Journal article
Schoenberg - Schenker - Bach A Harmonic, Contrapuntal, Formal Braid
Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, Vol.16(1), pp.67-97
01/01/2019
DOI: 10.31751/1005
Abstract
This article follows on the heels of one by Holly Watkins, who argues that music, "a subsystem of the social system of communication," can evoke the organic (the bodily and the psychic) not by forming a self-contained unity of parts and whole but through the "internal recursiveness" of musical works, their external "recursiveness vis-a`-vis other music," and - crucially - "the knowingness the music displays toward its own operations." I adopt the premise that music evokes the organic most vividly not through recursive processes in individual systems but through the as-if intentional integration of such processes in multiple systems, of which I concern myself particularly with the harmonic, contrapuntal, and formal domains (or, more precisely, the motivic). I offer correctives to the organicist theories of Arnold Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker, which similarly concern these domains, and especially to their reception. And I explore this direction through an analysis of J. S. Bach's Prelude No. 7 in E-flat major from book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 852, a singular piece that billows forth like an unfathomable blossom.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Schoenberg - Schenker - Bach A Harmonic, Contrapuntal, Formal Braid
- Creators
- Matthew Arndt - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, Vol.16(1), pp.67-97
- DOI
- 10.31751/1005
- ISSN
- 1862-6750
- eISSN
- 1862-6742
- Publisher
- GESELLSCHAFT MUSIKTHEORIE
- Number of pages
- 31
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/01/2019
- Academic Unit
- School of Music
- Record Identifier
- 9984399473602771
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