Is Language a Music? Writings on Musical Form and Signification (review)

David Lidov's attention-grabbing title pleads for fresh thinking in musicology. It is not intended to advocate a mode of critical discourse that continually inverts fundamental, frequently posed questions, though certain reversals of the expected and familiar are to be found in the pages of what is, basically, a 'Collected Essays'. Various texts from three decades, some conflated, are brought together, grouped in five parts with new introductions, but usually without extensive engagement with other commentaries on the same materials. We are also encouraged to think of the collection as a kind of parallel to Lidov's magnum opus, Elements of Semiotics (Toronto, 1999), which is not primarily about music, and which I have not read.

The Part titles—'Structuralist Perspectives', 'Semiotic Polemics', 'From Gestures to Discourses', 'The Messages of Methods', 'Resisting Representation'—suggest a network of topics dealing with 'musical form and signification', and progressing, overall, from formalism to hermeneutics. Yet the connective tissues of the network are strained by the variety of the elements connected, a consequence of the diverse dates, functions, and locations of the original texts. Perhaps because he is also a composer who takes his creative work seriously enough to devote the last part of the book to it, Lidov wants us to expect the unexpected. It could also be because he is a composer that the book's argument and originality come most vividly into focus when he is making broadly based judgements about contemporary—or at least post-1900—music, and commenting more generally on 'fundamental dilemmas of civilization' (p. 157).

Take Bartók's Second String Quartet (1915–17). This signifies—communicates—through paradox: for example, the first movement is 'extraordinary' for the way in which Bartók sustains 'a flexibility of sound that does not disregard the harmonic values it contradicts' (p. 191). Lidov's outline analysis (in Part IV) doesn't take the easy formalist route along the familiar paths of extended tonality, whether or not refracted through the prism of pitch-class-set theory. Instead, he argues with provocative generality that

Bartók makes a syntax out of representations. He makes allusions. He alludes to tonality without subscribing to its rules. He alludes to song without rounding out his melodies. He alludes to imitative procedures and developmental procedures which he is quick to abandon for fresh gestures. He alludes to folk music without accepting its constraints. To put it another way, he has turned all these other styles into topics. Collectively, these topics constitute networks of oppositions which are mediated by the possibility, in a plastic sound, of a modulatory progress from any one pole to the other.

(pp. 191–2)

Pursuing this dialectical mode, Lidov claims that Bartók was 'a progressive . . . whose ideal was synthesis' and for whom progress meant 'access to what was new and everything of value in tradition, all at the same time' (p. 189). He then goes on to declare that 'the form of the first movement of the Second Quartet . . . represents a synthesis between the rationality of sonata form and the nineteenth-century aesthetic ideal of musical form as a psychological drama or an intimate confession' (p. 192). What is required, therefore, is neither a purely structural nor a purely semantic analysis:

We must be oriented by the dialogue of structure and representation which is fundamental to the music itself. Bartók's style establishes a humane music that is at once both autonomous and implicated in experience, a music that moves rapidly between extreme representational moments of gesture, texture, topic, and rhetorical manner within a unity that exploits the purely structural craft of plasticity, a music that sidesteps the debates between Classical and Romantic to assert (as is often remarked) its acquisition of the problem bequeathed in Beethoven's late style. We must reclaim a word for his progressive synthesis that has, perhaps, become discredited: 'serious'. It is a...