In a print by Carl Schütz from 1786, a rather large crowd gathers in front of Artaria's shop in Vienna (fig. I.1). Among the roughly two dozen well-dressed individuals, some inspect the shop window, while others try to peer into the store itself, presumably to gather an impression of its offerings beyond those on display. The Kunsthandlung, as the shop billed itself, might be advertising engraved pictures, maps, or even music; Schütz's faint scribblings obfuscate the exact nature of the wares exhibited. Based on available evidence, we can't know what curious onlookers might have seen, either in the window or beyond. Like the viewers on the street, we are left, rapt, with an incomplete picture of the contents of the store and its windows.

A later print, Franz Weigl's aquarelle of Steiner and Haslinger's shop ca. 1835 (fig. I.2), takes us inside a Viennese Kunsthandlung, but again no music is visible. Rather, one sees shop attendants, customers, prints of visual art, books one can assume to be shop registers, and commemorative busts. The only sounds in the room presumably emanate from the conversations among the buyers and attendants in the room. A transaction might be taking place, but it likely concerns a picture of some sort rather than anything musical.

These two prints are vivid reminders that the successful sale and distribution of music depended on much more than the quality of the ideas on the page: musical commerce involved both a physical and a social infrastructure. Though the existence of that infrastructure is most likely obvious, its organization and participants are among the least well-preserved and thus least-understood elements of the musical culture of the common-practice period: who bought music, and how did those consumers know what music was available? Where was it sold and by whom? How did the consumption of music affect its composition? How was consumers’ musical taste shaped and by whom? The documentary difficulty one encounters when attempting to answer such questions has been an impediment to engaging in more complex historical inquiries about consumers’ tastes, publishers’ promotional strategies, celebrity culture, and the wider communities that were fundamental to these and many more aspects of musical life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The virtual is something that is almost, but not quite, “real,” as Rob Shields writes in his study of virtuality. Etymologically related to the term virtue, he elucidates, it has in various cultural and historical contexts been linked to dreams, rituals, and the visual arts. In the digital era, virtuality has come to be associated almost exclusively with online communities and simulating technologies. Today, virtuality is often considered negatively, as a form of escapism that deceives and deludes, amplified by a larger trope of the apparent alienating, antihuman, dystopian facets of technology. This sentiment has most famously been articulated by Jean Baudrillard, who writes in Simulacra and Simulation that we have entered the age of “simulacra,” a “hyperreal order” in which the perceived world is simply a vast assemblage of simulations that obscure deeper political and social realities. However, contemporary anxieties about simulation are part of a longer history of a disdain for the “virtual,” fueled by the legacy of Enlightenment thought, colonial practice, and nineteenth-century empiricism, fixated on the observable, tangible, and measurable world.

Baudrillard's theory itself rests upon a problematic notion of Indigenous people as passive victims of a world obsessed with the authentic and “real” and denies the possibility of Indigenous people adopting media technologies for their own cultural and political purposes. Moreover, it overlooks how notions of realms beyond the visible human world are common within many cultures, including numerous Indigenous cosmologies. Following the literature of virtuality, this chapter takes issue with Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation by exploring how digitally assisted cultural simulation can enable powerful means of Indigenous cultural revival, musical transmission, and political articulation. I focus on the Sami, the Indigenous people of Northern Europe, and investigate how digital technology—in museums, educational software, and CD production— has become part of the complex and dynamic fabric of Indigenous cultures, in turn transforming notions of Indigenous subjectivity, cultural belonging, and political activism. In particular, I inspect how digital cultural simulation can help to revive a Sami Indigenous cosmology, within which the human world exists alongside the realms of the spirits and the dead. How do Indigenous artists and activists resist notions of a world subsumed by the “hyperreal order”?

Nattiez's Ambivalence

In his 1990 monograph, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, Jean- Jacques Nattiez welcomed “a new interest in ‘ethnotheories’” as “one of the great virtues of ethnomusicology's anthropological orientation.” By their very existence, ethnotheories, defined as “conceptions that indigenous peoples form of their own music,” suggest that “the ‘savage mind’ can also operate in the realm of music theory, with a precision that is a bit disturbing for smug Western feelings of superiority.” The context in which these statements appear is a broad semiological study of a variety of discourses about music. Nattiez reflects on the very concept of music and the musical work, the nature of musical meaning, and musical analysis in theory and practice. Along the way, he invokes writers as diverse as Charles Sanders Peirce, Nicolas Ruwet, Alan Lomax, Eduard Hanslick, Umberto Eco, Paul Ricouer, Jean Molino, Bernhard Riemann, and Andre Schaeffner; and music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Richard Wagner, the Inuit, the Kaluli, and the Igbo. In other words, as early as 1990, Nattiez's purview was “world music,” and it is against this cosmopolitan background that we might interpret his remarks.

Ethnotheories (the plural is hardly avoidable at this level) are typically reported in ethnographically based studies by “western” scholars of knowledge systems developed within cultures of (mainly) primary orality. They purport to show a high level of verbal and conceptual precision in the way that indigenous people think and talk about music. Nattiez lists writings by Feld, Keil, Powers, Sakata, Smith, Stone, Tedlock, and Zemp as the most significant contributions. Although welcoming of this new development, Nattiez was also skeptical. On one side was a positive valuation of the idea of ethnotheory, responding perhaps to an ethical imperative to respect native conceptualization; on the other side was skepticism about ethnotheory's intellectual cogency, especially when its claims came into conflict with scientific knowledge: “When an Inuk says that the throat is the point of origin of sound in Katajjaq, but modern articulatory phonetics (Ladefoged) states that there are no guttural sounds as such, I am hard put to imagine what guilt complex about ethnocentricity could allow privileging the informants’ illusion above a well-established physiological fact.”

If I may begin with an understatement, music journals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offer a wealth of material for scholarly study. Essays and reviews of musical works in periodicals such as the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik are rich sources for exploring a variety of topics: music criticism, as in the work of Mary Sue Morrow, Sanna Pederson, and Barbara Titus; and reception histories of individual composers, as in Robin Wallace's work on Beethoven or the volumes of contemporaneous criticism of Beethoven edited in English by Wayne M. Senner and in German by Stefan Kunze. The content of these journals can also tell us a good deal about the societies and institutions that published, performed, and enjoyed the music they discuss.

The periodicals in which these texts appear, however, are not documents that existed in a vacuum. They were, rather, part of a dynamic and competitive commercial market, an aspect of these publications that this volume sets into relief. Not only were they destined for a paying readership, but most journals were produced by publishing houses whose primary business was selling music. I suggest that considering this wider commercial context as more than a mere backdrop in fact materially changes the way we read these texts.

As a brief example, we might look to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, in which E. T. A. Hoffmann's famous groundbreaking essays on Beethoven appeared in 1810. Although Hoffmann's insightful writing naturally absorbs our attention, the commercial context of the reviews is by no means neutral; compelling as they are, the essays served a range of other interests. Most significant, the journal itself was issued by Breitkopf und Härtel, which also published and sold the scores Hoffmann was discussing. In a basic way, Hoffmann's essays served as advertising, generating or increasing demand for publications Breitkopf und Härtel could then supply. For modern readers, this function should at the very least raise questions about the selection of works reviewed in the journal and, perhaps more important, about works whose omission for commercial reasons has left them with a less prominent contemporaneous documentary history.

I have followed Jean-Jacques Nattiez's career from the beginning. The novelty and originality of his very first book, Fondements d'une sémiologie de la musique (1975), did not go unnoticed by observers in our field. This book was effectively the first of its kind to use methods of investigation based on the rigorous techniques of linguistics, in order to decipher and better understand the structures of musical language. With this truly fundamental work, Jean-Jacques Nattiez paved the way for a new branch of musicology, neglected until then. But beyond this theoretical and methodological work, he had the merit of applying his theories to areas as varied as they are worthy of deep interest.

The originality of Jean-Jacques Nattiez in the world of music lies in the fact that for him, musicology does not imply a narrow specialization, more often than not directed toward the past. That type of musicology is not without its utility but often seems to forget about both the present and other cultures.

As opposed to this, when looking at a list of his publications, one notes titles referring to topics that one has a hard time imagining as being written by the same hand. This is true of his studies of Wagner and another of Proust; in these, it seems to me, he has perfectly grasped the source of the greatness of creators of large-scale works: whether it be the Tetralogy or Remembrance of Things Past, these creators display the capacity, fundamental for me, of deriving compact yet fertile matrices for rich and infinite development.

In a Prague newspaper's assessment of culture in the Rheinland in 1820, Johann Anton André stands out as the prime merit of Offenbach: “[In Offenbach], nothing interests me more than André, the famous lithographer, the famous composer, the famous virtuoso, the famous music-printer, who is also, in addition to [having] many good qualities, a very pleasant associate [Gesellschafter] and a very cultured man.” For the writer, André is an exemplary citizen of the greater Frankfurt area. Not only is the music publisher competent in his professional capacity as a lithographer, he is also worthy of praise in a host of other surprising ways. He is hailed as a composer, virtuoso (presumably as a performer, as André came from a family of musicians), and generally educated member of society. While publishers were rarely afforded any descriptive adjectives as individuals in the press, here André is painted as a skilled and well rounded person. Inasmuch as it praises André for his fame and character, this short passage recalls the language used to describe patrons in dedications of the mid- to late eighteenth century.

Around the same time, and following in the tradition of his predecessors and contemporaries, André issued a catalog of wares (fig. 1.1)—a document that presented his activities as a publisher somewhat differently. Printed on the back of the title page of a violin concerto by C. F. LaFont, the list demonstrates a thoughtful, thorough, and possibly excessive hand at collecting, advertising many genres of interest to an individual who might purchase a string concerto and demonstrating a careful alphabetic approach to each category. The depth and breadth of the offerings within a limited range of string genres—including sonatas, duos, quartets, quintets, concertos, works for orchestra, etudes, and cello works—seem designed to demonstrate the publisher's versatility and taste. In fact, one could argue that the list was intended to highlight those qualities explicitly: the catalog is a public display of André's habits in acquiring new music, and thus it is a conspicuous record of the firm's purchasing power.

It was a blustery Thursday afternoon in early February 1729 as the Hamburg music lover Rudolph Burmeister finished his cup of coffee, bookmarked his place in a journal article about the advantages of educating women, and got up from his table at the coffeehouse. He walked a few blocks toward the city's center, crossed the Trostbrücke spanning the Nikolaifleet channel of the Alster River, then hurried past city hall and into the stock exchange, where a proprietor at the music stall greeted him warmly. “It just arrived,” the man said with a wink, handing Burmeister a freshly printed bifolium of music. It was the latest lesson from the Faithful Music Master: four densely engraved pages of music containing the second movement of a cello sonata, an aria recently sung to great applause at Hamburg's Gänsemarkt opera house, a passepied from a suite for violin or oboe with continuo, an Air for trumpet and continuo, a Marche and Retraite for harpsichord, and a demonstration of unusual chord progressions. It had been two weeks since the previous lesson, and Burmeister was eager to learn how the sonata and suite would continue and to discover what new works lay in store for him. He rushed home to play through the music on his violin and clavichord; later, he would compare notes with his three brothers, all of whom were equally eager pupils of the Faithful Music Master.

Something like this imaginary vignette must have played out during the 1720s in many German coffeehouses and bookshops, where periodicals of all kinds were eagerly consumed by an educated public hungry for news, advice, and enlightenment on a variety of topics. Burmeister and his brothers were in fact loyal patrons of Hamburg's leading musician, Georg Philipp Telemann, whose latest publishing venture was Germany's first journal of music. Der getreue Music-Meister, or the Faithful Music Master, was issued biweekly by the composer between November 1728 and November 1729 in twenty-five issues called “Lection” (lesson), for a total of one hundred pages of music.

In August 1831, Honoré de Balzac scored a major artistic and commercial success with the publication of La Peau de chagrin. One of the “philosophical studies” in his Comédie humaine, the novel chronicles the fantastic demise of Raphaël de Valentin. Down on his luck, the protagonist acquires a foreign talisman made of animal hide that will grant his every desire. With each wish it fulfills, however, the talisman shrinks; when it disappears, Raphaël dies. Thus the novel becomes the tale of a man who must desire nothing in order to survive. Surrounded by the lavish material and social trappings of Paris, he fails.

Despite the fantastic elements in its plot, La Peau de chagrin has long been understood as a commentary on the excesses of bourgeois materialism couched in ekphrastic descriptions of everyday life. The magic talisman, like the love potion in Tristan, is just a prop—the novel still works as a philosophical study without it. Balzac's narrative forces his readers to imagine the impossible task of not wanting anything while living in Paris. Thus even without the supernatural, his novel underscores the unavoidability and potential pitfalls of longing in a material world.

Balzac describes and cautions against a relatively new urban reality—one constructed by and for an emerging bourgeois society in which social and material desires are not satiated but instead beget further longing. Cultural theorists from Karl Marx on have discussed this intersection of desire, status, and goods in relation to the sociology of commodity capitalism. According to this point of view, a capitalistic system forces goods, labor, power, and social standing to enter into a complex network of exchanges in which, in contrast to earlier economic systems, there are fewer definite goals and boundaries; wealth, value, and power are defined by the relativism of a market in which anything could in theory be traded for anything else, so long as one could find a buyer. This results in a material and social system in which one could trade one's way up through reinvestment in the market, and the possibility of acquiring more goods or higher status in turn leads to a desire for more goods and status. The system, in short, makes one want more than one already has.

Introduction

Context

What happens in the minds of those listening to a musical work in a concert hall or other location? This frequently asked question continues to be surrounded by more mysteries than answers. While a variety of mental activities are in operation during listening, these activities resist description if they fail to leave concrete traces. Some listeners display observable signs of listening, but these do not go beyond foot tapping or head nodding induced by the rhythmic pulsation of the music. Nor do they reveal anything about the underlying processes involved in the perception of a work or the way mental representations are constructed.

To delve into a field that is so clearly hermetic requires a few precautions and requires us to specify what kind of musical listening will be under discussion here. In certain cases, one can, in effect, define listening as a creative act inasmuch as an individual can inject elements at will that emerge from preferences or from the imagination, such as visions of colored shapes, pastoral scenes, and so on. This would amount to a re-composition in the sense that a musical work is a pretext for an escape into external effects. In this respect, no two listeners can be said to take the same approach, since what the listener brings to the act of listening is fundamentally personal and bound up with states of mind and moods in the moment. Another type of listening is associated with the “consumption” of music as background sound, which drowns out silence and becomes a backdrop for other daily occupations.

Though these situations could well be interesting from a psychological point of view, this chapter will focus—in a ramified theoretical exegesis, followed by examples of selective application—rather on a type of listening that is concerned with the work itself, a listening that “is not reducible to the reception of its acoustic signal,” but tends toward its “codification and unconscious reinterpretation in the form of cognitive signs.”

The half-diminished seventh chord appears frequently in Brahms's works and in various roles, perhaps none more poetic than as a modally mixed plagal elaboration of a tonic harmony in a major key. In some pieces, such as the Capriccio, op. 116, no. 1, the sonority provides the main motivic seed, a feature facilitated by Brahms's penchant for congruence of melodic and harmonic content, in Edward T. Cone's terminology. In other works, Brahms embeds the half-diminished seventh chord in a more abstract network of relationships. Peter H. Smith has studied the connection between the half-diminished seventh's harmonic function and metrical setting in the opening movement of the Clarinet Trio, op. 114, revealing a correlation between its function as plagal embellishment and metrical consonance on the one hand, and its function as dominant preparation and metrical displacement on the other. Despite Brahms's fondness for the half-diminished seventh, rarely does one of his works begin with this chord. This essay focuses on three lieder that do, although—as we will see—even among these three lieder, viewing a half-diminished sonority as the music's starting point is sometimes accurate only in partial ways.

The three lieder in question are: “Nachtigallen schwingen” (op. 6, no. 6), “Die Liebende schreibt” (op. 47, no. 5), and “Die Schale der Vergessenheit” (op. 46, no. 3). “Die Liebende schreibt” was composed around 1858, a decade earlier than its opus number would suggest. The chronological order of their composition happens to match the increasing complexity of large-scale tonal structure across these three songs. In each case, the half-diminished seventh is readily interpreted as an event belonging only to the foreground, but in each case the striking launch is not without larger impact. Each lied revisits its opening half-diminished seventh and later gives special roles to the sonority's outer-voice pitches. In “Nachtigallen schwingen,” the tonic Stufe arrives solidly at the end of the opening strophe, whereas in the later songs the half-diminished seventh resolves to a first-inversion tonic chord, and an auxiliary cadence serves as tonal background.

Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Modern analytic approaches to sonata form generally take for granted that expositions normally divide into two large theme groups linked by a transition. This two-part analytic model has much to recommend it, for it helps to highlight the dramatic dialectic that lies at the heart of many sonata expositions composed during the high classical period. Analyzing an exposition in terms of two contrasting theme groups can also shed light on its voice-leading structure, since middleground prolongations often correlate directly with these thematic groupings.

Despite their importance in modern analytic discourse, however, large thematic groups in expositions went entirely unnoticed in publications throughout much of the eighteenth century. Not until the last few years of the 1700s was there any published indication that musicians recognized the presence— much less the importance—of a secondary theme within what would now be labeled a sonata-form exposition. Even when they did point to features that today would clearly be associated with secondary themes, music theorists of the time seemed not to notice the groupings that result.

That eighteenth-century theorists did not discuss such thematic groupings makes much sense, considering the repertoire with which they were concerned. After all, they examined not only works from the high classical period but also works composed earlier, including those from around the 1750s through the 1770s. For works composed during this earlier era, the formal descriptions proposed by eighteenth-century theorists work particularly well. The same might be said even for certain works from later decades by composers—most notably Joseph Haydn—who continued to employ formal procedures that were developed closer to the middle of the 1700s.

Modern analytic approaches to sonata form, by contrast, tend to take as their starting point procedures that developed in the high classical period or later. When examined through the assumptions inherent in modern analytic approaches, an uncomfortably large number of standard formal layouts of works composed during the third quarter of the eighteenth century appear to be deformational or involve departures from the norm. This in turn creates difficulties when we try to come to grips with the voice-leading procedures in the expositions of such pieces by using modern analytic models.

Most people would associate Robert Schumann more readily with the music theorist Adolf Bernhard Marx than with the political theorist Karl Marx. Yet Schumann's Manfred, op. 115, calls to mind a famous line from The Communist Manifesto, written by the latter Marx in 1848, the same year in which Schumann composed his incidental music to Byron's Manfred. The line is that quoted in my title. It applies in a fairly obvious way to Byron's dramatic poem. In a less obvious way, it also applies to Schumann's music, especially the overture. I have no intention of giving either Manfred a Marxist interpretation (although it would be possible to do so). What melts in Schumann's overture is not the social fabric of precapitalist society, as in the Manifesto, but those two most solid of tonal pillars, the tonic and the dominant. The more one tries to grasp them, the more they slip through one's fingers, in ways that underscore and even create the music's dramatic meaning.

Similarities between Byron's Manfred and Goethe's Faust, for which Schumann also provided music, have been discussed ever since Goethe himself noted the resemblance. Like Faust, Manfred has shunned human company in favor of philosophy and magic, pursuits that have left him unsatisfied. What Manfred seeks is not knowledge but oblivion. He wishes to die but is unable to kill himself—fearing, like Hamlet, that death will not end his agony. He is unable even to go mad. He is more defiant than Faust, angrily dismissing priests and demons, seeking neither salvation nor damnation but taking full responsibility on himself. He speaks to spirits and witches, but he never allows them to gain power over him; he uses them for his own purposes. Even the spirits admire his self-possession. As one says:

This essay explores the relationship between structure and design in the first movement of Schubert's Octet in F Major, D. 803, which contains a number of unusual features: a highly chromatic slow introduction that returns at the end of the development; a three-key exposition with a I–vi–V key scheme; a development section constructed in parallel blocks within which formal and prolongational spans are out of sync; and a recapitulation where only the first part of the main theme is restated in tonic. The rest of the recapitulation is a literal transposition of analogous passages in the exposition, such that I–vi–V is answered by IV–ii–I.

Schubert composed the octet in 1824, the year in which he abandoned his efforts to establish himself as an opera composer and instead sought to make his reputation by composing in serious instrumental genres. By the end of March, he had completed the octet and the string quartets in A minor (D. 804, “Rosamunde”) and D minor (D. 810, “Death and the Maiden”). As Schubert remarked in a letter to his friend Leopold Kupelwieser, he saw these works as means to pave his way toward a grand symphony. He hoped that his efforts in large-scale instrumental composition could lead to a concert in Vienna similar to one that Beethoven was about to give, which would include a performance of the Ninth Symphony.

That Beethoven was both a paragon and a competitor for Schubert is evident in the compositional design of the octet, which is closely modeled on Beethoven's Septet, op. 20. The two works have similar instrumentations and the same number of movements, each of which is nearly identical in formal type, tempo, meter, and tonal scheme. Since several commentators have investigated the derivation of the octet from Beethoven's septet, I do not intend to pursue the issue here. Instead, I focus specifically on Schubert's treatment of sonata form in the octet's first movement, which clearly differs from the characteristic practice of Beethoven. I begin with some general remarks on the viable voice-leading paradigms for the movement's unusual tonal design at the level of fundamental structure.

Introduction

In literary criticism, narrative trajectory is often understood as consisting of distinct phases, the last of which resolves the plot's tensions. This is clearly stated, for example, in Vladimir Propp's classical study Morphology of the Folktale. In every plot archetype that Propp describes, the concluding state resolves tensions that have been established earlier: “Morphologically, a tale (skázka) may be termed any development proceeding from villainy (A) or a lack (a), through intermediary functions to marriage (W*), or to other dénouement. Terminal functions are at times a reward (F), a gain or in general the liquidation of misfortune (K), an escape from pursuit (Rs), etc.” The plot's beginning thus proposes a problem, such as “a lack,” and its end provides a resolution to this problem, such as “a gain.” Likewise, discussions of musical narrative often suggest that a work's ending provides a resolution of its narrative tensions. This is evident, for example, in Byron Almén's recent theory on musical narrative. Building on the ideas of Northrop Frye and James Jakób Liszka, Almén suggests that the narrative archetypes in music grow out of a tension created by the elements in a binary opposition “order vs. transgression.” The poles of this opposition form an initial conflict, which suggests a distinction between two kinds of musical elements: those that attempt to establish order and those that try to lead to transgression. At the work's end the conflict is resolved; therefore, only those musical elements referring either to order or transgression remain.

This essay examines the slow movement of Robert Schumann's Second Symphony, arguing that this movement does not always follow a principle of providing clear resolutions. Rather, it leaves some of its tensions, both local and global, unresolved, thus often avoiding a sense of dénouement. My narrative reading pays special attention to the occurrences of the slow movement's main theme, its various transformations, and the formal and tonal environments in which it appears.