the way in which secondary sevenths and augmented sixths may be prolonged in passages that stretch common-practice tonality into distorted shapes familiar from other composers in the ‘late’ tonality of the turn of the century. Example 4a also aspires to reflect the degree to which neighbouring-note tensions are incorporated simultaneously into chordal structures and linear events. What it does not show, of course, is the manner in which secondary parameters tum this chromatic transition into a ‘field of disintegration’, a concept whose realization is not the stasis of a Klangflche but an altogether more mobile complex. The claim of chromatic chordal resources for greater status within a modified picture of Schenker’s theory does not invalidate the traditional categories of that theory, but represents an enrichment that is not merely special pleading for Mahler. Ex. 4: Mahler, Sixth Symphony, Finale, bs 39-49 Music aNatysts 10:3, 1991 369CRITICAL FORUM Ex. 5: Mahler, Sixth Symphony, Finale, bs 381-95 Trends in hermeneutics Anglo-American music theory may not as yet have aspired to the condition of critical hermeneutics. But insofar as the Adorno tradition now has the appearance of something susceptible at best to polishing of isolated concepts, awaiting in its tum the hermeneutic revelation of its interests (by which T do not mean such sentimental effusions as conclude Kldppelholz 1989, with its reference to Adorno’s ‘Musikgedicht about Mahler’, which itself is ‘an artwork for sharpening the hearing and opening the heart’), it seems possible that new Mahler analysis is more likely to be a continuation of the provocative but arresting claims of Hopkins, Bailey and Lewis. The basis for a new criticism may well issue from the steadily diverging factions of American music theory, At present, however, the search for a meaning in Mahler beyond analysis of syntax and forms has shown particular interest in tracing the presence of Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean intellectual schemes behind the music. Such a field of inquiry was most noticeably opened up by McGrath (1974) and Floros (1977-85) and has yielded its most extensive product in Eveline Nikkels’s book on Mahler and Nietzsche (1989). But here hermeneutic investigation has almost passed beyond the point of music 370 Music aNatysis 10:3, 1991analysis into the history of ideas, addressing Mahler's music almost exclusively at the point where it sets texts, and taking those texts as a message that is almost exclusive in its claims. “The flaws in Nikkels’s undertaking are obvious. Schopenhauer’s part in forming Nietzsche's outlook, and his undoubted importance to Mahler both in his ‘own right and as mediated through Nietzsche's earlier writings, require a rather ‘more generous framework than Nikkels provides. The manner in which concepts are redefined from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche is never quite addressed. ‘That Nietzsche's celebrated antithesis of Apollo and Dionysos in Die Geburt der Tragbdie underwent considerable evolution throughout his career, to the point that the antithesis dissolved into one Dionysos with certain clearly Apollonian features ilk and Stern 1981: 118-25; Thiele 1990: 140) is not completely grasped by Nikkels: they remain locked in an antithesis which she expresses in terms often lose to Adorno, with Dionysos a seeming agent of the Durchbruch (Nikkels 1989. 169). ‘The significant difference is that, whereas the idea of Durchbruch, the rending of the curtain by some metaphysical Jenseits, is subjected to searching critique in Adorno’s picture of Mahler, Nikkels's ‘Light-god Dionysos’ seems the hero of a morality play. ‘The task of assessing accurately the extent to which Nietzsche borrowed from Christianity while subjecting its ethics and morality to a devastating critique presupposes an ironic awareness (as described, for instance, in Thiele 1990: 211-12) that is lacking in Nikkelss study. The problem of reinterpreting Mahler’s ostensibly Christian texts in a Dionysian sense is that a simple development from Christian ideas of resurrection (however irregularly expressed in the Second Symphony) to a Nietzschean programme (assuming ~ and itis a large assumption ~ that this was Mahler’ intention) is not traceable without drastic qualification Nonetheless, Nikkels’s ambitious and thought-provoking undertaking is not without resonance in other Mahler studies. Most noticeably, her reading of “Um ‘Mitternacht’ secks support from Reinhard Gerlach’'s gnomic study (1982) of the Rickert songs (Nikkels 1989: 118). But whereas Nikkels reads the song positively from a consideration of the text, Gerlach’s picture is rather more complex. Far from expressing the triumph of the Dionysian life-spirit, the close of ‘Um Mitter- nacht’, with its stepping back from ‘neo-romantic’ fluctuating tonality into the ‘simpler musical language” of a custodian of tradition, becomes symptomatic of a ‘more brutal experience. In secking Nietzsche's ‘meaning of the earth’ (in other words the Superman), Mabler not merely violated his chosen text by Rickert in order to “bring the Romanticism of the ego just as much as its music to an end” (Gerlach 1982: 96-9, 105-6), he revealed that his own role was to stop short of disclosing that meaning (1982: 114-15). ‘The ending is no triumph of Dionysian life-spirt, but a stepping-back into musical models that reveal Mahler asa custodian of tradition. The wilful god-seeker of early Mabler studies becomes the wilful, would-be superman of Gerlach’s picture. Common to all Mahlerian critical hermeneutics is the notion that the composer and his musical material existed in a forced, even antagonistic relationship. Central to the German tradition of writing ‘on Mahler is the presupposition that mere analysis, too, remains within @ positivis- tic field that the music criticizes and undermines. Whether analysis can bridge the ap with hermeneutics is dependent upon how seriously we take the idea that our business is not with speaking about music but about Musiksprache, that rather indefinable idea with which modem Anglo-American music theory is funda- ‘mentally uncomfortable. At a time when Mabler's music appears to ‘speak’ to ever music aNaLysts 10:3, 1991 371larger audiences, the exact status of its message remains uncertain. Yet the intersubjective nature of the aesthetic experience refuses to bow before the neutrality of analysis; in this light, Mahler studies are gradually seeming less particular than prophetic. 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