Approaches to Meaning in Music

6. Uncanny Moments: Juxtaposition and the Collage Principle in Music

6 Uncanny Moments: Juxtaposition and the Collage Principle in Music Nicholas Cook Analysis and Bedtime Stories The opening of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in G Major: the orchestra remains silent while the piano plays a ¤ve-measure phrase outlining the clearest possible tonic to dominant in G major, undercut however by the lack of a clear phrase structure; a half-measure’s silence, and then the orchestra enters inconsequentially on the mediant major.The change in tonality combines with that in timbre to give the impression that the sound is coming from far away. Even the invariant element, the melodic B, is relocated, now wedged up by its own leading note, A
, where before it had initiated the descent to A with which the ¤rst phrase ended (a descent which any experienced listener would expect to be completed, in due course,through a further descent to G).And now begins the unwinding of the force held within the B major, which acts rather like the twisted rubber band that powers an old-fashioned model airplane: the harmonies move in a succession of ®attening ¤fths (B6 –E–A6 –D–G6 ) supporting a chromatic descent in the melody, with the ¤rst-inversion tonic—the point where the rubber band becomes untwisted— providing the stepping stone for the big root-position subdominant that initiates the tonally and metrically unambiguous cadence. You have a sense that the real beginning of the piece occurs when the orchestra re-enters—in the right key—with everything prior to that a kind of dream. In my account of these measures, which I relate as a kind of story allowing myself one or two idiosyncratic metaphors, I do not believe I have said anything original : there seems to be little scope for disagreement or misunderstanding. So it comes as a surprise to discover how problematic Heinrich Schenker (1954: 253–54) found this passage when writing about it in his Harmonielehre (originally published in 1906): “How many doubts does he [Beethoven] conjure up with this B major! Will it develop into a real B major . . . ? The major triad on E . . . is it a IV step in B major? Obviously not, as it is followed by a major triad on A, which has no place in the diatonic system of B major.” And Schenker continues in this manner for an entire page: at each stage in the unwinding process, he suggests, we think we have reached the tonic, only to abandon the supposition as the ®atward motion continues to unwind. “Our feeling gets confused,” he says, “because we feel tempted, step by step, to impute to each one of them the rank of a tonic. Until we understand , at the end, that the B major was nothing but a III step in G major . . . so that we kept moving throughout within the same key.” What are we to make of this? Is Schenker giving us a rare glimpse into the vivid tonal imagination of listeners a century ago, whose ears had not been stretched out of shape by atonality and serialism, and whose tonal disorientation in musical situations like this must have been matched at the regaining of the tonic by cathartic relief of an intensity that we, in the twenty-¤rst century, can at best imagine? Or is Schenker constructing a kind of perceptual straw man, an exaggeratedly disorientated and wrongheaded way of hearing the music, with the purpose of lending credibility to the solution when it emerges: that we were in G major the whole time, that “the B major was nothing but a III step in G major?” The telling phrase, of course, is “nothing but,”which has the rhetorical force of dismissing everything that has come before. Indeed, this is underlined by a characteristic footnote added by Oswald Jonas, editor of the version of Harmonielehre from which the English translation is taken, at the end of Schenker’s discussion of the passage: “In a later phase of his development, Schenker would have placed the main emphasis on the motion (Zug) which creates the unity of this whole” (Schenker 1954: 254 n. 2). It is all too easy to imagine what Schenker might have said had he chosen to graph this passage in Der freie Satz. Actually the graph would have said it all: the opening 3, falling at a subsidiary level to 2 in measure 5, is prolonged through the B major section, being picked up in the second half of measure 11 (note the...