15. Leonard B. Meyer on the shift
from the 18th to 19th centuries of seeing sonatas as
patterned on scripts vs developed by plans
In addition to being somewhat humorless, and
committed to a philosophy of organicism in “how things are made”, Romantic
music was very committed to plans. The
difference between following a script and having a plan is not at all subtle
and Meyer only touches upon those differences.
As I’ve done before, I’ll quote him at some length:
STYLE AND MUSIC: THEORY,
HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
LEONARD B. MEYER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
PRESS
COPYRIGHT (C) 1989 BY
LEONARD B. MEYER
ISBN 0-226-52152-4
page 225
... Organicism, which
posits the naturalness and virtues of gradual transformation, encourages the
emergence of a syntactic gesture from earlier materials; such emergence, at the
same time, tends to disguise the presence of the conventional.
page 231
Of the many factors serving
to disguise the presence of schemata in nineteenth century music, perhaps none
is more obvious than magnitude. ...
Magnitude tends to mask
schemata, --especially those defined by syntactic relationships--because of the
constraints of aural memory. ...
page 245-246
... While music of the Classic period employs plan-based patternings,
these are almost always coordinated with and dominated by syntactic scripts. In
the nineteenth century, the situation is more or less reversed: what had been
specific syntactic scripts tend to be subsumed within or transformed into
general plans. For instance, from this very broad point of view, the history of
the practice and theory of sonata form during the nineteenth century might be
interpreted as the transformation of a script--a tonally defined hierarchic
schema of slots--into a thematic plan, often of a dialectic or narrative sort
(thesis/antithesis --> synthesis; opposition/conflict ---. resolution). [emphasis added] More generally, as suggested earlier (and argued
later), the role of the secondary parameters in the shaping of musical forms
and processes becomes increasingly important during the course of the
nineteenth century. The forms and processes thus shaped are based on plans, not
on scripts.
footnote 62
This calls attention to a
relationship that may be more than coincidental; as the relative importance of
scripts declines and that of plans increases, programs (which quite literally
provide scripts) become more common.
The difference between a script and a plan can be put as simply as
this—you can go off script any time you want but once you stray from your plan
you need a new plan. This is why I am
convinced that a fusion of popular American styles with classical forms is not
something anyone steeped in any of the Romantic ideologies regarding music will
be capable of imagining. By contrast, I
have found that early music specialists ranging from the figured bass era to
the galant era to even medieval music all seem to recognize that improvisation
is part and parcel of those styles and that conceptual overlaps with
contemporary popular styles are relatively easy to imagine. It seems to be the Romantics and those
musicians committed to some form of Romanticism, who insist that the divide
between the divine high art music and the lowly pop music drivel cannot
possibly be bridged.
I trust by now it’s obvious how wrong I think those people
are. What to a Romantic would be
anathema, imagining that themes and transitions can be fitted into slots that
correspond to points in a script, is exactly what I’ll be doing to demonstrate
how a ragtime sonata can be composed. I
have Rochberg’s concept of time-space to even help visualize what such a script
could look like. The visual metaphor can
be a musical train assembled by way of cars hauled by an engine, or a row of
wooden blocks for which temporal-spatial correspondences between a Joplin style
rag and a Haydn-style sonata movement can be explored.
As Richard Taruskin put it in his Oxford
History of Western Music, it’s ironic that the archetypal composer of the
“textbook” sonata form, Haydn, so rarely ever actually wrote “textbook”
sonatas.
The Oxford History of Western
Music
Richard Taruskin
Oxford University Press;
Revised ed. edition (July 27, 2009)
volume 2
ISBN-10: 0195384822
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-538482-6
… The discrepancy between
Haydn’s own culminating and epitomizing symphonic movement and the later
academic description of “sonata form” is an integral part of the history of
nineteenth-century music and music education, but it ought not color our
understanding of eighteenth-century musical style. For Haydn, and his audience,
the sonata form was made intelligible through a tonal, not a thematic, contrast
(page 584)
Learning that the composer who supposedly
“made the rules” never really followed them can be an ear-opening experience,
but it can also make you really angry at your music teachers if they ever
taught you what Adorno warned Americans to never teach, that Haydn
“standardized” sonata forms.
Why am I focusing on Haydn? Let me quote
Charles Rosen on Haydn:
The Classical Style: Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded Edition)
Charles Rosen
Copyright (c) 1997, 1972, 1971
by Charles Rosen
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 0-393-040208
ISBN 0-393-31712-9 pbk
By 1790, Haydn had created and
mastered a deliberately popular style. The immensity of his success is
reflected in the volume of his production in the next ten years, the decade
after the death of Mozart. … Today when Haydn is almost a connoisseur’s
composer, whose music cannot compete at the box office with that of Mozart or
Beethoven, this atmosphere of enormous popular success must be borne in mind in
order to understand the late works, above all the symphonies and the oratorios.
There have been composers who were as much admired and others whose tunes were
as much whistled ad sung during their lifetimes, but none who so completely won
at the same time the unquestioned and generous respect of the musical community
and the ungrudging acclaim of the public. (page 329)
The procedures of Haydn and
Mozart must be understood in a larger context, that of the creation of a
popular style which abandons none of the pretensions of high art. … Only for a
brief historical period in the operas of Mozart, the late symphonies of Haydn,
and some of the Schubert songs, has the utmost sophistication and complexity of
musical technique existed alongside—or better, fused with—the virtues of the
street song. (page 332)
Why one brief historical period? Should we take it as given that such a fusion
of musical technique with the virtues of street song has never happened since
Haydn, or cannot happen again? Haydn was no more or less flesh and blood than
you or I, was he?
By now I trust you know that I’m going to use
Haydn as a reference for writing a ragtime sonata because had a Haydn with
Haydn’s training lived later I like to think he would have done that. If Scott Joplin had been able to train with a
Haydn, perhaps we could have lived in a world that already had many ragtime
sonatas from Scott Joplin’s hand.
Of course no such world existed and Joplin
died with his piano concerto lost and his opera a marginal work. We should be
able to love music not for what Romantic ideologies say we should think of a
finished musical “work”, we have the option of loving the music of the past for
the pathways it opens for us in the present.
Joplin’s music, in terms of works and performance traditions, is the
touchstone of whole histories of American popular music. Joplin, James Scott and Joseph Lamb may not
have “elevated” ragtime to the level of sonata forms but their work is
beautiful enough and rich enough with possibilities to give us a basis for a
ragtime school of sonata forms. I submit that the path toward such a ragtime sonata
is more readily taken with Haydn, and not Beethoven or even Mozart, as our
potential guide.
So, if we’re going to go with sonatas as
scripts rather than as plans, what are the next steps? Fortunately, there has been a renewed
interest in formal analysis of eighteenth century music so sprawling or
succinct theory books on eighteenth century musical forms are close at hand for
figuring out how a Scott Joplin who received the musical training of a Haydn
could have composed a ragtime sonata.
But we are, I’m afraid, not quite done with
philosophical questions about aesthetics, philosophy of history, and notions of
formal innovation in the arts. Before I
turn to William E Caplin I have something more from Leonard B. Meyer and
something from Raymond Knapp. There may yet be crucial ways in which to make a
new kind of art with the music Scott Joplin and his contemporaries have given
us we have yet more of the baggage of the Romantic era to cast off that,
ironically, involves a kind of Romantic rejection of parts of Romanticism that
retains its underlying intellectual spirit.
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