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Synecdoche in Music

Since composition is both learned and taught, it is an art predicated on reference to music of the past. Studies of specific musical quotation and allusion address issues of musical meaning and raise analogues with linguistic research into the structure of meaning. A little-explored but powerful instance is the "synecdochal quotation," in which immense wholes are compositionally represented in very few notes. Synecdoche functions in cultures with highly developed systems of sign agreement. Its meaning is based on temporal experience: the evocation of the past, which depends on recollection of the whole for effect. The often-overwhelming juxtaposition of large and small is also tinged with despair: allusion is a (painful) reminder of the absence of the whole. Further, synecdoche conveys an awareness of mortality--that what is past can never be regained and that death looms for all. But in music, unlike literature, synecdoche operates "in real time," as well as reflectively; thus it is not merely a type of metaphor or metonymy but a structural tool to convey meaning. Music, the most time-grounded of the arts, is the ideal medium for such a tool. My examples depend on their composers' cognizance of a place at the end of a line of tradition: Schoenberg's allusion to Johann Strauss in "O alter Duft" (_Pierre Lunaire_), Richard Strauss's allusion to Beethoven's Third Symphony in _Metamorphosen_, and finally, the synecdochal function of Wagner's leitmotif technique and the "inexpressible longing" it can convey.

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