Studies in Music with Text (review)

Abstract

IN MEMORIAM DAVID LEWIN Studies in with Text. By David Lewin. (Oxford Studies in Theory.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. [xii, 409 p. ISBN 0-19-518208-1. $65.] examples, index. David Lewin (1933-2003) was doubtless most significant music theorist of last half century. Oxford brilliantly inaugurates its new series, Studies in with a collection of essays that gives a more complete sense of Lewin's achievement than if we had been left with only two extraordinary but highly technical volumes published during his lifetime, Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) and Musical Form and Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). The essays comprise nineteen chapters, distributed over seven parts, each associated with a composer-six canonical German composers, organized chronologically from Mozart to Schoenberg, and Milton Babbitt (whom Lewin places as following in German tradition). Seven of chapters appear here for first time. Among twelve that have previously appeared are a number that may reasonably considered to have achieved status of classics of music theory and analysis: Music Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception, Au/ dem Flusse: Image and Background in a Schubert Song, Amfortas's Prayer to Titurel and Role of D in Parsifal, and most of Schoenberg articles chosen Lewin to represent his long engagement with this composer. In addition to-and more important than-the cultural boundaries within which contents of book are brought together, there are attitudes to music analysis generally and to analysis of music with text specifically that are characteristically Lewinian and that recur throughout. In his introduction, Lewin notes his tendency to seek ways in which music and text . . . each other. Thus, in his Tristan study, appearing here for first time, Lewin asserts a dialectic tension between the well-made play and the drama-of-passion, a tension that and is enacted by a tonal/atonal musical dialectic. There are three new essays on Robert and Clara Schumann, following an essay (also previously unpublished) on Schubert's Ihr Bild. Weaving biography and cultural history together with sort of metricharmonic reductions he used for first time in Auf dem Flusse essay, Lewin demonstrates an enactment per musica in Clara Schumann's setting of Ich stand in dunkeln Traumen that is far removed from Schubert's in Ihr Bild, but equally valid compositionally and poetically. In two related essays on modal-tonal ambiguity in Robert Schumann's Anfang wollt' ich fast verzagen and Auf einer Burg, Lewin leads us to hearings in which an ambivalence between ancient Phrygian and modern minor enacts temporal disjunctions for respective personae of songs. A postscript for opening Mozart essays discusses how tonics and dominants might said to drama, and be enacted drama. In final chapter, Some Problems and Resources of Theory, Lewin suggests that Babbitt's serial technique enacts central weaving imagery in Philomel (a suggestion, as we learn in an appendix added here, that was corroborated composer). Lewin's preference for locution enact is related to methodological stance he promulgated in many of his writings, in which he interpreted his favored transformational attitude as that of one who is inside music, as idealized dancer/singer (Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, p. 159). He wished to emphasize gestural, embodied activity of musician, singer, player, or composer, thinking: 'I am at s; what characteristic transformation do I perform in order to arrive at t?' ( Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, p. xiii). This stance is given its fullest expression (not only in Studies in and Text volume, but in Lewin's entire oeuvre) in article, first published in 1986, Music Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception. …