Le 1er juillet 2017
de 14h00 à 14h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 5
Séance - Epistemology and Musical Hermeneutics
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Matteo Magarotto
Music theory has gained quasi-scientific prestige by pursuing rigorous systematic organization and internal coherence. For example, complex systems such as Schenkerian theory and the Sonata Theory of Hepokoski and Darcy (2006) rely on single foundational principles (“Ursatz” and “rotation” respectively) and build large edifices whose components are strictly interconnected to those principles and to one another in a series of precise relationships, excluding unrelated elements. Such purity is a necessary condition for theory to be theory. By contrast, the best analyses result from the impure mixture of different theories in an attempt to unpack music’s density. For example, to only employ Sonata Theory in analyses of 18th-century sonata movements means excluding consideration of the pervasive galant schemata unearthed by Gjerdingen (2007) and of the stylistic allusions engendered by musical topics (Mirka 2014). Sonata Theory needs to exclude schemata and topics, but a composed sonata does not, nor should its study. This paper highlights the unavoidable tension between music theory and analysis. While the former is intrinsically bound to construct self-contained worlds, the latter should break the confines of these worlds, cross-contaminate them, and respond sensitively to whichever parameters of a composition appear to be salient at any given turn by applying the theoretical concepts most suitable at those junctures. Using select analyses of Western chamber music (with a case study on Mozart’s K. 576/i), I show how purist analytical results are variously deepened, complicated, or questioned when impurities from sister and divergent theories are introduced.
