Conference Agenda

Brian Ferneyhough’s music poses several challenges for the would-be analyst. Among these is the sheer amount of information that exists in any of his pieces. But a far more fundamental challenge lies in the ways that his notation impacts fundamental assumptions about the relationship between the composer, “the piece,” the score, the performer, and the listener that problematize usual notions about how one analyses music. In this paper, I argue that these challenges have not been adequately addressed in the literature on Ferneyhough’s music and present analytical case studies of analysis that focuses on my experiences of listening to and watching performances of Ferneyhough’s music. Ultimately, I demonstrate that one not only can meaningfully analyze Ferneyhough’s music mainly by listening and watching, but also that such analyses capture important aspects of the music that would be missed by purely score-based analytical approaches.

In this presentation, I frame George Crumb’s music as an invitation to conceive of subjectivity differently. In particular, I find that Crumb’s Music for a Summer Evening stages an agential network that frustrates typical ways of discussing musical agency, in turn problematizing humanist ideologies of subjectivity. While most scholarship on musical agency adopts a humanist model—agents act willfully and can be identified—I find that Crumb’s musical self-fashioning resonates with posthumanist thinking, in which actions emerge from tangled agential networks. Building on the work of Steven Bruns (1993), I trace intertextuality in Crumb’s music in general, as well as in Music for a Summer Evening in particular. In Music for a Summer Evening, quotations of other composers, self-quotations, and conventionalized exoticism blur together. “Who is speaking?” becomes a fraught question.

To mediate between humanist and posthumanist models of musical agency, I adapt David Morgan’s (2018) work on enchantment to music. This work allows us to derive both models from networks—here, enchantment is a process where a network is subsumed into a single actor. In this conception, humanist agents emerge from enchantment; posthumanist work keeps the network in focus. Enchantment helps us shuttle between stances on musical agency, so that their claims are legible to one another. I close by considering how following what I take to be Crumb’s invitation—adopting a posthumanist ideology of subjectivity—might affect our music-analytical work more broadly.

Richard Strauss knew how to write for singers. By the time he composed the eccentric song cycle Der Krämerspiegel (The Shopkeeper’s Mirror) op. 66 in 1918, he had been writing successful operas and Liederfor decades. Der Krämerspiegel, however, was Strauss’s response against music publishers who profited on composers’ work at a time when royalties did not yet exist. The main villain in this history was Bote & Bock, with whom Strauss had a contractual obligation to publish a set of songs. Strauss’s solution to this undesired contract was to write twelve songs set to the texts of literary critic, Alfred Kerr. One after another, the songs satirically mocked various publishers so obnoxiously that Bote & Bock eventually withdrew from the publication altogether.

This paper traces Strauss’s compositional choices that intentionally make the performance of Der Krämerspiegel burdensome: for the singer these include lengthy phrases with several jumps zigzagging up and down, entrances that start in the middle of the piano’s phrase, poorly prepared high points or difficult register breaks. For the pianist, we see complex textures, densely polyphonic material, and sudden changes in character or tempo. After giving a general overview, I will provide a more detailed phrase-level analysis on selected songs (Nos. 4, 7, and 8) with a focus on the various overlaps between piano and voice, the singer’s melodic contour, and the piano’s harmonic material vis-à-vis the vocal line. To further point out the differences, I compare these with two other Strauss’s Lieder to illustrate how Strauss actively works against his own compositional style by producing music that becomes deliberately challenging for both performers.

To conclude, the issues of Der Krämerspiegel resonate with recent debates on the relationships among composer, musical score and performers (see Leech-Wilkinson 2020 or Doğantan-Dack 2020). Indeed, afterthe last century of music that has presented even greater technical difficulties to performers (and analysts), many of Strauss’s challenges may become overlooked. The present paper clarifies the saliency of Der Krämerspiegel and the ways in which the composer seems, in this example, to not want his performers to succeed.