The blossoms of 'trockne blumen': Music and text in the early nineteenth century

Music Analysis

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 307-345

  Zbikowski, Lawrence M ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949236897     PISSN: 02625245     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2249.00098     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. Kofi Agawu asked a similar question in 'Theory and Practice in the Analysis of the Nineteenth-Century Lied', Music Analysis, 11/i (1992), pp. 3-36. While my argument here draws on Agawu's work, as will soon become evident it also departs from it in significant ways. I should like to acknowledge comments by Agawu on an early version of the theory presented here, as well as helpful comments by Brian Hyer and John Rothgeb on an earlier draft of this article. I should also like to acknowledge the support of The Franke Institute for the Humanities (formerly the Chicago Humanities Institute) at the University of Chicago, where I was able to conduct research basic to this article
2. For a discussion of these settings, and later reworkings of Schubert's setting, see Christopher Howard Gibbs, 'The Presence of Erlkönig: Reception and Reworking of a Schubert Lied' (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1992)
3. Although all of the works I shall discuss here, both literary and musical, use 'trockne' in their titles, the proper word is 'trockene', which may be contracted to 'trock'ne'. In order to be as consistent as possible between published titles, I shall use 'trockne' in this article, with the understanding that it stands for 'trock'ne' throughout. The version of Müller's 'Trockne Blumen' used in this essay is from Wilhelm Müller, Vermischte Schriften, ed. Gustav Schwab (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1830), Vol. 1, pp. 47-9
4. Further examples of the role of conceptual blending in literature, including extended discussions of works by Dante and Marcel Proust, can be found in Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), Chapters 5 and 6
5. Research on conceptual blending and conceptual integration networks is discussed in Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, 'Conceptual Projection and Middle Spaces', Department of Cognitive Science Technical Report 9401 (San Diego: University of California, San Diego, 1994)
6. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, 'Blending as a Central Process of Grammar', in Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language, ed. Adele E. Goldberg (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1996), pp. 113-30
7. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, 'Principles of Conceptual Integration', in Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, II, ed. Jean-Pierre Koenig (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1997)
8. Gilles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
9. Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, 'Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression', Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 10/iii (1995), pp. 183-204
10. Turner, The Literary Mind
11. Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, 'Conceptual Integration in Counterfactuals', in Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, II, ed. Koenig
12. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, 'Conceptual Integration Networks', Cognitive Science (1998). There is also a World Wide Web site for conceptual blending at: http://www.wam.umd.edu/∼mturn/WWW/blending.html. Throughout this article technical terms are given in bold when they are first introduced
13. The theory of mental spaces is developed in Gilles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language, 2nd ed., with a foreword by George Lakoff and Eve Sweetser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
14. Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language
15. Gilles Fauconnier and Eve Sweetser (eds.), Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
16. An important exception is the approach suggested by Nicholas Cook in his Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). However, Cook's approach, while valuable, is intended as a pragmatic approach to multimedia, without recourse to recent work in cognitive theory
17. From here on, I follow Susan Youens's excellent work on the origins and historical context of Die schöne Müllerin, which is reported in three of her publications: 'Behind the Scenes: Die Schöne Müllerin Before Schubert', 19th-century Music, 15/i (1991), pp. 3-22
18. Schubert: Die Schöne Müllerin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
19. and Schubert, Müller, and Die Schöne Müllerin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
20. Another important source has been Graham Johnson's copious notes for his recording of the cycle. See Johnson, 'Die Schöne Müllerin - the Poems and Their Background', in Die Schöne Müllerin, D795, CD (London: Hyperion Records, 1996), CDJ 33025
21. The process of metaphorical extension I refer to here is of the sort discussed by George Lakoff in 'The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor', in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed., ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 202-51
22. I have discussed Lakoff's and related work in 'Metaphor and Music Theory: Reflections from Cognitive Science', Music Theory Online, 4/i (January 1998)
23. Recent work in metaphor theory was a point of departure for Fauconnier and Turner's work on conceptual blending; see Turner and Fauconnier, 'Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression', pp. 183-5
24. However, it is unclear what motivated Klein's choice of poet. On 15 December 1822, Müller wrote a letter to Klein praising his settings, and asking if Klein would be interested in setting more of his poetry; the text of the letter can be found in Carl Koch, Bernhard Klein (1783-1832): Sein Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig: Oscar Brandstetter, 1902), p. 34, n. 8. Given the tone of the letter, it seems unlikely that Müller was an active participant in the selection of texts for the 1822 collection of songs
25. Here I am drawing on the notion of phrase rhythm used by William Rothstein in his Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music (New York: Schirmer, 1989)
26. In this connection, see Zoltán Kövecses, Emotion Concepts (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990)
27. The motto of Heinrich Schenker's Der freie Satz, for instance, is 'Semper idem sed non eodem modo' ('Always the same, but not in the same way'). For work by Meyer and Narmour, see Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)
28. and Eugene Narmour, The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures: The Implication-Realization Model (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)
29. and The Analysis and Cognition of Melodic Complexity: The Implication-Realization Model (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)
30. See, for instance, V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)
31. and Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994)
32. For references to work on metaphorical projection, see n. 16 above. For work on figurative language, see Albert N. Katz, Cristina Cacciari, Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., and Mark Turner (eds.), Figurative Language and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)
33. For work on discourse style, see Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), Part 1
34. Roman Ingarden argues that, when repetition occurs in literature, it is experienced as a musical element. See Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, ed. Jean G. Harrell, trans. Adam Czerniawski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 95
35. Kant's definition of the beautiful - 'Beauty is the form of purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of a purpose' - occurs at the conclusion of his Third Moment in the Analytic of the Beautiful. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard, reprint, 1892 (New York: Hafner, 1951), p. 73
36. David Lewin made a similar point in connection with Schubert's 'Die Post', from Der Winterreise. Lewin noted that an actor following the reading of the poem indicated by Schubert's music would declaim the text for the song in one way, while another actor, ignorant of Schubert's reading, would declaim it in quite another way. See David Lewin, 'Auf dem Flusse: Image and Background in a Schubert Song', in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 128