What Quackie said to Meister Eckhart: Intertextuality, projected motion and double-coding in John Adams's <i>Harmonielehre</i>

Abstract

This paper interrogates the nature of the radical intertextuality of John Adams's orchestral work Harmonielehre. As a three-movement symphony Harmonielehre sets up and fulfils many of the conventions of the late 19th-century genre; yet it also exploits the techniques and processes of American minimalism. It is thus 'double-coded' in the sense that postmodernists Charles Jencks and Linda Hutcheon use the term, to categorise artworks whose intertextuality is fundamental to their understanding. Harmonielehre sends the listener searching for meaning in the discursive spaces and semiotics of both late-Romanticism and minimalism; both styles are referenced not only in the work's syntactic surfaces but in the allusions and metaphors stitched into its musical, extramusical and paratextual codes. A clear allusion to Mahler's Tenth Symphony as well as a more ambiguous one to the 'magic sleep' motif in Wagner's Die Walkure operate in tandem with powerful verbal signifiers such as the titles Harmonielehre and 'The Anfortas Wound'. It seems that Adams intended in this work to make a point about the expressive force of tonality and to engage its directionalized rhetoric, albeit in a double-coded relationship with minimalism. Particularly distinctive within this fused syntax is Adams's development of a strategy we call 'projected motion', which occurs at critical points throughout the work and is analysed both as procedure and postmodernist referent. In conclusion, the authors meditate upon what they imagine were John Adams's personal and artistic goals in writing a 'retro' symphony, and what the predicament of the postmodernist artist might be in an era saturated with signs and sign systems, when irony and parody appear to be the only ways of engaging tradition.