Review... 3 years ago

My homework for fall 2008, intro to ethno in CUHK~ (Thanks Prof Olson!)

It's a little naive but I like that~

Name: Lee Siu Hei

SID: 0550xxxx

Course Code and Title: MUS 3243 Introduction to Musicology

Subject: Book Review

Unfinished Music. By Richard Kramer. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xiii, 405 pp.

It has never been easy to write, understand or even read on a topic like this one- Unfinished Music- not on the music as sound and nuances, but as a deep parsing about its reasoning and philosophy. After his Kinkeldey Award winning monograph Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (1995), Richard Kramer engaged another comprehensive and fruitful discussion, with equally significant footings on both music and philosophy, from C. P. E. Bach to Schubert. He established a complex network between the Classical figures including Forkel, Lessing, Herder, Schlegel, Diderot and Kundera, and various features in the selected works, which include the improvisatory style of Bach, the nostalgic and postmodern evocations of Beethoven and the fragments of Schubert. With different types or embodiments of unfinished music presented and criticized, the author addresses his findings and interpretations on the histories of art and wrote on the challenges of doing criticism (p.379). While “learning to live with the pleasurable discomforts of these paradoxes [in brief, the finishedness and unfinishedness of music] is the modest resolve of this book” (ix), it shows no reticence in contributing to actual performances, which successfully extends the power of the insights of the book.

The intended audience of this book is advanced specialists in the field of philosophy, aesthetic theory, musicology and performing musicians. Performing musicians could be irked by the elaborate philosophical conversations and analogies; however, indicative meanings in the pertinent works are clearly explicated, and are extremely useful. Non-specialists (undergraduate students) and non-English native speakers could be deterred by the tortuously poetic language, some peculiar vocabularies and foreign (especially the extensively utilized German) terms.

Instead of saying that the book “draws its inspiration from the riddling aphorism by Walter Benjamin” (official description of the book), I would also suggest the possibility that Kramer handpicked Benjamin’s words in skewering his examples and arguments, for the axiom fits the epicenter of the book – the Death Mask- so perfectly. The 3-page preface serves an effective and irreplaceable role of defining the question: when the music is “fixed” and thus “dead”. The first chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book in relating music to language and poetry, and anticipates the upcoming chapters by relatively short and introductory discussions on “a rhetoric of sonata”, “sketches and the improvisatory”, “fragments” and “patrimonies”. The author clarifies what music and musical ideas are: “Sprache der Empfinungen” and “Empfindung” (p. 10) and leads into the scrutiny on C. P. E. Bach, whom he considers as a father, a patricide and a master of idiosyncrasy and empfindung.

Five chapters devoted to C. P. E. Bach in Part II (Emanuel Bach and the Allure of the Irrational) portray the composer as an avant-garde, a person who had originality and who gave his answer to unfinished music- the importance of improvisation of the performing artist. In chapter 2, “Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and the Aesthetics of Patricide”, he demythologizes the intellectual patricide of Bach toward the great Bach. He suggests that the selling of the Art of Fugue implies the ambivalence on the values of music: Emanuel Bach did not seek superior control of musical forces, but expressivity. Improvisation is a style as well as a technique of expressing, and chapters 3 and 4, “The Ends of Veraenderung” and “Late Works”, demonstrate how Bach imagine an improvisation could be (not should be), and the Veraenderung is no mere embellishment (p. 62). Pieces of music are taken mostly in chronological order of composition align with the development of Bach in unfolding the unfinished characters of various pieces. To further justify his claims, Chapter 5 and 6, “Probestueck” and “Diderot’s Paradoxe and C. P. E. Bach’s Empfindungen”, are from the perspectives of music analysis (especially for the former) and philosophy. Kramer uses a quasi-Schenkerian analysis to synopsize the Probestuecken (test-pieces) and explicate the “skeleton” of music. “Music as a language of feeling” (p. 134) is debated by summation of commentaries of contemporary artists, theorists and thinkers, and strengthened by musical examples. The ample discussion is rounded off epigrammatically by the author’s expectations towards the performer for the ideal of unfinished music which he took pains to convince us of.

The fatherhood of Emanuel Bach from Mozart and Beethoven are outlined in Part III and IV, “Between Enlightenment and Romance” and “Beethoven: Confronting the Past”. Another image of unfinished music is featured in these chapters, and the sketchbook is, akin to mainstream trends, revisited, yet yields extraordinary results: the intimate history of the work reveals how and to what Benjamin’s death mask applied (p. 207-8). Pitch and intervallic importance are featured by music analysis and comparisons. Examples from Beethoven’s op. 109 and op. 110 decipher his internal renewable resources (unfinished music), and op. 90 externally searched for Emanuel Bach. All these sum up as a full picture of the Romantic elements of unfinished music.

Kramer then took great shouldering and vigil in attempt to summarize “fragments” in 2 chapters. He retreats to an aim of “coming closer to the disorderly notion of fragment” (p. 311) at the beginning of chapter 13, “Toward an Epistemology of Fragment”. He takes Mozart and Schubert as examples, with emphasis on the point where music stopped. He continues by returning to his expertise- Schubert- and investigates on the Reliquie (unfinished) Sonata, with constant reference to Schlegel’s understanding on fragment. One could write a book on that, thus the author humbly settles for a philosophical (instead of practical in the sense of performance) conclusion.

The final chapter is further philosophical conversations and the returning of Benjamin’s aphorism, which is of no surprise comparing to the exceptional perceptions of the previous parts. Except for the causal explanation of the use of German terms instead of English translations at an impromptu (or absurd) place (p. 136, in the middle of chapter 6), the book achieved an overall coherence and is, at a more sublime level, an excellent provocative in the lifelong search of the meaning of music.