Leo Treitler Research Articles

Leo Treitler at 90: A Tribute and Appreciation

It is an honor to introduce this festschrift for Leo Treitler on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Festschriften—volumes produced by students and colleagues to celebrate distinguished scholars and teachers upon a significant birthday or upon retirement—have gone out of fashion. In part this is a signal of a weakening of inter-generational ties to teachers and mentors and the vanishing of the aura that once surrounded commanding personalities in the scholarly world. The half-life of such reputations is getting shorter, particularly in the United States. The erosion of a once outsized respect for the authority of a holder of a powerful professorship in a field of scholarship is not altogether unwelcome; reigning academic authorities easily encouraged imitation, if only tacitly, and retarded new directions. But it was nonetheless touching to see and purchase the massive 2019 festschrift for Peter Revers, Musik im Zusammenhang. Recognition of influence and gratitude deserve...

Improvisatori. Improvisiren. Improviser ...

These brief reflections, provoked by Leo Treitler’s “Speaking of the I-Word” (AfMw 72/1), attempt to sharpen the focus on the concept “improvisation” both as logos and as praxis in the performance and composition of the fantasia in the later eighteenth century. Sulzer, Rousseau, Em. Bach, Koch, and Schenker contribute to the conversation.

Reflections on Musical Meaning and its Representations. By Leo Treitler.

Reflections on Musical Meaning and its Representations. By Leo Treitler.

Rethinking the Orality-Literacy Paradigm in Musicology

literacy-orality problematic, which has been debated from Plato to Postman, has focused on how the visuality of the literary medium affects the aurality of the oral medium. Recent research by John Miles Foley has addressed the particular advantages in using the most modern technology of the Internet to simulate and explore the oldest technology of orality, thereby calling into question our continued reliance on textually based media in orality research when electronic media provide a more effective vehicle for scholarly investigations into oral forms. 1 But how does this discussion relate specifically to the act of music-making? Is there an interface between a musical orality and a musical literacy? Musicologists have treated the question of the musical dimension of orality in such works as Yoshiko Tokumaru and Osamu Yamaguti’s The Oral and the Literate in Music (1986), Stephen Erdely’s research on the musical dimension of Bosnian epics (1995), Bruno Nettl’s collection of cross cultural research on the topic of improvisation (1998), Karl Reichl’s compilation of music research in a wide-ranging number of oral epic traditions (2000), and Paul Austerlitz’s work on the “consciousness” of jazz (2005), but less attention has been given to the link between the visual technology of notation and its effect on the oral-aural processing of music. 2 Scholars of medieval music have been at the forefront in addressing the connection between oral performance and the emergence of notation. Leo Treitler’s work during the latter half of the twentieth century that considered the visual-aural link in medieval music was groundbreaking, culminating in the recent collection of seventeen of his foundational essays on medieval chant (Treitler 2003). Seminal works by Susan Boynton (2003), Kenneth Levy (1998), Peter Jeffery (1992), and other medievalists have also contributed considerably to the discussion of orality and literacy in the music of the Middle Ages. In addition, Anna Maria Busse Berger’s recent book, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (2005), highlights the change in performance practice and composition with changes in medieval notation practices (250-51). Busse Berger asks why musicologists have been slow to address the role of memory and notation in music, and then follows with a thorough and thought-provoking analysis of the interaction

A second medial mode Palestinian chant in Old Roman, Beneventan and Frankish sources

ABSTRACTChants based on Crucem tuam in the second medial mode are examined in Greek, Slavonic and Latin sources. Central to the discussion is the role of Jerusalem in the dissemination of the modal system. On the Latin side, the emphasis is on Old Roman melodies, showing how they reproduce the prototypes more faithfully than Beneventan or Frankish melodies. The analysis does not support certain conclusions regarding the origins of the modal system and the relationship of Old Roman and Gregorian melodies advanced by Robert Snow, Helmut Hucke and Leo Treitler.

The Comfort of Denial: Metre, Cyclic Form, and Narrative in Shostakovich's Seventh String Quartet

AbstractRecent scholarship has taken the leap from documenting cyclic form in Shostakovich's Seventh String Quartet to its interpretation. David Fanning, Judith Kuhn, and Sarah Reichardt, for instance, endorse a belief in the quartet's satisfactory closure. I propose an alternative reading that qualifies such resolution as merely apparent. I posit a musical ‘persona’ (Edward T. Cone) that achieves comfort in denial. I support my claim by analysing shifting hypermetre, metrical insertions, motif, and cyclic form, then weave my observations into a narrative interpretation. While acknowledging the limitations of the narrative analogy (following Carolyn Abbate, Lawrence Kramer, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez), I rely on its principal strength: the ability to help construct a compelling interpretation of the elusive ‘meaning’ of a piece of absolute music (Cone, Fred Maus, Anthony Newcomb, Leo Treitler). I conclude that the peculiar arrangement of shifting metrical identities and the DSCH-motto-related fragments tell a psychological story: of a musical persona's thwarted search for self.

Naming: Music and the Postmodern

Things postmodern have not been missing from music, but use of the term 'postmodern,' as either a descriptive or conceptual tool, has been sparse in professional and even journalistic writing about music. While Stephen Connor's observation, in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, that there has been a tendency toward 'conservatism' and 'autonomy' in the academic study of music is certainly apt, it cannot fully explain the 'absence of a mature discourse' on 'postmodernist formulations and arguments.' Connor recommends that music studies address the 'explosion of collaborations and fusions' and the narrowing of the 'gap between classical and popular music;' but music scholars are frequently distrustful of a simple valorisation of fusions and bridges because the bridges often entail movement in one direction and the fusions are only partial. (1) I do not offer here an imperative for future directions in music scholarship, but rather take a historical view, addressing the issue of why music scholars and other music writers did not engage in substantial numbers in the postmodern debate, especially in the 1980s when the topic was burning. My argument is that while an explicit and focused debate was not present, musical practices and thought about those practices did manifest the issues that would come to define postmodernism from the mid-1960s through the early 1990s. A more explicit engagement with the conceptual dimensions of postmodern thought emerged significantly in the 1990s, but even then (and now) there remains a lingering distrust of the term and its implications. (2) If the discourse of music and the discourse about music in the thirty-year span between the 1960s and 1990s did manifest some of the characteristics of postmodern thought and the postmodern world, then why did writers avoid the term as a descriptive tool? In his 1987 book The Postmodern Turn, Ihab Hassan notes that 'there is a will to power in nomenclature, as well as in people or texts'. (3) About a decade later, the music scholar Leo Treitler would turn the formulation around, observing that 'labelling' has been a sign of the postmodern. (4) For both Hassan and Treitler, naming serves to make something appear, to give it shape - for Hassan it manifests a will to power and for Treitler it manifests a will to shape identities for marketing purposes. (5) The concern of each author for such naming draws attention to the resistance in discourse about music to employ the label 'postmodern'. (6) Music scholars and music critics are not averse to labelling generally, but in the instance of the postmodern, they avoided the term. The sources of this refusal of naming were varied. In a 1969 essay 'Music Discomposed,' the American philosopher Stanley Cavell notes that there is little 'critical' writing about music and that technical analyses of individual pieces have become necessary aesthetic accompaniments to those works. (7) About a decade later, Jacques Attali makes a similar observation when quoting Michel Serres: 'This remarkable absence of texts on music' is tied to the impossibility of a general definition, to a fundamental ambiguity. 'The science of the rational use of sounds, that is, those sounds organized as a scale.' That is how the Littre at the end of the 19th century defined music, in order to reduce it to its harmonic dimension, to confuse it with a pure syntax.' Michel Serres [reminds] us that beyond syntax there is meaning. (8) Writing at a time when the first instances of a postmodern music were emerging, Cavell and Attali wanted a critical address of musical meaning but found instead a technical address of musical syntax. In order to sort through both the historical implications of their comments and the divergence of disciplinary concerns, it will be helpful to consider who in professional music scholarship writes about music and why. For present purposes, I consider three categories of scholarship: musicology and ethnomusicology; music theory and analysis; and journalistic writing. …

The remarkable story of musical notation

level, Cullin writes of the ‘ audacity ’ of the Middle Ages in making the conceptual leap that allowed heard sound to be represented in visible form (p.10). Yet a complex interaction between sight and sound may be traced back, he argues, to the revelatory texts of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The word of God received by Moses on Mount Sinai took both audible and written forms; likewise the Revelation to John was heard as a voice that commanded him to write. Cullin implies that it was inevitable that music made the transition from sound to writing, given that the religious tradition was utterly grounded in written texts. The more frequently rehearsed story of musical notation’s place within the intellectual, political and spiritual aspirations of the Carolingian Empire also features here — as it should — although Cullin offers only a summary of this thorny topic, without taking forward the debates pursued in comparatively recent years by Leo Treitler, Helmut Hucke, Kenneth Levy and others. The other principal theme of the introduction is the purpose (or purposes) of the music book. No convincing evidence has yet been adduced that suggests that the centuries-old oral transmission of liturgical chant had begun to unravel by the time of the earliest notated manuscripts. Consequently, Cullin dwells on the various symbolic and honorific uses of the book, arguing that music writing emerged out of concerns that were not, in the first instance, principally musical. Yet, although musical notation was needed neither for performance nor transmission of chant at the time of the earliest music books, the ‘ seduction of writing ’ , pursued so vigorously by the Carolingians in other spheres of their culture, ‘ eventually became impossible to circumvent ’ (p.26). Given the breadth of discussion in the introduction, it is fitting that the first two plates in the main part of the book do not contain musical notation: the opening illustration, from a 6th-century Parisian manuscript, is accompanied by a revealing description of the kinds of information about musical performance that may be gleaned from its layout and textual evidence. The second consists of a pictorial image, inevitably (perhaps) depicting the myth of Pope Gregory the Great receiving the chant of the Roman Church from the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, and causing it to be written down. Despite the book’s disclaimer that it will not engage with the practicalities of notation, the commentaries next to each image furnish detailed descriptions of the various kinds of neumes and their interpretation, as well as the regional differences of notational scripts, and the status of the texts that the notations accompany. The manuscripts chosen cover a wide range of book types and musical genres: alongside chant in its earliest recorded forms are newer liturgical accretions of the later Middle Ages, neumed copies of classical verse, examples in music theory texts, and secular songs in Latin and the vernacular, in both monophonic and polyphonic settings. The most elegantly produced books (notably the 6th-century psalter illustrated in the first plate, whose leaves are tinted with purple and whose letters are formed with gold and

With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made. Leo Treitler

With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made. Leo Treitler

Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations, and: The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (review)

Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations. By Ruth A. Solie. (California Studies in 19th-century Music.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. [223 p. ISBN 0-520-23845-1. $39.95.] Illustrations, index. Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction. Edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff. (Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. [xx, 297 p. ISBN 0-7546-0577-9. $109.95.] Index, bibliography. Both these books are volumes in nineteenth-century series but only Solie's earned ML780 classification status at C-I-P stage of production, Fuller/ Losseff being properly assessed as literary criticism (PR823). Solie's prize-winning book (a finalist for 2005 American Musicological Society Kinkeldey Award) collects and refreshes four essays published earlier and adds two that are new. Fuller and Losseff bring together essays by eleven academic specialists in literature and musicology, some of which rework conference papers. Both books are fully indexed and carry welcome footnotes as both documentation and commentary. Fuller/Losseff collects bibliographic information from those citations into a bibliography of whole, helpfully divided into categories of primary and secondary literature. Both books begin with essays that serve as overviews, Solie's eloquently stating her interest in investigating what Leo Treitler called cardinal importance of 'what goes without saying' (p. 1) in a given culture's texts-all that is taken for granted or assumed be obvious. Solie explains that she took a casual comment by Leonard Meyer regarding cultural scuttlebutt as a definition of texts pursue help her make explicit the degree which Victorian world was saturated with music (p. 1). Edward Burne-Jones's painting Golden Stairs is given in color reproduction on dust jacket and in graytone as frontispiece her book and Solie says she found it helpful to look away from professional discourse of musicians and use sources as disparate and unlikely as journalism, novels, and teenagers' diaries unearth conversations that reveal music's place in nineteenth-century European and North American culture (p. 2). Fuller and Losseff's introduction comments on all essays in their book. Their purpose is interdisciplinary (musicology and literary criticism) but limited exploring British works of fiction, sufficient sources for myriad themes: reception, practice, societal issues, aesthetic assumptions and urgent late-nineteenth-century matter of personal and national identity. Unifying care was taken in both books refer chapters ahead and behind, as appropriate. Neither book has a sewn binding. UC Press product is printed on minimally permanent paper with a gluedon headband, and inner margins wide enough for eventual rebinding, while bare-bones Ashgate book, which opens easily enough, makes no claim permanence but could also withstand one rebinding. Fuller and Losseff, only slightly longer but nearly three times as expensive as Solie's book, and more limited in scope, is also generally cast in far more formidable academic language. Nicky Losseff, both a Lecturer in Music at University of York and a pianist specializing in contemporary music, offers chapter one: The Voice, Breath and Soul: Song and Poverty in Thyrta, Mary Barton, Alton Locke and A Child of Jago. Its twice-footnoted first sentence challenges readers know what sage writers are, tolerate notion yet again, and later withstand problematized (p. 3). novels Losseff examines originally had a working class audience and their singing characters were set in economically poor environments where air was foul. They dreamt of freedom of breath such as came on a rare fresh-air day, kind that London sees but once in half a dozen winters as one author put it (p. 15). Spirituality and religion (pointedly not same thing) and sacrifice are also treated in these novels and Losseff digs deeply into authors' research, their personal experience with poverty, and social, spiritual, and individual meanings they projected on singing in their works. …

Leo treitler, with voice and pen: coming to know medieval song and how it was made. oxford: oxford university press, 2003. xxx, 506 pp.; 9 pp. of plates; cd. isbn 0 19 816644 3.

leo treitler, <i>with voice and pen: coming to know medieval song and how it was made</i>. oxford: oxford university press, 2003. xxx, 506 pp.; 9 pp. of plates; cd. isbn 0 19 816644 3.

Review: Writing the history of song

With voice and pen: coming to know medieval song and how it was made Leo Treitler , (New York : Oxford University Press , 2003 ), $135 /£95

With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made (review)

With Voice Pen: Coming to Know Song How It Was Made. By Leo Treitler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. [xxx, 506 p. ISBN 0-19-816644. $145.] Music examples, facsimiles, illustrations, bibliography, index, compact disc. This is a book by arguably most influential North-American musicologist of late twentieth century on Middle Ages, Leo Treitler. We encounter here celebrated trademarks of Treitler's prose: dense, thought-riddled sentences which pull reader into a startling juxtaposition of medieval detail contemporary, sometimes personal anecdotes-in a word, to younger generation of musicologists nourished on Treitler, inimitable. How often does a medievalist combine a recent table conversation with Notre Dame polyphony, or Goethe with Gregory Great (pp. 55-56 188-189)? As either a review or introduction to a prominent writer on medieval music, this handsome tome of Treitleriania is indispensable. All seventeen of these chapters previously appeared over a thirty-three year period. It is frequently practice in such a collection to leave original essays just as they were, often with their original pagination; not so for present volume. To begin with, each essay been refitted to Oxford University Press' house style. Each is preceded by an introduction in smaller font ranging from a half a page (chap. 3) to twenty-one pages (chap. 6) that contextualizes often amplifies each essay. The introduction to chapter 13, for example, is comprised of five sections that briefly comment on different aspects of music writing. Within each essay proper, textual alterations range from slight changes in phrasing to lengthier inserted material-a labor Treitler shared with book's editor Bonnie Blackburn, as stated on p. xiii. The result is a honed text that first chapter, Medieval Improvisation, illustrates well. Of smaller changes, one telling instance is removal of and improvising from following sentence (words in brackets were removed): Even in late Middle composing performing [and improvising] could [all] be thought of as a single act (p. 12). Small changes of this sort are found on every page of book. In same chapter, we find larger additions: a one-page discussion of a recent book (pp. 22-23) an entirely new section treating gradual Scient gentes (pp. 26-32). Only one paragraph was excised on p. 34. Throughout book not only have all musical examples tables been refurbished but some figures as well, such as relief sculptures in plates V-VI. To these refinements author added a sixteen-track compact disc in a sleeve on book's inside back cover. Its most inspired track to my mind is Lightnin' Hopkins' blues tune Goin' Away (track 10), with its rich timbre subtle melody. The remaining performances presumably demonstrate what Treitler does not find in singing of Solesmes their followers: the vocal virtuosity, versatility, sensuousness implicit in written record made by notators of Middle Ages (p. xxiii). Listeners mayjudge for themselves. The significance of Treitler's contribution in late twentieth century is partly to have anticipated postmodern anxiety over beholder's influence. One of this book's most poignant moments comes in introduction to chapter five where Treitler ponders his ambivalent relationship to postmodernism, he whose lifetime has spanned shift, as he puts it (p. 104), from modernism to its alter ego. For Treitler never doubted possibilityas early as 1968 as late as 2001-of a better understanding of medieval music, as he reiterates throughout this book. For over three decades, he been reminding us of need to unlearn our own perspective in order to try to grasp a medieval perspective, each essay here contributes in its own way to this end. He begins in first two chapters by sensitizing reader to problematic notion of improvisation its post-medieval associations. …

Jazz Musicians and South Slavic Oral Epic Bards

Albert Lord writes in The Singer of Tales (2000:13) that for the South Slavic oral epic poet, or guslar, "the moment of composition is the performance." The guslar is concurrently performer, composer, poet, and singer. In performance, he participates creatively in shaping the tradition of which he is a part rather than acting merely as a transmitter. Similarly, though in a much more restricted sense, European art music of the late nineteenth century embraced a concept of performance—as contrasted to presentation—in which the musician provided "linear tension that went beyond what could be notated . . . and freely manipulated every part of every phrase . . . to achieve a performance that was itself inherent to the process of communication" (Ledbetter 1977:149-50). Until the 1920s, students of Franz Liszt and Theodor Leschetitzky, the unrivaled moguls of nineteenth-century pianism, flourished in a veritable hothouse environment of idiosyncratic performance styles.1 Such discretionary powers today have been abrogated by the modern notion of "fidelity to the score."2 However, echoes of nineteenth-century performance practice resonate today among jazz musicians, who view their improvisatory art as a process of communication with a live audience that itself participates in the performance event. This essay explores the startling kinship that the jazz musician shares with the guslar. [End Page 155] Comparisons between various oral performance traditions and jazz music have often been made, directly or implicitly,3 and it is logical and natural to associate these groups since each artist produces his art "live" in performance, without text, and before an audience. That one discipline is verbal art and the other musical need not overshadow the common ground that they share: both involve specialized languages. Each art form is subject to traditional rules that govern a spontaneous and ever-changing mode of aural expression. Most important, perhaps, is that both art forms share the medium of live performance, which makes unique demands on the artists and essentially defines their manner of composition. Indeed, the comparison is so immediate and attractive that it may thereby invite hasty and inaccurate assumptions. For example, whereas the oral poet is fluent in an epic language of formulaic phrases, he does not simply stitch together ready-made formulas to produce a familiar but "new" recombination. Likewise, jazz improvisation consists not of combining and recombining memorized motivic elements but of composing, within the parameters of traditional rules, new musical phrases that resonate with and respond to familiar chord progressions, themes, or styles. Jazz musicians and oral epic bards focus upon process rather than product, which is to say that their "product" exists only as the performance event itself, which temporally frames the "process" of creativity. A brief (and necessarily selective) review of relevant scholarship that explores creative processes in traditions of oral composition—both verbal and musical—will provide a wider perspective from which to investigate similarities between the jazz musician and the guslar. Margaret Beissinger has examined varieties of structural modification within oral composition by Romanian epic singers, or la'utari, who "are able to employ variation and innovative patterning within the traditional boundaries of epic song" (2000:110). She asserts that the smallest unit of musical composition within the Romanian epic tradition is the melodic formula, a traditionally derived element with which the la'utari construct linear sequences of larger systems that she calls "musical strophes" (101). Thus the Romanian epic singers' creative process involves an improvisatory "re-assembly" of traditional elements. [End Page 156] In a detailed study of the transmission of Gregorian chant, Leo Treitler writes that it is misleading to consider the medieval sacred singer's improvisation a "special" practice lest it be invoked solely as a rationale for explaining the unusual characteristics of problematic transmissions (1974:346). He conceives of a practice that involves elaboration and variation upon a Grundgestalt, or "fundamental model," and explains that "the singer learns one melody and imitates its pattern in...

Toward an epistemological model for music theory

This article reevaluates critical descriptions of the discipline of music theory advanced by such scholars as Edward Cone, Joseph Kerman, and Leo Treitler and promoted in more recent assessments of theoretical work. In particular, it challenges critical conceptions of the field implying a binarism that casts music scholars either as “structuralist"—dependent upon preexisting analytical methodologies designed to derive musical meaning from the examination of the musical details of a work—or as “hermeneutic"—holding that musical meaning resides in the relationship of the musical composition to a particular historical or cultural circumstance. I argue that their conception of these two seemingly irreconcilable epistemological poles has led critical scholars to make certain assumptions that do not square with the practice of music research. In my evaluation of critical descriptions of the field of music, I turn to Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolution as a corollary for critical claims about the development and growth of knowledge in the field of music and to Karl Popper, whose epistemological model seeks to address shortcomings perceived in Kuhn's theory. With reference to various analytical studies, I argue that Popper's model is superior to Kuhn's as a representation of the development of knowledge in the field of music theory and will thereby identify some of the problems inherent in critical descriptions of music analysis.

Music, politics, and the academy

Music, and Academy. By Pieter C. van den Toorn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. [x, 229 p. ISBN 0-520-20115-9. $40.00.] Whatever else 1990s are remembered for in American academic music circles, they will surely be remembered for conflict between New Musicology and Music (or between New Musicology and Old Musicology) over proprietary rights to music of Western canon. The first (and thus far only) explicitly political book to take on issues comes from music-theoretical side: Music, Politic, and Academy, by Pieter van den Toorn, a theorist who has already established himself as a key player in dispute with a controversial and much discussed essay, Politics, and Contemporary Music Theory (Journal of Musicology 9 [1991]: 275-99); a revised and expanded version appeals in book as chapter 1, Feminism, and Ninth. The book is, first and foremost, a broad rebuttal to attacks on contemporary music theory in general, and music analysis in particular. Van den Toorn directs his most extensive and hardest hitting counterattacks at work of Susan McClary and Leo Treitler, but he also singles out for criticism that of Joseph Kerman, Lawrence Kramer, Maynard Solomon, and Richard Taruskin. a positive vein, he also endeavors to demonstrate by example how music theory avid analysis can provide a foil that makes it possible for us to move productively back and forth between communal and contextual: between constraints of system and style on one hand, and individual work on other. The book divides neatly into four chapters of polemical rebuttal and three of analytical demonstration and exemplification. brief, first chapter launches an attack upon recent interpretations of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by McClary and Treitler, and upon points of view that underlie those interpretations. The second chapter, In Defense of Music Theory, places New-Musicological critique of music theory in its social and institutional context: for van den Toorn, Trader's call for a personally involved and humanistic scholarship rubs uncomfortably against value system of universities, whose publish-or-perish syndrome has tended to encourage very sort of objectifiable, positivistic approach that Treitler scorns. Van den Toorn himself recognizes need for personal, individual, and spiritual in musical scholarship, but he claims that Treitler, in harshly dismissing formalist and positivist approaches such as contemporary music theory, refuses to come to terms with social and academic forces that encouraged and empowered them in first place. At same time, while acknowledging that music theory and analysis at their worst can lead to sterile exercises of little worth, he maintains that it is [subjective] sensation but [objective] knowledge that separates and distinguishes scholar (p. 50). so doing, van den Toorn must take a philosophical position that argues for a degree of autonomy for musical work--an autonomy that is essential if systematic theory and analysis are to be viable tools for discovering musical meaning and significance. Conversely, he argues against what he calls the new subjectivity (p. 53) of postmodern and feminist musicology, which he sees as making musical structures not but less free, as drawing them more and into uses of world, into forms of ideological and personal-political manipulation, and as valuing them solely as sociopolitical comment (p. 61). The third chapter, Politics, Ho! is a short essay that attempts to connect academic politics of New Musicology with American politics of late 1960s. Here van den Toorn takes Treitler's drawing of a parallel between academic and national political life (in Music and Historical Imagination [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989]) as basis for an undisciplined foray into national issues of past twenty-five years or so (the Vietnam War, civil rights movement, and liberal egalitarian causes [p. …

Music before 1600

Nowhere in musical analysis is the tension between the two theoretical positions of considering music in the context of its external circumstances or examining its internal substance so apparent as in the study of the medieval and early repertoire. This volume seeks to bridge the gap between the historical humanistic study of the period's music and the application of analytical techniques more often found in criticism of later music. The chapters investigate a range of musical styles as well as a fair cross section of the ways in which music composed before 1600 is currently being analyzed. The book brings together critics from two camps: historians who seek to explain the nature of medieval and Renaissance music by reference to contemporary contexts, and more abstractly minded analytical scholars. In his introduction Everist explores the possibility of fusing the two approaches. Introduction by Mark Everist 1 Medieval Lyric by Leo Treitler 2 An Early Thirteenth-Century Motet by Norman E. Smith 3 Guillaume de Machaut: De toutes flours by Sarah Fuller 4 The Lamento di Tristano by David Lidov 5 Guillaume Dufay: Alma redemptoris mater (II) by Saul Novack 6 Josquin des Prez: Salve regina (a 5) by Cristle Collins Judd 7 Orlande de Lassus: Si bona suscepimus by James Haar 8 Anthoine de Bertrand: Las! pour vous trop aymer by Jean-Michel Vaccaro 9 William Byrd: Mass for Five Voices by David Stern

THE DEBATE ABOUT THE ORAL AND WRITTEN TRANSMISSION OF CHANT

Studies by Helmut Hucke and Leo Treitler concerning the oral and writ ten transmission of Gregorian chant,1 followed by responses on the part of David Hughes,2 Kenneth Levy,3 Hendrik van der Werf4 and Peter Jeffery5 as well as by reactions from Treitler,6 have opened a new phase in chant scholarship. In spite of some markedly controversial statements the debate has in many respects succeeded in bringing opinions closer and in revealing that the disagreements frequently only concerned the

Writing Music History

Writing Music History

The Dramatization of Hypermetric Conflicts in the Scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

Dramatic qualities are frequently attributed to Beethoven's instrumental music, yet there seems to be little consensus about the identity of the protagonists and what issues they are playing out. Some writers, such as Charles Rosen and Leo Treitler, have located drama in such pitch-based polarities as tonic and dominant, flat-side and sharp-side, or major and minor.' Others, including Robert Hatten and V. Kofi Agawu, have suggested that dramatic situations are created through the interaction of competing genres, styles, topics, gestures, or formal prototypes.2 More abstractly, drama might be discovered in the relation between structure and design, or clarity and unclarity.3 Rhythm and meter play supporting roles in these dramatic schemes, insofar as they shape the interpretations of tonal event, gesture, or topic, but rarely are they claimed as principal players. Until relatively recently, the study of rhythm and meter has been concerned primarily with taxonomic questions, such as the proper assignment of verse foot, topic, the position of the accent in the group, or (at higher levels) formal archetype. Although taxonomies can lead to identification of binary oppositions, they do not necessarily establish the nuanced dynamic relations of which successful dramatic narratives are woven. 19th-Century Music XV/3 (Spring 1992). ? by The Regents of the University of California.