Modernism and Reification in the Music of Frank Bridge

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the tradition of Formenlehre, this article puts forward a methodological historicism as a means of mediating between the disciplinary expectations of musical analysis, on the one hand, and philosophical aesthetics, on the other. Stylistic developments in the later music of Frank Bridge, perhaps British music’s best claim to a high modernist of the generation of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, are illuminated by means of Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of musical ‘reification’. A comparative analysis of the complementary modernism of Bridge’s contemporary Ralph Vaughan Williams is also put forward, and a critical light shone on recent writing on British musical modernism in general.

Notes

1 However, see now Fabian Huss, The Music of Frank Bridge (Woodbridge, 2015), which appeared after the completion of the present article.

2 Ebenezer Prout, Musical Form (3rd edn, London, n.d.), 2.

3 Ibid., 7, 30.

4 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Music and Language: A Fragment’, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London and New York, 1992), 1–8 (p. 1).

5 Ibid., 3.

6 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN, and London, 2006), 98–9, 183 note 75 (translation modified); see also Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1970–86), xii (1975), 121–2, 120–1 note 40.

7 See for instance Ian Bent with William Drabkin, Analysis (Basingstoke and London, 1987), 12–16.

8 See Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, ed. Gerald Strang and Leonard Stein (London and Boston, MA, 1967); A. B. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: Selected Writings on Theory and Method, ed. and trans. Scott Burnham (Cambridge, 1997), 55–154. On Schoenberg’s debts to nineteenth-century theorists, see Ulrich Krämer, Alban Berg als Schüler Arnold Schönbergs: Quellenstudien and Analysen zum Frühwerk, Alban Berg Studien, 4 (Vienna, 1996), 38–67.

9 Anton Webern, The Path to the New Music, ed. Willi Reich, trans. Leo Black (London, 1963), 27.

10 Alban Berg, ‘Why Is Schoenberg’s Music So Difficult to Understand?’, Pro Mundo – Pro Domo: The Writings of Alban Berg, ed. Bryan Simms (New York, 2014), 183–95 (pp. 184–5); Jonathan Dunsby, Making Words Sing: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Song (Cambridge, 2004), 73.

11 Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Analysis of the Four Orchestral Songs Opus 22’, trans. Claudio Spies, Perspectives of New Music, 3 (1965), 1–21 (pp. 7, 6).

12 See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik’, Der getreue Korrepetitor, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, xv (1976), 188–248 (pp. 211–17); and compare Bryan R. Simms, ‘Line and Harmony in the Sketches of Schoenberg’s “Seraphita”, Op. 22, No. 1’, Journal of Music Theory, 26 (1982), 291–312, and Jack Boss, ‘Schoenberg’s Op. 22 Radio Talk and Developing Variation in Atonal Music’, Music Theory Spectrum, 14 (1992), 125–49.

13 See William E. Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York, 1998), 49–53.

14 Adorno, ‘Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik’, 215–17.

15 On the ‘continuation phrase’ of the Schoenbergian sentence, see Caplin, Classical Form, 40–8. The present account reverts to Schoenberg (Fundamentals of Musical Composition, ed. Strang and Stein, 58) in its employment of the term ‘development’ in this context. See Caplin, Classical Form, 264–5 note 29.

16 Schoenberg, ‘Analysis of the Four Orchestral Songs’, 6.

17 Arnold Schoenberg, The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of its Presentation, ed. and trans. Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff (Bloomington, IN, 2006), 133.

18 Hans Keller, letter to Music Analysis, 1 (1982), 227–30 (p. 228).

19 For a summary and critique of Riemann’s theories of rhythm and metre, see Ivan F. Waldbauer, ‘Riemann’s Periodization Revisited and Revised’, Journal of Music Theory, 33 (1989), 333–91.

20 Prout, Musical Form, iii, 7–9, 26, 27, 15.

21 Ibid., 27, 123.

22 Ibid., 102–50.

23 Ibid., 99.

24 Charles Villiers Stanford, Musical Composition: A Short Treatise for Students (New York, 1911), 27, 47.

25 The ‘Prefatory Note’ to Musical Composition is dated ‘April, 1911’ (p. viii), the published score of the Seventh Symphony (London, 1912) ‘Feb. 1911’ (p. 109).

26 Stanford, Musical Composition, 51.

27 Jeremy Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician (Oxford, 2002), 397.

28 Stanford, Musical Composition, 93.

29 See Prout, Musical Form, 85.

30 Prout’s idiosyncratic scale-step theory of harmony is laid out in Ebenezer Prout, Harmony: Its Theory and Practice (16th edn, London, 1901); there is an excursus on modulation in Prout, Musical Form, 37–77. He may insist that ‘the only way to determine with accuracy the form of sentences of irregular construction is to examine the harmony of the passage’ (ibid., 121), but in his analyses Prout is generally content – from a harmonic perspective – simply to note points of cadence. The analyses of tonal repertory in the present article will blend scale-step and functional approaches after the manner suggested in Caplin, Classical Form, 23–31.

31 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Problem of Musical Analysis’, trans. Max Paddison, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley, CA, and London, 2002), 162–80 (p. 166).

32 Robert P. Morgan, Becoming Heinrich Schenker: Music Theory and Ideology (Cambridge, 2014), 188.

33 J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, Modernist (Cambridge, 2006), 58 note 59, 60.

34 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (18th edn, Tübingen, 2001), 163–4. The rival English translations, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1962), and Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY, 2010), both give the page numbers of the German edition in their margins.

35 Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, 59.

36 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge, 2002), 1–56 (pp. 23–5).

37 Timothy Clark, Derrida, Blanchot, Heidegger: Sources of Derrida’s Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge, 1992), 56.

38 Ibid., 200 note 56.

39 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, trans. Lisa Liebmann, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge, 1991), 89–107 (p. 90).

40 Clark, Derrida, Blanchot, Heidegger, 61–2; Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 27–32.

41 Stephen Downes, ‘Modern Maritime Pastoral: Wave Deformation in the Music of Frank Bridge’, British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960, ed. Matthew Riley (Farnham, 2010), 93–107.

42 For the reading summarized in this paragraph, see ibid., 101–2.

43 Roger Parker, ‘High Hermeneutic Windows’, Journal of Musicological Research, 12 (1992), 247–52 (p. 251).

44 See Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling, The English Musical Renaissance 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music (2nd edn, Manchester and New York, 2001), 187.

45 Downes, ‘Modern Maritime Pastoral’, 102–4.

46 Jonathan M. Dunsby, ‘Schoenberg’s Premonition, Op. 22, No. 4, in Retrospect’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, 1 (1977), 137–49 (p. 149).

47 See Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford, 397.

48 Adorno, ‘Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik’, 216.

49 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?’, trans. Régis Durand, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester, 1984), 71–82 (p. 81).

50 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London and New York, 2002), 4.

51 Schoenberg, ‘Analysis of the Four Orchestral Songs’, 6.

52 Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, 100–1.

53 Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question’, 74.

54 Between 1919 and 1931, The Sea was heard eight times at the festival, including a performance (on 15 October 1924) ‘in the presence of Their Majesties King George V and Queen Mary’. See <http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/archive/search/work/the-sea/3079> (accessed 20 November 2014).

55 Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question’, 75.

56 See Deborah Heckert, ‘Schoenberg, Roger Fry and the Emergence of a Critical Language for the Reception of Musical Modernism in Britain, 1912–1914’, British Music and Modernism, ed. Riley, 49–66; <http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/archive/search/work/five-orchestral-pieces-op-16/4259> (accessed 20 November 2014); and, for the enthusiastic response of audience and critics to the première of The Sea, Paul Hindmarsh, Frank Bridge: A Thematic Catalogue 1900–1941 (London, 1983), 72; and Trevor Bray, Frank Bridge: A Life in Brief, <http://trevor-bray-music-research.co.uk/Bridge%20LinB/ch2_21.html> (accessed 21 November 2014), 21.

57 Downes, ‘Modern Maritime Pastoral’, 93.

58 For the neoclassicism of the Seventh Symphony, see Paul Rodmell, Charles Villiers Stanford (Aldershot, 2002), 268.

59 Carl Dahlhaus, Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hermann Danuser, 10 vols. (Laaber, 2000–8), v (2003), 9–390 (pp. 318–82).

60 See the discussion of the ‘sixteen-measure sentence’ in Caplin, Classical Form, 69.

61 See Stanford, Musical Composition, 39, 77.

62 On the insertion of ‘reality fragments’ into the work of art, see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, MN, 1984), 73–8.

63 Downes, ‘Modern Maritime Pastoral’, 105.

64 The subterranean link between ‘new’ and Stalinist musicologies has been noted before. See Anna Maria Harley, review of Analytical Strategies and Musical Interpretation: Essays on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Craig Ayrey and Mark Everist (Cambridge, 1996), in Music Analysis, 17 (1998), 382–9 (p. 386).

65 Dibble, Charles Villiers Stanford, v.

66 See Stephen Banfield, Sensibility and English Song (Cambridge, 1985), 69; and, for Bridge’s programme for The Sea, Hindmarsh, Frank Bridge, 72.

67 Anthony Payne, Frank Bridge – Radical and Conservative (rev. edn, London, 1999), 12–13.

68 Ibid., 13.

69 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 138.

70 See Frank Howes, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London, 1954), 23–5; Elliott Schwartz, The Symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Amherst, MA, 1964), 58–62; Hugh Ottaway, Vaughan Williams Symphonies (London, 1972), 26–7; Michael Vaillancourt, ‘Modal and Thematic Coherence in Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony’, Music Review, 52 (1991), 203–17; Lionel Pike, Vaughan Williams and the Symphony (London, 2003), 79–89.

71 For the composer’s note, see ‘A Pastoral Symphony’, Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. David Manning (New York, 2008), 341–5 (p. 341). Frank Howes hears the theme as a two-part structure, of which the ‘balancing phrase’ is given by the solo violin’s material. Tovey had previously pointed out how the violin ‘answers’ the previous ‘theme’ in the bass. Schwartz notes how ‘at measure 9, an answering theme appears in the solo violin’. But for Vaillancourt, the ‘brevity’ of the material in the bass at bars 4–7 ‘suggests a motif rather than a true theme’: ‘theme 1’ appears at bar 8. Similarly, for Daniel Grimley the ‘first subject group’ starts at bar 9; he refers to the previous material as an ‘invocation’. See Howes, The Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 24; Donald Francis Tovey, Some English Symphonists: A Selection from Essays in Musical Analysis (London, 1941), 52; Schwartz, The Symphonies, 59; Vaillancourt, ‘Modal and Thematic Coherence’, 207–8; Daniel M. Grimley, ‘Landscape and Distance: Vaughan Williams, Modernism and the Symphonic Pastoral’, British Music and Modernism, ed. Riley, 147–74 (p. 152).

72 ‘A Pastoral Symphony’, 341–2.

73 Payne, Frank Bridge, 14.

74 Ibid., 16–17.

75 Payne, Frank Bridge, 42.

76 Payne (Frank Bridge, 77) understands the ‘Bridge chord’ as ‘bitonal’: it combines pitches from a minor triad and the major triad a tone higher. He would refer to the harmony at bar 103 in Example 6 as ‘major and minor sharing the same mediant’. Note that here the major triad (C major) stands a semitone below the minor triad (here D♭ minor), but is placed in a higher octave. As in the instances we shall encounter in the Piano Sonata, the mediant of the major triad is omitted in the upper octave.

77 Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, 1–2.

78 See James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge, 1993), 1–9; Matthew Riley, ‘Musikalische Moderne: Dahlhaus and After’, paper read at the conference ‘Elgar and Musical Modernism’, Gresham College, London, 14 December 2007, <www.gresham.ac.uk/elgar-and-musical-modernism> (accessed 15 July 2015).

79 Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar, 21; and see Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5, 7–8.

80 See Dahlhaus, Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, 322.

81 See Carl Dahlhaus, Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge, 1985), 118; and compare Dahlhaus, Musikalischer Realismus, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Danuser, iv (2002), 127–234 (p. 230): ‘den Weg von der Moderne zur Neuen Musik’.

82 Jenny Doctor, ‘The Parataxis of “British Musical Modernism”’, Musical Quarterly, 91 (2008), 89–115 (p. 111).

83 Payne, Frank Bridge, 101.

84 Doctor, ‘The Parataxis of “British Musical Modernism”’, 108.

85 Christopher Chowrimootoo, ‘Reviving the Middlebrow, or: Deconstructing Modernism from the Inside’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 139 (2014), 187–93 (p. 189).

86 Byron Adams, review of British Music and Modernism, ed. Riley, in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 64 (2011), 741–5 (pp. 741–2, 745).

87 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 208, 197, 179; compare Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutic Essays (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 360–88, and Susan McClary, ‘Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition’, Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian and Lawrence Siegel (Charlottesville, VA, and London, 1997), 54–74.

88 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 162–4.

89 Ibid., 168, 163–4, 181, 160. Jameson’s quotation seems to be his free version of Adorno’s ‘Wird sie [die Kunst] strikt ästhetisch wahrgenommen, so wird sie ästhetisch nicht recht wahrgenommen’, or maybe his ‘Sie ist für sich und ist es nicht, verfehlt ihre Autonomie ohne das ihr Heterogene’. See Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, vii (1970), 17. The standard translation renders these sentences thus: ‘Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived’ and ‘Art is autonomous and it is not; without what is heterogeneous to it, its autonomy eludes it’. See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London, 1997), 6.

90 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 107.

91 See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1971), 83–222; Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (2nd edn, London and New York, 2014), 50.

92 Rose, The Melancholy Science, 71.

93 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 107.

94 Ibid., 105–6.

95 Ibid., 106.

96 David Roberts, Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1991), 64, 2, 46.

97 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 20.

98 Ibid., 107, 185 note 9, 116, 108, 113.

99 Ibid., 96.

100 Ibid., 99, 183 note 75 (amended), 51.

101 Ibid., 112.

102 Ibid., 112–13.

103 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 119.

104 Robin Holloway, ‘Customised Goods 2’, Musical Times, 1,857 (1997), 25–8 (pp. 26–7).

105 Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Musical Autobiography’, in Hubert Foss, Ralph Vaughan Williams (London, 1950), 18–38 (pp. 28–9).

106 See Michael Kennedy, The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London, 1964), 235, and Anthony Barone, ‘Modernist Rifts in a Pastoral Landscape: Observations on the Manuscripts of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony’, Musical Quarterly, 91 (2008), 60–88 (p. 77).

107 See Vaughan Williams, ‘Musical Autobiography’, 22; Vaughan Williams, ‘The Teaching of Parry and Stanford’, Vaughan Williams on Music, ed. Manning, 315–21 (p. 318).

108 See Byron Adams, ‘The Stages of Revision of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony’, Vaughan Williams Essays, ed. Byron Adams and Robin Wells (Aldershot, 2003), 1–16 (p. 15); ‘Britten Looking Back’, Britten on Music, ed. Paul Kildea (Oxford, 2003), 250–3 (p. 250).

109 See Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten 1913–1976, ed. Donald Mitchell, Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke, 6 vols. (London, 1991–2012), i, 364, 437; ‘Back to Britain with Britten’, Britten on Music, ed. Kildea, 171–5 (p. 171).

110 Robin Holloway, ‘Customised Goods 3’, Musical Times, 1,858 (1997), 21–5 (pp. 24–5).

111 Barone, ‘Modernist Rifts’, 84, 72.

112 Grimley, ‘Landscape and Distance’, 153.

113 See Jonathan Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy (Cambridge, 1998), 88–104.

114 See Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 122–3, 114.

115 See Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: A Biography (London, 1992), 49.

116 On ‘cribbing’, see Vaughan Williams, ‘Musical Autobiography’, 31–2.

117 Barone, ‘Modernist Rifts’, 74.

118 Foss, Ralph Vaughan Williams, 133, 137, 135.

119 See Alain Frogley, ‘Constructing Englishness in Music: National Character and the Reception of Ralph Vaughan Williams’, Vaughan Williams Studies, ed. Alain Frogley (Cambridge, 1996), 1–22 (pp. 19–20); Byron Adams, ‘Vaughan Williams’s Musical Apprenticeship’, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams, ed. Alain Frogley and Aidan J. Thomson (Cambridge, 2013), 29–55 (pp. 30, 43–4); and in the same volume, the comments by Peter Maxwell Davies and Anthony Payne in ‘Vaughan Williams and his Successors: Composer’s Forum’, 299–320 (pp. 303, 318).

120 Foss, Ralph Vaughan Williams, 151.

121 Ibid., 109, 110.

122 Foss, Ralph Vaughan Williams, 47, 49.

123 Ibid., 135.

124 Ibid., 56.

125 Ibid., 75.

126 Payne, Frank Bridge, 33.

127 Frank Howes, The English Musical Renaissance (London, 1966), 160. For accounts of and selections from Bridge’s bad press, see Bray, Frank Bridge, 42, 64, 77, 86, 89, and Hindmarsh, Frank Bridge, 123, 135, 143, 152, 155; on Bridge and Coolidge, see Bray, Frank Bridge, 43–98, passim.

128 Payne, Frank Bridge, 33, 8.

129 Ibid., 12.

130 Ibid., 61.

131 Hugh Wood, ‘Frank Bridge and the Land without Music’, Staking Out the Territory and Other Writings on Music, ed. Christopher Wintle (London, 2007), 34–9 (p. 38).

132 Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895–1958, ed. Hugh Cobbe (Oxford, 2008), 214.

133 Edward Venn, ‘A Very British Modernism?’, Twentieth-Century Music, 6 (2009), 237–53 (pp. 238, 241).

134 Chris Kennett, ‘Segmentation and Focus in Set-Generic Analysis’, Music Analysis, 17 (1998), 127–59; see Allen Forte, ‘Pitch-Class Set Genera and the Origin of Modern Harmonic Species’, Journal of Music Theory, 32 (1988), 187–270.

135 Kennett, ‘Segmentation and Focus’, 127.

136 Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, ed. Strand and Stein, 58.

137 Schoenberg, The Musical Idea, ed. Carpenter and Neff, 163.

138 See Peter J. Pirie, Frank Bridge (London, 1971), 15. Pirie appears not to have noticed that, while material from the introduction and the start of the Allegro energico reappears only at the very end of the movement (from bar 291), material from later in the ‘exposition’ recurs (much of it barely altered) from bar 205. As Payne suggests (Frank Bridge, 63), the movement is ‘in arch-shaped sonata form’.

139 Payne, Frank Bridge, 23.

140 See Pieter C. van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven, CT, and London, 1983), 50.

141 Payne, Frank Bridge, 63.

142 Roberts, Art and Enlightenment, 102.

143 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 43. For an analysis of the sketches that confirms Adorno’s observation, see Joseph H. Auner, ‘In Schoenberg’s Workshop: Aggregates and Referential Collections in Die glückliche Hand’, Music Theory Spectrum, 18 (1996), 77–105.

144 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 20, 52–4.

145 See Hindmarsh, Frank Bridge, 122.

146 See Kennett, ‘Segmentation and Focus’, 140.

147 Adorno, ‘Music and Language’, 3.

148 Payne, Frank Bridge, 64.

149 Anthony Payne, ‘Bridge, Frank’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd edn, London and New York, 2001), iv, 346–9 (p. 347).

150 ‘Bridge, String Quartet No. 3’, Britten on Music, ed. Kildea, 396–7 (p. 397).

151 Howes, The English Musical Renaissance, 162.

152 Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question’, 81.

153 See Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge, 1991), 8.