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1 “The Wondrous Transformation of Thought into Sound”: Some Preliminary Reflections on Musical Meaning in Brahms Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith From where he sat, Clive tried to prevent his attention from being drawn into technical detail. For now, it was the music, the wondrous transformation of thought into sound. . . . Sometimes Clive worked so hard on a piece that he could lose sight of his ultimate purpose—to create this pleasure at once so sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating air this nonlanguage whose meanings were forever just beyond reach, suspended tantalizingly at a point where emotion and intellect fused. Ian McEwan, Amsterdam Although the omniscient narrator of Ian McEwan’s novel Amsterdam attributes these thoughts to a fictional late twentieth-century British composer, Clive Linley, contemplating his own composition, Linley’s reflections capture something of the universal mystery of music. The dualities the narrator develops between technical detail and wondrous transformation, between thought and sound, between hard work and sensual pleasure also resonate strongly with the unique musical persona of Johannes Brahms, a composer whose works have long been admired for their highly wrought craftsmanship as well as for their expressive immediacy. So, too, do the narrator’s words capture something of the challenge faced by the music scholar dedicated to the close study of Brahms’s compositions. How does one remain attuned to Brahms’s abundant compositional craft—the fruits of the composer’s hard labor and a self-conscious emblem of his works’ individuality— without losing sight of the music’s sensual beauty? Moreover, how do we engage a musical language that, while not strictly referential, nevertheless possesses deep meaning? Despite the acuity of McEwan’s narrative voice (not to mention the beauty of his prose), the thoughts this voice attributes to the composer Linley remain somewhat marred by an abundance of potentially false dichotomies. Rather than accept the assumption that emotion and intellect stand at odds in Brahms—that we, like Clive Linley, need to avoid being drawn into technical details in order to appreciate the wondrous transformation of thought 4 Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith into sound, to appreciate musical meaning, in other words—the authors in this volume see these characteristics as inextricably linked. Our view and a premise underlying each essay is not that Brahms’s music is meaningful in spite of its organizational intricacy but rather that meaning and technical complexity form an intimate bond. These two conceptions of Brahms’s music—as a manifestation of powerful intellect and of passionate expressivity—interact dialectically, with meaning poised, as McEwan/Linley would have it, at the intersection of emotion and reason. Our volume brings together eight perspectives on how meaning may be interpreted in Brahms’s compositions, spanning a variety of genres, including works for solo piano, chamber music, and a concerto movement of symphonic proportions, as well as texted works for either solo voice (lieder) or chorus and orchestra . During his lifetime and even throughout much of the twentieth century, Brahms was viewed as a composer of absolute music, that is, music of an abstract or purely formalist character.1 In more recent decades, historians have uncovered a wealth of documentation demonstrating that neither he nor the members of his circle heard his compositions in this way. Many theorists nevertheless continue to approach his music with something akin to scientific objectivity, apparently, like Linley, finding themselves unable to avoid being drawn into technical detail. Expressive Intersections in Brahms argues that a more thorough understanding of Brahms’s music emerges when issues of meaning are considered in conjunction with those of structure—indeed, that these aspects of the aesthetic experience are inseparable. Issues of structure, and the complex ways in which Brahms intertwines all the various musical elements, have been at the heart of the theoretical approaches that have proliferated following Allen Forte’s 1983 call for more rigorous analysis of Brahms’s music, in his study of the String Quartet in C Minor, op. 51, no. 1.2 Even now, nearly thirty years later, we find both a steady stream of systematic analyses and a variety of theoretical approaches designed specifically to address the structure of Brahms’s music.3 To a great extent, many of the publications first responding to Forte’s challenge focused on technical explanations of motivic, formal, and tonal organization; their positivistic rationality reflected academic culture in many disciplines during, and considerably before, that part of the twentieth century.4 From an historical perspective, the...

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