Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music: New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis by Judy Lochhead

Abstract

FORM AND THEORY Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music: New Tools in Theory and Analysis. By Judy Lochhead. (Routledge Studies in Theory, 2.) New York: Routledge, 2016. [xiv, 179 p. ISBN 9781138824331 (hardcover), $145; ISBN 9781315740744 (e-book), various.] examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, index.Lochhead's recent study is a significant contribution to music analysis that corresponds to the conceptual shiftWestern art music has undergone since the period of high modernism. The book argues that critical engagement with recent music is lagging behind; it aims not simply at reproducing the knowledge inherent in the artwork, but sets out to produce knowledge about musical experience itself-hence its insistence on structuring (rather than structure), conceived as emergent, phenomenal, and malleable (p. 7). This relates to a phenomenology of music, which has to be employed critically by the analyst, invoking a certain post-phenomenological attitude: the object of analysis is the content of listening, as a mediated, self-reflexive (p. 76).The book is divided into two parts comprising theory and practice. The first part traces the concept of in the post- WWII European and U.S. avant-garde, before introducing the tripartite framework of Lochhead's contribution to analysis: Investigating, Mapping, Speculating. The second part comprises four different case studies, designed to demonstrate the main procedures of Lochhead's productive analysis.The opening section attempts a definition of via a historiographical investigation of New according to the scientific research paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s, which served as the foundation of compositional [and therefore analytical] craft (p. 19). The interlinking of composition and analysis was furthered by several factors, examples of which include the founding of Die Reihe in Europe and of Perspectives of New in the U.S., as well as developments in academic practice. Lochhead's central claim here is that today's theory and analysis still bear the traces of the composer-theorist paradigm and of postwar epi stemic authority (p. 37).This epistemic metaphor is further traced via a comparison between musical and sociological references, while musical is shown to be frequently underdefined, at times hovering between the empirical activity of determining structural units (Ian Bent and Anthony Pople) and the discursive effect of evaluative terms such as (Robert Morgan) (pp. 51-52). In a revisiting gesture, Lochhead finds a resonance between Jacques Derrida's proliferating play of structure (p. 63) and the generative structural function of the series in Pierre Boulez (with its overtones of Theodor Adorno's conception of as distinct from the concrete elements of the work, but arising from them) (pp. 48-49).Lochhead's questioning leads not to merely another definition of structure; rather, it opens up the space for an analytical practice that involves musical listening and temporality. The former assumes the possibility of several performances (including indeterminate works) and is viewed as an interpretive activity; the latter implies that analysis is concerned with the work's becoming. As listening is phenomenologically involved in the of the work, the self-aware analyst must employ a reflective approach: Music analysis is a formal process of reflective engagement with musical works with the goal of producing knowledge by proposing new modes of engaging the work and as such contributing to the work's becoming (p. 77). The immediate implication for musical is now obvious: for Lochhead this engaging is dynamic and, to the extent that is a static unity with a fixed single origin (p. 78) it is not the object of analysis. Instead, she proposes the term structuring, to emphasize the temporality of the work's (p. …