CLARKE 2011 Music Analysis

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2249.2011.00307.
david clarke
Between Hermeneutics and Formalism: the Lento from

Tippett’s Concerto for Orchestra (Or: Music Analysis after
Lawrence Kramer)
Prologue
1. A Double Discourse
Two discursive strands intertwine in this essay. First, I am drawn to analyse a
movement of a piece by English composer Michael Tippett (1905–98) illumi-
native of a distinctive moment in his oeuvre. To create a written text is not the
only possible response to whatever it is in a work that arouses our desire, but it
is surely one potentially pertinent channel for the dissemination of what music
means to us. But, second, I am also driven to consider just what kind of writing
is most productive in that process, given that assumptions about music and
meaning have of late become strongly contended. The opposing positions have
been well enough rehearsed (and if the following binarist characterisation risks
reification, this arguably also reflects part of what is problematic in the polemic).
In the one corner are advocates of music as an autonomous phenomenon that
therefore warrants the kind of analysis that addresses the immanence of a
musical work – its status as (in Roman Ingarden’s terms) an intentional object.1
Facing them are proponents of music as (in Lawrence Kramer’s words) ‘mean-
ingfully engaged with language, imagery, and the wider world’, and thus calling
for a more interpretative style of investigation which privileges the human subject
– understood as an ‘agency [that] arises, not as a radiation from a central core of
being, but as a circulation among positions to be taken in discourse and society’.2
There is a degree of contingency in my juxtaposition of these two strands. My
plural analytical takes on the second movement (Lento) from Tippett’s Concerto
for Orchestra (1962–3) are offered as a contribution to Tippett scholarship and
to discourse about the languages of post-tonal music more generally. And my
critical encounter with Lawrence Kramer’s hermeneutic project (developed
especially in the closing, ‘theoria’ section of this commentary) aspires to further
debate around music and meaning that his work has done much to stimulate.
This double enquiry could have been rendered as two separate studies (and
pragmatists might yet choose to direct their focus in what follows towards areas
closest to their individual concerns). But my intention is that the musical
analyses should benefit from a certain reflexivity on their epistemological under-
pinnings and that the epistemological enquiry should gain from an analytical
Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) 309

© 2011 The Author.
Music Analysis © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
310 david clarke
case study, from both formalist and hermeneutic perspectives. This convergence
is appropriate not least because Tippett was the kind of composer who both
strained to achieve an aesthetic of musical autonomy (evidenced in his career-
long, maybe even oedipal, engagement with the Beethovenian sonata principle)
and also had a concern for the social that spilled beyond his operas and choral
works with a textual ‘message’ into his ‘purely’ instrumental works.
2. Championing Hermeneutics (Kramer), Defending Formalism (Puffett)

Just as I take a work by Tippett as the musical focus of this account, so I consider
the writings of Kramer as paradigmatic of a resurgence of hermeneutics within
musicology since the late 1980s and 1990s. I need to qualify this claim with a few
caveats. First, the new avatars of culturally and critically orientated musicology
that have emerged since that time are not readily described under a single
umbrella, and they are certainly not reducible to what has become known as the
New Musicology. Second, this last grouping itself seems to have a mutable
membership, depending on who’s talking. And, third, it would be remiss to
construe its imperatives as coterminous with hermeneutics. Yet for all these
qualifiers, it would not be a complete distortion to claim the following: first, that
the New Musicology is a distinctive and identifiable tendency (by now recogn-
isable as itself historically, culturally and geographically contingent) that has
loomed large in recent musicological debate – productively so in many cases, but
arguably also to the point where it in turn risks a hegemonic foreclosure of
discourses it regards as hegemonic (among them analytical formalism); second,
that Kramer has identified, if not so much with the term ‘New Musicology’ itself
(he has lately come to favour ‘cultural musicology’),3 then with various of the
exponents associated with it;4 and, third, that the New Musicology’s ethos, while
not exclusively hermeneutic, nonetheless inheres in textual acts that – in their
mission to foreground the significance of culture and society, subjectivity and
identity, gender and sexuality – are of their essence interpretative.
I choose Kramer, then, partly because he is exemplary; but also because I am
impelled to explore an ambivalence engendered by deep structural ambiguities I
detect within his work. On the one hand, I would join with numerous others in
admiration of his erudition, his sheer virtuosity in mobilising cultural meanings
around musical works. I am fully behind the spirit of his mission of ‘widen-
ing ... the possibilities of acceptable discourse on music’.5 And I agree whole-
heartedly with him that music’s significance cannot be divorced from linguistic
mediations (of which musicology is but one) and other cultural discourses and
formations. Indeed I recognise a convergence between tendencies in my own
writings on Tippett6 (including the account below) and strategies in Kramer’s
substantial corpus of essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western clas-
sical music – in that both employ multi-modal discourses that mix technical
discussion of musical material with social and cultural interpretation.Yet, on the
other hand, I sense significant differences in the background of our standpoints
© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Music Analysis © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Between Hermeneutics and Formalism 311
that are perhaps as symptomatic of the situation across the larger musicological
field as they are of different biographical and cultural contingencies.Whereas my
own predispositions and prejudices are founded on a conception of music as a
practice in its own right (whatever else it may be) and on a critical framework still
sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, Kramer’s seem to be based on a notion of
music much more immediately related to letters, and on an idiosyncratic amalgam
of postmodern and liberal-pragmatist approaches. If one had to put it in a nutshell,
I would hazard speculating as follows: that the ambivalences and ambiguities of
Kramer’s approach inhere in an attenuated (rather than dialectical) relationship
with the idea of truth.
I will save discussion of these larger theoretical concerns until my closing
ruminations. For now let us begin with one of the more particular challenges
Kramer presents to music analysts, who are likely to part company with him as
they follow the trajectory of an assertion like the following:
Without ascriptions of meaning, formal and analytical knowledge is inert, unac-

tualised, imperceptible. This is not to create a hierarchy of meaning over form;
without form, meaning is at best a hunch, at worst sheer vapourising. Both terms
are necessary, and one can start the process of understanding anywhere from
within either. But there are consequences to this alliance, and they do diminish
the cognitive power and authority traditionally claimed by analysis. Although the
loop between them is or should be continuous, in the last instance analysis is the
means and meaning the end.7
There is an all too apparent instability in Kramer’s position here, which starts out
with a seemingly even-handed desire to privilege neither form nor meaning, but
moves on pretty quickly to talk of diminishing the influence of analytical enquiry.
Perhaps he wants only to balance the two: to ensure that analysis is accorded no
more (rather than simply less) cognitive pertinence than hermeneutics. But,‘in the
last instance’, the role of analysis is as a servant for the facilitation of worldly
meanings. My issue, then, is not with Kramer’s embrace of hermeneutics, but with
his equivocation (not exactly antagonism) towards formalist analysis. It is not that
he avoids analysis: usually some form of immanent discussion of musical material
is present in his exegeses, often (though not always) based on informal method-
ologies (a kind of Analysis Lite).8 But, as I will later argue, he equivocates over the
full significance of the formalism on which his interpretations rely; and with this
goes a repression of certain truths about the ontology of a particular kind of music
that he, and I, and others care about.
The key question here is the status accorded to ‘meaning’ in relation to music.
On the face of it, Kramer abjures any notion of inherently musical meaning – in his
parlance, the ‘semiotic’.9 He is sceptical, for example, towards Charles Seeger’s
idea of ‘music knowledge of music’ (as opposed to ‘speech knowledge of music’).10
For Kramer, meaning in music is that which can be rendered linguistically: music
performs a semantics; its acts of meaning can be made legible through textual
‘constructive descriptions’ of cultural tropes circulating contemporaneously.11
Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

312 david clarke
Perhaps his most provocative challenge to those of a formalist persuasion is to

collapse the distinction between the inherent and the contextual: it is not just that
‘works of music have discursive meanings’; more trenchantly, ‘these meanings are
not “extramusical”, but on the contrary are inextricably bound up with the formal
process and stylistic articulations of musical works’.12
Unsurprisingly, deconstructive manoeuvres such as these have drawn polemic
from both sides of the binary divide they threaten to collapse. If the now famous
debate between Kramer and Gary Tomlinson most graphically illustrates the
response from music historiography,13 Kofi Agawu has offered one of the most
sustained counter-critiques from the analysts’ side, with not only Kramer but also
the New Musicology more generally in his sights.14 And while Susan McClary
more than Kramer has been the target of Pieter C. Van den Toorn’s gloves-off
counter-attacks against the New Musicology, this may nonetheless also be read as
another example of robust resistance to what has been perceived as an anti-
autonomist, anti-formalist stance.15 The title of Van den Toorn’s monograph,
Music, Politics, and the Academy, reveals an important contextual dimension – the
power struggles of institutional politics – just as the word repressed from it, the
[American] Academy, points to a local dimension to the problem and to a certain
insularity (with a tendency for US scholars to reference exclusively other US
scholars in their debates).16 If recognising the contingencies of American aca-
demic politics helps pre-empt a hegemonic projection of its particular sub-
disciplinary polarisations onto the international musicological stage (and thus
mitigate the tendency to turn a local difficulty into a global one), this might also
help us respond to the insights of dissident musicological interventions with less
institutional panic. It may not be coincidental that within the UK, where musi-
cology is practised on a less industrial scale and under a (somewhat) less
corporatist culture,17 responses to these debates have seemed less hothoused but
no less acute in their deliberations. Indicative is Alan Street’s 1992 review in this
journal of Kramer’s Music as Cultural Practice, which both takes the author to task
for his pragmatic conflation of empiricism and deconstructionism, and lauds him
for ‘insights [that] are genuinely revelatory’, while concluding that ‘it is really too
early to say’ whether his approaches reveal literary theory to hold prospects for
music analysis.18 And Giles Hooper’s monograph, The Discourse of Musicology,
offers a measured, carefully argued critique of the epistemological principles of
recent musicological trends, among them the New Musicology, and Kramer in
particular.19
A more problematised ambivalence is audible in the authorial voice of another
UK scholar: the late Derrick Puffett. Puffett is apposite to both strands of my
account. As one-time editor of Music Analysis, he wrote spiritedly ‘In Defence of
Formalism’ in an editorial that sketched out a neither ungenerous nor ungrudg-
ing appreciation of the New Musicology (and more particularly of Carolyn
Abbate’s Unsung Voices).20 But another motive was to assert a continuing need
for analysis ‘to maintain its own internal logic, its aims and its sense of purpose
– which may be described as formalist aims and purposes, in the best sense of the

word’.21 In this sense, then, he sits in the background of my essay as a counter-

vailing presence to that of Kramer. Additionally, Puffett contributed to this
journal one of the few published analyses of an entire Tippett movement – also
a slow movement, as it happens: that of the Second String Quartet. Furthermore,
he wrote a pugnacious critique of Tippett’s later output on the occasion of the
composer’s 90th birthday.22 What all three articles demonstrate is that for Puffett
certain ways of composing and writing about music seemed to represent an
unquestionable value system (others might see this as an ideology), one worth
upholding, and indeed able to be upheld because it possessed an integrity that
could not be dislodged by other modes of composing and criticism. What
preoccupied him in the fugue from Tippett’s Second String Quartet was the
extent to which many individual instances of local harmonic coherence could be
integrated into an account of long-range tonal structure, in the manner of a
multi-level Schenkerian voice-leading analysis. If this represents a formalist
analysis par excellence, it also remains scrupulously honest in refusing to offer
specious resolution of those elements that resist integration into any would-be
unifying whole. Puffett declares that ‘the very inconclusiveness of the analysis is
its best achievement. An analysis laid out in a set of graphs which can be
challenged, corroborated or simply thrown away shows us the exact nature of
Tippett’s tonal language, in that it demonstrates, through its failure as much as
through its success, the extent to which that language is tonal and the manner in
which it is so’.23 While Puffett’s achievement in such analytical work had as its
downside a grumpy imperviousness to musical and academic thought outside his
own ideological space, it nonetheless represents a benchmark of its kind, which
I have endeavoured to observe in my analysis, below, of the later Tippett slow
movement.
But it is also the tension between the epistemologies epitomised by Kramer
and Puffett that I want to explore.This will play out in another kind of doubling:
two analytical parses of the Concerto for Orchestra’s Lento – one hermeneutic,
the other formalist – that form the heart of my account. This yields two large
divisions, Analyses I and II, followed by a concluding contemplation, or ‘theoria’,
on the relationship between hermeneutics and formalism (by way of a critique of
Kramer’s anti-foundationalism), and on what might lie between or beyond them.
Notwithstanding the different tenors of the two analytical sections, I have admit-
ted a degree of permeability between them, so that Analysis I, substantially
hermeneutically orientated at the outset, becomes increasingly formalist; while
Analysis II, predominantly formalist, does not eschew contextual and wider
philosophical reflection. But – to pick up the preceding discussion of Kramer –
even my more hermeneutically inclined analysis operates on premises other than
the assumption that ‘language and imagery, description and depiction’ can be
‘precipitated’ from music, or that music in some unspecified way ‘transcribes
[its] contextual forces’.24 Beautiful as these conceits may be, they could be read
as implying that meaning is a matter of sublimation, the product of an unprob-
lematic passage from work to world – a position arguably resonant with Kramer’s

314 david clarke
assertion in his earlier writings that musical works ‘have discursive meanings’, or
can be treated as if ontologically cognate with literature.25 We know, of course,
not least from his subsequent developments of these arguments, that Kramer
himself is sceptical of notions of immediacy, so my issue with him is less about
the need for some element of mediation per se between the work itself and the
worldly meanings inferred from it, than about the nature, scope and structure of
any mediating framework. Related to this is the question of how interpretations
are to be validated. The deliberately anti-systematic nature of Kramer’s pro-
gramme would seem to preclude any formal protocol for validation – beyond
some elusive criterion of textual persuasiveness. While rhetoric remains an irre-
ducible dimension of all textual practices (as the deconstructive movement has
shown), hermeneutic acts require some stabilisation of meaning, however pro-
visional, and my own instinct here is to undertake this on terms as much
attributable to the work and its creator as to the interpreter him- or herself. To
this end, I seek in the account below to ground my interpretations on a continuum
of mediations that straddles all of these terms. There will of course be breakages
in the links of the chain, leaps from one kind of evidence to another, and
remainders of musical material that are hermeneutically resistant. These are
conditions that Kramer himself acknowledges, but, again, my inclination is to
draw somewhat different inferences as to what this means for musical meaning.
I will develop these arguments later, but, without losing sight of them, let me now
bring Tippett’s music into the foreground, and embark on the first of my
analytical parses.
Analysis I: Hermeneutics Ascendant

3. The Discursive World of Tippett’s Concerto for Orchestra:
King Priam and Other Intertexts
To date most commentary on Tippett’s Concerto for Orchestra has privileged
the first of its three movements – unsurprisingly, given its radical formal con-
struction, an Ivesian kaleidoscope that juxtaposes and superimposes nine inde-
pendent streams of music in ever-changing permutations.26 Both here and in the
immediately preceding Sonata No. 2 for Piano (1962), the approach can be seen
as an exploration in instrumental terms of the structural and aesthetic implica-
tions of the brave new stylistic world of Tippett’s second opera, King Priam
(1958–61). The Concerto’s second, slow movement is no less deserving of
critical attention, however. Because here Tippett is less explicitly concerned with
formal experimentation (innovation being sustained on more subtle levels), he
allows his materials fuller development, in what for him are ultimately perhaps
more aesthetically congenial terms; this factor among others signals the move-
ment as meriting analytical scrutiny. Furthermore, if the more overtly innovative
first movement foregrounds a schismatic moment in Tippett’s output dating
from around the early 1960s, the second suggests complementary aesthetic
continuities over a longer period. Indeed it takes its place in a great series of

orchestral slow movements – beginning with the Concerto for Double String
Orchestra (1938–9), extending through the symphonies and Triple Concerto
(1978–9) and culminating in The Rose Lake (1991–3) – that translate the huma-
nising power of song into the language of instrumental music.These observations
suggest, first, a more complicated story about Tippett’s oeuvre than is usually
told, one involving a counterpoint of ruptures and continuities, and, second, that
an oeuvre might represent an important mediating field (one only occasionally
explored by Kramer) through which a work might be opened up to various kinds
of interpretation.
For example, an oeuvre could be regarded as a field where history leaves its
traces, although we should hesitate to assume a direct homology between the
different kinds of history it embodies. An oeuvre’s evolution might result from an
historical dialectic within its own material – that is, the emergence of a new style
period as the negation of an earlier one whose expressive resources have reached
their limits. That Tippett never explicitly invoked such an Hegelian or Adornian
conceit does not mean that the process it signifies is not discernible in the
dynamics of his output. The dualism he sets up in his own commentaries
between ‘historical’ and ‘notional archetypes’ in music is arguably an informal
version of just such a theory of musical material – one that treats paradigm shifts
in, for example, the treatment of genres and handling of the orchestra, as purely
compositional concerns.27 While it would nonetheless seem perverse to see such
stylistic and aesthetic changes as entirely unconnected with a composer’s atti-
tude to contemporary social and historical vicissitudes – especially in a composer
as sensitive as Tippett to such matters – it would be crude to impute any directly
causal relationship between political climate and creative production. Even in A
Child of Our Time (1939–41) Tippett was concerned to do more than simply
‘reflect’ the times; the work is a complex intertextual amalgam of personal, social
and historical consciousnesses, a multidimensional virtual world with a mutable
relationship to the empirical, itself ever changing, ‘wider world’.28
If the Concerto for Orchestra belongs to the same historical moment in
Tippett’s oeuvre as King Priam, and if we want to treat the (conceptual) musico-
dramatic content of the latter work as a mediating ‘hermeneutic window’ onto
the former,29 we will still need to locate a further series of mediating texts
through which to read the opera itself. My hypothesis is that the soundscapes of
both Concerto and stage work (and of other works from the same period) make
audible the political climate of the Cold War, for which the struggle between the
Greeks and Trojans enacted in King Priam (in a story developed from Homer’s
Iliad) might be a metaphor. What, then, are possible sources of mediation
supporting such a hypothesis?
One takes the form of the affective correlates of the musical material. The
adoption in King Priam of sparse, often brittle textures – unprecedented in
Tippett’s oeuvre (at least in this magnitude); the harsher post-tonal soundworld;
the alienation of the protagonists as they sing from their own distinctive enve-
lopes of sound that never merge with one another: these conditions might be

316 david clarke
heard as expressing the tension of the era.To get beyond ‘might be’, we need turn
next to the composer’s own essays and writings of the period as further sources
of mediation. References to Sputnik and the plight of Poland in his radio talk
‘Too Many Choices’, broadcast in 1958, suggest a sensitivity to iconic political
events of the day and the anxiety that they provoked in the West.30
Significantly, these references to specific world events are in the context of
Tippett’s speculations on the nature of historical time: on the historical subject’s
experience of time as linear or cyclic, or as both or neither of these. Another
mediating link in the discursive chain (located through a little positivistic archival
activity) helps clinch the connection back to King Priam. In a letter probably
dating from October 1958, Tippett enquires after Joseph Campbell’s book Man
and Time. We now know that an essay by Gilles Quispel in this volume was
decisive in shaping the eventual composition of Tippett’s oratorio The Vision of
Saint Augustine (1963–5 – still some years down the line at this point), another
meditation on the individual subject’s relation to time. But in the letter itself,
Tippett’s concern is his work in progress, King Priam; and he there describes his
eponymous protagonist as ‘shot through with some other sense of the timeless in
time’.31 What all of this suggests is that Quispel’s account of the eschatological
significance of time and history for Saint Augustine took on a decidedly secular
resonance for Tippett, at a period in the Cold War (epitomised by the Cuban
missile crisis) when the end of history had begun to look like something more
material than theological speculation. And it was through his operatic creation
Priam, the Trojan king, that Tippett first explored what this prospect might mean
for the individual subject caught up in the processes of history. Hence tragedy,
the ancient Greek genre which Tippett sought to recreate in the opera, becomes
more than a set of conventions for neoclassical appropriation. It represents both
an aesthetic tone germane to the Cold War era and a ‘world vision’32 or philoso-
phy of life that is not unrelated to the post-metaphysical world of the later
Nietzsche, in which some concept of the human (or post-human) can still be
affirmed against a disenchanted universe.
4. The Concerto’s Slow Movement and Priam’s Women

Tippett’s emerging penchant for self-quotation in this period further invites us to
consider King Priam, with its tragic Cold War ethos, as a hermeneutic intertext for
the Concerto for Orchestra. Sometimes this is simply a matter of explicit quotation
by the Concerto of short motives from the opera, which go their own way in their
new context (compare, for example, the trombone motive at rehearsal number
455 in King Priam, and rehearsal number 20 in the first movement of the
Concerto). Sometimes it is a case of more extensive (and expedient) quotation, as
when the Concerto’s third movement lifts entire passages, vocal lines and all, from
the men’s Act II battle scene – a kind of operatic dumbshow (compare, for
example, King Priam, rehearsal numbers 226–230 and 292–300, with the Con-
certo for Orchestra, rehearsal numbers 113–117 and 123–131).33 Elsewhere, and

more meaningfully, the Concerto evokes rather than directly quotes the opera’s
materials.The second movement falls within this last category. Scored exclusively
for strings (including piano and harp), the Lento, like the opera, divides up the
orchestral string body, so that each section functions as a solo group (an example
of Tippett’s refashioning of the ‘historical archetype’ of the orchestra into a new
‘notional archetype’).34 After a short introduction dominated by double basses,
the melodic limelight is successively occupied by cellos, violas and violins –
respectively at rehearsal numbers 70, 84 and 87 – to create an A–B–C structure,
as represented in the formal schematic of Fig. 1a, which accounts for roughly the
first two-thirds of the movement (as this diagram implies, the details are a little
more complex, but these will be elaborated as the analyses unfold). In King Priam
each of these instrument groups partners one of the three main female characters:
violins with Hecuba (wife of King Priam); cellos and double basses with Andro-
mache (wife of Hector, Priam’s eldest son); and violas with Helen (wife adulter-
ously won by Paris, Priam’s second son).35 Act III, Scene I is theirs. In this, the only
time the women appear together, they work through their anxieties and animosi-
ties.The fact that their music is related but not identical to that of the Concerto’s
slow movement both signals this scene as hermeneutically pertinent to the
instrumental piece and cautions us not to read the content of the former too
literally into the latter.
Tippett’s earlier instrumental oeuvre offers another, this time counterfactual,
interpretant for what has happened to the strings in King Priam. For, as a general
rule, the homogeneous string body had been his archetype of the lyrical, and of
its corresponding humanist aesthetic. Consider, for example, the Fantasia Con-
certante on a Theme of Corelli (1953) for string orchestra, which carries forward
the affirmative expressive possibilities of Tippett’s first opera, The Midsummer
Marriage (1945–52). Here we find an exuberant excess in the accumulative
bravura of the eight-part fugue (especially after rehearsal number 67), and the
rhapsodic lyricism of the alla pastorale (rehearsal number 79 and following). So,
this prompts the hermeneutically informative question, What is signified by the
tendency to dismantle such a world in Priam’s tragic universe?
The cello soliloquy that opens Act III says it all (Ex. 1) – through both the
loneliness of its locution and its post-tonal soundworld. It conveys the tense
mental state of Andromache as she awaits the return of her husband, Hector,
from battle – vainly, as she unconsciously knows, and as the bleak melodic
outline imparts. The relative euphony of the implied set of perfect fourths
(C–F–B–(E)–A–D) in bars 1–2 offers scant mitigation of the initial dissonant
polarity between C and D (the quasi-chordal motive, a), of the anti-consonant
[0, 1, 6] cells at rehearsal numbers 341 and 342-1, or of the tight knot of
unordered chromaticism in the latter part of each of the opening two phrases.
This chromaticism is encapsulated in the running motive, b, and extends through
the third phrase (rehearsal number 342 and following), as the still unaccompa-
nied cello line rises tensely to a register more normatively that of a violin (or
viola), drops through a despairing glissando (motive c) and returns to the higher

Fig. 1 Michael Tippett, Concerto for Orchestra, Lento: (a) formal schematic; (b) registral distribution
318
(a) Intro. A B C A / C1 B…
Aria 1 Aria 2 Aria 1 Aria 2

arioso
arioso
arioso
arioso
arioso
arioso
© 2011 The Author.

Vn Vn
harm.
Vla
Vlc. solo
Vlc.
Cb.
Fig.: 69 70 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106
Intro. A B C A / C1 B…

(b)
C7
C6
david clarke
C5
C4
C3
C2
Fig.: 69 70 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106
Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Ex. 1 Tippett, King Priam: opening of Act III
Allegretto–andante ( = c. 69)
4ths: {C, F, B , [E ], A , D } chrom.: {A, B , B , C, C , D, E }
[0,1,6] appass.
Vlc. 341
a
[0,1,6]
chrom.: {F , G, A , A , [B ], B , C, C , D}
espress. (ten.)
cresc. ( )
a
b
(Curtain)
342 (Andromache alone on the stage) b a tempo
non troppo presto c b
b b
gliss.
dolce non troppo

non troppo
dolce
register. Similar melancholia haunts a similar cello soliloquy, which I term the
arioso passage, first heard after the opening of the Concerto slow movement
(rehearsal number 70; see Ex. 2), and destined to recur, unconsoled against the
varying moods that recontextualise it (or that it recontextualises).36 Although its
melody has the harmonic support of divided violas, double basses and piano (see
Ex. 5b, below) rather than being monodic, and although it starts out differently
from its Priam counterpart (with a roulade-building rumination around the
pitches G, A and B – motives d and e in Ex. 2), its subsequent salient features
likewise include a chromatic run into a violin-like register (motive b), a descend-
ing glissando through a minor ninth or augmented octave (motive c) and (albeit
differently manifested) the set class [0, 1, 6].
From this point of close contact between the two works the Concerto starts to
move along a different but related path. This is partly a necessary adjustment to
the new, purely instrumental context: the morphology of the materials follows an
immanent rationale, since there is now no explicit dramaturgy to shape larger-
scale events, nor any text around which to mould the immediate musical
sequence.Yet when arioso turns into aria at rehearsal number 72 – the solo cellist
joined by the entire cello section, the harmonic stasis of the preceding accom-
panying voices now animated (Ex. 3) – we are once again prompted to descry
meanings (in Kramer’s ‘worldly’, linguistic sense) in these unfolding formal
structures. For here we seem to have in instrumental terms the aria in which
Andromache would have lyricised her tragic plight, had Tippett not purged his

320 david clarke
Ex. 2 Tippett, Concerto for Orchestra, Lento, Section A: ‘arioso’ for solo cello
Lento ( = 48) e
70 d
i i i
Vlc. solo
poco
espr.
71 [0,1,6]
b c
gli
ss .
molto
b b c 72
gliss.
non troppo
molto
opera of such possibilities in the name of Brechtian dramatic parsimony.37 But

this amounts to more than simply permitting greater expressive breathing space,
since what follows this instrumental aria (Sections B and C) are yet further
responses to the lyrical impulse that become successively less tragically toned.
Might we therefore conjecture whether the Concerto’s ‘rewriting’ of the Trojan
women’s scene offers a more redemptive scenario than that offered by the opera?
Let us pursue the comparison further.
Bluntly put, the operatic scene involves a stand-off between the three female
protagonists. Andromache and Hecuba assail one another over the relative
priorities of love for a husband and duty to Troy, while Helen, singing a sublimely
aloof paean to erotic love, draws the opprobrium of both. The frenetic, nearly
hysterical solo violin line that accompanies Hecuba (at, for example, rehearsal
number 356) contrasts with Helen’s lush entourage of violas, harp and piano (for
example, rehearsal number 376); but if Helen receives more sumptuous instru-
mental treatment than her mother- or sister-in-law, she sings from a position of
no lesser isolation. Just as the strings no longer constitute a unified resonant
ensemble, so the characters they are associated with disavow their family ties.
And this resistance to integration is upheld even when all three women sing
together at the end of the scene (rehearsal numbers 394–408). This is an
ensemble of sorts, but the vocal and instrumental lines are carefully contrived so
as not to merge. The women display a certain affinity as they contemplate their

Ex. 3 Tippett, Concerto for Orchestra, Lento, Section A: ‘Aria 1’, phrase by phrase
a1 74
e1
Vlc. i ii ii iii
appass. intenso
i i i
Vla iv
Cb.
[+Pf.]
con forza marc. sonoroso
a2 75
[]
a3 76
[]
sempre
con forza
a4 77
fate – the death of their husbands, the fall of Troy – but no solidarity or mutual
compassion. The alienation of the individual would seem to be one of the points
about the wider world (or society) embedded in the opera’s principles of form
and structure.
The Concerto’s cello aria (Section A of the Lento) is congruent with this world.
After reaching its emotive registral peak (rehearsal number 75; see again Ex. 3), it
gradually works its way down to the bottom of the cellos’ register (rehearsal
numbers 83–84, not quoted), plumbing the depths of despondency. But then,
departing from the tragic course of the opera, which finds at best equivocal
redemption (and this in otherworldly terms), the next two sections of the Lento
work their way forward in a more worldly and affirmative metamorphosis.The first

322 david clarke
of these (Section B, beginning at rehearsal number 84), whose opening is quoted

in Ex. 5h below, draws on Helen’s soundworld: its extended viola melody,
amplified by piano, bobs on the surface of fluid triplet figuration for harp, blended
and blurred by sustained cellos divided a 3 (not quoted). But while the overall
texture retains something of the sensuality of Helen’s music, it abjures the latter’s
feisty intensity (as I will discuss below, it also has properties of Hermes’ apostro-
phe to music from Priam’s penultimate scene): its role here is to assuage, to effect
a journey up to the light through an unhurried registral ascent. Formally, this
means the passage is transitional, although this function is arguably discerned only
retrospectively, once we reach the onset of the next section, which turns out to have
been the goal all along. In Section C (rehearsal number 87 and following) an
extended, ever ascending duet for violins (accompanied by violas, also divided a 2)
takes centre stage (Ex. 4). The general affect perpetuates the gentleness of its
forebear while enlivening it into something more overtly goal directed. The
difference between the illocution of this music and that of Hecuba’s violin
figuration in King Priam could hardly be greater. If anything, the soundworld is
closer to that of the final stages of Helen’s arioso (compare rehearsal number 385
and following of the latter), but calmed, embodying principles of Apollonian
lucency rather than Dionysian delirium. Indeed, by the closing stages of Section C
Tippett seems to have reconnected with the affirmative, exuberant string writing
of the Fantasia Concertante: in particular, the texture and singing intensity capture
the vein of the latter’s andante espressivo section (rehearsal numbers 39–46); and
the cascading runs at the top of the violin register at rehearsal numbers 91–94 of
the Concerto are reminiscent of the approach to the climax (around rehearsal
numbers 72–75) of the Fantasia Concertante’s fugue.
5. Orpheus Rising
If the Concerto’s reworking of King Priam’s soundworlds is meant to imply more
positive possibilities of human becoming, the persuasiveness of this message
depends not only on the connotative and associative aspects of the musical
material, but also on its own embodiment of becoming as an immanent prin-
ciple: that is, on its large-scale syntagmatic (sequential) coherence. A key con-
tribution to such a condition is made by the process of large-scale registral
traversal, which already by the time of Tippett’s Second Symphony (1956–7)
had become a structural trope, and an important device for linear synthesis. The
most graphic (though not the only) example in the Symphony is in the penul-
timate section of its Fantasia-Finale, formed by a gigantic melodic descent, from
soaring heights to chthonic depths, coursing through the entire string body as if
it were a single super-instrument. In similar vein, the cello aria in Section A of the
Concerto’s slow movement makes a large-scale descent (as already noted), and
this is followed by the opposite trajectory across Sections B and C. This process
is plotted in Fig. 1b, which elaborates the schematic formal representation of
part (a) by blocking out the registral span of each subsection (with different

Ex. 4 Tippett, Concerto for Orchestra, Lento, Section C
87
Vns, divisi k
( )
leggiero dolciss. cantabile ( )

Vlas, divisi
l
88 k
( )
( ) ( )
m
( ) [ ]
l
89
poco ( ) ( ) ( )
( ) ( )
90 ( )
( )
non troppo cresc.

324 david clarke
Ex. 4 Continued
91
non troppo cresc.
92
con più forza più
93
( ) ( )
non troppo assai

( ) ( )
( )
più

shading for each instrumental group and type of music). As this makes clear,
Sections A–C trace out a long-range contour that reveals register to be something
more than the incidental coordinates of other processes: it becomes a synthesis-
ing determinant of the musical background.
But we should not be indifferent either to the hermeneutic suggestiveness of
this formal process, for, as Kramer reminds us, structural tropes like this ‘are the
most implicit and ultimately the most powerful of hermeneutic windows’.38 The
passage to the depths and back to the light: of the numerous myths in Western
culture based on this notion, perhaps none is more celebrated (and more relevant
to musicians) than that of Orpheus. Perhaps it was the case that Tippett already
was thinking of the Orphic legend several decades before he would quote in
The Mask of Time (1980–2) lines from Rilke’s Duino Elegies that read: ‘Who
alone already lifted / the lyre among the dead / dare, divining sound / the infinite
praise.’ This is also Priam’s journey: to the depths of his soul, to the point where
he loses everything, and then rising to some metaphorical space where he finally
understands his tragic situation and can confront his fate with dignity.39 Signifi-
cantly, at the turning point in the opera, which corresponds to the moment of
peripeteia in Aristotle’s account of tragedy,40 Priam’s progress is depicted meta-
phorically in an orchestral interlude (rehearsal numbers 493–499), which is
framed out as a registral ascent spanning six octaves, from D1 in the double
basses to C7 in the violins.41
We could plausibly further extend this Orphic reading to the Concerto, again
via King Priam, not least since the passage where the Concerto’s slow movement
begins to ascend from the depths (Section B) also evokes the orchestral texture
of Hermes’ ‘Hymn to Music’ from the opera’s final interlude (rehearsal numbers
544–554). The connection is implied by quasi-arpeggiated triplets commonly
played by the harp in both, which instrument might stand metaphorically for the
lyre and therefore also metonymically for both Orpheus and Hermes (the former
the instrument’s most famous exponent, the latter its mythological inventor).
The two characters are also metonymically connected by dint of the fact that in
some versions of the myth it is Hermes who accompanies Orpheus to the
underworld,42 a task he also by analogy performs for Priam at this near-final
stage of the opera. The liquid triplet figuration is as much an image of (in the
words of Tippett’s Hermes) a ‘stream of sound / In which the states of soul /
Flow’ in the Concerto movement as it is in King Priam. And equally appropriate
is the association with Hermes’ injunction: ‘O divine music. Melt our hearts.
Renew our love.’ But there is also an important contextual difference.Whereas in
the opera the lifting of the lyre against the surrounding darkness is followed
dramatically by the calamitous reality of the fall of Troy, in the slow movement
this redemptive possibility is extended in the ensuing lyrical violin and viola
music of Section C (see again Ex. 4), with its allusions, already mentioned, to
Helen’s paean to love. In other words, what in the opera is envisioned from the
standpoint of another world, suspended between the events of the ‘real’ drama-
turgical world, is in the Concerto sewn into the same discursive world as the

326 david clarke
music of the depths – is heard to emerge from it, and to ‘stalk on’ still further into
the light; it is thus represented as imaginable on the same worldly plane.
6. Formalism Rising
A further formalist tendency of the musical structure adds to this emerging
hermeneutic reading of the slow movement as the bearer of a potentially affirma-
tive message. Again King Priam acts as a Rosetta Stone. In an analysis of Paris’s
monologue from Act I, Arnold Whittall tests the hypothesis that in King Priam
‘music giving prominence to tritones – ic6 – can be associated with such topics as
war, death and doubt, while music giving prominence to perfect fourths and fifths
– ic5 – can be associated with topics of love, beauty and hope’.43 Whittall’s analysis
subtly avoids the reductionist temptation to force all the monologue’s material
towards one or other of the terms of this binarism; he instead confirms his
hypothesis within a complex of other musical connections. Aspiring to similar
sensitivity, we might discern a comparably meaningful opposition in the Concer-
to’s slow movement between materials based on a tritone (ic6) and those based on
a perfect fourth or fifth (ic5), and a corresponding extra-musical homology. We
might hypothesise the succession of Sections A to C as a progress from a post-tonal
soundworld in which ic6 has salience and which conveys a mood of darkness and
grief, to an extended diatonic soundworld in which ic5 and other diatonic intervals
convey the more optimistic possibilities of hope and love. But, likeWhittall, we will
need to widen these terms of reference and add some nuances.
Some of the staging posts in this process are illustrated in Ex. 5. Stave (i) of
Ex. 5a quotes the movement’s two introductory motives, of which the first, f,
featuring low double basses, is a darkly ruminative gesture leading from one
tritone dyad (F–C) to another (E–B), and thus providing strong evidence for the
first aspect of the hypothesis. While the second motive – g, three quasi-diatonic
trichords for double basses playing in harmonics at the other extreme of their
range – would seem immediately to undermine the hypothesis, we need to note
that these ethereal sounds, like similar ones in King Priam (for instance, at
Hermes’ final appearance, ‘as messenger of death’), evoke ‘an air as from another
planet’. Whenever they recur in the slow movement they are unchanging, struc-
turally inert, as if the voice of commentators from outside the main musical
narrative (they are indicated as the shaded area annotated ‘harm.’ at rehearsal
number 69 of Fig. 1a).The gesture’s A major diatonic field ambiguously signifies
the unattainably remote and an achievable telos – a dichotomy that will be played
out over the movement as a whole. Meanwhile, various structural latencies of the
opening tritone pair (motive f ) are activated as that journey unfolds. Stave (ii) of
Ex. 5a reveals the whole-tone and octatonic scales as larger gamuts implied by
the tetrachord, B–C–E–F, aggregated from the two tritones. Tippett draws on
these scale forms as harmonic and melodic resources as the cello aria unfolds;
and he seems to be interested not least in their potential as anti-diatonic con-
structs suitable for a post-tonal soundworld through which to convey tension and

Ex. 5 Tippett, Concerto for Orchestra, Lento: pitch and interval invariance
(a) f 69 g
(i) Cb., Vlc., Pf.
Cb., Hp
(ii) Implied gamuts
whole–tone octatonic
(b) (c)
70 74
Vlc. solo Vlc. [octatonic]
Vla, Vlc. [whole–tone]

Vla
.
.
. .
Cb. Cb.,
Pf.
(d) (e)
75 76
Vlc. [octatonic] Vlc.
D–E–G
Vla Vla
= whole–tone
. . .
Cb., Pf.
Cb., Pf.
(f) (g)
77 79
Vlc. Vlc.
Vla Vla
Cb., Pf.
Cb., Pf.
(h)
84
Vla h j
.
.
.
. . .
. .
Hp
. . .

328 david clarke
anxiety with no possibility of immediate assuagement. Members of the original

double-tritone tetrachord function as periodic invariant reference points.
Let us consider some instances. In Ex. 5b we see that the pulsating triplets
issuing from a repetition of the introductory motive f retain the E–B tritone as
their outer pitch classes, while their overall vertical aggregate, B–C–D–E,
exploits the whole-tone latency. Tritones prominent in the following cello arioso
further foreground the invariant pitch classes B and E in its first statement
(rehearsal number 71+1–2, quoted in Ex. 2) and C and F in its following variant
(at rehearsal number 73+2, not quoted).44 Subsequently these pitch classes
extend their salience. Exs 5c–g quote fragments from the beginning of several
phrases of the cello aria, and show the continuing presence of octatonic and
whole-tone aggregates. Particularly audible within the accompaniment are the
connections between the several occurrences of the specific pitch E3 associated
with the timbre of the viola.
The Orphic ascent of Section B relies, at least in part, for the persuasiveness
of its worldly (non-formalist) message on a (formalist) connection with, and
thence transformation of, the preceding material. Supporting such tendencies is
the little demisemiquaver roulade that begins the violas’ melody (motive h in
Ex. 5h), which subliminally evokes similar demisemiquaver figures in the cellos’
song. But there is also the generative function of the pitch E3 from which the
viola line emanates, and which was also salient within the preceding viola
accompaniment. Again this pitch is associated with B, and again the resulting
dyad is associated with the pairing of C and F (in both melody and accompa-
niment); only these are all now reconfigured to foster a flux – appropriate enough
for a transition section – between diatonic and anti-diatonic soundworlds.
Hence, as Ex. 5h reveals, E–B is enfolded within the largely diatonic ambit
of the viola motive – a diatonicism reinforced by the ic5-rich trichord C–G–D
unfolding within the harp accompaniment (soon also incorporating E and B).
Melody and accompaniment in this opening moment together articulate a
‘higher consonance’ (in Whittall’s parlance),45 which, inflected also by the F
within the viola roulade, evokes Lydian and Mixolydian modes. However, this
relatively stable sonority dissolves as the harp’s ic5 trichord cedes to the coun-
tervailing influence of the ic6-determined E–B–C–F complex. The diatonic
continues to move in and out of focus as the music ascends to its goal; for
example, quartal flourishes in the accompaniment (at rehearsal numbers 85+3
and 86-1, not quoted) momentarily foreground clouds of ic5s before giving
way again to the tritone complex, which in turn dissipates at the end of the
passage.
These samplings, then, show Section B as occupying a hybrid position
between the preceding anti-diatonic cello song and what ensues. Section C
completes the process, setting out from a position of unambiguous diatonicism
(see again Ex. 4). Not only does the pitch content of the opening violin phrase
draw from the diatonic set of A major (allowing for momentary inflections of G
by G), but its vertical structuring also foregrounds ic5, in particular perfect fifths

between the more sustained dyads (for example, between A and E at rehearsal
numbers 87 and 88; between E and B before rehearsal numbers 88 and 80).
Elsewhere, in the viola stratum, which inclines towards diatonic centres one or
two notches along the circle of fifths, vertical thirds further reinforce this diatonic
stability (for example, A–C and E–G at rehearsal numbers 87 and 88). E is once
again heard as a salient pitch class, though in the upper violin line it is now
placed in a much higher register. Significantly, together with the two other
prolonged pitches associated with it between rehearsal numbers 87 and 88-2, C
and B respectively, it invokes the unordered diatonic trichord (E–C–B) outlined
by the top voice of the double bass harmonics (as quoted in Ex. 5a). The violins’
deployment of those pitches might, then, be interpreted as a transformation of an
originally cool, detached and ghostly sound into something warm and alive with
human tenderness.
7. Hermeneutics Destabilised
The preceding technical analysis supports a hermeneutic account of the slow
movement as a parable of the possibility of breaking out of despair and alienation
through the restoration of hope and the renewal of love. And if my earlier hunch
about the Cold War context of such a narrative is right, it may be appropriate to
project these meanings onto a wider historical and cultural canvas – as a message
perhaps about how light may follow from darkness; or a demonstration in and
through music of subjectivity putting something up against, and thus not allow-
ing itself to be reduced to, inimical social and (geo-)political forces. However, if
it was Tippett’s intention to promote such a reading, he also puts a sting in the
tail. After this sequence of musical events – the progress through Sections A, B
and C – we return to Section A (rehearsal numbers 94–96), as if beginning the
whole process again. As the formal schematic in Fig. 1 shows, this next cycle
includes a sliver of the start of Section B (rehearsal number 106), before the
movement breaks off inconclusively.
This formal configuration, along with its hermeneutic implications, needs
careful assessment. While the material of Section A is completely restated –
endorsing the notion of return – a version of the violins’ line from Section C
(which I have labelled C1 in Fig. 1) is now superposed on it – implying con-
tinuation. At first, counterpointing the arioso material (rehearsal numbers
94–96), the violins, now coloured by harp and piano, refer back to the final
stages of Section C, taking, as it were, a further run up to the point where they
were interrupted. But following this impasse, as the reprise of the cello aria
proper gets under way, the violins’ material assumes a modified guise: some-
what vehement (it is marked con forza) and not a little astringent (each phrase
cuts in with a dyad forming a major ninth, followed by a species of two-part
counterpoint that shows a predilection for other manifestations of ic2). Indeed,
the violins seem to have moved somewhat closer to Hecuba’s soundworld than
Helen’s.46

330 david clarke
This is a destabilising gesture in several senses. Particularly poignant is the

onset of the reprise of A (rehearsal numbers 94–96), with its conflicting tenden-
cies of looking back and moving on. At just the point where the violin–viola
texture of Section C was at its most ecstatic, as if from nowhere, the lamenting
cello arioso returns to haunt the vision. If the higher, affirmative string stratum
can trace its lineage back to this deeper, darker moment (and is therefore of a
piece with it), what does it mean that these two types of subjectivity now confront
each other in their separate worlds? Is this to say that the previous progress to the
light was but a dream, and that we have now awakened back into a still tragic
reality? And what of the violins’ changed relationship to the other instruments,
expressed through their new type of material in C1? Earlier, in Section C, their
relation to the violas was one of complementation rather than opposition –
placed at the little distance that is the essence of intimacy. Now, they seem
sundered and desolate. Is this a dramatisation of Orpheus’s second loss of
Eurydice, and of what that might stand for metaphorically? And might the
aborted continuation of the original proceedings, as the viola melody of Section
B breaks off before it has barely begun, suggest a process of eternal return
(remembering that Tippett was preoccupied with constructions of time and
history at this point in his oeuvre)? If so, how do we read this? Is it to say (as at
the end of The Midsummer Marriage), ‘All things fall and are built again’? Or is
it to imply (perhaps more bleakly) that we are destined to repeat a cycle of hope
and loss?
Or is it all – or none – of these things? It seems that the more facets of the
musical utterance we consider through hermeneutic spectacles, the more what
we get to look at is a shimmering field of possibilities rather than a single story
that can be gotten straight. And these conditions intensify as we consider yet
further hermeneutic possibilities.What if, for example, we were to pick up on the
music’s elemental cues: the earthy tread of the slow, march-like low-string
accompaniment to the cello aria in Section A; the watery flow of the harp triplets
in Section B; the aerial flight of the violin figuration in Section C, mutated into
fiery intensity in the reprise of Section A (not to mention the periodic manifes-
tation of the high double-bass harmonics from out of the ether)? What would be
the significance of evoking such an archaic world vision in a piece composed in
the atomic age? Is this a gesture back to Jung – an evocation of timeless
archetypes of human understanding, or of the mythopoeic imagination – at the
very moment in his oeuvre when Tippett seems to be moving into a post-Jungian
phase and closer to a (disenchanted) mainstream modernism? Can this be
squared with the previous Orphic reading? Or is it an inappropriate reading
altogether – a flight of subjective fantasy facilitated by the gap between the
musical material and the semantic meanings generated through the inquirer’s
interactions with it?
For some, the shifting interpretative ground that lies in the gap between
musical object and investigating subject is exactly what brings the hermeneutic
enterprise into question. For a hermeneut such as Kramer, however, such gaps

are exactly what makes his practice possible.47 We will eventually need to scru-
tinise these arguments more closely, but first I want to open up the gap further,
and develop more fully the formalist aspect of my enquiry. The implications of
such a tack are disguised in Kramer’s accounts, since his adoption of immanent
musical analysis extends as far as but no further than providing material for
hermeneutic rendering. That this downgrades immanent analysis to a utilitarian
role (for all that it may conversely help situate a work within other culturally
signifying networks) is perhaps what motivated Puffett to urge that ‘[a]nalysis
needs to maintain its own internal logic’. So, applying part of the spirit of
Kramer’s own modus operandi to territory about which he is equivocal, I want
to now address such issues through a textual performance that raises the for-
malist stakes to a point of overdetermination.
Analysis II: Formalism Rampant!

8. Section A, Cello Aria: Inviting and Resisting Analysis
While Puffett’s account of the fugue from Tippett’s Second String Quartet serves
as a cynosure for an analysis of the Concerto for Orchestra’s slow movement, my
approach necessarily differs in two significant ways. First, unlike Puffett, I have
already ceded some of the space needed for analysis to a hermeneutic reading (as
Agawu puts it, ‘[c]ontext is simply more text’;48 but, then, I would argue, that is
sometimes a price worth paying). Hence, I will need to omit certain sections of
the music (the second part of Section A, and the reprise of that entire section) in
this second parse. Second, whereas the Quartet’s slow movement was stylistically
a relatively consistent utterance that could be plausibly analysed within a single
(Schenkerian) analytical framework, its counterpart in the Concerto for orches-
tra is more heterogeneous: each section resets the parameters of the musical
language – with analytical hybridity as a corollary.
In fact, hybridity is an issue even within sections. The cello aria of Section A
is a case in point. Notwithstanding its resemblance to (in Tippett’s parlance) the
historical archetype of a melody and accompaniment texture, heterogeneity
within and between these elements results in even more qualified susceptibility
to Schenkerian analysis than was the case with the Quartet’s fugue, as we will
soon consider. But we will reach that point by way of a discussion of more
general structural features.
Formally the aria divides clearly into two large-scale statements, spanning
rehearsal numbers 74–78 and 79–84. (The interpolation at rehearsal numbers
78–79 of gestures from the initial arioso – the plaintive descending glissandi and
the inscrutable double bass harmonics – makes this articulation unequivocal.)
The second statement, ‘Aria 2’, could on the one hand be considered a variant
of the first, ‘Aria 1’, with an identical phrase structure and closely related
material. On the other hand it could be considered a continuation of it, as it
extends its descent to the depths of the cello register (as discussed in the
preceding analysis). This double ontology also conditions the middleground and

332 david clarke
foreground: Arias 1 and 2 both comprise four phrases (labelled a1–a4 in Ex. 3)
that in turn represent variants on a model and stages in a process.
This dialectic plays out as follows. Each phrase selects from a vocabulary of
rhythmic and proto-motivic forms that are permutated and combined in a
developing variation process in a configuration unique to the phrase; the resulting
(synchronic) whole is then treated as a formal model to be (diachronically)
recomposed in succeeding phrases. Analysing the cello melody of phrase a1 of
Aria 1, which establishes this paradigm (see again Ex. 3), we can inventory the
discrete elements of the rhythmic vocabulary as: an initial prolonged tone,
syncopated quavers, syncopated triplet quavers, triplet semiquavers and
demisemiquavers. Their synthesis is an acceleration towards a final prolonged
tone which is simultaneously the initial tone of the next phrase. Meanwhile, the
figural, proto-motivic vocabulary comprises: i, a linear motion through a third (a
retrograde of the profile of motive d from the preceding arioso [compare with
Ex. 2]); ii, a gap-fill construction; iii, a partial scalic run (extending i); and iv, a
turn (issuing from iii).The synthesis of rhythmic and figural parameters, and the
relative weightings of elements are varied in successive phrases, but prominent
within the manifest motivic content are developments of motive e of the arioso
that draw on both its roulade feature and its flourish in short note values (motive
e1 in Ex. 3). Further microanalysis would reveal that the surface figurations turn
on a seamless osmosis of different scale forms (diatonic, octatonic, whole tone).
But these are also audible as diminutions of a series of prolonged tones
that form an extended linear descent, represented in the treble of Ex. 6,
a quasi-Schenkerian analysis of Aria 1.
With this rendering, my point about structural hybridity becomes (literally)
graphic. In summary, Ex. 6 shows a set of partial structures – some continuous,
some concatenating, some overlapping: remnants of historical structural arche-
types, hanging together sufficiently to promote a flux of coherence, but coun-
tervailed by dislocations, disruptions and other anti-connective forces (the
classic condition, we might say, of a modernist artwork). I will now consider
these structures in approximate order of cohesiveness.
The cello melody, which we have already begun to investigate, is probably the
most comprehensively connective element. As the connecting beam in Level 2 of
the analysis makes especially evident, the melody articulates an extended linear
descent, spanning all four phrases, from D5 to B3. Structural pitches of the
progression are determined sometimes by their rhythmic emphasis or phenom-
enal salience and sometimes by the logic of the motion itself (for example, in
phrase a2 the pitch C in the progression D–C–B–A is weakly stressed and
appears only once, but nevertheless belongs to the larger voice-leading gestalt).
Certain pitches can be interpreted as especially strongly functional, notwith-
standing the vagaries of the post-tonal environment. For example, the initial D5,
with its prominent registral position, its emphatic reiteration and its salient
position at the beginning of the aria, functions in a manner cognate with a
Schenkerian primary melodic note; the motion to E and back again at the

beginning of phrase a2 even suggests a middleground neighbour-note motion

prolonging it. Yet while these properties are reflected in the analytical notation,
what remains ambiguous is any determination of the D quasi–primary melodic
note as a particular scale degree; hence its labelling as ‘ P̂ ’ (for primary melodic
note) rather than, say, ‘ 3̂ ’.The latter option would have been tempting, given the
supporting B in the bass, a simultaneous inner-voice D, the linear motion’s
trajectory ultimately to B3 and various allusions to B during the course of the
passage. But these various B-promoting tendencies are not sufficiently coordi-
nated or synthesised (for example, as a higher-level contrapuntal motion) to give
B unequivocal primacy over the prevailing hybridity. (Indeed the treble line itself
is distinctly hybrid, its possible B minor profile mutating in phrase a3 into a
whole-tone sequence.)
While horizontal and vertical aspects resist integration, the long-range
melodic descent nonetheless has a harmonic complement that supplements its
coherence while resisting assimilation to it – in the form of four visceral sonori-
ties (further species of higher consonance) heard at the onset of each phrase.
These are most apparent in Level 1 of Ex. 6, adjacent to the quasi–bar lines that
signal the beginnings of the four phrases (with descriptions in text boxes
beneath); both levels represents the bass of the four chords with open noteheads,
signifying their putative roots. The harmonies have diverse structures, most of
them pro-diatonic. The first, rooted on B (rehearsal number 74), is quartally
based; the second, rooted on C (rehearsal number 75), essentially mixed-mode
triadic; the third, rooted on D (rehearsal number 76), quintal, with an added
Lydian inflection; the fourth (rehearsal number 77), a knotty polarisation of a
quintal trichord built on B and a whole-tone/Lydian agglomeration around B.
Although these sonorities take effect on a middleground timescale, it would be
specious to join them up into a unified middleground ‘progression’ allegedly
composing out some still higher sonority – notwithstanding the temptation to
interpret the succession of bass roots that opens the first three phrases (B, C, D)
as an ascending third-progression. Rather, each sonority effects a moment of
harmonic reorientation; its identity usually then dissolves or mutates as its
pro-tonal elements dissipate and/or other possible tonal trajectories are hinted at.
Implicit tonal motions are indicated with parenthetical chord indications
beneath Level 2 of the analysis, the more significant of which are isolated in Level
1. Unsurprisingly in the wake of the above discussion, harmonic implications in
this category gravitate towards D and B. In phrase a1, there is a drift towards V
of D (A in the bass, C and E in the inner voices, working non-contrapuntally
against the treble D), whose tonic resolution is simultaneously posited by the
continuing inner voices (to D and F) and cancelled by the descent to G in the
bass (in turn the implicit dominant of the ensuing C-rooted higher consonance
at rehearsal number 75). At the end of phrase a2 D is again implied via an
unresolved – and incomplete – dominant. Progression towards this functional
moment is somewhat blurred on the empirical musical surface, since inner-voice
motions are, as it were, temporally disjointed from the bass and treble counter-

334
Ex. 6 Tippett, Concerto for Orchestra, Lento: quasi-Schenkerian analysis of Aria 1 (compare with Ex. 3)
74 75
© 2011 The Author.

^
‘P’
a1 a2
N
F
10 10 10 10
1
C (CPN) //
//
[D : V // (I)] [D : IV V //]
B quartal C Lydian
B – (E –) – A – D maj./min.

74 75
^
‘P’
octatonic octatonic
a1 whole tone a2
david clarke
2 (E – B )
//
//
octatonic octatonic
B : (I) [D : V // (I)] [D : IV/V V //]

C: (V ) I /
<G – G > <G > <G G>
G

Ex. 6 Continued
76 77
whole tone
a3 whole tone a4
F –C N
E
1

B
B Lydian
D Lydian B quintal / B WT I
B: V
76 77
a3 whole tone a4
N N
2
Between Hermeneutics and Formalism
I
[B : V–I ] B A Lydian B: V
D: I
B
335
© 2011 The Author.

336 david clarke
point progression they would reinforce – as shown with diagonal lines in Level 2.
Level 1 conjoins them (in an act of analytical recomposition) to represent the
tonally normative counterpart to which they allude. In phrase a3, the closing
major triadic configuration around B in the accompanying voices would seem to
be negated by the whole-tone scalar motion in the treble that issues from the
D-Lydian resonances of the opening higher consonances; yet it is arguable that
the whole-tone set provides greater mediation between the harmonic extremes of
the phrase than has been the case so far (the content at this point in Level 1
sounding more cohesive than for the previous phrases). However, this tendency
is abandoned in phrase a4, where the final emergence of a (partial) V7 sonority
in B in the lower voices (over which the treble superposes the tonic) makes no
audibly functional connection with what precedes it, notwithstanding the fact
that B is an embedded tonal centre in the opening sonority.
Hence the quasi-middleground analysis of Level 1 represents only a fragmen-
tary cohesion; and whatever the diatonic propensities of the melodic foreground
and its complementary structural harmonic gestures, these become further
qualified, suspended or cancelled by the accompaniment texture. Revisiting
Ex. 3, where the accompaniment’s three polyphonic strands are compressed into
short-score form on the lower stave of each system, tells us why this is so.
Resembling one another more than they do the melody, the three accompani-
ment strata function independently from it, resisting rhythmic alignment with it.
And a more subtle level of differentiation between strata exacerbates this ten-
dency. Each has slightly different rhythmic propensities. For example, the lowest
(lower double basses, doubled by piano, left hand), displays a roughly equal
distribution of onbeat and syncopated crotchets, while the highest (violas) has a
strong predilection for syncopation one semiquaver ahead of the crotchet pulse.
With syncopation at more than one level and a tendency to avoid structural
accentuation of downbeats (except for the beginnings of phrases), and with the
cello melody’s even more complex triplet syncopations and asymmetrically
grouped semiquavers compounding matters further, the texture resists easy
resolution (or ‘quantisation’) of the many varied rhythmic displacements around
any given beat. Therefore distinctions between structural and ornamental tones,
ambiguous enough in the absence of any unequivocal tonal centre, become even
more problematic. It thus becomes difficult to interpret inner-voice motions in
anything much more than an ad hoc fashion. Correspondingly, there is a high
incidence in Ex. 6’s graph of non-coinciding slurs, of vertical alignments of
pitches that have no apparent contrapuntal rationale, and partial progressions
(shown in parentheses) that resist connectivity to those on either side.
9. Subjectivity beyond Measurement

Like Puffett, we may rhetorically question what the value of an analysis like the
one above might be.The answer might be much the same: that in both its failures
and its successes the analysis is telling us something truthful about the music

(‘a set of graphs which can be challenged, corroborated or simply thrown away
shows us the exact nature of Tippett’s tonal language’). It would seem a rea-
sonable assumption, for example, that Tippett’s idiosyncratic handling of his
inner voices in the cello aria is deliberately intended to create an opaque braid of
sound that cannot be resolved according to traditional historical archetypes of
harmony and voice leading. He spoke in his later years of a polarity in his own
(and others’) creative process between ‘spontaneity’ and ‘measurement’.49 If, in
the present context, we were to posit a correlation between the measurable and
what is tractable to analysis, we might conversely conjecture that what resists
analysis (the glitches, equivocations and lacunae of a voice-leading diagram)
might be an indexical sign of the composer’s ‘spontaneity’: the material trace of
authorial subjectivity that has not entirely assimilated to the objective tendencies
of his material.
Except that, in his embrace of ‘spontaneity’, Tippett also risked the inchoate:
a willingness to tap into what he characterised as the ‘demoniac cauldron’ of the
human psyche. And while he recognised that in order to create great art this had
to be followed by a subsequent process of refinement, or measurement, he was
reluctant to apply this tempering process too far or too systematically: in the end
he declined to aspire to neoclassical refinement, represented by Stravinsky in
music or Racine in literature.50 In the same account in which he talks of
spontaneity and measurement, Tippett also introduces the term ‘black material’
(which he ascribes to T. S. Eliot) to denote aesthetic elements that do not
succumb to the ordering processes of measurement.51 This may invite delight or
opprobrium, for, lying outside of categories of judgement that would render it
transparent, ‘black material’ places the listener in a disorientating critical
no-place. For analysts it represents a kind of musical antimatter, and I suspect
this may have been what perplexed Puffett about Tippett’s musical language. He
seemed able to tolerate homeopathic levels of it in the fugue of the Second String
Quartet, and indeed appeared engaged by the consequences; but with the later
works of which he was so critical he no doubt drew negative conclusions about
their higher levels of black material and the correspondingly larger quantity of
grit they would deposit in the analytical works.
Negative analytical results – whose dialectical significance is that they are
fissures in what can be positively described – may be disturbing symptoms of
Tippett’s encounters with a void beyond meaning. Significantly, such a place of
no-meaning may be a space where hermeneutics and formalism, philosophical
reflection and compositional aesthetics can converge. Priam’s final vision of
‘mirrors, myriad upon myriad, moving the dark forms of creation’ might be of a
piece with, simultaneously, the realm that Tippett divined as a source of creativ-
ity, and the untempered Dionysiac will to power whose sociopolitical manifes-
tations in the empirical world might have led (might yet lead) to a sharing of
mythological Troy’s fate. Beyond meaning and before it (perhaps even under-
pinning it), this void would later become audible as the simultaneously joyful and
terrifying no-sound that is the striking closing gesture (arguably also an opening)

338 david clarke
of The Mask of Time. Meanwhile, if the aria section of the Concerto slow
movement displays ample evidence of tarrying with the inchoate, then, as we
have already observed, the music that follows it represents an emergence back
into the light, and with it – we might surmise – increasing susceptibility to a
conceptual account of its immanence.
10. Out of the Void: Flux and Articulation in Section B

Appropriately, given its transitional function, Section B is a mediation of the
melodically articulate and harmonically fluid. Our previous analytical parse of
the passage already drew attention to an osmotic harmonic field that flows
between diatonically affirming and negating sonorities (quintal and quartal
higher consonances generated from C, countervailed by the tritones E–B and
F–C prominent from earlier in the movement). Responding to what is articu-
lated in the melody, a complementary series of analytical reductions will show it
to be not so differently structured from its accompaniment which eludes articu-
lation.
Several overlapping dimensions of repetition give the melody its distinctive
morphology, as shown in the paradigmatic analysis of Ex. 7. At the extreme
foreground, repetition determines the second of the opening phrase’s two prin-
cipal motives, labelled h and j on stave i, where j is a repeated upward leap to a
hyper-dotted rhythm (four, rather than three, demisemiquavers followed by one
demisemiquaver). When this phrase, a, is itself repeated as phrase a′ (see staves
ii and iii), j’s repetitions are reordered and compounded. This paradigm of
groups of phrases is repeated and developed at yet a further level of magnitude
to yield three groups – variants of a, a1 and a2 – evident in the horizontal layout
of Ex. 7. Since motives are vertically aligned according to their pitch content, the
general orderly shift to the right reveals a correspondence between the succession
of phrase groups and the succession of ordered pitch collections. Within each
group, the layout makes visible the developmental processes between phrase
variants – unpredictable combinations of contraction, exact repetition extension
and folding back.
Next, Ex. 8 remodels this material as a set of prolongational analyses, each
stave presenting horizontally the phrase groups clustered vertically in the pre-
ceding analysis. (Some regard is still paid to paradigmatic alignment in this new
stage, so as also to highlight correspondences and differences between prolon-
gational structures.) The generative initial pitches of motives h and j are shown
stemmed throughout, while pitch classes of the referential tritone E–B are
circled. What is clear is that there is a considerable overlap between these
types of pitch salience, with E and/or B accounting for a preponderance of the
prolonged pitches. (This is not to say that all non-linear diminutions are har-
monically assimilated to these pitches, as they would be in a conventional tonal
structure and Schenkerian analysis: rather that the notes remain salient against
the diminutions.) In the final group, a2, the balance of pitch salience shifts

towards C, as both generator and goal (two octaves higher) of this phrase, and as
the outcome of the section’s entire progress.
A background underwriting the coherence of these structures is discernible,
but its character is more fluid – more the analogue of an intuition – than any
Schenkerian counterpart. It is perhaps paradoxical, then, that this is reached
through an intermediate stage resembling a rationalised distributional analysis.
This is shown in Ex. 9a, where, on staves corresponding to the preceding
analysis, the pitch (rather than pitch class) content of each phrase group is
abstracted (ignoring repetition) in ascending form as unordered collections.
Again the vertical alignment between staves is intended to reveal common
content, which leads to two insights. First, the layout, together with the conceit
of notating phrase group a2 with an ‘8va’ symbol, makes it clear that a2’s pitch
content is all but identical to that of phrase group a1, except an octave higher –
notwithstanding differences in their empirical surface formation (as shown in
Ex. 7). Second, going a step further, it becomes clear that a large number of
pitches is also shared by all three phrase groups – again notwithstanding their
seeming surface differences.
Those common pitches are abstracted in the top stave of Ex. 9b, the final
stage of the analysis, which is aligned paradigmatically with its forebear,
but which is also, like Ex. 8, overlaid with analytical notation that interprets
the mutual functions of pitches. This graphs what is intuited in listening,
namely a tension between tonality-promoting and tonality-resisting elements
that has the E–B sonority at its heart. B’s diatonic prolongations are shown in
its upward unfolding to D and F (and beyond this to A and C in phrase
groups a1 and a2); but these are also destabilised by the equivocation between
D and D/C and by the E which will not resolve into the rest of the sono-
rity. This is a background structure in that it represents a synthetic epitome of
the melody’s sonic progress across the section, just as the elements shown in
the stave below it (Ex. 9c) are an epitome of the harmonic progress of the
accompaniment.
These strata (Exs 9b and c) are both coordinated and not coordinated, just as
their notated elements both succeed one another and remain co-present in the
phenomenal experience of the music. I allude here to the way the sonic succes-
sion conditions subjective time. To reinvoke my earlier point, this has to do with
a deconstruction of the articulate and the fluid at the background level. The
melodic background represents an unfolding sonority, in which no element
reduces to any other, in which several elements may be in effect at the same time,
but which is not wholly present at all times. Similarly the harmonic epitome is a
genuine succession across the passage: we start with the (quintally based)
C-rooted sonority, pass through the more dissonant whole tone–based field, and
end with a quartally derived B-rooted collection, which phases out to the dyad
B–C – pitch classes common to all the sonorities. But it is not possible to identify
exactly when in the empirical flux of the music one sonority ceases to be in effect
and the next starts. Moreover each phrase group’s rendition of the melodic

Ex. 7 Tippett, Concerto for Orchestra, Lento, Section B: paradigmatic analysis of viola melody
340
84
a h j
© 2011 The Author.

a
ii
a1
iii
[]
[ ]
85
a1

iv
86
a1 bis a2
david clarke
vi
vii
viii
87
ix

Ex. 8 Prolongational analysis of viola melody
84 h j a′ h j - ext.
a
.
.
85
a1 a1′
. .
. .
RT
RT
86
a2
.
Ex. 9 Tippett, Concerto for Orchestra, Lento, Section B: (a) unordered pitch
content of viola melody; (b) pitch functions; (c) epitome of supporting harmony
(a)
a
a1
a2
a1, a2
(b) only
(c)

342 david clarke
epitome does not coincide with the same elements of the harmonic succession –
the two layers unfold at different rates (the top layer in effect iterated three times
to the bottom layer’s single statement) – yet the sense (meaning) of both is that
they express the progress of a single time span, and so are in some sense
coterminous. My hope, then, is that this extensive analytical discussion of
Section B has brought us closer to the essence of what is happening musically in
it, and hence of what is alluring, enjoyable, in it.
11. Arriving at the Diatonic: Section C

As the melodic baton is passed to the violins at the beginning of Section C
(rehearsal number 87; see again Ex. 4), we finally reach the point where recog-
nisable historical archetypes of voice leading play a sustained part in shaping
more transparently tonal structures. But, as ever, Tippett effects this on his own
terms. Rather than emulating a conventional SATB arrangement (with all that
that would mean for functional distinctions between treble, bass and inner
voices), the divided violins and accompanying violas are configured in two pairs,
each (like the different instrumental layers of the cello aria of Section A) with its
own stylistic behaviour. Within this arrangement, however, the upper violin part
has a certain primacy; and this is conformant with a wider tendency for Tippett
to determine tonal functionality from the top down, rather than adopt the
bass-generative model of conventional common-practice tonality.52 So, it is pos-
sible to extrapolate from this treble the functional voice-leading interpretation
shown in Ex. 10, as well as the supporting harmonic structure, which, paradoxi-
cally, is implied – virtual in status – rather than being actually manifest in the
lower voices. Instead, the latter operate along rather different lines, resisting
conventional harmonic and contrapuntal conformity.
So, for example, the little fanfare figure, k, that begins the upper violin line
(see again Ex. 4), essentially a descending A major arpeggiation (C–A–E), is
counterpointed by an analogous motion starting on D in the lower violins, and
by the lightly jaunty viola motive, l, that settles on the dyads A–C and E–G.
Here, then, we have implications of subdominant, tonic and dominant only
loosely coordinated against the lead violins’ tonic configuration; but none of this
undermines the inference that this time span is essentially an A major prolon-
gation. In short, tonality holds sway over this passage (until nearly the very end)
in two guises: first, through the goal-directed voice-leading structure of the upper
violins; and second, through diatonic collections or fields manifested by the
lower voices, that have a much weaker allegiance to conventional triadic and
contrapuntal norms. I will explore both species by turn.
To begin with the upper violin melody, there is little here that resists encoding
in conventional prolongational, voice-leading terms (see again Ex. 10, which, in
the interests of legibility, represents the melody an octave lower). We might posit
the opening C as the primary melodic note 3̂; for, while unemphatically stated, it
has prominence and is the source of a clearly directed temporal envelope: witness

Ex. 10 Tippett, Concerto for Orchestra, Lento, Section C: voice leading and harmonic field analysis (cf. Ex. 4)
^3
(arp.: C –E–A)
(3 – – 2) (3)
N
Vn [I]
6 5 7
A: I V I V
Diatonic (G – G) (D – D)
field: A
87 88 89 90

Vla l m l m m
I / V IV I / V IV I V
Diatonic V V (D – D)
field: A G A E A E A B
3rd progression 3rd progression

(chromatic)
I V I ( III) ( I) V–I
(G _ G)
Between Hermeneutics and Formalism
A D C A (chromatic)
B F A
-1
91 92 93 94
V IV
V (G – G )
A B A G C A A
343
© 2011 The Author.

344 david clarke
its hint of a descent to 2̂ at the end of the first phrase (as if mirroring a putative
fundamental line), and its repositing of itself at the beginning of the next (rehearsal
number 88). According generative primacy to C encourages us to interpret the
large-scale (middleground) arpeggiation to the top A at rehearsal number 91 as an
intensification of the primary melodic note’s own essence, a powering upwards to
the next most important structural moment. Thus, Section C’s extension of the
movement’s ongoing registral ascent renders this final stage of the process as more
than a filling in of abstract space. The voice-leading structures of this last phase
have a palpably tensile quality because they stretch the protentive and retentive
capacities of the listening subject: the top A at rehearsal number 91 registers not
only itself but also the primary pitch to which it connects back and which it holds
within it; the primary note is retroactively perceived as stretching forward through
its arpeggiation to the A.
As Ex. 10 further shows, there are intervening prolongations within this
process, and subsequent ones that extend it further. The arpeggiation involves a
substantial prolongation of E, which explores the space between it and the goal
tone A.This first takes the form of a structural neighbour-note motion (rehearsal
number 89), and then a motion to G, the flattened leading note, which here (and
elsewhere in the passage) displays a particular sensitivity to its sharpened coun-
terpart with which it is eventually exchanged to complete the motion to the top
A. The instability between G and G is manifested again immediately after this
point, in a prolongation of the A (rehearsal number 91 and following). And it is
perhaps a related modal mutability that we hear as A reaches yet higher, through
a linear progression A–B–C (rehearsal numbers 92-1–93). This has the effect of
momentarily tonicising C. C’s prolongation after rehearsal number 93 involves
further tonal colouration: a descending whole-tone third-progression, C–B–A,
where A is also heard as locally tonicised (rehearsal number 93+3) before being
enharmonised as G and thus taking on a leading-note function in order to return
us to A major. However, the close sonic proximity of A and A major sonorities
seems to have a destabilising effect, which is enhanced by the chromatic satura-
tion of the foreground diminutions following rehearsal number 93+4 (demisemi-
quaver roulades coursing through the chromatic collection B, A, G, G, F).
And this fluctuation of tonal/melodic centres never achieves resolution, since it
coincides at rehearsal number 94 with the interruptive force of the return of
Section A.
Thus, while this entire passage displays stronger conformity than anywhere
else in the movement to historical archetypes of voice leading and prolongation,
the structure itself remains a fragment, albeit an extensive one. Not only does the
primary melodic note never complete a structural descent, the entire framework
has no direct organic connection with other structures in the movement. This
voice-leading graph cannot be plausibly glued to the one advanced for the cello
aria of Section A, for example. Nevertheless we might regard the later passage (as
well the later analysis) as a transformation of the premises of the preceding one,
from the domain of the post-tonal into the domain of the neo-diatonic.

The ‘neo-’ aspect is most notably manifest in the idiosyncratic tonal behaviour
of the accompanying voices, organised, as mentioned above, under the aegis of
diatonic (or even pandiatonic) fields.The principles are a logical extension of the
‘emancipation of the consonance’ – a tendency that Whittall has identified as an
attribute of Tippett’s music (and which he identifies with the principle of higher
consonance).53 That is, within a given musical time span all the diatonic pitch
classes associated with a tonal centre are in principle equally available without
regard to normal functional priorities of tonic, dominant, and so on; and any
pitch class may be counterpointed against any other without regard to conven-
tional triadic functional hierarchies of consonant or dissonant intervals.Thus the
divided violins and violas, which mostly operate a form of first-species (note-
against-note) counterpoint relative to themselves, do so with no obligation to
follow (and indeed with every propensity to subvert) traditional patterns of
vertical interval succession, while remaining loyal to the presiding diatonic field.
So, to revisit an earlier example, the opening violin motive, k, presents four
consecutive sevenths followed by a fifth, drawn from a diatonic field of A major.
While the violin and viola duos proceed along parallel paths they maintain
interestingly independent, but by no means entirely dislocated, behaviour. The
succession of diatonic fields generated by each pair is shown beneath their
respective staves in Ex. 10 (which indicates occasional inflections of diatonic
fields by parenthetically naming the affected notes). Here we can see that while
the violins sustain an A major field for much of the early part of the passage (until
just after rehearsal number 91), the violas display greater variegation. In large
part these fluctuations are a mediated reflection of the harmonic progress
implied by the treble. Thus the treble motion to an implied dominant before
rehearsal number 88 prompts a shift to an alternative diatonic field, G, in the
violas, their flickering cadential motive, m, configuring pitches that simulta-
neously imply dominant and subdominant chords of that tonality (represented in
reduction in the lower system of Ex. 10). At the equivalent place in the next
phrase (leading up to rehearsal number 88), the violas mutate to an E major field
(motive m transposed accordingly) against the E of the treble and its implied
chord I of A. In other words, the accompanying voices are heard as responsive to
the melody, but at one or more removes around the circle of fifths. In the later
stages of the passage a counterpoint of tonal fields emerges. So, for example, the
upper violins’ prolongation of III of A before rehearsal number 93 is supported
by the diatonic field of C in the aggregated violins, and, simultaneously, by the
field of G in the violas. Significantly, in the final stages of the section (after
rehearsal number 93) the two strands achieve a union (or maybe ‘unison’) of
fields – A major, followed by A major.
Within any field it becomes difficult to ascertain in precise formalist terms
what may have determined the content and sequence of the material of the lower
voices. There are moments where, within these strata, prolongational structures
become audible – such as the prolongation of E5 in the upper violas between
rehearsal numbers 90 and 92 (shown on the lower stave of Ex. 10), and its

346 david clarke
implications of chord I of A and chord V7 of B. But even in these moments of

quasi-functional transparency, the elements remain disconnected from one
another, and only elliptically related to harmonic features of the principal violin
line. Hence, even in the section of the slow movement that comes closest to
operating within a set of conventions shared by creator and listener (another
name for classicism), the analytically intractable still looms.This need not signify
any shortcoming in the music. In this case, far from it: the conditions modelled
in the analysis reflect an imaginative and original reworking of the possibilities of
the diatonic, appropriate to the wider musical language of the piece. But, just as
our first analytical parse led us to ponder the limits of hermeneutics, so the
conclusion of this second one leaves us contemplating what it is that the limits of
formalism might point to, and indeed what both sets of limits might together
signify.
Theoria: Between Epistemes

12. Minding the Gap?
Decades before the emergence of the New Musicology, Theodor Adorno made
it an axiom of his own critical practice (which, interestingly, Max Paddison has
characterised as ‘an extended exercise in hermeneutics’) that the investigation of
artworks needs to be conducted on several levels.54 Like Adorno, we might seek
to avoid reifying a division of intellectual labour between the immanent (for-
malist) analysis of music and philosophical reflection on its cultural, social and
political mediation. Kramer too is mindful not to fall prey to a competitive
opposition between musical autonomy and a musical semantics characterised by
historical and cultural contingency. He writes: ‘I’m seeking to do a tricky bal-
ancing act with the debate over meaning: to uphold the semantic end, but in
terms that incorporate the autonomous one’. In this sense we share the same
tightrope (even if we wobble in different ways). But what could be seen as a tiny
nuance of difference in our approaches is in another sense fundamental (though
nonetheless cause for productive reflection, I hope). When pushed, Kramer
chooses to come down on one side of the debate – his metaphor of incorporating
the autonomous dimension into the semantic makes this clear enough; and he
elaborates by asserting his desire ‘to acknowledge the historical, ideological,
functional importance of the experience of autonomy in the context of a view in
which the primary term is contingency’.55 Part of his imperative here is no doubt
to correct what he perceives as a historical imbalance in the other direction. I
probably have to admit that, due to my own personal history, and despite
Kramer’s many wise and persuasive words on musical meaning, I remain more
likely to slip off the tightrope onto that autonomist side. But the point I’d like
to make, despite this, is the desirability of trying to stay on: of seeking not to
plump for the incorporation or absorption of either term by the other, but to
underline the radical differences and incompatibilities between these two modes
of understanding, while still seeing the resulting high-wire tension as something

positive, rather than a debilitating problem. The difference between my figura-

tion of this difference and Kramer’s, then, points to divergent epistemologies of the
gap.
Gaps, coupled with the notion of excess, are certainly critical for Kramer: on
his view, they are the very enabling condition of hermeneutics. In Music as
Cultural Practice he asserts that ‘points of under- or overdetermination: on the
one hand, a gap, a lack, a missing connection; on the other, a surplus of pattern,
an extra repetition an excessive connection’ represent potential sites of herme-
neutic windows in a musical work.56 True enough. My formalist analysis of the
cello aria of the Lento of Tippett’s Concerto for Orchestra has demonstrated
that points where it is impossible to say what has determined certain patterns of
voice leading or contrapuntal part writing (a substratum of underdetermined
‘black material’ that exceeds the articulate form) represent lacunae that prompt
philosophical reflection or interpretation in terms of cultural meanings. And in
his essay ‘Subjectivity Rampant!’, Kramer displays a classic piece of intellectual
jujitsu: refuting the idea that gaps between musical text and discursive meaning
might ‘discredit the whole idea of musical meaning’, he asserts that ‘[n]ot only
are these hermeneutic gaps not a sign of arbitrariness, they are the enabling
condition of musical meaning, and the site where the interplay of music and
culture is most fully realized’.57
Also plausible enough.Yet at the crux of my own position is the notion that the
reverse might be no less the case: that analytical formalism’s mandate comes
from the point where hermeneutic productivity gives out, the point beyond
which we may still seek an account of music as music (the point reached above
at the turn from Analysis I to Analysis II). Of course, it may be possible in
principle to switch polarities yet again, and draw further hermeneutic readings
from this additional swathe of analysis. An account such as Whittall’s analysis of
Paris’s monologue from King Priam (discussed above), in which analytical and
interpretative episodes seem perpetually to slip from underneath and exceed one
another, would endorse such a possibility. But the conclusion to be drawn from
such slippage is not that it provides grounds for an a priori privileging of
hermeneutics, but that the two modes of enquiry are radically incommensurable:
non-coterminous.
But if the non-congruence of formalist and hermeneutic accounts of a work
potentially releases a free play of both, it also signals a lack of any necessary
connection between them – which is to reverse Kramer’s rhetorical tack and
drive us back to the problematic of the potential arbitrariness of herme-
neutically derived content. An implicit problem in my interpretation of the
Concerto for Orchestra slow movement as a Cold War parable is the absence
of any conclusive evidence that the composer intended it this way or that
anyone, at the time of its composition or now, might feel compelled to hear it
as such. Kramer’s tactic toward such objections is once again to deploy their
force in his own defence. He robustly declares that the construction of such
parables

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expressly does not mean that the interpretation aspires to understand the
work as its maker or first audience understood it ... . In place of these
quasi-positivist ideals, the culturally sensitive interpretation puts a concept of
potential or virtual meaning. The intent is to say something consistent with what
could have been said, whether or not it actually was, and in so doing to suggest
how the work may have operated in, with, on, and against the life of its
culture.58
In that composers’ and audiences’ understanding of their own culture may not
be transparent to themselves, and in that music (and other arts) may be exactly
the kind of medium we might consult for traces of such unconscious knowledge,
such a view is tenable. However, the sheer number of qualifiers in this statement
(as highlighted) suggests a less than empowering admission of conditionality on
claims to musical meaning: we could hear a work a certain way, but why should
we? And this condition is of a piece with Kramer’s prioritising of the interpreting
subject – in one sense a liberating (maybe also Liberal) move, licensing the
commentator as an individual to produce a more open musicology for more
enjoyable consumption; yet the price of this may be that the knowledge achieved
risks remaining more a piece of private property than something to which a larger
discursive community is able to claim ownership.To recast the previous question
with a shift of emphasis: I may hear Tippett’s Concerto as voicing Cold War
anxieties, but why should you?
My own strategy, as I have sought to demonstrate in my hermeneutic reading
of the Concerto, has been to seek to bridge the gap through a series of mediations,
in which immanent structural principles of the work are seen as consistent with a
certain aesthetic disposition, which is traceable in textual writings by the same
composer, and which is echoed by tendencies in others of his works of the same
period and in the writings and works of other individuals. To be sure, Kramer’s
accounts also mobilise many discourses and documents around musical works,
but he is less concerned with establishing the veracity of potential interconnec-
tions than with multiplying them to create an accumulation of semantic potenti-
ality. No doubt Kramer would reject a concern for actuality as the recidivist
operation of ‘quasi-positivist ideals’.Yet his interpretations of musical works are
often at their most plausible when they are congruent with positive evidence such
as verbal statements by the composer in question. For example, one might take or
leave his metaphorical reading of the tonal and chromatic instabilities of Schu-
bert’s Moment musical in A as ‘a certain trope of the diseased body, tainting both
the [piece’s] outer world (theTrio) and its own inner core (the recapitulation)’; but
things begin to look more plausible on the introduction of the evidence of a
contemporaneously written letter in which Schubert voices ennui over his chronic
ill health (and by implication his syphilitic condition).59 To underscore the voice
of the composer (of Schubert and others in Kramer’s case, of Tippett in my own)
need not be seen as a reversion to quasi-positivism or the intentional fallacy. It is
rather to widen the frame of what is permitted to inform our understanding of
musical meaning, neither denying the agency of the interpreting subject, nor

making a fetish of compositional intent, but rather tempering the signifying free
play of the former in the ground of the latter.
13. Recovering the Musically Intrinsic
By his own admission, Kramer’s persuasiveness is staked on his textual perfor-
mativity. Success depends not only on the overdetermination of the (potential)
evidence for any given reading, but also on his negotiation of the problem of how
to legitimate the supporting premises of his practice. In pursuit of the latter
Kramer needs a self-consistent metanarrative about musical meaning that is
simultaneously not a grand systemic metanarrative about musical meaning.
Hence his prefaces and other prospectuses present many lucid variants on the
conditions of possibility for his approach while consistently seeking not to base
it on any transcendental principle.60 His perception (arguably a distorted one,
but maybe reified through the prism of the US academy) of music analysis as a
pseudo-objective discipline is no doubt what inclines him towards methodologi-
cal informality and ‘subjectivity rampant’; but it also leads to him to downplay
(or equivocate around) the intrinsically musical, as if a desire to loosen the
stranglehold of a putative fixation on methodological objectivity also had to
mean letting go of the object.
Thus subjectivity and culture become for Kramer the defining, mutually
resonating terms in which music and its meaning are situated: ‘subjectivity is the
medium in which music works, and through which it reveals its cultural signifi-
cance’; ‘music is one of the primary media in which Western subjectivity has
mirrored and fashioned itself’. The musical object is audible (only) insofar as it
contributes to the processes that constitute those terms: ‘music both reflects and
helps to produce historically specific forms of subjectivity’.61 His ‘paraphrases
and parables ... take some part of [a] work’s cultural framework [not the work
itself] as their own context and conditions of possibility’.62 Hence it is the space
of culture to which he looks for the ground of his analysis of music’s role in
culture by the culturally constructed interpreting subject.
Street’s review of Kramer’s Music as Cultural Practice points to a problem in
this hermeneutic circle. Against Kramer’s claim, which deploys terminology
from Pierre Bourdieu, that ‘[i]t is the interpretive habitus more than the imme-
diate object of interpretation that is the source of meaning’,63 Street juxtaposes
Bourdieu’s reminder that the ‘habitus’ (‘the inculcation in men and women of a
set of durable dispositions which generate particular practices’, as Terry Eagleton
paraphrases it) can also be understood as ‘history turned into nature’.64 In other
words, subjects may become subject to an ‘ineradicable adherence to the estab-
lished order’ through ‘the naturalization of its own arbitrariness’.65 Citing Chris-
topher Norris, Street goes on to argue for critical theory’s need to interpose a
necessary distance ‘between its own categories and those of a naturalised mythol-
ogy or commonsense system of assumptions’.66
Where – without attributing to it some universal, supra-historical status –
might such an alternative locus be found? Might it be (or include) the ‘object of

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interpretation’ itself? For, within specific historical musical traditions (among

them the very modernist tradition to which Tippett subscribes), the musical
object may acquire a certain critical distance from the habitus of its times. In this
tradition artworks carve out a space for themselves: their meanings are produced
within a ‘cultural framework’, but they are not coterminous with it, and hence
they contain critical potential.
The difficulty for Kramer is that he forecloses this possibility of such alter-
native anchorage through his disinclination to grant musical works status as
autonomous existents with independent structures of meaning. He certainly
admits the existence of what he terms the ‘medium-specific’ content of music –
this is after all the source from which he sees ‘meaning’ (in his sense) being
precipitated. But again he cannot seem to stabilise a position in view of the fact
that the two fields are non-coterminous, that their respective architectonics do
not marry up. Thus, on the one hand, he invokes Schleiermacher and Dilthey,
asserting:
The object of interpretation ... is not the word or sentence but the work, ... the
place where lived experience acquires a durable form ... . Music’s lack of a word-
and sentence-level semantics does nothing to bar it from having meaning at the
higher level of the work ... . The presence or absence of semantic value at the
lower levels belongs to the medium, music or language; meaning belongs to the
higher-level message conveyed by ‘working’ the medium-specific elements into
comprehensible patterns.67
Kramer’s talk of the interactive functionality of hierarchic levels has an unexpect-

edly formalist ring: the lower levels of a (musical) work remain ‘medium-specific’,
but by being arranged in ‘comprehensible patterns’, through the higher-level
agency of the work, meaning is (seemingly dialectically) generated (sublated?)
from them.Yet, on the other hand, this model can seemingly be abandoned. Only
a few pages later Kramer writes: ‘If musical devices are really bearers of meaning,
then every aspect of music is potentially available for interpretation’ (Kramer
2002, p. 18; emphasis added). And this notion is reinforced when elsewhere he
claims that ‘[m]usic has no means to reserve some specific layer or pocket for
meaning ... .There is no guarantee that any particular detail will become herme-
neutically active, but no detail is exempt from the possibility.’68
A concern about methodological consistency intertwines here with another
about the handling of musical particularity. We might ask: Would anything
happen to the work’s semantic content if certain details of voice leading, as found
in the various graphical representations of the preceding formalist analysis, were
to change; or if a prolongation were extended a little longer, or differently
fashioned? To this question Kramer would appear to have two possible answers:
No, there would be no difference, assuming that the higher level structure was
unchanged; and Yes, there could be a difference, because every aspect of the
music is open to interpretation. The same ambiguity around the specificity of
correlation between music and interpretation might also obtain between works,

as well as within them. One has a recurring sense that the meanings Kramer
predicates of one piece might in many cases be no less predicable of another. (To
how many other works by Liszt (or indeed by other composers), for example,
might Kramer’s points about the Piano Sonata in B minor – its ‘confluence of
rationality with ... virtuosity’, its constitution as ‘a composed script for the
bipolar narrative of furor and sentiment typical of Liszt’s virtuoso performances’
– apply)?69 This indeterminacy need not matter, but it would mean that herme-
neutics in such cases would be determined at the level of style or oeuvre, rather
than of work or movement.
Two observations follow from this. First, Kramer might argue that such fluidity
of response, almost a kind of improvisation as to what may or may not work for
hermeneutics, is of a piece with the anti-foundationalism of his working practice
– a catch-as-catch-can affair that constantly evades making explicit (or at least
conscious) any thoroughgoing theoretical premises, and positively celebrates an
‘opportunistic, unruly, and contestatory’ ethos.70 But actually this is troubling.
Kramer’s heads-I-win-tails-you-lose attitude to where musical meaning may or
may not be located, together with his reflex of turning every possibly valid criticism
of the hermeneutic approach into a virtue, in fact weakens his case. For if nothing
can challenge the conditions of possibility of hermeneutics; if no particular,
identifiable conditions engender it; if hermeneutics is in principle possible any-
where, then its conditions of possibility are undermined.71 Hermeneutics needs
the non-hermeneutic in order to find its essence.
Second, then, this leaves a clear space and role for formalism. Not only is
formalism not eclipsed by hermeneutics, so that analysis may still, in Puffett’s
words, ‘maintain its own internal logic’; but formalism can also be seen as
hermeneutics’ necessary other. It is only because formalist analysis maintains, in
principle or in practice, its internal logic, that hermeneutics is able to operate with
such shape-shifting licence. In other words, only because analysis makes it its
mission to care in principle for all levels of musical structure and the interaction
between them (and only because it underwrites a concept of music based upon
such principles), is hermeneutics released to pursue its more informal, ‘unruly’
agenda.
Formalism is not identical with the musically intrinsic, which may be registered
as informally as any other everyday statement about music; but it nevertheless
helps underwrite it. Formalism reflects, and ought certainly to be grounded in,
what Kramer describes as ‘habits of listening that make music available for enjoy-
ment without reference to its [semantic] meaning’. But when Kramer goes on to
say that ‘those same habits are based on historically specific sets of values, not on
the intrinsic nature of music’, he sets up a difference as ripe for deconstruction as
any he seeks to collapse. For the fact that the basis of those habits is historical does
not preclude it from also being intrinsic. What is intrinsic to classical music in
particular is not some kind of idealised essence, but the fact that it is materially
composed.That this is a historical and culturally contingent factor does not alter the
fact that, at a certain time and in a particular context, works were (are being) made,

352 david clarke
put together, formed in such a way that their very formedness becomes part of the
condition of their meaning. Formalist analysis responds to this material condition.
It does not seek crudely to reverse-engineer the process whereby a piece was
composed; but it could be said to represent an empathic act of virtual recompo-
sition on its own terms: an attempt to find affinity with the musical material, to
ponder and weigh its significance and relationships in a manner akin to compos-
ing. (Paradoxically, analysis may be seen as extending rather than proscribing the
reach of subjectivity: it involves an affinity with the composing subject, with that
subject’s mediation in the objectivity of the composed material, hence with the
presence or traces of subjectivity there, and through this engagement it also
constructs the investigating subject as such.)
None of these claims need portend an imperialist agenda on formalism’s part.
Asserting the formedness of music as an essential moment in our logical under-
standing of its meaningfulness is not to assume a priori that this aspect of its
condition will always be the most salient one for musicological enquiry. In the
case of a piece such as La MonteYoung’s Composition 1960 #7, whose formation
is literally minimal (the notes B and F ‘to be held for a long time’), we need not
be detained for very long with a formalist analysis, before moving on to other
discursive modes that will necessarily be in the ascendant. But for repertoires
where the compositional formation of musical material has historically been
central (the cultural practice of autonomous music), the immanent richness of
construction might continue to be a topic for discussion. For it is through this
material circumstance that it is able to carve out a space of its own that is other
to quotidian life – the very condition that gives it agency in quotidian life, that
helps subjects shape it.
14. Between/Beyond Hermeneutics and Formalism

The tenuous fit between hermeneutics and formalism (their non-exchangeability)
is perhaps part of the explanation for what seems like an impasse in current
musicology. But this perhaps suggests something else too, salutary for both. It
marks a space between the two where new (or reinvented old) paradigms for
musicology, and for studies of music and meaning, might emerge. Given that
up to now I have largely focussed on the problematics of Kramer’s theoretical
modelling, in a manner that somewhat distorts my overall admiration for his work,
it would be fitting to allow him the last word with a particularly inspiring passage
from his book Musical Meaning. In the following, he locates musical meaning
within a continuum he defines as a ‘sonorous envelope’:
[T]he most salient feature of the sonorous envelope is that it is filled with
nonsignifying matter but nonetheless exists in a dynamic relationship to signifi-
cation. The locus of this relationship is a body of sound that ... shuttles between
the borderless mass of noises and articulate utterance. This mediatory sound
embraces everything that, whether literally or figuratively, makes up the sphere of
intonation that runs through speech to ritualized vocalization and songfulness. To

the extent that such musicality is heard as expressive or constructed, it bears on

signification; to the extent that it is received as material, visceral, or merely
sensory, it bears on the nonsignifying realm uniting the body to the world. These
‘bearings’ are rarely experienced as alternatives; their mutual implication is almost
unbreakable. Shuttling between ‘logos’ and ‘noise’, musicality thus embodies the
general flow of communicative energy into which nonsignifying sound is fun-
nelled and from which language and imagery, description and depiction, are
precipitated.72
The scope of Kramer’s vision (or audition) here extends beyond both herme-
neutics and formalism. It situates both within a field of living, embodied, sonic
experience. This is the tenor of much of Kramer’s project, and one of his most
valuable contributions to his thinking about music, pointing to areas ripe for
further exploration. As it turns out, Tippett’s music is germane in this respect,
mobilising as it often does a sonic stratum ‘that is received as material, visceral,
or merely sensory, [bearing] on the nonsignifying realm uniting the body to the
world’. This is exactly the domain, intuitable beyond the limits of formalist
analysis, that we encountered in the second phase of the analysis of Tippett’s
Concerto movement above – the domain of ‘black material’. As mentioned there,
this is probably also the aspect of Tippett’s later music that so exercised Puffett,
with his more monological commitment to formalism.
That domain of sensory embodiment, located in the spatial here and temporal
now of lived musical experience, might in turn point to a realm between herme-
neutics and formalism – possibly a kind of phenomenology, or some form of
enquiry into the determination of consciousness by music, and vice versa – as a
necessary and still inadequately investigated component in our deliberations
about musical meaning. This is neither to deny the need to understand music in
terms of our cultural being (for instance, via hermeneutics) nor to underestimate
the terms in which music takes its own being (inter alia via its principles of
formation). But it is perhaps also to hear the distant hail of another metanarra-
tive, which grants music the possibility of capturing – however fleetingly – what
is unnameable in being.
NOTES
My thanks to Ian Biddle, Giles Hooper, Bethany Lowe and not least Lawrence Kramer
himself for invaluable and thought-provoking comments on earlier versions of this essay.
Music examples from King Priam © 1962 by Schott & Co. Ltd, London. Reproduced by
kind permission of Schott Music Ltd. All rights reserved. Music examples from the
Concerto for Orchestra © 1964 Schott & Co. Ltd, London. Reproduced by kind per-
mission of Schott Music Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. See Roman Ingarden, TheWork of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, trans. Adam
Czeniawski, ed. Jean G. Harrell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 120–2.
2. Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press, 2002), p. 1; and Kramer,

354 david clarke
Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1995), p. 10 (see also pp. 2–3).
3. See, for example, Lawrence Kramer, ‘Subjectivity Rampant! Music, Hermeneutics,
and History’, in Martin Clayton,Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (eds), The
Cultural Study of Music: a Critical Introduction (New York and London: Routledge,
2003), pp. 125–6.
4. See, for instance, Kramer, ‘Musicology and Meaning’, The Musical Times, 144
([1883] 2003), p. 6.
5. Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, p. xiv.
6. See my ‘ “Only Half Rebelling”: Tonal Strategies, Folksong and “Englishness” in
Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra’, in David Clarke (ed.), Tippett
Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1–26; and my The
Music and Thought of Michael Tippett: Modern Times and Metaphysics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
7. Kramer, ‘Musicology and Meaning’, p. 10.
8. Compare Dai Griffiths’s term ‘Power Analysis™’, a concept critiqued in the course
of his review article, ‘The High Analysis of Low Music’, Music Analysis, 18/iii
(1999), pp. 389–435.
9. See, for example, Kramer, ‘Musicology and Meaning’, p. 8.
10. Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, p. 15.
11. Kramer, ‘Subjectivity Rampant!’, p. 126.
12. Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice 1800–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA:
University of California Press, 1990), p. 1.
13. Kramer’s article ‘The Musicology of the Future’, Repercussions, 1/i (1992), pp. 5–18,
sparked an exchange in the pages of Current Musicology, 53 (1993), as follows: Gary
Tomlinson, ‘Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: a Response to Lawrence
Kramer’, pp. 18–24; Kramer, ‘Music Criticism and the Postmodernist Turn: In
Contrary Motion with Gary Tomlinson’, pp. 25–35; and Tomlinson, ‘Gary Tomlin-
son Responds’, pp. 36–40.
14. See, for example, Kofi Agawu, ‘Does Music Theory Need Musicology?’, Current
Musicology, 53 (1993), 89–98; Agawu, ‘How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to
Get Back In Again’, Music Analysis, 23/ii–iii (2004), pp. 267–86, which references
many other texts germane to several aspects of these debates; and Agawu, ‘Analyz-
ing Music under the New Musicological Regime’, Music Theory Online, 2/iv (1996).
15. Pieter C. van den Toorn, Music, Politics, and the Academy (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
CA: University of California Press, 1995).
16. In fairness, Kramer might qualify for partial exemption from charges of cultural
introversion, given the influence of European theory in general (perhaps more than
European musicology in particular) on his intellectual formation.
17. Albeit that it has lately not escaped many of the depressing tendencies of a neolib-
eral culture, which Kevin Korsyn describes as happening in the United States in his
Decentering Music (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

18. Alan Street, review of Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, in Music
Analysis, 11/i (1992), p. 119.
19. Giles Hooper, The Discourse of Musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); on Kramer,
see especially pp. 110–20.
20. Derrick Puffett, ‘Editorial: In Defence of Formalism’, Music Analysis, 13/i (1994),
pp. 3–5.
21. Puffett, ‘In Defence of Formalism’, p. 4.
22. Derrick Puffett, ‘The Fugue from Tippett’s Second String Quartet’, Music Analysis,
5/ii–iii (1986), pp. 233–64; and ‘Tippett and the Retreat from Mythology’, The
Musical Times, 136 ([1823] 1995), 6–14.
23. Puffett, ‘The Fugue from Tippett’s Second String Quartet’, p. 258.
24. Kramer, Musical Meaning, p. 158, and ‘Subjectivity Rampant!’, p. 125.
25. A key claim with which Kramer’s Music as Cultural Practice opens (p. 1) is that
‘works of music have discursive meanings ... definite enough to support critical
interpretations comparable in depth, exactness, and density of connection to inter-
pretations of literary texts’.
26. The first movement forms the centre of gravity of analyses of the Concerto by
Merion Bowen, Ian Kemp and Arnold Whittall. See Bowen, Michael Tippett, 2nd
edn (London: Robson Books, 1997), pp. 175–8; Kemp, Tippett: the Composer and
His Music (London: Eulenburg, 1984), pp. 380–6; and Whittall, The Music of Britten
and Tippett, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 194–
200.
27. Tippett first used the dichotomy of historical and notional archetypes of music in his
contribution to Robert Hines (ed.), The Orchestral Composer’s Point of View: Essays on
Twentieth-Century Music by Those Who Wrote It (Norman, OK: University of Okla-
homa Press, 1970), subsequently modified in the first part of Tippett’s essay,
‘Archetypes of Concert Music’, in Meirion Bowen (ed.), Tippett on Music (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 89–108. While the term ‘archetype’ would have had
strongly Jungian connotations for Tippett (and might therefore have implied some-
thing universal and timeless), Alastair Borthwick’s helpful reading of Tippett’s
account of this opposition (‘Tonal Elements and Their Significance in Tippett’s
Sonata No. 3 for Piano’, in Clarke [ed.], Tippett Studies, pp. 117–44) draws out the
historical dimension in it. As Borthwick puts it,Tippett uses ‘historical archetype’ to
refer to the established norms of a genre (for example, symphony, concerto), while
‘ “notional archetype” is understood as an individual composer’s subjective response
to and employment of those established norms’ (‘Tonal Elements’, p. 119) – a
response which is, of course, formulated at a later point in history. Thus, one
composer’s notional archetype (his or her own notion of what is definitive for a
certain kind of piece) can become a later composer’s historical archetype, as he or she
reformulates it into his or her own notional archetype. Although Borthwick (pp.
120–3) models the implicit historical movement in Tippett’s account in terms of
Nattiez’s semiological tripartition, my own (by no means incompatible) inclination is
to construe this as a modernist’s critical (or dialectical) reception of what history has
made available. Borthwick’s account is also valuable in extending Tippett’s ideas,
which he himself tends to confine to ‘formal archetypes’ (for example, musical

356 david clarke
genres), to potentially any kinds of musical material – an extension which I also adopt
in the present and subsequent sections of this essay.
28. For more recent contextual accounts, see Anne Marshman, ‘Music as Dialogue:
Bakhtin’s Model Applied to Tippett’s A Child of Our Time’ (PhD diss., University of
Melbourne, 2005); and Suzanne Robinson, ‘From Agitprop to Parable: a Prolego-
menon to A Child of Our Time’, in Robinson (ed.), Michael Tippett: Music and
Literature (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 78–121.
29. See Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, pp. 9–10.
30. Tippett, ‘Too Many Choices’, in Moving into Aquarius, 2nd edn (St Albans: Paladin
Books, 1974), pp. 130–44.
31. Tippett, letter to Colin Franklin, BL Add. MS 69422B, fols. 16, 17; Gilles Quispel,
‘Time and History in Early Patristic Christianity’, in Joseph Campbell (ed.), Man
and Time: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1958), pp. 85–107. I discuss these points further in Clarke, The Music and Thought
of Michael Tippett, pp. 100–3 and 142–51.
32. The idea of ‘world vision’ is developed in Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: a
Study of TragicVision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip
Thody (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964) – a text that Tippett read in the
original French and that was influential on the composition of King Priam in
particular. See also Clarke, The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett, pp. 1–12.
33. Ian Kemp reports that Tippett ‘confessed that he quoted from King Priam [so
extensively in the finale] only because he was short of time’ (Kemp, Tippett, p. 385).
34. This handling of the strings complements the first movement’s fragmenting of the
orchestral wind, brass and percussion into an array of nine smaller ensembles.
35. The relationship between instrumental sonorities is not entirely isomorphic. The
cellos, for example, also play with Priam in his arioso ‘A father and a king’; but the
musical material is different from that associated with Andromache.
36. The recurrences are evident in Fig. 1; see the areas marked by hatching.
37. See Michael Tippett, ‘The Resonance of Troy: Essays and Commentaries on King
Priam’, in Tippett on Music, pp. 209–19.
38. Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, p. 10.
39. Interestingly, the lines from Rilke employed in The Mask of Time are sung by a
similar voice type to that specified for the role of Priam (baritone for the former,
bass-baritone for the latter), and the vocal declamatory style at this point is also
reminiscent of Priam’s Act I, Scene II monologue, just as there are also similarities
in the accompanying instrumental sonorities.
40. This topic is explored in Rowena Harrison, ‘Homeric Resonance: King Priam
and the Iliad’, in Robinson (ed.), Michael Tippett: Music and Literature, pp. 215–34.
41. Repeated descending string glissandi form another link with the Concerto’s slow
movement, especially those between rehearsal numbers 496 and 497 of the inter-
lude, which are in a register close to that of cello song.
42. This association is explored in another Orphic poem by Rilke, ‘Orpheus – Eurydice
– Hermes’.

43. Whittall, ‘ “Is There a Choice at All?” King Priam and Motives for Analysis’, in
Clarke (ed.), Tippett Studies, p. 60.
44. The superscript symbols following the rehearsal numbers signify bars before or after
the rehearsal number mentioned; thus, for example, the phrase ‘rehearsal number
85+3’ refers to three bars after rehearsal number 85, while ‘rehearsal number 86-1’
indicates one bar before rehearsal number 86.
45. The concept is as valuable as Whittall’s own definition of it is parsimonious. In
The Music of Britten and Tippett, p. 5, he describes higher consonances as ‘chords
... which, while giving some priority to triadic elements, no longer require the
exclusive presence of those elements in any privileged contexts: their function is
mediation rather than resolution’.
46. Compare, for example, the two-part violin texture at rehearsal numbers 390+3–392
of King Priam, as Hecuba remonstrates against Helen. The illocutionary force is
starker than in the equivalent passage of the Concerto, but the content is far from
dissimilar – not least the final dyad of each of four-note phrase in the operatic scene,
frequently a major ninth.
47. See section 12 of this article.
48. Agawu, ‘Does Music Theory Need Musicology?’, p. 90.
49. See Michael Tippett, E.William Doty Lectures in Fine Arts, 2nd ser. 1976 (Austin,
TX: College of Fine Arts, University of Texas at Austin, 1979), pp. 25–45.
50. The cauldron metaphor is found at the close of Tippett’s 1954 essay ‘A Composer
and His Public’, in Moving into Aquarius, p. 100; and in the Doty Lectures, p. 39.
Stravinsky and Racine are discussed on pp. 38–9 and 19–31, respectively, of the
latter. For a fuller discussion of these points, see Clarke, The Music and Thought of
Michael Tippett, pp. 238–49.
51. Tippett, Doty Lectures, p. 11.
52. See Puffett’s discussion of this in ‘The Fugue from Tippett’s Second String
Quartet’, p. 260. The opening of Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra
also contains a treble-generated structure, as described in my ‘ “Only Half Rebel-
ling” ’, pp. 14–17.
53. Whittall, The Music of Britten and Tippett, p. 5.
54. See Max Paddison, review of Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Music Analysis,
6/iii (1987), pp. 372 and 367–71.
55. Kramer, Musical Meaning, p. 5.
56. Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, p. 12.
58. Kramer, Musical Meaning, p. 20 (emphases added).
59. Kramer, Musical Meaning, pp. 21 and 22.
60. ‘Transcendental’ refers here to the conditions of possibility of knowledge. See
Hooper’s discussion in The Discourse of Musicology, pp. 48–53.
61. Kramer, ‘Musicology and Meaning’, p. 7.

358 david clarke
62. Kramer, Musical Meaning, p. 20 (emphasis added).

64. Street, review of Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, p. 113.
65. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 95; quoted in David Harvey,
The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p.
345.
66. Street, review of Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, p. 114. Kramer’s more recent
work begins to address such criticisms. In his article ‘The Mysteries of Animation:
History, Analysis and Musical Subjectivity’, Music Analysis, 20/ii (2001), pp. 153–
78, he develops a notion, adapted from ideas in Althusser and Lacan (see especially
sections 3 and 4 of this article), of a negotiation between listening subject and the
big Other (whose call is made audible in music). Under this model, the necessarily
historically contingent position from which the subject heeds the Other sets up a
gap (presumably also a locus of resistance) against the ‘always and by definition
universal’ claims of the Other (p. 160). As ever, there is much that is persuasive in
Kramer’s conceit, which continues to situate itself in ‘the interpretive habitus more
than the immediate object of interpretation’. However, this stance would seem to
foreclose the possibility of resistance already being enacted within the work itself as
a trace of a composer’s own resistance to the universal. In other words, the approach
still seems to make a fetish of the listener’s position, while downplaying the full
significance of the prior mediation of subjectivity in the musical object itself. And
Kramer makes a similarly challenging construction of musical analysis, which he
represents as inherently ‘desubjectified’ – most graphically in statements such as:
‘purely analytical discourse lies outside the discursive systems by which Western
societies “produce humanly significant” subjectivity’; and: ‘[t]o identify “human
interest” with analytical elaboration is, in effect, a linguistic mistake, a category
error’ (p. 172). It will be evident from the argument immediately following that I
take a different construction of the relationships between work, composer and
listener, and of the activity of musical analysis, which (to anticipate a later
comment) I would construe at its most effective as ‘an empathic act of virtual
recomposition’.
67. Kramer, Musical Meaning, pp. 15–16.
69. Kramer, Musical Meaning, pp. 95 and 96.
70. Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, pp. 12 and 14.
71. See also Hooper’s discussion of ‘the principle of contestability’ in The Discourse of
Musicology, pp. 63–7.
NOTE ON CONTRIBUTOR
David Clarke is Professor of Music at Newcastle University. He is co-editor
(with Eric Clarke) of Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and
Cultural Approaches (Oxford University Press, 2011).

ABSTRACT
An account of the slow movement of Tippett’s Concerto for Orchestra can be
productively interwoven with a discussion about musical meaning. This provides
a focus for the question of whether musical meaning should be regarded as
primarily intrinsic or as located within what is linguistically predicable of music
within cultural (or ‘worldly’) discourses. Methodologically, this is homologous
with a distinction between formalist and hermeneutic approaches, correspond-
ing loosely to disciplinary distinctions between music analysis and approaches of
the so-called New Musicology.The work of Lawrence Kramer is paradigmatic of
the latter, while writings by Derek Puffett, notably his analysis of Tippett’s
Second Quartet, illustrate the former.
Complementary analyses of the Lento from Tippett’s Concerto, drawing on
the composer’s second opera, King Priam, as an intertext, reveal the potential
and limitations of hermeneutics and formalism. I suggest that we should not be
misguided into an a priori privileging of one approach over the other, but instead
attempt correctly to construe the relationship between them. Kramer considers
analysis to be no more (or less) than the means to hermeneutics, and assumes the
possibility of a relatively unproblematic translation from one mode of enquiry to
the other. But the knowledge they produce is not coterminous, which leaves open
the pursuit of the musically intrinsic, as well as the question of what approaches
are suggested by the space between.


CLARKE 2011 Music Analysis

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DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2249.2011.00307.

Between Hermeneutics and Formalism: the Lento from

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) 309

2. Championing Hermeneutics (Kramer), Defending Formalism (Puffett)

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Without ascriptions of meaning, formal and analytical knowledge is inert, unac-

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

Perhaps his most provocative challenge to those of a formalist persuasion is to

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

word’.21 In this sense, then, he sits in the background of my essay as a counter-

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

Analysis I: Hermeneutics Ascendant

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

4. The Concerto’s Slow Movement and Priam’s Women

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

Aria 1 Aria 2 Aria 1 Aria 2

© 2011 The Author.

Fig.: 69 70 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

Music Analysis © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Fig.: 69 70 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Ex. 1 Tippett, King Priam: opening of Act III

dolce non troppo

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

opera of such possibilities in the name of Brechtian dramatic parsimony.37 But

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

of these (Section B, beginning at rehearsal number 84), whose opening is quoted

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Ex. 4 Tippett, Concerto for Orchestra, Lento, Section C

leggiero dolciss. cantabile ( )

non troppo cresc.

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

non troppo cresc.

con più forza più

non troppo assai

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Vla, Vlc. [whole–tone]

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

anxiety with no possibility of immediate assuagement. Members of the original

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

This is a destabilising gesture in several senses. Particularly poignant is the

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Analysis II: Formalism Rampant!

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

beginning of phrase a2 even suggests a middleground neighbour-note motion

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

© 2011 The Author.

Music Analysis © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

B : (I) [D : V // (I)] [D : IV/V V //]

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

© 2011 The Author.

9. Subjectivity beyond Measurement

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)

Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011) © 2011 The Author.

10. Out of the Void: Flux and Articulation in Section B

© 2011 The Author. Music Analysis, 30/ii–iii (2011)