Listen to audio clips in context

OK, the readings are really the context, so just listen to the first movement of Chopin's Sonata in B-flat minor while you get started on those.

 

Done with the Schumann reading? Good. Just a couple of additional remarks. The cultural musicologist Lawrence Kramer argues that despite the apparent subjectivity of our use of words or images to convey musical meaning, the "unsemanticizable" aspect of music should not be an obstacle to interpretation. That is indeed why the practices of interpretation must be carefully studied in their historical context, because composers, performers, and trained listeners so often have resort to shorthands and codes that try to eliminate the gap between music and meaning. Even casual metaphors can tell us a great deal, as for example when Robert Schumann reviewed Fryderyk Chopin's B-flat sonata, op. 35 (1836). Listen to an excerpt from the beginning of the second movement: 

 

Think about Schumann's characterization of Chopin: "the Sarmatian flashes from the tones in his defiant originality." Perhaps the change of tempo and texture are enough to justify this, and certainly the references to national character in the review are typical of the time. Does the music itself mandate the use of the term Sarmatian, referring to the legendary race of hunter-warriors who supposedly ruled primeval Poland? Schumann thus links creative originality to feral energy and primitive nobility. The music might sustain the metaphor, but does the music signify?

If we are (justifiably) skeptical, that does not mean we should discredit the idea of musical meaning entirely. Indeed, Kramer presses us not to be complacent about how that gap is represented in historical work, because the attributions of musical meaning are grounded in historically specific forms of subjectivity that cannot be excluded from how we understand the music itself. "The politics of disengaged listening is based on the systematic misrecognition of this surrender [of the possibility of strong claims about the worldly contexts of the 'music-as-such'] as either a transcendence of subjectivity or, contrariwise, a fundamental enhancement or expression of it." Schumann juxtaposes a true or original self (Chopin the Sarmatian) with one that can deceive itself (by borrowing from the Italian or the German), so that the latter becomes potentially inauthentic. The defiant chords at the end of the movement ensure Chopin's authenticity. This is not just the usual East/West contrast, but also a bourgeois separation between private or interior identity and public demeanor. For Schumann, Chopin's Sarmatian character confirms that authentic identity must be socially resistant. And what we have to allow for in the process of composition (how this particular sonata recapitulates its themes, how it shifts between major and minor modes at the end, how the "Sarmatian" vehemence sets things right at the end) is that the music carries its contingent, socially-constructed character as part of its content. Listen to the brief final movement:

 

Ask yourself why you agree or not with Schumann that it is "fascinating," but not music.

In her essay Frolova-Walker notes that Mikhail Glinka's symphonic fantasy Kamarinskaya combines two folk songs in an unconventional manner:

 

Even though they seem ill-matched to each other, Glinka uses a chain of ostinato variations to create resonances between them. "Ostinato" simply means that Glinka is relying on a persistent musical phrase or rhythm to help create the association in our ears. The first tune is spelled out roughly 00:26-00:36 and then developed in variations, while the second tune is introduced at about 01:40. Listen to how Glinka moves back and forth between them.

Frolova-Walker also refers to the following works:

Example 5.1a: Borodin, Symphony No. 1, Finale

 

Example 5.1b: Schumann, Symphony No. 4, Finale

 

Example 5.2: Balakirev, Symphony No. 1, first movement, The descent of the Holy Spirit