Abstract
This article surveys the state of so-called topic theory today. It charts its development through two ‘generations’ of ‘topic theorists’. The first is constructed around three influential texts: Leonard Ratner’s seminal book that established the discipline in its own right, Classic music: expression, form and style (1980); Wye Allanbrook’s Rhythmic gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (1983); and Kofi Agawu’s Playing with signs: a semiotic interpretation of classical music (1991). The second comprises significant advances in topic theory essayed through two further pairs of texts: Robert Hatten’s Musical meaning in Beethoven: markedness, correlation, and interpretation (1994) and Interpreting musical gestures, topics, and tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (2004); and Raymond Monelle’s Linguistics and semiotics in music (1992) and The sense of music: semiotic essays (2000).
Highlights
This article surveys the state of so-called topic theory today
The second comprises significant advances in topic theory essayed through two further pairs of texts: Robert Hatten’s Musical meaning in Beethoven: marked ness, correlation, and interpretation (1994) and Interpreting musical gestures, topics, and tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (2004); and Raymond Monelle’s Linguistics and semiotics in music (1992) and The sense of music: semiotic essays (2000)
By its very nature, disinclined towards—if not incapable of—reading expressive intentions encoded in music’s gestures or voices. Like those af flicted with Asperger syndrome, its practitioners are “generally ‘blind to social meanings’ and create instead their own networks of correlations ‘that bring to mind the elaborate pseudoscientific systems of numerology and astrology’.”2 Whereas this is considered a pathological disorder in neurological science, such insensitivity to socio-semantics be came in twentieth-century musicology the norm, but something of an ideological virtue
Summary
This article surveys the state of so-called topic theory today. It charts its development through two ‘generations’ of ‘topic theorists’.
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