Performing transformations

Author / Creator

Bungert, James, dissertant

Available as

Online

Physical

Summary

The dissertation's point of departure is David Lewin's well-known transformational attitude. He writes in "Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations" (1987) that rather than regarding music...

The dissertation's point of departure is David Lewin's well-known transformational attitude. He writes in "Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations" (1987) that rather than regarding musical intervals as measurements of extension between pitches "observed passively 'out there' in a Cartesian res extensa," the transformational attitude "regards the situation actively, like a singer, player, or composer," and in so doing, gets us "inside the music." The dissertation attempts to bring us inside the music in a transformational analysis of Frédéric Chopin's Berceuse in D♭ Major, Op. 57 (1844) that focuses in particular on the pianist's physical actions. Chapter 1, "The Chopin Berceuse and the Spaces of Performance," examines the Berceuse's accompanimental ostinato. It identifies two coincident musical cycles -- the registral cycle and the harmonic cycle -- each of which are understood in terms of a transformational space adapted to the intricacies of its performance. Although transformational technology can model musical performance to some extent, there is a lurking sense that performance actions necessarily dissolve the distinction (implicit in transformational thinking) between the objects of analysis and their relationships. Chapter 2, "Performing Tension," outlines Heinrich Schenker's brief analysis of the Berceuse "theme," the first four-measure melodic phrase. On Schenker's account, the theme teems with what he calls "conceptual tension," but in certain ways, his interpretation violates his own understanding of conceptual tension, suggesting that the tension he has in mind stems from some source he was not able to articulate. In response, the chapter develops a transformational conception of tension via finger choice -- the fingering chosen to execute a particular passage -- with which we can model Schenker's Berceuse hearing. Chapter 3, "The Eight-Measure Variation and Performative Reversal," turns to the final sixteen measures of the Berceuse, where a shift to the subdominant involves two semitone figures that are inversionally symmetrical about A♭ in pitch space, but also about the topography of the piano keyboard (around the A♭ piano key), and about the human body (via its rough right-left symmetry). This shift represents a moment of breakthrough that retrospectively reinterprets earlier harmonic events and that dissolves the demonstrable distinction between finger space and pitch space.

Show More