Language on music : Beethoven, Mann and the absolute
Master Thesis
1997
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University of Cape Town
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Abstract
This dissertation investigates the general use of language on instrumental music. Three types of linguistic usage are identified: the metamusical, the systemic, and the metasystemic. In the first section, various forms of the metamusical - description, attempts at "recreation" and formal analyses of music - are considered, and are all shown to fail in different ways. The limitations of existing systems for negotiation between language and music are also brought to the fore. Failure is redefined, and shown to be intrinsically related to the tradition of musical ineffability, which finds its most extreme development in the notion of "absolute music". The second section attempts to provide a systemic discourse which takes the failure of language into account. Drawing on Lacan's imaginary/symbolic distinction and on Derrida's notion of the frame, it sets forth a construct called "the word of music", which is itself an impossible point of aspiration, but which manages to account for some of the dialectical complexities involved in systemic negotiation with a non-denotative form such as music. The third section entails metasystemic analysis proper; in other words, metamusical and systemic sources are analyzed and assessed. This part consists of a passage-by-passage translation of eight pages from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in which the fictional character Wendell Kretschmar delivers a lecture on and performance of Beethoven's Opus 111. Various metamusical and systemic issues are discussed: it is shown that Mann draws on a large number of established musicoliterary traditions, with his sources ranging from early Beethoven biographies to the writings of Theodor Adorno. Particular attention is given to the Romantic "Beethoven myth" and to Adorno's analysis of the composer's late music. Mann's negotiation between two partly opposing trends in the presentation of Opus 111 as an "ultimate" or "absolute" composition - the one based in a Romantic discourse of musical transcendence and the other originating in Adorno's identification of a tendency towards alienation in Beethoven's late style - is extensively discussed.
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Bibliography: 190-197.
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Verster, F. 1997. Language on music : Beethoven, Mann and the absolute. University of Cape Town.