Desire in Chromatic Harmony

Of the many composers in the Western classical tradition who celebrated the marriage between psyche and sound, those explored in this book followed the lines diverging from Wagner in philosophizing the nature of desire in music. This book offers two new theories of tonal functionality in the music of the first half of the twentieth century that seek to explain its psychological complexities. First, the book further develops Riemann’s three diatonic chord functions, extending them to account for chromatic chord progression and substitution. The three functions (tonic, subdominant, and dominant) are compared to Jacques Lacan’s twin concepts of metaphor and metonymy, which drive the apparatus of human desire. Second, the book develops a technique for analyzing the drives that pull chromatic music in multiple directions simultaneously, creating a libidinal surface that mirrors the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, and the post-Freudians Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. The harmonic models are tested in psychologically challenging pieces of music by post-Wagnerian composers. From the obsession with death and mourning in Suk’s Asrael Symphony to an exploration of “perversion” in Strauss’s Elektra, from the post-Kantian transcendentalism of Ives’s Concord Sonata to the “Accelerationism” of Skryabin’s late piano works, and from the Sufi mysticism of Szymanowski’s Song of the Night to the failed fantasy of the American dream in Copland’s The Tender Land, the book cuts a path through the dense forests of chromatic complexity and digs deep into the psychological makeup of post-Wagnerian psychodynamic music.

Tonal Interpretation, Transformational Models, and the Chromatic Calls to Repent in Franck's Le chasseur maudit

This article provides an analysis of Cesär Franck's Le chasseur maudit, which serves as an extended and elegant reflection on the potential and limitations of various analytical frameworks. This article is placed with respect to notions of chromatic music, specifically on the idea that chromaticism poses analytical difficulties that Riemannian and neo-Riemannian perspectives are particularly well suited to address. After discussing the work from both linear and functional perspectives, and examining the conceptual problems that attend each, the article then demonstrates how a contextual, neo-Riemannian view can capture the work's important gestures, and offers a balance between a desire to understand the work as a reflection of an orderly and coherent relational system, and the need to engage the aural experience of the music.

The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories

In recent years Hugo Riemann's ideas have thoroughly captured the music-theoretical imagination, both in the United States and abroad. Neo-Riemannian theory has proven particularly adept at explaining features of chromatic music where other theoretical approaches have failed, and thereby established itself as the leading theoretical approach of our time. This book brings together a group of proponents of Riemannian and neo-Riemannian theory for an exploration of the music-analytical, systematic, and historical aspects of this new field. It elucidates key aspects of the field, draws connections between Riemann's original ideas and current thought, and suggests new applications and avenues for further study. A number of articles in this book suggest connections to other fields of inquiry, such as cognitive and mathematical music theory, as well as applications in the field of metric or melodic analysis. The selection of articles is complemented by several of Hugo Riemann's key original texts, many of which appear in English translation for the first time, and is rounded off by a glossary of key concepts for easy reference.

Dualism and the Beholder's Eye: Inversional Symmetry in Chromatic Tonal Music

This article considers the theme of inversional symmetry as it manifests itself in Riemann's theoretical writings and in late-nineteenth-century chromatic music. It examines the mathematical properties of the concepts of symmetry underlying musical systems and explores how these symmetrical properties can be brought to bear in innovative ways on musical structures. Section 1 of the article provides a historical background by examining Rameau and his proposed laws of tonal harmony which are invariant under four basic operations: reordering, octave shift, note duplication, and chromatic disposition. It also discusses Weber's Roman numeral notation which develops and fulfills Rameau's ideas. Section 2 discusses Riemann's “dualism” as an attempt to incorporate inversion into the Rameau/Weber collection of symmetries. Section 3 examines whether the “second practice” of the nineteenth-century chromaticism involves inversional symmetry. Section 4 provides a Riemannian understanding of dualism and Section 5 illustrates a contrapuntal approach by examining a Brahms intermezzo.