Musical Topic

Music History, Music Th eory THE An invaluable interdisciplinary study that addresses three traditional MONELLE Th e Musical Topic discusses three tropes topics in music MUSICAL prominently featured in Western European music: the hunt, the military, and the pasto- Monelle spins an Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of musical sig- ral. Raymond Monelle provides an in-depth nifi cation by combining semiotics, historical analysis, cultural studies, THE cultural and historical study of musical top- literature, art history, social history, musicology, and musical analysis TOPIC ics—short melodic fi gures, harmonic or to map the terrain associated with three musical topics. A tour de force MUSICAL rhythmic formulae carrying literal or lexical in comparative studies, Monelle celebrates the reticular relation of the meaning—through consideration of their musical sign to an object and to its interpretation. TOPIC origin, thematization, manifestation, and —William P. Dougherty, meaning. Th e Musical Topic shows the con- Ellis and Nelle Levitt Professor of Music, nections of musical meaning to literature, Drake University social history, and the fi ne arts. Th is book is concerned chiefl y with Th is brilliant study deepens and extends Monelle’s investigations of top- those topics that relate to great cultural ics—musical features and musical fi gures that reference and develop worlds; it shows that signifi er and signi- cultural concepts. Th e fascinating tour he conducts through historical fi ed are oft en not contemporary, and that archives and musical repertoires surprises with its logic in the manner many topics refer to older and even purely of a detective story. Th e continual metamorphoses of the hunter’s horn, conventional worlds. Aft er an introduction the sometimes painful ambivalence of the soldier’s march, the spiritual in which the theory of topics is formalized burdens of the shepherd’s pipe attest to the capacity of music to promote and rationalized, three topics are studied in social values, intervene in societies’ dialectics, and elaborate and enforce depth through the concert and operatic mu- the mythologies by which we represent ourselves. Monelle’s analyses are sic of a wide range of periods. Monelle il- RAYMOND MONELLE has degrees in his- supported by a richly grounded theory and illuminated by diverse, de- lustrates how the topic of the hunt is shown tory and music. His doctoral work was on tailed, and imaginative research in cultural history. No reader will con- to be only obliquely related to the hunting Italian opera seria. His work on music theory clude this volume in any doubt that precisely and consensually articu- of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries; and semiotics is internationally known, and lated topics permeate music and constitute a fundamental dimension of how the military topic, similarly, is only am- his books include Linguistics and Semiotics musical signifi cation. —David Lidov, York University biguously related to the military life of the in Music (1992) and Th e Sense of Music period; and fi nally, how the pastoral topic (2000). He has been composer, pianist, and bears no relation to contemporary peas- conductor. He also writes music criticism antry, but rather to classical and renaissance for Th e Independent, Opera magazine, and verse and neoplatonic love. other publications. He is Honorary Fellow in Music in the University of Edinburgh, INDIANA Scotland. University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis Musical Meaning and Interpretation http://iupress.indiana.edu Robert S. Hatten, editor 1-800-842-6796 ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34766-4 ISBN-10: 0-253-34766-1 Hunt, Military and Pastoral INDIANA Jacket illustration: Piqueur de la vénerie de Napoléon III RAYMOND MONELLE (René Princeteau). Used by permission of the Musées de Senlis. The Musical Topic Musical Meaning and Interpretation Robert S. Hatten, editor Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera Naomi André Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy William Echard Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert Robert S. Hatten Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation Robert S. Hatten Intertextuality in Western Art Music Michael L. Klein Is Language a Music? Writings on Musical Form and Signi¤cation David Lidov Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber Jairo Moreno Expressive Forms in Brahms’s Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet Peter H. Smith Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style Michael Spitzer RAYMOND MONELLE The Musical Topic Hunt, Military and Pastoral INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] © 2006 by Raymond Monelle All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includ- ing photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Informa- tion Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Monelle, Raymond, date The musical topic : hunt, military and pastoral / Raymond Monelle. p. cm. — (Musical meaning and interpretation) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34766-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Music—History and criticism. 2. Hunting music—History and criticism. 3. Military music—History and criticism. 4. Pastoral music (Secular)—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. ML160.M686 2006 781.5′9—dc22 2006002650 1 2 3 4 5 11 10 09 08 07 06 To Joseph Kerman with respect and admiration Contents List of Plates ix Preface xi Note on Titles of Musical Works xv part one: topic theory 1. Topic and Expression 3 2. The Literary Source of Topic Theory 11 3. Signi¤er and Signi¤ed in Music 20 part two: huntsmen 4. Signi¤er: The Hunting Horn 35 5. Signi¤ed: Hunts Noble and Ignoble 59 6. Musical Hunts 72 7. The Topic Established 95 part three: soldiers 8. The Military Signi¤er: 1. The March 113 9. The Military Signi¤er: 2. The Military Trumpet and Its Players 134 10. The Military Signi¤ed 142 11. The Soldier Represented 160 part four: shepherds 12. The Pastoral Signi¤ed: The Myth 185 13. The Pastoral Signi¤er 207 14. The Pastoral in Music 229 15. New Pastorals 251 16. Epilogue 272 Appendix 1 275 Appendix 2 281 Bibliography 291 Index 299 Plates 1. French hussar of the Napoleonic period (painting by François Fleming). Peter Newark’s Military Pictures. 2. Antoine Watteau, The Shepherds (ca. 1719). Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin. 3. Bartolomeo Pinelli, Shepherd Musicians Before a Shrine (1807), detail. Florence, Uf¤zi. 4. Player of the double aulós. Red-¤gure painting on a drinking bowl, ca. 480 b.c. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich. 5. Titian, The Three Ages of Man, detail. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. 6. The angel’s visitation to the shepherds. From the Book of Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux (fourteenth century). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 7. Pieter Bruegel the elder, Dance of the Peasants (ca. 1568). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Plates follow page 114. Preface Musical topics are more than mere labels. Since the full elucidation of a topic, both as signi¤er and signi¤ed, must depend on investigations of social history, literature, popular culture, and ideology as well as music, each topic must lead to a lengthy cultural study. This is the kind of exercise that is three times embarked on here. It becomes clear that musical topics map whole tracts of human reality; that even a single topic involves an almost inexhaustible quest, far beyond anything possible in these few pages. Topic theory, in fact, may signal the moment when musicology ceases to be wholly, or even primarily, about music. This kind of undertaking—“interdisciplinary studies”, or nowadays “compara- tivism”—carries two dangers. You can do it for amusement, leading your reader out of her specialty into wider ¤elds and making wild connections. Or you can frustrate her, by failing to give a proper account of music, literature, painting, social history, philosophy, or anything else. The present book errs in both respects. Aca- demic minds, somebody said, are either arrows or storage rooms. Most of us spend our early years trying to become arrows, but if you were born a storage room you had better ¤nd some way, ¤nally, to be yourself. As a lifelong storage room and an erstwhile modern historian, I have found myself continually drawn out of positiv- istic musical analysis into re®ections on semantics and general culture. This book has much to say about general culture. Here is a kind of musicology that may sometimes even lose sight of music altogether. If this is so, let us say that hunting is often good fun even when you lose the scent, that military maneuvers may achieve useful results even when not in pursuit of the enemy, and that there may be other sheep which are not of this fold. The most perfectly focused work of musicology ever written was Ludwig Köchel’s Chronologisch-thematisches Ver- zeichnis sämtlicher Tonwerke Mozarts, but few of us have ever read it for pleasure. There is more pleasure in going down the road of Paul Ricoeur’s “split or cleft reference” where doors may unexpectedly open on insights scarcely sought.

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