"A Heap of Broken Images"? Reviving Austro-German debates over musical meaning, 1900-1936

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‘A Heap of Broken Images’? RevivingAustro-German Debates over MusicalMeaning, 1900–36Matthew Pritchard

To cite this article: Matthew Pritchard (2013): ‘A Heap of Broken Images’? Reviving Austro-GermanDebates over Musical Meaning, 1900–36, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 138:1, 129-174

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‘A Heap of Broken Images’?Reviving Austro-German Debatesover Musical Meaning, 1900�36

MATTHEW PRITCHARD

The spectre of hermeneutics

LISTEN, first, to the words of a young Austrian critic from 1894. As a composer for

the piano himself, he responds enthusiastically to a new set of piano pieces by a

figure he reveres, Johannes Brahms:

The Capriccio no. 1 [of the Phantasien, op. 116] is a stormy synthesis of three elements[. . .]. It is precisely in the development section that the most interesting and most peculiarjuncture of the piece is reached, just at the point where, from the third of the above-mentioned elements, which was originally only billows and foam, a figure suddenly arises,with pithily expressive traits, musing, surging up in pain, but then quickly sinking awayagain before it has told us enough of its story. One would positively like to grab the formby its coat-tails in order to learn something more from it, this scarcely revealed and yet soattractive apparition! No. 2, Intermezzo. A dusky piece, full of the tenderly melancholicpoetry of nature. As if in folk style [. . .]. No. 5. One of the most modest, but also thedaintiest, most perfumed little flowers in Brahms’s flower-garden. Notice here the prettyand very original technique with which the blissful scent of the melody is enveloped sowarmly in gently soughing harmonies! No. 6. A profound, solemn, yet absolutely delicaterhapsody, which is interrupted by a more fervent, more excited piece of lyricism. Thecontour of the melody is full of wisdom.1

E-mail: [email protected] ‘Das Capriccio No. 1 ist eine sturmische Verbindung dreier Elemente [. . .]. Gerade im Durchfuh-

rungstheil ereignet sich der interessanteste, seltsamste Zustand des Stuckes, und zwar dort, wo aus demdritten der fruher erwahnten Elemente, das ursprunglich nur Woge und Gischt gewesen, plotzlich eineFigur auftaucht, mit bundig ausdrucksvollen Zugen, sinnend, im Schmerz aufwallend, die aber rasch

versinkt, ehe sie noch genug uns erzahlt hat. Man mochte formlich die Gestalt an einem Zipfelfesthalten, um irgend Naheres von ihr zu erfahren, der kaum enthullten und doch so anziehendenErscheinung! No. 2, Intermezzo. Ein dammeriges Stuck voll zart melancholischer Naturpoesie. Wie im

Volkston [. . .] No. 5. Eines der bescheidensten, aber zierlichsten, duftendsten Blumlein in Brahms’Blumengarten. Mochte man sich die hubsche, sehr originelle Technik hier merken, die den wonnigenBlumenduft der Melodie so warm in zartrauschenden Harmonien einhullt! No. 6. Eine tiefsinnige,

feierliche, aber durchaus zarte Schwarmerei, die von einer innigeren, erregteren Lyrik unterbrochenwird. Die melodische Zeichnung ist voll Weisheit.’ Heinrich Schenker, review of Johannes Brahms,

# 2013 The Royal Musical Association

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2013

Vol. 138, No. 1, 129�174, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2013.771976

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2013.771976

The identity of the writer will come as a surprise to many readers. It is HeinrichSchenker, better known as a pioneer analyst who insisted on the necessity of firmtechnical foundations for the discussion of art. Such foundations are not exactly onopen display in this review. (One is not likely to succeed in finding in the score anynew motive in the development section of Brahms’s Capriccio that would correspondto Schenker’s description of the ‘musing’ figure: all the material is closely derived fromthe ‘three elements’ he mentions at the start.) Yet, as a critic for the weekly Viennesemusical press, Schenker actively espoused the virtues of such ‘poetic’ music criticism.Kevin Karnes claims that Schenker’s essays are ‘exemplary models of late-centurymusic criticism as defined by Leon Botstein [. . .] written to serve as a ‘‘guidingmedium’’, as ‘‘prose translations of the musical experience’’’,2 and compares them toHans von Wolzogen’s Wagnerian opera guides. In light of Schenker’s later distancefrom Wagner and closeness to Hanslick’s aesthetics, it is interesting that Karnes findsquasi-Wagnerian (and thoroughly un-Hanslickian) assumptions in Schenker’sdetailed essays on Brahms’s songs op. 107 and choral pieces op. 104 � such asbringing out ‘poetic ideas’ over text-setting, taking aesthetic and critical positionsclearly at odds with those of Hanslick in his review of the same songs two years earlier(1889), using dramatic concepts to justify unusual harmonic progressions, anddiscussing the psychological effect of motivic recurrences in the manner of‘leitmotivs’.3 Schenker would reject Hanslick’s aesthetics in 1895 as an ‘ice-flow ofnegation’ that ‘overlooked important sources and spheres of association which linkmusic to the world of feeling and ideas’.4 His definitions of critical analysis were,Karnes argues, a challenge to the contemporary academic positivism of Guido Adler,Hanslick’s successor at the University of Vienna. Instead of objectivism, ‘The critic,Schenker held, must embrace subjective impression, indulge the hermeneutic impulse,and even probe the depths of the creative mind in his attempts to elucidate theeffectiveness and worth of the artworks he considers.’5

Phantasien fur Pianoforte, op. 116, in Musikalisches Wochenblatt, 25 (1894), 37�8, repr. in HeinrichSchenker als Essayist und Kritiker: Gesammelte Aufsatze, Rezensionen und kleinere Berichte aus den Jahren1891�1901, ed. Hellmut Federhofer (Hildesheim, 1990), 64�5. Translations throughout are by theauthor unless indicated otherwise. All italics for emphasis in quoted material are original.

2 Kevin Karnes, Music, Criticism and the Challenge of History (Oxford, 2008), 100.3 Ibid., 86, 87�90, 96, 98�9.4 ‘Eisscholle der Negation’; ‘ubersah wichtige Quellen und Kreise von Ideenassociationen, die die

Musik an die Vorstellungs- und Gefuhlswelt knupfen’. In fact Schenker’s direct accusation was aimedat Helmholtz, who (in his Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage fur eineTheorie der Musik (Braunschweig, 1863)) was actually correcting Hanslick’s position; but the a fortioriimplication was unquestionably intended: the untitled piece from Die Zeit (4 (1895), 174) waswritten on the occasion of Hanslick’s seventieth birthday (Heinrich Schenker als Essayist und Kritiker,ed. Federhofer, no. 56, pp. 280�1). The conscious � if respectful � distance Schenker keeps fromHanslick here is of a piece with his other aesthetic views at the time, and thus to interpret the essay asmerely a ‘backhanded’ tribute, as Nicholas Cook does (The Schenker Project: Culture, Race and MusicTheory in Fin-de-siecle Vienna (Oxford, 2007), 52, note 39), seems stretched.

5 Karnes, Music, Criticism and the Challenge of History, 107�8.

130 MATTHEW PRITCHARD

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More evident than any influence from Wolzogen, or even Wagner, is the younger

Schenker’s adulation of an interpreter towards whom he later felt the strongest

antipathy: Hans von Bulow, praised by Schenker in 1894 as ‘an epochal figure [. . .]who possessed the gift of catching and communicating [. . .] the soul of music itself

in the clearest, most responsive words’. Some people, Schenker writes (little

suspecting he would one day be one of them), ‘will call such empathizing

[‘‘Nachfuhlen’’] with a work of art mere speculation, and phrasemaking which

interferes with music. And yet it is a true poetic labour.’6 Such a ‘poetic labour’ was

for Schenker � an active pianist in the 1890s � not merely a critical task, but an

integral part of preparing any ‘poetic work in tones’ (‘Tondichtung’) for

performance. In a review of Beethoven’s op. 90 performed by Julius Rontgen,

Schenker complains:

Beethoven loved to call himself a poet, not merely a composer [. . .]. And yet how hecomposed ‘poetically’, how he strung together themes and motives according to a poetic-musical idea, almost always programmatically, how his musical indications were never justpure musical signs, but at the same time signs of a poetry of thought which for him waseven accessible in definite words � this is all ignored [. . .]. With Beethoven, and similarlywith Schumann and other true musical poets, a musical fact has beside its purely musicalfunction also a higher poetical one, which can of course in the end be felt differently bydifferent people, but must never be totally overlooked. Rontgen several times overlookedsuch poetic functions of individual musical facts [. . .] for this reason he is inferior to an[Eugen] d’Albert.7

Such quotations call for comment. Two facts make it difficult for present-day

musicologists to interpret Schenker’s writings of this period: first, that they have not

yet all been translated, and secondly, that Schenker’s commentators are, naturally,

6 ‘Ein epochaler Mann [. . .] der in hellen, bewubtesten Worten [. . .] die Seele der Musik selbst

aufzufangen und mitzutheilen die Gabe besab’; ‘[Leute] nennen [. . .] ein solches Nachfuhlen einesKunstwerkes ein Grubeln nur und ein die Musik nur belastigendes Wortemachen. Indessen ist Daseine wahrhaft poetische Muhe.’ Heinrich Schenker, ‘Konzertdirigenten’, Die Zukunft, 7 (1894), 88�92, repr. in Heinrich Schenker als Essayist und Kritiker, ed. Federhofer, 75�82 (pp. 77�8).

7 ‘Beethoven liebte es, sich einen Dichter zu nennen, nicht blob einen Komponisten [. . .]. Wie er aber‘‘gedichtet’’, wie er Themen an Themen, Motiv an Motiv nach einer poetisch-musikalischen Idee, fastimmer programmatisch reiht, wie seine musikalischen Zeichen nicht blob Zeichen reiner Musik,

sondern zugleich Zeichen einer Gedankenpoesie sind, die fur ihn sogar in bestimmten Wortengreifbar war, das alles wird ubersehen [. . .]. So hat nun, wie gesagt, bei Beethoven und ahnlich beiSchumann und anderen wirklichen Musikdichtern eine musikalische Tatsache auber ihrer rein

musikalischen Funktion auch noch eine hohere poetische, die zwar von mehreren schlieblichverschieden gefuhlt werden kann, nie aber uberhaupt ubersehen werden darf. Rontgen ubersahvielfach solche poetische Funktionen einzelner musikalischer Tatsachen [. . .] darum steht er z.B.

einem d’Albert nach.’ Schenker, untitled review for Die Zeit, 6 (1896), 158�9, repr. in HeinrichSchenker als Essayist und Kritiker, ed. Federhofer, 327�8.

‘A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES’? 131

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more familiar with his later work than with that of his most important

contemporaries of the end of the century (Hanslick excepted).8 The temptation

has thus been to interpret isolated aesthetic statements from the 1890s as ‘forecasts’

of Schenker’s later, more fully developed theories.9 A full realization of how radically

Schenker could have changed his mind about musical aesthetics and criticism

perhaps still awaits us. Schenker at the fin de siecle either openly supported or came

close to reproducing the insights of almost all the major figures he later attacked. He

already kept his distance from Richard Strauss and programme music, to be sure. But

it was precisely in his defence of ‘poetic’ interpretations of pure instrumental music

that he came close to the ‘hermeneutics’ of Hermann Kretzschmar, later the butt of

Schenker’s most merciless jibes.Today, Kretzschmar is associated with decadent and subjective fin de siecle

writing on music at its most extreme. Carl Dahlhaus blamed him for reducing the

notion of musical hermeneutics ‘to the label for a particular and one-sided

method’, one which since 1920 had � with justice, Dahlhaus implied � been

subjected to ‘an almost unanimous rejection’ as a ‘piece of the ‘‘bad nineteenth

century’’’.10 Leon Botstein includes Kretzschmar in his portrait of a ‘debased’ late

nineteenth-century musical culture that approached music in literary terms, before

figures such as Ernst Kurth and Schenker brought about ‘the reconstitution of

music theory and analysis, and therefore of genuine musical apperception and

hearing, in the early years of the twentieth century’.11 Yet Botstein’s dismissal feeds

off � even if it does not directly participate in � a persistent misunderstanding of

Kretzschmar as a ‘programmatic’ interpreter of concert music. Achim Heidenreich,

for instance, calls his procedure a ‘fanciful conversion of music into novelistic

language’ and states that Kretzschmar ‘meant by musical expression the expression

8 Schenker’s major theoretical essay of this period, ‘Der Geist der musikalischen Technik’ (1895), canbe found translated as an appendix to Cook’s The Schenker Project (‘The Spirit of Musical

Technique’, trans. William Pastille, 319�32). See also ‘Three Essays from Neue Revue (1894�97)’,trans. Jonathan Dunsby and Horst B. Loeschmann, Music Analysis, 7 (1988), 133�41, and ‘JohannesBrahms’ (1897), trans. William Pastille, American Brahms Society Newsletter, 9 (1991), 1�3.

9 Such an attitude is encouraged by Federhofer in his Foreword to Heinrich Schenker als Essayist undKritiker, when he writes that ‘what [Schenker] [. . .] found in the music-aesthetic and music-theoretical writings of his time did not satisfy him in an artistic sense. That spurred him on to higherinsights into the spirit and technique of the work of art, for which the journalistic forum was no

longer suitable’ (‘Was er [. . .] im musikasthetischen und -theoretischen Schrifttum seiner Zeitvorfindet, genugt ihm aus kunstlerischer Sicht nicht. Es drangt ihn zu hoheren Einsichten in Geistund Technik des Kunstwerkes. Dazu eignete sich das journalistische Forum nicht mehr’; p. xxxi).

10 ‘Zum Etikett einer besonderen, einseitigen Methode’; ‘ein[e] nahezu einhelligen Ablehnung’; ‘einStuck ‘‘schlechtes neunzehntes Jahrhundert’’’. Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Vorwort’, Beitrage zur musikalischenHermeneutik, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Regensburg, 1975), 7�10 (p. 7).

11 Leon Botstein, ‘Listening through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience’, 19th-Century Music, 16 (1992�3), 129�45 (p. 144).


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of an extra-musical programme’.12 Heidenreich seems to have overlooked thefollowing passage from Kretzschmar’s famous articles in the Jahrbuch derMusikbibliothek Peters :

When for the sake of easier understanding [the exegete] draws a poetic image into theform of his elucidations as an aid now and then or even speaks poetically throughoutlonger sections, as Robert Schumann, for example, loved to do, or before him E. T. A.Hoffmann as a critic, that must be allowed him as long as he turns it to good effect andcontinues to be supported by the musical facts. But anyone who believes that musicalhermeneutics comes down to reading stories, novels and little dramas into instrumentalcompositions has not understood the purpose and the nature of the discipline.13

The distinction is between genuinely ‘programmatic’ criticism, of which somenineteenth-century examples (such as the interpretations of the Russian ‘realist’ criticAlexander Serov) certainly exist, and Romantic ‘poetic’ criticism.14 Kretzschmaraligned himself more with the latter. As Tibor Kneif observes, Kretzschmar is alive tothe metaphorical status of his own, and indeed all, musical descriptions:‘Kretzschmar does not maintain that a musical work refers to an extra-musicalsituation that could be specified exactly [. . .]. If interpretation does become concrete,then it serves solely as a metaphor, which could be replaced by others.’15 Thisawareness, and the consequent ability to choose images on the basis of their

12 ‘Ein[e] romanhaft[e] Versprachlichung von Musik’; ‘Kretzschmar [meinte] unter musikalischemAusdruck denjenigen eines aubermusikalischen Programms’. Achim Heidenreich, ‘‘‘Die Ungeheuer-lichkeit dieser Art von Hermeneutik . . .’’: Ein Disput zwischen Hugo Riemann und HermannKretzschmar’, Hugo Riemann (1849�1919): Musikwissenschaftler mit Universalanspruch, ed. Tatjana

Bohme-Mehner and Klaus Mehner (Cologne, 2001), 153�7 (pp. 155�6).13 ‘Wenn er der leichteren Verstandlichkeit halber in die Form seiner Erlauterungen hin und wieder ein

poetisches Bild zur Mithilfe heranzieht oder gar langere Strecken hindurch, wie das z. B. R.

Schumann, oder vor ihm E. T. A. Hoffmann als Kritiker liebten, dichterisch spricht, so mub ihm daszugestanden werden, solange er damit wirkt und auf dem Boden der musikalischen Tatsachen bleibt.Wer aber glaubt, dab musikalische Hermeneutik darauf hinauslauft: aus Instrumentalkompositionen

Geschichten, Romane und Dramolets herauszulesen, der hat Zweck und Wesen der Disziplin nichtverstanden.’ August Ferdinand Hermann Kretzschmar, ‘Anregungen zur Forderung musikalischerHermeneutik: Satzasthetik’, Gesammelte Aufsatze uber Musik und Anderes, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1910), ii,

280�93 (pp. 289�90); trans. in ‘Neue Anregungen zur Forderung musikalischer Hermeneutik:Satzasthetik (1905)’, Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader, ed. Edward A. Lippman, 3 vols.(Stuyvesant, NY, 1990), iii, 31�45 (p. 41; translation adapted).

14 See Werner Braun, ‘Kretzschmars Hermeneutik’, Beitrage zur musikalischen Hermeneutik, ed.

Dahlhaus, 33�9. As Braun points out, with regard to music and music criticism Kretzschmar ‘stillstands close to the Romantic view’ (‘steht der romantischen Auffassung nahe’; p. 34); he praisedMarx’s interpretations of Beethoven, and (like Marx and Schumann) regarded technical analysis as

powerless to explain the essence and true value of music (pp. 34�5).15 ‘Kretzschmar behauptet [. . .] nicht, dab das Musikwerk auf einen aubermusikalischen Sachverhalt

hinweist, der genau angegeben werden konne [. . .]. Wird die Deutung konkret, so dient sie lediglich

als Metapher, die durch andere ersetzt werden kann.’ Tibor Kneif, ‘Musikalische Hermeneutik,musikalische Semiotik’, Beitrage zur musikalischen Hermeneutik, ed. Dahlhaus, 63�71 (p. 65).


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communicative power rather than their ‘truth’, is precisely the strength of

Kretzschmar’s writing. (It characterizes Schenker’s early journalism, too.)None of this is to claim that Kretzschmar’s position was unassailable. The object

to which poetic images were attached in his method was musical emotion, which (he

believed) formed the concrete ‘content’ of music. He chose to present this

ontological interpretation under the guise of a revivified Baroque Affektenlehre, or

doctrine of musical ‘affect’, illustrated by an analysis of the C major Fugue from

Book 1 of Bach’s Wohltemperierte Klavier. It must have been Kretzschmar’s intention

thereby to show the historical range of his method; instead, however, he ultimately

reveals its limitations. In dialectical terms all too clearly derived from

A. B. Marx’s Beethoven criticism, it presents the course of the C major Fugue as

governed by a ‘struggle between sorrow and hope’ in which the latter finally

prevails.16 The very notion of a ‘struggle’ between opposed affects runs counter to

the principle of affective unity (‘Einheit des Affekts’) which operated in the Baroque,

both in theory and in Bachian practice. There was no question of Wagnerian

‘transitions’, nor any competition between Beethoven’s (alleged) ‘two principles’,

although in Kretzschmar’s case it is clear that these types of emotional process are

some of the things he values most in music.17 In this case, then, Kurth’s later

objection does hit home:

No one will be so meticulous as to reject hints about the emotional content of music or itsbrief description, as they are almost indispensable. But by making them into itsfoundation, hermeneutics forgets completely [. . .] that this is to scorn the existence ofdifferent intellectual tendencies in music, acting as if in the realm of musical art therereigned an eternal ‘age of sensibility’.18

Kretzschmar’s follower Arnold Schering, however, abandoned this metaphorical stance late in hiscareer for a more positive ‘search for keys’ (‘Schlusselsuchen’), most notoriously in his programmaticexplanations of Beethoven’s instrumental works as musical paraphrases of Shakespeare plays. Arnold

Schering, Beethoven in neuer Deutung (Leipzig, 1934), 7�15.16 ‘Der Kampf zwischen Sorge und Hoffnung’. Kretzschmar, ‘Anregungen zur Forderung musikalischer

Hermeneutik’, 286; trans. in ‘Neue Anregungen’, 37.17 See his correction (in ‘Anregungen zur Forderung musikalischer Hermeneutik’, 291, trans. in ‘Neue

Anregungen’, 42�3) of a certain Heinrich Bulthaupt concerning the ‘stagnation’ (‘Stillstand’) of Acts2�3 of Tristan und Isolde : Kretzschmar uses almost the same terms as Wagner himself to describe the‘transformation of the jubilation of love into longing for death’ (‘Umbildung des Liebesjubels in

Todessehnsucht’), and compares this directly to the Bach fugue which ‘struggles from darknessthrough to light’ (‘aus dem Dunklen zum Hellen durchkampft’).

18 ‘Niemand wird so angstlich sein, Hinweise auf musikalische Gefuhlsinhalte oder ihre kurze

Beschreibung an sich abzulehnen, sie sind fast unentbehrlich. Aber so wie es die Hermeneutik zurGrundlage erhebt, vergibt sie grundsatzlich [. . .] dab dies verschiedenen Geistesrichtungen in derMusik geradezu Hohn spricht, und gebardet sich, als herrsche in der Tonkunst ein ewiges

‘‘empfindsames Zeitalter’’.’ Ernst Kurth, Bruckner, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1925; repr. Hildesheim, 1971),i, 270n.


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Yet the historical naivety of Kretzschmar’s assumption that all music must begrasped emotionally is, I would argue, outweighed by his attentiveness to themetaphorical character of his analytical descriptions. Indeed, the lack of discursiveself-awareness demonstrated by other writers of Kurth’s school soon led them intostill more unhistorical generalizations of their own. In any case, the early twentieth-century rejection of hermeneutics was more visceral than these historicist scruplesmight suggest. To the proponents of the new analytical ‘energetics’, of which Kurthwas one, the aesthetics of the fin de siecle was an overgrown psychologistic wildernessof moods, poetry, interior narratives and mystic symbolism, which urgently neededto be cut back. At bottom, this condemnation appears to have been a revolt, verysimilar to that of contemporary neoclassicist ideology, against the perceived excessesof Romanticism; but it presented itself as a wholescale renewal of musical culturethrough the theoretical realization of objective, timeless, ‘purely musical’ values.19

Through an often violent assault on hermeneutic and poetic music criticism,Schenker and his contemporary August Halm in particular secured for their ownanalyses a reputation for greater objectivity that carried considerable weight in thepost-Romantic musical climate. And yet, looked at closely, the intellectual outcomeof the actual debates in which they became engaged was far more indecisive thanone might at first assume. First of all, early ‘energetic’ analysis was itself imaginativelydiverse, and often incoherent or eccentric. And secondly, when one looks moreclosely at the arguments of those who defended, or honestly acknowledged, thelegitimacy of traditional hermeneutics, one finds that they are still remarkablyrobust. Some have an epistemological sophistication that is nothing short ofastonishing.

Before I embark on a closer reading of some of the debates on musical interpretationfrom this period, in the interests of showing their relevance for us today, it is worthestablishing what, in twenty-first-century musicological terms, they might be read asbeing ‘about’. If they were to be ‘revived’, what position might they occupy in thecircle of contemporary discourse? It is difficult to make them relate to the mostwidely circulated contemporary body of theory on ‘musical meaning’ � semiotics �for the simple reason that they were conducted in a period and in a region of Europeunexposed to linguistic structuralism. Although it could be argued that theirprestructuralist insights overlap significantly with those of post-structuralism, thelatter draws its force from the tension with Saussurean concepts of difference, thesignifier and so forth that were not familiar to writers such as Halm or Kurth.20

19 On neoclassicism’s hopes for cultural renewal, see Richard Taruskin, ‘Back to Whom? Neoclassicism

as Ideology’, 19th-Century Music, 16 (1992�3), 286�302.20 Robert P. Morgan has argued that Schenker’s work relates to a Viennese branch of (non-linguistic)

structuralism. See his ‘Schenker and the Twentieth Century: A Modernist Perspective’, Music in theMirror: Reflections on the History of Music Theory and Literature for the Twenty-First Century, ed.Andreas Giger and Thomas J. Mathiesen (Lincoln, NA, 2002), 247�74.


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An interest in musical ‘symbols’ did develop in the later work of Arnold Schering,but I find little evidence that this was taken up widely.21 The categories used by thesewriters are much less theoretically rigorous and more all-embracing, often coveringlarge sections of music or broad categories of musical phenomena. In this theyresemble much more the growing contemporary literature on metaphor in music.

This literature is diverse in motivation and method, and it would perhaps be unwiseto discuss every scholar who has tried to theorize the role of metaphor in music as partof a single body of ‘metaphor theory’. Some writers such as Marion Guck and FredMaus are particularly interested in metaphor as an alternative to mainstream structuralanalysis, taking advantage of the larger space which the idea of metaphor provides forthe articulation of a richly subjective and gendered experience of music.22 Theirmotivation appears in some ways closer to that behind the early New Musicology,represented by writers such as Susan McClary and Rose Subotnik. A much larger groupof scholars is applying the insights of cognitive metaphor theory to music, and thisbegan with the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson on ‘conceptual metaphors’and ‘image schemata’ as encapsulations of bodily experience.23 Because Lakoff andJohnson regard embodiment as a pre-conceptual layer � that of ‘image schemata’ �underlying the formation of metaphors, cognitive metaphor theory has regarded thoseintuitions of space and motion which are fundamental for the experience of our bodiesas equally fundamental for the experience of music. Subconceptual � and thusinfracultural � dichotomies such as part/whole, up/down, centre/periphery and path/goal are thought to direct our most immediate responses to musical events.

This particular branch of metaphor theory appears to have reached a consensus onthe question of music ontology. Beneath its cultural superstructures, these theorists

21 Arnold Schering, Das Symbol in der Musik (Leipzig, 1941).22 Marion Guck, ‘Musical Images as Musical Thoughts: The Contribution of Metaphor to Analysis’, In

Theory Only, 5/5 (1981), 29�42, and ‘A Woman’s (Theoretical) Work’, Perspectives of New Music,32 (1994), 28�43; Fred Everett Maus, ‘Music as Drama’, Music Theory Spectrum, 10 (1988), 56�73.

23 The following is a select list of titles: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By(Chicago, IL, 1980); Janna Saslaw, ‘Forces, Containers, and Paths: The Role of Body-Derived ImageSchemas in the Conceptualization of Music’, Journal of Music Theory, 40 (1996), 217�43, and ‘LifeForces: Conceptual Structures in Schenker’s Free Composition and Schoenberg’s The Musical Idea’,

Theory and Practice, 22�3 (1997/8), 17�33; Steve Larson, ‘Musical Forces and Melodic Patterns’,Theory and Practice, 22�3 (1997/8), 55�67, and ‘Musical Forces, Melodic Expectation, and JazzMelody’, Music Perception, 19 (2002), 351�85; Lawrence M. Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music:Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (Oxford, 2002); Michael Spitzer, Metaphor and MusicalThought (Chicago, IL, 2004); Yonatan Malin, ‘Metric Analysis and the Metaphor of Energy: A Wayinto Selected Songs by Wolf and Schoenberg’, Music Theory Spectrum, 30 (2008), 61�87; GolanGur, ‘Body, Forces and Paths: Metaphor and Embodiment in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Con-

ceptualization of Tonal Space’, Music Theory Online, 14 (2008), Bhttp://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.08.14.1/mto.08.14.1.gur.html� (accessed 13 March 2013); Robin Attas, ‘Metaphors inMotion: Agents and Representation in Transformational Analysis’, Music Theory Online, 15

(2009), Bhttp://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.09.15.1/mto.09.15.1.attas.html� (accessed 13 March2013).


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http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.08.14.1/mto.08.14.1.gur.html

http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.08.14.1/mto.08.14.1.gur.html

http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.09.15.1/mto.09.15.1.attas.html

argue, music is experienced as bodies positioned in and moving through musicalspace and time. Viewed from a cognitive perspective, it might not seem that there isany problem with this; but that feeling of metaphorical consensus is also attributed,in more overtly questionable ways, to music history. In Metaphor and MusicalThought, Michael Spitzer outlines music history as a tripartite schema of systemicmetaphors, each corresponding to a traditional element of music and to a periodwithin the history of the canon: harmony as painting (Baroque), rhythm as language(Classical) and melody as life (Romantic). Transitions between these are thus shiftsof stylistic emphasis, rather than irreconcilable ontological disputes; together theyarticulate aspects of an embodied ‘metaphorical imagination [that . . .] is universal’and ‘reveal[s . . .] common humanity’.24 Lawrence Zbikowski promises to address‘competing models of music’ in his book Conceptualizing Music, but ends upaffirming two characteristic presuppositions of present-day theory: that ‘disagree-ments can be traced to competing models of musical structure’ (assuming that musicis always modelled as ‘structure’); and that a dynamic and ‘depth’-orientated modelof structure bears witness to a more superior ‘level of artistry’ or understanding thanthat represented by a static and superficially ‘atomistic’ model.25 These writersconfine to the margins any historical, political and aesthetic affiliations that thecognitive-analytical model might have. Yet the metaphor of music as bodies movingthrough space, besides echoing Hanslick’s ‘tonally moving forms’, was also agreedupon by a significant group of music theorists during the period I examine in thisarticle. What makes their contributions interesting is not primarily the issue oftemporal priority; rather, it is the vigorous philosophical contestations and culturallyspecific definitions of ‘movement’ as the basis of musical meaning which make thisperiod such a fertile source for comparisons with present-day debates. Music asmotion was not merely a subject for the pages of music-theory journals or thepsychologist’s laboratory. It was bound up with contemporary dance, composition,mysticism, educational reform, politics and, not least, the foundation of musicanalysis as a cultural institution in its own right.

The halls of that institution have recurrently been haunted by the ‘spectre ofhermeneutics’; sometimes, as with Schenker, in the shape of analysts’ own earlierselves. I have tried to convey indirectly something of the social and cultural contextof the earliest polemics against hermeneutic criticism in my title. The ‘heap ofbroken images’ is, I admit, not echt Weimar: it is, of course, from T. S. Eliot’s TheWaste Land (line 22). Yet it captures � as, indeed, does Eliot’s poem as a whole, withall its quotations and footnotes � an ambivalence, characteristic of the period,towards the accumulation of cultural symbols. Inasmuch as this attitude pervadedAustro-Germanic music theory of the 1920s, Eliot’s image of 1922 can for ourpurposes stand as a summation of contemporary discontent with the cultural

24 Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, 135.25 Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music, 324 and Chapter 7 passim.


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interpretation of music. Hermeneutic discourse was inert, broken, disunified, tooobviously and limitedly human � a discarded idol standing in the way of Schenker’sself-proclaimed ‘monotheistic’ (and others’ more scientistic) analytical projects. Forall that, it showed and still shows a disturbing ability to revive at unexpectedmoments � not unlike the corpse that threatens to ‘sprout’ and ‘bloom’ at the end ofthe first part of Eliot’s poem. ‘Images’ themselves are a fertilizing, renovatory part ofEliot’s own aesthetic background (Ezra Pound’s ‘imagism’). Since their relationshipto the visual was to become so materially important in the history of music aestheticsover this period (and the linguistic and cognitive connotations of ‘metaphor’ are lessin evidence than in modern metaphor theory), I refer in what follows to ‘images’more than to metaphors for musical experience.

Before continuing with an in-depth discussion of period debates, I will brieflyoutline the course of the argument. First I will examine an important early‘energetic’-analytical critique of hermeneutics and the responses to it. Then thecultural and metaphysical background of the imagery in early twentieth-centuryanalytical writing will come under scrutiny, bringing to light some of the moreesoteric roots of the images of force and motion still found in metaphor andmusic theory of the present day. The central portion of the article will summarizeepistemological arguments for and against energetics’ claims to objectivity,closing with an exposition of the pluralist epistemology that emerged from thisdebate. In the final section I turn to what has come to be seen as the definingmusic-analytical approach of the epoch, the mature theory of Schenker, andre-examine the social and political consequences of his system of notationalimages.

Subduing the ‘Tempest’: the Bekker�Halm debate

One of the most celebrated and historically effective assaults on musicalhermeneutics was written not by Schenker but by one of his correspondents andallies whose reputation has only recently begun to be rescued from obscurity. AugustHalm’s attack on the Berlin-based critic Paul Bekker’s highly popular studyBeethoven was conducted first in a review of the book, and then through a longand detailed refutation of Bekker’s critical approach in Halm’s influential tract Vonzwei Kulturen der Musik.26 Halm’s polemic was thoughtful and witty, and compelledBekker’s response. It was nevertheless not quite as intellectually decisive as Halmseems to have intended.

26 See Paul Bekker, Beethoven (Berlin, 1911); August Halm, review of Bekker, Beethoven, repr. in Halm,

Von Form und Sinn der Musik: Gesammelte Aufsatze, ed. Siegfried Schmalzriedt (Wiesbaden, 1978),170�5; Halm, Von zwei Kulturen der Musik (Munich, 1913). Although translations here are againmy own, they can be compared with the complete translation of Halm’s Von zwei Kulturen made by

Laura Lynn Kelly, ‘August Halm’s ‘‘Von zwei Kulturen der Musik’’: A Translation and IntroductoryEssay’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2008).


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In his review, Halm found the style of Bekker’s musical descriptions disturbinglyinexact, detached from the support of concrete musical processes. He claimed that akind of shadowy drama � Kretzschmar had indeed called it a ‘Schattenspiel’ � wasbeing enacted by Bekker’s prose, which continually conjured up struggles, victories,downfalls and other convulsive theatrical effects, but without specifying their musicalcauses:

In music journalism one plays with too many inimical and too few fruitful oppositions[. . .]. How many times do we read [the exclamation:] ‘In vain’! And yet there is nothing‘in vain’ in a work of art, unless it is in the wrong place. Many passages in Bekker’s bookread like the summary of a drama, or even a psychological novel, in which we watchemotional states succeed each other or even in some sense play roles, but which we do notexperience, since we do not get to see the vehicles, the living creatures which embodythem.27

Halm admitted straightaway that in a literal sense the missing ‘vehicle’ � the music �could always be supplied by the reader, either by memory or by reference to thescore, but purported to find such ‘constant referring [. . .] perpetually trouble-some’.28 At first sight it is hard to believe that a lack of conveniently placed musicexamples would constitute a major bone of contention (particularly since Bekker’sbook was already handsomely illustrated). When Edward Lippmann presents asimilar criticism of Kretzschmar as a final judgment � ‘Kretzschmar’s hermeneuticsmust be regarded as inadequate. It is clearly to be used in alternation with the musicitself, a practice that amounts to an implicit acknowledgement of its owninadequacy’ � one struggles to know what to make of the problem.29 Surely it ispart of the strength of any critical method that it repeatedly ‘sends one back to’ themusic, and causes one to re-examine it. Seen in the context of the history oftwentieth-century analysis the objection is, however, more indicative than it mightseem at first glance. The practice of printing examples in music notation to allowgreater precision of reference would later, in Schenker’s hands, expand from anapparently incidental practice to one capable of replacing the critic’s discoursealtogether.

In Von zwei Kulturen, Halm tried a different tack, concentrating on Bekker’saccount of the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata, op. 31 no. 2, an old

27 ‘Es wird in der Musikschriftstellerei zu viel mit feindlichen, zu wenig mit fruchtbaren Gegensatzen

gewirtschaftet [. . .]. Wie viele ‘‘Umsonst’’ lesen wir! Es gibt aber kein Umsonst in einem Kunstwerk,es sei denn an einer fehlerhaften Stelle. So lesen sich auch in Bekkers Buch viele Stellen wie dasCroquis eines Dramas, auch wohl eines psychologischen Romans, wobei wir die seelischen Zustande

sich folgen, etwa auch agieren sehen, aber nicht erleben, da wir keine Trager derselben, keinelebendigen Wesen zu sehen bekommen.’ Halm, review of Bekker, Beethoven, 174.

28 ‘Dieses bestandige Nachschlagen [. . .] stort bestandig.’ Ibid.29 Edward A. Lippmann, ‘The Dilemma of Musical Meaning’, International Review of the Aesthetics and

Sociology of Music, 12 (1981), 181�9 (p. 182).


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warhorse of Romantic interpretation.30 The unusual introductory lead up to theD minor first subject, on which most of the debate focused, is reproduced inExample 1. The awkwardness of Bekker’s hermeneutic style, as Halm saw it, was itsinappropriate mixture of ‘objective’ technical details and subjective, metaphoricalimagery � imagery which, moreover, was not even internally consistent. We cansample Halm’s objections as he tackles Bekker’s account of the second Allegropassage (bar 8 onwards):

Let Bekker continue: ‘Still more vehemently than before the defensive figures answer �starting up as far as f ??? in tremendous excitement.’ � May I quickly interrupt here again,to correct the phraseology? Musical figures do not ‘start’ up, but go up, or if you like theystorm or drive up, or upwards, until they reach a particular pitch which one can name. Butfigures which ‘start up’ are not of a musical nature, but figures let us say from a drama,thus perhaps people, or ghosts, or gods, and since such ‘starting up in tremendousexcitement’ has nothing to do with the musical scale, we thus see the author commit thesame error that we drew attention to just now. Let us listen further: ‘and then plunginginto the depths, where a chromatic scale unleashes the tempest’. Now here we are reallyfaced with a muddle! The imagery was from the start without any support, without anyclear content: a ‘phantom’ appeared, and was opposed, ‘violently repudiated’, by ‘energeticquaver rhythms’. None of it fits together, it plays out on different levels, and the drama isdoomed to fail [. . .]. If we want, however, to grasp music extra-musically, let us first of alllook for an image which best agrees with the music � and also, in particular, with itself !31

Halm seemed to think that the purpose of hermeneutics was to provide such a visualstory: he ‘designated it as one of the characteristics of hermeneutics that it did not

30 See Bekker, Beethoven, 118�19. Halm’s argument has been effectively summarized, and indeedreinforced, in Lee Rothfarb, ‘Music Analysis, Cultural Morality, and Sociology in the Writings ofAugust Halm’, Indiana Theory Review, 16 (1995), 171�96, and idem, August Halm: A Critical andCreative Life in Music (Rochester, NY, 2009), 101�7, 169�70.

31 ‘Lassen wir Bekker fortfahren: ‘‘Heftiger noch als zuvor antworten die abwehrenden Figuren � infurchtbarer Erregung auffahrend bis zum F3’’ � Darf ich hier gleich wieder unterbrechen, um die

Redeweise zu korrigieren? Musikalische Figuren fahren nicht ‘‘auf’’, sondern sie gehen, odermeinetwegen sie sturmen oder fahren hinauf, oder aufwarts, bis zu einer gewissen Tonhohe, die mannennen kann; Figuren jedoch, die ‘‘auffahren’’, sind nicht musikalischer Natur, sondern etwa Figuren

eines Schauspiels, also vielleicht Menschen, oder Gespenster, oder Gotter, und da solches ‘‘infurchtbar Erregung Auffahren’’ nichts mit der Skala zu tun hat, so sehen wir den Autor wiederdenselben Fehler begehen, auf den wir soeben aufmerksam gemacht haben. Horen wir weiter: ‘‘unddann in die Tiefe sturzend, wo eine chromatische Skala den Sturm entfesselt’’. Hier liegt nun das

Durcheinander vor uns! Das Bildliche war von Anfang an ohne Halt, ohne deutlichen Inhalt: ein‘‘Phantom’’ erschien, und ihm setzten sich ‘‘heftig abwehrende energische Achtelrhythmen’’ entgegen.Alles das trifft sich nicht, das spielt auf verschiedenen Ebenen, und das Drama muss misslingen [. . .].Wollen wir aber die Musik schon aussermusikalisch nehmen, so suchen wir vorerst nur einmal einBild zu gewinnen, das am besten mit ihr und besonders auch in sich selbst ubereinstimmt!’ Halm,Von zwei Kulturen, 41�3. For the problematic ‘auffahren’ Rothfarb offers ‘mount up’ and ‘bolt up

[in fear]’, of which the latter seems preferable (‘Music Analysis, Cultural Morality, and Sociology inthe Writings of August Halm’, 185).


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Example 1. Beethoven, ‘Tempest’ Sonata, op. 31 no. 2, first movement, bars 1�22. Ludwig vanBeethovens Werke: Vollstandige kritisch durchgesehene uberall berechtigte Ausgabe (Leipzig, 1862�8), Serie16: Sonaten fur das Pianoforte, 2 (pp. 69�88), no. 140.


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take images as similes, but dwelt upon the image, and ‘‘saw and taught one to see inthat the materiality of the musical process’’’.32 (The same understanding lay behindSchenker’s accusation that hermeneutic critics could only ‘see rather than hear theirway about in music [. . .] compell[ing] them to debase music to a cinema for theears’.33) Bekker pointed out � as Kretzschmar would have done � that Halm hadthereby failed to comprehend that the imagery was there to ‘characterize’ the affectsor emotions aroused by the music, not to constitute a substantial narrative in its ownright:

Halm misunderstands from his dogmatic standpoint the basic feature of my type of[critical] treatment, which is not at all a poetic paraphrase, as he tries to present it, butaims at a characterization of affect translated into sensually graspable terms.34

If, alternatively, the difficulty was the interspersion of mild technical details � ‘as faras f ???’, ‘quaver rhythms’, ‘chromatic scale’ � into what otherwise reads as prosepoetry, Bekker could have retorted that such reference was necessary not to makeanalytical points, but to facilitate the task of comparison with the music whichseemed to be causing Halm such trouble.

In fact Halm’s difficulty was, of course, the presence of such hackneyed images as‘phantoms’ and ‘tempests’ at all.35 Yet it was very easy for Bekker to point out howreliant on imagery Halm’s own account of the piece is:

Now it is instructive to observe that even Halm, as soon as he wants to characterize amusic-technical process in terms of its meaning, cannot get round the use of affectivedesignations. Only he, in order to underline the contrast [with Bekker’s own writing],

32 ‘Er bezeichnet es als eines der Merkmale der Hermeneutik, dab sie das Bildliche nicht zum Gleichnisnehme, sondern im Bilde verweile und darin ‘‘das Stoffliche der musikalischen Vorgange sehe und

sehen lehre’’.’ Siegfried Schmalzriedt, ‘August Halms musikalische Asthetik: Versuch einerDarstellung’, Introduction to Halm, Von Form und Sinn, ed. Schmalzriedt, 3�56 (p. 33). Theinner quotation is from Halm, Von zwei Kulturen, p. xxx.

33 ‘Zwingt, auch in die Musik [. . .] hineinzusehen statt hineinzuhoren und dadurch Musik zu einemOhr-Kino herunterzusetzen.’ Heinrich Schenker, ‘Die Urlinie: Eine Vorbemerkung’, Der Tonwille:Flugblatter zum Zeugnis unwandelbarer Gesetze der Tonkunst einer neuen Jugend dargebracht, 1

(Vienna, 1921), 22�6 (p. 22); trans. Robert Snarrenberg in Schenker, ‘The Urlinie: A PreliminaryRemark’, Der Tonwille: Pamphlets in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music, Offered to a NewGeneration of Youth, ed. William Drabkin, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2004�5), i, 21�4 (p. 21).

34 ‘Im ubrigen verkennt Halm von seinem dogmatischen Standpunkt aus den Grundzug meiner

Betrachtungsart, die keineswegs, wie er es darzustellen sucht, eine poetisierende Umschreibung,sondern eine ins sinnlich Fabbare ubersetzte Affektcharacteristik erstrebt.’ Paul Bekker, ‘Wohintreiben wir?’ (1913), repr. in Bekker, Gesammelte Schriften, 3 vols. (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1921�3), i:

Kritische Zeitbilder, 247�59 (p. 256). For an analysis of the originating context of music-critical‘characterization’, see Matthew Pritchard, ‘‘‘The Moral Background of the Work of Art’’: ‘‘Character’’in German Musical Aesthetics, 1780�1850’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 9 (2012), 63�80.

35 Rothfarb seems to share Halm’s outrage, referring to ‘Bekker’s pseudo-drama posing as analysis’ and‘crude anthropomorphisms’ (August Halm, 170).


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avoids all figurative analogies (in my account they are only analogies), and uses the mostabstract expressions possible.36

Recording privately his reactions to Von zwei Kulturen from the opposite, staunchly

anti-hermeneutic point of view, Schenker concluded similarly: ‘Time and again the

purely musical breaks down, and the writer’s imagination so often resorts to feelings,

philosophizing.’37 Rereading Halm’s text today, one notices how at many points

Halm’s writing actually thrives on ‘affective designations’, albeit of an indirect kind.

The best moments in his own interpretation of the sonata � where he actually does

succeed in improving on Bekker, as advertised � are no less metaphorical than

Bekker’s account, and indeed scarcely any less anthropomorphic. Take this

productive point of disagreement about the meaning of bars 2�6:

The melodic element veiled itself and its intentions on its first appearance in those restless,jittery quavers of the first Allegro, which Bekker interprets as a violent [gesture of] fendingsomething off. One would do better to attribute to them the character of being startledinto life [. . .]. It is after all important that they begin from a ? and come back to thesame a ?. Only the appearance, the gesture, is restless; the content is admittedly not restful,but static; the intention, the function [of the quavers] is that they work as a check, acounterweight. This check should not be viewed as inimical, but as a strengtheningopposition; as it were, the substance of a force, or the material which the force needs inorder to be effective, for it to be able to feel itself.

The opening theme, a chord, proceeding like a slow melody, concealed anotheropposition within itself. Striding upwards, it announced an aspiration, which, however, itconcealed in the cloak of tranquillity; its counterpart, following immediately, was a will topersist disguised as hastiness. This is corrected in what follows, and in such a way that theambiguity is dispelled. The hastening creature is freed from its circle, and it storms faroutside its initial boundaries.38

36 ‘Nun ist es lehrreich zu beobachten, dab auch Halm nicht umhin kann, sich, sobald er einmusikalisch-technisches Geschehen auf seine Bedeutung hin charakterisieren will, gleichfalls der

Affektbezeichnung zu bedienen. Nur dab er dabei, um den Gegensatz hervorzuheben, jedenbildlichen Vergleich (und einzig um Vergleiche handelt es sich in meiner Darstellung) vermeidet undsich moglichst abstrahierender Ausdrucke bedient.’ Bekker, ‘Wohin treiben wir?’, 256.

37 ‘Immer wieder versagt das rein-Musikalische, u[nd] die Fantasie des Schriftstellers macht so oft Anleihebei Gefuhlen, Philosophemen.’ Schenker, diary entry 19 March 1914, available at Schenker DocumentsOnline, Bhttp://mt.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/schenker/diary/oj_212_pp_540541_317.html�, quoted inRothfarb, August Halm, 34.

38 ‘Das Melodische verhullte sich selbst und seine Absicht bei seinem ersten Auftreten in jene unruhigflatternden Achtel des ersten Allegros, die Bekker als ein heftiges Abwehren deutet. Besser ware ihnender Charakter des Aufgescheuchtseins zugesprochen worden [. . .]. Es ist namlich wesentlich, dass sie,

von a anhebend, auf dasselbe a zuruckkommen. Nur der Habitus, die Geste ist unruhig; der Inhalt istzwar nicht Ruhe, aber das Stationare; die Absicht, die Funktion ist, dass sie als Gegengewicht wirken,dass sie hemmen. Kein feindliches Hemmen zwar darf in ihnen erblickt werden, sondern ein

verstarkender Gegensatz; gewissermassen das Material einer Kraft, oder die Materie, deren die Kraftbedarf, um zu wirken, um sich erst selbst zu fuhlen.


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http://mt.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/schenker/diary/oj_212_pp_540541_317.html

Towards the end of the first paragraph quoted, Halm almost succeeds in explainingthe quaver figures through a functional ‘force’ (though still one with subject-likecharacteristics, insofar as it is said to ‘feel itself ’). But at the beginning and end of thispassage, where his account is easier to follow, they are clearly anthropomorphized:the quavers are ‘restless’ and ‘jittery’; the creature rushes away.

Halm himself denied any such anthropomorphic tendencies in his writing. UnlikeBekker, he was determined to write always about musical figures, and not imaginarytheatrical ones. As he put it later, in 1926,

When I spoke there [in Von zwei Kulturen] of ‘hesitation’, and ‘wanting to go further’, onemight wish to learn from me who, then, is hesitating and wanting, if not persons whom Iimagine to myself and in whose feelings I participate? To which I answer: it hesitates, itwants.39

Halm’s modern commentators have more or less accepted this. Lee Rothfarb claimsthat ‘unlike Bekker’s and other hermeneuticists’ stories, Halm eschews anthro-pomorphisms and extra-musical references. Instead, he sticks to music qua music,even if at times his verbiage may resemble that of hermeneuticists.’40 SiegfriedSchmalzriedt discriminates more precisely: ‘When Halm seems, in his later writings(after about 1910), to fall victim to hermeneutics himself, then it is always images ormetaphors from the domain of the dynamic or the gestural which are involved, andnever reifications or personifications.’41 Yet in the passage quoted above, the neutralsubject or ‘it’ that Halm pictured (es in the original, with its curiously Freudianresonances) gives way to an actual specified agent. It is hard to know how one shouldtranslate ‘Wesen’ in the last sentence of the quotation from Von zwei Kulturen except

Das Anfangsthema, ein Akkord, schreitend wie eine langsame Melodie, barg einen andernGegensatz in sich. Aufwarts gehend, verkundet es ein Streben, das es aber in das Gewand der Ruhe

verbirgt; sein ihm unmittelbar folgendes Gegenspiel war Verharren-wollen im Habit der Hast. Daswird im nachsten Verlauf richtiggestellt; und zwar so, dass die Eindeutigkeit errungen wird. Dashastige Wesen wird aus seinem Zirkel befreit, es sturmt weit aus den anfanglichen Grenzen hinaus.’

Halm, Von zwei Kulturen, 57�8.39 ‘Wenn ich dort von einem Zogern und Weiterverlangen sprach, so mochte man etwa von mir

erfahren wollen, wer denn da zogert und verlangt, wenn nicht Personen, die ich mir vorstelle und an

deren Empfindungen ich teilnehme? Darauf antworte ich: Es zogert, es verlangt.’ August Halm,Einfuhrung in die Musik (Berlin, 1926; repr. Darmstadt, 1966), 140.

40 Rothfarb, August Halm, 105. Rothfarb’s interpretation in his article ‘Music and Mirrors:Misconceptions and Misrepresentations’, in Music in the Mirror, ed. Giger and Mathiesen, 233�45, is more ambiguous � ‘Halm insists on dynamic purity’, he writes, but also ‘on describing musicalactions as performed by fictional ‘‘agents’’’ (p. 239). Quite what these agents might be imagined to beother than ‘persons or personifications’ (p. 239) is not clear, especially when Rothfarb goes on to cite

(with apparent approval) the dramaturgical approach to music of Marion Guck and Fred Maus (p. 240).41 ‘Wenn aber Halm in seinen spateren Schriften (nach etwa 1910) selbst der Hermeneutik

anheimzufallen scheint, so handelt es sich immer um Bilder oder Metaphern aus dem Bereich des

Dynamischen und des Gestischen, niemals jedoch Verdinglichungen oder Personifizierungen.’Schmalzriedt, ‘August Halms musikalische Asthetik’, 33.


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as ‘creature’. Schmalzriedt’s attempt to separate metaphors of action from their‘personified’ agents is in any case specious, since types of action suggestcorresponding types of agent (when a second subject ‘coaxes’ and ‘pleads’, wehardly have to be told that it is being stereotyped as feminine). Quite before we getto the ‘hastening creature’, the kind of actions Halm attributes to the motives �including disguise � are more like those of animal or human agents than of thenatural forces so often conjured up in relation to this sonata.

In addition to affirming the justice of Bekker’s retaliatory comment that Halm isstill talking in metaphors, Alexander Rehding further observes that Halm’s imageryhas often seemed peculiar to his later readers:42

The supreme role in which absolute music features in Halm’s thought is reflected in theformalist stance he assumes in his musical analyses, coupled with an intransigentopposition towards the then prominent hermeneutic school of musicology. In starkcontrast with this position, however, the language that Halm employs throughout hiswritings is richly metaphorical. His imagery, which draws, apparently arbitrarily, ontheology, mythology and politics, has caused bewilderment among many commentatorsand resulted in a variety of responses, ranging from incidental acknowledgement tooutright rejection.43

The ‘apparent arbitrariness’ Rehding detects in Halm’s imagery is again ironic,considering the accusations of mixed metaphor Halm himself directed againstBekker. In contrast to Rehding’s picture of receptive ‘bewilderment’, Rothfarbobserves how in the years after his death in 1929 Halm’s style of analysis was ‘tacitlyabsorbed, with rare acknowledgement, into the mainstream of musical discourse’.44

And yet there is no contradiction: what is fascinating about reading Halm is preciselythat one has the feeling of witnessing some of the first, still embryonic andunprofessionalized, attempts to create what is now the familiar modern discourse ofmusic analysis.

Radioactive rhythms and astral eurhythmics

In its early days, the discourse of music analysis was considerably more wide-rangingin its imagery than one might expect, given its emphatic rejection of ‘poetic ideas’and ‘literary’ language. Rothfarb has established that the ‘energetic’ school of musictheory relied on a notion of musical force and movement which acted as a powerfulunifying focus for new interpretations. As was pointed out by Rudolf Schafke, the

42 Alexander Rehding, ‘August Halm’s Two Cultures as Nature’, Music Theory and Natural Order fromthe Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Rehding and Suzannah Clarke (Cambridge, 2001),142�60 (p. 157).

43 Ibid., 143.44 Rothfarb, August Halm, 172.


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historian of aesthetics who coined the term ‘energetics’ (‘Energetik’) in 1925,45 thisin itself was not even especially new: the new school of analysis owed an important,and largely unacknowledged, intellectual debt to Hanslick.46 Since both weredistinguished by their rejection of an emotion-centred aesthetic, this was perhaps notsurprising. The governing metaphor of music as ‘lawfully regulated movement,flowing from a source of energy’47 is essentially no more than an expansion ofHanslick’s famous definition of music as ‘tonally moving forms’ � ‘tonend bewegteFormen’, in which the passive ‘bewegt’ already comes close to suggesting thepresence of an external force. Nevertheless, examined in more detail, the variety and,indeed, energy of these theorists’ imaginative readings were qualitatively new. AsSchafke traced it in some detail through the work of Halm, Kurth, Schenker andtheir followers,48 the notion of musical force or energy produced as one of its mostparadoxically ‘impressionistic’ moments a positive efflorescence of new metaphorsfor music. The fact that many of these images were also applied to other arts andcultural activities of the period reveals them as part of a new cultural force, ratherthan as the realization of a purely musical substratum.

Some of these images simply concentrated on different aspects of metaphoricaldomains already traditional in musical descriptions, adapting the terms of themetaphor better to fit the central concept of ‘force’. ‘Organicism’ was the mostnotable of these adapted metaphors; in Schenker’s work of the 1920s, as Schafkewrote: ‘Tones are animalistic creatures, gifted with life-force, vitality, drives, motives,aspirations, strivings, leanings, will, and energy.’49 (When phrased in this way, thedifference between this new ‘energetic’ organicism and Romantic poetic organicismbecomes clear: in the latter it had always been the music’s unified poetic contentbreathing life into individual notes that otherwise remained inert.) To suit thetraditional idea of musical ‘logic’ one could imagine ‘force [. . .] as intellectual, as thepower of thought’,50 switching the metaphor’s application from the traditionalharmonic to the thematic sphere by bringing out the verbal connection of themusical ‘idea’ (literally ‘thought’, ‘Gedanke’) with the dynamic activity of thinking(‘Denken’). This metaphor was particularly associated with Schoenberg’s circle, as

45 Rudolf Schafke, Geschichte der Musikasthetik (Berlin, 1934), 394. See also Lee Rothfarb, ‘Energetics’,The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge, 2002), 927�55.

46 Schafke, Geschichte, 395, note 3.47 Ibid., 428.48 Schafke (ibid., 398) names Fritz Jode, Waldemar Woehl, Walther Krug, Otto Vrieslander and

Herman Roth, the last two particularly influenced by Schenker.49 ‘Der Ton ist ein animalisches Wesen, mit Lebenskraft, Vitalitat, Trieb, Drang, Impuls, Streben,

Tendenz, Wille, Energie begabt.’ Ibid., 429. For a detailed comparison of organicism in Schenkerand in Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre (Leipzig, 1911), see Matthew Arndt, ‘Schenker and Schoenberg

on the Will of the Tone’, Journal of Music Theory, 55 (2011), 89�146.50 ‘Die Kraft [. . .] als geistig, als Denkvermogen’. Schafke, Geschichte, 428.


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for instance in Erwin Stein’s 1927 essay on Beethoven and Schoenberg.51 Halmreactivated the age-old Platonic connection of music aesthetics with sociology andstatecraft, comparing the sonata to the political regime of force exerted by thecentralized state, while the fugue represented a ‘free form of society’ (‘freieGesellschaftsform’).52 And certain formal elements � no reference was made toexpression or subject matter � were abstracted from the other arts: the energy of linein draughtsmanship or painting; the static equilibrium between forces and the‘constructive will’ (‘bauender Wille’) of architecture; and the carefully controlled arcof tension inherent in a dramatic plot.53

Other images were quite new, created from areas of modern life that had eitherbarely existed a century ago, or were experienced as improbably distant from the(then) all too human concerns of aesthetics. Physics and engineering, with theircoupled definitions of forces in motion (mechanics, kinetics) and in opposition (in astatic equilibrium or tension), were suddenly ubiquitous in musical discourse.Schoenberg defined several key theoretical terms in relation to physical metaphors:the motive as an initial ‘unrest’ initiating motion; the importance of ‘balance’ and‘equilibrium’ in harmonic relations; the division of developing variation intoprocesses of ‘liquidation’ and ‘condensation’.54 Simple images such as the build-upand discharge of ‘tension’ (‘Spannung’, which could be employed with theproductive extra meaning of ‘electrical charge’), commonly used today without asecond thought, in fact have their origin in the early twentieth century, and arehardly to be found in nineteenth-century writing on music.55 Schafke records muchmore elaborate similes in use at the time, taking in everything from thermodynamicsto chemistry.56 Not mentioned by Schafke is the use of dynamic geologicalmetaphors from seismology and vulcanology, above all in Theodor Adorno’swritings on Schubert and Beethoven; Carolyn Abbate has explored the implications

51 Erwin Stein, ‘Musical Thought: Beethoven and Schoenberg’, Orpheus in New Guises, trans. HansKeller (London, 1953), 90�5.

52 Schafke, Geschichte, 430.53 Ibid., 432�5. For the influence exerted by formalist theories of the visual arts on Schenker, via his

friendship with the Viennese painter and theorist Victor Hammer, see Hedi Siegel, ‘Looking at the

Urlinie’, Structure and Meaning in Tonal Music: Festschrift in Honor of Carl Schachter (Hillsdale, NY,2006), 79�99.

54 For these terms, see Arnold Schoenberg, The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of itsPresentation, ed. Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 121, 234, 175�7

respectively.55 Karl Grunsky’s Musikasthetik (Leipzig, 1907) is to my knowledge the first influential music-aesthetic

tract to thematize the idea of ‘Spannung’. Eighteenth-century psychology did make extensive use of

the concept of tension as a physical/mathematical basis for affect (see Margarete Kramer,‘‘‘Spannung’’ und Musik’, Zeitschrift fur Musikwissenschaft, 9 (1926), 40�2); but this rationalisticapproach did not survive the onset of Romanticism, and authors such as Kurth do not refer back

to it.56 Schafke, Geschichte, 432.


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of his image of the musical analyst as seismographer.57 Karl Grunsky introduced, inplace of the generalized marine imagery of raging seas popular among poetic criticsof the previous century, a more precisely generated ‘wave line’ supposed to governmusical phrasing.58

One could probably write a cultural history of this last concept alone: the ‘wave line’was idealized as a free and natural form of motion across a number of the arts. It was thebasis of Isadora Duncan’s revolutionization of dance in the early years of the twentiethcentury, displacing the artificial imagery of ballet with pure imitation of nature:

With the strengthening of the breeze over the seas, the waters form in long undulations.Of all movement which gives us delight and satisfies the soul’s sense of movement, that ofthe waves of the sea seems to me the finest. This great wave movement runs through allNature [. . .] all energy expresses itself through this wave movement. For does not soundtravel in waves, and light also? And when we come to the movements of organic nature, itwould seem that all free natural movements conform to the law of wave movement: theflight of birds, for instance, or the bounding of animals. It is the alternate attraction andresistance of the law of gravity that causes this wave movement.59

The reference to sound and light waves fixes the apparently ‘timeless’ observationin relation to a chronology of scientific thought. Duncan’s varying images formovement point to an ambiguity of cultural signification. Was movementimportant because it liberated inner forces within the human soul and body, orbecause it allowed one to specify external, physical dimensions and laws of musicalbehaviour along scientific lines? Movement as the concentration of inner forcesaligned itself more with psychodynamics, the Freudian theory of psychic pressuresand tensions, arising ultimately from the Schopenhauerian metaphysics of the Will.But as soon as one began to take seriously Schopenhauer’s esoteric belief in theWill’s cosmic identity, the opportunity arose to visualize this cosmic dimension interms of outer movement: waves, cyclic rhythms, gravitational pulls, and perhapseven more complex and subtle forces. In music theory, though Halm’sHarmonielehre (1905) talks of ‘Will’, it is opposed to a force called ‘(natural)gravity’, and both Schenker’s and Grunsky’s early works make reference to theopposition of ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ forces.60 As Rafael Kohler observes, the

57 See especially Theodor Adorno, ‘Schubert (1928)’, trans. Jonathan Dunsby and Beate Perrey, 19th-Century Music, 29 (2005�6), 3�14; idem, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, trans. EdmundJephcott (Cambridge, 1998), 125�6, 130; and Carolyn Abbate, ‘Music: Drastic or Gnostic?’, CriticalInquiry, 30 (2004), 505�36 (pp. 527�9).

58 Grunsky, Musikasthetik, 54�8. The ‘wave line’ or ‘symphonic wave’ later became crucial to Kurth’senergetic analysis: see his Bruckner, i, 279�461.

59 Isadora Duncan, ‘The Dancer and Nature’ (c.1905), The Art of the Dance, ed. Sheldon Cheney (NewYork, 1928), 66�70 (pp. 68�9).

60 Cited in Rafael Kohler, Natur und Geist: Energetische Form in der Musiktheorie (Stuttgart, 1996),

182�3; for ‘zentrifugal’ and ‘zentripetal’, see Schenker, Harmonielehre (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1906),58, quoted in Kohler, Natur und Geist, 182, and Grunsky, Musikasthetik, 58�9.


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dynamic impulse of the Will, which had once been conceived as transcendingspatio-temporal forms, was now being calculated within them, inviting a ‘synthesiswith the dynamic concepts of classical physics’.61 The same situation pertained tothe metaphysics of dance: Duncan wrote that ‘the movement of the universeconcentrating in an individual becomes what is termed the will [. . .]. The danceshould simply be, then, the natural gravitation of this will of the individual, whichin the end is no more or less than a human translation of the gravitation of theuniverse.’62

One of Duncan’s greatest admirers, the highly influential Swiss pedagogue EmileJaques-Dalcroze, developed during this period the system of musical training andself-development known as rythmique or, in the now-standard English translation,eurhythmics. For Dalcroze, the experience of music was crucially mediated by thebodily component of rhythm, which students of his method learnt to reproducephysically through simple, musically coordinated movements � walking, swinging orraising the arms. The larger, mystical significance of this practice he outlined in 1914as follows:

The actual practice of individual rhythms (as also the method adopted for the purpose[that is, eurhythmics]) is more than a pedagogic system. Rhythm is a force analogous toelectricity and the great chemical and physical elements � an energy, an agent � radio-active, radio-creative � conducing to self-knowledge and to a consciousness not only ofour powers, but of those of others, of humanity itself. It directs us to the unplumbeddepths of our being. It reveals to us secrets of the eternal mystery that has ruled the lives ofmen throughout the ages; it imprints on our minds a primitive religious character thatelevates them, and brings before us past, present, and future.63

To be fair, Dalcroze was less given to such grandiose flights than were some of hiscontemporaries � notably Rudolf Steiner, anthroposophist and inventor of‘eurythmy’ (Eurythmie). This practice Steiner conceived as a visible manifestationof the same kinetic impulses that he believed underlay both poetry and music, as a‘visible speech’ or ‘visible singing’. These kinetic impulses were bodily, but theypertained to the ‘astral body’, for ‘when the human being sings or speaks, theexperience of the singing or speaking is in the astral body or ego’; and ‘singing andspeaking do in fact entail a withdrawal of the astral body and ego from the [. . .] solidand fluid elements of the human body, which then remain behind’.64 Eurythmy thusserved to rematerialize the inner ‘gestures’ made by the astral or etheric body whileperforming music or reciting poetry. Steiner’s mystical system of correspondences

61 ‘Eine Synthese mit dem Bewegungsbegriff der klassischen Physik’. Kohler, Natur und Geist, 184.62 Isadora Duncan, ‘The Dance of the Future’ (1902), The Art of the Dance, ed. Cheney, 54�63 (p. 55).63 Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, ‘Rhythmic Movement, Solfege, and Improvisation’ (1914), Rhythm, Music

and Education, trans. Harold F. Rubinstein (London, 1967), 60�79 (pp. 63�4).64 Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmy as Visible Singing, trans. Alan Stott (Stourbridge, 1998), 15�16.


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between tones, vowel-sounds, colours and gestures (partly derived from the music

theory of the Viennese composer Josef Hauer) was supposed to guarantee a perfect

translation from the astral to the physical plane. This should be so exact that if ‘one

person expressed in eurythmy something that another person is singing [. . .] anyone

possessing spiritual vision would see in the etheric body of the singer precisely the

same movements’.65

Such spiritualist intuitions are not quite so far removed from present-day

analytical and scientific approaches to music as one would assume. Bruno Repp

has traced the ancestry of modern perceptual and performance-based theories of

movement (such as Manfred Clynes’s ‘sentics’) back to three ‘German pioneers’ of

analytical motion research, Eduard Sievers, Gustav Becking and Alexander

Truslit. Whereas Steiner’s and Dalcroze’s techniques were intended for and

transmitted within a pedagogical context, and in their more developed forms were

apt to be mistaken for a kind of dance, Sievers, Becking and Truslit used a

technique of graphic notation to convey research insights into the expressive

kinetic characteristics of sound, a notation that could be realized through a kind

of conducting. In other respects they were similarly intuitive, mystical,

metaphysical and, in a quite literal sense, loopy. The so-called ‘Becking curves’

used by both Becking and Sievers had ‘a cyclic or looping character’.66 Sievers

used these to convey, through a system of correspondences considerably more

opaque than that of Steiner, the integral dynamic expression of a spoken or

musical text. As Repp puts it: ‘Sievers was the only recognised master of the

technique he had developed. He claimed to be in possession of an extraordinary

‘‘motoric sensibility’’ which [. . .] enabled him to find the accompanying

movements for the most subtle variations in the sound shape of spoken texts.’67

In 1928, Becking applied the curves to the characterization of composers’ styles

(see Figure 1).The awkward combination of physical law and psychic insight highlighted earlier

also lay behind Becking’s metaphorical approach here: he explained that

the personal curves reflect a composer’s individual ‘management of gravity’. Gravity beinga physical given, different composers’ solutions reflect different philosophical attitudestowards physical reality � as something to be overcome, to adapt to or to be denied, as thecase may be. Becking’s ultimate goal was thus a typology of personal constants linked to atypology of Weltanschauungen.68

65 Steiner, Eurythmy, 73.66 Patrick Shove and Bruno H. Repp, ‘Musical Motion and Performance: Theoretical and Empirical

Perspectives’, The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, ed. John Rink(Cambridge, 1995), 55�83 (p. 67).

67 Ibid.68 Ibid., 69.


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Figure 1. ‘Becking curves’ for various composers, end plate to Gustav Becking, Der musikalischer Rhythmus als Erkenntnisquelle (Augsburg, 1928). Reproducedwith permission from The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, ed. John Rink (Cambridge, 1995), 68.

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Truslit’s approach, finally, was focused more on individual works, and was

somewhat more methodically detailed. However, it still retained in common with

all the authors so far mentioned an unquestioned belief in certain metaphysical

postulates:

Music is tonal motion; it was thus from the beginning and will always be that way.

Musical motion is internal and encompasses the whole human being [. . . it] is as

differentiated and manifold as life itself [. . .]. What all motions have in common is that

they communicate from one inner being to another.

In music, the motion processes should occur in a natural manner [. . .]. Motion is

perceived as natural only when it obeys the natural laws of movement [. . .]. In nature,

everything moves in curves.69

The last statement shows the imaginary and mystical-aesthetic character of Truslit’s

approach most clearly in being, literally speaking, untrue.

Ernst Kurth and the ‘physics of the mind’

The tension between physics and metaphysical psychology inherent in the analytical

discourse of movement was raised to its limit in the work of Ernst Kurth. On the face

of it, Kurth’s style of writing represents the most determined and self-aware attempt

so far to create a unified musical discourse of ‘force’ and movement; one that was

consciously derived from physics, and almost never anthropomorphic.70 Part of

Kurth’s significance lies in his unification of the two major anti-Romantic critical

schools � ‘energetics’ and style criticism. He was both a pupil of Adler at the

University of Vienna and, a few years later, a colleague of Halm at an alternative

educational establishment, the Freie Schulgemeinde in Wickersdorf. Kurth’s

position, unlike Halm’s, was thus underpinned by a classical positivist understanding

of the problem of subjective or, as he called it, ‘aesthetic’ response. Like his teacher

Adler, he regarded aesthetic subjectivity not as a complete misapprehension of music,

69 Bruno H. Repp, ‘Music as Motion: A Synopsis of Alexander Truslit’s (1938) Gestaltung undBewegung in der Musik ’, Psychology of Music, 21 (1993), 51�3.

70 Kurth’s publishing career shows a startling degree of self-conscious organization: each of his three

central monographs comprised a thorough investigation of a theoretical topic � counterpoint,harmony and form � exemplified by the work of each of three composers: Bach, Wagner andBruckner. (See Ernst Kurth, Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts: Einfuhrung in Stil und Technikvon Bachs melodische Polyphonie (Berne, 1917); Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners‘Tristan’ (Berne, 1920); and Bruckner, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1925).) Each volume was based on principlesof method laid out in his inaugural dissertation of 1913, Die Voraussetzungen der theoretischenHarmonik und der tonalen Darstellungssysteme (Berne, 1913). Kurth then returned to discussion of hismethodology in his final book, Musikpsychologie (Berlin, 1931; 2nd edn, Berne, 1947).


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but as a transcendent and unscientifically vague area lying just over the border of

analysis’s objective field of study:

Music psychology in the narrow sense must [. . .] seek to exclude as far as possible anysubjective character; it can do this by emphasizing only those psychological functionswhich are objectively provable and not subject to the personal fluctuations of the aestheticworld of feeling [. . .]. In all this it is clear that investigations must begin with absolutemusic, which cannot be penetrated by any extra-musical complex of ideas.71

Musical forces and movements were central, the essence of any musical phenomena;

for Kurth, what ‘feelings’ (‘Gefuhle’) laymen cared to attach to them was their

business: ‘The course of movement is [. . .] the original process to which all

imagination that goes beyond absolute music applies itself.’72

Promising though this assertion of priorities seems as a way of exorcizing the

spectre of hermeneutics, it does not quite achieve all it claims. Kurth must have

recognized at some level that his system of physical terminology did not form a new

objective core for all other interpretations, but an alternative to them. Movement

was, after all, not the only metaphorical area on which traditional poetic criticism

could draw; nor does motion convincingly cover all elements of music on equal

terms.73 Line is privileged over timbre, which would lend itself better to images of

light or colour, say. In his study of Romantic harmonic practice, Kurth identified an

‘acoustical-sensuous’ (‘klangsinnlich’) moment in harmony, residually present

alongside the ‘energetic’ (‘energetisch’) factors which really interested him � a

forced acknowledgement that not all harmony was dynamically motivated.74 And

then, as we have seen above, a metaphorical vocabulary drawn from physics builds its

own imaginative momentum, rapidly passing the point (represented by Dalcroze or

71 ‘Die Musikpsychologie in engerem Sinne [. . .] mub den subjektiven Charakter moglichstauszuschlieben suchen; sie vermag es, indem sie eben nur die psychischen Funktionen heraushebt,

die objektiv nachweisbar sind und noch nicht den personlichen Schwankungen der asthetischenGefuhlswelt unterliegen [. . .]. Mit alledem ist auch gegeben, dab die Untersuchungen von absoluterMusik auszugehen haben, in die von keiner aubermusikalischen Ideenumschreibung hereingedrun-

gen werden kann.’ Kurth, Musikpsychologie, 75.72 ‘Der Bewegungsverlauf ist demnach der Quellvorgang, an dem all uber die absolute Musik hinaus

verarbeitende Phantasie einsetzt.’ Ibid., 296.73 Robert Adlington has made a very similar objection to contemporary metaphor theory’s focus on

motion. In analysing salient ‘embodied metaphors’ in relation to music by Debussy, Ligeti, Carter,Kurtag and Saariaho, he finds that his experience of more apparently ‘static’ twentieth-century musicis ‘not dominated by a single metaphor � that of path-like motion � but involves [. . .] non-motional

physical schemas, creating a sort of kaleidoscope of metaphorical imagery’ including such attributesas warmth, fullness, weight and pressure. Adlington, ‘Moving Beyond Motion: Metaphors forChanging Sound’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 128 (2003), 297�318 (p. 308).

74 Ernst Kurth, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners ‘Tristan’ (Berlin, 1923; repr.Hildesheim, 1968), 12�14.


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Schering) where dynamic imagery supports the characterization of emotion, and

reaching a level on which emotion is displaced altogether.Kurth’s musical ‘physics of the mind’ extended Adler’s positivist programme in

other ways. Like style analysis, Kurth’s explorations demanded a certain uniformity

and restriction of vocabulary:

One must also [. . .] not baulk at repeating the same expressions for these images offorce and basic forms; to vary one’s words for the sake of mere diversity would notfacilitate but disrupt one’s experience, and would lead one away from the overpoweringunity of the fundamental phenomena. It is necessary to indicate motions directly, not insimiles.75

More responsive to historical nuance than Halm with his Bruckner worship or

Schenker and his golden age of Bach-to-Brahms, Kurth also suggested the possibility

of a continuous ‘energetic’ music history, examining the different ways in which

historical styles handled the forces inherent in music:

The system of dynamic forces and their historical as well as individual possibilities oftransformation represent nothing other than a natural history of the human soul; and thisis all the more evident the more purely one directs one’s gaze on these processes of forceand tension in themselves, that is, in the first place independently of the residualexpressions of feeling or mood into which they radiate.76

The idea of such a ‘natural history’ was realized by Hans Mersmann, in a number of

articles on musical ‘phenomenology’ and the books Beethoven: Die Synthese der Stileand Angewandte Musikasthetik, which offer surveys of musical style according to

energetic categories.77

Yet just as ‘energetics’ was starting to spread its wings, critics were on hand to clip

them. Schafke objected that metaphors of ‘force’ were not obligatory, but just as

much a matter of subjective interpretation as the ontologies of music that had gone

before:

75 ‘Man darf sich [. . .] auch nicht scheuen, die gleichen Ausdrucke fur diese Kraftbilder undGrundformen zu wiederholen; hier der bloben Abwechslung halber die Worte zu andern, wurde dieEinfuhlung nicht fordern, sondern storen, und es ware ein Abirren von der uberwaltigenden Einheitder Grunderscheinungen. Es gilt, die Bewegungen unmittelbar, nicht in vergleichenden Phrasen zu

kennzeichnen.’ Kurth, Bruckner, i, 255, note 1.76 ‘Das Wesen der Kraftbewegungen und ihre geschichtlichen sowie die individuellen Wandlungsmog-

lichkeiten stellen nichts anderes dar al seine Naturgeschichte der menschlichen Seele; dies um so

mehr, je reiner man den Blick auf diese Kraft- und Spannungsvorgange an sich richtet, d. h. zunachstunabhangig vom ubrigen Gefuhls- und Stimmungsausdruck, in den sie verstrahlen.’ Ibid., 256.

77 Hans Mersmann, ‘Zur Stilgeschichte der Musik’, Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters, 2 (1921), 67�78; Beethoven: Die Synthese der Stile (Berlin, 1922); ‘Versuch einer Phanomenologie der Musik’,Zeitschrift fur Musikwissenschaft, 5 (1922�3), 226�69; Angewandte Musikasthetik (Berlin, 1926).


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What is given, in pure matter of fact, as the musical phenomenon is only the simultaneityor succession of tones of a particular pitch and duration [. . .]. [If] instead of the simpleestablishment of succession one says for instance: this tone strives upward to the other, wehave a case of anthropomorphic or psychic interpretation. The images of force in whichthe present day sees music cannot, accordingly, lay any claim to objective and generallyvalid truth. In fact this is reinforced negatively simply by the historical fact that the essenceof music [‘das Musikalische’] was not always interpreted in this way in times past, nor didit have to be [. . .]. All that is as much as to say that the musical analysis of energetics, too,despite its confident, overbearing claim to objectively valid judgment, remains in thrall[. . .] to the subjectivity of human impressions.78

Schafke allowed ‘energetics’ to have had a salutary, modernizing effect on musical

discourse, even if its philosophical claims were overstretched. However, Schering �who before the First World War had briefly espoused an energetic model of music,

albeit only as a securer foundation for Kretzschmarian hermeneutics � subsequently

turned against the new school, subjecting its pretensions to a sophisticated and

unstinting critique:79

This theory of the notes’ endowment with force, [or] of a will immanent within themwhich produces its effects by secret laws without being influenced externally, rests,however, on a misunderstanding � or a mystification. Notes and tonal connections canneither possess a will nor be gifted with a force of their own, since they are in generaldetermined by the human mind in the first place, summoned from their natural conditionand appointed to be the instruments of art � just as the ‘will’ of a saw to saw up wood isnot its will, but one imposed on it by the human spirit [. . .]. Of course, such a state ofaffairs can be grasped symbolically by anthropomorphizing the tonal process, and usingprosopopoeia, as when we talk of ‘fleeing clouds’, ‘writhing trees’ or a ‘thirsty landscape’.It is in this sense that the term [‘expressive force’] that I used above has validity. But that isnot what this [new] aesthetic means. It attaches great importance to speaking without anysymbols whatever. Instead of understanding this hypothetically assumed will or force assomething projected into the notes by the human psyche, and thus starting with that [the

78 ‘In der musikalischen Erscheinung rein tatsachlich gegeben ist nur die Gleichzeitigkeit bzw.Aufeinanderfolge von Tonen bestimmter Hohe und Dauer [. . .]. [Wenn] statt der bloben

Statuierung der Aufeinanderfolge etwa gesagt wird: Ein Ton strebt hinauf zu einem anderen, liegtanthropomorph-seelische Deutung vor. Die Bilder der Kraft, unter denen die Gegenwart die Musiksieht, konnen demnach keinen Anspruch auf objektive und allgemeingultige Wahrheit machen. Daswird eigentlich negativ allein durch die geschichtliche Tatsache erhartet, dab nicht zu allen Zeiten

das Musikalische so aufgefabt wurde und aufgefabt werden mubte [. . .]. Mit alledem ist zugleichgesagt, dab auch die musikalische Analyse der Energetik, trotz ihres herrischen und sicherenAnspruchs auf objektives, gultiges Urteil, weitaus der Subjektivitat des Eindrucks [. . .] unterworfen

bleibt.’ Schafke, Geschichte, 447.79 Schering’s early use of ‘energetic’ discourse occurs in his Musikalische Bildung und Erziehung zum

musikalischen Horen (Leipzig, 1911) and the article ‘Zur Grundlegung der musikalischen

Hermeneutik’, Zeitschrift fur Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 9 (1915), 168�75: seeRothfarb, ‘Energetics’, 944�6.


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human psyche], it imputes all the motives for what occurs to the notes themselves [. . .].The logical contradiction goes unnoticed that whatever is put into or read out of the tonalprocess during this procedure, it does not belong to the mind of the artwork but � as willbe the case in all hermeneutics � to the interpreter’s own mind.80

Some analysts were significantly unnerved by these criticisms. Mersmann referred,

the following year, to the ‘attacks suffered by methods of analysis which strive to be

exact and binding’, among which Schering’s was the ‘most fundamental’: ‘Schering

here subjects the analytical work of Kurth, Halm and myself to a scathing critique, to

which I have no substantial answer in the present context. For what is rejected here is

not individual results, but a whole perspective [‘‘Anschauung’’].’81 Mersmann re-

ferred again to Schering’s attack in a 1935 paper, in which he nevertheless revealed

his failure to understand the point Schering was making. He describes the first task

of analysis as ‘the exact investigation of all elemental (i.e. created by the disposition

of material) contributory forces [‘‘Teilkrafte’’]’, which ignores Schering’s rebuke that

the creation of musical ‘forces’ should not be attributed in the first instance to the

‘disposition of material’, but to the human psyche.82

The more acute theorists of the Kurthian school, however, were able to take these

points on board. Kurth himself developed in his Musikpsychologie what was in

80 ‘Diese Lehre von der Kraftbegabtheit der Tone, von einem ihnen immanenten Willen, der sich nach

geheimnisvollen Gesetzen auswirkt, ohne durch anderes beeinflubt zu sein, beruht indessen aufeinem Mibverstandnis oder einer Mystifikation. Tone und Tonverbindungen konnen weder Willenhaben, noch kraftbegabt sein, da sie uberhaupt erst vom Menschengeist bestimmt und aus ihremNaturzustand zu kunstlerischen Werkzeugen berufen worden sind, ebensowenig wie der ‘‘Wille’’

einer Sage, Holz zu zerkleinern, ihr Wille ist, sondern ein ihr vom Menschengeist aufgezwungener[. . .]. Allerdings labt sich dieser Tatbestand symbolisch fassen, indem man das Tongeschehenvermenschlicht und Prosopopoien gebraucht, etwa wie wir von ‘‘fliehenden Wolken’’, ‘‘sich

krummenden Baumen’’, ‘‘durstender Natur’’ reden. In diesem Sinne gilt mein oben gebrauchterAusdruck Expressivkraft. Aber dieses meint jene Asthetik nicht. Denn sie legt Wert darauf, ohneirgendwelche Symbolik zu sprechen. Statt also jenen hypothetisch angenommenen Willen, jene

Krafte als etwas aus der Menschenpsyche in die Tone Hineinprojiziertes aufzufassen und folglich vonihr auszugehen, unterstellt sie alle Geschehensmotive den Tonen selbst [. . .]. Man bemerkt nicht denlogischen Widerspruch, der darin liegt, dab das, was auch bei diesem Verfahren in das Tongeschehen

hineingelegt oder aus ihm herausgelesen wird, nicht des Kunstwerks, sondern � wie das ja bei allerHermeneutik der Fall sein wird � des Interpreten eigener Geist ist.’ Schering, ‘Musikalische Analyseund Wertidee’, Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters, 36 (1929), 9�20 (pp. 13�14).

81 ‘Angriffe, welche eine nach Exaktheit und Verbindlichkeit strebende Methode der Analyse erfahren

hat’; ‘das prinzipiellste’; ‘Schering ubt hier an den analytischen Arbeiten von Kurth, Halm und mireine vernichtende Kritik, auf die ich sachlich in diesem Zusammenhang nichts zu erwidern habe.Denn was hier abgelehnt wird, sind nicht einzelne Ergebnisse, sondern ist eine Anschauung.’ Hans

Mersmann, ‘Zur Geschichte des Formbegriffs’, Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters, 37 (1930), 32�47 (p. 47).

82 ‘Die exakte Untersuchung aller elementaren, d. h. durch die Materialschichtung gegebenen

Teilkrafte.’ Hans Mersmann, ‘Versuch einer musikalischen Wertasthetik’, Zeitschrift furMusikwissenschaft, 17 (1935), 33�47 (p. 34).


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essence a phenomenology of music similar to the later work of Thomas Clifton, and

at the same time an attempt to ground theoretically the approach of his previous

critical works on Bach, Wagner and Bruckner. In it he acknowledged that not only

‘energetic’ but also other types of phenomena in music � spatial and textural

qualities, for instance � were created in the listener’s mind. Their investigation,

which for Kurth was the task of music psychology proper, was thus a ‘softer’

discipline than Tonpsychologie or acoustics, which began with physical sound. But,

Kurth insisted, the intuitive self-evidence of such qualities within the listening

experience made them fundamental. Unless they were recognized, music could

hardly be said to exist for us:

Features that we will shortly consider further, such as gravitation, substantiality, spatiality,accumulation of energy, etc., are likewise illusory impressions, and yet not mere side-effects; rather, in all such things lie constitutive elements without which music wouldcompletely disappear from our consciousness. They adhere irredeemably to music, theyhave in our musical intuition a compulsive character, even if, for the self-conscious viewthat steps outside that basic intuition, they crumble into nothing. [. . .] At root we do notobserve [. . .] the [musical] tone, but always only the psyche.83

In his perceptive dissertation on the methodology of formal analysis, Der Begriff dermusikalischen Form in der Wiener Klassik (1935), Kurt Westphal described the

anthropomorphisms of everyday language about music as the result of a legitimate

‘abbreviation’, a product of our identification with the musical process:

From this point of view � and this should be emphasized briefly but categorically � thereis nothing to object to when one speaks of the will of a motive or the consciousness of atheme. Naturally the material in and of itself has no will or consciousness. It is always ourwill, our consciousness which addresses us out of the [musical] object. Yet when, as here,we are dealing with a form of thinking which we implement automatically [. . .] then thisform of thought appears to us to have been transferred into the object, whence itaffects us compulsively [. . .]. We then have the feeling that it is not we who are active,but the object, which actively demands from us the implementation of an automaticprocess of thought. It is thus merely a kind of abbreviation when in such cases we nolonger speak of our will, our consciousness, but of the will or consciousness of anobject.84

83 ‘Es ist wie die gleich weiter zu betrachtenden Merkmale von Gravitation, Stofflichkeit, Raumlichkeit,

Energieaufspeicherung usf. ein Trugeindruck, und doch nicht eine blobe Begleiterscheinung;vielmehr liegen in alledem konstituierende Momente, ohne die die ganze Musik aus unsermBewubtsein verschwande. Sie haften als etwas Untilgbares, haben im Musikgefuhl den Charakter

eines Zwanges, mogen sie sich auch fur die bewubte, aus jenem Grundgefuhl heraustretendeVorstellung in ein Nichts auflosen. [. . .] Im Grunde beobachten wir [. . .] nicht den Ton, sondernimmer nur die Psyche.’ Kurth, Musikpsychologie, 11.

84 ‘Unter diesem Gesichtspunkt � und das sei kurz, aber grundsatzlich betont � ist nichts dagegeneinzuwenden, wenn vom Willen eines Motivs, vom Bewubtsein eines Themas gesprochen wird.


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There is indeed nothing to object to in this, if the original sense of the ‘abbreviation’

is recalled when necessary. (We will see later, in relation to Schenker, what happens

when it is not.) However, it is immediately evident that such psychic projections

need not exclude emotional states, which can and do attach themselves to music

in the ‘compulsive’ manner that Westphal describes. Without wishing to detract

from the value of Kurth’s original approach, one must ask why he should have

admitted the sense of ‘space’ conjured up by a symphonic texture as a legitimate

subject for his phenomenological speculations, and yet have excluded emotional

affect as ‘aesthetic’ and subjective.

From ‘music itself ’ to ‘musics’

Uniquely among the ‘energetic’ theorists, Westphal was willing to draw the natural

conclusion from the above chain of reasoning. Energetics and hermeneutics were

equally subjective, being alike the results of projecting certain experiential categories

into the music itself:

Experience, the capacity for experience � this, then, is the decisive precondition [forinterpretation]. Without this capacity, interpretation cannot be undertaken, evenon the basis of the most minutely detailed knowledge of the available stock offacts. This experience is then converted into a creative effort. Thus at the outset of everyinterpretation there stands not close philological work, but a psychologicalact which cannot be further discussed, analysed or in any way monitored. Thispsychological act stands at the outset of every system of interpretation [. . .]. It represents[its] apex, in a sense [. . .]. The varying character of this initial psychological act [. . .]alone determines the various methods of interpreting music or individual musicalworks.85

Selbstverstandlich hat die Materie an und fur sich keinen Willen und kein Bewubtsein. Stets ist esunser Wille, unser Bewubtsein, die aus den Gegenstanden uns ansprechen. Handelt es sich jedoch umeine Denkform, die wir automatisch vollziehen [. . .] so scheint uns diese Denkform auf den

Gegenstand ubergegangen zu sein und von ihm aus zwingend auf uns zu wirken [. . .]. Wir habendann das Gefuhl, dab nicht wir aktiv sind, sondern dab der Gegenstand aktiv den Vollzug einesmechanisierten Denkvorgangs von uns fordert. Es ist also lediglich ein abkurzendes Verfahren wennwir in solchen Fallen nicht mehr von unserm Willen, Bewubtsein usw., sondern vom Willen,

Bewubtsein usw. eines Gegenstandes sprechen.’ Kurt Westphal, Der Begriff der musikalischen Form inder Wiener Klassik: Versuch einer Grundlegung der Theorie der musikalischen Formung (Leipzig, 1935),22.

85 ‘Das Erlebnis, die Erlebnisfahigkeit ist also die entscheidende Vorbedingung. Ohne sie ist eineInterpretation selbst bei minutiosester Kenntnis der Tatsachenbestande nicht zu leisten. DiesesErlebnis setzt sich dann in eine schopferische Leistung um. Am Anfang jeder Interpretation steht also

nicht philologische Kleinarbeit, sondern ein psychischer Akt, der nicht weiter diskutierbar, nochanalysierbar, noch sonst in irgendeiner Weise zu kontrollieren ist. Er stellt gewissermaben die Spitze


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Still more boldly, this conclusion could be extended to the entire range of analytical

methodologies to be found in the contemporary literature: not only hermeneutics

and energetics, but also mathematical and graphic analyses. All were metaphorical in

the literal sense that they transferred extra-musical domains of theory and experience

into music:

However different the starting point for all these forms of interpretation is, their commonfeature remains that they all interpret music by introducing something else in its place.Each of them conceives music according to a model lying outside it [. . .]. Each of them issophisticated enough to claim a scholarly status for itself alone; each accuses the others of agreater degree of subjectivity. In reality, all are in the same way subject-dependent.Fundamentally, then, the hermeneutics of Kretzschmar and Paul Bekker has the sameauthority as the ‘verbal mechanics’ [. . .] of Mersmann.86

So far this is radical, but at the same time diplomatic. Calling a halt to the

epistemological bloodletting of the past decades, Westphal seems to be proposing a

happy, proto-postmodern co-existence of Stanley Fish-style ‘interpretative commu-

nities’, resting undisturbed in their subjective frameworks of understanding, and all

contentedly interpreting any and all music that comes within their reach. But he adds

a proviso: every interpretative system is tied to a historical point of origin and a

related aesthetic ideal. These inevitably lend it a bias towards or a suitability for

certain kinds of music:

Every interpretation is tied to a subjective point of departure. There are in consequence anumber of forms of interpretation, all equally legitimate. Each has grown out of aparticular musical ideal, and remains closely connected with it. Since Mersmann’s, forinstance, did not spring from a Romantic spirit, it basically cannot find any application toRomantic music. If nonetheless it is applied to Chopin or to Wagner, then the content oftheir music will in no way be exhausted. The richness of the variegated affects which thismusic contains cannot be interpreted or characterized through the somewhat anonymousformula of energy [‘Kraft’]: a rigid typology will be the unavoidable result. For the line ofenergy of a certain music will in this way be interpreted only generally, not in itsparticularity. It would be entirely conceivable that the interpretation would yield the same

des Interpretationssystems dar [. . .]. Der verschiedene Charakter dieses ersten psychischen Aktes [. . .]allein bedingt die verschiedenen Methoden, Musik bzw. einzelne Werke der Musik zuinterpretieren.’ Kurt Westphal, ‘Analyse und Interpretation: Anmerkungen zu einem musik-

asthetischen Grundproblem’, Die Musik, 24 (1932), 349�55 (p. 352).86 ‘So verschieden der Ausgangspunkt bei diesen Interpretationsformen auch ist, es bleibt als

gemeinsames, dab alle Musik interpretieren, indem sie ein anderes fur sie einsetzen. Jede denkt

Musik nach einem auberhalb ihrer selbst liegenden Modell [. . .]. Jede ist anspruchsvoll genug, sichfur allein wissenschaftlich zu halten, jede schiebt der anderen die grobere Subjektivitat zu. InWahrheit sind alle in gleicher Weise subjektgebunden. Grundsatzlich hat daher die Hermeneutik

Kretzschmars und Paul Bekkers die gleiche Berechtigung wie die ‘‘Wortphysik’’ [. . .] vonMersmann.’ Ibid., 353.


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or a similar line of energy for two musical processes that were, in their particularexpression of affect, extremely different from each other.87

A few years earlier, Bekker had come to very similar conclusions, in his casestarting from the opposite, hermeneutic position. In 1913 Bekker had defended thehermeneutic method of his book Beethoven vigorously, and in absolute terms,against Halm’s attacks, confessing his ‘conviction that the characterization of affectis in truth the closest means at hand of attaining a clarity akin to knowledge aboutan artwork’.88 By the early 1920s, as he witnessed the continued rise of the new‘energetic’ school of aesthetics, he had modified his stance.89 It seemed to Bekkernow that, especially in light of the music being created in conjunction with it, thenew direction was on its own terms just as legitimate as the old. What was neededwas to correct the intolerance, the incipient fundamentalism and the lack of a senseof history which characterized the new aesthetics. It ought to recognize the historicalrelevance of hermeneutic ‘characterization of affect’ to the music of the previouscentury (in particular), rather than trying to dismiss it through appeal to an imaginaryobjectivity of method. Energetics, on the other hand, would be more relevant to musicof the twentieth century, which was ‘no longer a music of affect’. In a review of ErnstKrenek’s First Symphony, for example, Bekker applied energetic concepts as a new andself-conscious standard of criticism for recent music:

What does this music want? It does not want to represent, it does not want to grab hold ofus or agitate us, it is a music without any pathos or sentiment whatever. But what is itthen? A play of movement in sound [. . .]. A work of this kind is not to be apprehended orjudged from the point of view of expression, in the commonly accepted sense, but throughthe effect of its kinetic impulses. Judged by these, the symphony bears witness to a talentof rare proportions [. . .]. In recognizing the fundamental model of this type of music and

87 ‘Jede Interpretation ist an einen subjektiven Ausgangspunkt gebunden. Es gibt demnach vieleInterpretationsformen, die alle gleichberechtigt sind. Jede ist aus einem bestimmten Musikidealerwachsen und hangt mit ihm zusammen. Da die Mersmannsche beispielsweise nicht aus

romantischen Geist erwachsen ist, vermag sie im Grunde genommen keine Anwendung aufromantische Musik zu finden. Wird sie dennoch auf Chopin oder Wagner angewandt, so wird derGehalt dieser Musik in keiner Weise erschopft werden konnen. Der Reichtum der verscheidensten

Affekte, der in dieser Musik liegt, kann nicht durch die gleichsam anonyme Formel der Kraftgedeutet werden. Eine starre Typisierung ist die unausbleibliche Folge. Denn die Kraftkurve einerMusik wird auf diese Weise immer nur allgemein, niemals aber in ihrer Besonderheit interpretiert.Und es ware durchaus denkbar, dab die Interpretation eine gleiche oder ahnliche Kraftkurve bei zwei

musikalischen Bewegungsverlaufen ergabe, die in ihrem besonderen Affektausdruck weit voneinan-der verschieden sind.’ Westphal, ‘Analyse und Interpretation’, 355.

88 ‘Dab aber diese Affektcharakteristik in Wahrheit das nachstliegende Mittel ist, uber ein Kunstwerk

[. . .] zu erkenntnismabiger Klarheit zu gelangen � das allerdings ist meine Uberzeugung.’ Bekker,‘Wohin treiben wir?’, 256.

89 Bekker had meanwhile become a close personal friend of Kurth; their correspondence is reproduced

in Luitgard Schader, Ernst Kurths ‘Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts’: Ursprung und Wirkungeines musikpsychologischen Standardwerks (Stuttgart, 2001), 307�32.


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how to give it unified development, a productive power is [here] documented which [. . .]presages the main spiritual current of our times.90

Bekker was working his way towards a pluralistic and historically relative

conception of music aesthetics, which in 1925 he phrased in terms even more

radical than Westphal’s. His article of that year ‘What is Musical Phenomenology?’

deserves to be quoted at length, for it is probably the most incisive and least well-

known intervention in the philosophy of music during the whole Weimar era:

The majority of music which is talked about today [the historical repertoire] is a hermeneuticallyconceived music, which thus justifies and demands a hermeneutic point of view. Theaestheticians from the eighteenth century up to Hermann Kretzschmar were not as unmusicalor uneducated as one is pleased to believe at present, and many who think they can pass asupercilious judgment on the Affektenlehre perhaps still have something to learn before they canseriously approach those people. If they were to do so they would realize that the theory of affectand the hermeneutics based upon it were something entirely accurate: that is to say, theaesthetic point of view exactly corresponding to the art to which it was applied. It could becomea false theory only when it was adapted to an art to which it was alien � in other words, in theattempt to make it into the epistemological foundation of the study of music in general.

With this we have hit on the core of the present-day problem. It can be characterized bystating that there is no such thing as music ‘itself ’, music ‘as such’, but only musics [‘Musiken’].To them there correspond various aesthetics [‘Aesthetiken’], of which each is perfectly correct solong as it is applied to its own art. From this perspective we will of course have to reject theAffektenlehre for present-day music � yet not because the Affektenlehre is per se ‘false’, butbecause present-day music is no longer a music of affect. It does not need to be any ‘better’, norindeed any worse, than the music of affect, just as we do not after all compare Renaissance,Baroque, Rococo and Empire as terms of value.91

90 ‘Was will diese Musik? Sie will nicht darstellen, will nicht ergreifen oder erschuttern, sie ist eine

Musik ohne jegliches Pathos und Sentiment. Was aber ist sie? Ein Bewegungsspiel der Klange [. . .].Ein Werk dieser Art ist nicht vom Ausdrucksmabigen im landlaufigen Sinne her zu erfassen und zubewerten, sondern aus der Wirkung seiner Bewegungstriebe. Auf diese angesehen, erscheint die

Symphonie als Zeugnis einer ebenso erstaunlichen wie erfindungsreichen Begabung von seltenemAusmab [. . .]. In der Erfindung des Grundtypus dieser Musik uberhaupt und seiner einheitlichenDurchfuhrung dokumentiert sich ein produktives Vermogen, das [. . .] ahnend auf die seelische

Grundstromung der Zeit deutet.’ Paul Bekker, ‘Ernst Kreneks erste Symphonie’, Musikblatter desAnbruch, 5 (1923), 16�18 (pp. 17�18).

91 ‘Der grobte Teil der Musik, uber die heute gesprochen wird, [ist] eine hermeneutisch konzipierteMusik, die also auch eine hermeneutische Auffassung rechtfertigt und erfordert. Die Asthetiker vom

18. Jahrhundert bis zu Hermann Kretzschmar waren weder so unmusikalisch noch so ungebildet, wieman sie gegenwartig hinzustellen beliebt, und mancher, der meint, uber die Affektenlehre einhochmutiges Urteil sprechen zu durfen, hatte vielleicht noch einiges zu lernen, um sich diesen Leuten

ernstlich nahern zu durfen. Er wurde dabei zu der Erkenntnis gelangen, dab die Affektentheorie unddie auf ihr basierende Hermeneutik etwas absolut Richtiges war: namlich die asthetischeAnschauung, die genau der Kunst entsprach, auf die sie sich bezog. Zur Irrlehre konnte sie erst

da werden, wo sie auf eine ihr wesensfremde Kunst angewandt wurde � bei dem Versuch also, sie zurerkenntnistheoretischen Grundlage der Musikbetrachtung uberhaupt zu erheben.


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The closing reference to the relativity of different styles in art history � derived

from Bekker’s reading of Wolfflin during the First World War � actually disguises

how advanced Bekker’s thinking is here. (For once, the study of music was not

limping behind the other humanities but shooting far ahead.) In the

Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Wolfflin’s approach had, after all, remained

formalist whatever century of art he discussed; what Bekker had in mind was a

fundamental alteration in the aesthetic frame of reference depending on the

individual type of music being studied. There was no ontological consistency

between different musics that would allow an ‘epistemological foundation for the

study of music in general’, because ‘music in general’ did not exist.92 ‘There is nosuch thing as music ‘‘itself ’’ [. . .] but only musics.’ It took over 60 years for

musicology to circle back to this realization � for McClary to confess ‘I am no longer

sure what MUSIC is’; for Philip Bohlman to pluralize music’s culturally determined

essences as ‘ontologies of music’; and for Bekker’s ‘musics’ (which once sounded

equally peculiar in German and English) to enter accepted parlance.93 Dahlhaus

referred in 1985 to the increasing frequency with which the plural form was being

used, ‘without the stylistic uneasiness � which is also one of substance � having yet

been removed’.94 Yet for him, the challenge to which such usage was a response

came only from popular, non-Western and post-war avant-garde traditions, since

‘the differences between the epochs of European music history left [. . .] the inner

unity of the [Western] concept of music essentially unaffected’ � he little realized

that Bekker had, several decades previously, broken such ‘inner unity’ apart from

within.95

Damit ist der Kern der heutigen Problemstellung erfabt. Er labt sich dahin kennzeichnen, dab eseine Musik ‘‘an sich’’, eine Musik ‘‘schlechthin’’, nicht gibt, sondern nur Musiken. Ihnen entsprechen

verschiedene Asthetiken, von denen jede soweit vollkommen richtig ist, wie sie sich auf ihre Kunstbezieht. So gesehen, werden wir freilich die Affektenlehre fur die heutige Musik ablehnen mussen �aber nicht, weil die Affektenlehre an sich ‘‘falsch’’, sondern weil die heutige Musik keine Affektmusik

mehr ist. Sie braucht deswegen nicht ‘‘besser’’, aber auch nicht schlechter zu sein als die Affektmusik,ebenso wie wir auch Renaissance, Barock, Rokoko und Empire nicht als Wertkundgebungenvergleichen.’ Bekker, ‘Was ist Phanomenologie der Musik?’ (1925), repr. in idem, Organische undmechanische Musik (Stuttgart, 1928), 25�40 (pp. 36�7).

92 Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History, trans. Marie Donald Hottinger (London, 1932). For anassessment of Wolfflin’s formalism and its continuing influence in art history, see Michael Hatt andCharlotte Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to its Methods (Manchester, 2006), 71�80.

93 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis, MN, 1991), 276;Philip V. Bohlman, ‘Ontologies of Music’, Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist(Oxford, 1999), 17�34.

94 ‘Ohne dass das stilistische Unbehagen, das zugleich ein sachliches ist, bereits behoben ware.’ CarlDahlhaus, ‘Gibt es ‘‘die’’ Musik?’, Was ist Musik?, ed. Dahlhaus and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht(Wilhelmshaven, 1985), 9�17 (p. 9).

95 ‘Die Unterschiede zwischen den Epochen der europaischen Musikgeschichte lieben [. . .] die innereEinheit des Musikbegriffs im Wesentlichen unangetastet.’ Ibid., 13.


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This was a vulnerable moment, laden with partisan tensions and anxieties, just asmuch so in culture as in politics. But for that reason, as Bekker’s contemporary KarlMannheim realized, it was also an opportunity � for those with the inner strength,the ‘negative capability’, necessary � to realize the contingency of norms and idealsthat until such a juncture had been taken as ‘natural’ and ‘true’:

It is imperative in the present transitional period to make use of the intellectual twilightwhich dominates our epoch and in which all values and points of view appear in theirgenuine relativity. We must realize once and for all that the meanings which make up ourworld are simply an historically determined and continuously developing structure inwhich man develops, and are in no sense absolute [. . .].

Hence it has become extremely questionable whether, in the flux of life, it is a genuinelyworthwhile intellectual problem to seek to discover fixed and immutable ideas orabsolutes. It is a more worthy task, perhaps, to learn to think dynamically and relationallyrather than statically. In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing lessthan shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute areusually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in ourday attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of theabsolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the needfor intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who areunable to look life in the face.96

Notenbild: notation as image

For a musicologist reading that last sentence, it is hard not to think of Schenker. Hispersonal ‘nostrum of the absolute’, the Urlinie, was part of a retreat into privateabstraction that arguably went one step further than anything ‘energetics’ by itself

96 ‘Es ist geradezu Gebot der Stunde, die jetzt gegebene Zwielichtbeleuchtung, in der alle Dinge undPositionen ihre Relativitat offenbaren, zu nutzen, um ein fur allemal zu wissen, wie alle jeneSinngebungsgefuge, die die jeweilige Welt ausmachen, eine geschichtliche, sich verschiebende Kulisse

sind und dab das Menschwerden entweder hinter oder in ihnen sich vollzieht [. . .].Es ist deshalb auberst fraglich geworden, ob es uberhaupt erstrebenswert und eine wirkliche

Aufgabe sei, Unbezuglichkeiten oder ‘‘Absolutheiten’’, wie man sie zu nennen pflegt, in diesem

Strome zu finden. Vielleicht liegt die hohere Aufgabe gerade darin, relational und dynamisch, abernicht statisch denken zu lernen. Es mutet ja manchmal geradezu unheimlich an, wenn in dergegenwartigen Denk- und Seinslage gerade jene sich als hoherwertig vorkommen, die irgend etwas‘‘Absolutes’’ zu besitzen vorgeben. Dieses Sich-Anpreisen und Sich-Empfehlen durch Absolutheiten

spekuliert allzu oft blob auf das Sekuritatsbedurfnis breiter Schichten, die den auf der gegenwartigenSeinsstufe offenbar werdenden Abgrund des Lebens nicht sehen wollen.’ Karl Mannheim, Ideologieund Utopie (1929), 4th edn (Frankfurt am Main, 1965), 76�8, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils

as Ideology and Utopia (1929) (London, 1991), 76�7. Mannheim’s call for a ‘relational’ analysis ofknowledge might productively be viewed in juxtaposition to contemporary ideas of ‘relationalmusicology’; see, for example, Georgina Born, ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and

Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135(2010), 205�43.


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had been capable of. In discussing the second movement of Beethoven’s op. 111 he

presented motivic ascending thirds as scattered segments of a ‘deeply buried’

(‘tiefverborgen’) contrapuntal line.97 A new type of organicist analysis � any tendency

towards which Schenker had hitherto resisted � was starting to bud: it would flower

only later, after the First World War, in the last of the Erlauterungsausgaben, on op.

101.98 It both incorporated and exceeded ‘energetic’ notions such as ‘line’, ‘linear

progression’ (‘Zug’) and the ‘will of the tones’.99 The advance over other ‘energetic’

theory lay in the notated precision of Schenker’s analytical imagination. Yet along

with that precision went an ignorance of or wilful blindness to the psychological

critiques detailed above. It was this that gave his system its fateful character � that of

focusing on features of the score rather than (like Kurth or Halm) directly on the

listening experience. For Schenker, as for Schoenberg, one of the consequences of

true musical education was that ‘listening’ in the outward sense, and thus the

performance that went with it, became unnecessary. Music could be understood and

appreciated directly from the printed page, like a book:

It must be the highest aim for all musicians to bring their art, too, to the point reached inthe art of language, for instance, where books are not only read aloud, but far more often,and indeed as a rule, simply read [silently]. In other words: even the performance ofmusical works of art, although it certainly offers the layman who stands outside art hisonly possibility of participation and enjoyment, should not be or remain the sole aim ofmusical training [. . .]. Rather, let the aim of musical education be to develop the inner earof those concerned with music, so that they can hear a musical artwork sounding correctly

97 Heinrich Schenker, Die letzten funf Sonaten von Beethoven: Kritische Ausgabe mit Einfuhrung undErlauterung: Sonate C-moll Op. 111 (Vienna, 1916), 54.

98 Heinrich Schenker, Die letzten funf Sonaten von Beethoven: Kritische Ausgabe mit Einfuhrung undErlauterung: Sonate A-dur Op. 101 (Vienna, 1921).

99 For the difference between Schenker’s score-based Urlinie and Halm’s more purely experiential conceptof musical ‘line’, see Rafael Kohler, ‘Linie und Urlinie: Zur Methodendiskussion in der energetischenMusiktheorie’, Zur Geschichte der musikalischen Analyse: Bericht uber die Tagung Munchen 1993, ed.

Gernot Gruber (Laaber, 1996), 157�76. ‘Zug’ was a term of Kurth’s, borrowed by Schenker from hisGrundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts: Einfuhrung in Stil und Technik von Bachs melodischer Polyphonie(Berne, 1917), where it is introduced on the second page thus: ‘If one wanted, then, to translate the [. . .]geometrically derived expression ‘‘melodic line’’ back into something better corresponding to the real[musical-psychological] context, one would have to speak [. . .] of ‘‘drive’’ [‘‘Treiben’’] or ‘‘pull’’ [‘‘Zug’’],in order to bring out the immanent sensation of movement, the living will that inhabits all melody’(‘Wollte man daher den [. . .] einer geometrischen Anschauung entnommenen Ausdruck ‘‘melodische

Linie’’ in die wirklich vorliegenden Verhaltnisse zuruck ubertragen, so hatte man [. . .] von dem ‘‘Treiben’’oder dem ‘‘Zug’’ [zu sprechen], um die immanente Bewegungsempfindung, den lebendigen Willen imMelodischen, herauszufassen’). Part of the irony of Schenker’s usage is precisely that he restores to

Kurth’s term the ‘geometrical’ and visual aspect Kurth wanted to escape by coining it in the first place:Schenker uses ‘Zug’ as a replacement for what he had been calling the Urlinie, as a reference to allbracketed linear progressions between the surface and the Ursatz in his analysis of the Scherzo and Trio

from Beethoven’s op. 101 (Die letzten funf Sonaten [. . .] Op. 101, 36�43). ‘The will of the tones’ is thetitle of Schenker’s first analytical journal, Der Tonwille (see note 33).


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even when they only read it, so that they can grasp its true meaning and thus attain as itwere an inner performance.100

Allowing the text to dictate meaning was a new development. As Ian Bent hasshown, the critical practice of Kretzschmar had gone (typically for Romanticism) inthe other direction, often describing musical moments erroneously according to thetext but accurately according to their sonic impression in performance.101 Halm hadbaulked at Schenker’s notational fixation of concepts such as ‘line’, which for himexisted holistically, prior to and outside any close examination of the notes. Thatmany modern scholars are willing to dismiss such attitudes as ‘imprecise’ is anillustration of how far Schenker’s priorities have been accepted. Even a scholar suchas Robert Snarrenberg, appreciative of Schenker’s more subjective, programmatic(and atypical) interpretations, finally insists that interpretation must be grounded inthe ‘tonal content’, the ‘arrangements of tones crafted by [the] composer’, the‘specific factual situation’ � in other words, the score.102

The pleasure in graphic interconnection took Schenker away from hermeneuticreadings of his graphs and towards the idea, which Hedi Siegel sees embodied in theFunf Urlinie-Tafeln of 1932, that the graph itself could present all that theSchenkerian analyst might want to say.103 The use of notated diagrams as areplacement, rather than a support, for individual interpretations was by no meansubiquitous in Schenker’s work of the 1920s, but it nonetheless had deep roots. Oneof the Urlinie’s earliest aesthetic functions is to render the products of purehermeneutic criticism superfluous or irrelevant � something that was morerhetorically achievable with the resonant spatial ‘depth’ of the Urlinie than withthe relatively traditional, surface-orientated analytical categories of the pre-FirstWorld War Erlauterungsausgaben.104 As Schenker’s 1921 introductory text on the

100 ‘Als oberstes Ziel mubte fur alle Musiker gelten, es auch in ihrer Kunst so weit zu bringen, wie manes z. B. in der Kunst der Sprache gebracht hat, wo Bucher ja nicht ausschlieblich vorgetragen,sondern weit ofter, ja in der Regel nur gelesen werden. Mit anderen Worten: Auch der Vortrag

musikalischer Kunstwerke sollte, obgleich er den auberhalb der Kunst stehenden Laien sicher nurdie einzige Moglichkeit der Teilnahme und des Genusses bietet, gleichwohl nicht das einzige Zielaller musikalischen Ausbildung sein und bleiben [. . .]. Vielmehr sei das Ziel der musikalischen

Bildung, das innere Ohr der Musikbeflissenen zu entwickeln, damit sie ein musikalisches Kunstwerkauch nur lesend schon richtig klingen horen, dessen wahren Sinn begreifen und so gleichsam zueinem inneren Vortrag gelangen.’ Schenker, ‘Vorbemerkung zur Einfuhrung’, Die letzten funfSonaten [. . .] Op. 111, 26�31 (p. 27).

101 Ian Bent, Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1994), ii, 37.102 Robert Snarrenberg, Schenker’s Interpretive Practice (Cambridge, 1997), 7.103 Hedi Siegel, ‘The Pictures and Words of an Artist (‘‘von einem Kunstler’’): Heinrich Schenker’s

Funf Urlinie-Tafeln’, Schenker-Traditionen: Eine Wiener Schule der Musiktheorie und ihreinternational Verbreitung, ed. Evelyn Fink-Mennel and Martin Eybl (Vienna, 2006), 203�19.

104 See Holly Watkins, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann toArnold Schoenberg (Cambridge, 2011), Chapter 5 (‘Heinrich Schenker and the Apotheosis ofMusical Depth’, pp. 163�91).


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Urlinie announced: ‘The so-called poetic idea is also given the lie by the Urlinie.’105

This imaginative impulse towards the formal ‘depths’ of the work obeyed a logic ofits own that virtually determined the analytical development of the Urlinie conceptin advance.

To see the history of the Urlinie in this way is not to succumb to a historicistfallacy of retrospection. It was rather a development foreseen by one of Schenker’scontemporary critics, Paul Carriere, in 1925, reviewing Der Tonwille in the MunichAllgemeine Musikzeitung. Carriere could see only one way in which Schenker couldgive his meandering Urlinien some semblance of necessity, and that would be tocontinue applying the principle of ‘composing out’ (in reverse) until one arrived at akind of musical atom � the Urton:

Schenker does not restrict his sketching (based on movement by seconds) to those passagesin which real progressions by seconds underlie the progress of the music; no, he attemptsto trace his newly discovered principle of form everywhere: that is, he tracks down allpossible progressions by seconds and consequently attains an ever-greater simplificationuntil, at the most highly compressed chain of seconds, the ‘Urlinie’, he stops. � Why hestops precisely there and does not proceed further with his simplification is a mystery. Ifone thought it through systematically, the Urlinie would have to shrink further until it nolonger went up and down but only in one direction; and then consistency would demandthat one did not stop there, but treated the line once more as merely a ‘composed-out’scale degree and melted it down into this scale step, the ‘Urton’.106

In the very same year, Schenker was hypothesizing that ‘the task of the composer iscomposing out a chord’.107 This was a Naturklang or ‘chord of nature’, rather thanan Urton ; an original, irreducible unit almost equivalent to that which Carriere had

105 ‘Durch die Urlinie wird auch die sogenannte poetische Idee Lugen gestraft.’ Schenker, ‘Die Urlinie:Eine Vorbemerkung’, 22; trans. in ‘The Urlinie: A Preliminary Remark’, 21.

106 ‘Schenker beschrankt die Skizzierung mit Hilfe der Sekundschritte nicht auf die Stellen, wo dem

Verlauf reale Sekundgange zugrunde liegen, sondern er sucht das neu entdeckte Formprinzip uberallausfindig zu machen, d.h. er spurt alle moglichen Sekundengange auf und gelangt consequent zuimmer groberer Vereinfachung, bis er bei einem aufs auberste komprimierte Sekundengang, der

‘‘Urlinie’’, halt macht. � Warum er gerade dort halt macht und in der Vereinfachung nicht nochweiter geht, ist nicht erfindlich: konsequent weiter gedacht, wurde die Urlinie zusammenzu-schrumpfen haben, bis sie nicht auf und ab, sondern blob noch in einer Richtung geht, und dannfordert die Konsequenz, dab man auch hierbei nicht stehenbleibt, sondern die Linie wieder nur als

‘‘auskomponierte’’ Stufe betrachtet und sie in diese Stufe als den ‘‘Urton’’ einschmilzt.’ PaulCarriere, ‘Schenkers Urlinie’, Allgemeine Musikzeitung, 52 (1925), 139�40 and 163�5 (p. 140).

107 ‘Sache des Komponisten ist die Auskomponierung eines Klanges.’ Heinrich Schenker, ‘Fortsetzung

der Urlinie-Betrachtungen’, Das Meisterwerk in der Musik: Ein Jahrbuch, 1 (Munich, 1925), 185�200 (p. 188); trans. John Rothgeb as ‘Further Consideration of the Urlinie: I’, The Masterwork inMusic, ed. William Drabkin, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1994), i, 104�11 (p. 104); cf. William Pastille,

‘The Development of the Ursatz in Schenker’s Published Works’, Trends in Schenkerian Research,ed. Allen Cadwallader (New York, 1990), 71�85 (p. 81).


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foreseen, but with the added property of an internal ‘tonal space’ between itsfactors. Carriere could envisage such a conclusion only because Schenker’s Urlinienin Der Tonwille were already constrained by a ‘simplification’ based on anotherpiece of imaginative metaphysics: the ‘progressions by seconds’ were an illustrationof the Leibnizian principle ‘Natura non facit saltum’ (‘Nature does not makeleaps’). The ‘simplification’ did not merely entail ‘hearing at a distance’(‘Fernhoren’) between widely separated tones of the Urlinie � in other words,imagining progressions or connections; it also involved imagining those tonesthemselves. As is well known, there are notes belonging to the Urlinie in Schenker’smature graphs that are not present in the score. This is not a consequence of therestricted number of Urlinie forms in Der freie Satz ;108 rather it is alreadynecessitated by the postulate of linear connection underlying the very earliestUrlinie constructions. Schenker’s reading of the first eight bars of Schumann’sTraumerei is a good example: the fourth note of the Urlinie, G, is present in themusic neither at the higher middle-ground register nor at the obligatory registery ofthe Urlinie (see Figure 2).109

Why was this not a problem for Schenker himself, given his violently expressedantipathy to editorial interventions in texts of the ‘masterworks’? The reason lies inSchenker’s conception of what he was doing in presenting Urlinie analyses. Contraryto the title of Snarrenberg’s book, Schenker did not think of himself as constructingan ‘interpretive practice’ at all. As Snarrenberg acknowledges, Schenker thought ofhis activity as ‘presenting’ (‘vorstellen’), ‘elucidating’ (‘erlautern’) or mirroring the

Figure 2. Schenker’s Ursatz and the ‘raw material of the diminution’ (middle-ground) in Schumann’sTraumerei, from Der Tonwille (1924), 156.

108 Heinrich Schenker, Der freie Satz: Das erste Lehrbuch der Musik (Vienna, 1935).109 Heinrich Schenker, ‘Schumann’s Scenes of Childhood, Op. 15, No. 7: ‘‘Traumerei’’’, trans. Joseph

Lubben, in Der Tonwille, ed. Drabkin, ii, 156, Figure 1.


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already given ‘content’ of works, not as ‘interpreting’ them.110 There was a distinctand rhetorically marked division between this register of analysis and the more‘poetic’ syntheses that Schenker continued to offer into the mid-1920s. The latterwere habitually introduced by the word ‘gleichsam’, ‘as if ’, indicating a desire forpoetic colour quite independent from any claim about musical ‘truth’. Schenker’sanalytical prose in sensu proprio was delivered with absolute certainty, quitedifferently from the provisional ‘readings’ and ‘hypotheses’ in which Schenkeriananalyses are framed by modern scholars. For Schenker, analysis had an ontologicalstatus that outranked not only poetic images, but even the more ‘objective’components of tradition: the texts of the masterworks and the music theory thatstood alongside them. This priority continues to be asserted by modernSchenkerians, and in their preface to Der Tonwille, Ian Bent and William Drabkinwrite: ‘Schenker articulated a position on textual criticism whose fullest realization isperhaps yet to come, namely, that one must have the deepest understanding ofstructure in order to determine the best reading of a musical text.’111

Moreover, Schenker regularly operated in his writings of the 1920s as if the Urliniewere just as firm a theoretical category as the traditional figured basses, Romannumerals and contrapuntal principles that he operated with in his earlier works. TheUrlinie ‘proved’ that a particular reading of the text, or the foreground, was the rightone: ‘That’ � in the repeated, fist-thumping phrase with which he ‘corrects’ thereadings of Beethoven’s op. 110 offered by fellow analyst Walter Engelsmann �‘That is the way it is, and not otherwise.’112 This is a somewhat odd, not to saycircular, argumentative strategy, given that the validity of the Urlinie as a theoreticalconstruct was not even accepted by more than a handful of contemporary theorists.Moreover, since Schenker never addressed the question of why his particularconstruction of an Urlinie was uniquely correct or necessary, he never had an answerto the objection made by Carriere: ‘[Schenker’s] method [. . .] allows one, with alittle ingenuity, to uncover all sorts of Urlinien.’113 The ‘deeper’ one’s ‘under-standing of structure’ becomes, the more alternative readings proliferate. This wouldbecome evident only precisely at the point when Schenker’s theory did becomerecognized by a larger community of theorists � which was also when he was nolonger alive to ‘correct’ their readings.

And yet the lack of an explanation for such persistent ontological instability ishardly to be overcome by a postmodern confession of faith in interpretativepluralism, for that would fail to acknowledge that it was not by such means thatSchenker established his critical authority during his lifetime. It is clear enough to us

110 Snarrenberg, Schenker’s Interpretive Practice, 153.111 Ian Bent and William Drabkin, ‘General Preface’, Der Tonwille, ed. Drabkin, i, pp. v�xiii (p. ix).112 Heinrich Schenker, ‘A Postscript to Beethoven’s Opus 110’, The Masterwork in Music, ed. Drabkin,

i, 99�103 (passim).113 ‘Seine Methode [. . .] gestattet bei einigem Geschick, allerhand Urlinien zum Vorschein zu bringen.’

Carriere, ‘Schenkers Urlinie’, 140.


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that a large part of Schenker’s ‘problem’ consists in not recognizing the essential

intersubjectivity of music-theoretical concepts � that, to cite Nicholas Cook,

clarinets and maracas have an objective existence, but the same cannot be said of accentedpassing notes or semitones or even notes. The existence of these things (if that is the rightword for them) is instead intersubjective, meaning that they exist because the members ofmusical communities have come to an agreement that they should exist.114

By the same token, Schenker’s Urlinie has acquired the appeal that it has because

of the type of analytical imagination he shared with many of his readers, past and

present � it has gradually induced collective agreement. But it has done so in part,

too, by precisely not being presented as an intersubjective or collective ‘useful fiction’,

but rather as a superhuman reality. Schenker’s theory was never conceived merely as

an imaginative exercise in encouraging listeners to hear music in a certain way, as

might have been said of Kretzschmar and Bekker (who, measured by standards of

contemporary public influence, did much better at this task). Rather, Schenker’s

purpose was the establishment of the musical truth: ‘With everything that belongs to

it, that accompanies it, the Urlinie provides truth in the realm of tones, its very own

musical truth.’115 If that truth excluded 99% of people from musical ‘participation’,

then that was something Schenker was quite prepared to accept. He concluded one

of his dismissals of Bekker and Kretzschmar with ‘None of these people and their

vanities matter at all. What matters is one thing and one thing alone: how the

musical nature of a master such as Beethoven was constituted!!’116 In fact, that was

not quite all that mattered to Schenker. His own imagery in the ‘preliminary remark’

makes it clear that the unique ontological stability he attributed to the Urlinieencapsulated a social vision, conjuring up the lost harmonies of an aristocratic

golden age:

In the Urlinie, the composer becomes a seer [. . .]. He assigns his tones a merciful fate fullof agreement between the life of each individual tone and a life that exists above andbeyond their being (like a ‘Platonic idea’ in music), a fate full of breeding and proprietyand order, even in places where uproar, chaos, or dissolution seem to emerge in theforeground.117

114 Nicholas Cook, ‘Writing on Music or Axes to Grind: Road Rage and Musical Community’, Music,Performance, Meaning: Selected Essays (Aldershot, 2007), 307�19 (p. 311).

115 ‘Mit allem, was zu ihr gehort, was sie begleitet, schafft die Urlinie im Reich der Tone Wahrheit,eben die eigene Musikwahrheit.’ Schenker, ‘Die Urlinie: Eine Vorbemerkung’, p. 23; trans. in ‘TheUrlinie: A Preliminary Remark’, 21.

116 ‘Denn auf all diese Menschen und auf all ihre Eitelkeiten kommt es ja gar nicht an. Worauf es aberankommt, ist nur das Eine, das einzig Eine: wie die musikalische Natur eines Meisters, wie z.B.Beethoven beschaffen war!!’ Schenker, Die letzten funf Sonaten [. . .] Op. 109, 56�7.

117 ‘In [der Urlinie] wir der Komponist zum Seher [. . .] er [bescheidet] seinen Tonen ein gnadenreichesSchicksal voll Ubereinstimmung zwischen ihrem Eigenleben und einem uber und hinter ihnen


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The political resonances are obvious. Yet Schenker was so taken with his vision of the

tones themselves as social beings, submitting to the composer as to an ersatz Kaiser,

that he scarcely addresses the real social consequences of his vision of music here.Those consequences emerged more clearly in the contrasting responses of Bekker

and Walter Riezler to Schenker’s work in the early 1920s. Bekker asserted the

participatory rights of the musical layman, and simultaneously made cutting

reference to Schenker’s Ninth Symphony monograph, in writing: ‘I can analyse

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony harmonically and thematically, right down to the last

details, and yet inwardly may stand further from the work than some listener who

knows not the first thing about compositional technique.’118 Schenker’s own

response, left unpublished because Emil Hertzka of Universal Edition was too

embarrassed to print it, tried to set the voice of a one-man music journal against the

most respected newspaper in Germany:

[Bekker] appears to rely for support on the widely read Frankfurter Zeitung, in whoseservices he is engaged. But that � at least as far as it concerns me � is ill-contrivedarrogance since, in the first place, his paper is only a daily newspaper and, secondly, only ademocratic paper. And so I can say boldly that I am stronger than Bekker and his paper �his shield � because I am engaged in the services of the aristocracy of genius.119

Had such openly elitist arguments been all that could be mustered against Bekker,

his support for a lay-orientated critical discourse might never have been undermined.

Objections to hermeneutics gained a certain amount of force when presented as an

attack on an outmoded literary taste: Halm labelled Bekker the representative of a

certain ‘dying genre’ (‘aussterbende Gattung’) of ‘popular journalism’,120 while

Kurth referred disparagingly to the ‘tastelessness’ (‘Geschmacklosigkeiten’) of

hermeneutic discourse.121 (Halm and Kurth’s interventions were, of course,

thoroughly ‘performative’ attempts to guide public taste, rather than diagnoses

pure and simple.) Riezler’s entry into the debate, however, represents a tangible shift

of prestige away from hermeneutic criticism and towards analysis. His work on

Beethoven became the standard biography in German, entering a twelfth edition in

Seienden (als einer ‘platonischen Idee’ in der Musik), ein Schicksal voll Zucht und Sitte undOrdnung selbst dort, wo im Vordergrunde sich Aufruhr, Chaos oder Auflosung zu zeigen scheint.’Schenker, ‘Die Urlinie: Eine Vorbemerkung’, 23; trans. in ‘The Urlinie: A Preliminary Remark’,22.

118 ‘Ich kann Beethovens Neunte harmonisch, thematisch bis auf die letzten Einzelheiten zergliedernund stehe dem Werk innerlich vielleicht ferner als irgendein Horer, der von Kompositionstechniknicht das mindeste weib.’ Bekker, ‘Kritik und Personlichkeit’, Kritische Zeitbilder, 23; quoted in

Heinrich Schenker, ‘Music Criticism’, trans. William Drabkin, in Der Tonwille, ed. Drabkin, ii,161�5 (p. 162).

119 Schenker, ‘Music Criticism’, trans. Drabkin, in Der Tonwille, ed. Drabkin, ii, 165.120 Halm, review of Bekker’s Beethoven, 174.121 Kurth, Bruckner, i, 270.


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1983, whereas Bekker’s, which garnered him an immediate reputation on its

appearance, has not been republished in Germany since 1922. Riezler’s polemical

article ‘The Bekker Case’ (1921) was published in the Suddeutsche Monatshefte, the

organ of the right-wing nationalist group the ‘Young Conservatives’.122 It vigorously

disputed Bekker’s subjective, sociologically founded theory of musical form, set out

in his 1916 book Das deutsche Musikleben (Berlin, 1916). Not only does Riezler refer

confidently to the existence of the ‘musical-artistic facts’ (‘musikalische-kunstlerische

Realitaten’) � and Schenker’s ‘excellent analyses’ (‘ausgezeichneten Analysen’) of

them � but he also believes their recognition has clear consequences for the social life

of music, and who is entitled to participate in it.123 Riezler’s position leads to a kind

of technical fundamentalism. There are ‘the musical’ � those who have been taught

to perceive what is really going on in music; and ‘the unmusical’ � those who have

not. The latter are ‘already eliminated [from the discussion] for the reason that they

are incapable of perceiving the facts’.124 In both music education and criticism, ‘The

technical foundation of the subject may not be abandoned; quite the opposite, it

must be further expanded. To try to do without the most thorough musical training

is impossible.’125

This is one social implication of Schenkerian ideology from which modern

analysis has not distanced itself. Those who would like proof of that can turn to Carl

Schachter, who in 2001 apparently reaffirmed the orthodox Schenkerian separation

of ‘ideology and method’ (to quote the title of a more unorthodox study by Martin

Eybl that recouples these two): ‘[Schenker’s] ideology is in no way an essential

component of the analytic practice.’126 Nevertheless, whatever Schachter might

think about Schenker’s nationalism, he regards other aspects of Schenker’s politics as

no less relevant to twenty-first-century America than they were to 1920s Vienna �specifically, those that have to do with ‘cultural democracy’:

Schenker’s opposition to cultural democracy as the glorification of the lowest commondenominator raises questions that are still current, as can be seen from recent controversiesregarding the National Endowment for the Arts. Whether a populist, anti-elitist societyand government like ours can foster valuable artistic production is doubtful, at least in myview; in any case, recent trends in this country are not encouraging.127

122 Walter Riezler, ‘Der Fall Bekker’, Suddeutsche Monatshefte, 18 (1921), 305�10.123 Ibid., 306.124 ‘Die ‘‘Unmusikalischen’’ schon deshalb ausschalten, weil sie unfahig sind, diese Wirklichkeiten

uberhaupt wahrzunehmen.’ Ibid., 307.125 ‘Die fachliche Grundlage darf nicht verlassen, sie mub im Gegenteil noch fester ausgebaut werden.

Ohne die grundlichste musikalische Bildung geht es nicht.’ Ibid., 310.126 Martin Eybl, Ideologie und Methode: Zum ideengeschichtlichen Kontext von Schenkers Musiktheorie

(Tutzing, 1995); Carl Schachter, ‘Elephants, Crocodiles, and Beethoven: Schenker’s Politics and the

Pedagogy of Schenkerian Analysis’, Theory and Practice, 26 (2001), 1�20 (p. 16).127 Schachter, ‘Elephants, Crocodiles, and Beethoven’, 8.


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Schachter goes on, in a footnote, to pick out ‘a sign of the times’ in the populist

critical discourse or ‘marketing strategies’ used by American orchestras:

Here is the latest brochure of the New York Philharmonic, advertising the Verdi Requiem:‘this choral classic garbs religious celebration in the vivid hues of Tintoretto andMichelangelo as violins weep, drums pound, and voices soar in fervor and ecstasy’.128

Schachter presents this as if it were the last word in classical music’s prostitution ofits own values, a final confirmation of the kind of Spenglerian decline that Schenkerloved to prophesy. Emotionally charged language continues to do duty, just as in

Schenker’s attacks on hermeneutic ‘affect-babblers’ (‘Affektschwatzer’),129 asanalysis’s meretricious Other � the Magdalene to its Virgin, unsullied mother ofmusical truth.

The destruction of critical ‘loose talk’ and unsubstantiated hyperbole has been

constitutive of the legitimacy of analysis as a discipline. Yet while it might be risky tovouch for the author of the New York Philharmonic’s publicity, it was certainly notthe case, as Schenker alleged, that writers such as Bekker and A. B. Marx wrote‘poetic’ criticism because they were ‘factually’ incompetent or could not find theirway around a score. The point of a more literary style of criticism, from E. T. A.

Hoffmann onwards, was that it opened up collective, imaginative participation inmusic to wider circles of society.130 Marx could deal competently in technicalitieswhen he so desired � for instance, when writing a textbook for composers andtheorists � and Bekker made liberal reference to analytical detail in his monographon Mahler.131 If we look only at the ‘heap of broken images’ accumulated on the

surface of their more journalistic prose, we neglect the underlying feeling and instinctfor synthesis which motivated it, and which could unite layman, critic, performerand composer into an aesthetic network of communication capable of functioningon a truly ‘democratic’ scale. Those who experience distaste at Romantic criticalwriting should perhaps ask themselves whether they are reacting to something more

socially significant than amusing period idiosyncrasies.After all, we are still dealing in images today � only ones with less wide a currency.

Analysts reject a style that is too ‘bildlich’; too ‘figurative’ in a literary sense. Yet oftenthey insist on something equally ‘bildlich’ in the alternative sense of ‘graphic’:

dependent on ‘the graph’ yielded by Schenkerian or other methods, which claims thedubiously unexamined and, for a layman, unexaminable status of structural ‘proof ’ �or academic legitimation. (If it is a question, as Bekker alleged, of either being a

128 Schachter, ‘Elephants, Crocodiles, and Beethoven’, 19, note 28.129 Schenker, Die letzten funf Sonaten [. . .] Op. 109, 56.130 See Ulrich Tadday, Die Anf ange des Musikfeuilletons: Der kommunikative Gebrauchswert

musikalischer Bildung in Deutschland um 1800 (Stuttgart, 1993), 104�5.131 Adolph Bernhard Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, praktisch-theoretisch, 2nd edn

(Leipzig, 1841); Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin, 1921).


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‘hermeneut’ or an ‘involuntary hermeneut’ � that is to say, an analyst � then surelygreater self-awareness constitutes the greater virtue.132) Graphs or no, we are certainlymade to feel that our arguments should be backed up by the score. Yet as the Germanword ‘Notenbild’ tells us, even that is really only another kind of ‘image’ (‘Bild’). Thedifference is that it supports the analytically desirable attributes of precision and deicticgroundedness much better than hermeneutic or energetic experiences of an emotional,unstable interiority. When Spitzer, for instance, calls music theory a ‘quasi-graphicsnapshot of the musical dynamic’ and demands ‘the visual, the static, the determinate[. . .] as a base from which to make our metaphorical projections’, the problem goesbeyond a perverse ontology that replaces those attributes of music normally thought souniquely significant to it � its aurality, its dynamism, its escape from determination �with their precise opposites.133 It is far more the assumption that music notationconstitutes the only adequate vehicle for the musical imagination, and that musictheorists therefore ‘really do bring us closer to the ‘‘meaning’’ of music’.134 Thepotential insight of Bekker’s layman ‘who knows not the first thing aboutcompositional technique’ is implicitly ruled out. But the advantages of music theoryand notation in pragmatic communication between composers and performers do notnecessarily translate to advantages in a wider interpretative discourse involving criticsand listeners.135 In neither case do such advantages aid us in the constitution of ‘themeaning’ of music, or ‘musical truth’.136 If, as inhabitants of a pluralist age, we werealready aware of that anyway, then perhaps we should begin to ask which sorts of‘image’ honestly serve our communicative purposes. Our choice of images is not just apragmatic but also a political question; one which, in reversing the critiques of popularhermeneutics that began a century ago, might well begin to put in doubt the presentlegitimacy of music analysis as an institution.

ABSTRACT

This article examines a range of writings on the status of musical interpretation in Austria and

Germany during the early decades of the twentieth century, and argues their relevance to

current debates. While the division outlined by recent research between popular-critical

hermeneutics and analytical ‘energetics’ at this time remains important, hitherto neglected

contemporary reflections by Paul Bekker and Kurt Westphal demonstrate that the success of

energetics was not due to any straightforward intellectual victory. Rather, the images of force

and motion promoted by 1920s analysis were carried by historical currents in the philosophy,

132 Bekker, ‘Was ist Phanomenologie der Musik?’, 35.133 Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, 299.134 Ibid., 2.135 See Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford, 1990), Chapter 3 (‘Knowing and

Listening’, pp. 122�86).136 ‘[The analyst’s] discourse is now widely recognized as fictive, of itself neither more nor less useful

than, say, the fictive programmes of the nineteenth-century critic.’ Jim Samson, ‘Analysis inContext’, Rethinking Music, ed. Cook and Everist, 35�54 (p. 46).


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educational theory and arts of the time, revealing a culturally situated source for twenty-first-century analysis’s preoccupations with motion and embodiment. The cultural relativizationof such images may serve as a retrospective counteraction to the analytical rationalizingprocesses that culminated specifically in Heinrich Schenker’s later work, and more generallyin the privileging of graphic and notational imagery over poetic paraphrase.


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"A Heap of Broken Images"? Reviving Austro-German debates over musical meaning, 1900-1936

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