Making Words Sing: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Song (review)

Abstract

Making Words Sing: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Song. By Jonathan Dunsby. York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. [x, 153 p. ISBN 0-521-83661-1. $65.] Index, bibliography, music examples. Since 1980s Jonathan Dunsby has published numerous thought-provoking, influential articles and books concerning analysis of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury music, particularly music of Brahms and Schoenberg; Schenkerian and semiotic theories; and relationships between analysis and performance. His latest book, Making Words Sing, is informed by these diverse interests as well as by his mastery of analytical and theoretical concepts. Although are now numerous books on nineteenth-century lied, are few monographs on lied of twentieth century. Edward Kravitt's brilliant The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) is most authoritative study of stylistic links between these two eras, but, as tide implies, emphasis is on turn of century. The subtitle of Dunsby's book, and opening page of his introduction, might lead one to believe he will explore this topic more fully. But he does not provide a systematic analysis or survey. Instead he proffers a series of idiosyncratic discussions of a small number of pieces from both centuries in an effort to understand special quality of vocal music, or what he calls vocality. Dunsby adapts to music Oxford English Dictionary definition of as the quality of having voice (p. 4). He uses term to denote those qualities of music and text that enable one to identify it as articulating narrative, mood, times of tenses, associations, grammatical tropes such as interrogative, visual images, persons and landscapes, mundane and divine. Vocality concerns everything that a replete analysis of music and text ought to explain, and ought not to neglect (p. 62). The pieces discussed in most detail are: Brahms's Von ewiger Liebe (op. 43, no. 1); Schoenberg's Vorgefuhl (op. 22, no. 4) and Friede auf Erden (op. 13); Alexander Goehr's The Law of Quadrille (op. 41); Gyorgy Kurtag's The Sayings of Peter Bamemisza; Cathy Berberian's Stripsody; Aaron Copland's Going to Heaven!; and Schubert's Erster Verlust. At first glance this selection seems quixotic at best, though on further reading it becomes apparent that stylistic diversity is an attempt to demonstrate power of term vocality, and that text-setting techniques in pieces can be related and compared. Nevertheless, choice of pieces remains somewhat problematic as twentieth-century works are not nearly as well known as earlier ones, and Dunsby offers little in way of introductory material. It is also surprising that he does not consider lieder of Hugo Wolf. As definition of vocality implies, and as diverse styles of pieces (and their texts) necessitate, Dunsby draws on an impressive array of analytical techniques to explore music and original poems. In studying each song he discusses text, and in some cases style of poet, and then pinpoints specific moments or structural elements in music that are cued to words. Along with his insightful interpretations he invokes a wide range of other scholars, and in particular critically appraises New Musicology. His introductory remarks about this trend demonstrate his attitude, and also his idiomatic, talky prose: there emerged in musicology of 1980s and 1990s not only a rather piggish liberalism coupled with a naive-in my view -psychologism that masqueraded as a kind of psychoanalytical savvy without, if truth be told, having much to do with psychotherapeutic scholarship or understanding, but also much more positively, what has been called a 'eucrasia', a sort of wellbeing based on openness, in technical musical discourse (p. 2). Von ewiger Liebe is only nineteenth-century lied to be accorded its own chapter, and Dunsby begins with a surprising defense of love songs in which he discusses Paul McCartney's Silly Love Songs. …