Klang und Linie von Pierrot Lunaire zu Ionisation : Studien zur funktionalen Wechselwirkung von Spezialensemble, Formfindung und Klangfarbenpolyphonie (review)

The premiss of this book is that the unusual instrumental resources found in so many ensemble compositions between roughly 1910 and 1930 may have had a structural function, as expression of a new form of polyphony, over and above the simple, modernist interest in the new and the unusual. Thirteen works by a total of nine composers, and a general chapter on Varèse, provide a broader analytic footing than is generally given in studies of this kind, reiterating also that what unites these pieces is, in fact, that each is one of a kind. As the author points out, there are many reasons why a particular instrumentation may be called for-not all of them musical-though it is clear that what interests him most is the question of technique, since, apart from compositional sketches, he gives little historical information relative to the origins of the works. Similarly, the actual role of instrumentation varies as well: sometimes it plays a secondary but consolidating role to pitch organization, and sometimes it blurs formal lines between what Tomi Mäkelä himself still terms structure and surface.

Mäkelä differentiates two basic strategies for dealing with instrumental voices-individuation and integration (see particularly p. 80). It is the former that is so striking in ensemble music of the period. In this context, he also explores what we could term the difference between the parts as characters and the character of the parts: in the former case-in which instrumental lines are, as it were, 'personified'-he draws historical lines back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theorists including Forkel and Koch who frequently talked of musical voices as figures in a drama, participants in a conversation. Indeed, that we talk of a musical argument and of musical voices at all, that the terms in which we describe musical form are derived from the terms of rhetoric, is the outer, often unreflected heritage of a historical tradition that saw instrumental music gradually come to dominate vocal music aesthetically, thereby glazing over much of its debt to it. In other words, it has a more than metaphorical significance for the discussion of musical form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, despite what the theory of absolute music might imply to the contrary, and is not really as surprising as Mäkelä makes out. The main thrust of the book, however, is how composers trained in this tradition, but working without the security of many of the implied tonal and thematic functions, may have turned to instrumentation to help compensate.

The problem is not that there is something wrong with Mäkelä's basic thesis-it is an interesting one. The problem is that he doesn't go far enough in attempting to prove it-or to disprove it, which amounts to the same thing. His decision to link this to the concept of polyphony-including in the context of the old debate regarding the primacy of harmony or counterpoint, homophony or polyphony, which he sketches with rather too much concentration on German theorists-is also not without its problems, since his understanding of that term is rather too classical to be helpful. Although the title of the book emphasizes Schoenberg and Varèse, it is Webern and Hindemith, and to a slightly lesser extent Stravinsky and Berg, who dominate the analyses. That Webern should feature so strongly is hardly surprising: Webern was a card-carrying polyphonist whose instrumentation can be seen to be very definitely at the service of clarifying, laying bare even, the structure of his compositions (and those of others-think of his orchestration of Bach). Even the early miniatures can be read in terms of classically derived gestures, shrunk expositions, and whisper-thin recapitulations. Yet, though unusual ensemble combinations are a feature of...