8 - Hearing Another’s Voice

Summary

The absence of a singular first-person voice in music may simply indicate that such music is speaking in the plural, in the third person, or in some more objective manner. These questions are examined in the opening chapter of Part IV, ‘Hearing Others’. Looking first at the use of quotation, allusion, and intertextuality in Schumann’s music (in this, picking up the question of ‘whose voice?’ left at the close of Chapter 4), ‘Hearing Another’s Voice’ goes on to explore questions of intersubjectivity and the collective seen in the ‘objective’ tendency of Schumann’s music across the 1840s, the distinction between a divided subject and multiple subjects in the composer’s choral, orchestral, and chamber works, before considering the attempted union of self with world, the subjective with the objective, in two of his later songs, ‘Abendlied’ and ‘Nachtlied’. This eighth chapter thus focuses on those examples from Schumann’s music that have a generally positive ethos, when self and other can still be still distinguished.