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Notes 58.3 (2002) 556-560



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Book Review

Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts

Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences andRitualizedPerformancein Modernist Musical Theater


Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts. By Daniel Albright. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. [xiv, 395 p. ISBN 0-226-01235-0. $70.]

Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences andRitualizedPerformancein Modernist Musical Theater. By W. Anthony Sheppard. (California Studies in 20th-Century Music.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. [xv, 350 p. ISBN 0-520-22302-0. $45.]

As musicologists continue to revise their standard views of twentieth-century music and modernism, they shift their focus increasingly away from the work of music as the subject of formal analysis towards issues of performance, cultural context, politics, and collaboration between the arts. Daniel Albright's Untwisting the Serpent and W. Anthony Sheppard's Revealing Masks mark significant turning points in this current period of historical revisionism, and thus both deserve much attention and critical consideration.

In Untwisting the Serpent, Albright aims to tell "stories" that will reveal a theory of artistic collaboration (p. xiii). Whereas traditional accounts of collaboration have been based on the notion of "horizontality," or of the arts coexisting independently of each other like the single lines of a non-tonal composition, Albright seems more interested in "verticality," or in an image of the arts as combining like the single voices in a tonal "chord," sacrificing their autonomy in order to create a unity or "intimate integrity" (p. 5). Horizontality results when composers adopt an Apollonian model of music as aesthetically autonomous and closed, and thus don't worry too much about its combination with other arts. Verticality, however, reflects a Marsyan model of music as mimetic and psychologically expressive, and thus in danger of losing itself in contact with other arts. Oskar Kokoschka's and Paul Hindemith's Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen provides Albright's perfect Marsyan example: music itself is "the flaunting of a shriek" (p. 20) and thus connected with Kokoschka's text as "one long scream" (p. 24), and with the semitone chords that open Hindemith's opera as "a quantum of a scream" (p. 25). When brought together with Kokoschka's drawing, the overall effect is "an ultra-overstress of eye, ear, and mind all pointing toward a single locus of pain" (p. 27). The scream as a primal, unifying means of expression establishes the foundation for Albright's discussion of varying degrees of "consonant" Marsyan collaborations in part one of his [End Page 556] book. In its second half, he concentrates on more easily defined, "dissonant," Apollonian combinations (p. 28).

Albright sets up his exploration rather brilliantly around metaphorical terms of correspondence between the arts, which he calls "figures of consonance" (p. 6). He begins with a Neoplatonic definition of an Egyptian "hieroglyph" as a transcendental metaphor (p. 63) that presents forms or ideas directly through pictorial images (p. 40). In music it defines a statement of almost pictorial referential clarity such as Sarastro's couplet at the end of act one of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte ("Sobald dich führt der Freundschaft Hand"), which acts like a "perlocution, or verbal formulae that is itself an action" (p. 45). In the music of Franz Liszt, the "hieroglyph" becomes rhythmically linked to specific words, creating a second figure of correspondence, or what Albright calls the "epigram" (p. 46), a "self-contained, fairly rigid unit, associated with (and evocative of) a specific verbal sentence, and typically an expansion of a cadence" (p. 50). In his second chapter, he expands upon the notion of the hieroglyph by introducing the Chinese ideogram, or "picture of an abstract or complex idea, generated by juxtaposing pieces of pictures of various concrete objects" (p. 63). Igor Stravinsky's works function as ideograms, especially because they are not built through "sequential logic, but through juxtaposition, a kind of nebeneinander conducted not in space but in time" (p. 65). In his third chapter he again expands upon this...

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