Music and Allusion

The Middle Ages greatly valued originality and creativity, although these qualities were not only linked in the long chain of imagination (as we usually do today), but they were also framed in the field of memory. Therefore, the usual assumption that memory is an exclusive resource of an oral society does not seem to be entirely satisfactory: in the Middle Ages the memory was equally present in the more cultured and literary social strata. In fact, during the medieval period, the influence of an inherited pedagogy (from Classical rhetorical roots) meant that the cultivated memory (and the affective appropiation of preexistent material) remained fundamental to medieval literary culture because it was understood as essential not only to reading and composition, but also to the formation of character. This paper suggest some thoughts and sacred and profane examples on this issue.

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.

Scholars have only recently begun to recognize the practice of pairing related works of similar genre with consecutive opus numbers. Reynolds (2012) suggested that Beethoven and Brahms occasionally did so, even if publishers sometimes interfered with their intentions. Although Weber, Mendelssohn, and others also practiced this technique, Louise Farrenc (1804-1875), uniquely, composed the majority of her sixteen orchestral and multi-movement chamber works as contrastive pairs of this type. She linked individual pairs through melodic, textural, and structural references, not unlike Brahms in his Piano Sonatas, opp. 1 and 2.

Farrenc's practices in organizing her own catalogue suggest that she had carefully considered the potential for consecutive opus numbers to signify intertextual groupings. She assigned opus numbers to unpublished compositions, including her three symphonies and her overtures, a consecutive opus pair. A letter from her husband (also one of her publishers) also implies that they had once hoped to publish these overtures together. A twenty-three-volume collection of historical keyboard music that the couple edited together, moreover, preserves the consecutive-opus groupings of Beethoven and others.

Sisman (2007, 2008) has identified the eighteenth-century multi-work opus as a type of "rhetorical field," an assemblage within which several pieces communicate with one another intertextually. The multi-piece opuses of Farrenc and others show how this method of grouping extended into the Romantic era, and I argue that a consecutive-opus pair may function much like this type of opus. Using Farrenc's oeuvre to develop further the concept of a rhetorical field, I demonstrate that composers may construct these groups additively by composing new works that react to previous ones written in the same genre. Thus, Farrenc linked her violin sonatas much like her other pairs, although she neither assigned them consecutive opus numbers nor composed them alongside each other.