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September 1, 2012
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ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work would not have been possible if not for the encouragement from many
individuals. First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Martha Hyde for assisting me
with this topic from the beginning, taking me on a thesis advisee, and having faith in my
musical and linguistic abilities. I am thankful for her thorough edits and fantastic insight
into the subject. I would also like to extend my gratitude to my committee member Dr.
Richard Plotkin for providing expert advice on my writings. I am deeply indebted to Dr.
Kerry Grant for quickly joining my committee and for his willingness to assist the
process in my time of need. I am also appreciative to Dr. Michael Long for reading and
librarians at the UB Music Library—Nancy Nuzzo, Dr. John Bewley, and Rebecca
graduate career. I am also grateful for the constant support of my family and friends over
the years. Finally, and certainly not least, this thesis would not have been completed
without the love and support of Alex. His willingness to read my drafts as well as offer
iii
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii
CONTENTS iv
ABSTRACT v
Chapter 1 1
Chapter 2 21
Chapter 3 36
Chapter 4 52
BIBLIOGRAPHY 77
iv
ABSTRACT
The study of musical meaning has become an increasingly important topic of discourse
among music theorists over the past thirty years; however, the study of twentieth-century
musical semiotics has remained underexplored. Moreover, the link between musical
fragment forms and the semiotic code of the uncanny has never been elucidated in the
writings of music theorists. Sigmund Freud's essay Das Unheimlich explores the
psychological uncanny, which splits the ego into a double that represses one's awareness
of mortality; this concept provides a fertile starting point for exploring twentieth-century
musical semiotics. This paper synthesizes these areas of study through an overview of the
writings in the field and through analyses of three twentieth-century compositions. These
include Claude Debussy's Voiles, Béla Bartók's Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra,
and “Es Blendete uns die Mondnacht” from György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments.
v
to Julia Benfer (1910-2009)
for teaching me the beauty of analyzing what I hear
and for instilling in me the musical sensitivity to do so
Chapter 1
Much of human life is a search for meaning, and nowhere is that more evident than
especially fertile ground for questions of meaning. Why this form? Why this key? Why
does this piece make us feel the way it does? Modern analytic techniques have explored
these questions and have provided a vocabulary to grapple with the difficulties of meaning
in an evocative art form. This has proven especially valuable in the pursuit of meaning in
twentieth-century music, where obscurity often leaves listeners vaguely baffled, vaguely
chilled. This paper argues that one of the reasons is the presence of the musical semiotic
code of the uncanny. It traces the rationale for a semiotic analysis of twentieth-century
music; it demonstrates the significance of fragment form as a potent vessel for the sinister
and unsettling subliminal message of the uncanny; and it explores the origin of the uncanny
Over the past thirty years, the study of musical meaning has become an
increasingly frequent topic of discourse among music theorists. Because modernism in all
the arts emphasizes formal analysis, the analysis of musical meaning has been neglected in
favor of what we commonly describe as structural analysis. Additionally, there are many
intangible elements present in music that these forms of analysis neglect or fail to
study of meaning, and semiotics, or the study of how the meaning is encoded into musical
signs, present a new theoretical framework in which we can approach the topic of musical
meaning from the perspectives of historical roots and literary narrative theory. Thus,
1
theories of musical semiotics, musical hermeneutics, and musical narrative strive to
identify meaning through signs and codes present within the music itself. By applying this
and was the first to explore topical analysis within Classical music in his groundbreaking
Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style, published in 1980.2 For Ratner, a topical
analysis involves associating specific gestures with technical details based on historical
fact, such as rhythms or contours creating certain styles, and he thus views a piece as a
Classical period frequently changes character every few measures, Ratner accounts for
these changes as the music’s means of expressing the many emotions elicited from all
aspects of life. Common examples of topics are dances (minuets, marches, etc.), stylistic
genres (singing style, brilliant style, etc.), and text painting. Additionally, Ratner focuses
highly technical view, but one that strives to categorize changes in style and texture by
1
The following books provide an extensive overview of the history of musical semiotic theory, as
well as the foundations of the musical narrative theory: Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1979); Eero Tarasti, A Theory of Musical Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994).
2
Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer Books,
1980).
2
simultaneously.3
Many scholars, having been highly influenced by Ratner’s work, have continued
to explore different aspects of musical meaning. Kofi Agawu also explores eighteenth-
century music from an approach first defined by listening through expression and
structure. When extended to multiple topoi, Agawu’s work explores music through the
relationships between signs’ interactions with one another.4 Raymond Monelle was one
of the first scholars to study narrative analysis in music.5 His work focuses on describing
music by its inherent meaning and argues that the meaning of music can only be
described in reference to history, and thus cultural temporality.6 Robert Hatten has
also examined the web of meaning through musical semiotics in relation to culture.8 The
3
Oppositions are a common part of semiotic theory. In short, oppositions involve the
juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated objects, yet each concept remains a part of the other. For a
thorough discussion of musical oppositions, see the introduction of Esti Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody
and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000).
4
V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991).
5
Raymond Monelle, Linguistics and Semiotics in Music (Chur: Hardwood Academic, 1992).
6
Ibid., The Sense of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
7
Robert S. Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
8
Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990).
9
Michael Klein, “Chopin's Fourth Ballade as Musical Narrative,” Music Theory Spectrum 26
(2004): 23-56; Bryon Almen, A Theory of Musical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2009).
3
intertextuality.10 Most of the literature on these latter subjects addresses music composed
Surprisingly, very few scholars have explored semiotics and musical narrative in
Currently, this small body of work includes analyses of pieces by Arnold Schoenberg,11
György Kurtág,12 Claude Debussy,13 Witold Lutoslawski,14 John Adams and Steve
overlooked twentieth-century music in the search for semiotic meaning. Due to what we
10
Ibid., Intertextuality in Western Art Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
11
Alan Street, “The Obbligato Recitative: Narrative and Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, op.
16,” in Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 164-183.
12
Martha M. Hyde, "Semiotics and Form: Reading Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments," in
Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 5, eds. Maciej Jablonski and Michael Klein (Poznan: Rhytmos,
2005), 185-207.
13
Michael Klein, “Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse as Territorial Assemblage,” 19th-Century Music 31
(2007): 28-52; Steven Rings, “Mystéres Limpides: Time and Transformation in Debussy's Des pas sur la
neige,” 19th-Century Music 32 (2008): 178-208.
14
Nicholas Reyland, "Livre or Symphony? Lutosławski’s Livre pour orchestre and the Enigma of
Musical Narrativity," Music Analysis 27 (2008): 253-95.
15
David Schwarz, “Listening Subjects: Semiotics, Psychoanalysis, and the Music of John Adams
and Steve Reich,” Perspectives of New Music 31, no. 2 (1993): 24-56.
16
Yayoi Uno Everett, “Signification of Parody and the Grotesque in György Ligeti’s Le Grand
Macabre,” Music Theory Spectrum 31 (2009): 26-56.
17
Michael Klein and Nicholas Reyland, eds., Musical Narrative after 1900 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2012). The book is scheduled for release on October 24, 2012.
4
signs or musical narrative from music without tonality.18 Traditional signs, if present at
all, do not act in traditional ways. Thus, signs can change meaning and act differently
than we have learned through tradition to expect. It appears that musical narrative
continues in the twentieth century, but now adapts to the new forms of media, such as
traditional forms of analysis seem inadequate because they do not sufficiently address
musical meaning. For example, analyses that rely only on the identification of recurring
pitch-class sets seem particularly inadequate for much experimental music by Krzysztof
offers a way to glimpse meaning in what may otherwise appear to be chaotic and
unexplainable noise.
Composers of the early twentieth century were products of the nineteenth century
by birth and culture and, by further extension, would have been familiar with the
traditional semiotic signs used in the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, they appear to
have continued using these signs in much early twentieth-century music.21 For instance,
18
For a discussion of Arnold Schoenberg’s concept of the emancipation of dissonance, see Carl
Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press
1989), 379-89.
19
See Klein and Reyland, Musical Narrative after 1900. The introduction, written by Michael
Klein, assumes the presence of musical narrative in the twentieth century and attempts to characterize its
changes and behaviors.
20
See Morag Josephine Grant, “Experimental Music Semiotics,” International Review of the
Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 34 (2003): 173-91 for one attempt to analyze experimental music with
musical semiotics.
21
One common technique composers use to evoke the past is quotation. For an extensive
discussion of this technique in twentieth-century music, see David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural
Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
5
formal evocations of prior forms, such as sonata form, became commonplace and, when
present in the twentieth century, can often evoke nineteenth-century semiotic codes. The
forms are often obscured in some aspect, and nineteenth-century elements can obscure
the perception of what the music is evoking.22 The ultimate challenge for music theorists
is to decide how or even if twentieth-century music evokes the past through specific
continued to be evoked. However, one of the most prevalent codes appears to be the
Germanic Gothic novel, this code carries sinister and chilling connotations. Thus, by
default, the uncanny is associated with other Gothic novel elements, primarily
22
For an extensive review of how early twentieth-century composers use older forms to
reconstruct and evoke the past, see Martha M. Hyde, “Neoclassic and Anachronistic Impulses in Twentieth-
Century Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 18 (1996): 200-35.
23
It is obvious from the scarcity of writings on the subject that theorists are undecided about how
to deal with musical semiotics in twentieth-century music. Simply extending prior semiotic signs to
twentieth-century music and examining if they are present is enough to begin an examination of how they
function in atonal music. Furthermore, narrative theory can easily be applied to atonal music. See Jonathan
Cross, “Music Theory and the Challenge of Modern Music: Birtwistle’s ‘Refrains and Choruses,’” in
Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 184-94. While Cross does not provide a satisfying solution to the problem, he does identify many
issues that inhibit the semiotic analysis of twentieth-century music.
24
For a detailed and comprehensive overview of the origins of the uncanny and how this concept
pervaded literature, psychology, and nineteenth-century culture, see Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New
York: Routledge, 2003).
6
the cruel and credulous aspects of life in the Middle Ages.25 Because of the commonly
superstitious early Romantic culture, the term “Gothic” was further applied to
supernatural elements of novels. There is a strong link with the uncanny arising from
nostalgia originating in Gothic novels. Within Gothic novels, one of the primary
tangible and natural. Within these novels, the plots often end without resolution, leaving
the reader understandably perplexed. Should the novel vary from this trend and end with
a resolution, there are two common types: the supernatural becomes incarnate or
manifest, in which case, it crosses into a different literary genre, referred to as “the
marvelous;” or the event is rationally and logically explained, but nonetheless remains
shocking and induces anxiety through the unexpected, and it thus “provokes in the
character and in the reader a reaction similar to that which works of the fantastic have
made familiar.”26 For example, at the end of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, we
are left wondering if the governess is insane or if ghosts manifested themselves in the
flesh.27 On a basic level, Gothic novels, in fact, can often resemble fairy tales.
because it is so “broad and vague, but so is the genre which it describes: the uncanny is
25
For an elaborate discussion of the word “Gothic,” see Margaret L. Carter, Spectre or Delusion?
The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 5.
26
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland: Press
of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 46.
27
For a interesting discussion of The Turn of the Screw as a narrative of darkness implying
sinister undertones, see Dani Cavallaro, The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear
(London: Continuum, 2002), 104-8.
7
not a clearly delimited genre...”28 In other stories, even as banal an event as murder can
provoke an uncanny effect as well. Beyond Gothic novels, there are many other
definitions of the uncanny throughout German literature. While most definitions agree on
most of the attributes of the uncanny, the meaning and use of the word has changed since
its original inception. In the most basic sense, the uncanny always “…involves feelings of
and unfamiliar.”29 Eventually, the uncanny began to penetrate other literary works, even
those written in the nineteenth century in England and America. Perhaps it is most
prevalent within the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, as they often manifest the uncanny
Despite the difficulties of precisely defining the meaning of uncanny, one famous
definition emerged from one of Sigmund Freud’s essays published in 1919.31 For Freud,
the uncanny is clearly related to its origins in the novel, but the definition primarily
describes the uncanny’s difficult attributes as a relation to what is known juxtaposed with
28
Todorov, The Fantastic, 46. Of special interest is that a specific definition for the uncanny
remains elusive because it can assume altered forms depending on the context in which it appears.
29
Royle, The Uncanny, 1.
30
Sybil Wuletich-Brinberg’s Poe: The Rationale of the Uncanny (New York: P. Lang, 1988)
presents an all-encompassing study of the uncanny in Poe’s literary works. Many of the concepts covered
in the text assist in broadly defining the literary genre.
31
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 193-233.
32
Freud refers to the German word unheimlich for the uncanny whose literal translation is
“unhomely.” For an extended discussion of the German connotations of the word, see David Punter, “The
Uncanny” in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London:
Routledge, 2007), 129-36. When discussing the word’s etymology, Putner emphasizes “…because that
which is ‘heimlich’ is in fact also ‘surrounded’, ‘secret’, ‘kept close to home’, then it also becomes
‘unheimlich’, incapable of full description, unknown to those who are outside the magic walls” (130).
8
what is not known. Thus, the uncanny recollects a once familiar memory that has been
repressed through time, but one that cannot be fully remembered. Freud implies that the
memory should have stayed in the past, and its surfacing constitutes an element of
terrifying recognition. Drawing heavily on the work of Otto Rank, Freud extends the
definition of the uncanny to the concept of the ego’s formation of the double as insurance
against its destruction. This repression of mortality is created during a person’s youth.
Later in life, the double reverses its course and splits, bringing with it the ghastly
harbinger of death as the ego acknowledges its own mortality.33 Other criteria Freud uses
to identify the uncanny’s presence is “something repressed which recurs.”34 Signs for the
repression. The criteria include something which occurs, is repressed, reoccurs, and
ultimately brings with it a struggle and the ghastly harbinger of death. This narrative of
repression can be effectively extended to musical narrative, which engages a new path for
Much has been written about musical manifestations of the uncanny prior to the
twentieth century, but not after. Because the literary concept came to general fruition
with two articles, one by Ernst Jentsch (1906) and the one by Freud mentioned above
(1919), the uncanny also changed its definition from its original provenance as a literary
genre in Gothic novels. The traditional, supernatural definition and the Freudian one both
agree that the uncanny engages both ambiguity and some aspect of imminent death.
33
For an intriguing explanation of the ego and its double, see Susan Sugarman, Freud on the
Psychology of Ordinary Mental Life (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 61-69.
34
Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 78.
9
If the definition of the word “uncanny” changed in the beginning of the twentieth
century, then it seems likely that the musical semiotic codes for its presence changed as
uncanny clearly continues to intrude but often in a smaller and more sequestered way. In
music composed before 1900, Michael Klein elegantly coins musical signs for the
which I add the whole-tone scale as shown by my later analysis of Debussy’s Voiles). We
can extend most of Klein’s tonal musical signs to twentieth-century music, especially in
music that unambiguously evokes the past in its form or in its allusions to tonality. For
music that is fully atonal, we often find that the uncanny is evoked by an accompanying
text.37
35
See Jo Collins and John Jervis, eds., Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) for a comprehensive discussion of how the definition of the
uncanny is transformed in twentieth-century culture.
36
Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 87. Unfortunately, Klein’s convincing intertextual
analysis using musical signifiers for the uncanny only encompasses music beginning with Beethoven and
finishing with Schoenberg’s Gurrlieder and does not explore the musical uncanny in later twentieth-
century music.
37
In addition to Klein, the following sources that consider the uncanny deserve close reading:
Joseph Kerman, “Opus 131 and the Uncanny,” in The String Quartets of Beethoven, ed. William
Kinderman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 262-78; Christopher H. Gibbs, “‘Komm, geh’ mit
mir’: Schubert’s Uncanny Erlkönig,” 19th-Century Music 19 (1995): 115-35; Lawrence Kramer, “Chopin at
the Funeral: Episodes in the History of Modern Death,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54
(2001): 97-125; Michael P. Steinberg, “Canny and Uncanny Histories in Biedermeier Music,” in Listening
to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth-Century Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2004), 94-132; Nicholas Cook, “Uncanny Moments: Juxtaposition and the Collage Principle in Music,” in
Approaches to Meaning in Music, eds. Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2006), 107-34; David Schwarz, “Music and the Gaze: Schubert’s ‘Der Doppelgänger’ and
‘Ihr Bild,’” in Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997),
64-86.
10
Other scholars have explored the impact of the uncanny in late nineteenth-century
music. In an effort to give a comprehensive formula for uncanny passages in tonal music,
Richard Cohn has traced uncanny moments beginning with the music of Carlo Gesualdo,
but primarily focuses on late Romantic composers, such as Richard Wagner and Anton
Bruckner, and he does not explore this concept in twentieth-century music.38 Michael
Cherlin identified brief moments that evoke tonality in Arnold Schoenberg’s music as
composers repress tonality. “The ghosts of the past become particularly haunting if we
live with them on a day to day basis. Transposing Freud’s thoughts onto a musical
sphere, I would say that tonality, the most ‘Heimlich’ of musical groundings, becomes
increasingly estranged and repressed as Schoenberg and others struggle to surmount it.”39
music; rather, it is the study of how it is evoked and why its musical meaning is worth
pursuing. Often, the uncanny arises from its association with ambiguity40 and is best
analyzed in music by applying Freud’s narrative of the repression of death by the ego’s
creation of a double.
38
Richard Cohn, “Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age,” Journal of
the American Musicological Society, 57 (2004): 285-324. Cohn’s convincing discussion emphasizes the
influence of the Freudian uncanny in the early twentieth century, but does not discuss music after Richard
Strauss. Cohn seeks to explore “resemblances that both co-relate individual musical representations of the
uncanny, and bind those representations to the uncanny…” (286).
39
Michael Cherlin, “Schoenberg and Das Unheimliche: Spectres of Tonality,” The Journal of
Musicology, 11 (1993): 362.
40
V. Kofi Agawu, “Ambiguity in Tonal Music: A Preliminary Study,” in Theory, Analysis and
Meaning in Music, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 86-107. Agawu
identifies the issue of musical ambiguity and presents a case study of how to successfully deal with musical
ambiguity. He does not connect ambiguity with the uncanny, yet the connection is obvious from the
uncanny’s historical association with inherent ambiguity.
11
Another aspect of the Gothic novel genre often working in tandem with the
uncanny was “the fantastic.” The fantastic is defined as the point of hesitation when one
questions the reality of a supernatural or strange occurrence. Today, this concept persists
in the literary genre of magical realism.41 Because the uncanny is associated with the
supernatural and with death, and because the fantastic represents the moment the mind
tries to determine whether a seemingly mystical event is real, one way of repressing the
obsession with repressing death than the general fascination with the fantastic in
as a Freudian “double” by creating a fantasy world obsessed with waltzes.43 For the
Viennese, waltzes served to repress unsettling events in life, such as political turmoil and
death. The repression culminated in a trend of suicides in the late nineteenth century,
creating much anxiety in Vienna. Additionally, the obsession with magical elements as a
composers, regardless of nationality, would have been aware of this concept. For
41
See Todorov, The Fantastic for a discussion of how the fantastic and uncanny interact with
each other.
42
See Alessandra Comini, The Fantastic Art of Vienna (New York: Knopf, 1978) for an elaborate
discussion of the fantastic in nineteenth-century Viennese culture, especially within music, art, and
literature. Her convincing argument elaborates on distraction and repression as foundational cultural traits
of Viennese culture.
43
See Hyde, "Semiotics and Form: Reading Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments," in Interdisciplinary
Studies in Musicology 5. Hyde explores the connection of waltzes in operas with death and demonstrates
how the concept is still present in contemporary music, using as an example one of Kurtág’s’s Kafka
Fragments.
12
instance, Debussy’s fascination with the esoteric can be interpreted as providing a
Other common ways of repressing death in the nineteenth century arose through
nostalgia. For instance, the Roman Ruins in Schoenbrunn Castle Park was a piece of
architecture that “had been built as a romantic ruin in 1778, and for the observant painter
it served as a marvelous depository for the elusive, deep pockets of light that were
reflected by the translucent water of a still pool onto the jumble of undergrowth, statues,
and architectural fragments.”45 It is evident that the ubiquitous Viennese obsession with
creating a fantasy world, through ruins, fragments and nostalgia, was a deeply engrained
between the Freudian uncanny and the semiotic interpretation of literature and music.
The fragment was a common literary genre in the late Classical and early Romantic
periods, but the allure of fragments or ruins predates by hundreds of years what we
commonly describe as musical fragment form. The literary form of the fragment is
44
For a connection between Debussy’s fascination with the esoteric and his musical esoteric style,
see David Paul Goldman, “Esotericism as a Determinant of Debussy's Harmonic Language,” The Musical
Quarterly 75 (1991): 130-47.
45
Comini, The Fantastic Art of Vienna, 8. This example shows the obvious connection with
repressing life events by the creation of a double manifested from nostalgia for the past. Again, early
twentieth-century composers would have been aware of this symptom of repression.
13
notably at Pompeii and other lost cities in Ancient Greece and Rome.46 The Romantics
became obsessed with the concept of the incomplete, and consequently it became
reflected in the literary form of the fragment. While fragments are not explicitly
associated with the uncanny, the appeal of the fragment, by default, also relies on and
As a common literary form in the nineteenth century that was developed in the
late eighteenth century, the fragment is usually considered a short and self-contained
entity. Literary fragments are complete in themselves, yet they simultaneously imply
things outside or beyond themselves. Its typical short length allows it to grow and change
constantly for its duration, a feature that proves essential for provoking ambiguity. As a
result, fragments possess a cyclical feeling, as they often begin in the middle of a thought
and end unresolved. Paradoxically, they can be viewed as both complete and
broken off from an ancient vase.”48 Each fragment attempts to reconstruct the original,
yet the original can never be reconstructed: too much of it can never be retrieved. The
inherent melancholy apparent in this kind of loss clearly contributed to the sense of the
uncanny. Any number of fragments can only provide general ideas about the vase—its
form, its texture, the decorations painted on its surface—but no fragment can provide
46
The Romantic fascination with ruins also extended to literary fragments from antiquity. This
connection, between physical and literary ruins, was a common preoccupation of the Romantics. For an
extensive discussion of these concepts, see Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique
of a Form (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 28.
47
For a basic discussion of how fragment forms are connected with ruins and nostalgia for
antiquarianism, see Sophie Thomas, “The Fragment,” in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 502-13.
48
Beate Julia Perrey, Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poets: Fragmentation of
Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 28.
14
completion. Fragments also bear a strong connection with sketches49 and possess a close
relationship with ruins. Each mirrors the other.50 Other scholars stress the relationship of
character pieces by Robert Schumann53 and preludes by Frederic Chopin,54 to name only
two examples. In order to understand how the Romantic fragment is evoked in the
fragment form in music and how contemporary composers related to it. For instance,
until the mid-nineteenth century rarely did a piece end with anything other than a tonic
chord, let alone a dissonance. Yet Schumann does just that in “Im wunderschönen Monat
Mai” from his song cycle Dichterliebe.55 The introduction of musical fragment form also
49
Samuel Johnson made this connection while editing the works of the celebrated poet Edmund
Smith. For a thorough discussion, see Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the
Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 58.
50
Ibid., 59.
51
Linda Cummins, Debussy and the Fragment (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2006), 21-22.
52
For a detailed history of the origins of the fragment and how Romantic authors (such as
Wordsworth and Coleridge) viewed the fragment in conjunction with ruins, see Thomas McFarland,
Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981).
53
Robert Schumann’s music evokes the concept of distance through his musical and literary
analyses, texted and instrumental music, and music and scenery. For an extended discussion of Schumann’s
use of these in fragment forms, see Berthold Hoeckner, “Schumann and Romantic Distance,” Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 50 (1997): 55-132.
54
For a proposed theory and analysis of closure in Chopin’s Preludes, see V. Kofi Agawu,
“Concepts of Closure and Chopin's Opus 28,” Music Theory Spectrum, 9 (1987): 1-17.
55
Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 41.
Here I summarize Rosen’s ideas, as well as rely on his elegant prose. While there are many other musical
sources on the subject, Rosen’s entire chapter warrants close reading.
15
coincided with a change in harmonic language brought about by Romantic composers.
When discussing this song, Charles Rosen argues that the form is circular and produces
Many fragments possess a cyclical feeling because they often begin and end
unresolved with their musical content isolated from the whole work. Yet the whole work
requires the fragment’s presence in order to complete itself. For example, in Schumann’s
Carnaval not only is each character piece isolated and in itself complete, but each also
depicts something specifically indicated by its title, which is related in turn to the entire
work. Because each miniature piece is complete, fragments also contain an inherent
tension and conflict with self-identity.57 Rosen beautifully summarizes this characteristic
as unstable and ambiguous, “…implying a past before the song begins and a future after
its final chord”58 and “separate from the rest of the universe…[but suggesting] distant
perspectives.”59
One of the common misconceptions of fragment forms is that they must always
be quite short. If many physical ruins from antiquity remain massive yet incomplete, such
as the Roman Colosseum, one questions the validity of the common assumption that all
literary fragments—and thus musical ones as well—must be only a few lines and of short
duration. As mentioned above, musical Romantic fragment forms lack completion, are
56
Ibid., 44.
57
See Lisa Ann Musca, “The Piano Fragment and the Decomposing of the Musical Structure
from the Romantic to the Postmodern” (PhD diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2007) for a
discussion of how fragments and miniatures deal with issues of closure, tracing music from Beethoven to
Schoenberg.
58
Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 56.
59
Ibid., 48
16
usually short, and often appear as sets of character pieces. This topic warrants special
century pieces, it is often used in a distorted way and, instead of evoking past practice, it
is used ultimately to deconstruct the music.60 Past forms do appear and bring with them
tonality, do not always bear their traditional connotations, and they change to
Thus, we will discover that fragment forms are not always short, as some scholars have
commonly assumed.
One good example of a long, literary fragment is by the celebrated poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. Composed after a dream in 1797, the circumstances surrounding the
poem “Kubla Khan” are clearly uncanny. The plot occurred in an opium-induced dream,
and after awaking Coleridge began to transcribe it in the form of a poem.61 Unfortunately,
he was quickly interrupted by a visitor and could not remember the rest of the dream.
While the content and analysis of the poem is not of prime importance here, the fact that
Coleridge could not remember the rest of the dream and published it regardless implies
that fragments can be of longer length even in the Romantic era.62 The length of “Kubla
60
I explore this concept to explain the presence of the uncanny in my analysis of the second
movement of Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto.
61
For an extensive discussion of the circumstances surrounding the composition of “Kubla
Khan,” see Elisabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (New York: Octagon Books, 1975).
62
Many literary scholars dispute the meaning and influences contained in Kubla Khan. For an in-
depth discussion of current discourse, see Robert F. Fleissner, Sources, Meaning, and Influences of
Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000).
17
Khan” is 54 lines; while this is long for a literary fragment, it nonetheless possesses many
of the same qualities found in other fragments. Coleridge originally estimated that the
finished length would likely have been between 200 – 300 lines. His intent was to create
a complete poem, but it remains a fragment because it was unfinished. Today, literary
we will see, a musical parallel to Coleridge involves the events surrounding the
composition of Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto. The primary difference is that death
interrupted Bartók from its completion, and thus it can be considered a literal
compositional fragment.
The link between fragments and the uncanny has been largely ignored in the
the similarities of the two. The Freudian uncanny arises from nostalgia and ambiguity in
the same way that fragments arise from nostalgia. The nineteenth-century Viennese
obsession with the past was a common way to repress troubled everyday life and
circumstances surrounding the allure of fragment forms are very similar. Thus, fragments
are, in a sense, uncanny, because they imply a past memory or place, just as the ego
creates the double in an early phase to repress death. Yet, fragments can never provide a
complete memory because there is always something missing—a feature that is used to
create a Freudian uncanny effect. In ruins, the original memory is repressed, and all that
remains is a partial structure. Not surprisingly, the presence of the uncanny in twentieth-
63
One source, which rewards close reading, discusses Coleridge’s life and common literary
themes throughout his writings. See The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
18
century music often reveals itself in fragment forms and thus is strongly connected to the
music must describe them in some sense to be incomplete. Such examples include not
only the traditional fragment forms, such as those found in sets of Preludes, but also
works left unfinished by the composer. Fragments thus, by definition, can be uncanny
One of the only sources that treats the presence of the Freudian uncanny in
most of the argument here, as it provides the primary link with the musical uncanny and
musical fragment forms.64 The Gothic and confusing nature of the text of “Christabel”
imply the presence of the Freudian uncanny in multiple ways. First, the poem’s text
Thomas argues that readers are often puzzled by the poem’s strange subject
matter and that aspects of it, the uncanny manifestations, should have remained hidden.
64
See Sophie Thomas, “The Return of the Fragment: ‘Christabel’ and the Uncanny,” in
Untrodden Regions of the Mind: Romanticism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Ghislaine McDayter (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 2002), 51-73. Thomas’s convincing argument is the foundation for the
connection between the uncanny and fragment forms.
65
Ibid., 52.
19
Furthermore, Thomas explores the concept of disturbing ambiguity—another signifier of
the uncanny—in fragment forms, and he beautifully summarizes the relationship between
the uncanny and fragments: “…by extension, the presence of the fragment, as a persistent
reminder of the remainder, may be seen as the allegorical presence within a text, within
every text (no matter how lively) of its own ‘death’: its own necessarily incomplete
incompletion.”66
I will continue the discussion of the relationship between fragments and the
still rely on nineteenth-century signs, acting in their traditional ways, for the uncanny to
manifest itself through oppositions. The second analysis, the second movement of
Bartók’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, No. 3, shows that the uncanny can mutate in
twentieth-century music to manifest itself in a longer fragment form. Here, the uncanny is
used to evoke and distort past formal structures and tonalities, as Bartók seeks to repress
his own sense of mortality. The final analysis, a movement from Kurtág’s Kafka
Fragments, shows that twentieth-century composers can read a Freudian textual narrative
between fragments and the uncanny, we will become better equipped to explore musical
66
Ibid., 69.
20
Chapter 2
Preludes late in his life and in only three months between December 1909 and February
1910. A second book of preludes followed two years later, and both books constitute a
total of 24 preludes, each of which has a unique title that may or may not indicate the
presence of extra-musical meaning in the prelude. The second prelude from Book 1,
Voiles, is notoriously ambiguous, peculiar both in its title and its use of the whole-tone
scale. I begin by examining the connection and extension of the Romantic fragment to
fascination with the works of writer Edgar Allan Poe, I will review a preexisting pitch-
class set analysis and determine why a semiotic analysis is needed for a fuller
in opposing registers, I then examine Michael Klein’s semiotic codes for the presence of
the uncanny in Voiles by analyzing its musical content, concluding with a Freudian
narrative reading.
Preludes have much in common with fragments. In fact, most preludes in the
Romantic sense are fragments because they are essentially preludes to nothing, unlike
Bach’s celebrated Preludes and Fugues. One of the best example of preludes as
Romantic fragments is Frédéric Chopin’s Preludes, op. 28, published in 1839. The
scholar Charles Rosen argues that even though they are often performed as a complete set
21
today, much evidence suggests that Chopin intended them to be performed individually
the prelude, Chopin’s Preludes challenge our understanding of a “set” by seeming closer
to 24 separate pieces published under one title. It is in this way that Debussy’s two books
of Preludes strongly evoke Chopin’s Preludes. Each prelude cultivates contrast to the
extent that their association instead strongly invokes a group of disconnected fragmentary
forms. By Debussy’s time, the fragment was certainly a recognized and accepted form.
Because the Preludes were composed late in Debussy’s life, it is important to note
Debussy’s contemporaneous obsession with sustaining the French musical heritage of his
predecessors. In the last decade of his life, he began to compose piano works in older
forms, such as preludes, etudes, and sonatas. Moreover, he dedicated his set of Études,
Even though Chopin was a Polish national, he lived in Paris for much of his life and, in
turn, Debussy viewed Chopin as his French musical predecessor. Furthermore, Debussy’s
Études during his lifetime were frequently compared with those of Chopin.3 Thus, it is
not surprising that Debussy’s Preludes evoke Chopin’s and offer a direct extension of
nineteenth-century fragment forms. However, there are many differences between both
1
Rosen, The Romantic Generation, 83. This remains an issue of debate among musicologists.
2
Marianne Wheeldon, “Tombeau de Claude Debussy: The Early Reception of the Late Works,”
in Rethinking Debussy, eds. Elliott Antokoletz and Marianne Wheeldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 261. Wheeldon details Debussy’s correspondence with Durand et Fils, his publisher, regarding the
protracted discussion of the dedication to both Couperin and Chopin.
3
See Marianne Wheeldon, Debussy’s Late Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009),
56-57.
22
composers’ preludes. Debussy disregards “key order, thus creating a closed but
unordered collection, and one that is closed simply through association with Chopin and
other prelude collections—the number twelve having meaning only in memory.”4 And
unlike Chopin’s Preludes, Debussy added titles which appear as postscripts at the end of
each prelude.
an equally obsessive interest in the literary works of Edgar Allan Poe. Beginning in 1901,
Debussy began using two short stories by Poe as texts for short operas, neither of which
were ever completed. In a letter from Debussy to André Caplet, he speaks of his
I cannot hide from you that I have been giving in to neglecting Images to
the benefit of Mr. E. A. Poe. . . . [His works are] nearly anguishing. It
makes me cast essential affection aside. This man—though
posthumously—exercises an almost tyrannical influence on me, which is
nearly anguishing, and I lock myself like a brute in the “House of Usher,”
lest I be keeping company with the “Devil in the Belfry.”5
writings had begun to penetrate other aspects of his life. The above letter was written on
September 21, 1909—merely two months before he composed Voiles. Both “The Fall of
the House of Usher” and “Devil in the Belfry” were written in the traditional genre of the
nineteenth-century Gothic novel by Poe, and both function according to the expectations
for Gothic novels as outlined in Chapter 1. Clearly, the uncanny, ambiguity, and the
sublime preoccupied Debussy when composing Voiles. Thus, in addition to the evidence
4
Cummins, Debussy and the Fragment, 154.
5
Claude Debussy, Claude Debussy Through His Letters, trans. by Jacqueline M. Charette (New
York: Vantage Press, 1990), 93.
23
of Debussy’s obsession with the past by using traditional forms, it seems likely that he
also incorporated the uncanny into his compositional process through his strong interest
in Poe’s works.
Many aspects of Voiles embrace ambiguity. The Prelude’s title lacks an initial
French article, denuding it of gender and thus rendering it ambiguous and open to
multiple interpretations. This was clearly deliberate on Debussy’s part, because he placed
an ellipsis before the noun instead of an article. Similar to Voiles, most of the titles for the
remaining Preludes are somewhat arbitrary; but unlike Voiles, most were written as
which noun best represents Voiles. The English translation is either “veils” or “sails.”
Additionally, some scholars have attempted to analyze the music based on the possible
meanings of the Prelude’s title. For instance, Frank Dawes eloquently describes both
options: “The veiled thirds of the opening, faintly suggestive of the Faun’s pipe again,
could be either; but the rocking ostinato at très souple and the hint of flung spray in the
In turn, many music theorists attempt to find literal musical meanings from the
title Voiles. Unfortunately, this type of analysis only leaves us searching for musical
elements that indexically point to one over the other instead of embracing the inherent
ambiguity. If the titles were indeed afterthoughts, there still is much in the music that
6
Marguerite Long, At the Piano with Debussy (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1972), 62.
7
Frank Dawes, Debussy Piano Music (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), 38.
24
Debussy’s peculiar use of tonality, Boyd Pomeroy turns to Voiles “only to find a
beyond its natural limits. As for that perplexing ‘structural vagueness,’ it will require
nothing less than a (new) ‘form of analysis to cope with the problems to which the new
effective analysis of Voiles, most likely because the harmonic content of the piece
consists of only one whole-tone scale, except for six measures that are solely pentatonic
(mm. 42-48).9 There are no extra accidentals or modulations throughout the Prelude. One
common type of analysis used to explain Debussy’s use of scales is a pitch-class set
analysis. Richard Parks creates a schema by organizing Debussy’s commonly used scales
into four genuses: diatonic, whole-tone, chromatic, and octatonic. When analyzing
Voiles, Parks focuses on the connection of the whole-tone and pentatonic scales to exploit
“the differences and interconnections between two contrasting [pitch class] set genera.”10
At the end of his rigorous pitch-class set analysis, he summarizes that “…the whole-
tone’s genus’s symmetrical structure and homogeneous [interval class] content radically
Thus, in support of Pomeroy’s request for a “new form of analysis to cope with”
Voiles, and after examining Park’s thorough pitch-class set analysis, it seems clear that
8
Boyd Pomeroy, “Debussy’s Tonality: A Formal Perspective,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Debussy, ed. Simon Trezise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 163.
9
See Claude Debussy, Préludes pour Piano (Paris: Durand, 1910), 4-7 for the score.
10
Richard S. Parks, The Music of Claude Debussy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 59.
11
Ibid., 64.
25
other forms of analysis must be employed to further explore musical meaning in Voiles.
approaches fail to offer a convincing analysis of Voiles. Examining the music’s semiotic
oppositions. If we must embrace the ambiguity of the Prelude’s title, can we also ask if
the music in any way suggests repression? By acknowledging Debussy’s use and
extension of the Romantic fragment form to his Preludes, we now have the freedom to
uncover any nineteenth-century signs for the uncanny, since the same forms of these
structure. On first glance, we can hear the Prelude’s opening as the struggle between the
oppositions of contrasting registers. The opening motive in the right hand (mm. 1-4) and
its answer in the left hand (interrupted at mm. 7-8 but subsequently stated in full at mm.
8-14) appear, with few exceptions, in the exact registers in which they are first stated.
The first motive projects a calm and stagnant rhythmic topos that blocks or subverts
found in m.1, as A♭, providing a sense of bizarre and extraneous enharmonicism. The
only slight derivation of the first motive appears in m. 2 with the octave transfer (C5–C6)
coupled with a crescendo that somewhat conceals a continuous whole-tone descent from
G♯5 to B♭4. If we hear this as depicting calm water for “sails,” then a small wave
apparently has disrupted this calmness. The motive dies out with a strong decrescendo,
26
But before we hear the second motive at m. 7, a repeating B♭1 appears in the bass
at m. 5 and obscures the piece’s calmness and serenity. Although the B♭s are jolting, the
pitch is not random; the right hand’s opening motive ends on B♭6. At first, the B♭s seem
to provide the first sense of “harmony,” due to the stepwise descent in the right hand
from E4 and C4; but instead they turn the piece in an unexpected direction. I later interpret
further the insistent nature of the repeating B♭s, but even at the outset a strong sense of
two oppositions is projected—the opening higher and static descent of thirds against dark
or ominous repetitive B♭s two octaves lower. In real time, this subtle, unmitigated
opposition causes one to feel disoriented and unsure of the future direction of the piece. It
is important to clarify that because Debussy is using the same whole-tone scale, there is
often an association between motive and register, just as there is an association between
By the time the second motive is fully stated, the listener may become somewhat
and expanding the motives (found in the right hand at m. 7) into new thematic material,
Debussy continues to state them in full (except for the brief disruption of a “small wave”
in m. 11) juxtaposed against one another. Here, the pitch center briefly centers around the
A♭4 in the right hand against the recurring B♭1 in the left hand. It is as if each motive
struggles to stay alive, to keep its distinctive characteristics within a sea of turmoil
new thematic material enters, but only as a whole step ascent in thirds from C5-D5-E5-F♯5
27
(mm. 18-20) and finally finishing on G♯5/A♭5 in m. 21, which leads to a new motivic
idea starting in m. 22. This new motive is so insistent and repetitive that it eventually
dominates the right hand in m. 28. As the left hand struggles to catch up with a whole-
tone scale ascent in m. 29, it seems too late and hope seems to recede. What was static
and peaceful at the beginning has become obsessive-compulsive and has overthrown our
sense of what the piece means, perhaps by storm or hurricane. By m. 31, the left hand has
ascended into the right hand’s registral domain. The right hand has nowhere left to go and
attempts to fight against the left hand. In m. 32, the right hand resigns and momentarily
surrenders to the left hand. The music reverts to its original state in m. 33 with the
addition of a new accompanying motive in the right hand, placing the oppositions even
farther apart. As the registers suddenly change and normalize around middle C, chaos
begins between both hands but dies down briefly in mm. 40-41.
that ushers in a glimpse of change. While lasting only 6 measures, the section contrasts
markedly with the previous material by presenting for the first time new harmonic
content. Here, for the first time, the oppositions of register are broken. Both hands play
lush scales, which continue to ascend until the climax in m. 44. Unfortunately, the whole-
tone scale is too insistent, and the pentatonic scale subsides in mm. 45-47 with four
cadences.
Even when the material of the A section returns in m. 48, it is not until m. 50 that
an explicit restatement of the second motive occurs in its initial register (m. 33). This
time, motives in the inner register, the site of previous oppositional conflict, project
splashes of the whole-tone scale that provide support below the melody in the high
28
register. Here, the clearly defined oppositions of the A section are obscured by the
addition of a measure of chords in higher and lower registers (m. 54), which are then
repeated in an even higher register (m. 56). In m. 58, the new extreme registers become
blurred and intertwined with the opening melody in its original register, largely obscuring
the previously defined oppositions. The motive from the opening motive can only state its
first four measures before it finally submits to the excessive whole-tone scale and dies
away.
have not yet examined how the fragment projects a sense of the sinister and uncanny. As
discussed in Chapter 1, the uncanny can be signaled by “signs for the ombra
repetitions of musical material. The uncanny is associated with signs for terrible
recognition, anxiety, dread, death and the sublime.”12 In tonal music and twentieth-
century music that invoke past forms, composers will often use functional harmony. But
what about music that is not explicitly or fully tonal? Beyond fragment form and
oppositions, how can we investigate if the uncanny is present when “tonality” is derived
When Arthur Wenk speaks of Debussy’s use of the whole-tone scale in his mature
music, he makes a pertinent observation: “Debussy remarked of the necessity ‘in some
places to paint in monochrome and to be content with shades of gray.’ The absence of
12
Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 87.
29
confusion, dread, all of which convey a certain paralysis and immobility.”13 Thus, within
Debussy’s output, Voiles is uncanny by being largely comprised of pitches from a single
whole-tone scale. If Wenk states that the whole-tone scale can also symbolize “fear,
confusion, [and] dread,” and Klein states that uncanny musical signs can also be
indexical for “fear and trembling,”14 can we add this to our semiotic musical vocabulary
for the presence of the uncanny? And if so, what happens when we apply this type of
analysis to Voiles? Are we able to discover yet deeper meaning? While the uncanny may
not always consist of the presence of a whole-tone scale, I have nonetheless used it in this
context to enhance our understanding of how the uncanny can behave outside of
traditional tonality. By applying Freud’s narrative of struggle between the creation of the
double to distract the ego from approaching death, we are able to discover a markedly
Immediately from the opening phrase in mm. 1-2, we are met with a sign that the
The piece begins with a G♯5 in the soprano voice at m. 1, yet the alto voice moves
becomes G♯5 when it ascends to accompany the octave leap in the soprano. At first, we
may assume that Debussy tries to preserve some type of distinction between certain
registers by exclusively limiting accidentals to those registers; however, this does not
explain why Debussy notates the previous G♯ as A♭ in mm. 29-47. (Additionally, there is
13
Arthur B. Wenk, Claude Debussy and Twentieth-Century Music (Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1983), 42.
14
Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 85.
30
no difference in the tone quality of either written pitch when performed on a piano.) By
changing the accidentals within a span of four measures, it is also visually awkward for
the pianist to read. It is almost as if Debussy mimics the inherent struggle between the
registers by creating a mental struggle between the pianist and written score. Clearly the
presence of the whole-tone scale on a background level enhances the uncanny effect.
understand what, if anything, is repressed for the entirety of the piece. If we read the
contrasting sections as oppositions between the whole-tone and pentatonic scales, could
the pentatonic scale represent that which is being repressed? Because of the alternation in
notation between the A♭ and G♯, I read A♭5 of the higher register as repressed from the
octave leap to G♯. As it attempts to overthrow the double, the double apparently
disregards its threat, quietly replacing it with G♯. Thus, the opening phrase could be read
as recalling a distant memory, only to have the double repress it with the octave transfer
Just as the opening motive descends into the abyss, the sinister B♭s arrive in the
bass at m. 5, suggesting to us that the complacent opening melody represents more than it
seems to be. The lyrical second opening motive attempts to move out of the strange and
terrifying world by ascending by step in m. 7, but the B♭s, while toujours pp, seem to
imply that the ghastly harbinger of death loiters in the background, waiting for the proper
time to unleash death. While not our repressed A♭s, the bass B♭s, in their persistence,
also seem to signify the uncanny. As the theme expands in m. 10 from the right hand to
31
the left hand, the opening motive returns in full once again against the two other motives.
In my reading, I hear this entrance as obsessive because the motive returns in full and
attempts to momentarily obscure the ascent of the second motive. The opening motive is
restated in full yet again at mm. 15-17, but this time, it is finally able to break free of the
monotonous opening section by stealthily creeping out by whole step ascents in m. 18.
All is not well, however, because compulsiveness overtakes the motive by insisting on its
ascent only by step. The left hand has embraced fuller chords to prepare for a possible
struggle (mm. 15, 17, 19), but the music temporarily rests on D7 at m. 22, implying that
twice. While the right hand is eventually able to momentarily shake free of the uncanny
and move on to similar but different melodic material (mm. 25-26), the left hand is stuck
mm. 23-28. By m. 29, the right hand can no longer contain itself and begins to spin out
of control with repetitions, all of which eventually lead it to its climax in m. 32. The
climax, while only at a piano dynamic level, is initially provoked by the left hand’s
dotted rhythms. I read this as a strong attempt to overthrow the double, primarily due to
its robotic nature. Because the efforts are in vain, since the right hand goes off in its own
direction, the left hand changes its strategy and attempts to bring the realization of death
via ascending whole-tone scales. Measure 29 is also the first time A♭ appears in the
higher register (A♭5), suggesting that the memory is stronger than the ego had thought.
32
As the memory and ego battle, the deathly B♭s finally cease for two measures (mm. 31-
The A♭s (in both hands at m. 33) allow us to remember the repressed memory for
the first time. In this reading, the B section begins at m. 33 as the music becomes the
memory by way of the A♭s. The sinister B♭s in the bass become longer, recurring less
frequently, and they seem to fall into the background with the uncanny. Because a new
rotating motive was introduced in m. 32 (D5-E5-D6-D5), we are unable to repress the new
material to fully uncover the memory—it is too persistent. This motive acts as a constant,
mechanical reminder that the uncanny is still with us, strategically planning the
destruction of the double. Even though the A♭s are finally allowed to surface (mm. 33-
36), we are not able to understand and enjoy the memory because the melodic content
stays the same, immovable in its texture. When the mechanical motive ceases in m. 38,
another brief struggle between the ego and the repressed memory commences in the
contrary motion between both hands. Just when it seems like the ego has gained control,
the alteration of the A♭s and B♭s in m. 41 cease the struggle and, for the first time, allow
As the repressed memory reveals itself in full (mm. 41-43), Debussy abandons his
strict adherence to the earlier defined registers. The memory finally gains enough
momentum to completely overtake the ego, even if only briefly. The ascending
pentatonic scales imply splashes of life. At the beginning of m. 42, the new motivic
material is repeated and insisted upon as the memory grows from a small reminiscence to
33
a detailed painting with two new pitches, D♭ and E♭, introduced by the change in key
signature from no sharps or flats to five flats at m. 42. What has been repressed quickly
becomes our reality. The B♭1 in the bass acts as a support rather than a reminder of our
sense of mortality due to the key change at m. 42 and the role of B♭ in the pentatonic
scale.15 In addition, all dissonance disappears as we reach the climax in m. 44. The music
finally seems to work naturally and smoothly. It is at the climax that the memory cannot
overthrow the ego and quickly resigns, almost apologetically, by four consecutive
cadences to E♭ minor (mm. 45-46). These cadences are not strictly tonal; however, the
effect is achieved by the perfect fifth in the left hand (D♭2-A♭2), which acts as the
dominant, resolving to a minor third (E♭2-G♭2) or tonic. The missing note of the tonic
chord, the B♭, not surprisingly, is played in the bass immediately following each cadence
in E♭ minor (beginning in m. 45), punctuating the temporal space after each cadence.
Now that the double has split, the terrifying recognition of impending death confuses the
music for two measures by its stagnant and fragmented whole-tone scales that lead to
nowhere (mm. 48-49). The B♭s jump back and forth in octaves (B♭1-B♭2), as if death is
following our every move as a constant reminder of its presence (mm. 48-57). In an effort
to restore the order of the opening, the ego brings back in the upper register the second
motive from mm. 9-13. This manifestation loses its momentum and thus its initial
15
The B♭1, played in the bass in both m. 42 and m. 43 acts as a note of stability instead of a
reminder of the ghastly harbinger of death.
34
promise that the opening will return; it now merely acts as a recollection of that motive,
rejecting its initial active role. By m. 54, death is mischievously made manifest in the
circular chordal motions in the right hand. I hear this as death knocking at the door,
patiently waiting until we must finally succumb to it. In m. 55, disjointed whole-tone
fragments return from the inner voices in mm. 48-53 and allow the music to become
Finally, in m. 58, the first theme returns, but its static and repetitive material loses
strength because of its softer dynamic of piu pp. As it attempts to become part of death in
order to accommodate its new uncanny surroundings, it barely unfolds the opening first
phrase before it is trapped at the end of its descent (mm. 61-62). For the first time in the
piece, the sinister B♭s have disappeared—because death has taken its toll, and they are
no longer needed. As a small token of hope in death, the persistent G-sharp has
relinquished its double, and finally mutated into the A♭, which has been repressed from
the beginning. In its last moments of life, even though impending death has been
accepted, the two intervals at the end of the motive, F♯4-D4 and E4-C4, attempt to flee in
mm. 62-64. Instead of succeeding, they are caught in the midst of death. With one final
sigh at the end of m. 64, the motive becomes a victim of the uncanny and succumbs to
death.
35
Chapter 3
The above quotation is how historian Halsey Stevens describes the end of Béla
Bartók’s life after an extended battle with leukemia. The Third Piano Concerto and the
Viola Concerto, both composed during Bartók’s final months, were left unfinished at the
time of his death. While the Viola Concerto primarily consisted of unfinished sketches,
the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, No. 3 was complete except for the orchestra parts
for the final 17 measures. Serly, a friend of Bartók who later realized the Viola Concerto
from sketches, was also responsible for finishing the third movement of the Third Piano
Concerto.
Due to Bartók’s simultaneous struggle with his own mortality and composition of
the Third Piano Concerto, many scholars acknowledge that the second movement has
strong autobiographical allusions, but in doing so, they have attempted to map literal
autobiographical narratives onto the music. One common reason for this treatment of the
movement is due to its tempo marking, Adagio religioso. It is the only instance in
Bartók’s oeuvre that religioso is used. As Ferenc Bonis argues, “in the light of our
1
Halsey Stevens, The Life and Music of Béla Bartók (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 105-106.
36
if the music itself did not [quote or allude to] a movement of a Beethoven string
Rather than agree with speculative autobiographical evidence and analyze the
approach. I have allowed the music to speak for itself to tell us that it contains an inherent
uncanny narrative. My analysis focuses only on the second movement, the Adagio
religioso. I begin with exploring the connection between the second movement and the
musical fragment. Due to the movement’s ambiguous formal design, I show that only a
semiotic analysis can interpret this formal ambiguity. Moreover, I show that strange and
inexplicable moments in the music use the same Romantic period signifiers to signify the
presence of the uncanny. I then examine the uncanny passages through the Freudian
concept of repression and conclude with a Freudian narrative reading by using uncanny
Before one can proceed with a topical analysis, it is important to explain the
connection between Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and the musical fragment. While it is
atypical for music theorists to isolate a movement from a concerto and analyze it apart
from the whole piece, unusual features in the second movement require special
musical fragment and the musical uncanny has remained virtually unexplored in literary
and musical writings. And one could easily question whether one movement from a
concerto is not short; in performance it lasts more than ten minutes. I propose that the
2
Ferenc Bonis, “Bartók and Wagner,” in Bartók Studies, ed. Todd Crow (Detroit: Information
Coordinators, 1976), 88.
37
fragmentary nature in this case occurs because Bartók left much of the piece unfinished,
just as Samuel Coleridge’s long unfinished poems are considered fragments. However,
the second movement of the concerto, other than its attacca into the final movement,
could easily be performed alone as an independent work, for the movement is complete
in itself. The first and unfinished third movements, while stylistically similar to each
other, have little in common with the second movement. The outer movements, for
example, share similar tonality and character, yet these features are abandoned in the
second movement. If, for Freud, the creation of the double distracts the ego from its sense
of imminent death, then the second movement could be read as containing the struggle
and battle between the ego and double that is not present in the other movements.
reminder of the remainder, may be seen as the allegorical presence within a text, within
every text (no matter how lively) of its own ‘death’: its own necessarily incomplete
If we consider the overall form of the second movement, we might easily question
codes, for its form seems not to mimic any past model. It mimics some type of A-B-A1
structure featuring a calm and peaceful A section (mm. 1-57), a faster and heavily
contrasted B section (mm. 58-88), and a returning A section containing excessive new
material (mm. 89-137). Thus, one could further argue that the A1 section differs markedly
from the A section, and thus the piece is through-composed. Interestingly, the scholar
3
Sophie Thomas, “The Return of the Fragment: ‘Christabel’ and the Uncanny,” in Untrodden
Regions of the Mind: Romanticism and Psychoanalysis, 69.
38
Istvan Lang also caters to the movement’s inherent ambiguity and untraditional form. In
an attempt to treat the A1 section as variations on the opening A section, he observes that
structural analysis. Thus, a topical semiotic analysis is one method that allows us to
explore musical meaning in the midst of ambiguity. It is easy to see how many
conventional topics work in tandem to create order in an ambiguous form. The movement
begins with a calm, reflective introduction (mm. 1-15) in the strings featuring imitative
counterpoint, a C pentatonic mode and static harmony.5 As the introduction subsides, the
solo piano enters at m. 16 with a chorale topic in a strict contrapuntal and tonal style. The
strings punctuate each of the piano’s cadences to extend their duration (mm. 20-23),
evoking a hymn-like topic. All is not well for long, however, as seemingly wrong notes
creep into the music, creating a jolting effect (for example, the A♯3 in m. 34). At the
climax of this section, the piano has a descending chain of diminished-seventh chords
4
Istvan Lang, “Bartók’s Heritage: A Composer’s View,” in Bartók Studies, ed. Todd Crow
(Detroit: Information Coordinators, 1976), 200.
5
See Béla Bartók, Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra (New York: Boosey & Hawkes,
1947), 32-48, for the score.
39
implying the intrusion of an ombra topic.6 When we reach the final cadence of the A
section at m. 54, the piano cadences in C major, without the third (E) from a ♭vii chord,
leaving the listener unsatisfied. Obviously, we have reached the end of the first section,
but the inexplicable chromaticism has obscured our understanding of what key we are in.
The strings return with a small variation of the introduction (mm. 54-57) perhaps
suggesting the form of theme and variations, but the material of the second section
When compared with the A section, the B section appears to be unrelated. The
tempo is faster and the tonality is ambiguous. The melodic content focuses on short
motives as the strings trill and tremolo, the winds play small three- or four-note motives,
and the piano plays repetitive figures and scales. Conventional musical topics intrude in
the form of birdcalls in the solo piano and flutes—an indexical sign implying spring and
nature (mm. 63 and 75). The birdcalls transfer to the piano in descending chains (mm. 68-
71), hinting that a flock has emerged. The birdcall motives transition into whole-tone
scales in contrary motion (mm. 79-83) and inch us towards the climax of this section.
When we arrive in m. 84, the climax offers us the quintessence of nature: pentatonic runs,
trills that answer the birdcalls and suggest water, and an implicit return to the tonality of
C major. Because this piano concerto contains neoclassical features (such as conventional
topics and tonal allusions), one could argue that the purpose of this section is to showcase
reading, however, would obscure any semiotic analysis, because traditional topics are
6
Ratner, Classic Music, 24. The ombra topic is rooted in the Baroque fantasia style and, in
eighteenth century opera, “is used to evoke the supernatural…representing ghosts, gods, moral values,
punishments.” The uncanny has its musical roots in ombra.
40
present. Furthermore, whatever this section may evoke, there exist no surface connections
As the B section dissipates and the opening material of the A section returns in m.
89, the topics also return but are obscured by the piano at cadence points with the
intrusion of chromaticism (see mm. 94-95). Because the woodwinds play the opening
chorale (from mm. 16-20), the piano plays contrapuntal lines containing many major-
seventh intervals provoking a sense of instability (see, for example, D5 against D♯4 in m.
92). When we reach the ombra topic from the A section (at m. 122), the strings finally
arrive with the melody in octaves while the piano arpeggiates diminished triads. As we
reach the conclusion of the section, the piano plays an extended solo cadenza (mm. 128-
movement, the tam-tam (m. 128). It appears that the movement will end tragically, but
the piano cadences back to C major (in m. 134), a brief diminution of the introduction
returns (mm. 134-135), and the piano finishes the movement with a final cadence to E
major.
made sense of this movement by using “tonal” topics. It appears that the neoclassicism
present in this movement is not only manifested through tonal allusions, but also through
traditional topics. While this is a logical reading, it leaves many aspects unaccounted for,
“anything supernatural or beyond the normal” and “the weird, the sinister, and…the
41
terrifying in the sublime.”7 In order to explain the troubling moments of strange
uncanny moments using the musical criteria established by Michael Klein. In so doing,
The first signifier of the uncanny appears in m. 15 at the end of the introduction,
immediately before the piano’s entrance. The chord progression of the introduction
evokes peace because the harmony is predictable, complacent, and static. As the canonic
motive from the opening descends through the strings in m. 12 over I 6/4, first in the
violins followed by the violas, we expect it to finish in a similar way in the celli. Before
the motive can continue, however, the celli descend a tritone from A2 to E♭2, instead of
to the E2 we expect. The E♭2 is jolting because it is accented and played on the downbeat
of the topic and of the key. Metaphorically, we believe we have reached inner peace, but
something else is attempting to intrude. Because this first uncanny moment happens in a
brief duration and at a soft dynamic level, the piano’s entrance with the chorale topic at
peace.
The opening interplay between the piano and strings sets up an abstract
opposition. While both voices are in learned style, the strings never play dissonant
chords. In fact, the motivic material in the strings always contains tonal canonic or
7
Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 78.
42
imitative figures (see mm. 20-23). For the entirety of the A section, the strings only
punctuate cadence points almost as if attempting to ground the piano and to block the
destructive chromaticism. By the third phrase (mm. 31–37), the piano has invited
dissonance and begins to move away from its initial peaceful character. In m. 33, the
piano plays a diminished triad, the first present in the movement (beat 1), followed by
parallel octaves (beat 2) of m. 34 (A4/5 against A♯3). This is an example of the uncanny’s
strange voice-leading and strange note. While the A diminished triad is surprising, it is
justified because D♯4 properly resolves up to E4, restoring inner peace. Both hands move
in contrary motion, yet the strange note is approached through a passing motion. The
right hand descends in octaves from B5 to G5. The left hand ascends from G♯3 of its E
major chord (m. 34) to A♯3 and finally moves to B3 and D4.
After the cadence, the piano begins the fourth phrase (mm. 38–47) and continues
the strange chromaticism, emphasizing half-step relationships (F♯-F in mm. 38-39, G♯-A
in mm. 40-41, and C♯-C♮, B♭-B♮ in m. 45). The most jolting, and thus uncanny,
moment in this phrase occurs on the downbeat of m. 45. Due to the descent in octaves
from C♯-C♮-B♭-B♮ in both hands, the inner voices distort a G major chord; it creates a
sense of anxiety. Although the piano immediately cadences to A minor in m. 46, the
The fifth and final phrase of the A section (mm. 48–57) is characterized by a
downward chain of diminished- and half-diminished seventh chords played by the piano.
When all hope is lost, the E6 arrives (beat 4 of m. 53) and allows the piano to cadence
back to C major.
43
Uncanny moments cannot be found in the B section; they wait until the return of
the A section to intrude again. At m. 89, the piano no longer plays its chorale; rather, the
woodwinds play the chorale and the piano plays a contrapuntal commentary. At the
cadence points, the winds hold each chord and the piano punctuates with odd scales that
seem to be unrelated to the chorale (see mm. 100-104). While the cadence points hint at
the uncanny, it is not until the third phrase that a literal musical sign appears. The
beginning of the phrase in m. 105 begins conventionally with canonic material interacting
in the piano between both hands. However, strange notes appear in m. 106 (see beat 4 –
F5 against F♯4) and continue into m. 107 (D♯5 against D5). The piano punctuates the
cadence at m. 109 by quickly alternating two whole-tone scales at once, again evoking a
sense of anxiety. The scales sound strange but familiar—another sign of the uncanny. In
the next phrase (mm. 112-121), the counterpoint disappears and the piano now plays
unison figures beginning with eighth notes increasing to triplets and finally to sixteenth
notes. In an effort to regain its bittersweet counterpoint, the piano uses obsessive motions
and attempts to expel the uncanny. When the flutes and clarinets play the strange set of
chromatic notes in m. 119 (C♯-C♮-B♭-B♮), the piano trills from D to E♭ in both hands
against them, creating an intensified clash. When the fifth theme returns in m. 122, the
strings finally return with the melody and the piano continues to play rising diminished
triads in octaves.
The tam-tam arrives at m. 128. The piano can no longer play with the strings,
because the oppositions between them are too strong. In this passage, almost everything
present in the piano is a musical sign of the uncanny. In the bass, there are many strange
notes and much chromaticism (see m. 132). While the right hand of the piano is derived
44
primarily from the octatonic scale, enharmonicism and chromaticism are unmistakably
m. 134, however, the sudden presence of E5 allows the piano to cadence on C major,
grounding the key center and restoring the peaceful topic from the introduction.
tonality, expression, and character. It is not enough, however, to simply identify the
uncanny. If the juxtaposition between tonality and the chromatic uncanny is all that is
present in the movement, we might read this piece as Bartók’s rushed attempt to finish a
concerto before his death. Reading uncanny moments still leaves us with the problem of
interpreting the B section. If we are correct in assuming that these moments signify
something more, we must answer further questions. Assuming that there is some type of
coherence in this movement, how do the uncanny moments together make sense? Why
are these moments present to begin with in a movement that could survive without them?
In short, what narrative makes the best sense for connecting these disorienting elements?
double to distract from one’s sense of mortality, something musical must be repressed,
and it must recur later, bringing forth the ghastly harbinger of death. By applying this
narrative, we immediately perceive a different reading of the piece, one that is shocking
It is easy to see how this movement appears to represent the struggle between the
double’s repression of death and the ego’s acceptance of mortality. The introduction
(mm. 1-15) as played by the strings represents a successful denial of death; we are at
45
peace because the ego has created the double and repressed its sense of mortality. The
first uncanny moment, in m. 15, represents the imperfection of this repression: although
the double has repressed mortality, it is always present in our subconscious mind (the
ego) and exposes itself in haunting ways. If we read uncanny moments as signifiers of
repression, we must determine what is repressed in the music itself. This repressed
in this case, it is E♭2 and D♭2. Here, I also propose that the repressed interval can appear
diminution of a minor-second. It is derived from the fifth phrase of the A section with the
descending melody over diminished-seventh chords (mm. 48-53). The other occurrences
of the repressed interval are signaled by strange chromaticism. However, the first
manifestation in m. 15 is brief because the double takes over and sends the ego back to
denial.
The next uncanny moment arrives in m. 33. Because this moment is outlined by
stepwise counterpoint and appears within the inner voices, this manifestation of
repression is not as shocking as the previous instance in m. 15; the double continues to
repress our sense of mortality and the half-step chromaticism recalls m. 15 only on a
subconscious level. However, in mm. 44-45, the double begins to lose control with the
occurrence of the next uncanny moment. Here, the same descending major second (E♭-
D♭) returns from m. 15, but it is spelled enharmonically as E♭5 and C♯5. The strange
note (C♯5) occurs on the downbeat as the repression falters and a sense of mortality
begins to surface. Although the double has long successfully repressed the awareness of
46
impending death, death is more persistent than the double had assumed. Thus, the
repressed figure from m. 15 has more semiotic weight here, and the double seems
The previous uncanny moment has allowed imminent death to manifest itself in
measures (m. 48-53), the double submits to reality, allowing the ego to explore our sense
of mortality. When the piano cadences back to C major in m. 54, the double regains
control and represses all previous confrontations with reality. We are at peace again,
The logic of the B section emerges through this reading due to this nascent
and a complete escape from reality into the past, one that offers more promise than the
mere repression of death. It is the acknowledgement of repression that allows our mind to
wander to past memories after the uncanny reveals itself in the A section. If we take an
autobiographical approach as to what this memory might be, most scholars suggest that it
is Bartók’s experience with nature. If that is the case, it is easy to find representative
elements in this section. The different motives in all of the instruments represent life
found in a forest. The tremolos in the strings represent trees (mm. 58-67); the motives in
the lower strings represent animal footsteps (mm. 64-67); the oboe motive represents
insects (mm. 58-67); the clarinet, which plays an inversion of the falling tritone figure
from mm. 14–15, signifies some robust animal (mm. 59); and the piano and flutes
represent flocks of birds, as discussed above. All of the motives interact and answer each
other as if all of the creatures communicate using the same language and are talking
47
among themselves. By imagining this memory as an experience with nature in a forest
accessed by emerging repression, we can account for the stark change in material and its
temporarily repressed the sense of imminent death and allows the ego to wander freely
into the past. The uncanny moments from the A section “[lead us] back to something long
With the return of the A section, the woodwinds play the opening chorale,
implying that the double knows it is starting to fail, thus summoning other voices to its
aid. The piano’s antiquated contrapuntal lines include elements of the Baroque fantasia
topic at cadence points, which continue to recollect the past and begin the struggle with
our sense of mortality. We have briefly experienced the past accessed by a happy
memory of nature. Thus, the ego does not want to return to our complacent state of denial
of death created by the double. No longer is our awareness of death slowly stealing in; it
is evident that we have come too far to return to blissful ignorance. By the second
cadence point (mm. 100–104), the piano becomes obsessive with the scale figures from
the B section. Instead of connoting happiness, the scale figures now become uncanny in
and of themselves due to their insistent nature. They are skewed and bewildering; anxiety
begins to manifest itself. The possible destruction of the double is looming. By the fourth
phrase, beginning at m. 112, the piano becomes so obsessive that both hands play in
unison and finally lead in mm 118-119 to the third uncanny moment (the C♯-C♮-B♭-B♮)
8
Ibid, 78.
48
As the piano reaches the chain of diminished-seventh chords in m. 122, the roles
have switched: the strings cry and tremble at its appearance while the piano evokes the
vision of terror by repeatedly playing diminished-triads. As the winds enter to plead with
the double, the double refuses to yield and brings us to the apotheosis, or turning point, in
m. 128.9 The chromatic half-step has allowed the ego to see the double as the ghastly
harbinger of death. If we read this section as the ego’s last confrontation and struggle
with the double, we still must account for the appearance of the tam-tam. Perhaps it is
here that we realize that we have been confronting the vision of terror all along. The stark
textural and melodic changes emulate a declamatory effect. By examining the pitches in
the right hand of the piano, we not only see the repressed chromatic half-step again and
again but also notice the octatonic scale that has been repressed for the entire movement.
At the first uncanny moment of the movement (E♭2-D♭2 in the celli at m. 15), it is easy
to see that these pitches are derived from D♭ octatonic scale (D♭- E♭-E♮- G♭…). At the
apotheosis in m. 128, it is easy to see that all pitches are derived from the E♭ octatonic
scale (E♭-F♮-G♭-A♭…). In the nineteenth century, the octatonic scale always signified
the supernatural and magical.10 Thus, Bartók would have been familiar with the scale’s
previous implications; clearly its emergence at the climax is intended to evoke the
supernatural. The same semiotic codes present in nineteenth-century music are present at
9
For a thorough discussion of the concept of apotheosis, see, Michael Klein, “Chopin's Fourth
Ballade as Musical Narrative,” Music Theory Spectrum 26 (2004): 23-56.
10
Herman Rechberger, Scales and Modes around the World, (Finland: Fennica-Gehrman, 2008),
40. “Russian composers often used the [octatonic] scale to evoke scenes of magic and exotic mystery
(Rimsky-Korsakov: Kashhchey the Immortal, Igor Stravinsky: Petrushka and The Rite of
Spring)….Octatonic scales were [most frequently] used by Béla Bartók, mainly in his work Mikrokosmos.”
49
the end of this movement, signifying the same signs via the octatonic scale. The scale
finally breaks out of its repression until it accepts impending mortality in m. 133 (E5) and
By using Freud’s concept of the uncanny and narrative of repression, this analysis
has made sense of strange and unexplainable musical events. I clarified at the outset that
it is not my intention to map an autobiographical narrative onto the music. However, the
results of the Freudian narrative reading provoke further questions. What is Bartók
repressing? Can we ever know without creating a historical fiction? Are there any
autobiographical hints in the music, or should we end our search for meaning here? We
need look no further than the tempo indication, Adagio religioso. It is tempting to
speculate what religious connotations this may have evoked for Bartók. He was raised
Roman Catholic as a child, converted to atheism as a teenager, and found an inner utopia
through nature for the rest of his life. Perhaps it is his Catholicism that has been
repressed. Perhaps this movement represents a return to or final confrontation with his
ingrained religious belief system. If we read this narrative along with Freud’s, the double
would not only represent the denial of death but also of religion. Thus, the opening
chorale is more complacent than previously noted because religion is repressed. The
repression triggers the uncanny moments and allows us to briefly acknowledge our own
mortality. In this reading, the B section represents a hopeful return to eternal bliss as an
escape from impending death. If this is the case, the double is present throughout the B
section, but it has transformed itself. It is a double in terms of body and soul—implying
hope, because the soul represents immortality. If we are to read this section as hopeful,
50
could we go as far as hearing it as the Garden of Eden or Heaven itself? This section
draws us back to nature, or, metaphorically, to religion and the hope of an afterlife. The
birdcalls represent the idea of life, the natural world continuing on in a dream realm
beyond death. As heaven dissipates and the ego takes us back to reality, the struggle
between repression of death and belief in the afterlife commences. By the time we reach
the apotheosis, death refuses to be repressed and splits the double in such a way that we
are forced to make a choice. In this reading, E5 (in m. 133) represents the decision to
accept or deny the afterlife. But which does it choose? If we look ahead to the final
cadence of the movement (mm. 136-137), the melody descends from G5 to E5, an Amen
figure that appears at the end of church liturgy and hymns. If we read this descent as the
conclusion of a hymn or prayer, the piano represents the church organist’s two hands and
is accompanied by the “pedals” of the organ, the celli and basses (which play DàE).
Although it remains ambiguous, the final cadence to E major gives the hope that life
51
Chapter 4
themes of his large body of literary work. Born into a Jewish family in 1883, Kafka went
on to become one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century. Two of his
best-known narratives, Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, explicitly deal with
morbid themes of coming to terms with inevitable death. Clearly, he was preoccupied
with what we commonly refer to as the Freudian uncanny and the destruction of the
double.
Kafka, unable to finish many works before his death, left behind a number of
unintentional literary fragments. However, the piece this analysis is concerned with,
drawn from another type of fragment—namely, the seemingly random but carefully
chosen lines from letters and diary entries left behind by Kafka. I begin by examining the
connection between Kafka and Kurtág, and then examine common themes throughout the
Kafka Fragments. By reading the entire text of the work as a Freudian narrative of
repression, I will investigate uncanny moments throughout the whole to make sense of
the final fragment, “Es Blendete uns die Mondnacht” [The Moonlit Night Dazzled Us],
52
Upon his death, Kafka bequeathed his unpublished works to his close friend Max
Brod, requesting that they be destroyed and never published. However, because Brod
ultimately ignored Kafka’s request and did publish the fragments, some eventually served
as the text for Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragments, his third song cycle and another example of
of a set of preludes, Kurtág intentionally wrote this work in the form of musical
fragments because this form comprises a traditional Romantic idiom. Scored for soprano
and violin, the cycle contains forty fragments, including repetitions, which Kurtág further
separates into four parts. But is Kurtág’s piece the product of a random ordering, or did
Born in Lugoj, Romania, in 1926, Kurtág attended the Franz Liszt Academy in
Marianne Stein, one of Kurtág’s mentors during his musical studies in Paris in 1957.
reject formal conventions and to focus instead on short bursts of emotion; he began to
compose in fragment forms arising from his exposure to and in the style of Webern’s
compact forms, causing him to radically change his previous compositional style.1 One
1
Peter Halasz, György Kurtág (Budapest: MAGUS Publications, Ltd., 1998) discusses Kurtág’s
experience in Paris in-depth, as well as providing a detailed study of his musical style and compositional
output.
53
abundant overarching metaphor in the Kafka-Fragmente is traveling down a path. Ruth
Gross connects this textual theme autobiographically with the dedication to Stein who
ultimately changed Kurtág’s own musical path.2 Thus, connections between Kurtág and
Kafka are easy to identify. Kafka wrote in the form of literary fragments, a logical
musical fragments.
short length that on the surface seem far removed from tonality or tonal allusions,
traditional forms of analysis yield minimal results. John Clough was among the first to
introduction, he acknowledges that “…even with the most powerful analytical tools, we
can only hope to gain some small insight to Kafka-Fragmente, while holding its deepest
analysis attempts to unravel order and structure by focusing only on the musical
these fragments might mean to us from a semiotic perspective. Because Kurtág set the
2
See Ruth V. Gross, “György Kurtág’s ‘Kafka Fragmente’: Kafka in Pieces,” in Traditions of
Experiment from the Enlightenment to the Present, eds. by Nancy Kaiser and David E. Wellbery (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992) for an intriguing connection with autobiographical, textual, and
musical paths within the work.
3
John Clough, “Diatonic Trichords in Two Pieces from Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente: A Neo-
Riemannian Approach,” in Hommage à Kurtág, ed. Péter Halász (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2002), 333.
54
music to a preexisting text, we will use a literary narrative to explore semiotic
Currently, the only semiotic analysis of Kafka Fragments is by Martha Hyde, who
fragment form, even though many compositional devices are uniquely contemporary. Her
analysis examines how Kurtág deals with the issue of “how to create a sense of unstable,
incomplete or expanding meaning without tonal harmony and its formal conventions.”4
environment, the traditional meaning of the topics, while still present, are destabilized.
There are many questions to consider when investigating what kind of literary
narrative the piece evokes and how the music portrays that narrative. Because the work is
as an uncanny narrative imbued with the Freudian concept of repression.5 Does Kurtág,
in fact, evoke the uncanny using the criteria outlined in Chapter 1? If the fragments lack
functional tonal harmony and exploit traditional topics, how does Kurtág
Freudian narrative of repression present? And if so, what in the music is being repressed?
Finally, what musical signs for the uncanny, if any, alert us to this narrative and how do
4
Hyde, "Semiotics and Form: Reading Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments," in Interdisciplinary Studies in
Musicology 5,186.
5
Kafka was clearly aware of Freud’s writings. For a discussion tracing the development of
Kafka’s interest in Freudian psychology, see Eric Marson and Keith Leopold, “Kafka, Freud, and ‘Ein
Landarzt,’” The German Quarterly 37 (1964): 146-160.
55
A quick examination of the final fragment, “The Moonlit Night Dazzled Us,” 6
reveals unique features that traditional methods of analysis cannot address. This final
fragment is the longest in the cycle, consisting of 10 pages and requiring approximately 6
minutes and 24 seconds to perform.7 Secondly, the text is full of pastoral and religious
imagery: “The moonlit night dazzled us. Birds shrieked in the trees. There was a rush of
wind in the fields. We crawled through the dust, a pair of snakes.” The solo violin begins
ascent over many registers (See Ex. [A]).8 Yet, before the soprano enters, the violin
quickly shifts textures to one of three whole notes ([A1]). This sudden change in texture
suggests a disruption that implies something unexpected has happened. Before we can
make sense of this, however, the original texture returns and conventional musical topics
intrude. Here, Kurtág evokes indexical signs for birds and wind ([D] and [E]). As the
wind begins to roar and the soprano pauses, with recurring four-note motives throughout
the violin, the register drops sharply to the lowest G on the violin, G3 ([F]). The soprano
also descends in register to evoke something crawling on the ground, a debased and
animalistic image to complement the disturbing text. When the soprano sings “a pair of
snakes,” which is only uttered once, the text stops in the soprano and gives way to a
bizarre extended vocalise for three pages ([J]). As the music progresses toward the
6
All of the titles and texts of the fragments are from the English postscript translations in Edito
Musica Budapest’s published score, which are translated by Júlia and Peter Sherwood. See György Kurtág,
Kafka-Fragmente für Sopran und Violine, op. 24 (Budapest: Editio Musica, 1992), 70-79 for the score.
7
I have used pages to describe the length of the fragment because Kurtág does not write in
traditional measures or bar lines; he indicates only phrase markings with a solid bar line at the end of a
section of text. The duration is from György Kurtág, Kafka-Fragments, performed by Adrienne Csengery
and András Keller, Hungaraton HCD 31135, 1992. Kurtág oversaw the preparation of the recording.
8
For my analysis, I have created rehearsal letters as points of reference. See Figure 1 on page 57
for the list of rehearsal letters with their respective page numbers and identifying elements.
56
Figure 1. List of Rehearsal Letters in Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragments
A 70 System 1, beat 1
B1 71 System 1, beat 1
C 71 System 2, C5 in soprano
E 73 System 1, beat 1
G3 75 System 2, beat 1
I 75 System 4, beat 1
M 77 System 4, beat 1
O 79 System 1, beat 1
Q 79 System 4, beat 1
57
climax, the soprano and violin begin a large ascent in register until the apotheosis is
reached ([N]). It is not until the climax that the violin begins a downward spiral of runs,
and the soprano finally stops singing. At the end of the descent, the soprano utters for the
last time “We crawled through the dust, a pair of snakes” as the violin partially returns to
One is puzzled why this final fragment evokes religious imagery that describes
the fall of man, and why it contains an extended soprano vocalise. Furthermore, why is
the imagery of crawling snakes evoked? Ruth Gross reads the final fragment as a
metaphor for the breakdown of language and communication that essentially leads to
modernism. In her view, the entirety of the work depicts the fall of man because the
fragments begin with the good path and end with our inability to continue walking—thus
we crawl on the ground. Additionally, she justifies the vocalise by using the alienation of
snakes from the trees to represent the breakdown of communication.9 But this analysis
does not explain the stark musical contrast with the other movements or convincingly
justify the vocalise. If we read an uncanny narrative for the entire work, then this
fragment must be the culmination of that narrative. But could it also embody the uncanny
To further explain the diversity of musical topics, theorists tend to isolate specific
fragments from the whole and analyze each of them individually. One can certainly
justify this approach (as demonstrated in my previous analyses), but the Kafka Fragments
differs because the work is essentially a musical setting of a text. Should we read a
literary narrative throughout the entire set of fragments, as Gross has done, or should we
9
Gross, “György Kurtág’s ‘Kafka Fragmente’: Kafka in Pieces,” in Traditions of Experiment
from the Enlightenment to the Present, 205.
58
investigate the meaning of each one separately? Scholars agree that it is difficult to read a
single narrative that encompasses the entire piece because on the surface the texts seem
valid construction when viewing the fragments in isolation.10 Ruth Gross argues that
“there is no real plot here”11 and “it is not always clear why Kurtág has chosen the order
he has, or what specific relationship each fragment’s setting has with the next.”12 She is
also correct in observing that the ordering seems both bizarre and strange. But Kurtág did
deliberately choose specific Kafka’s fragments and deliberately placed them into four
distinct sections. It seems likely, then, that there must be some overarching literary and
musical narrative that Kurtág seeks to project. To investigate its presence, we must
analyze the literary narrative through the entire set of fragments for uncanny moments, as
unconnected as they appear, and, based on these findings, further investigate what “The
Paradoxically, when considered as a whole, the fragments are far too varied to
grasp their meaning as one entity, which implies that they also carry meaning on an
individual level. Thus, I read two levels of fragmentariness: the first on the scale of the
entire work and the second on that of each dissected, discrete movement. I propose that
fragment form in this work can be fragmentary on multiple levels, both as one entire
piece as well as in each of its smaller fragments or movements. In both cases, neither
10
Hyde, "Semiotics and Form: Reading Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments," in Interdisciplinary Studies
in Musicology 5, 188.
11
Gross, “György Kurtág’s ‘Kafka Fragmente’: Kafka in Pieces,” in Traditions of Experiment
from the Enlightenment to the Present, 192.
12
Ibid., 192.
59
option constructs a satisfying whole or creates a duality of fragment form. Perhaps we
should consider if the strategic ordering of the fragments is a deliberate device used by
Clearly, one must examine the various recurring literary narratives throughout the
the fragments can be successfully analyzed as distraction from death created by a double
and a few are, in a Freudian sense, uncanny on their own. The subjects contained therein
consist of anecdotes and proverbs (“The Good March in Step”), depictions of a specific
everyday life (“Scene at the Station”), and moments of supernatural imagination and
fantasy (“Leopards”). Even though these themes are present throughout the work, the
texts of the fragments are too varied to make sense when read as a single inclusive
narrative.
One of the primary recurring music and textual themes is walking down a path.
The work of Hyde explores how Kurtág’s use of step motives and other traditional
devices contributes to the presence of musical topics. For instance, the first fragment of
Part I, “The Good March in Step,” contains two oppositions. The violin and soprano
begin in step with each other, but the dancers (mentioned in the text) quickly fall out of
step and jest as the violin marches on with its two-note step motive.13 “Like a Pathway in
Autumn” exemplifies the physical path in autumn when leaves continually fall and
constantly leave the path covered. The violin depicts the falling leaves with ascending
and descending scales. The path becomes an ironic image in Part III with “Destination,
13
Hyde, "Semiotics and Form: Reading Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments," in Interdisciplinary Studies
in Musicology 5, 188-89.
60
Path, Hesitation;” here, there is an ultimate destination but no path to it, with hesitation
Another recurring theme is the opposition of city with nature, or, when extended
to music, with a pastoral topic. Within this work, I read the pastoral topics as manifesting
the uncanny. In “Nevermore” (Part I), we are exiled from the city, but we are not told
where we are going. The “Scene at the Station” (Part I), depicts travelling on a train and
watching the onlookers as they freeze—but, again, we are not told where we are going.
We are exiled yet again in “Again, Again” (Part IV), but this time we know we are going
to multiple places in nature; at least we hope we will see mountains and desert. Unlike
the traditional nineteenth-century pastoral, the topic becomes uncanny here because we
are not given any sense of location and remain mystified as to where or when we will
ultimately arrive. In all three cases, the music does not manifest pastoral topics. At the
beginning of “Scene at the Station,” the violin has a chain of upward rising double stop
glissandi. Here Kurtág clearly uses an indexical semiotic sign that implies the whistle of
an approaching train. Yet, when the voice enters with mundane text, the fragment quickly
deconstructs itself and ends within three measures, conveying to the listener a musical
It is evident that Kurtág often uses text painting in his musical settings—such as
indexical signs for birds, paths, or train whistles—to literally evoke musically the
meaning of the text. However, beyond this common compositional technique, does
Kurtág use any traditional musical signs to evoke the uncanny? Most of the uncanny
musical signs outlined by Klein are of little use here because the music does not make use
of tonality. For instance, examining chromaticism, or the strange note or voice leading
61
cannot be used to reveal to the presence of the uncanny. However, a common sign of the
Freudian uncanny is obsessive compulsiveness, and it is on this sign that I will focus to
When we read “The Moonlit Night Dazzled Us” as a whole, the narrative of
repression intrudes from the beginning to the end. Because the texts of this fragment
cycle contain features of Freud’s concept of repression, the cycle functions as a narrative
of the uncanny. On the surface the ordering of the fragments seems random, yet the
fragments whose texts allude to distractions act as a double, a Freudian double. Thus, the
narrative is that of repression with the uncanny manifesting itself at various points,
culminating in the final fragment with a final terrible recognition of death that fully splits
the double. Secondly, the final fragment itself manifests the uncanny through text and
music. The moment of revelation in the final fragment implies a repression prior to the
easy to see how repression and the uncanny manifest themselves in an overall literary
narrative. It is important to interpret the literary narrative before making sense of the
music, as it is the text that can reveal what the music might mean. In addition, to make
sense of “The Moonlit Night Dazzled Us,” the textual narrative of the Freudian uncanny
can clarify why this final fragment needs to appear. I have separated my narrative into
four distinct parts based on Kurtág’s sections: Part I as “depictions of a mundane life,”
Part II as the “uncanny explicitly manifesting itself,” Part III as the “increasing
realization of one’s mortality,” and Part IV as the “ultimate destruction of the double.” I
will only discuss the texts of fragments that contribute to the uncanny and double, and I
62
will assume that the other fragments contribute to the theme of distraction arising from
double. While the ordering of the fragments’ texts do not make logical sense, the bizarre
ordering is fragmented by the double. We are not afraid of death; therefore, the double
has confidently asserted itself. We begin with the text of the first fragment. “The good
march in step. Unaware of them, the others dance around them the dances of time.”
death. “Like a Pathway” depicts a pathway in autumn, while “Hiding-places” deals with
elements of religion, specifically salvation. It is not until the sixth fragment of Part I
where one first notices the presence of the uncanny, suggesting an attempted overthrow
of the double. The text, “Nevermore, nevermore will you return to the cities, nevermore
will the great bell resound above you” can be read in several different ways. The
But did we choose to reject the chosen path of religion or is this a forced exile from urban
life? Because of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden with the fall of man, we are
existence focused on cities and on such profane gatherings as the Tower of Babel, where
one attempts to reclaim virtue beneath the bells of churches. In this context, city imagery
implies religion, while exile from the city evokes the return to paradise. By not “returning
to the cities,” we can also read the text as bearing an uncanny manifestation of a pastoral
of self away from the distractions of city life into a communion with nature. Here, the
63
removal of self is implied by the subtitle and the text of the fragment, but we are never
told what our destination is. We are exiled somewhere, but it is a forced exile rather than
one self-imposed for the purpose of experiencing nature. Thus, this fragment is the first
manifestation of the literary uncanny. Additionally, the music does not reflect traditional
pastoral topics and seems to deliberately oppose the text, creating oppositions on multiple
levels.
manifest itself, but, as in “Nevermore,” the uncanny is lurking in the background and not
explicitly stated. The text of Fragment 8, “Someone tugged at my clothes but I shrugged
death? If the double has repressed death, we are unaware of it when it appears. Thus, I
read “someone” as death tugging on our clothes, reminding us that it is always with us
lurking in the shadows. Before we can begin to speculate, the fragment is followed by a
repression of the prior manifestation of the uncanny by a scene of “The Seamstress in the
from everyday life. In Fragment 11, “Sunday, 19th July 1910,” it is evident that the
double has convinced us that our lives will go on forever by sleeping and awaking
(“Slept, woke, slept, woke, miserable life”). Most of the remaining fragments in Part I
continue with these themes until we reach Fragment 18: “The flower hung dreamily on its
tall stem. Dusk enveloped it.” It is obvious that this fragment depicts nature, but not in
the pastoral sense. Dusk inevitably leads to darkness, to sunset, and to death. It is a step
on the path that leads to realization. The flower is still lovely, as is dusk, yet night is
approaching.
64
Part II exemplifies the “uncanny explicitly manifesting itself” with a realization of
the double, but remains peculiar for many reasons. Firstly, it contains only one fragment,
titled “The True Path.” Obviously, the uncanny is present from the text of the fragment:
“The true path goes by way of a rope that is suspended not high up, but rather just above
the ground. Its purpose seems to be more to make one stumble than to be walked on.”
terrifying—in which we realize our own mortality. The music supports this literary
analysis with text painting and binary oppositions. The voice is nested within the
extremities of the notes of the violin except when we stumble upon the rope: at these
moments, the voice descends below the violin, and the violin evokes a wobbling
Part III begins the “increasing realization of one’s mortality.” Death is looming
and causes the texts to become progressively more morbid. From Fragment 1 in Part III,
“To have? To be?,” we are immediately met with a realization of death because we are
“longing for the last breath, for suffocation.” The second fragment, “Coitus as
Kurtág repeats two fragments in Part III, “Miserable Life” and “Hiding-Places.” While
the musical settings differ from their initial fragments, we cannot make sense of why they
repeat unless we read the work as a narrative of the Freudian uncanny and repression. In
this way, we can make sense of the repetition as a manifestation of the uncanny.
Finally, Part IV can be read as the “ultimate destruction of the double.” The first
two fragments of Part IV begin with a lament of love. It is the first time that any of the
fragments focus on this particular topic. The text of Fragment 3 reminds us we cannot
65
escape death, “Though the hounds are still in the courtyard, the game will not escape, no
matter how they race through the woods.” The double anticipates a confrontation with the
rustic ceremony of leopards breaking into a temple and drinking jugs dry: “Leopards
break into the temple and drink the sacrificial jugs dry; this is repeated, again and again,
until it is possible to calculate in advance when they will come, and it becomes part of the
Memoriam Joannis Pilinszky,” as well as with our final exile in “Again, Again.”
By the time we reach the “The Moonlit Night Dazzled Us,” we are overwhelmed
with the struggle between the double and ego, and we are simultaneously confused,
anxious, and dazed. The previous bursts of emotion have made us weary, and it is here
that the struggle between the ego and double commences textually and musically by way
of an epic battle. It is easy to see how the narrative of repression comes full circle in this
final fragment.
From the opening introduction of this final fragment, the music is surprisingly
serene and is marked dolce ([A]). Because the tempo is lento, the solo violin immediately
takes on a melodic role with a simple monophonic texture. The opening motive, E5-F♯5-
6th from F♯5 to D♯6, which centers the pitch material of the introduction around F♯5. As
the motive is played for the second time, the music begins to expand with continuous
ascents in intervals of thirds (C♯6-E♯6) and fourths (D♯6-G♯6). When the motive is played
the third time, the music becomes much more elaborate with increased rhythmic motion
and a great ascent in register from D7 to B7, while simultaneously decreasing the
66
dynamics to pppp. Much like the opening of Zoltán Kodály’s Summer Evening, which
features an unaccompanied English horn solo, the introductory material in the violin can
be read in terms of a Freudian narrative as the restoration of the double’s authority over
the ego. Here, for the first time in Part IV, the music is too pastoral for uncanny moments
to be present. At the same time, and to incorporate the accompanying text of the
fragment, the violin establishes the context of the piece by evoking a “moonlit night”
with its calm pastoral topic, which features many consonant intervals (thirds, fifths, and
sixths), typical of the nineteenth-century pastoral topic.14 As the violin attempts to play
the opening motive for the fourth time, it is suddenly interrupted by C5. The entrance of
this strange pitch causes the rhythmic propulsion of the introduction to hesitate (at [A1]).
The violin subsides by elongating the rhythm into three whole notes (the melody is C5-
G4-C♯4) and descends. In this fragment, centering the tonal center between G to C♯ is of
prime thematic importance. The stark rhythmic change (at [A1]) has little connection with
the prior serenity of the introduction. Due to this significant change in character, this
overthrow the double; the presence of the descending tritone (G4-C♯4) suggests that
something has obscured an otherwise perfect moonlit night, given its historical
association with the diabolic. Additionally, the tritone descent at [A1] concludes on C♯4,
and it is not until the soprano enters when the double can repress the ego once more by
14
See “From Topic to Premise and Mode” in Robert Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures:
Markedness, Topics, and Tropes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) for an extensive discussion
of the musical components indicating the nineteenth-century pastoral genre. Many of the musical signs he
discusses are present in this final fragment.
67
The Freudian double temporarily regains control over the ego (from [B] to [E])
and allows the pastoral topic to act as a repression of death. The soprano arrives with “the
moonlit night dazzled us” (at [B]) and immediately reinstates the pastoral topic by using
strong emphasis on intervals of thirds and sixths, and continued repetitions of upward
rising contour (<0 1 2 1>) taken from the violin’s opening motive. The violin continues
in the character of the introduction (at [B]) and clearly evokes a carefree evening in
nature, imbued with complex scales and repeated rhythmic patterns.15 The soprano
centers around G♯4, the same pitch that launched the first uncanny moment. The double
continues to repress our sense of mortality as the voice repeats ascents and descents of
similar contour from the motivic material of the opening four-note cell. As soon as the
soprano finishes uttering the opening text, a vocalized melisma begins (at [B1]) with a
whole-step descent of major thirds (from E♯5-D♯5-C♯5). The importance of the descent in
major-thirds allows the soprano to continue in the consonant pastoral topic as the violin’s
rhythmic figures become increasing more complex and disturbing. As the soprano
attempts to break free and restore the pastoral order, it descends from F♯5 to B♯4. This
motion causes the violin’s rhythmic complexity to briefly subside and allows the double
to repress the ego through an obsessive-compulsive fixation with the thematic material
via descent. However, another uncanny moment creeps in at [C]. As the soprano holds
the aforementioned B♯4, Kurtág re-notates the pitch as C5, and it immediately provokes
chilling connotations. One of the most commonly used signs to indicate the presence of
15
Hatten argues that “hypnotic reiterations of motivic and rhythmic figures” (59) are a sign of the
pastoral topic. Here, Kurtág evokes the same nineteenth-century semiotic codes using a highly complex
rhythmic structure (see violin part at [B]).
68
the musical uncanny is strange enharmonicism. Because the B♯ is tied to C and sung by a
vocalist, there is no apparent need for Kurtág to notate this pitch differently. Thus, this
brief moment, which is only apparent in the score, provides a clue to the performer of a
subtle uncanny moment. Before the note makes a lasting impact, the soprano continues
its ascending melisma by a perfect fifth (C5 to G5) and continues to descend by step, first
in thirds (G5 to E5, etc.) and then by fourths (E5 to B4 ). As the soprano gains momentum,
the violin continues to evoke an animated night in nature with alternating pizzicati and
acro bow strokes. As the melisma begins to subside, Kurtág marks the final notes of the
soprano has temporarily inwardly repressed the ego at the end of the long first phrase.
The second phrase (at [D]) quickly ushers in changes in topics and texture with
the arrival of the text, “birds shrieked in the trees.”16 This section clearly exemplifies the
continued successful repression of the ego by the double by continuing with a pastoral
topic. The violin changes its role and implies an animated nighttime scene in nature by
using contrasting harmonics with percussive bowing. The soprano takes on the shrieking
role of the birds with grace-note attacks in quick descents (frequently in fifths [G5 to C5
and F4 to C5]) punctuating the scene evoked by the violin. Most of the melodic content in
the soprano centers on C5. This section ends quickly, however, because Kurtág does not
repeat the text. “There was a rush in the fields” ([E]) continues with the same theme of
repression and surprisingly the mood does not change. The violin becomes obsessed with
small triplet figures in descents, but it is obvious that the double has repressed death. In
some ways, the rush of wind contributes to the loveliness of repressed horror.
16
The English postscript translation in the published score differs from a literal translation of the
text. A literal translation of the German would be “birds shrieked, birds shrieked from tree to tree.”
69
It is not until we reach the Lento, rubato (at [F]) that the struggle between the ego
and double begins. After a fermata, this section begins with the violin abruptly dropping
in register to G3, the lowest note possible on the violin, and beginning to elaborate a
fourth (from G3 to C4) by stepwise ascent in triplets through A3 and B3. Here, the violin
centers itself around G3 and C4. As the motive is played the second time, it becomes more
elaborated with the new pitches B3 and A♭3. As the motive repeats for the third time,
becomes so obsessed with the motive that Kurtág writes “ad lib.” with two repeat signs,
leaving it up to the performer to determine its duration. It is evident that the elaboration
of G3-C4, by way of a chromatic ascent and descent, portrays the couple crawling on the
ground (G3 ascending to C4, the ascent from B♭3àC♭4 followed by quick descent to
A3àA♭3). The voice arrives soon after with the text “we crawled through the dust” in a
traditional song-like manner. The entrance of the voice also shares the drop to the low
register with the violin as it begins on C4. Unlike earlier sections, the duration of the
soprano’s pitches become elongated and are juxtaposed against continuous thirty-second
and sixty-fourth notes that ascend in the violin. The pitch material of the soprano stays
70
Johann Sebastian Bach, Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Rust (Leipzig:
Breitkopf & Härtel, 1857), 7:378.
While the contour and chromaticism of the violin’s motive (at [F]) could clearly
be interpreted as portraying someone crawling on the ground, it also depicts another word
painting. Although the last part of text, “a pair of snakes,” does not arrive until [G3], [F]
is the first time, other than the uncanny moment found at [A1], that the pastoral topic
changes. But what is the music depicting? By simply looking at the music notation and
studying the contortions of the violin’s motive (at [F]), this passage bears a strong
resemblance to the bass aria, “Höllische Schlange, wird dir nicht bange,” from Johann
Sebastian Bach’s Cantata No. 40 (see the above example). Bach depicts the text “Serpent
benighted, art thou affrighted?” by using a twisting, curving, upward rising motive in the
first violins that continues to ascend with many sudden descents in pairs. Perhaps not a
71
coincidence, this so-called “serpent motive”17 and the melody both begin on the same
pitch (D4), yet the serpent motive weaves in and out of the melody. In Baroque music,
this motive is frequently depicted by “rocking gently back and forth” as the serpent hangs
“down from the tree before the woman…deluding her with its crafty speech.”18 Thus, this
motion is portrayed by its contour, which entwines around the melody. It is easy to see
how Kurtág clearly depicts the motive beginning at [F]. If the serpent motive arrives
before the text does, does it change our Freudian narrative of repression? The snakes
clearly enter (at [F]), yet the double cannot see them until it splits (at [N]). Thus, [F]
signifies the beginning of the struggle between double and ego, or between life and death.
If we read the ego, or snake, as the violin and the double as the voice, the struggle begins
with the double’s attempted repression of the ego. The violin’s drop in register, its
obsessive-compulsive nature, and its serpent motive eventually call forth the ghastly
Other than the uncanny nature of the serpent motive, the first uncanny musical
moment in this struggle occurs immediately prior to [G]. Just as the soprano utters the
text “we crawled” for the second time, the violin and the voice align and descend with a
quick chain of trills quasi glissando. However, as the descent occurs, the violin stops at
G3, its lowest note, as the voice continues to descend beneath the violin’s register to F♯3.
The double has temporarily overthrown the ego, but, as soon as the soprano attempts to
begin again with the elaborated fourth (G3-C4, see [G]), perhaps evoking a horn call, the
17
For a discussion of Bach’s use of the serpent motive, see Albert Schweitzer, J.S. Bach: Volume
II (London: A. & C. Black, 1935), 79.
18
Ibid., 79.
72
violin spins out of control by expanding chromatically and ascending in register. Here,
the violin moves not just by fourths, but also by tritones (see [G1]) and sevenths (see
[G2]). As the soprano utters the remaining text “through the dust,” the music and texture
By this point, we are no longer walking down the path as humans; rather, we are
creeping through the dust like sinister creatures. Metaphorically, this moment seems to
did something so lovely as the opening introduction become the terrible recognition of a
slithering snake? Throughout the entire work, reference to the city has represented the
prison cell. To go back to nature, to commune with our true selves, we go back to the
Garden of Eden, often evoked by rural places, in search of inspiration and escape. We can
return to what we perceive as perfect harmony, yet we can never completely escape the
horrors of this world. In “The Moonlit Night Dazzled Us,” even the most lovely pastoral
moment is ironic, underlying a sense of horror when confronting our sense of mortality.
When the second snake emerges at [H], it becomes clear that Kurtág still
emphasizes the perfect fourth by inverting the original fourth (at [F] from G3 to C4) to D4
to G4.20 Due to the constant parallel motion between the intervals in the violin, the snakes
are working in tandem with each other to overthrow the double. When the soprano enters
19
Of particular relevance is that the violin begins playing in double stops immediately prior to
[G3] where Kurtág depicts a second snake.
20
Martha Hyde discovered Kurtág’s use of ascending and descending fourths in other movements
of the Kafka Fragments. See Hyde, "Semiotics and Form: Reading Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments," in
Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 5, 193-94.
73
with the text “a pair of snakes” at [I], the realization of mortality is looming. Because the
soprano’s low range is encased by the double stops of the violin, the “pair of snakes,” the
soprano becomes hypnotized and falls into a trance resulting in hysteria. Similar to
Baroque serpent topics, the “snakes” in the violin alternate and slither above and below
the voice. The snakes provoke the ghastly harbinger of death. Here, the double realizes
that it can no longer suppress death and chaos ensues. Because the soprano, or double, is
so frightened from the realization of death, it relinquishes its text and falls back on its
through a complex vocalise. This demand for a reinstatement of the double acts as an
attempt to repress the realization of death. Kurtág evokes this struggle through alternating
solo sections between the two voices (see [J] and [L]), which begin a continuous rise in
dynamics and register. The snakes begin the overthrow of the double (at [J]), followed by
the double’s attempt to repress death with a solo (at [L]). The violin continues to ascend
in fourths, but rapidly expands to encompass other intervals as well. By the time the
register expands, we have successfully moved from the loveliness of the opening to the
approaches (see [M] and the prior system), the registers become higher and the dynamics
increase until we finally reach the apotheosis (at [N]). It is here that the double splits and
sees itself for what it really is – the ghastly harbinger of death. Because of this terrifying
recognition, the music has no other choice but to obliterate itself by descending back to
earth, back to the dust from which we came. This is accomplished by a great descent in
register in both the soprano and violin beginning at [N] and ending at [P]. Because the
double has split (at [N]), the soprano stops seconds later (at [O]) and does not return until
74
the violin, or the ego, has finished. It is not surprising that the violin’s chromatic descent
depicts snakes being banished from the trees in Genesis and ends on G3, the lowest note
As the soprano finally enters (at [P]) singing the same text as before, it is also at
the lowest extremity of its range (F♯3). It is evident that Kurtág deliberately chose to set
the text in this range because it musically depicts the fall of man. It is hardly surprising
that Kurtág set the final utterance of “dust” as the only spoken word throughout the last
fragment. For we are made of dust and to dust we shall return. If we recall the first
uncanny moment of the piece (at [A1]), the tritone descent from G4 to C♯4 evoked
demonic connotations. Here, on the text “a pair of snakes,” the same tritone is inverted
(C♯4–G3) connecting the uncanny event from the beginning to the end. This tritone
represents the acceptance of our mortality and likely portrays our death. The descent to
G3 represents us returning to the ground. The violin’s final phrase, the recapitulation of
the introduction (at [Q]), evokes a peaceful end to our lives and fades away as dust is
****
The foregoing analyses have shown the usefulness of musical narrative in music
composed after the nineteenth century, but the scarcity of writings in this field indicates
remember that no single narrative can fully interpret a piece; my analyses have shown
only one possible way to explain a piece's dramatic and disorienting moments, moments
75
that can frustrate conventional analytic approaches. By examining the presence of the
semiotic code for the uncanny in fragment forms, I suggest that the musical narrative of
repression can be present in music lacking tonality or coherent tonal allusions, just as it
was present in earlier fragment forms both in literature and music. One could plausibly
read other narratives for each of my three pieces, yet any adequate narrative would need
to interpret the significant and dramatic features on which I have focused. From a broader
perspective, it is my hope that this study will spur other scholars to explore further the
76
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