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The Composer's Voice? Compositional Style and Criteria of Value in Weill, Krenek and Stravinsky

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Claire Taylor-Jay
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Abstract

This article focuses on three twentieth-century composers – Weill, Krenek and Stravinsky – whose stylistic ‘voices’ underwent radical changes during their compositional careers. It reflects on how these transformations have been received by critics and musicologists, and asks how far the criteria of value found within musicological and compositional practice have been contingent upon the requirement that composers possess a distinctive, and original, personal style.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 134 , Issue 1 , 2009 , pp. 85 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Musical Association

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References

1 Regular reading of, for instance, the Saturday ‘Review’ supplement of the Guardian bears this out.

2 See, for instance, Judy Lochhead, ‘Lulu's Feminine Performance’, The Cambridge Companion to Berg, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge, 1997), 227–44 (p. 242); Anthony Pople, ‘Early Stravinsky’, The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Jonathan Cross (Cambridge, 2003), 58–78 (p. 63); Nicholas McKay, ‘Stravinsky's Other Voices: Quotation or Allusion?’ (paper given at the conference ‘Music and Gesture’, University of Norwich, August 2003); and various papers at the Third Biennial International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music, University of Nottingham, June 2003. Slightly different terminology, but essentially the same idea, can be seen in Steve Swayne's How Sondheim Found his Sound (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005).

3 By canon, I intend to encompass here works that gain a certain degree of critical recognition, enjoy regular performances, and are perhaps discussed by musicologists.

4 These prospectuses can be viewed online at the following locations (accessed 21 November 2008): <www.rcm.ac.uk/Studying/Professors + and + Faculties/Composition>; <www.conservatoire.bcu.ac.uk/departments/composition>; <www.ram.ac.uk/study/programmesofstudy/postgraduate + programmes/Composition + an + introduction.htm>; <www.rncm.ac.uk/pdfs/rncmprospectus_2008_2009.pdf>; <www.rwcmd.ac.uk/postgraduate_courses/music/master_of_music_mmus/composition.aspx>. Of course, composition is also taught in universities, and is often discussed in similar terms.

5 On originality, see Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley, CA, and London, 2002), Chapter 12.

6 Edward T. Cone, The Composer's Voice (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1974); Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1991), and ‘Elektra's Voice: Music and Language in Strauss's Opera’, Richard Strauss: Elektra, ed. Derrick Puffett (Cambridge, 1989), 107–27. See also Carolyn Abbate, ‘Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women’, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1993), 225–58. In The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Oxford, 1998), Lydia Goehr uses ‘voice’ to mean the literal, singing voice; see especially Chapter 3.

7 Abbate, Unsung Voices, x. Abbate admits that her interpretative move is an act of imagination: ‘I make a different, deliberately prosopopoeiac swerve; in effect I endow certain isolated musical moments with faces, and so with tongues and a special sonorous present. I construct voices out of musical discourse’ (ibid., xiii; see also p. xi). Cone admits something similar: ‘Even the most sympathetic reader of the foregoing pages will no doubt be dissatisfied […] he may contend that the discussion primarily develops an elaborate figure of speech, and that conclusions based on analogies cannot be trusted. He would be right’ (The Composer's Voice, 158). For criticism of Cone, see Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1995), 119.

8 I derive my terminology here partly from Rudolf Stephan's article, ‘Über Hindemiths “Klang”’, Hindemith Jahrbuch, 25 (1996), 41–55.

9 This is also betrayed in the way Abbate phrases her argument: she still refers to Strauss's agency, in such phrases as ‘Strauss made a brilliant stroke in gradually reintroducing the pitch E flat’ (‘Elektra's Voice’, 112); ‘Traces of epicedium and lament pass into Strauss's monologue for Elektra […] in the effect of a song, in the way Strauss frames the opening’ (ibid., 126); and ‘Strauss rejects the notion of operatic music as an objectifying gaze […] he coaxes the listening ear into occupying a female position, by erasing any sense of a male authorial voice’ (‘Opera’, 247, Abbate's italics; also see pp. 244, 248, 257). (Admittedly, this type of rhetoric does not appear in Unsung Voices.) It is also implicit in Cone that the composer has only one Klang (see The Composer's Voice, 43).

10 In recent years, a number of other musicologists have followed Cone's and Abbate's leads; for a similar approach to that of Abbate, see Stephen Downes, Szymanowski, Eroticism and the Voices of Mythology (Aldershot, 2003); and for an alternative, Bakhtin-derived approach, see Anthony Gritten, ‘Stravinsky's Voices’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1999). In the field of popular musicology, Richard Middleton's ‘Authorship, Gender and the Construction of Meaning in the Eurythmics’ Hit Recordings’ (Cultural Studies, 9 (1995), 465–85) argues that the Eurythmics use allusions to different generic styles – or ‘topics’, as he also admits they can be referred to – and that these can be understood as Bakhtinian ‘voices’. (This concept is not central to Middleton's recent Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of Popular Music (London and New York, 2006), however; here he uses the term fairly literally, along with some reference to Abbate.) Matthew Gelbart's ‘Persona and Voice in the Kinks’ Songs of the Late 1960s’ (Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 128 (2003), 200–41) examines how the Kinks, through their various songs, present different personae; they thus react against the idea of ‘authenticity’. See also Simon Frith, Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music (New York, 1996), 183ff., and David Brackett, in his Interpreting Popular Music (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1995), 14–16 and passim.

11 Cf. Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Chicago and London, 1989), 3. Meyer defines style as patterning which ‘results from a series of choices’. However, he goes on to say that these choices are more or less unconscious, ‘a result of the interaction between innate modes of cognition and patterning on the one hand, and ingrained, learned habits of discrimination and response on the other’ (p. 4). See also Robin Gadd, ‘Theorising Style’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southampton, 1999), 42–3. For a critical appraisal of Meyer, see Kevin Korsyn's review in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 46 (1993), 469–75.

13 Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, 123.

12 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image, Music, Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London, 1977), 142–8, and Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Oxford, 1977), 113–38.

14 Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, 123., 127–8. The wish to find unity within musical works has been extensively critiqued; see, for instance, Ruth Solie, ‘The Living Work: Organicism and Music Analysis’, 19th-Century Music, 4 (1980–1), 147–56; Alan Street, ‘Superior Myths, Dogmatic Allegories: The Resistance to Musical Unity’, Music Analysis, 8 (1989), 77–124; Jonathan Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy (Cambridge, 1998), 196–7; and the articles by Cross, Korsyn, Chua, Kramer and Dubiel in Music Analysis, 23 (2004). However, while the necessity of finding unity within a work has to some extent been debunked, there has been less recognition that the same can go for the ‘unity’ of a composer's entire career. The wish for unity within biographies of composers is discussed by Jolanta T. Pekacz in her article ‘Memory, History and Meaning: Musical Biography and its Discontents’, Journal of Musicological Research, 23 (2004), 39–80; she does not consider musical works within these biographies, however.

15 Perhaps in the twenty-first century some composers are beginning to question the paradigm of consistency themselves. Bernard Hughes says of Christopher Fox: ‘It is common to praise a composer by saying that, despite variety between pieces, his voice is always unmistakeable. This is not true of Christopher Fox, who is happy to reinvent himself […]. Indeed, he has said of his music: “I don't think it's important that people know it's by me.”’ Review in Tempo, 61 (July 2007), 84–5.

16 On the early twentieth-century belief in artistic crisis, particularly in Germany, see Claire Taylor-Jay, The Artist-Operas of Pfitzner, Krenek and Hindemith: Politics and the Ideology of the Artist (Aldershot, 2004), Chapter 1.

17 David Drew, Kurt Weill: A Handbook (London and Boston, MA, 1987), 1. Also see Matthew Scott, ‘Weill in America: The Problem of Revival’, A New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill, ed. Kim H. Kowalke (New Haven, CT, and London, 1986), 285–95 (pp. 287, 291).

18 Douglas Jarman, Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Biography (Bloomington, IN, 1982), 137–8. The negative reception of Weill's American works is explored by Kim H. Kowalke, ‘Kurt Weill, Modernism and Popular Culture: Öffentlichkeit als Stil’, Modernism/Modernity, 2 (1995), 27–69 (pp. 27–9 and passim).

19 ‘Wird vom Begriff des Komponisten kaum recht getroffen’. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Kurt Weill’, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1970–96), xviii (1984), 544–7 (p. 544).

21 Drew, Kurt Weill, 43.

20 David Drew, ‘Weill, Kurt’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (London, 1980), xx, 300–10.

22 David Drew, ‘Kurt Weill and his Critics’, Times Literary Supplement (10 October 1975), 1199–1200 (p. 1199). This is the English version of the introduction to Über Kurt Weill, ed. David Drew (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), vii–xxxiii. Drew does reveal a tendency towards Romanticism when he sees the American works, particularly Lady in the Dark, as an expression of the composer's feelings about emigration. For discussion of Drew's essay, see Jürgen Engelhardt, ‘Fragwürdiges in der Kurt-Weill-Rezeption: Zur Diskussion über einen wiederentdeckten Komponisten’, Angewandte Musik 20er Jahre: Exemplarische Versuche gesellschaftsbezogener musikalischer Arbeit für Theater, Film, Radio, Massenveranstaltung, ed. Dietrich Stern (Berlin, 1977), 118–37 (pp. 123ff.); Heinz Geuen, Von der Zeitoper zur Broadway Opera: Kurt Weill und die Idee des musikalischen Theaters (Schliengen, 1997), 268; and Stephen Hinton, ‘Großbritannien als Exilland: Der Fall Weill’, Musik in der Emigration 1933–1945: Verfolgung, Vertreibung, Rückwirkung, ed. Horst Weber (Stuttgart and Weimar, 1994), 213–27 (pp. 217ff.).

23 ‘Weill von hier ab, etwa 1938, quasi mit einer zweiten persona arbeitete.’ Jürgen Schebera, Kurt Weill: Leben und Werk: Mit Texten und Materialien von und über Kurt Weill (Königstein, 1983), 202. This view is repeated in idem, Kurt Weill: An Illustrated Life, trans. Caroline Murphy (New Haven, CT, and London, 1995), 232.

24 Drew, ‘Weill, Kurt’, 307.

25 David Drew and J. Bradford Robinson, ‘Weill, Kurt’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, 29 vols. (2nd edn, London, 2001), xxvii, 220–32 (p. 228). Robinson contradicts himself somewhat in the next paragraph when he writes ‘just as the importance of the “text” recedes in his output, so does the notion of a composer as fashioning an inimitable personal style and expressing a consistent artistic persona’. For David Drew's own opinion on these changes, see ‘The New Grove’ <www.daviddrewmusic.co.uk> (accessed 31 July 2008), and Kurt Weill Newsletter, 23/2 (2005), 8–9. In an article in 2002 (Kurt Weill Newsletter, 20/2, 4–9), Tamara Levitz criticizes Drew's 1980 article for what she sees as an overemphasis on Weill as a German modernist, and for his allegedly consequent denigration of the American works, ‘creating a binary opposition that he used primarily in order to confirm the dominance of the German side of the equation’ (p. 7). She believes that this prejudice towards modernism is continued in the 2001 edition, only now Drew/Robinson try to find modernist trends within the American works; she argues that this is similarly ‘colonialist’ (although she does not define what this term means). See also Levitz's ‘“Junge Klassizität” zwischen Fortschritt und Reaktion: Ferruccio Busoni, Philipp Jarnach und die deutsche Weill-Rezeption’, Kurt-Weill-Studien, ed. Nils Grosch, Joachim Lucchesi and Jürgen Schebera (Stuttgart, 1996), 9–38 (p. 9), for her opinion on Drew's 1980 New Grove entry.

26 Kim H. Kowalke, ‘Biography’, Kurt Weill: A Guide to his Works, ed. Mario R. Mercado (2nd edn, New York, 1994), 65–7 (p. 67). In the second edition of the guide this biography is not attributed, but in the third edition (New York, 2002) it appears (slightly revised) under the name of Kowalke, who presumably also wrote the earlier version. Interestingly, this particular line is cut from the third edition (p. 69).

27 Kim H. Kowalke, ‘Preface’ to David Farneth, Elmar Juchem and Dave Stein, Kurt Weill: A Life in Pictures and Documents (Woodstock, 2000), ix–x.

28 Kowalke, ‘Kurt Weill, Modernism and Popular Culture’, 27.

29 For further examples arguing for ‘one Weill’, see Foster Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway (New York, 2002), 7; Christopher Hailey, ‘(Re-)Unification?’, Kurt Weill Newsletter, 8/1 (1990), 9–10; Ronald Sanders, The Days Grew Short: The Life and Music of Kurt Weill (Los Angeles, CA, 1980), 1; and Kim H. Kowalke, ‘Editor's Preface’, A Stranger Here Myself: Kurt-Weill-Studien, ed. Kowalke and Horst Edler (Hildesheim, 1993), 7–12. Guido Heldt, ‘Vom Begriff des Komponisten: Das Problem Kurt Weill?’, Ordnung und Freiheit: Almanach zum Internationalen Beethovenfest Bonn 2000 (Laaber, 2000), 113–33, goes some way towards criticizing the ‘clichéd idea of the inner unity of an artistic biography’ (‘die nicht minder klischierte Idee von der inneren Einheit der künstlerischen Biographie’), yet also says that ‘the dividing line between a German and an American Weill’ is ‘misleading’ (‘die Trennlinie zwischen einem deutschen und einem amerikanischen Weill [ist] irreführend’) (pp. 129, 120; also see pp. 126, 130). In passing, he also questions ideas of the unity of Weill's oeuvre in his ‘… Listening Weill …’ (Kurt Weill Newsletter, 18/1–2 (2000), 10), but without going into particular detail. Richard Taruskin addressed the ‘problem’ of the unity of Weill's career surprisingly early, in a review of A New Orpheus (Kurt Weill Newsletter, 4/2 (1986), 14–15). He argues that a fundamental problem of Weill scholarship is that it ‘remains committed a priori to unifying Weill's career under the aegis of approved modernist values’ (p. 14), thus pointing out two issues: the wish for unity, and the limitations of seeing Weill in modernist terms. It seems that subsequent writers have taken some of Taruskin's argument on board, and have dealt with the fact that the Broadway works cannot be assessed from the perspective of European modernism; yet the other half of his argument, that concerning ‘our cursed inability to accept as valid a disunified entity, be it a sonatina movement or a life's work’, has been largely neglected. (It is intriguing to compare Taruskin's position towards Stravinsky ten years later; see below.)

30 ‘Der Vorgang der Anpassung [in Amerika] bedeutete […] keineswegs die Schaffung einer neuen persona. Im Gegenteil: in mancher Hinsicht fand sein Komponistentypus erst in der Neuen Welt Erfüllung.’ Hinton, ‘Großbritannien als Exilland’, 227.

31 Stephen Hinton, ‘Emigration and Self-Discovery’, Hindemith Jahrbuch, 27 (1998), 12–24 (p. 22). It is rather ironic that Hinton spends some time in this article criticizing what he sees as ‘Romantic’ views of Weill and Hindemith.

32 Kurt Weill, liner notes for the original cast recording of Street Scene, <www.kwf.org/kwf/liner-notes-for-the-original-cast-recording-of-qstreet-sceneq> (accessed 8 December 2008). Also see idem, ‘Zwei Träume werden wahr’, Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Stephen Hinton and Jürgen Schebera (Berlin, 1990), 143–4. For this ‘fulfilment’ perspective, see also Stephen Hinton, ‘Weill, Kurt’, Grove Music Online (Grove Dictionary of Opera), ed. Laura Macy, <www.grovemusic.com> (accessed 15 September 2007); Kim H. Kowalke, ‘Hin und zurück: Kurt Weill heute’, Vom Kurfürstendamm zum Broadway: Kurt Weill (1900–1950), ed. Bernd Kortländer, Winrich Meiszeis and David Farneth (Düsseldorf, 1990), 16–27 (p. 19); idem, ‘Hin und zurück: Kurt Weill Today’, Kurt Weill, ed. Mercado, 55–63 (p. 57); idem, ‘Kurt Weill, Modernism and Popular Culture, 34; idem, ‘Looking Back: Toward a New Orpheus’, A New Orpheus, ed. Kowalke, 1–20 (p. 7); and John Rockwell, ‘Kurt Weill's Operatic Reform and its Context’, ibid., 51–9. The teleological perspective also slightly creeps into Drew's ‘Kurt Weill and his Critics’, 1200. On Street Scene, also see Larry Stempel, ‘Street Scene and the Enigma of Broadway Opera’, A New Orpheus, ed. Kowalke, 321–41.

33 Kowalke, ‘Kurt Weill, Modernism and Popular Culture’, 34 (see also p. 37).

34 Kowalke, interview with Foster Hirsch, quoted in Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage, 351.

35 Kowalke, interview with Foster Hirsch, quoted in Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage, 351., 7. Also see Sanders, The Days Grew Short, 4; and Stephen Hinton, ‘Fragwürdiges in der deutschen Weill-Rezeption’, A Stranger Here Myself, ed. Kowalke and Edler, 23–33 (p. 26).

36 Tamara Levitz: ‘Kurt Weills Identität als deutsch-jüdischer Komponist vor 1933’, Amerikanismus–Americanism–Weill: Die Suche nach kultureller Identität in der Moderne, ed. Hermann Danuser and Hermann Gottschewski (Schliengen, 2003), 221–45. Douglas Jarman also mentions three styles (Kurt Weill, 7), as does Eric Salzman (‘New York Discovers a “Third” Weill’, Kurt Weill Newsletter, 18/1–2 (2000), 19–24), but they include here the early, more modernist works that preceded the jazz-influenced phase; most commentators do not make this division in the European works.

37 Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage, 8.

38 Quoted ibid., 352.

39 Kowalke, ‘Kurt Weill, Modernism and Popular Culture’, 34–5, 36.

40 Sanders, The Days Grew Short, 304, 349 and passim; Geuen, Von der Zeitoper, 282.

41 Kowalke, ‘Kurt Weill, Modernism and Popular Culture’, 31. Also see Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe (Ann Arbor, MI, 1979), 4; Joachim Lucchesi, ‘“Fremd bin ich eingezogen”? Anmerkungen zu einer geteilten Biographie’, A Stranger Here Myself, ed. Kowalke and Edler, 58–69 (p. 60); Stephen Hinton, ‘Kurt Weill: Life, Work, and Posterity’, Amerikanismus–Americanism–Weill, ed. Danuser and Gottschewski, 209–20 (pp. 214–18); Jarman, Kurt Weill, 133ff.; and Geuen, Von der Zeitoper, 282.

42 Kowalke, ‘Kurt Weill, Modernism and Popular Culture’, 31. Also see Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe (Ann Arbor, MI, 1979), 4; Joachim Lucchesi, ‘“Fremd bin ich eingezogen”? Anmerkungen zu einer geteilten Biographie’, A Stranger Here Myself, ed. Kowalke and Edler, 58–69 (p. 60); Stephen Hinton, ‘Kurt Weill: Life, Work, and Posterity’, Amerikanismus–Americanism–Weill, ed. Danuser and Gottschewski, 209–20 (pp. 214–18); Jarman, Kurt Weill, 133ff.; and Geuen, Von der Zeitoper, 9, 87; also cf. Hinton, ‘Großbritannien als Exilland’, 219.

47 ‘Außer daß Weill stets Weill geblieben ist, was mir zweckmäßig und vernünftig erscheint […]. Ich will nicht leugnen, daß sich die nichtdeutschen Werke von den deutschen unterscheiden. Im Gegenteil: […] [es gilt], selbst bei der angeblichen Heterogenität der Werke, ein Modell zu finden, das auf den ganzen Weill paßt, anstatt ihn in zwei verschiedene Personen zu teilen.’ Hinton, ‘Großbritannien als Exilland’, 219.

43 Hinton, ‘Kurt Weill’, 212, 220.

44 ‘Eine metaphysische und eine ästhetische Konstruktion’, ‘der “wahre”, der “authentische” Weill’, ‘ein Stück deutscher Romantik’. Hinton, ‘Großbritannien als Exilland’, 217. See also ‘Fragwürdiges in der deutschen Weill-Rezeption’, 32.

45 Hinton, ‘Kurt Weill’, 212.

46 Hinton, ‘Kurt Weill’, 218–19.

48 Although the poem also states that ‘everyone is Orpheus’ (‘Jeder ist Orpheus’).

49 For more discussion of Der neue Orpheus, see Robert Vilain and Geoffrey Chew, ‘Iwan Goll and Kurt Weill: Der neue Orpheus and Royal Palace’, Yvan Goll – Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts, ed. Eric Robertson and Robert Vilain (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 1997), 97–126; Ricarda Wackers, ‘Eurydike folgt nicht mehr oder Auf der Suche nach dem neuen Orpheus: Skizze der musikalisch-dichterischen Zusammenarbeit zwischen Kurt Weill und Yvan Goll anhand der Kantate Der neue Orpheus’, Kurt Weill: Die frühen Werke 1916–1928, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich, 1998), 105–29; and eadem, Dialog der Künste: Die Zusammenarbeit von Kurt Weill und Yvan Goll (Münster, 2004), 162ff.

50 See above, note 39.

51 See above, note 39., 37. See also Hirsch, Kurt Weill on Stage, 172, on the ‘trademark Weillian progression’ of a C major to a C half-diminished chord.

52 ‘Der Akkord mit hinzugefügter Sexte, den Ian Kemp zurecht als den “Weill-Akkord par excellence” bezeichnet, verkörpert […] Weills kompositorische Identität.’ Geuen, Von der Zeitoper, 282.

53 One example of this might be the uses of the ‘Tristan’ chord in the works of composers other than Wagner; it does not make those works sound like Tristan.

54 Janet Levy, ‘Covert and Casual Values in Recent Writing about Music’, Journal of Musicology, 5 (1987), 3–27.

55 One is reminded here of the psychological phenomenon of apophenia, the human tendency to see patterns where none exist. The way in which analysts might find apparently meaningful patterns when they want to has been discussed in Lloyd Whitesell, ‘Men with a Past: Music and the “Anxiety of Influence”’, 19th-Century Music, 18 (1994–5), 152–67 (p. 157: ‘our chosen modes of analysis are also reflexive metaphors that tend to turn back on us, influencing the kinds of truth we look for’); and in Kevin Korsyn, ‘The Death of Musical Analysis? The Concept of Unity Revisited’, Music Analysis, 23 (2004), 337–51 (p. 343: ‘Since analysis is a kind of performance, we play a role in the construction of our analyses’). Also see Korsyn's discussion of Chopin analysis in his Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Research (Oxford and New York, 2003), 101ff. The interrelationship between analysis and what is actually heard is discussed in Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford, 1990), who comments that ‘the structural wholeness of musical works should be seen as a metaphorical construction rather than as directly corresponding to anything that is real in a perceptual sense’ (p. 5).

56 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London, 1990), 33.

57 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London, 1990), 42, 23.

59 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London and New York, 2002), 27. Also see Gadd, ‘Theorising Style’, 38 (‘what we take to be the norm of Mozart's style is really no more than our own, particular analytical spin – a created mode of understanding that we impose on the material under discussion’) and 43 (‘Sonata style, classical style, Beethoven's style, Furtwängler's style […] are all abstract norms constructed and maintained by musicologists and music theorists’).

58 For a musicologist's perspective on this, see Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 9–10.

60 Cf. Butler, Gender Trouble, 33: ‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.’

61 Korsyn, Decentering Music, 62. Cf. John L. Stewart, Ernst Krenek: The Man and his Music (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1991), 363: ‘Every work of art evokes a persona, a presence felt with varying degrees of immediacy, created by recurring features of style and technique, by the cumulative effect of the details chosen for inclusion, and by the choice of themes and subjects in which to clothe those details […]. When the same persona is evoked by work after work from the same hand, we tend to identify it with the artist himself.’

62 ‘[Sie sind] der rätselhafteste aller Komponisten […], den ich nicht auf die Formel bringen kann.’ Letter dated 30 September 1932, in Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Krenek, Briefwechsel, ed. Wolfgang Rogge (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 41; also quoted in Stewart, Ernst Krenek, 111 (I use his translation here).

63 Claudia Maurer Zenck, ‘For Ernst Krenek's Birthday Centennial’, Ernst Krenek 1900–1991: Gesamtwerkverzeichnis (Vienna, 2000), 5. Zenck later refers to Krenek's move to serialism as a ‘compositional necessity’, however, betraying a belief, perhaps, that the course of Krenek's career followed a higher, pre-determined path (ibid.). Lothar Knessl similarly seems to think that Krenek was following ‘an inner dictation’ (‘ein inneres Diktat’); see his Ernst Krenek (Vienna, 1967), 9.

64 ‘Einer von intellektueller Neugier geprägten Neigung zu abrupten, überraschenden Veränderungen der musikalischen Schreibweise, zu Entwicklungssprüngen oder -brüchen, die nicht als bloßer Stilwandel, sondern geradezu als Sprachwechsel erscheinen.’ Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Ernst Krenek und das Problem des musikalischen Sprachwechsels’, Ernst Krenek, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna, 1982), 36–46 (p. 36). Also cf. Martin Zenck, ‘Die Ungleichzeitigkeit des Neuen: Zu den acht Streichquartetten Ernst Kreneks’, Ernst Krenek, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich, 1984), 92–113 (esp. pp. 96–7).

65 ‘Krenek besteht auf einem prinzipiellen Primat des musikalischen Gedankens gegenüber der Tonsprache, in der er sich manifestiert. […] daß weniger der Gedanke durch die Sprache als vielmehr die Sprache durch den Gedanken geformt werde.’ Dahlhaus, ‘Ernst Krenek’, 43–4. This, of course, raises the question of whether a musical ‘idea’ can exist independently of the language in which it is expressed. For a parallel discussion, and critique, of the concept of the Gedanke in Krenek, see Rainer Nonnenmann, ‘Wegweiser ins 21. Jahrhundert? Ernst Kreneks Idee einer musikalischen Axiomatik als Vorschlag zur Güte’, Musiktheorie, 16 (2001), 121–36. See also Adorno and Krenek, Briefwechsel, ed. Rogge, 31–2, 139–40, 162–3.

66 ‘“Beherrscht” tatsächlich meisterhaft den Gebrauch der Masken fremder musikalischer “Sprachen” […]. Daß er die “eigene Sprache” nicht “beherrscht”, sondern ihre Eigentümlichket gerade von der Entscheidung lebt, sich bewußt von ihr “beherrschen” zu lassen’. Matthias Schmidt, Im Gefälle der Zeit: Ernst Kreneks Werke für Sologesang (Kassel and London, 1998), 222.

67 Published in German as ‘Ernst Kreneks Masken’, trans. Rudolf Klein, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, 35 (1980), 437–44. The English version has not been published; I am grateful to Petra Preinfalk of the Ernst-Krenek-Institut for providing a copy of Stewart's typescript. Quotations in the following discussion are taken from this version.

68 Stewart, ‘The Masks of Ernst Krenek’, 3.

69 Stewart, ‘The Masks of Ernst Krenek’, 5.

70 Reported by Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London, 1988), 1.

71 Stewart, Ernst Krenek, 50; see also pp. 57, 249, 364. This same idea of the two sides of Krenek's personality can be found in Matthias Schmidt, ‘Ernst Krenek's Musical “Language”: A Sketch’, Newsletter of the Ernst Krenek Archive, 7 (1998), 5–15 (p. 8); and in the first chapter of his Im Gefälle der Zeit, which is the German version of the English article, p. 13.

72 Stewart, Ernst Krenek, 331.

73 Stewart, Ernst Krenek, 304.

74 ‘Dieser Wechsel zwischen […] kompromißloser Esoterik einerseits und unmittelbarem Wirkungsanspruch andererseits, sollte für sein […] Schaffen charakteristisch werden.’ Albrecht Dümling, ‘Ernst Krenek zum 80. Geburtstag: Ein Komponist zwischen den Stilen’, Das Orchester, 28 (1980), 910–11 (p. 911).

75 Schmidt (Im Gefälle der Zeit, 215ff.) discusses how there are some allusions to other music, such as motives from Schubert and from Krenek's earlier works; these are so well hidden, however, that the average listener would not notice them, whereas in Weill's piece the references to other styles are obvious. Further discussion of The Dissembler can be found in Stewart, Ernst Krenek, 363ff., and ‘The Masks of Ernst Krenek’; and in Michael Ingham, ‘A Meditation on Krenek's The Dissembler’, Newsletter of the Ernst Krenek Archive, 3 (1992), 1–8.

76 ‘Man [kann] vielleicht gewisse Linien entdecken, die sich da durchziehen’; ‘wenn ich auch heute nicht mehr so schreibe wie ich vor sechzig Jahren geschrieben habe, so ist es doch meine Handschrift, obwohl doch so viel Zeit vergangen ist.’ Eberhardt Klemm, ‘“Jeder Komponist hat eine gewisse persönliche Handschrift …”: Gespräch mit Ernst Krenek’, Spuren der Avantgarde: Schriften 1955–1991 (Cologne, 1997), 301–15 (p. 305). The fact that Krenek's phrase was chosen for the title of the article itself says much about the ideological preoccupations of the author. This phrase is more or less repeated (as ‘gewisse handschriftliche Eigenheiten’) in a letter from Krenek to Martin Zenck in 1984; see Zenck, ‘Die Ungleichzeitigkeit des Neuen’, 102.

77 Quoted in Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky, trans. Jeff Hamburg (Oxford and New York, 1989), 204. Also see Stuart Campbell, ‘Stravinsky and the Critics’, The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Cross, 230–47 (p. 232). However, this position is contradicted by Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out (New Haven, CT, and London, 2001), 259.

78 This view is repeated to some degree by Campbell, ‘Stravinsky and the Critics’, 231; and Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out, 69. Richard Taruskin, in his Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra (Oxford, 1996), argues that the reception of Le sacre, particularly by Jacques Rivière, was such that it was actually instrumental in influencing Stravinsky to move towards neoclassicism in order to ‘live up’ to Rivière's praise (pp. 992ff.); this illustrates precisely the self-constructed nature of stylistic development.

79 See Campbell, ‘Stravinsky and the Critics’, 237. On the reception of Stravinsky's neoclassical and serial works, see also Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out; Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1576ff.; Jann Pasler, ‘Introduction: Issues in Stravinsky Research’, Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist, ed. Pasler (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1986), ix–xix (p. xv); and Stephen Walsh, Igor Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882–1934 (London, 1999), passim.

80 Joseph N. Straus suggests that a possible reason for Stravinsky's move to serialism was the younger generation's rejection of his neoclassicism (‘Stravinsky the Serialist’, The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Cross, 149–74 (p. 149)).

81 Geuen argues that, unlike Weill, Stravinsky's changes of direction were easier for critics to deal with because he never wrote music that was destined for the commercial sphere (Von der Zeitoper, 281).

86 Ibid., 77. Similar reasoning can be found in McKay, ‘Stravinsky's Other Voices’; he writes in his abstract that reference to other composers in Stravinsky's music ‘perhaps defines and articulates Stravinsky's voice to a degree rarely matched in other composers’. Thus McKay holds to the view of Stravinsky's own ‘voice’, rather than seeing that his allusions to other styles illustrate precisely how fragile and contingent the whole issue of an ‘authentic style’ is.

82 Francis Routh, Stravinsky (London, 1975), 70 (see also p. 131).

83 Andriessen and Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork, xiii.

84 See Paul Griffiths, Stravinsky (London, 1992), 46, 159; Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 596; Stephen Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky (Oxford, 1993), 173, 190, 192, 223, 242, 275; Charles Wuorinen and Jeffrey Kresky, ‘On the Significance of Stravinsky's Last Works’, Confronting Stravinsky, ed. Pasler, 262–70 (passim); Roman Vlad, Stravinsky, trans. Frederick and Ann Fuller (London, 1960), 178; Lynne Rogers, ‘A Serial Passage of Diatonic Ancestry in Stravinsky's The Flood’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 129 (2004), 220–39; David Smyth, ‘Stravinsky's Second Crisis: Reading the Early Serial Sketches’, Perspectives of New Music, 37 (1999), 117–46; Eric Walter White, Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (London and Boston, MA, 1966), 485ff. On this issue, also see Straus, ‘Stravinsky the Serialist’, 156.

85 Vlad, Stravinsky: see pp. 2, 5, 8, 10, 13 and 16, as just a few examples from early in the book.

87 Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 16, 660; also see pp. 847, 1608, 1648–9. (This stance may seem ironic, given Taruskin's discussion of Weill mentioned above, but does illustrate that scholars, like composers, do not necessarily present a consistent line throughout their careers.) Similar examples can be found, for instance, in the words of Aaron Copland (‘there remains in Stravinsky's music an irreducible core that defies imitation’; quoted in Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy, 7); Elliott Carter (‘the highly original and compelling voice of Stravinsky’; quoted ibid., 8); and Gilbert Amy (‘the extraordinary continuity of the Stravinskyan style throughout all the transformations of his musical language’; ‘Aspects of the Religious Music of Igor Stravinsky’, Confronting Stravinsky, ed. Pasler, 195–206 (p. 201)).

88 Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1675. Another example of Romantic aesthetics in Taruskin can be found in his reference to the ‘organic fruit’ of the composer's method (ibid., 1652).

91 Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky, 192.

95 Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky, 226.

96 Straus, ‘Stravinsky the Serialist’, 150. He does ultimately seem to come down on the side of the difference of Stravinsky's late works (see ibid., 156, 172). Stravinsky's own views on the idea of style (which are, unsurprisingly, heavily based in nineteenth-century aesthetics) can be found in Robert Craft's edited volumes, specifically Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London, 1959; repr. 1979), 26, and Dialogues and a Diary (London, 1962), 26–7.

89 Pasler, ‘Introduction’, Confronting Stravinsky, ed. Pasler, x, xiv; Pieter van den Toorn, ‘Octatonic Pitch Structure in Stravinsky’, ibid., 130–56 (pp. 156, 130); Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘Discontinuity and Proportion in the Music of Stravinsky’, ibid., 174–94 (p. 177).

90 Amy, ‘Aspects of the Religious Music’, 206.

92 Routh, Stravinsky, 131–4.

93 Pieter van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven, CT, and London, 1983), and ‘Octatonic Pitch Structure’. Also see Smyth, ‘Stravinsky's Second Crisis’, who takes an approach influenced by van den Toorn. Criticism of van den Toorn's argument can be found in Dmitri Tymoczko's ‘Stravinsky and the Octatonic: A Reconsideration’, Music Theory Spectrum, 24 (2002), 68–102. However, Tymoczko still argues that there is the ‘impression’(!) of unity in Stravinsky's music, and a ‘characteristic “Stravinsky sound”’ (pp. 100–1).

94 Kramer, ‘Discontinuity and Proportion’, 177, 184.

97 Campbell, ‘Stravinsky and the Critics’, 246.

98 Pasler, ‘Introduction’, x. On Stravinsky's ‘adaptability’, see also Christopher Butler, ‘Stravinsky as Modernist’, The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Cross, 19–36. Pople discusses some aspects of the perceived ‘contrasts and continuities’ of Stravinsky's style, particularly regarding the ‘turning points’ in his oeuvre, in his ‘Misleading Voices: Contrasts and Continuities in Stravinsky Studies’, Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretation: Essays on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Craig Ayrey and Mark Everist (Cambridge, 1996), 271–87. The ‘voices’ of his title pertain to musical lines, as in voice-leading, rather than in the sense in which I am using the term in this essay. Some analysts do acknowledge to a limited extent the ‘masks’ of Stravinsky; yet these are still nevertheless implicitly superimposed on an essential ‘core’: see Griffiths, Stravinsky, 65, 96, 193. Maureen A. Carr discusses the ‘mask’ of objectivity in some of Stravinsky's neoclassical works in her Multiple Masks: Neoclassicism in Stravinsky's Works on Greek Subjects (Lincoln, NE, and London, 2002); however, ultimately she believes in the unity of his style across periods (see pp. 13, 15–16, 22).

99 Cf. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), 23; Kevin Korsyn, ‘Beyond Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Influence, and Dialogue’, Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford, 1999), 55–72 (p. 67); and Korsyn, ‘The Death of Musical Analysis?’, 338.

100 On the latter, see Nicholas Cook, ‘The Other Beethoven: Heroism, the Canon, and the Works of 1813–14’, 19th-Century Music, 27 (2003–4), 3–24.

101 Korsyn, ‘Beyond Privileged Contexts’, 65. Korsyn himself points out that the composer's oeuvre is one of the ‘privileged contexts’ he discusses in this article. See also Pople, ‘Misleading Voices’, 286.

102 Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing (London, 1974), 16; quoted in Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, 115.