This paper opens with an evaluation of the current state of a particular subdiscipline of music theory—Schenkerian theory and analysis—with respect to its ability to incorporate insights and methodologies from other fields, particularly dramatic theory, into a genuine interdisciplinary analytical methodology. Finding scholarly efforts to date lacking in this regard, and identifying the call for such a methodology in the work of Carl Schachter, David Neumeyer, and Patrick McCreless, the paper points toward future directions for the development of interdisciplinary Schenkerian theory by advancing two new concepts for the analysis of opera and art song: the idea of a “permanent” or sustained interruption, and a model for the multi-movement Ursatz, both substantiated, in the case of Winterreise, by a “dramatic analysis” of Müller’s texts according to a method developed by drama theorists Igor and Irina Levin. Identifying the interruption as a “nexus” of musical and dramatic meaning, the paper presents an analysis of Winterreise as a unified, though interrupted, musical and dramatic structure. The conclusion addresses possible future directions for interdisciplinary music theory, including the incorporation of dance theory into a model for the analysis of ballets by Debussy and Stravinsky, and highlights the significance of a composite analytical method for the growing field of analysis and performance.

This paper investigates a link between metric displacements and romantic longing (Sehnsucht) in selected Lieder by Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. Sybille Reichert has shown that expressions of Sehnsucht generally involve movement outwards, towards the infinite, followed by a return to the self. Metric displacements have the potential to generate “energy profiles” (Lewin) that correlate with this gesture of longing. The correlation is inevitably loose, however, for while the resolution of metric displacements brings about a relative state of rest, the longing subject who returns to him- or herself achieves neither resolution nor rest. The songs presented here compensate for this discrepancy in a variety of ways.

In Schubert’s “Wandrers Nachtlied II” metric displacements reflect the outward movement of the Wanderer’s longing. They cease with the turn to self-consciousness, but their “kinetic energy” is transferred to the vocal line, and the singer reaches up to his or her melodic climax in the final phrases. Ultimately Schubert’s song achieves a state of rest that lies outside of the “temporal actuality” of the poem. Metric displacements in Schumann’s “Intermezzo” are introduced as the poet gazes inward at an image of his beloved, intensified as he sings a song which flies out towards her, and resolved as he returns to the image in his heart. Schumann’s postlude, however, undermines the sense of full closure. In Brahms’s “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer” the dying protagonist performs her urgent longing for the beloved with metric displacements, and her life energy dissipates as the displacements resolve.

            As Carl Schachter has observed, meter is a problem for both theorists and performers. Brahms’s Capriccio in C, op. 76, no. 8 (1878), is an intricate work temporally; while the notated meter is 6/4 throughout, the implied meter shifts between 6/4 and 3/2 meters, presenting each with varying degrees of metrical dissonance. The richness of the temporal design of this Capriccio results in a multitude of possibilities for the performer.

            After reviewing David Lewin’s brief analysis of the opening of the Capriccio, the paper will outline a metrical narrative for the entire Capriccio. This metrical narrative has inherent analytical value since it suggests motivations for events such as a phrase expansion near the beginning of the work and recompositions in the recapitulatory section of the Capriccio, but it also provides a tool for making interpretive decisions involving the projection of meter. By responding to the location and function of each passage within the overall narrative, the performer can nuance metrical identities in a way that creates an interpretation imbued with continuity and direction—qualities valued in the performance of Brahms’s music. The metrical narrative places the complex temporal design of the Capriccio into a framework that proposes relative degrees of salience for metrical identities at various moments in the work but leaves the means of emphasizing or disguising these identities to the performer. The metrical narrative thus offers the performer a concrete but flexible mode of conceptualizing the work rather than a specific set of directions.

            Schenkerian analysis is a discipline commonly taught without reference to the passage of time despite its namesake’s philosophical emphasis on the real-time experience of the phenomenological perception of the composition as art. Recently, Carl Schachter devoted the first chapter of Unfoldings to this issue, outlining five reasons that time is not commonly treated as an essential element of Schenker’s theory and arguing that it need not be.

            Despite the comprehensive and logical nature of his arguments, one issue that Schachter does not address is how Heinrich Schenker conceived of rhythm and time in music, possibly because no such coherent theory was described in any of his works. Nevertheless, Schenker’s writings resonate with the ideas of art and time described in the writings of Temporalist philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James, whose popularity in academic and intellectual circles was at its peak around the time Schenker was writing Der freie Satz.

            This paper will examine the resonances between Heinrich Schenker’s theories and Temporalist philosophy. It will demonstrate that Schenker, rather than ignoring elements of rhythm and time in his analyses, actually possessed a philosophically sophisticated and coherent understanding of temporality in music consistent with the intellectual thought of his day. It will examine how memory serves a creative and cohering role in experience and serves as an essential cohering element of the Ursatz. It will further examine similarities between descriptions of art in Schenker’s writings and in those of French Temporalist Henri Bergson.

In his 1983 treatise “A Music Lesson,” architect and scholar Radoslav Zuk calls for a rigorous and systematic investigation of relationships between architecture and music. Inspired by his challenge, more than sixty scholars from the areas of music theory, environmental design (including architecture, interior design, and landscape architecture), dance and sculpture have presented their ideas during the past three summers at the Symposium on Systems Research in the Arts: Music, Environmental Design, and the Choreography of Space in Baden-Baden, Germany. Held in conjunction with the annual conference of the International Institute of Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, the emphasis has been on the application of general systems theory—the study of ways in which sets of things are related—to relationships between music and space composition.

Some types of systems, including those based upon rhythm, harmony, and form, are common to works of music and space design. The Symposium focuses on studies that transcend traditional concepts of style in favor of objective descriptions of synergistic relationships within and between works of music and space. Four questions provide a framework for the Symposium: (1) How do the systemic properties of music and space correspond? (2) How are systems related to elements such as rhythm, harmony, and form integrated within particular musical or spatial works? (3) Is there potential for a multi-disciplinary language within these arts? (4) If so, what methodologies and technologies are necessary to create it? These questions will continue to be addressed at the upcoming Symposium in the summer of 2002.

            David Lynch’s Lost Highway has been the subject of various contrasting readings ranging from psychotic, to postmodern, to New Age. The reason for these contrasting readings is a split in the film’s plot: partway through the movie most of the characters disappear and new characters are introduced, even though we seem to be watching the same story.

Slavoj Zizek argues that all of these readings are problematic in that they don’t take Lynch seriously, and that doing so requires reading him through Jacques Lacan. The two parts of the film are the opposition of reality and fantasy. By this opposition, Lynch successfully tears apart our normal sense of reality—where reality and fantasy work together (vertically), fantasy always supporting reality—into a situation where reality and fantasy are presented separate from each other (horizontally). However, Zizek’s conclusion of where the worlds of reality and fantasy begin and end in the film is problematic in that he does not take into account the musical score, which, according to Lynch, is half the film.

            This paper summarizes Zizek’s reading of the film as a split between reality and fantasy and examines the musical score showing how music signifies the fantasy world. Moreover, a musical interpretation allows us to pinpoint more precisely the moments that the film shifts from one world to the next. This examination of the musical score does not undermine Zizek’s reading but instead strengthens and fine-tunes the argument for the reordering of reality and fantasy onto a horizontal plane.

            György Kurtág (b. 1926) is one of the most eminent living European composers. Musical settings to poetry occupy the central position in his œuvre. Although Kurtág is Hungarian, since the late ’70s, many of his vocal works are settings of Russian texts. For more than twenty years Kurtág has been fascinated with the sound of the Russian language and the semantics that it is capable of conveying.

This paper focuses on one fragment of Scenes from a Novel, op. 19, a vocal cycle for soprano and instrumental ensemble set to poems by Rimma Dalos, a Russian poet living in Hungary. Each fragment of this vocal cycle brings musical and poetic entities together into one musico-poetic whole. In this composition Kurtág succeeds in translating into music the deepest level of poetic meaning, which usually remains beyond the words.

            I use the structuralist analytical method of Iurii Lotman, Russia’s foremost semiotician, to examine Dalos’s text. This approach considers the phonological (sound content), prosodic (metric structure), graphic (appearance on the page), lexical (word content), and grammatical levels of poetic structure. My analysis of the musical counterpart of “Visit” examines both vertical and horizontal dimensions of the structure, not following any particular theoretical-analytical model, but, nevertheless, borrowing the idea of “wedging” from David Lewin. To incorporate these approaches, I consider this fragment as an independent musical entity, an independent poetic entity, and finally as a musico-poetic symbiosis, where the poetic and the musical structures interpret each other.

            A distinctive compositional signature for Bartók’s post-1926 contrapuntal style consists of the superposition of strands in different keys. Analytical approaches to this music seem to divide along a standard tonal/atonal boundary. However, both approaches suppress the individuality and coherence of diatonic strands, the first by reducing chromaticism into diatonicism, the second by scattering diatonicism into chromaticism.

            This paper proposes an alternative framework in which to conceive superposed diatonic spaces, without specifying diatonic collections nor appealing to pitch-centers. The starting point is the analytical tradition inspired by Bartók’s notion of polymodal chromaticism, and its subsequent crystallization as a prolongational model, the Lydian-Phrygian polymode. It is suggested that polymodes can be viewed independently of pitch-centric constraints, through a space I call dasian, after the dasian scale discussed in the medieval Enchiriadis treatises. The dasian space is a 48-element cycle, in which the twelve diatonic pitch-spaces are represented. It is thus a hybrid space: diatonic at the regional level and chromatic when gradually venturing outside each region. However, subsegments are defined not by their key affiliation, but by their (sometimes multiple) location within the cycle. Hence, the space draws its coherence not from the differentiation between key areas, but from its intervallic coherence and autonomous patterning. The navigation of the dasian system (through stepwise motion, and through an operation I call channeling) during mm. 1–38 of Bartók’s Piano Sonata, mvt. III, retains the individual diatonic strands within the dasian space, as the music engages in a process of coherent exploration of that space.

            Neil Minturn regards “the interaction of tradition and innovation as a key feature of much of Prokofiev’s music.” Along with Jonathan Kramer and others, Minturn applies the term “wrong-note music” to the juxtaposition of classical and modernist tendencies that create a delightful and witty incongruity in pieces such as the Classical Symphony and the March from The Love for Three Oranges. The Second Piano Concerto is resistant to this type of “wrong-note” analysis; it is, in a sense, Prokofiev’s Rite of Spring. The most prominent theme of this concerto, presented in the fourth movement, is based on the Aeolian mode, followed by its reinterpretation in the Phrygian mode. This modal transformation is reflected in the other movements, in which the [0, 2, 5, 7] set, derived from scale degrees 1, 2, 4, and 5 of the Aeolian mode and consisting of a four-note segment of the circle of fifths, is juxtaposed with the [0, 1, 5, 6] set, derived from scales degrees 1, 2, 5, and 6 of the Phrygian mode and consisting of two fifths separated by a semitone. Thus the concerto’s dissonant and modernist aspects arise from a modal rather than a tonal base. The result is a work that offers an “interaction of tradition and innovation” distinct from the one Minturn describes, that draws upon a rich modal heritage, and that exhibits an astonishing diversity masking an underlying unity. This paper describes in detail this powerful and vital mixture of modality and modernism which fueled the development of Prokofiev’s early musical language.

Although Olivier Messiaen has left us extensive writings on his compositional techniques and despite the growing theoretical literature on his oeuvre, theorists have not yet provided a comprehensive theory of harmony and voice-leading for the music that he based on his “modes of limited transposition.” This paper develops such a theory. It presents a classification system for harmonic and contrapuntal vocabularies based not on mod12 pitch class contexts, but on pc collections of cardinalities smaller than 12. The paper illustrates the relationship between Messiaen’s voice-leading patterns and chordal structures and develops the necessary generalizations. The classification system is also used to analyze contour. The paper studies a wide range of harmonic and contrapuntal patterns in Messiaen’s music with the goal both of validating the theory and illuminating Messiaen’s compositional practice.

In the late 1930s, George Perle began to devise a new compositional method that he now calls “twelve-tone tonality.” With this new approach, Perle combines inversional symmetry and cyclic intervals to create a rich harmonic vocabulary. Despite many authors who have discussed the concept of a tonality based on the twelve pitch classes, including the composer himself, little has been written about the depth and complexity in which symmetry exists not only in Perle’s pre-compositional approach, but also in his own twelve-tone tonal compositions. In this presentation, I will illustrate the various symmetrical properties inherent in the pre-compositional stages of Perle’s twelve-tone tonal approach. I will then demonstrate the various complex uses of inversional symmetry that is “interrupted” and “restored” in the first movement of Perle’s piano piece entitled Modal Suite.

According to Alan Pearlman and Daniel Greenblatt, “the meaning of a phrase [in a jazz solo] is its history.” While Wynton Marsalis and others defend the reification of jazz’s past, pianist/singer Patricia Barber has consistently tested the genre’s boundaries. Her album Modern Cool (1998), released after she earned a Masters degree in Jazz Pedagogy from Northwestern University, incorporates references to avant-garde art music as much as jazz’s stylistic codes.

Modern Cool reveals Barber’s ambivalence at the close of the twentieth century, playing on modernism’s connotations of optimistic progress as well as bittersweet fin-de-siècle nostalgia. This ambivalence can be found in “Postmodern Blues,” a song that clearly reveals her contemporary-music influences even as its lyrics invoke Dali, Boulez, Karl Marx, and Bill Gates. I will analyze the song’s central group improvisation (piano, bass, electric guitar, percussion), using Nicolas Ruwet’s generative method of motivic analysis and Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of difference and repetition. I will demonstrate how the structure of this musical unfolding may be interpreted in terms of Deleuze’s theories even as it signifies several major composers of twentieth-century music—from Ligeti to Reich—in the process. The presentation will be accompanied by a transcription of the improvisation. 

Analyses of improvisation typically do not address processes of texture formation.  Analyses of motivic development abound, but most focus almost exclusively upon referent-based improvisation and rarely address issues beyond pitch design or form.  Musicians create both materials and relationships while improvising.  Analysis of free improvisation is especially rich for the study of texture formation and strategies that guide player interaction.

This study examines aspects of texture formation within the context of various collective free improvisations recorded by the group Oregon.  (One of Oregon’s hallmarks is their use of free improvisation in live concerts and studio recordings.)  A typology of textural interaction is presented that considers two general dimensions of textural construction:  (1) textural stratification and hierarchical relationships, and (2) the formation of a textural fabric through time and ways in which textural relationships change as an improvisation develops.  The formation of texture in an Oregon free improvisation reflects the ways in which the players interrelate within the frame of the emerging piece.  Players negotiate textural relationships hierarchically according to necessities posed by the emerging material and often change textural roles as a piece evolves, moving (1) from one hierarchical level to another (background, middleground, foreground), or (2) between different types of textural relationships (dialogical or discrete).  Structural coherence of the textural fabric fluctuates as players’ interactivity converges or diverges.  Along with various schemes of textural assemblage (including thickening and dissolution), changes in convergent or divergent motion affect the degree of intensification or abatement prevailing within a musical passage.

Musicologists—both traditional and new—have criticized music theory for its focus on structure. Theory nevertheless retains its relevance to broader concerns. This outlook forms the basis for an exploration of intersections between structure and expression in Brahms’s C-minor Piano Quartet. The discussion focuses on the interaction of generalized stylistic and topical characteristics and piece-specific structural processes as generators of emotional content. The analysis centers on formal relationships in which Brahms pits structural correlations for emotional despair against correlations that suggest the potential for emotional healing. In each case, the relentlessness of the whole overwhelms areas of reprieve as the work pushes inexorably to its tragic outcome. The quartet’s idiosyncratic and even at times bizarre characteristics help to stir fateful energies that are excessive compared to other Brahms works and that are traceable to the quartet’s affective motivations as an expression of suicidal despair.

The paper also engages motivic process as a potential carrier of emotional content, with special attention to the consequences—both structural and expressive—of an unusual pizzicato E-natural motive that Brahms introduces early in the first movement. The paper concludes with reflections on the significance of the quartet within the Romantic tradition of C-minor tragic works. It posits an exceptional status for the quartet not only in relation to the darkness-to-the-stars plot archetype of many pieces in this tradition, but also in relation to works that end in the tragic state in which they begin.

Gustav Mahler’s Wunderhorn song Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fish) exemplifies the structural principle I call “rotational form.” This particular song unfolds according to the process of “accretional rotations,” whereby each successive rotation adds something to its predecessor: A AB ABC, etc.

This paper proposes a close analytical reading of the song that relates its expanding rotational structure to the hermeneutic implications of the text. As a satiric indictment of churchgoers who faithfully attend and participate in Sunday services yet gain not one iota of moral edification therefrom, this poem thematizes failure—here, St. Anthony’s failure to make any lasting impression upon his watery flock. Accordingly, Mahler’s musical setting thematizes failure in a variety of ways. Moves towards harmonic functionality, formal clarity, and modal enlightenment are all thwarted, as are St. Anthony's attempts at spiritual edification.

The paper will conclude with a brief demonstration of how the structure of the song influenced the structure of Symphony II/3, which is also rotational on multiple levels. It will also suggest how in the symphonic scherzo, Mahler elevated the humorous parody of the song into a grim portrait of the human condition—mechanistic, utterly purposeless, and incapable of change. 

            Eduard Mörike’s poem “Das verlassene Mägdlein” (1832) tells the tale of a young domestic servant and serves as a touchstone into the 19th-century social dichotomy between Welt and Haus—between masculinity, unconstrained power, or sexual wantonness on the one hand, and security, intimacy, and social convention on the other. Whereas Mörike’s poem only hints obliquely at the tragedy and profound loss that have befallen the young woman, Hugo Wolf’s musical setting of the poem (op. 64, no.2, 1888) gives further, more explicit, access into the intimate sphere of the Mägdlein’sprivate world. Yet there is a disturbing undercurrent to the music, a knowledge or presence that has yet to assert itself fully.

Our critical interpretation draws on the story of another young German girl, Anna O, whom we know through the writings of Joseph Breuer. Breuer, a patron of Wolf’s, practiced medicine in Vienna from 1864 to 1912 and worked with Anna from 1880 to 1882 to overcome a succession of debilitating symptoms that arose during her father’s illness and eventual death, most notably that of her alternation between two distinct states of consciousness. Like Anna through her transient symptoms—her cough, hallucinations, paralyses, and agitations—Wolf’s music attempts to express its clandestine knowledge by way of its nagging rhythms, musical ambiguities, withheld resolutions, dissociations, and ever-elusive tonic.

The traditional pedagogical divide between music theory and performance frequently marks a musician’s process of interpretation, despite the fact that interpretation requires a comprehensive understanding of the music itself. Intuition often replaces conscious analysis. But late Romantic chromaticism involves subtlety and complexity that easily elude intuition, preventing purely intuitive performers from fully expressing their music.

The analysis presented here was developed through the author’s interpretative process. It explores musical issues such as harmony, melody, motive, and structure, as well as textual issues of meaning and subtext. Integral in the analysis are performance concerns, informed by the author’s own experiences. The analysis is organized by moment-to-moment perceptions, mirroring the experience of performing the song. The analytical issues and process illustrated here are intended to serve as an example of performance-informed analysis.

The second of Schoenberg’s op. 2 songs is challenging vocally, dramatically, and harmonically. In the text, Richard Dehmel imagines Jesus approaching Mary Magdalene sexually, asking to take on her burdens and save her. Jesus appears insecure and anxious from sexual inexperience. Schoenberg’s setting is as complex and full of nuance as the text, but he has taken the composition further: his often uncomfortable and frustrating setting creates in the performer the same awkward anxiety the text depicts in Jesus. Schoenberg has done much of the interpretative work for the performers. By using instances of this manipulation the performer achieves a more deeply integrated and emotionally authentic performance.

John Rahn’s 1979 article “Logic, Set Theory, Music Theory” discusses a tonal theory of his own devising, one conceived as an extension of axiomatic set theory yet intended to be pedagogically useful and directed toward musical experience. After he presents the system, Rahn offers an analysis of Mozart’s, K. 331 I, mm. 1–8 that ostensibly actualizes the system he has created.

Yet before focusing our attention on the analysis, Rahn makes a fascinating statement: “This is not the place in which to discuss the intuitions by which this particular analysis was arrived at, or the ways in which analytical decisions in this theory closely reflect decisions in performance and in listening.” This is the point in Rahn’s article that I find most intriguing: in the transition from discussion of the theory to discussion of the analysis the reader is asked to make a leap of faith. Rahn’s silence regarding his musical intuitions about the actual analysis is problematic. We, as his audience, are not allowed to know what led to his analysis; we are only told that there were “intuitions.”

Through further discussion I will show that Rahn’s rhetorical silence regarding his musical intuitions reveals a critique.  For Rahn, intuition enters the discourse when the counterintuitive is made concrete.  Intuition, then, becomes a marker for inexpressible yet real perceptions, and “arises monstrously” when we move between the worlds of meta-theory and theory, theory and analysis, analysis and intense experiences of individual pieces.

In the treatise entitled Homo Academicus (1984), Pierre Bourdieu takes a sociological perspective on intellectual communities, and examines the way that research is performed, presented, and received by those who claim membership to various scholarly groups with French academia (notably in the area of medicine, science, law, and the arts). According to Bourdieu, research is, more often than not, driven less by questions that might be of interest to a particular scholar than by the desire to “fit into” an academic world that predetermines the research questions and methodologies that its members might engage with.

Bourdieu’s thesis has particular significance for music theory, where recent debates have raised interesting questions about the nature of the relationship between scholars and musical works and about the way that such scholarship is (and should be) undertaken. Broadly speaking, music theorists have come under fire for their apparent detachment from the objects of their scholarship—an interpretation of music scholarship that arises, in large measure, from the belief that the analytical methodologies associated with the discipline of music theory provide a shield behind which scholars might conceal their personal engagement with musical works. Bourdieu would argue, however, that the research programs touted by New Musicologists (and their theoretical counterparts) are similarly limiting in the questions that scholars might pose and the methodologies they might invoke. Using Bourdieu as my point of departure, I will draw from recent analytical literature to question scholarly motivations in the field of music theory.

After the critical success of his song cycle La bonne chanson (1894), the international renown of his music for Pelléas et Mélisande (1898), and the personal triumph of his lyric tragedy Prométhée (1900), it would appear that Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) had reached an artistic impasse. The luxurious textures of these works, so full of rich nuances, shimmering harmonies, and long lyrical lines, could not be surpassed or sustained, and the beginning of the twentieth century witnessed relatively little from Fauré’s pen.

Yet in 1906 the Symbolist poetry of Jean Dominique and Charles van Lerberghe seems to have had a profound effect on Fauré’s musical style. Its allusive images, fluid lyricism, and sonorous musicality suggested to Fauré a new approach to musical invention based on the coordinated development of intervallic spans and relations. Expansion and contraction processes, systematic variation of associative harmonies, and progressive motivic transformation, often concealed within minimalistic textures, invested his music with intriguing sophistication and intimacy.

This presentation will illuminate some of the motivic processes which distinguish the late music of Gabriel Fauré. Analyses of the mélodie Le don silencieux (1906), plus excerpts from the cycles Chanson d’Eve (1910) and Le jardin clos (1914), as well as the opera Pénélope (1912), reveal Fauré to be an innovator in the structural domain, and not merely a postromantic harmonic voluptuary. Thus the paper will offer evidence of the composer’s modernity that places him among the greatest figures of his day.

This paper advances a theory of motive in the music of Prokofiev. It explores the theoretical and analytic implications of three types of motives, which I call tonal, pitch class and set class. Tonal motives are diminutions of middleground linear patterns, such as stepwise progressions or neighbor motions. Tonal motives occur in music by Prokofiev that can be modeled by Schenkerian methodology, such as the Classical Symphony. Pitch-class motives occur when tonal syntax and grammar do not conform strictly to Schenkerian principles. The disruption of tonal syntax that forms the nexus of most pitch-class motives often involves one of Prokofiev’s so-called “wrong notes.” Pitch-class motives associate these chromatic melodic gestures across structural levels, without regard to the tonal position or function of the pitches in the gesture. Finally, we find set-class motives in contexts where tonal syntax breaks down completely, and we are compelled to examine the surface through an atonal lens.

The presentation explores various representations of the different kinds of motives using examples from the Classical Symphony, Violin Concerto no. 2, Piano Concerto no. 3, Violin Sonata op. 94, and Piano Sonata no. 9. These examples raise intriguing issues about the nature of motivic transformation and analytical methodology.

In discussions of musical narrative, a crucial point of contention is in what sense, if any, music can be said to narrate. Is the relationship between music and narrative limited exclusively to event-sequences, or can we sometimes discern within music a presence akin to a narrator? This talk raises these issues in the context of Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, ultimately locating a narrating presence within the musical text itself. Various musical features combine to suggest a narrative framework. Just as in a novel or film the reader or viewer might retrospectively construct a “story” suggested by the more complex “discourse,” the listener can reconfigure isolated fragments of the flute part (“The Fighting Answerers”) to form a coherent linear succession. As the narrator of this story, the strings (“The Silence of the Druids”) frame the discourse, maintain distance from the action of the flutes, and contextualize the flutes’ futile chromatic discussions by interjecting diatonic commentary. A conception of The Unanswered Question as narrative has promising ramifications for Ives’s music, given his strong literary orientation, his propensity for programmaticism, and the pervasiveness of fragmentation and layering in his compositions. Furthermore, the narrative interpretation’s dependency on uniquely twentieth-century aspects of Ives’s compositional practice suggests ways of expanding narrative studies beyond the tonal repertory.

In making the pitch for associations among the twelve pieces of Debussy’s second book of Préludes, I establish a definition of “connectedness” that devolves from an interdisciplinary analytical strategy. The paper embraces concepts normally associated with our field, but it also turns to a specific device encountered in 20th-century literature, for I will isolate a trait associated with “post-modern” novels—this in an effort to establish a framework for interpreting intricate details concerning large-scale planning in Debussy.

Establishing webs of interconnections among pieces is a multi-faceted task, and not something that any musical language on its own guarantees. In this regard Mikhail Bakhtin’s “dialogical discourse,” Roland Barthes’s “structural analyses in the novel,” and Hayden White’s “modes of emplotment” prove helpful in presenting us with new ways of accounting for the ubiquitous shifts between traditional and non-traditional musical syntax in the unfolding surfaces of Debussy’s music.

Debussy’s art elevates allusion and illusion to levels previously unmatched in the corpus of Western music. Interpretation is thus super-charged, for the analyst is constantly enjoined to keep vivid a striking number of narrative threads. While these threads are posited in standard ways, we are required to reposition ourselves with respect to them. The paper will lay bare that Debussy actively steered a course that enabled him to embrace traditional conceptions of unity and coherence on his own terms, thus distancing his compositions from those of his precursors.