Tragedy and the Gaze of the Living Dead

The chapter describes how harmonic functional cycles flow strongly in the music of Richard Strauss, demonstrable in the opening scene of Elektra, the harmonies of which surge in an ever-tonicward direction. The chapter further re-examines the concept of hysteria, refuting its applicability to Strauss’s opera, opting for a more detailed Lacanian reading. Strauss’s harmonic progressions support the author’s psychodynamic reading, employing a dynamic in which one octatonic cycle controls a separate cycle. The chapter also examines this from an ethical position, following Lacan’s model of Aristotelean catharsis (in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), and shows how these functional cycles come to a head in the final dance of death that, like Wagner’s Isolde, shuttles to and fro between the cycles as they are completely dismantled.

When Octatonic and Hexatonic Collide

Following the rise of Deleuze in chapter 6, the chapter passes through famous remarks by Deleuze concerning cybernetics and acceleration, focusing on the futuristic projects of Alexander Skryabin, who wanted to speed up time through his music and, in particular, through his harmony. While other works set the hexatonic and the octatonic in a diatonic flux, the first as an energy-discharging mechanism, the second as a storage capacity, Skryabin’s Sonata No. 10, Op. 70, recently explored by Vasilis Kallis (2015), is unique in juxtaposing hexatonic composition with the octatonically rotating model as clearly segregated areas. The chapter asks: To what extent can the flow between these cycles carry our tonal desire? To what extent does our diatonic engagement fluctuate between distinct sections? How do these different types of tonal “space” impact on our perception of “time”? How can drive analysis meaningfully integrate with Funktionstheorie?

Epilogue

It is my hope that the project of this book is continued, and that its extensions will stray from the modest tools I have proposed for zooming into the micro detail of the musical surface: drive analysis and neofunctional metaphoric-metonymic rotation. Equally, I hope that the tools for analyzing this turbulent music will undergo their own cybernetic autopoiesis through future refinement and probable release from their psychodynamic genesis (though there will always be an operative trace of their origin). It should be clear that, although the creative disruptive force of the turn of the twentieth century embodies a particularly heated concentration of the applicability of these tools, the theory has wider scope. This is true beyond the already expanded parameters of that concentrated moment in the first few chapters, which I opened up in both directions (Wagner in the 1850s, Copland in the 1950s). Even within this frame, there are far more potential applications than those that I could rehearse. Substitute Bruckner for Wagner, and we might well find (analyzing the passages of, say, the Eighth Symphony as Miguel ...

Romantic Provenance

The chapter considers how seventh chords, half-diminished chords, and diminished chords might fit into the book’s root–theoretical model of tonal function, grounded in the Romantic tradition of Schubert, Beethoven, and Chopin. The chapter works toward a full functional analysis of the Vorspiel and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. The phantasy involved in Isolde’s transfiguration is explored from a Lacanian perspective, leading to reflections on how phantasy works to support tonal function. An addition to the canon of analyses of Hugo Wolf’s “An den Schlaf” covers the theme of death, sleep, and the land of limbo in between, offering a corollary to Isolde’s desire for death. These themes weave their way into the outlined theory of harmonic function and offer a precursor to the psychodynamics to come.

Karol Szymanowski’s Dominant Drive Model and the Excess of the Cycle

The chapter explores several songs by Karol Szymanowski that demonstrate the explicit rotation of a T→S→D substitution model in relatively strict terms. These songs also reflect on the theme of desire as a circular driving force. The chapter then examines Szymanowski’s symphonic music, specifically the third symphony, “Song of the Night” Op. 29, whose sonorities spread their tensions out in many directions. To visually re-create this, the chapter employs a method called “drive analysis,” which represents triads as triangles and tetrads as squares, each with tailored corners to represent the raising or lowering of pitches. When placed on a graph whose y-axis unfolds the circle of descending fifths and whose x-axis represents the flow of time, various patterns emerge that unlock new hearings of a work whose harmonic “momentum” could otherwise be considered static.

Transcending Root Motion

The third chapter studies the third movement (“The Alcotts”) of Charles Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–1860, and demonstrates how Ives's harmony short-circuits the philosophies of the New England Transcendentalists, anticipating post-Lacanian psychological complexity. Along with Ives’s transcendental project, the chapter looks to Copland’s opera The Tender Land, which exchanges static octatonic minor-third cycles with major-third cycles (as in Ives), but this now expands in scale, exhibited in two key scenes from the work. The expanding harmonic rotation portrays the sexual awakening of the naïve young subject of the opera, Laurie Moss. In their broader function the cycles speak of the regeneration of the American landscape and the families who settle on it. Taking a cue from Lacan, who became influenced by the emerging American meta-discipline of “cybernetics” we interrogate the operations of these cycles as feedback-loops that propel desire forwards through constant rotation and exploration.

The Thanatotic and the Tonnetz

The chapter describes how the Andante from Josef Suk’s Asrael Symphony is a funeral march in all but name. It celebrates the lives of Suk’s teacher Dvořák and his wife Otilie, whose death during the work’s composition famously changed the projected optimistic tone. The various moods of this movement hang together because of a heavily asserted inner pedal of d♭, heard prominently in various instruments throughout. This pitch is never dissonant, and chords are constructed around it in such a way as to replicate a perfect hexagon on the common neo-Riemannian graphical Tonnetz. The associations of death with limited harmonic progression are aligned with Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” The same compositional technique occurs in each of the five pieces from About Mother, Op. 28. The dual association held by this technique between maternal warmth and death leads to a critique of the basic Freudian death drive inspired by Lacan, Deleuze, and Lyotard. A flexible approach to the Tonnetz is adumbrated, which allows for the integration of tense tetrachords.

A Linguistic Theory of Chromatic Harmonic Substitution and Progression in the Diatonic Unconscious

The chapter constructs an energetic model of harmonic progression in which tense chords are signifiers of tonal functions (Riemann’s T, S, and D functions). The paradigm adopts the linguistic axes that Lacan mapped as metaphor and metonymy, which were crucial to the formation of a human subject at whose center lies désir. The theoretical claims build on the recent work of David Lewin (2007), Richard Cohn (2012a), Steven Rings (2011a), Dmitri Tymoczko (2011a), Brian Hyer (2011), and others but also reevaluate the earlier work of Ernest Kurth (1920), Hugo Riemann (1893), and Ernö Lendvai (1993). The chapter seeks to account for voice leading, modulation, and tonal diversity in a broad range of works