Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles

Analytical Pathways Toward Performance

Gordon Sly, Michael R. Callahan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367220259
• eBook ISBN: 9781000219760
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles: Analytical Pathways Toward Performance presents analyses of fourteen song cycles composed after the turn of the twentieth century, with a focus on offering ways into the musical and poetic structure of each cycle to performers, scholars, and students alike. Ranging from familiar works of twentieth-century music by composers such as Schoenberg, Britten, Poulenc, and Shostakovich to lesser-known works by Van Wyk, Sviridov, Wheeler, and Sánchez, this collection of essays captures the diversity of the song cycle repertoire in contemporary classical music. The contributors bring their own analytical perspectives and methods, considering musical structures, the composers' selection of texts, how poetic narratives are expressed, and historical context.

Informed by music history, music theory, and performance, Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles offers an essential guide into the contemporary art-music song cycle for performers, scholars, students, and anyone seeking to understand this unique genre.

1
“As if with lightning bolts”
The Ombra and Tempesta in Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten¹

Jessica Narum

Introduction

It is difficult to describe precisely the events depicted in Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, Arnold Schoenberg’s 1908–9 song cycle, which sets poems by Stefan George. Part of this difficulty concerns the ambiguous temporal perspective: is the speaker describing events or remembering them? Another layer of ambiguity arises from the descriptions of the events themselves: the use of metaphor obscures any definitive meaning. Most commentators agree that these 15 poems recount the growth and decay of a passionate affair between the speaker and an unnamed person. The tone and imagery prompt descriptions that highlight the text’s exotic and/or archaic setting. We might even say that the “timelessness” of the cycle’s temporal ambiguity contributes to the sense of the mythical and melancholy that persists throughout the work.²

The musical material in Schoenberg’s setting of these texts further complicates this expressive ambiguity, compounding the interpretive challenges facing analysts of this work. These challenges have prompted diverse approaches to understanding meaning in the song cycle. For example, Allen Forte’s 1992 study explores the use of set-classes throughout the cycle and the role that ciphers for the names Arnold Schoenberg, Mathilde Schoenberg, and Richard Gerstl may have played across the cycle. David Lewin’s approach (1973) focuses on pitch inversions and near-inversions to study the emotional stance of the song’s narrator in song 7, “Angst und Hoffen.” And Anne Marie de Zeeuw (1993) argues that the 3:4 rhythmic ratio that emerges at the opening of the eleventh song not only influenced Schoenberg’s decisions about rhythm, form, melody, and harmony throughout the song, but also suggests a metaphor between two oppositions: men and women, and sex and marriage.

One avenue that has remained relatively unexplored in the analysis of these songs is the role of musical topics—conventional signs that convey cultural and emotional content. In this chapter, I aim to investigate how two enduring topics, the tempesta and the ombra—musical styles originating in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera—may be identified and understood in Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. As I demonstrate, Schoenberg maintains many of the traditional elements of the tempesta and the ombra while also including consistent atonal elements. Specifically, I will argue that (014) trichords, or three-note units that consist of a semitone within a major third, become signifiers of the ombra in Schoenberg’s atonal music. I will first provide some background about topic theory in general and about the ombra and tempesta in particular, before turning to examples from Das Buch der hängenden Gärten.

Topical analysis

Danuta Mirka has recently defined topics as “musical styles and genres taken out of their proper context and used in another one” (2014, 2). Topics signify through the associations that they accrue from these original contexts. The musical elements that are visible in the score and audible in performance (including parameters such as rhythm, harmony, melody, and dynamics) refer to current or historical types and styles of music, from which they draw their associations; these references point to larger cultural ideas, which we, as listeners, often translate into emotions.³

For example, the tempesta is marked by rapid and sometimes repetitive melodic gestures, the minor mode, a fast tempo, and a high register, among other features.⁴ These signs were used by composers of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century operas to depict storms, both natural and supernatural. In the context of those operas and in the context of how we hear the tempesta today, we might also understand these musical signs as indicative of anxiety, distress, or turmoil—emotional states evoked by storms and referenced in the historical sources of the topic. Since 1980, scholars such as Leonard Ratner, Wye J. Allanbrook, Robert Hatten, and Raymond Monelle have demonstrated the explanatory power of topical analysis in tonal music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries⁵; in recent years, scholars have explored how this mode of analysis can be applied fruitfully to the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.⁶

Two recent approaches to the analysis of topics in music after 1900 influence my analysis here. Frymoyer (2017) suggests a tripartite hierarchical division of the features of a topic by considering whether they are essential, frequent, or idiomatic, a methodology that proves useful in determining whether topics are strongly or less strongly present. The hierarchical model seems most effective for topics defined by rhythm and meter, such as the waltz and the march, which constitute Frymoyer’s primary case studies; her analysis does not consider the pitch aspect of Schoenberg’s waltzes. Johnson (2017) differs by suggesting that instances of topics may demonstrate a familial relation with each other; instead of possessing one feature that is true of every occurrence of a topic, individual examples of topics may instead possess some subset of features that may be shared by the broader topical category. Influenced by these perspectives, the remainder of this chapter will consider both topical inclusion and issues of pitch in Schoenberg’s use of the tempesta and ombra in Das Buch der hängenden Gärten in an effort to understand how hearing these topics might influence our interpretation, as potential performers and listeners, of the cycle as a whole.

I have chosen the topics of tempesta and ombra for three reasons. First, these topics share many of the same figurae, or building blocks; musical elements such as “chromatic bass motion” or “tremolo effects” are features of both of these topics.⁷ The tempesta and the ombra primarily differ in terms of tempo and tessitura. Second, both of these topics feature pitch-class structures and relationships, such as fully diminished sevenths, the minor mode, and dissonant leaps, which are marked elements in triadic tonal music; as such, this raises the question of markedness in a non-tonal context. And third, commentary around Das Buch der hängenden Gärten has often employed language that suggests an understanding of the expressive content of the topics present and of these topics specifically.⁸ Investigating the presence of the ombra and tempesta throughout this cycle addresses both structural and expressive concerns in this enigmatic piece.

Defining the Ombra and Tempesta

Clive McClelland’s chapter on the ombra and tempesta in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (2014) will serve as my primary touchstone for the definition of these topics. McClelland contrasts these two topics, drawing on previous writings on the subject and original analyses of examples from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opera to create Table 1.1.⁹ This table contrasts the ombra and the tempesta, indicating potential features of each topic in areas such as rhythm, dynamics, melody, harmony, and texture. His analysis parallels Frymoyer’s distinction among essential, frequent, and idiomatic features by informally identifying common and less common signifiers; note his use of “especially” and “often” in the lists of characteristic features.

TABLE 1.1 McClelland’s Figure 10.1: “A comparison of ombra and tempesta characteristics” (2014, 282)

	Ombra	Tempesta
General	High style, sombre, sustained	Agitated, declamatory, stormy
Tempo	Slow or moderate	Fast
Tonality	Flat keys (especially minor keys); occasionally...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 “As if with lightning bolts”: The Ombra and Tempesta in Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten
• 2 Georgy Sviridov’s Pushkin Romances: Approaches to Interpretation
• 3 Poetry, Voice, and Resistance in Poulenc’s Tel jour telle nuit
• 4 Guilt, Deliberation, Affirmation: Britten’s The Holy Sonnets of John Donne as Catharsis
• 5 Arnold van Wyk’s Van Liefde en Verlatenheid (“Of Love and Forsakenness”): Love and Others in 1950s South Africa
• 6 The Queer Context and Composition of Samuel Barber’s Despite and Still
• 7 Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin: Nihilism and Transcendence in Late Shostakovich
• 8 Perceiving Imaginative and Intellectual Oscillation in George Crumb’s Apparition
• 9 Modern and Sentimental Voices in Scott Wheeler’s Wasting the Night
• 10 “Let Me Count the Ways”: Nostalgia and Repetition in Libby Larsen’s Sonnets from the Portuguese
• 11 Climbing the Mountain: Thoughts on Robert Morris’s Cold Mountain Songs
• 12 Portrayals of Incongruity in William Bolcom and Sandra Seaton’s From the Diary of Sally Hemings
• 13 Longing for a Fragment: Sappho as a Figure of Hope in Paul Sánchez’s ὁδοιπορία
• 14 There and Then, Here and Now: Higdon’s Civil Words
• Notes on Contributors
• Index