Queer theory in sonata form: exploring homogenous motivic development
Music analysis in the West situates itself largely around the model of Sonata form. Inasmuch, a surprisingly vast amount of understanding around musical landmarks and procedures rely on the demarcations presented by adherence to the formal boundaries, from the cellular levels of motivic formations through to the large structural unifying teleological mappings of an entire 4 movement sonata work.
For example, modulations would be imperceptible if the motive was not announced strictly at equidistant transpositions. When we compare music of the Arab tradition, for instance, against the music of the Western tradition, analysis makes us aware of just how remarkably idiosyncratic a phenomenon such as modulation belongs to the West. In Arabic music, for instance, there is always a sense in which a centralized scale member creates an axis of gravitational correspondence over an extended period of time, and which controls the relationship of consonances and dissonances to that central tone by means of a drone enactment. To Arab theory, this tone is designated as the Yakāh(Touma, 1996: Loc 295). To be sure, this is not foreign to Western theoretical discourse by any means, who utilizes a tonic and scale degree members which have rules of hierarchical ordering by which, through a series of contrapuntal layering and the adherence to voice-leading aesthetics, has mutated into a secondary texturing through the ordering of triadic elements called chords, by which the constituent notes form a more taut and permeable fabric. It can be taken even closer semblance by considering the importance of pedal-points and their consequent importance to Schenkerian thought. Here the semblance might end, however, when we consider that any frequency that is mathematically doubled in Western theory is considered an octave, and inasmuch denotes it as equivalent to the prior corresponding frequency at half its value, and thus abstracts away any real and perceived differences in those frequencies as autonomous identities. The octave, then, makes no distinction between whether a piece is in C4, C6, or C2 -that is, it does not consider it’s range- when establishing that a key is in C major(Straus, 2016: 1). While this aesthetical decision renders octaves as something that our mental faculties process as homogeneous, such distinction naturally implies a new parameter; range. Compare the two notated versions of the melody from Ah! Vous Dirai-je, Maman (Twinkle Twinkle Little Star), and play them each at the piano.
Figure 1: Ah! Vous Dirai-je, Maman contained within one octave
Figure 2: Ah! Vous Dirai-je, Maman calling octave equivalence into question.
As can be immediately comprehended, octaves are not, in reality, equivalent. Ethnomusicologist Habib Hassan Touma draws attention to this distinction:
‘The function of a tone depends not upon its absolute pitch but upon its position within the scale and its distance from its neighboring tone’(Touma, 1996: Loc 294). We should pause for clarification; the equivalent of the Western tonic, in the Arabic system lies, outside of the eponymous designation of a scale. C major has C as its tonic, where, as in the Arab system the lowest tone is not necessarily the tone in which all the other tones have a gravitational relationship toward1. Furthermore, where in the Western system all scale degrees define their relationship to the gravity by which they enforce on the tonic, in the Arabic system, that gravitation is moveable2. In other words, the modes of Arabic music, and indeed of many localized identities of music -both indigenous folk, and sophisticated ‘classical’ forms- globally do not conceive of tonic, and the contrasting dominant and subdominant functions as Western music does3. Touma continues that as the registers land on the higher octaves, they are not considered equivalent:
‘The lowest tone of the scale corresponds to the lowest tone of the singer’s register and is called yakāh, the corresponding next higher octave is called nawā, and the second higher octave ramal tūtī. The modes are, as a rule, named after a particularly characteristic tone of the scale, which only in rare cases is the first tone of the scale’(Touma, 1996: 294).
1 This is surely the result of the leading-tone which is then artificially reproduced in the so-called Harmonic Minor mode, in which that leading-tone leads upward as a tension and resolves into the relaxed state of a gesture that promotes finality; one which echoes the original tone of origin. Hence the phenomenon of the tonic and octave equivalence are interdependent, locked into, and related to each other through symbiotic bond.
2 It is of course true that we might move the gravitational pull by means of modulation, but this again enforces the idea that modulation is the unique development of a mental conception of tonic as permanently fixed
3 Although, through the proliferation of radio and recording technologies, most localized traditions of mutated to superimpose the traditional on to these functional pillars as part of a natural proclivity to the nature of sound, rather than the intellectual distinction of academic European philosophies.
If this were true of Western theoretical conception, then C4, C5 and C6 would all represent specific, autonomous landmarks on the way to an ever distancing projection away from the ‘tone’ which is, again, not the lowest tone of the range. If this were the case, there could be no modulation perceived to the western ear, where a theme sounds first in C major, then in G major, A minor, and later in Eb major. According to the Arab system, these would simply be melodic fragments that bear little similarity perhaps save motivic contour, for there is no parameter which cancels previous relationships to one centralized tone, and reinterprets them to another centralized tone. It helps here to consider the difference between a sequence which is said to be a destabilizing effect to key center; the motivic contour is present, while the sense of gravity toward one key is all but lost. Only octave equivalence can force this type of structural hearing. We should be humble to conclude then, that, as outsiders to indigenous repertoire, we will always listen with Western ears that lock us out from the structural hearing required to hear the music as it is perceived by the localized composer and audience. In other words, through our hearing, we subjugate the experience of performance to a colonized interpretation acceptable to our Western ear. How could we not? It would seem imperative that a de-colonial criticism might help to establish the understanding of a work so that the aesthetic experience can be more pure, and indeed more enjoyable, by removing the barriers that keep us locked out of that experience through our superimposition of Western aesthetical theories.
We might began by distilling idiosyncratic elements to find basic and universal tenants of musical enjoyment. Consider the establishment of cultural normatives which imply expectations, while artistic creativity implies negation, reinterpretation, delay, or cancelation of those expectations. The 21st century British connoisseur of music, then, can not likely have the same aesthetic experience as the 21st century Middle Eastern connoisseur of music, and surely, as diachronic, regional, and socio- economic parameters further confine the aesthetic understanding to compartmentalized experiences, we can be assured that as musicologists strive to provide equality of representation to global musics, equality of experience will always remain elusive to some extent, unless fascist procedures force audiences to politicize the communal reception and the personal contemplation of any give work. Hence another parameter is presented in terms of the ethics of the audience experience.
We may also find that even inherent theories may yet still keep us locked out of our own cultural experience of our own representative repertoire by the misrepresentation or utter silence of marginalized voices that remained unheard in the historical account. Let us briefly change our perspective to examine the quintessential formulations of the Western tradition; The Sonata, and its derivative form which has undoubtedly shaped the way we taxonomically categorize, process, and interpret material.
The origin of the term Sonata originally was used to denote a piece that contrasted from the more prevalent, and culturally appropriate vocal form of the Cantata, which dominated European musical until the 18th century, and even long before Europe was unified as a summation of nation states under Christendom. However, the elements that would come to define the formal considerations of the sonata were developed long before they were present in the work of the 18th century masters of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
In sonata form, a first theme is initiated in a home key; the key of the tonic. After which, a motivic element that has been liquidated from that theme is treated to a series of transpositional sequences which establishes the motivic element as important by its relief from harmonic boundaries as it destabilizes the sense of tonic as a central governing tone. When the energy has been dissipated through means of a medial cesura, a secondary theme is employed to stand in contrast of the first(Hepokoski and Darcy, 2006: 23-40). This secondary theme has been rightfully adjusted to be known as the
Subordinate Theme, by the music theorist William Caplin in his seminally influential Classical Form. Here he states, ‘Today, of course, we generally reject the typical nineteenth-century position, which, by focusing on melodic-motivic design, held that a dynamic, “masculine” main theme stands in opposition to a lyrical, “feminine” subordinate theme’(Caplin, 1998: 97). But even Subordination carries with it the connotation of a theme that must be dominated, and certainly Sonata form seems to suggest as much, where, after a dramatic conflict of interest between motivic elements destabilizing power structures in the middle of a development section, the main theme emerges triumphantly, overtaking the subordinate theme in the recapitulation by forcing it into the tonic key where it is governed, controlled, and brought to resolution. Jacques Derrida, in his deconstructionist masterpiece, Of Grammatology, questions the usage of feminine labels as a usage of property:
‘The property of man is announced from the double possibility of liberty and of the express anticipation of death. The difference between human desire and animal need, between relationship with the woman and relationship with the female, is the fear of death’(Derrida, 1974: 200). This of course, is in response to Rousseau’s observations in Discourse of Inequality, ‘The only good that he [the animal] recognizes in the universe are food, a female, and sleep: the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain, and not death; for the animal will never know what it is to die; and the knowledge of death, and its terrors, is one of the first acquisitions that man has made in departing from an animal state’(Rousseau, 1754: 28).
But if the evolution of man from an animal state to a human state is substantiated through the transformative mutation of awareness and sensitivity, then at some point it would be logical to assume that the identity of being feminine might be liberated from the grasp of its label as property for pleasure, and a condition to be dominated by the contrasting masculine. Inasmuch, Sonata form might derive its dramaturgy and internal formal conflicts divorced from binary dialects proposed by main and subordinate themes, where an interpretation might yield equally convincing results through the more appropriate self-realization narratives posited by Derrida, and Levinas. Indeed, Caplin suggests that ‘the frequent absence of such contrasting melodies in works of the classical composers, especially those of Haydn, has led most theorists to abandon melodic dualism as an essential element of classical form’(Caplin, 1998: 97). In such a reading, we understand that the composer has supplied a theme, a single strain of musical DNA, that will generate the development of itself. Caplin -though not consciously intending to- reveals an exquisite point to the narrative of gender/sexual labels in music:
‘Many books on musical form begin by discussing the very smallest units of formal organization, a collection of several notes usually termed a motive.(The terms “cell” and “germ” are frequently encountered as well). The impression is that a composition is constructed out of tiny building blocks (often just a single interval formed by two notes), which represent the fundamental units of formal structure for the work’(37).
There are many biological terms we see embedded in these descriptions such as ‘cell’ and ‘germ’ which ‘motivates’ development and gives birth to identity of the structures at play in the Sonata. For Rousseau, that development was linked to sexual desires, and there is much to suggest that here ‘cell’ and ‘germ’ could equally be understood as ‘seed.’ However, Caplin is quick to elucidate that such a reading gives the impression that it is only the cell that generates itself, which it can not. It needs sexual union with the other(Levinas establishes identity by the acknowledgment of the other) in order that some greater, transcendental principal emerges from the union, and thus reveals a revelation greater than the themes engaged in the opposition and brief climactic union. As Nietzsche suggests, ‘the continuous development of art is bound up with the duplexity of Apollonian and the Dionysian: in like
manner as procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual conflicts with only periodically intervening reconciliations’(Nietzsche, 1872:1). However, Caplin asserts that such a means of formal development is not only possible, it prevails heavily in the literature. ‘This view of form has some merits(particularly for late romantic compositions by Brahms, for example), but it does not apply well to classical compositions’(Caplin, 1998: 37). We know also that Caplin attributes this self- generative cell building to Haydn as a progenitor, as was just briefly mentioned as a cause for the abandonment of melodic dualism, and of course, Schoenberg attaches himself to the cell as the basis of composition as a leading principle of the second-viennese school. For Caplin, what does not apply well is essentially that the smallest units of composition- the cell- work as identifying agents that are engaged with other cells and from those ideas are linked to phrases, which make up themes. It should be understood that Caplin is not wrong. But such a reading is only helpful for a particular aesthetic pertaining to a certain style, or era, and thus, a listener who is not aware of anything except the traditional reading will not hear the expectations, nor the evasions and developments put fourth unless that listener engages the work at different levels of interpretation4.
Beethoven was the most prominent composer to draw our attention to the cell as self-generating through the inarguably monumental Fifth symphony in which the rhythmic cell of 3 shortly articulated notes and 1 sustained note -first as a major third, and then a minor third- represents all sorts of ambiguous parameters; Does the implied tritone belong to C minor with a raised leading-tone, as 2 and 4, or as 7 and 2 in Eb Major? As each one enters through new transpositions, harmony becomes a transitory phenomenon. To begin a symphony, or a Sonata form, where the harmony is not deliberately announced at the onset throws the listener immediately off of a cliff -so to speak- in which no expectation can be made because no traditional signpost can be established. By the time a key is firmly announced, we are already cadencing in a secondary key of the closing section of the exposition, and thus, the material from the opening until the closing of the exposition is laid in analytical abeyance. The only thing for the listener to latch on to is the cell itself. The only thing generating the music forward is the cell itself. The replication of the cell creates the strands of harmonic implications, and as the cell itself begins to mutate it brings contrast to itself.
4 This draws our attention poignantly to the otherwise unarticulated distinctions between the Western and Middle-Eastern connoisseur of musical aesthetics.
Figure 3: The ‘cell’ in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the initial forms of permutation in transpositions.
Alan Forte observed an analogous procedure in the music of Brahms.
‘With the exception of a few recent studies, little analytical work of any depth has been published on the music of Brahms... It is not difficult to ascertain the reason for this: Brahms’s music, even when ostensibly simple, is full of complications and projects unusual structures which have no counterparts in the music of the Classical masters generally regraded as his model repertory’(Forte, 1983: 471).Of course, Forte is misguided in this interpretation; As we have just witnessed, these very counterparts happen with Beethoven, albeit they’re considered ‘revolutionary’ where as in the music of Beethoven’s teacher, Haydn, they were standard. Indeed, it is Mozart who presented the novelty of secondary themes to contrast against first(a practice that was adopted by Beethoven in his early Sonata forms). But Forte’s words are symptomatic of the generalizations posited in the theoretical world up to the end of the last century, perhaps responsible for its silence or blindness to an analysis that refuses to examine themes outside of the normative contrasts of main and subordinate, first and secondary, masculine and feminine parameters. In other words, Brahms music is hard to analyze because it is self-generating. Forte explains that Brahms’ music ‘often departs from Schenkerian5 paradigms in order to cope with special features of Brahms’ music. In particular, it emphasizes the primal importance of the motive- to be construed in a sense somewhat broader than traditionally conceived- as a determinant of musical gestures at the levels beyond the scale of the foreground’(471).
5 By Schenkerian, he means harmonic ordering of dominant and tonic, of which themes are treated by their hierarchical orderings of importance.
We must briefly turn our attention to self-generation as a gender neutral derivative to provide a theoretical context for the extrapolations I will present in the next section in accordance to an aesthetic that drives theoretical understanding. According to the Bible, Eve was extracted from the rib of Adam, and thus Eve is the concept of Adam knowing himself intimately by experiencing himself through a type of hyper-awareness. As a cell, Adam has generated himself, who is his intimate self as her(For Levinas this is the understanding of self-identity through awareness of the other)(Levinas, 1961). In such a reading, sexual union comes only after self-generation. According to the apostle Paul Jesus, as Messiah represents the last Adam:
‘So it is written: "The first man Adam became a living being" the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven’ 1 Corinthians 15:45-48.
We would be remiss not to notice that in the biblical narratives the names of important players also represent iconic representations of embodied archetypes. When Paul refers to Jesus as the ‘Last Adam’ he can only mean to represent an archetype; No one, not Christian, nor Jewish, archeological, academic, philosophical, or historical scholars disagree on this point; The Last Adam, as represented by Paul, suggests a state of finality of the human condition. Francesca Ferrando suggests that this state of paradise is rooted in the hyperbolic forms of humanistic exceptionalism, moral anthropocentrism and absolutism. She draws attention to the fact that as humanistic metrics, they would no longer cease to be desirable to the post-human(the Last Adam) condition, and as such, technology becomes the drive to fulfill desires(Ferrando, 2019: Loc 915). Such desires are not fulfilled through sexual means to the posthuman condition; they are rooted in Rousseau's animal and human conditions. In other words, through technology, fulfillment of desires may become aided but ultimately are self-generated(albeit through aid of digital technology). The spirit of which Paul describes, through a posthuman reading would consider technology the means for the aura of the individual to escape the confines of his sexually derived, biological parameters which result in an ultimate repression of life by means of continual degradation until death. Hence, the Christ figure represents full liberty from any repression, from any desire as a biological necessity; In essence Jesus represents the ability to choose life, and paradise; a concept that is subjective to the autonomous liberty of the one making the choice. Renaissance artists attempted to convey the theme of the fulfillment of human conditions by depicting Jesus as androgynous; both the male and female are subsumed into one where as the essence of the transcended soul is one both male and female, no longer reliant on biological transmission for life, and self-contained; self-generated.
Art Scholar H. Valdes-Socin details a strikingly vibrant example:
‘The androgyne (from the Greek andros, “man”, and gune, “woman”) is a creature that is half male and female. The Bible states: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). According to the Genesis, the first man created was androgynous, so Adam gave birth to Eve.
The Museum of Notre-Dame à la Rose, in Belgium, has among its collections an astonishing and unique work of its kind. The painting, from the end of the sixteenth century, represents “the Lamentation around the remains of Christ”. The work, probably commissioned by Augustinians nuns, was restored during the twenty-first century. Unexpectedly, restoration discovered an androgynous Christ, occulted under a layer of paint on the upper torso. Indeed, we observe some additional female characteristics of Christ, such as breasts, and feminine curves. Jesus finger, delicately placed on his nipple, further reinforces the symbolism of divine spiritual breastfeeding’(Valdes-Socin, 2020).
Figure 4: Oil on wood (103 cm × 73.5 cm). “The Lamentation around the remains of Christ”. Anonymous painter, probably painted at the end of XVI century. Museum of Notre-Dame à la Rose Hospital, Lessines, Belgium.
Here we must conclude that any revisionist history that may be leveraged as criticism against this stance needs to take into account that for artists of antiquity, the philosophers of posthuman futurism, and the words of Paul himself, Christ represents a state where ‘there is no longer male and female for those in Christ’ Galatians 3:28. Or as Jesus asserts in Matthew 22:30, men and women will be like Angels(without the biological need for pro-creation) at the moment of eternal resurrection.
All of this points to a condition of self-fulfillment, by means of self-discovery. Which can be a narrow path; a door who few find, as Jesus posits. And thus, such a reading presents us a different analysis for formal considerations in music. But if we were to return again to the biological identity in which these archetypes manifest themselves most clearly; where the generation of identity is not passed through DNA and sexual relationships but through the understanding of decisions that are based in self- awareness, of choosing who to harmonize with, rather than who to dominate and subordinate into harmony, the sexual, and by that I mean biological condition that best represents such an interpretation is the homosexual identity. An identity that comes at the dissonance of discovery of self, rather than the domination of the ‘other.’ As a means of representation in aesthetic, a homosexual theme would be one that derives all of its own material, and generates the meaning that is embedded from both implicit inception and explicit execution. A theme can be considered to be repressed under the material of its own projections, amassed by cultural expectations, attempting to force it into one key or another; Its identity of course lays outside of the parameters of the tonality that attempts to define it. It is not difficult to establish analogous relations to myriad peoples of the LGBTQ+ community who have described an ‘in the closet’ experience that resulted in the eventual realization of self identity even at the cost of an amelioration of social norms.
The American poet, cultural critic and LGBTQ+/Queer Theory contributor, in his book, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire laments, ‘In shame I will find paradise’(Koestenbaum, 1993: 3). Tony Kushner, reflecting on these passages concludes that Koestenbaum ‘has already let us know that the only obtainable paradise is temporary, transitory, bounded by absence, longing, sorrow, is no paradise. Paradise exists only as the object of an unending yearning... The rescue, the redemption, the lamenting of that which has been buried, all through the medium of an ecstatic prose bordering on, often becoming poetry: central to Koestenbaum’s politics is deep belief in art as agency’(5).
Using Kushner’s description as the point of investigative departure, we can understand the development in both Beethoven and Brahms as a cell of single, autonomous identity that is repressed simply by the weight of its own uncertainty. Like the transcendence of the Christ figure, binary complications of theme and counter theme, or female and male, or dominate and subordinate elements act merely as illusionary transient perturbations to an embedded realization of self. The beginning of a motif can then be considered ‘buried’, as Kushner suggests, gives way to a paradise that is obtainable through temporary and transitory harmonies which give impressions of context, but are never established as totalitarian in themselves. Such music is bounded by absence more than it is confirmed
by assertiveness. No where is such an interpretation so readily available as in Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (L. 86). Debussy of course was not shy about overt homosexual themes in his work. He set the text of Pierre Louÿs’ Les Chansons de Bilitis ; an erotic collection of lesbian poetry that Louÿs roughly translated from Ancient Greek. The Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun itself is embedded with an erotic program depicting a mythological creature who, in the heavy heat of a late afternoon loses himself in the hypnotic melodies of his own flute and begins to hallucunate about nymphs and naiads until he finally drifts into a deep sleep. We might spot familiar narratives in the description of the poem by Stephane Mallarmé. Here, the nymphs represent the identity of the other which must be sexually dominated, but as illusionary or transient visions of his onsetting delirium. Sleep both biblically and poetically is used to denote a type of transcended moment of death when paradise, or total awareness becomes available to the dreamer of life. Harmonically, Debussy builds much of his material from symmetrical collections such as the hexatonic whole-tone scale as to avoid a sense of leading-tone or progressions. In this way, Debussy divorces harmony from function and thus utilizes the agent of dominance in the classical aesthetic to impressionsitic colorings of melodic
importance. Furthermore, Debussy’s fleeting harmonic gestures represents a viewpoint of soceital norms from the viewpoint of the autnomous identity of the cell. For the cell, all harmonic keys present a vague and attenuated classification that is undesirable for the identity of the cell. The main theme itself quietly permeates the silence as the prelude opens. Composer Michael Norris finds at least 21 examples of transformative generation from the singular idea; Here the only competition regards the theme as struggling with its own identity and in the process developing:
Figure 5: The head motive developed: 21 examples. These do not present an exhaustive list of the motive, but simply the most prominent. It is enough to suggest Debussy's process of self-generating motives.
While in other layers of the orchestral textures, the theme has been inverted or retrograded to provide contrapuntal material such as the inversion of the opening theme at measure 13 in the French horns.
Figure 6: Theme from the Prelude inverted as a counter-statement of theme. A form of self-generation of materials.
Despite the theme being the only cell by which materials are generated, Debussy is capable of demarcating three large sections of formal distinction(not ulike Sonata form). Of course, it would be Arnold Schoenberg who would determine that multiple cells could work in tandem to create a tone-row that would be capable of transmitting entire formal structures while maintaining precisely controlled parameters in all the parts. Schoenberg himself was of the highest caliber as a music theorist, and as such, obsessed about the most meticulous details of form and the intergrated aspects of motives, harmony and melodic formations. Much of his understanding came from his appreciation of Brahms, from which he discovered the cell, and Beethoven of which he discovered the Sentenal phrase.
In conclusion, this essay has provided more than enough evidence to consider the benefits of utilizing critical art theories within post-modern discourse to approach works with an egalitarian and democratic scope of aesthetic appreciation and representation. The vastness of such an undertaking can only produce a greater acceptance of historically favored art, while opening the door to the marginalized and forgotten art of groups whose narrative has been ignored by the traditional view of historic survey. Furthermore, the revisionist tendencies that might be superimposed on traditional works of art may yield new levels of deep and sensitive understanding of the artists who made these works. More times than not, these artists themselves were under the same censorships that authoritative bodies placed upon society as a whole, and therefore, such constraints do not reflect the population nor their understanding, but the transparent prejudice of a small oligarchy. It is surely uncontested that what has become part and parcel of artistic signature has been the embedding of symbolic representations as means of deictic interposition to both satisfy the censors of the age while retaining representation, if not intention, for the benefit of acknowledgement with current audiences and toward the discovery of future generations. In the introduction to his essay The Archeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault expresses a sentiment that I will close this essay with:
‘For many years now historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the irreversible processes, the constant readjustments, the underlying tendencies that gather force, and then suddenly reversed after centuries of continuity, the movements of accumulation and slow, saturation the great silent, motionless bases that traditions history has covered with a thick layer of events. The tools that enable historians to carry out this work of analysis are partly inherited and partly of their own making: models of economic growth, quantitative analysis of market movements, accounts of demographic expansion and contraction, the study of climate and its longterm changes, the fixing of sociological constants, the description of technological adjustments and of their spread and continuity. These tools have enabled workers in the historical field to distinguish various sedimentary strata; linear successions, which for so long had been the object of research, have given way to discoveries in depth. From the political mobility at the surface down to the slow movements of material civilization, ever more levels of analysis have been established: each has its own peculiar discontinuities and patterns; and as one descends to the deepest levels, the rhythms become broader’(Foucault, 1972: 1-2)
Said simply, as the political and socio-economic considerations of each era bring forth new criteria by which the historical record is examined, new modes of analysis must be utilized to consider the history of the marginalized who has survived undetected, and whose story has remained untold hitherto. It is high-time that we be bold enough to consider their stories through their lenses and alternative, concealed aesthetical formulations -their frame of reference- if we are to establish a proper egalitarian reading of the attributes, concerns, and philosophies underlying the cultures that we have inherited and are responsible to represent in our own research as musicologists.
References:
Caplin, W. E. (1998) Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Derrida, J. (1974) Of Grammatology. Edited by G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press.
Ferrando, F. (2019) Philosophical Posthumanism (Theory in the New Humanities). London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Forte, A. (1983) ‘Motivic Design and Structural Levels in the First Movement of Brahms’ String Quartet in C Minor’, The Musical Quarterly, 69(4), pp. 471–502.
Foucault, M. (1972) The Arcaeology of Knowledge. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc.
Hepokoski, J. and Darcy, W. (2006) Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century
Sonata. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press.
Koestenbaum, W. (1993) The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. De Capo Press.
Levinas, E. (1961) Totality and Infinity, British Medical Journal. Edited by A. Lingis. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press. doi: 10.1136/bmj.2.990.973.
Nietzsche, F. (1872) The Birth of Tragedy. Edited by W. A. Haussmann. Digireads.com Publishing. Rousseau, J.-J. (1754) A Discourse on Inequality. Philosophical Library/Open Road.
Straus, J. N. (2016) Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory. New York London: W.W. Norton and Company. Touma, H. H. (1996) The Music of the Arabs. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press.
Valdes-Socin, H. (2020) ‘The androgyny of Christ’, Journal of Endocrinological Investigation.