Le 28 juin 2017
de 14h00 à 14h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 5
Séance - The Second Viennese School (I): Berg, Organicism, and the Teleology of Form
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Ramiro Limongi
An essential part of Western thought, teleology defined the structure of temporal poietic enterprises since Aristotle described classical tragedy. Present all along centuries of musical developments, it finally became indigenous to tonal music. Additionally, an equivalence between organization and organicism was later crystallized, particularly by German composers.
The late nineteenth century posed the crisis of its consequent formal conception, concurrently with the exploration of tonality limits and a growing interest on the thought and music of Eastern cultures. However, due to habits of perception and the nature of brain processes themselves, listeners compare, and relate sequential musical events, deducing implications and expectations. Sense-making greatly depends on building patterns and establishing hierarchies, for which teleology proved effective and therefore hard to disappear.
Even when emancipated dissonance, atomized materials, and condensed information were crashing the very frame of musical intelligibility, around 1910, Anton Webern still kept the organic conception of form, proposing a distinguishable directionality and a sense of development linking the treatment of his ideas. Contemporaneously, Debussy, while maintaining more traditional vocabulary elements and, occasionally, some conventional relationships, tended to abandon narrative designs. Although his works were often considered shapeless or nebulous because of the absence of dramatic outbursts, an apparent static quality and his interest in other parameters as axial organizers, he carefully handled elements, evaluating their interaction, thus generating markers that allowed a clear perception of larger formal structures.
A comparative analysis of Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige and Webern’s Op. 7, No. 3 exemplifies these contrasting approaches.
