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The Shapes of Sociability in the Instrumental Music of the Later Eighteenth Century

The 2009 Dent Medal Address

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

W. Dean Sutcliffe
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Abstract

The particular listener-friendliness of later eighteenth-century music is no secret; it has been an article of faith for some more recent writers, but has not that often informed the basic approach to this repertory. Theories of rhetoric, schema or topic are certainly premissed on such an understanding, but do not necessarily address what the author believes to be a central aspect of the musical aesthetics (and indeed of the wider culture) of the time: sociability. Yet music, especially instrumental music, arguably forms the most powerful expression of sociability that has reached us from that time – not merely reflecting wider practices but actively providing models for human behaviour. I discuss some of the common syntactical mechanisms that convey the sociable impulse, in line with Judith Schwartz's definition of an art that ‘communicate[s] by means of pattern rather than momentary passion’, and with particular reference to Pleyel, J. C. Bach and Haydn.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 138 , Issue 1 , 2013 , pp. 1 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Musical Association

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Footnotes

This article adheres closely to the paper I gave at the Dent Medal Study Day at the Institute of Musical Research of the University of London on 27 November 2010, being expanded only here and there. This paper was then read at the University of Cambridge in December 2010 and the University of Auckland in August 2011, while earlier, in November 2010, a condensed version had been read at the meeting of the American Musicological Society in Indianapolis.

References

1 Riley writes: ‘In the twentieth century, the study of “classical style” in Anglophone scholarship seems to have become a haven for the otherwise embattled genre of polite criticism, in which the writer poses as a gentleman-connoisseur and assumes a similar pose from his readers. Its echoes are recognizable in the prose styles of Tovey, Rosen, Joseph Kerman, and perhaps even Cone.’ Matthew Riley, ‘Sonata Principles’ (review article), Music and Letters, 89 (2008), 590–8 (p. 596).

2 William E. Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York, 1998); Robert O. Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style (New York, 2007); James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York, 2006).

3 I have discussed many of the issues pertaining to the definition of sociability in my ‘Before the Joke: Texture and Sociability in the Largo of Haydn's Op. 33 No. 2’, Journal of Musicological Research, 28 (2009), 92–118; see esp. pp. 92–9. As that article makes clear, Wye J. Allanbrook was one scholar who did make sociable qualities a fundamental point of orientation for her work; the forthcoming posthumous The Secular Commedia: Comic Mimesis in Late Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music (Berkeley, CA) will sum up her contribution in this area. Also covering such ground, James Currie's ‘Waiting for the Viennese Classics’, Musical Quarterly, 90 (2007), 123–66, places particular emphasis on the ethics of a style that conducts a dialogue with the listener, one that is based on recognition – and often distortion – of conventions.

4 Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 5.

5 Henry Fielding, ‘An Essay on Conversation’, Miscellanies, 3 vols. (London, 1743), i, 119, 121.

6 William Jones, A Treatise on the Art of Music; in which the Elements of Harmony and Air are practically considered, and illustrated by an hundred and fifty examples in notes[,] Many of them taken from the best Authors: The whole being intended as a Course of Lectures, preparatory to the practice of Thorough-Bass and Musical Composition (Colchester, 1784), iii and 49–50.

7 Heinrich Christoph Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Komposition, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1787), ii/1, 22, cited in Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch, ed. and trans. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen (Cambridge, 1995), 147. What the following translation does not quite make clear is that being ‘carried along’ by the music is not deemed a good thing by Koch. His original ‘mit sich fortzureißen’ conveys a rather more violent image: of a style of music that, by ‘jumping randomly’, causes the listener to lose his bearings and hence a centred sense of selfhood. On the other hand, the translation's ‘retreat into himself’ conveys just the gap between an outwardly directed, interactive aesthetic and Koch's very different ideal.

8 ‘After dinner, [Bach] played, with little intermission, till near eleven o'clock at night. During this time he grew so animated and possessed, that he not only played, but looked like one inspired. His eyes were fixed, his under lip fell, and drops of effervescence distilled from his countenance.’ Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces (London, 1773), 269.

9 On the relevance of Koch's views to the Viennese style of the later eighteenth century, see Felix Diergarten, ‘“Auch Homere schlafen bisweilen”: Heinrich Christoph Kochs Polemik gegen Joseph Haydn’, Haydn-Studien, 10 (2010), 78–92. An English version appeared as ‘“At Times Even Homer Nods Off”: Heinrich Christoph Koch's Polemic against Joseph Haydn’, trans. Michael Schubert, Music Theory Online, 14 (2008), <www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.08.14.1/mto.08.14.1.diergarten.html> (accessed 10 February 2012). Diergarten argues that both aesthetically and technically Koch's views have very limited application to compositional practice of the time, especially that of Haydn. See also Michael Spitzer's review of Anselm Gerhard's London und der Klassizismus in der Musik: Die Idee der ‘absoluten’ Musik und Muzio Clementis Klavierwerk in Eighteenth-Century Music, 3 (2006), 330–6: ‘Gerhard is motivated by the scandal at the heart of the Viennese classical style – namely, the apparent absence of a Viennese intellectual context […]. The most influential aesthetic writings flowed instead from north Germany, from the Berlin philosophical circle of Moses Mendelssohn and C. P. E. Bach (about which Gerhard has edited a collection of essays), and the Sulzer circle of Schulz, Kirnberger and Koch. None of these fits the style of Haydn or Mozart particularly well’ (p. 331).

11 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ed. David Daiches Raphael and Alec Lawrence Macfie (Oxford, 1976), 37.

10 Charles Avison's Essay on Musical Expression, with Related Writings by William Hayes and Charles Avison, ed. Pierre Dubois (Aldershot, 2004), 6.

12 Of cadence, William E. Caplin asserts that ‘in no other repertory does cadential articulation, and especially cadential play, assume such major significance for formal expression’ as it does in the Viennese Classical style: ‘The Classical Cadence: Conceptions and Misconceptions’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57 (2004), 51–117 (p. 52). On formal functions, see the chapter ‘Introversive Semiosis: The Beginning–Middle–End Paradigm’ in Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 51–79. This sentence and the first three sentences of the following paragraph derive, with some modifications, from my ‘Before the Joke’, 99.

13 Peter Burke, in The Art of Conversation (Cambridge and Ithaca, NY, 1993), notes how references in these publications to the need for spontaneity, which increased through the eighteenth century, ‘are contradicted by the very existence of the treatises as well as their advice to study in order to improve conversational performance’ (p. 92).

14 That appoggiaturas could be understood as a soothing or a smoothing device is apparent in many sources of the time – for instance Daniel Gottlob Türk's injunction, cited by Stephanie Vial, that when an idea is supposed to be executed in a defiant and sharply accented manner, to include appoggiaturas would be inappropriate ‘because through them the melody would receive a certain smoothness which, in such cases, would not be desirable’. Stephanie D. Vial, The Art of Musical Phrasing in the Eighteenth Century (Rochester, NY, 2008), 187.

15 Cited in translation by Dena Goodman in The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 101. Goodman's study places great emphasis on the agency of the salonnière in the discursive practices of a French Enlightenment that was ‘grounded in a female-centered mixed-gender sociability that gendered French culture, the Enlightenment, and civilization itself as feminine’ (p. 6). Chapter 3 deals most directly with the role of the hostess, who had to ‘enforc[e] the rules of polite conversation’ (p. 91).

16 Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York, 1980), 118. Earlier on the same page he suggests that ‘individual voices or parts in an ensemble can move with or against each other much as actors or dancers do on the stage’.

17 For a good recent discussion of eighteenth-century analogies between language and music, see Chapter 1, ‘Musical Punctuation, the Analogy’, in Vial, The Art of Musical Phrasing, 13–31.

18 Of course, such ambiguity about agency is hardly confined to this style of music, but its habit of offering quick contrasts of style and material certainly sharpens the matter. See the discussion by Robert S. Hatten in ‘Aesthetically Warranted Emotion and Composed Expressive Trajectories in Music’, Music Analysis, 29 (2010), Special Issue on Music and Emotion, guest edited by Michael Spitzer, 83–101. On the subject of ‘indeterminate’ agency in music, Hatten asks: ‘When do multiple actants suggest a single subject versus interacting subjects?’, and proceeds to explore theories suggesting that listeners try to make sense of their experience through the agency of an implied persona (p. 93). More specifically with regard to the repertory in question, Allanbrook remarks: ‘Some writers have tried to tame the wild polyphony of “voices” that replaced the single affect of, say, a Baroque concerto movement by invoking more decorous or civilized metaphors of “dialogue” and “conversation” to account for the near-cacophonous profusion of contrasts that roiled the surface of later eighteenth-century music.’ The Secular Commedia, [46].

19 Madame de Staël, De l'Allemagne (1811; Paris, 1868), 54 (my translation follows).

20 Cited in translation by Elena Russo, ‘The Self, Real and Imaginary: Social Sentiment in Marivaux and Hume’, Yale French Studies, 92 (1997), 126–48 (p. 130).

21 Carl Dahlhaus, for instance, notes that the maxim of music as a language of feeling was ‘repeated endlessly in the eighteenth century’. Further, music was described as being ‘gefühlsbildend’: through musically expressed feelings, sympathy could be created between human beings. Geschichte der Musik, 7 vols. (Laaber, 2010), v: Die Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts (repr. of Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, ed. Dahlhaus and Hermann Danuser, 13 vols. (Laaber, 1980–91), v (1985)), 9.

22 For example, Richard Will notes that ‘composers liked to pit loud, forceful unisons against soft, homophonic music, especially as an opening gambit’, in ‘When God Met the Sinner, and Other Dramatic Confrontations in Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music’, Music and Letters, 78 (1997), 175–209 (p. 193). Daniel Heartz notes how Mozart's Violin Sonata K.454, together with the slow introductions to the composer's ‘Linz’ Symphony and Quintet for Piano and Winds, K.452, ‘alternate loud, forceful chords with soft, pleading melodies, mostly falling by step’, though in this context the implication is that this is a Mozartean fingerprint shared by other works written around the same time: Mozart, Haydn and Early Beethoven, 1781–1802 (New York, 2009), 56–7. In relation to music of an earlier time, Janice B. Stockigt and Michael Talbot write of the second movement of a newly discovered Dixit dominus by Vivaldi: ‘Characteristic, too, is the pleading piano phrase that responds to the aggressive unison opening […]; Vivaldi was a pioneer in the creation of an opposition between a (so-called) masculine antecedent and a feminine consequent.’ See ‘Two More New Vivaldi Finds in Dresden’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 3 (2006), 35–61 (p. 53).

23 Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, ii (London, 1782), ed. Frank Mercer (New York, 1957), 866.

24 Barbara Hanning, ‘Conversation and Musical Style in the Late Eighteenth-Century Parisian Salon’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 22 (1989), 512–28 (p. 512).

25 Hans-Joachim Bracht gives a fine account of the logical problems inherent in the metaphor of conversation as applied specifically to the string quartet in his ‘Überlegungen zum Quartett-“Gespräch”’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 51 (1994), 169–89. He includes a discussion of the opening of Haydn's Quartet op. 33 no. 1 in B minor, noting that the individual voices speak not just one after another, but at the same time (‘Es zeigt sich jedoch, daß die Einzelstimmen nicht nur nacheinander, sondern auch gleichzeitig als sprechende Individuen hervortreten können’; p. 172). He notes, too, that the repeated-note figure heard in the second violin in bar 1 is important material rather than simply being subordinate, but in describing it as an ‘accompanying figure’ (‘Begleitfigur’; p. 173) he shows he has not quite grasped how the composer softens the boundaries between melody and accompaniment. The second violin's repeated-note figure must initially be heard as an imitation of the first violin's ‘melody’ before the listener can subsequently start to categorize it as accompaniment, and it is from this ambiguity that much of the discursive brilliance of the movement unfolds.

26 Floyd Grave has recently written a study of this phenomenon in the Haydn string quartets. Taking his cue from a schematic label of Gjerdingen's, but being more particular in his definition, Grave dubs it the Grand Cadence. See ‘Freakish Variations on a “Grand Cadence” Prototype in Haydn's String Quartets’, Journal of Musicological Research, 28 (2009), 119–45. The salient events in this schema are a melodic peak, the plunge to a very low note, generally ˆ5, and a following cadential trill on ˆ2 that resolves to a tonic note somewhere in between the two registral extremes, but of course various elaborations are possible within the basic pattern.

27 For an example of both the rising arpeggios that start to fill the gap between the two previous extreme pitches and the accompaniment of that gesture by repeated notes, see the finale of Haydn's String Quartet op. 50 no. 1, bars 58–64. In a later equivalent passage, at bars 200–14, the whole schema is stretched considerably, with the rising arpeggios now coming three times on the first violin and the two inner parts’ repeated notes being executed in syncopated rhythm.

28 William Weber, ‘Did People Listen in the 18th Century?’, Early Music, 25 (1997), 678–91 (p. 683).

29 As Dena Goodman writes, citing the work of Roger Chartier: ‘In the eighteenth century […] civility was devalued as mere formality associated with courtly notions of superiority, as mere appearance disengaged from any moral basis.’ The Republic of Letters, 4.

30 Lawrence E. Klein uses the term ‘instrumentalist’ to refer to a strain of the literature on manners that saw social discipline ‘as a tool of domination or self-promotion: manners were not the expression of moral identity but techniques for advancement and conquest’. ‘The Figure of France: The Politics of Sociability in England, 1660–1715’, Yale French Studies, 92 (1997), 30–45 (p. 35).

31 Steven Rumph conveys such a reading of late eighteenth-century style from a different perspective in his account of Mozart's Symphony K.550 in G minor in Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics (Berkeley, CA, 2012). He suggests that its first movement – and by extension most other instrumental music of that time – does not function rhetorically as ‘an act of communication’, but rather as ‘a process of cognition’ (p. 25). While I find it hard to dismiss the readily communicative aspects of later eighteenth-century musical language in quite these terms, I entirely agree that it does not communicate fixed messages; the process of discussion and evaluation is what counts.

32 For László Somfai, such a passage might exemplify one of ‘those constituents of Haydn's style that were invented precisely to overrule natural speech: the articulation and rhetorical flow of a musical piece’, among which he lists ‘the search for an endless legato melody’. ‘Clever Orator versus Bold Innovator’, Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric, ed. Tom Beghin and Sander M. Goldberg (Chicago, IL, 2007), 213–28 (p. 228). The kind of writing we hear at this point of Haydn's movement might therefore be thought to issue from a ‘post-rhetorical’ mindset. A further example from a late Haydn piano trio would be the finale of the Trio L.38 (H.24) in D major, in the outer sections marked ‘Allegro, ma dolce’. However, the sense of periodicity there makes the ‘endless legato’ rather easier for the listener to process.

33 For instance, Johann Baptist Schaul wrote with reference to Haydn's quartets: ‘Hat er einmal das Motiv eines Allegros bestimmt, so trägt er es auf hunderterley Arten vor, in dem er bald den Baß, bald den Alt, bald die zweyte, oder die erste Violin, bald in Einem Nu, mit Einem Pinselstreiche das Ganze verändert, und dennoch immer das Thema hervorleuchet, so daß man nicht umhin kann, darüber zu erstaunen’ (‘Once he has determined the motive of an Allegro, he delivers it in a hundred different ways, now giving it to the bass, now the viola, then to the second or the first violin, now transforming the whole in a trice, with a single brushstroke, and yet he always lets the theme shine through, so that one cannot help but be astounded’; my translation). Schaul in fact sees the matter in dialectical terms, admiring the variety that can issue from a single motive while at the same time suggesting that a listener is always reminded of the original starting point. Johann Baptist Schaul, Briefe über den Geschmack in der Musik (Karlsruhe, 1809), 10. Elaine Sisman suggests a more rhetorical and unitary conception of such thematic economy, as the ‘amplification characteristic of display rhetoric, the verbal facility capable of expressing the same idea in a variety of ways’, leaning on remarks made by the old Haydn to his biographer Griesinger. ‘Rhetorical Truth in Haydn's Chamber Music’, Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric, ed. Beghin and Goldberg, 281–326 (p. 295).

34 Adolph Freiherr von Knigge, Über den Umgang mit Menschen (Hanover, 1788), trans. P. Will as Practical Philosophy of Social Life, or the Art of Conversing with Men (London, 1799), 137.

35 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 6 vols. in 3 (London, 1711), i, 70. Citing this passage, Lawrence E. Klein comments that ‘oratory lacked the emancipatory potential of conversation since it was an authoritative regime’; Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994), 99. Compare my reservations about the applicability of rhetoric as a discursive model to later eighteenth-century music as expressed in a review of Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric, ed. Beghin and Goldberg, in Music and Letters, 92 (2011), 128–32.

36 Hanning, who cites Morellet's strictures (‘Conversation and Musical Style’, 515), acknowledges that musical conversations may feature the sorts of faults that he enumerates, writing towards the conclusion of her study: ‘Thus, the various facets of galant musical style share both positive and negative traits of conversation as practiced in contemporary French polite society’ (Music and Letters., 525). Thus she interprets these faults ‘realistically’ – as evidence that musical conversations replicate the same sorts of errors found in real-life conversations – rather than suggesting that this may reveal the limitations of the conversational metaphor.

37 This crisis does not simply build on the activities of the middle section. The recapitulation has already erupted in ways that reflect the dark energy of the development. There is a shading-over into minor from bar 179, leading via a beautiful rising cello line to a most unusual recapitulation of the second subject in the flattened mediant major (from bar 181). Suddenly from bar 1913 we are back to the form that the motto-transition complex took during the development, using the minor mode and sitting on the dominant rather than the local tonic. This leads abruptly to a heart-stopping enunciation of the first three notes of the motto as a diminished-seventh chord (bars 195–6). This is a clear echo of the climax in the development at bars 144–7 – the scoring is very similar and the same c′′′ is heard at the top of the texture.

38 For a definition by the inventor of the term, Arnold Schoenberg, see his Fundamentals of Musical Composition (London, 1967), 58.

39 See Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style, 162, for a definition and discussion.

40 Judith L. Schwartz, ‘Conceptions of Musical Unity in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Musicology, 18 (2001), 56–75 (p. 74). Schwartz goes on to describe a ‘unifying pattern of restraint, balance, reciprocity, or complementarity among conflicting passions or events’ that was a defining characteristic of neoclassical art, and that in musical terms became ‘more striking’ over the course of the century, with contrasts of material becoming stronger.

41 The role of the listener in this respect is stressed throughout Gretchen Wheelock's Haydn's Ingenious Jesting with Art: Contexts of Musical Wit and Humor (New York, 1992). See especially the concluding pages, which comment on ‘the accomplishments of listeners who were responsive to the challenges of [Haydn's] art of combinations’ (p. 206).

42 Richard Taruskin has recently stressed the ‘active mental engagement’ required from the listener with the flourishing of independent instrumental music in the eighteenth century, making the listening experience in fact ‘more strenuous’ and leading to some famous objections like that of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (New York, 2005), ii: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 208.