Varieties of Musical Irony: From Mozart to Mahler by Michael Cherlin (review)

In his essay "The Four Master Tropes," Kenneth Burke discusses the significance of metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, and irony (A Grammar of Motives [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969], 503–17). While these four tropes are important for the way we conceptualize the world around us, Michael Cherlin argues that irony is unique among them: "Irony has an existential quality not shared with the other tropes. We can speak of 'life's ironies' in ways that we cannot speak of life's metaphors, synecdoches, or metonyms" (p. xiv). This conceptualization of irony is the springboard for Cherlin's book, which examines the roles that irony can play in how we think about music.

Irony is a complex concept, but Cherlin begins with a rather straightforward definition—"to know one thing and its opposite, simultaneously" (p. xii)—and throughout the book develops nuanced approaches for how we can consider irony as an important aspect of how we hear and think about music. While there are a number of other authors who study various aspects of musical irony or perhaps use musical irony as one analytical category among several others as part of a larger framework, Cherlin's book stands out in that its primary focus is developing multiple approaches for understanding musical irony.

One important note regarding Cherlin's analytical approach in this book—which is perhaps contrary to what one might think after reading the book's title—is that his "goal in studying musical irony is not so much to bracket and categorize, but rather to use its limitations toward opening a way toward a larger restitution of meaning" (p. 15). In other words, even though Cherlin does develop various categories (or varieties) of musical irony, he focuses more on how these varieties can serve as a framework for analysis than applying strict definitions or applications of the categories themselves. This results in conceptual overlap between some of the varieties Cherlin discusses in this book, but if the reader goes into his analyses without expecting a precise list of clearly differentiated and defined categories, there is still much to be gained from his analytical prose.

The book contains a preface and five chapters, framed with a brief praeludium and postludium. The first chapter serves as a sort of literature review, presenting a summary of how other authors define and address irony in primarily nonmusical contexts. Discussions of Burke, Hayden V. White, Wayne C. Booth, Søren Kierkegaard, Harold Bloom, Georg Wilhelm Fried-rich Hegel, and Friedrich von Schlegel, along with a few references to music scholars such as Carolyn Abbate (Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991]), lay the book's conceptual framework. These examinations provide hints as to how Cherlin will approach his analyses in subsequent chapters.

The second chapter is the book's longest, comprising 83 of its 266 pages. Much of this chapter's length stems from Cherlin's discussion of twelve varieties of musical irony, each of which he presents with several brief music examples. While some of the varieties discussed in this chapter seem to overlap with others, it is important to keep in mind Cherlin's statement at the end of chapter 1 that his goal is not to "bracket and categorize." The varieties of musical irony discussed here should thus be considered as an examination of how they can affect our musical understanding rather than as twelve rigid categories that clearly delineate distinct aspects of the concept to be applied.

While the book's title suggests the focus will be on common-practice tonality, chapter 2 provides a wider range of musical styles. There are certainly a few examples from classical and romantic composers in this chapter, but there are also a number of examples from twentieth-century composers—Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Maurice...