An Applied Approach to the Descriptive Analysis of Music as Heard THESIS

Transcription

1 An Applied Approach to the Descriptive Analysis of Music as Heard THESIS Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Alissandra Reed Graduate Program in Music The Ohio State University 2017 Master's Examination Committee: David Clampitt, Advisor David Huron Eugenia Costa-Giomi

2 Copyrighted by Alissandra Elise Reed 2017

3 Abstract This document engages music analysis toward the aim of describing the experience of listening to a piece of music, specifically Franz Liszt s Il Penseroso. In this analysis, music is considered strictly as an aural experience, an object that exists in its hearer s brain. The document therefore takes a critical approach to descriptive analysis by combining Schenkerian reduction, tonal and neo-riemannian harmonic analysis, phenomenology, and empirical participant-based musicology to describe the experience of listening to Il Penseroso. The term descriptive analysis, taken from David Temperley (1999), refers to the description of how a piece of music is experienced; Temperley opposes this to suggestive analysis, which instead provides a new way of hearing a piece. An analysis is thus given based on the analyst s perceived experience of listening to Il Penseroso, with focus on the role that harmony and melody play in that experience. Next, a study is carried out to gather phenomenological accounts of Il Penseroso from expert listeners. Their verbal descriptions are categorized using qualitative content analysis and the occurrences of the resulting categories are compared to the initial, score-based analysis. Liszt s emotionally complex Il Penseroso highlights inherent differences between listeners experience of affect. The results demonstrate that an analysis can be, and often is, both descriptive and suggestive, as it may accurately describe one listener s experience while suggesting a new way of hearing the music to another listener. ii

4 Acknowledgments For their invaluable discussion and guidance throughout this project, I thank my adviser David Clampitt and my dear colleague Lindsay Warrenburg. I thank my committee members, David Huron and Eugenia Costa-Giomi, for the compelling conversations that led me to this project and for their insightful feedback on it. Finally, I thank the Ohio State University Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory for their never-ending support and cheerful participation in my study. iii

5 Vita June Coral Glades High School May B.M. Music Theory, Florida State University 2015 to present...graduate Teaching Associate, School of Music, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Music iv

6 Table of Contents Abstract... ii Acknowledgements... iii Vita... iv List of Tables... vii List of Figures... viii Chapter 1: Foundations for Musical Description... 1 Background... 2 Analysis and Description... 3 Music Psychology... 6 Phenomenology... 9 Description of Il Penseroso as Heard Chapter 2: Listening-Based Analysis of Liszt s Il Penseroso Melody and Harmony: Schenkerian Reduction Narrative Interpretation Harmony and the Penseroso Narrative v

7 Chapter 3: Method for Participant-Based Phenomenological Analysis Method for Collecting Participant Responses Participants Stimuli Procedure Instructions Data Collection and Content Analysis Results Limitations Chapter 4: Descriptive Strategies "Thinking" Descriptions Expressive Categories Negative Emotion: Fate/Hopelessness Moments of Highest Agreement Overall Emotional Trajectory Conclusions References Appendix A: Segmented Participant Responses vi

8 List of Tables Table 1. Segmented responses to Clip Table 2. Researcher 2 s categorization process and category operationalizations Table 3. Experimenter s categorization process and category operationalizations Table 4. Correlation of two category lists and resultant new category list Table 5. Operationalizations for the final category list Table 6. Tallied number of participants who used each expressive category by stimulus 45 Table 7. Expressive categoric responses compared to intial analysis vii

9 List of Figures Figure 1. Schenkerian and Neo-Riemannian reduction of Il Penseroso Figure 2. Chunking Il Penseroso Figure 3. Average affective trajectory of participant responses across 21 ordered clips. 58 viii

10 Chapter 1: Foundations for Musical Description When I first heard Franz Liszt s Il Penseroso, I was stricken. I had been passively listening to Alfred Brendel s 1998 CD recordings of the entire Années de pèlerinage as background music, but when Il Penseroso came on, it demanded my attention. The music carried a certain emotional profundity that drove the analyst in me straight to the score. I wanted to analyze the notes so I could understand what it was about their combination that felt so deep, so emotionally compelling. My goal was to combine deep, reflective listening with the tools of harmonic and melodic analysis to construct an understanding of the profound affective nature of the piece. I sought to use the tools of music theory to analyze not the notes in the piece, but the experience of listening to it. It did not go unnoticed, however, that, through analysis and targeted listening, my experience of the piece changed. Indeed, that is what analysis is meant to do; to give its practitioner a deeper understanding of a piece of music. Perhaps I noticed things in the printed score that I didn t notice through listening. Perhaps too, looking at the score inhibited my ability to hear beyond the written pitches. Perhaps acquiring a visual representation of the music changed my mental representation of the sound. That reading a score is usually a substantially less emotional experience than listening to a performance is indicates that analysis of a score is, indeed, not analysis of a musical 1

11 experience. Yet to engage in an analysis using the tools of music theory is to use the score as a representation of the experience. Thus, the act of listening is confounded; it becomes an affirmation or critique of analysis rather than a sublime, unburdened artistic experience. How, then, can a music analysis truly reflect the sublime, non-analytic, artistic experience of listening? An ideal analysis of listening experience should seek to explain what non-analyst listeners describe as affective. Therefore, after I crafted my analysis through a combination of reflective listening and score reading, I sought a method to focus the analysis back on the experience of non-analytic listening. I gathered qualitative data by asking participants to listen deeply and report on their perceptions of the piece. By analyzing the content of their phenomenological responses, I could both fortify and critique my initial analysis. Background As a music analyst, with what tools can I dive into this piece in order to resurface with a firm understanding of what gives it its emotional profundity? Music theory has given analysts a garage-full of tools with which to examine and explain musical features. The tool or tools of choice depend on the task that one hopes to accomplish. Some tools facilitate inspection of the musical surface, some prune away surface materials to reveal a more essential structure, some enable their users to plant new ideas into an existing piece. My analysis requires tools that facilitate inspection and description of music as a listening experience, and not as dots on a piece of paper. Although written scores provide an invaluable entry into understanding the aural experience, they are themselves reductive. 2

12 There is much that they don t show: notes indicate fundamental pitches but not harmonics, timbre is reduced to an instrument indication and some articulation markings (which require a performer s interpretation), and importantly, the score cannot convey the feeling of hearing the music performed. To focus music analysis on the listening experience is to place analysis somewhere near the crossroads of music theory and music cognition. This, of course, is not a new concept; many music analysts, especially within the past few decades, have found themselves at that intersection. It is a bustling juncture with activity on every corner that has produced intriguing theories and analytic approaches. To arrive there, one must begin by asking oneself about the purpose of music analysis. Analysis and Description The truest answer to the query, what is the purpose of music analysis? is that it depends entirely on whom one asks. With even minimal research into this question, it becomes clear that, by and large, music scholars do not agree on an overarching purpose or goal for analysis. What appears to be the most widely agreed upon (and perhaps the vaguest) conception of analysis is that it somehow relates to musical structure: The study of musical structure applied to actual works or performances. Analysis (Harvard Dictionary of Music) An analysis is an investigation of the structure of a single piece. The Question of Purpose in Music Theory (Temperley 1999, 66) That part of the study of music that takes as its starting-point the music itself, rather than external factors. More formally, analysis may be said to include the interpretation of structures in music, together with their resolution into relatively simpler constituent elements, and the investigation of the relevant functions of those elements. 3

13 Analysis (Bent and Pople) Analysis is thus concerned with structure, with structural problems, and finally, with structural listening. By structure I do not mean here the mere grouping of musical parts according to traditional formal schemata, however; I understand it rather as having to do with what is going on, musically, underneath these formal schemata. On the Problem of Musical Analysis (Adorno 1982, 173) The disagreements truly abound when one asks either, where does the structure arise? or, how should analysis address the structure? The question of how analysis should address structure appears overall to have been of more central concern to music theorists. A common thread running through written investigations of the practice of analysis is the relationship of description to analysis of structure. Michael Rogers, in a book chapter about the pedagogy of analysis, writes, the most basic problem in defining analysis is to distinguish it from description, where description is the fact-gathering enterprise that answers, what happens [in a piece of music]? and where does it happen? His objection to description, or fact-gathering, as analysis mirrors Adorno s sentiment regarding the mere grouping of musical parts. The stance against description as analysis is indeed a shared sentiment among many other music scholars. To them, analysis is heralded as an achievement and held in much higher esteem than description of music. Authors who hold this point of view sometimes ascribe analysis rather lofty goals; for instance, Adorno writes, works need analysis for their truth content [Wahrheitsgehalt] to be revealed (1982, 176). The more general more grounded conception amongst those who oppose description as analysis is that analysis tells you more than you could find out by listening, description does not; and analysis tells you why things happen, description does not (Dubiel 2000). 4

14 Joseph Dubiel laments this widespread opposition to description. In his 2000 exposition on the subject, Analysis, Description, and What Really Happens, he asks, what s mere, I d like to know, about conveying the sense of what it s like to listen to some music? The examples Dubiel cites in his ensuing defense of description make clear that his idea of description differs from Rogers s in a particularly telling way. Where Rogers opposed the description of facts that can be gathered from looking at a score, Dubiel defends, instead, the description of the experience of hearing a piece. Both are descriptions of musical structure. They differ primarily in the conception of where that structure arises: for Rogers, structure is primarily discoverable in the composer s notation; for Dubiel, structure exists in the listener s brain. Dubiel s idea of description is representative of a camp of theorists who view music more as an aural or mental process than as a set of notated ideas. David Temperley, both a music theorist and a cognitive scientist, is part of this camp. In his article The Question of Purpose in Music Theory, Temperley responds to Bent s statement that analysis is the means of answering directly the question how does it work? (Bent and Pople) by noting that to ask how something works might either be to ask, what does it do? or to ask, how does it do what I already know it does? He elaborates this dichotomy, In the case of music, I could be saying, This piece has certain effects on me (an emotional effect, a sense of conflict and resolution, etc.). How is it having these effects [e.g., how does it do what I already know it does]? Or I could be saying, I don t feel that I m fully understanding this piece; show me a better way of listening to it so that I can appreciate it more [e.g., what does it do]. (1999, 67) 5

15 The remainder of Temperley s article paints the former statement as a starting point for description or descriptive analysis and the latter as one for prescriptive or suggestive analysis. His line is thus drawn between analysis that explores and describes how a piece of music is heard and analysis that suggests particular ways of hearing a piece of music. To accomplish descriptive analysis, then, one must have some basis for understanding how a given piece music sounds to a population. We return to the busy intersection of music theory and music cognition. Analysts who come to this crossroads in search of musical description remember that music unfolds in time; we do not wait until the end of a piece to begin analyzing it, but rather, we interpret it as we go along, sometimes revising our interpretation of one part in light of what happens afterwards (Temperley 2001, 2). Therefore, description of musical experience requires knowledge of cognitive and perceptual experience. Music Psychology In seeking Temperley s brand of descriptive analysis, it is crucial to note that the same music sounds different to different listeners. A listener s perception and experience can depend on their previous musical experience, their knowledge of the musical idiom, any external associations they might have with a sound stimulus, or their artistic preferences (Stewart 2008). Even a single listener might experience the same stimulus in different ways depending on the time of day, how much attention they give to the stimulus, or their mood. Therefore, issues of affective perception across an entire piece are essentially impossible to quantify or define when the piece is considered as experienced sound. 6

16 Nevertheless, some music theorists, Temperley included, have constructed theories that generalize aspects of musical experience. Because of principles like statistical learning, researchers can say with high degrees of certainty that listeners experienced in an idiom will have similar expectations associated with different musical sounds. Some models that have taken a scientific approach to generalizing musical experience across a population include the Generalized Theory of Tonal Music (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983), the implication-realization model (Narmour 1990), Temperley s preference rules in The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures (Temperley 2001), and the ITPRA model of expectation (Huron 2006). These models enable theorists and analysts to approach the analysis of a piece of music in terms of how a listener is likely to interpret some of its sounds. Some traditional models of music analysis have also been said to describe psychological processes. For instance, in regard to Schenkerian analysis, Nicholas Cook wrote, Schenker s approach to analysis was psychological in the sense that he was interested in how musical sounds are experienced, rather than in the sounds themselves; so that he interprets one C major chord one way and another differently because the context is different and consequently the chord is experienced in a different way. (1987, 67) Although the consideration of context and experience was central to Schenker s theories, his reductive approach to analysis has been criticized for its questionable perceptual salience. Schenker s approach to melodic interpretation at the foreground level is, in fact, quite similar to Lerdahl and Jackendoff s prolongational analytic domain (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983, Cross 1998, 7 8). However, Schenker had no empirical evidence for his 7

17 model, and his was not supposed to be generalizable beyond the genius of German instrumental music (Kerman 1980). Even Cook, quoted above, quickly backpedals to say of Schenker, this is to use the word psychological in a rather loose manner. In response to music theories claims to represent psychological experience, Ian Cross criticizes the music theory community s utilization of unproven folk psychologies as they oppose empirical cognitive psychology. In his 1998 paper Music Analysis and Music Perception, Cross quotes Jerome Breuner, defining the term as a set of more-or-less normative descriptions of how human beings tick, what minds are like, what one can expect situated action to be like, what are possible modes of life, how one commits oneself to them (Cross 1998, 5). These descriptions are used by laypeople to describe perceived mental processes; they often do not accurately reflect the findings of empirical psychology research. Cross insists that the analytical idea of perception can be thought of as a partial folk psychology of music analysis. In other words, the way that many analysts conceive of musical perception is not consistent with the findings of cognitive science. Analysts often discuss perception as though it is subject to volitional intervention, while the broader domain of cognitive psychology, he writes, understands perception as involving involuntary and non-conscious processes (Cross 1998, 5). Cross eventually concedes that it would not be reasonable to forgo folk psychology in music analysis entirely, but calls on music analysts to make clear whether their analysis makes use of an understanding of folk or empirical psychology. This may not be a realistic request on all fronts, but I will concede that the current study chiefly engages perception through folk psychology. By collecting and analyzing listener- 8

18 based data, I take an empirical approach to understanding the experience of listening to Il Penseroso among a population. Since cognitive science considers perception an involuntary and non-conscious process, though, the act of reporting on one s perception is necessarily confounding. Whatever its challenges, the music cognition field has set a precedent and standard for the collection of participant-based data toward the goal of understanding how listeners perceive musical sounds. It has introduced to music analysts a rigorous, scientific, and empirical approach to describing music listening experiences. While most of the generalized music cognition models discussed above will not be directly applied in the forthcoming study, their philosophy of approach to uncovering satisfactory descriptions of musical experience will. Phenomenology When one looks outside the bounds of cognitive science for a method for reporting on one s perceptual experience, one discovers the philosophic discipline of phenomenology. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes phenomenology as the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. It elaborates: We all experience various types of experience including perception, imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition, and action. Thus, the domain of phenomenology is the range of experiences including these types (among others). (Smith 2016) Phenomenology therefore accounts for the volitional aspect of music listening that cognitive science does not. Husserlian phenomenology, however, is not empirical. It depends on its practitioners to report on their experience by introspecting. 9

19 Phenomenology is wholly subjective and qualitative, but this does not mean its application cannot be rigorous. A seminal application of Edmund Husserl s phenomenology to the description of music came in Thomas Clifton s 1983 book Music as Heard: Studies in Applied Phenomenology. As its title implies, Clifton s book takes music as a listener-dependent object. His philosophy mirrors music cognition s as they both consider music an artifact of the mind of the listener. In the following statement, Clifton makes an appeal to musicians to consider phenomenology as a valid and useful mode of theory and analysis: there is ample room in music theory for phenomenological description. There is no reason why music theory cannot feel free to deal with meanings which are significant to one s consciousness of music, to the way one relates to, and in fact, recognizes music. Music theory need not feel that it is being unscientific by returning the experiencing person to center stage. The dichotomies have been dissolved, and we speak today out of ignorance when we oppose descriptive and objective methods. For this reason and others, it is possible to frame a phenomenological definition of music theory in which a surprising number of theorists may recognize their own efforts: let us say that music theory is not an inventory of prescriptions or a corpus of systems, but rather, an act: the act of questioning our assumptions about the nature of music and the nature of man perceiving music. to perceive any object as an individual standing out from the background of the world is already to theorize about it. Perception does not precede thought, but a reflective attitude is needed if the thought in the perception is to emerge [italics mine]. (1983, 37) The last statement confronts the conflict between cognitive science and folk psychology s views of perception as involuntary or volitional. In his book, Clifton uses his carefully developed philosophy to discuss music that has challenged other theoretical approaches, such as aleatoric music. Chance music challenges analysts who seek to illuminate musical meaning in a work because there is no agent behind the notes. Phenomenology, however, can account for the music purely in terms of how it is heard. 10

20 Therefore, Clifton finds no experiential basis for distinction between indeterminate music and that which is highly specified (Bowman 1989). Another insight arising from his discussion of aleatoric music is that repeatability is as impossible for highly circumscribed compositions as for the aleatoric or improvisatory, since the listener's experiential modes vary even given an otherwise identical performance (Bowman 1989). In other words, the phenomenological approach recognizes that repeated music or musical ideas will be experienced differently on each iteration. This is a concept that does not appear to pervade much music analysis, as writers often highlight recurrent structures each on the same level. In David Lewin s 1986 article Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception, he presents a decidedly formalized model for a musical perception based on Husserlian phenomenology. Lewin s formula accounts for five elements of perception that occur at any moment in listening time: the sonic event, the musical context, a list of pairs of perception and relation, and a list of statements in a stipulated language. In the article, Lewin uses his five-element formula to write an analysis of a passage from Schubert s Morgengruss. He divides three measures into eleven events and defines the five elements for each event in order to track the phenomenon of listening to these measures. Lewin s method employs phenomenology to make predictions about how an enculturated listener would interpret a musical event in terms of its context. The approach, like some empirical psychological approaches, produces a great amount of information with respect to each musical event. This rigor yields stimulating results and 11

21 discussion, to be sure, but perhaps it is not the most useful approach for a written descriptive analysis of an entire piece. Description of Il Penseroso as Heard The current study will employ phenomenological thought, participant-based data, and traditional music-theoretic concepts to construct a description of Il Penseroso as a heard experience. The analysis presented in Chapter 2 employs theoretic tools such as Schenkerian reduction and neo-riemannian transformational analysis to investigate the harmonic and melodic structures that underlie my experience of listening to the piece. These tools are employed not for the purpose of understanding the composition, but for the purpose of understanding the listening experience. Since they necessarily do both, and since they were used for analysis prior to a thorough phenomenological approach, the act of analysis changes my listening experience in unknown ways. I then gather phenomenological data, or in other words, descriptions of the experience of listening to Il Penseroso that are unconfounded by score-reading, in a participant-based study whose methods are detailed in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the phenomenological data, a comparison to my original listening-based analysis, and a concluding discussion on the goals, methods, and viability of descriptive analysis. 12

22 Chapter 2: Listening-Based Analysis of Liszt s Il Penseroso Franz Liszt composed Il Penseroso in the 1840 s as the second piece in his suite Deuxième année: Italie (Second year: Italy) from his set of three suites entitled Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage). The piece s title, translating roughly to the thinker, the serious man, or the man deep in thought, has a clear programmatic implication. Because I read the title when I first heard the piece, I can t remember a time when I didn t associate the music with a man s thought process. As I listen to the short piece, an affect of solemn, dark, negative contemplation overwhelms my experience. There seems to be a strong sense of introspective searching, perhaps as an internal quest for meaning or to reconcile difficult thoughts. Moments of sequence or process-based harmony particularly intensify the feeling of endless pursuit. Even moments of tonal, functional progression tend to feel noticeably less sure than usual. Harmonic and melodic analysis of the piece from both tonal Schenkerian and neo-riemannian perspectives appears to reveal some of Liszt s most affective compositional strategies. Solemnity and melancholy seem to manifest in slow almost static and descending melodic lines. Contemplation and mental process seem to be represented in occasional absences of functional harmony through harmonies related by neo-riemannian transformations. Internal conflict is made evident by dissonant inflections on functional dominants. The sadness and yearning associated with lowered sixth scale degrees weighs heavily on the listening experience. 13

23 As I approached the construction of my analysis, my main goal was to explain how the piece achieved its strong affect. In effect, I attempted to answer Temperley s question how does it do what I already know it does? In pursuing an answer, however, I discovered new and clearer conceptions of what I know it does evidence that the analytic process changed my perceptions and that therefore I could not truly use analysis to describe my initial, non-analytic listening experience. Nevertheless, I consistently used listening as my guide to interpret the notes on the page. As I got to know the piece more deeply, a narrative emerged. It is told through melody, harmony, texture, dynamics, range, and motivic development. Melody and Harmony: Schenkerian Reduction The original graph in Figure 1 provides a useful way to visualize both transformational and Schenkerian reductive information about the melodic and harmonic foreground. The graph s two upper staves display a Schenkerian interpretation of relationships and hierarchies in the outer voices 1. The graph therefore displays phenomenological information. The melody and bass notes with stems are experienced as structurally important; they are marked 2 as moments of sectional beginning or ending, or as arrivals. Other notes are heard as relating to the stemmed notes. Flagged notes are heard as upper neighbors to their succeeding structural stemmed notes, always implying the expectation (and eventual satisfaction) of semitonal descent. The graph makes clear that the first half of the piece is characterized by two minor third ascents in both melody 1 Written bass notes do not always reflect their true composed octaves. 2 Markedness is here used as it is defined in Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Hatten 2004). 14

24 and bass and a long descent to the first structural dominant at m. 21. This interrupting dominant results in a restart of directed harmonic motion in the second half, beginning with the recovery of the structural melodic scale degree 3. This time, the minor third ascents are forgone in favor of a melodic climax in m. 30 on 6 as the upper neighbor to 5. This climax is followed by a descent to structural harmonic closure which is first attempted in m. 35 and finally achieved in m. 39. The final eight measures act as a coda to the closure, primarily reinforcing the tonic but including too a recall of the climactic 6 5 motion. While all Schenkerian analyses aim to reduce a melody to a handful of notes at the background, applying the process to this piece hardly feels like reduction. One of the most noticeable experiences I have while listening to this piece is the stasis of the melodic line; for long stretches of time, the melody feels as if it has nowhere to go. The interrupted 3-line structure and the background pattern of descent seem to truly permeate the phenomena of the piece. That there are two moments of ascent in the first half is tempered by the fact that the melody never rises above 3 in the concurrent key; even the climax on 6 in the second half is heard as 3 in the concurrently tonicized key. 15

25 16 Continued Figure 1. Schenkerian and Neo-Riemannian reduction of Il Penseroso.

26 17 Figure 1 continued

27 The lower part of each system on the graph shows a different kind of phenomenological reduction. Below each system are written roman numerals and figures to describe every discrete harmony in relationship to its local tonic. The lowest staff illuminates voice leading relationships in harmonies that do not satisfy the expectations of tonal function. To emphasize the neo-riemannian transformations between them, the staff depicts harmonies without respect to inversion (i.e., without respect to bass note, which is shown on the staff above). These voice-leading transformations are illustrated with blue slurs indicating common-tones and purple dotted lines indicating half-step motions; in moments of non-tonal function in this piece, common tones and half steps are the only types of voice-leading motion to exist. The types of triadic transformations are also labeled in brackets below or at the roman numeral level. Each of these refers to semitonal voice-leading motion from one harmony to the next. [P] refers to the parallel transformation under [P] the third of a major triad moves down or the third of a minor triad moves up. [L] refers to the leittonwechsel transformation under [L], either the fifth of a minor triad moves up or the root of a major triad moves down. Combinations of these should be read with right orthography (i.e., [LP] means first apply [L], then apply [P] to the result of [L]). [SL] refers to the slide transformation under [SL] the root and fifth of a major triad move up or the root and fifth of a minor triad move down. Each of these discrete transformations results in a triad whose quality (major or minor) is opposite that of its originator. Neo-Riemannian and Schenkerian approaches to analysis have sometimes been painted as opposing viewpoints. An understanding of the harmonic forces at work in this composition, however, unquestionably requires an integration of the insights from both 18

28 approaches. Both give phenomenological information about how harmonies relate to each other. The Schenkerian and roman numeral approach describe how harmonies relate to the local tonic. The neo-riemannian approach describes how harmonies relate to their immediately surrounding harmonies. Listeners experience music in both ways, hearing both long-term, directional relationships and immediate ones. When a harmony does not fit within the key, it is useful to investigate where it does fit. Therefore, in a piece that stretches the bounds of tonality, a combined approach such as mine lends the most useful information for describing how harmony and melody are experienced. Narrative Interpretation In addition to the initial harmonic incompletion and the parallelism between the beginnings of each half, the piece is sectionalized by its texture. The first half is relatively sparse; with separated melodic and harmonic attacks, and harmonies realized as blocked or rolled chords with a single attack, the music feels like it is wandering (or, perhaps, wondering). There is a palpable uncertainty, a sense of being lost. The second half introduces moving eighth notes in the bass voice, usually moving in oscillating half-steps. To me, this textural device invokes images of gears turning, or perhaps thoughts processing. The music sounds more connected, coherent, and goal-directed. The coda, beginning at m. 40, recalls the opening texture, but sounds more sure. The melody becomes registrally buried under the harmonies that now occur on strong beats and persist without rests. Through listening and analysis, the piece has led me to the following narrative interpretation: in the first half, a subject, il penseroso, contemplates new, negative, and confusing thoughts; at the start of the second half, he begins to be able to process those thoughts, arriving for a moment at a staggering realization (m. 30), and 19

29 by the end he fully accepts the subject of his contemplation, having gained the ability to integrate it into his prior understanding of the world. Harmony and the Penseroso Narrative A primary harmonic element of this interpretation is the use of harmonies without diatonic function throughout the piece. The first half particularly uses non-diatonic or non-functional harmonies within its keys to communicate confusion and negative emotional states. In fact, only about half of the twenty-nine discrete harmonic moments in the first half have clear, directed harmonic function, and even those are divided among four successive tonal areas. The opening two measures use non-diatonic harmony to communicate an immediate affect of solemnity and confusion. David Huron noted, in his book Sweet Anticipation, that even the initial tonic chord is likely to sound unexpected on first hearing. On the basis of past statistical exposure, listeners are apt to assume that the initial octave E s represent either the tonic or dominant pitches. At least initially, the most probable inferred key is either E or A major or minor. Listeners will tend to hear the first (C# minor) chord as a mediant chord evoking both surprise and seriousness. Repeating the pattern into the second measure, the ensuing (A minor) chord holds a chromatic mediant relation to the first chord and so will reinforce the qualia of surprise and seriousness. (Huron 2006, 274) Roman numerals might be stretched to call this A-minor chromatic mediant bvi b, but it is more usefully described by its neo-riemannian, voice-leading relationship to the preceding tonic. Through the [LP] transformation, only one note is held in common between the two triads the E of the static melody. On its initial hearing, the A-minor harmony makes little sense amid a phrase that is otherwise an entirely functional C#- 20

30 minor progression, despite being related by close voice-leading to both its functional neighboring chords. It is as if the melodic E is searching for options both C#-minor and A-minor are valid harmonizations (although, as minor triads, both are negatively valanced), but C# wins out as the stronger option immediately with its cadence. When I hear these opening measures, even though I now fully expect it, the A-minor chord still invokes a strong sense of emotional pain 3. The second time the C#-minor A-minor progression is heard, in m. 6, the ear is somewhat more prepared to understand it; its purpose becomes retrospectively clearer when it is reconciled as a functional predominant leading to the E-minor cadence in m. 8. Parallel to the opening harmonies of the first and second four-measure phrases are the augmented triads in the following two phrases that tonicize E-minor and G-minor respectively. Both of these phrases open with augmented triads built on 7, 3, and 5, once again using semitonal and common-tone voice-leading to move between the nonfunctional chord and the local tonic. The augmented triad, which is equal parts dominant ( 7 and 5) and tonic (3 and 5), and whose notes are equidistant from each other (each a major third or diminished fourth apart), invokes to me a feeling of emptiness, a needing to be filled in. They are strong purveyors of the sense of searching and confusion that permeates the opening half of the piece. The final augmented triad prompts the filling in that I desired on hearing it, but perhaps in the least satisfying way. The major thirds (between 7 and 5 in the bass and 3 and 7 in the melody) are filled in with chromatic steps in mm This chromatic 3 This emotional response may also be caused particularly by Brendel s performance. In the second measure, he strikes the low A 1 a moment before rolling the rest of the chord. The resulting expectation of A-major makes the realized A-minor chord all the more painful. 21

31 descent is achieved through a chain of neo-riemannian triadic transformations through which the triads alternate preservation of the root and fifth and preservation of the third. Born out of an augmented triad and with no sense of tonic, the sequence sounds as if it might be an endless search. Every melodic or inner voice note within the sequence moving in descent creates a sort of sinking feeling and at this point, il penseroso s search for understanding sounds fruitless and hopeless. By contrast, the second half of the piece is more substantially made up of directed harmonic function. It begins with the same [LP] motion in the same harmonic phrase as the opening, though it should be noted that by this third hearing, the A-minor triad feels unquestionably less foreign. The fourth time the C#-minor to A-minor motion is heard, instead of modulation to E-minor, another voice-leading transformation occurs, [L], so that A-minor moves to F-major the hexatonic pole of the global tonic (mm ). F- major is tonicized for three measures, marking the only non-tonic key area in the second half. The arrival on F-major sounds triumphant. It marks the first and only major key area in the piece, the first moment of melodic ascent in the second half, and its second measure, marked rinforzando, results from the first melodic ascent larger than a minor third in the whole piece. It is as if this triad, with only one semitone of difference from the recurrent A-minor, realizes the goal that that bvi b had been striving to achieve the entire time. It sounds to me like an apex of realization for il penseroso, an exciting idea, perhaps a possible solution to dealing with the difficult ideas on which he was thus far focused. The achievement of this positively-valanced major triadic moment is satisfying, a triumph after 29 long measures of struggle. That sweet feeling of triumphant idealism, however, is abruptly swept away by the chromatic bass descent back to the tonic in m

32 il penseroso s remembrance of a grave reality, perhaps. The triadic [LPL] transformation here moves every chord tone by half-step, creating that unique, disorienting feeling that tends to accompany any immediate transformation from a triad to its hexatonic pole. The other occurrence of the C#-minor A-minor F-major progression falls after the final achievement of tonic in a coda section, mm This time, instead of the abrupt move from F-major back to C#-minor, a common tone C/B# is held through a move to the functional dominant, effectively integrating the non-diatonic F-major triad into the larger tonal C#-minor framework of the piece. Although C#-minor has been established as the inescapable tonic of reality, perhaps the F-major possibility need not be so distant as felt necessary after its initial presentation. Thus, without losing all hope, Il penseroso has become able to reconcile the short-lived triumphant discovery with his more somber, realistic view of the world. Setting aside the implications of non-tonal harmonies, the narrative interpretation is also supported by an examination of functional dominants. The inclusion of a minor ninth above the root of a dominant chord can be understood as reflecting not only harmonic, but cognitive dissonance; thus, use of V 7b9 s versus V 7 s follows the same overall pattern of confusion, realization, and integration. No dominant in any key area in the first half is heard without its minor ninth. In fact, the extended dominant at the point of interruption (mm ) prominently features this ninth in its left-hand arpeggiation. The global use of V 7b9 s does not let up until after the triumphant F-major moment. Immediately after its [LPL] transformation back to tonic (m. 32) begins a chain of applied dominants leading to 2. For the first time here, the listener hears regular, uninflected V 7 s in between V 7b9 s. This reflects the moment of realization associated with 23

33 the F-major section, the consonance acting as an afterglow of the seeming clarity achieved in that moment. Unexpectedly, when this sequence is immediately repeated as a small-scale interruption of the structural cadence (expected on m. 36), each dominant includes a minor ninth. This, in conjunction with the prior denial of cadence, reflects a lingering uncertainty and need for further mental processing. The structural authentic cadence is finally realized in mm , brought about by a plain V 7, devoid of ninth inflection. This dominant s relative consonance coincides with the moments of largescale melodic and harmonic closure, and together these elements all point to il penseroso s reconciliation and acceptance of his dissonant thoughts. Not only did the V 7b9 s create dissonance, but they represented part of a thematic instantiation of tension-to-resolution that prevails throughout the piece. While I cannot say for sure whether all of the following was noticeable to me by ear, I notice a theme of 6 5 resolutions across the piece. At a deep background level, this is reflected by 6 as the ninth in the first structural dominant (m. 21) resolving to 5 in the last structural dominant (m. 38). At a more immediate level, both of these dominants are approached by iv 6 so that there is 6 5 motion in the bass. However, this motion is not fully satisfied by the first dominant, since 6 persists through it; therefore, the 6 5 resolution is stronger at the final dominant. This and other moments of 6 5 outer-voice motion are denoted on the upper two staves of Figure 1 with flagged 6s. The melodic climax itself (m. 30) is part of one of the most important 6 5 resolutions. Overall, it should be observed that 6s occur more frequently in the second half, and each of them resolves directly to 5. This once again points to the ability that il penseroso gains in the second 24

34 half to better process his thoughts and to move toward the acceptance and reconciliation of dissonance. The idea that 6 5 motion represents an important aspect of resolution here is especially supported by the final melodic motion in the coda, after the structural achievement of tonic. Measures elaborate 6 5 motion over the harmonic progression of F-major V I that I have said represents il penseroso s integration and acceptance of his dissonant thoughts. It is unusual for a melody in a 19 th -century concert piece to end off tonic; usually the tonic pitch is an indication of finality. Liszt emphasizes the decision to end the melody on 5 by preparing the listener to expect 1 by using a melodic 3 2. The expectation that the melody will end with is created both through experience listening to European art music of a similar tradition and through the already-heard structural cadence in mm Thus, despite that the 6 5 motion usually represents resolution or closure in this piece, the melodic conclusion on 5 simultaneously represents a lack of closure. It draws attention to the importance of that 6 and F-major moment. The C#-minor that won in the first cadence is slightly thwarted in this final cadence by the denial of 1. To me, this indicates that il penseroso s triumphant, climactic idea, represented by F-major and the 6 5 motion, has not only integrated into, but has changed his lasting view of the world. This small ray of positivity at the end of his thought process is still assertively grounded in the negatively-valanced C#-minor, however, by means of the low C# octaves that end the piece. Although the analysis presented in this chapter sought to explain my experience of listening to Il Penseroso, many of its details would not have come to light without 25

35 the analysis of the written score. As a music theorist who has spent years thinking about meaning in composed music, I am aware of a personal tendency to ascribe meaning to interesting harmonic and melodic relationships. At the time of writing, however, I do truly hear the narrative presented in this chapter when I listen to the piece. I hope that the tonal relationships and the narrative structure I have described here are not far removed from an experience that other expert listeners might have as they listen to the piece. In an effort to discover what type of experience my descriptive analysis truly describes, the following chapters present the methods and results of a study on the reported aural experiences of expert listeners hearing Il Penseroso with fresh ears. 26

36 Chapter 3: Method for Participant-Based Phenomenological Analysis This chapter describes the methods used in the participant-based portion of the descriptive analysis of Il Penseroso. The goal of the study described herein is to collect data on trained musicians descriptions of the experience of listening to this piece without having seen the score. The data will be compared to the findings of my score- and listening-based analysis presented in Chapter 2. Method for Collecting Participant Responses Musicologists and theorists have developed different methods for probing what people experience when they listen to music. Joshua Albrecht has reviewed some of these methods in his 2012 dissertation that methodically chronicled affects in Beethoven s Pathétique sonata. The most common and simplest method to collect data on listener experiences is to have listeners self-report. Self-reported data contrast in two important ways with other experiential data, such as metabolic changes, that might be collected by taking measurements. First, self-reported data give researchers access to a listener s feelings, which are subjective and cannot be measured. This fact points to the second contrast, that self-reported data are somewhat unreliable. For instance, some research has shown that listeners are relatively unreliable when rating their felt emotions (Albrecht 2012, 6 7). 27

37 There are two common approaches to collecting self-reported data from listeners. Albrecht notes that the most common is a retroactive response paradigm in which participants listen to a piece or passage and subsequently report their responses. Reports in this paradigm might take many forms. Methods employed have included free response, choosing adjectives from a checklist, and rating affects on Likert scales. A benefit is that retroactive response data are relatively easy to read and analyze, even when they are quite detailed. Furthermore, participants are given time to think about their responses. A drawback is that a listener responding to a passage after it ends diminishes the researcher s ability to track changes in listener perception over the time of the passage. A second approach to self-reported data enables real-time responses to track changes in affect over time. In this continuous response paradigm, participants manipulate a scale or dial while they listen to the piece or passage to indicate their perception of how given variables change over time. Although real-time response is valuable, this method comes with its own drawbacks. First, the manipulation of a single slider or two sliders yields rather crude information about the complex experience of listening. Second, research has shown that listeners require different amounts of time to process different musical features. This discrepancy makes it difficult to attribute participant responses to specific musical features. Finally, tests using the continuous response paradigm have shown low reliability both between and within listeners. Albrecht suggests that the continuous response task might be too difficult, placing an undue cognitive load on its participants. 28

38 As a sort of compromise between these two paradigms, Albrecht developed the progressive exposure method (PEM). This method divides a work or passage into small, discrete chunks. Then, retroactive responses are collected for each chunk. The result combines the benefits of retroactive response with the benefit of tracking changes over time that had previously only been available through continuous response. PEM yields rich data at small time intervals. One virtue that PEM lacks, and that continuous response has, is accounting for musical context and experience as it unfolds over the course of a piece. Participants in Albrecht s 2012 experiment listened to fifteen out of 56 five-second chunks from a recording of Beethoven s Pathétique sonata, movement two. Albrecht chose to present the chunks to participants in a random order as an effort to minimize any effects of time over the course of participant responses. He calls this random ordering a mosaic presentation of the stimuli, but explains that for other experiments, a diachronic presentation where stimuli are presented in the composed order might be preferable. Albrecht s study and the use of his PEM served as the methodological backdrop for the participant-based portion of my analysis, detailed forthwith. Participants Because the initial analysis was based on my listening experiences, I sought a population of participants that could be reasonably expected to experience music in a similar way to me. Research has shown that musicians brains process music differently than do nonmusicians, and furthermore that the type of musical experience a person has affects their mental processing (Stewart 2008). Therefore, I limited my sample to musicians with or near the achievement of at least one advanced degree in music. Five 29

39 members of the Ohio State University Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory were recruited to participate. Stimuli It is important to note that a composer s music cannot be heard without also hearing the decisions of its performer. As this is the case, the influence that a performer has on a listening experience is essentially inescapable; therefore, any analysis informed by listening is in some part an analysis of a performance rather than just a written piece in abstract. In my theoretical analysis, the notes written on the score were created by Liszt, but my listening experience was created by Alfred Brendel s 1998 recording on a Philips Classics CD set of all three books of Liszt s Années de pèlerinage. It was that recording that inspired the analysis in the first place. While I listened to a handful of other performances during my exploration of the piece, I kept coming back to Brendel s. Since my analysis is therefore influenced most heavily by Brendel s recording, my participants listened to the same recording to maximize the opportunity for consistency between my analysis and their responses. The process of chunking the recording presented some problems. Albrecht s experiment used five-second chunks whose start and end points were purely a mechanical decision. Removing the influence of the experimenter in such a way is valuable in eliciting unbiased responses; it does not impose a way of hearing the music on the participants. For the slow-moving Il Penseroso, however, mechanically chunking didn t seem to work as well. Musical ideas (usually about two measures) tend to last around ten seconds and to start or end a chunk in the middle of an idea felt jarring and unrepresentative of the typical listening experience. Additionally, the participants in this 30

40 study are highly trained in music; it is reasonable to assume that they themselves would divide the music according to beginnings and endings rather than time. Therefore, unlike Albrecht, I manually divided the 47-measure piece into 21 discrete chunks. Most of the chunks are shorter than a phrase but might be described as subphrases. The paradigm for choosing start- and endpoints was that a chunk must either begin at the beginning or end at the end of a musical unit (both conditions were satisfied whenever possible), while aiming for units of approximately two measures. Phrase elisions, changing hypermeter, and long sequences made these goals challenging. The resulting chunks are illustrated in Figure 2, although other solutions would certainly have been possible. I segmented Brendel s recording into 21 clips, cut at these points; to eliminate abrupt endings, the last attacked note or chord of each clip was elongated by 25% or less and faded out. Although the PEM is the optimal method for obtaining rich data throughout the listening experience, it comes with the disadvantage of periodically stopping the music. To maximize similarities between the progressive exposure experience and a typical listening experience, participants first listened to the entire 4 10 piece and gave a retroactive response. After this experience of the piece as a connected whole, participants were exposed to the 21 clips diachronically. While speaking in between each clip lessens the transfer of context from one clip to the next, the initial hearing of the whole piece followed by the diachronic presentation of clips enables more maintenance of context in the mind of each participant than would a mosaic presentation of the clips alone. 31

41 Continued Figure 2. Chunking Il Penseroso, page 1. 32

42 Figure 2 continued 33