Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (review)

Stanford musicologist Karol Berger's latest book is about time. Its thesis is both simple and grandiose: around 1750 a shift takes place in musical temporality from cyclical time to linear time, a shift that marks the birth of autonomy and thus the origin of Western modernity. The book is correspondingly structured as two large acts, framed and interspersed by a Prelude, Interlude, and Postlude. Berger's historical scope is far reaching, but the main thrust of his narrative is all of a piece: his Prelude begins with the anxious first stirrings of the modern self in Monteverdi's Orfeo, and his Postlude concludes with that self's profoundly estranged disillusionment in Schubert's Winterreise. In between, Bach and Mozart represent each side of Berger's defining binary, and they set into sympathetic vibration a host of figures within an even broader swath of cultural history, ranging from Augustine to Proust and featuring a potent cluster of those heroes of modern self-determination, Rousseau, Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

Both of Berger's posited modalities of musical time, the cyclical and the linear, share principal elements of tonal harmony and form. But in the first, musical invention trumps formal disposition, while in the second, formal function and ordered succession become paramount. In Bach's art—whether in da capo arias, varied ritornellos, or fugal expositions—the emphasis is on "the contemplative reinterpretation of the central idea." Core material undergoes a series of transformations; the ordering of those transformations can be completely arbitrary. This means that listeners hear Bach's events paradigmatically rather than syntagmatically—there's no telling where one is in the unfolding of the form. In Mozart's art, on the other hand, conventions of formal ordering are well developed: cadential syntax and formal function work to make clear distinctions between beginnings, middles, and ends. Time is relentlessly linear in this music, and listeners always have a sense of where they are at any point in the journey.

Berger's reigning binary is easy to undermine, and for some readers his book will live or die with the extent to which they are willing to buy the idea of a profound shift in musical temporality. They will point to linear aspects of Bach's music (and there are plenty), as well as cyclical aspects of Mozart's (plenty again). But Berger finds such countervailing tendencies as well, deploys them in fact to profile his sense of the prevailing temporal ethos of each composer. Moreover, Berger's two conceptions of musical time are well supported in recent theoretical literature about the music of Bach and the music of the Viennese Classical Style. Laurence Dreyfus' pathbreaking book J. S. Bach and the Patterns of Invention develops the idea of Bach as a composer whose salient gift was to be instantly aware of any musical theme's potential for elaborative combinations. And a number of recent books about the Classical Style offer detailed taxonomies of conventional formal functions, as, for example, William Caplin's Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (1998) and James Hepokoski's and Warren Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (2006).

Berger cannot resist opening with Orpheus, in that figure's ca. 1600 instantiation. And indeed, who else could set a stage of these proportions, who else introduce the emergence of the modern self, the power of music, and the plight of the artist? Berger offers a renewed allegorical reading of the Orpheus myth in the hands of Monteverdi and others as the "inherently tragic situation of the artist," in which the ideal of artistic perfection (Euridice) slips away at the moment of realization. Complicating the situation is the anxiety of the early modern composers in the face of the ancient music they were at pains to resurrect (yet another Euridice). The...