The musical topic : hunt, military and pastoral

321 Pages·2006·2.688 MB·English

by  Monelle, Raymond

Music History, Music Th eory
THE
MUSICAL
An invaluable interdisciplinary study that addresses three traditional MONELLE Th e Musical Topic discusses three tropes
topics in music prominently featured in Western European
TOPIC 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 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.
INDIANA
other publications. He is Honorary Fellow
in Music in the University of Edinburgh,
University Press
Scotland.
Bloomington & Indianapolis
Musical Meaning and Interpretation
http://iupress.indiana.edu Hunt, Military and Pastoral
Robert S. Hatten, editor
1-800-842-6796 ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34766-4
ISBN-10: 0-253-34766-1
INDIANA
RAYMOND MONELLE Jacket illustration:
Piqueur de la vénerie de Napoléon III
(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
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© 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.
It is pointed out in the text that this is not a comprehensive study of musical
topics, though that was how it started out. Such a study would occupy twenty vol-
umes and a lifetime’s work. There are whole categories of topics that are not men-
tioned: topical dance measures, icons (such as the noble horse and the pianto), sty-
listic references (the French overture), and passing fashions (the Turkish topic).
These have been excellently covered by other writers, and I have said something
about a couple of them in my last book, The Sense of Music. The three great topical
genres, hunting, soldiering, and shepherding, are chosen here because they repre-
sent major cultural themes. In any case, comprehensive lists of topics are probably
of little use and are not the way to do topic theory. As Agawu has said, the inventory