Bruckner's Symphonies: Analysis, Reception and Cultural Politics (review)

Abstract

Bruckner's Symphonies: Reception and Cultural Politics. By Julian Horton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. [x, 280 p. ISBN 0-521-82354-4. $75.] Music examples, bibliography, index. Julian Horton's Bruckner's Symphonies: Reception and Cultural Politics is work of an energetic, musically astute scholarly mind pursuing an important and challenging task, namely establish grounds for understanding that do justice to an unmediated sense of music-historical and analytic significance that I never quite managed to reconcile with prevailing (p. viii). Horton begins by taking aim at 'Bruckner problem' in broadest sense, which as he sees it, encompasses not only notorious text-critical but myriad other issues of reception including Nazification of Bruckner's music, persistent questioning of music's artistic merit, and belittling approaches to composer's biography (p. 1). In a novel twist that helps to enrich his perspective, Horton identifies as the single factor uniting these trends a consistent revisionist motivation that goes back to debates about Bruckner's music in 188Os and the desire to defend him against ridicule of Hanslick and Brahmsian faction (p. 2). Horton is uneasy with persistence of revisionism, however, for it tends to produce single-minded and often contradictory interpretations and because it has prevented formation of a critical overview capable of properly comprehending apparently intractable scholarly problems raised by Bruckner's works. Thus, Horton's central motivation is intention to investigate 'the problem' in broadest sense in a comparative, rather than a disciplinarily speci6c, fashion in conviction that this will escape repeating cycle of reappraisal that in many ways constitutes enduring ground of scholarship (p. 3). Horton structures his book around a of case studies that prosecute this aim by exploring consequences of allowing problematic issues to intersect, or to be refracted through a succession of diverse methodological debates and applications (p. 3). This produces a series of fairly self-contained chapters on topics ranging from Right-wing Cultural Politics and Nazi Appropriation of to Bruckner and Construction of Musical Influence and Psychobiography and Analysis. Given this ambitious program, it is hardly surprising that results of Horton's efforts are mixed. In general, parts of his work that are rooted in musical analysis are most satisfying, while his efforts to extend into interdisciplinary and post-modern reaches are insightful and frustrating by turns. Horton is a talented music analyst. The single best chapter is compendious Bruckner and Musical Analysis, which at seventy pages is nearly twice length of next-longest chapter and occupies more than a quarter of book's total length (pp. 92-161). It begins with a appraisal of ways in which current theoretical and analytic paradigms, particularly those rooted in Schenkerian principles, struggle to comprehend Bruckner's formal and harmonic methods. Horton argues well that prevalent tendency in Anglo-American music theory to define common in Schenkerian terms has fostered a tradition of misunderstanding by granting normative status to an essentially Brahmsian concept. With tables thus skewed against Bruckner, it has become an accepted truism that his symphonies are imperfect if not fundamentally problematic. But Horton avers that the source of these is analytic theory, not Brucknerian practice (pp. 94^95) and proceeds to explore how a more apt and nuanced analysis would work. He brings to bear some of best recent work on sonata form, thematic and tonal design, and neoRiemannian notions of harmonic function in a series of substantial analytic vignettes addressing salient parts of Fourth, Fifth, Seventh and Eight Symphonies, supported by a series of fine music examples, reductions, and analytic sketches. …