Desire in Fin de Siècle Tonality

Dr Smith explores the links between musical harmonies and early twentieth century aesthetics, adapting music theory within a psychodynamic framework.

Background

The turn of the twentieth century marked a turning point for musical harmony. Wagner had pushed the boundaries of musical harmony with his painfully tense chord progressions that embodied the straining, and yearning of humanity, inspired directly by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. A few years later, when the Viennese psychoanalyst Freud developed this philosophy into a science of the human psyche, diffuse post-Wagnerian composers also responded in different ways, constructing harmonies and chord progressions that expressed the developments of psychodynamic thought.

The project

The German theorist Hugo Riemann propounded theories that have recently sparked interest in North-American music theory, and these will be developed into a theory of how we mentally reduce all of the strange new chords that we hear into just three primary functions, like the primary colours. When hearing like this, new philosophical questions are raised about how one chord wants to move to another. The various composers examined in the book, all have a direct connection to philosophical schools, and their music is examined not only in the light of these, but in the framework of more recent critical debate that can be used to tease subtle musical messages out of the compositions through new techniques of music analysis.

• The Polish Karol Szymanowski was influenced by Sufist philosophy in his Third Symphony ‘Song of the Night’. His new harmonies were much much, richer and yet still full of potential to pull our ears in different directions at once. How do we connect with the straining ‘pull’ of these new sounds?
• The Czech Josef Suk was in profound mourning when he wrote the intimate piano pieces ‘About Mother’ which are characterized by a repeated pitch throughout each piece that never goes away. How does this repetition control the chord progressions if the pitch has to fit with each chord?
• The Russian Alexander Skryabin was profoundly mystical and tried to infuse his pieces with the processes of cosmic evolution. Is this embodied in the new harmonies he created?
• The Americans Charles Ives and Aaron Copland were highly nostalgic composers, connected to the New-England transcendentalists, and it is possible that their sense of longing for past wholeness is part and parcel of their composition of harmonic progression.
• Richard Strauss and Alexander von Zemlinsky wrote one-act several operas whose themes mixed cruelty and desire into some disturbing vignettes of human existence. His harmonies take us through these fascinating dramas, and pass on messages of profoundly pessimistic philosophy.

Outputs

A book is being prepared that explores each of these questions and tries to connect North-American ‘hard’ music theory with the long tradition of European philosophy. The book outlays the psychodynamic music theory and then tests it with eight chapters.

Explanation

Fin de siècle Vienna was obsessed with the connection of love and death that was brought together most famously in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1859). Wagner famously pushed harmony and chord progression in many new directions.