Le 1er juillet 2017
de 10h00 à 10h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 5
Séance - Reconsidering Later Romanticism
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Gabriel Venegas
Bruckner’s treatment of form and the textual idiosyncrasies of his symphonies loom large in his music’s reception history. Because the idea of a « Bruckner symphony » is hard to match with traditional notions of authenticity and authorship, Bruckner scholarship has operated under text-critical discourses that construct his oeuvre as defective and problematic. Similarly, in addressing traditional and innovative formal aspects of Bruckner’s music, critics have tended to overemphasize one side or the other; some judging his symphonies as formless, others considering them excessively predictable and overly reliant on classical models. It seems then that a more constructive appraisal of Bruckner’s music requires an epistemological change of gears. Towards that aim, this paper presents an analysis-based method that embraces the particularities of Bruckner’s music as their foremost potential. The scope of the study is restricted to Bruckner’s slow movements. Building upon James Hepokoski’s dialogic approach, I propose conceiving formal-expressive meaning in Bruckner’s symphonic Adagios as growing out of a two-dimensional dialogue. First, there is the outward dialogue (the Hepokoskian dialogic dimension), in which the individual exemplar dialogues with its implied genre. Second, I suggest considering an inward dialogue among the various versions of a single movement, and the interplay between inward and outward dialogues. The proposed analytical method has the advantage of both accounting for Bruckner’s formal idiosyncrasies and turning the “Bruckner Problem” into a “Bruckner Potential.” It provides an analytical/theoretical framework that clears the way for a more nuanced and sympathetic understanding of Bruckner’s music.
