KEVIN KORSYN

THE DEATH
REVISITED

OF

MUSICAL ANALYSIS? THE CONCEPT

OF

UNITY

I
In `The Concept of Unity and Musical Analysis', Robert Morgan examines
doctrines expressed by five writers on music: Kofi Agawu, Daniel Chua,
Joseph Dubiel, Jonathan Kramer and me. We all stand accused of the same
heresy, a lapse in analytical orthodoxy that he calls `anti-unitarianism' (p. 8).
Since this `opposition to unity' is no transient temptation, `but a major
development associated with a distinguished group of scholars' (p. 8), it must
be refuted before it leads others into error. Morgan fears that the `unitydenying disposition' (p. 7) will undermine basic tenets of the analyst's faith,
because it originates in `a comprehensive recent epistemological transformation
that has influenced attitudes about truth and knowledge' (p. 22). By embracing
a postmodernist notion that `all language is necessarily metaphorical', antiunitarianism `eliminates the possibility of an objective account of music' (p. 22)
and even destroys our belief that music makes sense: `analysis is based on the
assumption that music ``makes sense'' without which it makes no sense itself as
a discipline' (p. 27). Ultimately this retreat from making sense will cause the
analytical enterprise to sink into a kind of mute self-abnegation:
The mere claim that a composition lacks unity necessarily silences the analyst
. . . once Mozart is said to `lack motivic precedent or consequent', that Haydn's
outburst is `gratuitous', that Brahms's quartet contains `historical contradictions' analytical commentary ceases, immediately and entirely. (p. 27)

If Ezra Pound was right when he described a professor as `someone who has to
talk for an hour', then the prospect of falling silent is indeed a kind of death for
an academic. What Morgan fears, then, is death the death of music analysis as
we know it.
I welcome Morgan's vigorous and uncompromising defence of his
principles, because it gives me the opportunity to bring together arguments
I have made over a number of years to unify them in order to clarify my
ideas on this topic. Once I have done so, it will become apparent that
rethinking the concept of unity does not entail abandoning the cardinal virtues
of sense and objectivity, and whilst I am reluctant to generalise about Agawu,
Chua, Dubiel and Kramer, I nonetheless believe that they share my respect for
these values and have more in common with Morgan than he realises. Although
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Morgan makes a number of trenchant observations about the music he

discusses, in his zeal to rebut anti-unitarianism he greatly simplifies my
position, interpreting my attitude towards unity as one of outright opposition,
whereas it involves considerable nuance, complexity and ambivalence; it is not
a giddy celebration of heterogeneity for its own sake, nor is it a pure and simple
rejection of unity. Other readers of my work, including Nicholas Cook and
Mark Everist, have recognised the complexity of my critical stance; in their
introduction to Rethinking Music, they write: `Korsyn does not, presumably,
wish to privilege heterogeneity over unity, but rather to establish an orientation
in which both concepts become available to the analyst' (Cook and Everist
1999, p. 3).
Why we should hesitate to give our unqualified allegiance to unity as the
supreme value for analysis becomes clear if we historicise our notions about
unity, asking how these notions arose. This question seems especially urgent
since many of our current models for criticism in music and the other arts
developed during the early romantic period and continue to exert a powerful
influence, whether we realise it or not; M. H. Abrams, for example, dates `the
making of the modern critical mind' to the lifetime of Coleridge and notes that
concepts developed then continue to operate even in criticism `that professes to
be anti-romantic' (Abrams 1953, p. vii). Considered historically, unity is by no
means a unified, singular concept; there have been multiple and conflicting
accounts of unity, of what it is and why it might be desirable. In the rhetorical
tradition, for example, the unity of the oration was a pragmatic affair, a means
to an end rather than an end in itself, in which adhering to a central theme was
recommended as the best way to persuade an audience, but not fetishised for its
own sake. Comparisons between the form of the oration and the human body,
for example, were understood as suggestive metaphors, as part of the tradition
of discussing rhetoric in rhetorical terms, of using figurative language to
explain the craft of figurative language, but with no intention to take these
metaphors at face value or to claim that the work was literally alive.
A decisive shift in attitudes towards unity occurred with the development of
aesthetics as an independent region of philosophy starting in the mideighteenth century. In Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche,
Andrew Bowie links the birth of aesthetics to `the growing centrality of
subjectivity in modern societies' and the increasing urgency of subjectivity as a
problem for philosophy (Bowie 1990, p. 253). In The Ideology of the Aesthetic,
Terry Eagleton reinforces this sense of a rupture in the history of the aesthetic;
according to Eagleton, in the late-eighteenth century the aesthetic became a
`surrogate discourse' in which the unity of the work of art provided a
compelling model for the unity and autonomy of the emerging bourgeois
subject. This adds a new ideological twist to the idea of artistic unity: as the
unity of the work of art came to be modelled on that of the human subject, it is
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now our own unity that is at stake in discussions of artistic unity, and this may
explain our frequently intense investment in the idea of musical unity.
Eagleton coins a wonderfully suggestive term for this new property of the work
of art: cryptosubjectivity (Eagleton 1990, p. 169). The following quotation
from Eagleton strikes me as fundamental in explaining the difference between
earlier pragmatic concepts of unity and the emerging idea of artistic unity as
the correlate of the subject:
Conceptions of the unity and integrity of the work of art are commonplaces of
an `aesthetic' discourse which stretches back to classical antiquity; but what
emerges from such familiar notions in the late eighteenth century is the curious
idea of the work of art as a kind of subject. It is, to be sure, a peculiar kind of
subject, this newly defined artefact, but it is a subject nonetheless. And the
historical pressures which give rise to such a strange style of thought, unlike
concepts of aesthetic unity or autonomy in general, by no means extend back to
the epoch of Aristotle. (Ibid., p. 4)

This cryptosubjectivity of aesthetic discourse is one reason why a

reconsideration of the notion of artistic autonomy in our time, through
concepts such as that of intertextuality, has gone hand-in-hand with critiques
of the `Cartesian' subject (see Korsyn 1988 for further discussion).1
One could hardly find more suggestive evidence of the links between
concepts of personal identity and aesthetic autonomy than Morgan's anxiety
that scepticism about unity will drive analysis towards an impasse where `it
makes no sense itself as a discipline' (p. 27). For him, analysis is so closely
bound up with unity that to lose one is to lose the other, surrendering the very
rationale, purpose and identity not only of our discipline, but of ourselves as
analysts. Given these historical connections between aesthetics and
subjectivity, a discipline such as music analysis that derives its identity from
its association with aesthetic objects, and grounds its cultural authority in
establishing their unity, should re-evaluate its fundamental assumptions,
beginning with the relationship between the disciplinary subject and its
musical objects.
II
The conjunction of aesthetics and subjectivity was a central issue in `Brahms
Research and Aesthetic Ideology' (Korsyn 1993a), the essay of mine that
provoked Morgan's response. Although my views have evolved considerably
since that essay appeared more than a decade ago (see Korsyn 2003), the
position presented there is still worth defending in its basic outlines, particularly since Morgan's summary of my conclusions omitted any mention of the
philosophical context I developed to support them. My essay used close
readings of some recent studies of Brahms's music to explore wider ideological
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issues in the field of musical scholarship, including the tendency to appropriate

works of art to confirm rather than to challenge our identities, and to provide
reassuring images of our own wholeness as individuals. The historical
references in Brahms, to which so many writers have called attention, are a
key issue here, because these references have often been recruited to represent
tradition as a narrative of seamless continuity between past and present; thus
the unity of the individual work becomes a microcosm that encapsulates the
unity of tradition as a historical process, and both then validate the unity of the
human subject. Karl Geiringer's essay `Brahms the Ambivalent', for example,
seems to epitomise this sort of approach. After assembling a catalogue of the
contradictions in Brahms's personality, he blandly reassures us that Brahms's
art transcends any such dichotomies and reconciles all oppositions: `there is no
conflict between old and new, between experimental and traditional; instead, a
peaceful dialogue leads to a harmonious solution' (quoted in Korsyn 1993a,
pp. 923). Geiringer constructs an idealised image that neutralises conflict: not
only must the `solution' always be `harmonious', but even the `dialogue' that
leads to it must be `peaceful'. Although meant as a tribute to Brahms, this
image of an art bleached of any conflict recalls the process through which the
Victorians imagined Greek sculpture as a world of pristine white marble,
despite evidence that it had been brightly painted, and represented Greek art
as a realm of `sweetness and light', purging it of anything demonic or
irrational.
Despite its greater analytical sophistication, I found traces of this same
ideology in David Lewin's essay `Brahms, His Past, and Modes of Music
Theory', particularly in his belief that Brahms's music involves `an ongoing
process of musical synthesis' in which different `historical modes of musical
thought' are reconciled (Lewin 1990, p. 13). In the first movement of the
Quartet Op. 51 No. 1, for example, Lewin finds a `dialectic synthesis' in which
`two radically different historical modes of musical rhetoric', which he
associates with Beethoven and Mozart respectively, `can interact as an essential
feature of his compositional discourse' (ibid., p. 14). Where Lewin and I
disagree is not about the existence of these historical modes but about their
meaning; I hear a much greater ambivalence towards the past than he does, `a
less reassuring relationship between past and present' (Korsyn 1993a, p. 96).
Whilst our different interpretations may reflect legitimate personal differences,
one of my claims in `Brahms Research' was that Lewin's position might also
conceal unexamined assumptions, particularly concerning parallels between
the way he constructs the music as an object for analysis and how he represents
his own identity as a theorist/analyst.
To explore this issue, and to uncover the ways in which my response to
Lewin provoked Morgan's response to me, we shall need to examine Lewin's
analysis in more detail. According to Lewin, the opening of Brahms's quartet
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Ex. 1 Brahms, String Quartet Op. 51 No. 1, first movement, bars 123
Allegro

cresc.

cresc.

cresc.

cresc.

espress.

14

19

dim.

dim.

dim.

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(see Ex. 1) integrates the tightness of Beethovenian `sentence rhetoric' with the
expansiveness of Mozartian `lyricism'. The sentence rhetoric, involving `the
statement, development, and liquidation of a motivic model', is one familiar
from many of Beethoven's first movements, and Lewin cites the beginnings of
Op. 2 No. 1, the `Waldstein', the `Appassionata' and the Fifth Symphony as
precedents (Lewin 1990, p. 13). As Morgan correctly observes, the proportions
of Brahms's sentence differ somewhat from Beethoven's typical procedures,
and its phrase rhythm is more complex (p. 15). However, this does not affect
Lewin's larger point that Brahms expects us to recognise `the gist of a rhetorical
form' associated with Beethoven, in which `the motivic rhetoric leads to a
climactic half-cadence on the dominant, followed by a pregnant pause' (Lewin
1990, p. 13). It is a Beethovenian way to signal the beginning of a big movement,
powerful but concentrated, and it evokes Beethoven's heroic style. Bakhtin
would call this an artistic image or representation of another's language, and
such images can be stylised without becoming unrecognisable. Indeed,
recognising such cultural references is a vital part of musical experience for
many listeners, as significant in its own way as our appreciation of structural
relationships within a single piece. I think, then, that Morgan's insistence that
the passage is `fundamentally non-Beethovenian' (p. 27) is mistaken, and his
quibble with Lewin over this point may reveal deeper anxieties about whether
the analysis of internal structure alone can wholly account for how we make
sense of music, given that pieces may derive part of their coherence from
references to music outside them (see Korsyn 2003, pp. 97101).
Whereas Beethoven, in his heroic works, typically follows the pregnant pause
with `an immediate return to the opening motivic model, forcefully plunging on
into the bridge material', Brahms waits until b. 23 for the counterstatement
(Lewin 1990, p. 13). Instead, in what Lewin considers `an abrupt shift of
rhetorical mode', Brahms `explores the dominant in a complex and lengthy
trope' that Lewin associates with Mozartian lyricism. He suggests that the
beginning of Mozart's `Dissonance' Quartet K. 465 provides a possible model
for Brahms's procedure here if we disregard Mozart's cross-relations; a passage
in the String Quintet K. 515 offers another precedent. Lewin finds `the very
balanced periodic structure' in Brahms's bars 1122 `utterly foreign to the
sentence rhetoric' (ibid., p. 14). Underlying these differences, however, are
subtle motivic continuities, and Lewin uses a voice-leading reduction to show
how a chromatic motive spanning bars 14 (GF]GA[A\) appears in
retrograde form in the bass of bars 922.
This analysis has much to recommend it, and in 1993 I wrote that `any
critique must first acknowledge the considerable appeal of [Lewin's] position'
(Korsyn 1993a, p. 93). Rather than immediately taking sides, however, I
suggest we investigate the sources of this appeal examining the rhetorical
strategies, for example, through which Lewin seeks to persuade us that a
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synthesis has occurred, looking at the values and ideals that make him frame
the piece in particular ways, and situating his work in an ongoing disciplinary
conversation to understand how he consolidates an identity for himself, even as
he constructs the music as an object for analysis. This turn to the rhetoric and
politics of interpretation seems especially pertinent in the present context of
my debate with Morgan, which reminds us that the sort of statements that
scholars make about music occur within an institutional setting of power
relations among rival factions that turns academic discourse into a struggle for
the cultural authority to speak about music.
When placed within an institutional framework, Lewin's essay, which was
first presented at the International Brahms Conference in Washington DC in
1983, can be viewed, in part, as a response to charges made by Joseph Kerman
and others that music theory and systematic analysis have been formalistic and
ahistorical, ignoring context because of a myopic focus on internal structures,
on what is often called `the music itself' (Kerman 1980). Although some have
reacted to such accusations by mounting a strident defence of compositional
autonomy, Lewin's response is more subtle, and it works through incorporation rather than opposition. By arguing that Brahms's structures carry
`dialectic historical baggage' (Lewin 1990, p. 15), he effectively turns historical
context into part of `the music itself', subsuming the historians' project within
his own. Rather than being a surface phenomenon that might be deduced from
a comparison of many compositional details across a given repertoire, Lewin
locates history at the deep structural levels that have traditionally been the
province of the theorist. This move combines two explanatory modes, two
professional languages often associated with different academic factions: that of
technical analysis, including voice-leading sketches and `hidden' motivic
relationships, and that of historical musicology, including the tracing of
compositional sources and models. Uniting these two perspectives consolidates
a powerful subject position for Lewin as an observer for whom structure and
history can be viewed from a single point of intelligibility.
The synthesis between past and present in Brahms for which Lewin argues
depends on a synthesis of disciplinary methods and languages, and involves a
narrative of legitimation that defends certain types of musical engagement from
the challenges posed by Kerman's brand of criticism. By combining the
rhetorics of history and theory into a unified argument, Lewin `subtly
reproduces the dialectic he ascribes to Brahms' (Korsyn 1993a, p. 96). Lewin
thus identifies with Brahms as someone who is caught between, and mediates
between, conflicting languages. Since analysis is a kind of performance, we
play a role in the construction of our analyses; this sort of identification with
the objects of our analyses may be inevitable, but we need to interrogate such
identifications and critique them (Korsyn 2003). Morgan might see this
admission as a surrender of objectivity, but it is actually an attempt to come to
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terms with a subject-object dialectic in which neither the analyst nor the music
is self-identical.
Although I share Lewin's desire to move beyond formalism by opening the
process of analysis to historical and contextual considerations, I question
whether a synthesis or fusion of disciplines can fully achieve this goal,
because the notion of synthesis may itself be a formalist ideal. In Lewin's
case, his attempt to merge methods seems to institute a hierarchy in which
history is subordinated to theory and treated as one more structure to analyse.
In his account, the formerly anonymous structures identified by analysis now
bear proper names with historical associations (the Beethovenian sentence,
the Mozartian periodic structure), but they still belong to a grid of logical
relations in a spatialised and atemporal structure; history is here represented
as the closed circle of a timeless order. Although Lewin grants Brahms a
history, it is a purely musical one that leads from one autonomous structure
to another, and that treats the score as the primary object of study. My
disagreement with Lewin, then, involved more than different reactions to
Brahms; it was also about the different disciplinary configurations that
authorise our interpretations. Other sorts of disciplinary interactions that do
not involve hierarchical relations may better enable us to transcend
formalism, and we might imagine a dialogue among methods that does not
fuse them into the synthesis of a unitary perspective. Analytical structures
and historical meanings may operate according to different logics, and
musical experience may include multiple forms of sense-making, some of
them incommensurable.
One way to explore these other forms of sense-making is to examine the role
of the listener in this historical dialectic. Lewin seems to imagine a relatively
passive role for the listener; it is difficult to see what he expects us to do with
Brahms's historical allusions beyond noting that they exist. But as listeners we
do not merely recognise or identify cultural references we can also identify
with them or against them. What might Brahms's allusions represent, then,
for a listener? Alluding to Beethoven's heroic style, for example, might evoke
not only a distinctive musical idiom but also various cultural images associated
with Beethoven the image, say, of heroic resolution or tragic resignation, so
that musical representations of compositional styles might be one way in which
subjectivity is mediated through music. The Beethovenian rhetoric might be
heard as a model of a particular mode of subjectivity, as a mode of
consciousness with particular historical associations.
This raises another question: what attitude does Brahms take, or invite us to
take as listeners, towards these allusions? For me, one clue lies in understanding how Brahms frames or contextualises his allusions. To take a
relatively simple example, consider the two chords in bars 910, which belong
neither to the Beethovenian sentence of bars 18 nor to the Mozartian lyricism
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of bars 1122, but constitute a sort of no-man's land perched between the two
rhetorics. Although Lewin notes that `Brahms temporarily relaxes the tension
of the climactic dominant' in these two bars (Lewin 1990, p. 14), they hardly
figure in his analysis, and may offer a point of resistance to the synthesis he
describes. By repeating bars 78 a tone lower, changing the dynamics from
forte to piano, and requiring the first violin to leap down more than two
octaves, bars 910 could be heard as a negation of what preceded. When
Brahms makes a heroic Beethovenian gesture in bars 18 and immediately
seems to retract it, this can be heard as a critique of Beethoven not of the
`real' Beethoven, of course, but of the musical representation of Beethoven that
Brahms has just presented, along with its associated cultural images. If the
allusion is interpreted as also being a representation of subjectivity, then the
critique of Beethoven does not only involve a musical idiom but also a mode of
subjectivity. Rather than the continuity between past and present that Lewin's
synthesis fosters, we have a discontinuity. Instead of identifying directly with
Beethoven, or hearing the music as a spontaneous expression of heroic feelings,
we become aware of a certain distance or ambivalence; past and present are not
simultaneous here. Rather than resolve historical contradictions, Brahms
exacerbates them so that we become aware of real differences in historical time.
I took this critique further (Korsyn 1993a) by suggesting that the digression
that begins with the two chords of bars 910 invokes a gesture that Beethoven
would have confined to a recapitulation. In the `Waldstein', for example (see
Exs 2 and 3), the difference between the exposition and the recapitulation
establishes a clear hierarchy of functions; the identity of the theme is established
in the exposition, and stands out against the digression that expands the theme
in the recapitulation. From the standpoint of subjectivity, I described this as
`the crisis and reintegration of a monologic subject' (ibid., p. 99), as the self
encountering otherness in the form of threats to its tonal and thematic integrity,
and converting the other into the same. The relationship of the theme to the
digression could be described through various binary oppositions, including
primary/secondary, original/derivative and container/contained. Since
Brahms's digression, however, is intrinsic to the identity of his theme, we
could say his theme deconstructs such oppositions, deconstructs them in
Derrida's sense of overturning the hierarchy of functions. This could be
interpreted both as the critique of a certain Beethovenian procedure and as the
critique of a certain type of self (or of a particular mode of listening to and
identifying with the music).
Morgan took these remarks as a pure and simple rejection of unity, even
interpreting my critique of Lewin as a critique of Brahms, as if by observing the
historical contradictions to which his music points I was somehow denying its
logical coherence or accusing it of logical contradictions. Thus Morgan mounts
an earnest defence of the integrity and logic of Brahms's structures, totally
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Ex. 2 Beethoven, Sonata Op. 53, first movement, bars 114

Allegro con brio

cresc.

12

decresc.

missing my point. He presents a Schenkerian voice-leading sketch of the

beginning of the quartet, for example (p. 16), and imagines that this constitutes
some sort of refutation of my position. But, as we have seen, Lewin had already
offered a (slightly different) voice-leading sketch of this passage, and it should
have given Morgan pause to realise that I did not by any means dispute or
reject this sketch; moreover, although I saw no need to supplement Lewin's
sketch with one of my own, I could easily have done so, and have frequently
used Schenkerian analyses, and other traditional methods of analysis, in my
work (see Korsyn 1991, 1993b and 1996). Other commentators on my work,
such as Arnold Whittall, have recognised that my rethinking of unity does not
constitute an abandonment of analytical techniques or a rejection of making
sense:
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In his work on Brahms, Korsyn argues that it is the presence of multiple

perspectives on tonality itself, irrespective of any wider hermeneutic factors,
that undermines any simplistic formalist interpretation . . . Korsyn does not
propose that, in Brahms, tonality itself is dismembered and disarticulated;
rather, he offers a reading of the Romance, Op. 118 No. 5, in which
Schenkerian analysis plays a vital role in showing that orthodox voice-leading is
compatible with the presence of tonal instability, by way of a `conflict of levels'.
(Whittall 1999, p. 89)

Since Morgan himself discussed Korsyn (1996) in his review of the collection
in which it appeared, I can only assume he is aware of my use of Schenkerian
analysis (Morgan 1999).
Morgan also makes some observations about motivic connections in the
quartet, noting that `despite the shift in ``rhetoric'' motivic links are palpable'
(p. 16), again intending this as a refutation of me. But Lewin had already
observed motivic connections in this piece; and had Morgan asked himself why
I did not take issue with Lewin's statements about motives, he might have had
second thoughts about whether he had understood the basis of my critique.
Indeed, I welcome Morgan's discussion of motives, and find it insightful and
convincing. But it has no bearing whatsoever on my argument about historical
contradictions.
Ex. 3 Beethoven, Sonata Op. 53, first movement, bars 16674
166

decresc.

171

174

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When I speak of historical contradictions, or heterogeneity, or intertextuality, or a plurality of musical discourses in Brahms or any other music,
this is not an indirect way of saying that the voice-leading does not cohere; it is
not an attack on motivic logic or a way of denying that the music makes sense.
It is part of a search, common to many thinkers in the twentieth century and
beyond, for other units of analysis, and thus for other unities, that go beyond
those of grammar and logic. In developing his concept of discursive formations,
for example, Foucault was interested in isolating types of statements that do
not coincide with the unity of the sentence, which is a unit of grammar, or the
unity of the proposition, which is a unit of logic (Foucault 1972). Similarly
Bakhtin contrasted the utterance as a unit of speech communication with the
sentence as an abstract unit of language, and he maintained that linguists have
been much too preoccupied with the sentence as the paradigm for understanding language, at the expense of understanding utterances. He appealed for
a `metalinguistics' that would analyse transactions among complete utterances
(Bakhtin 1986). In much the same way, I have argued that music analysis has
been almost exclusively concerned with the musical analogues of grammar,
syntax and logic, whilst neglecting the potential of the utterance, and other
forms of intertextuality, as models for musical analysis (Korsyn 1999).
I have tried to dispel some of the misconceptions that these new forms of
unity and sense-making can arouse:
Although intertextuality may resemble a conspiracy to deny all unity and
coherence, such fears are misplaced. When Francis Barker, for example, calls
Hamlet `a contradictory, transitional text', it does not suddenly degenerate into
nonsense; the words remain comprehensible; a line such as `I am but mad northnorth-west' does not suffer a sea-change, mutating into `colorless green ideas
sleep furiously'. Logical or grammatical coherence is not the issue. It is a question
of acknowledging other unities, other sources of coherence, that may cut across
and subvert those we have been trained to recognise. (Korsyn 2003, p. 38)

Curiously, at the end of his article, Morgan seems to embrace something close
to my position. After more than forty pages of denouncing postmodernist and
poststructuralist views of music, he suddenly reverses himself and starts
quoting Foucault and Barthes, and finds that `far from simply denying old
unities, Barthes seeks new ones' (p. 44). This is what I have been saying for
years, and if this is what Morgan recommends, we have more in common than
he is willing to acknowledge. But given his appeal to Barthes, why does he
denounce my engagement with literary theory? He writes: `at the very moment
when we should discover what insight a non-synthesising view can provide . . .
the author turns to literary theory to Paul de Man and Mickael [sic] Bakhtin'
(p. 17).
Morgan's apparent belief that my discussion of historical contradictions was
about logical contradictions may explain some curious failures in
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communication between our positions. His conclusion to his response to my

essay deserves to be quoted at length, because it completely misrepresents my
views:
Since this is essentially all that Korsyn says about Brahms, his analytical point
remains purely negative: that by ignoring Beethoven's example, Brahms
engenders irreconcilable conflicts. But why must Brahms docilely follow
Beethoven's lead in order to avoid contradictions? (Is Mendelssohn's E major
[sic] Fugue, Op. 35 flawed because it opens in Bach's footsteps but then
gradually transforms itself into something quite different, making use of an
extended accelerando and crescendo in the process?) That this position underlies
a supposedly `postmodernist' reading only compounds the oddity. (p. 17)

With all due respect to Morgan, this stands my article on its head, and it is not
surprising he found my conclusions odd. Here is what I wrote: `Although
Brahms invites us to hear his quartet in relation to Beethoven, he does not offer
us any easy continuities with the past. He dismembers and disarticulates
Beethoven's procedures' (Korsyn 1993a, p. 98). Morgan seems to think I was
criticising Brahms for not slavishly following Beethoven, when I was praising
him for critiquing Beethoven for creating a musical representation of
Beethoven's heroic style but then distancing himself from it so that we become
aware of historical discontinuities. No-one reading Morgan's summary of my
essay would have the slightest idea that I was talking about subjectivity,
meaning history and intertextuality in Brahms; these terms do not figure in his
discussion at all. In any event, other readers have drawn quite different
conclusions from my article, among them David Lewin himself. Shortly after
`Brahms Research' appeared in 1993, I received a warm and generous letter
from Lewin. It began: `Thank you for the excellent critique of the Brahms
piece in Music Analysis! My assumption that there is a ``synthesis'' going on
now appears to me not only disputable but unnecessary' (Lewin 1993).
NOTE
1.

Before these books by Bowie and Eagleton appeared (both published in 1990), I
had stumbled upon similar insights myself in an essay called `Schenker and
Kantian Epistemology', published in 1988 (Korsyn 1988; see also Korsyn 1994).
I was trying to recover Schenker's unspoken problematic the implicit questions
to which his work responds; in particular, I wondered why he posed the question
of unity in the terms he did, and why he saw the Ursatz or fundamental structure
as a satisfying answer to the question of the unity and identity of the work of art.
Gradually I realised that there is an uncanny resemblance between the way that
Schenker ultimately came to conceive musical unity and the way that Kant
imagines the unity of a cognitive subject, of an I that thinks. Before Kant could
establish the validity of the categories for experience, he had to refute Hume's
scepticism about personal identity, the so-called bundle theory that a person is

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KEVIN KORSYN

merely `a bundle of impressions'. In a move that Kant considered the highest

principle of his philosophy, which he called the transcendental unity of
apperception, he showed that for thoughts to exist at all, they must belong to
an I that thinks. A cognitive subject is a series of mental events unfolding in time
and unified by the `I think'. But this Kantian version of the Cartesian cogito is
not a unique soul or principle of individuality; it is merely a neutral vehicle for
thoughts, having no specific content, and the same for all persons: there is only
one `I think'. In much the same way, a tonal composition as Schenker
understands it is a connected series of musical events, unfolding in time and
unified by the mental retention of the Ursatz. Since all forms of the Ursatz derive
from the overtone series, and since that series is ultimately generated by a single
note, the composition radiates from a single point, just as the subject is the
prolongation in time of the `I think'. For Schenker, then, piecehood the
property of belonging to a piece resembles personhood, as Kant conceived it.
I do not claim, of course, that Schenker consciously adapted the Ursatz from
Kant. But the transcendental unity of apperception was the single most
influential aspect of Kant's philosophy and a key point of departure for German
Idealism. It provided a widely disseminated cultural model that helps to explain
why Schenker posed the question of unity in the terms he did. The connections
between aesthetics and subjectivity to which Bowie and Eagleton have called
attention make the transfer of Kant's principle to the aesthetic realm seem
eminently plausible.

REFERENCES
Abrams, M. H., 1953: The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition (London: Oxford University Press).
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1986: Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee,
ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press).
Bowie, Andrew, 1990: Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche
(Manchester: University of Manchester Press).
Cook, Nicholas, and Mark Everist, 1999: `Introduction', in Cook and Everist
(eds), Rethinking Music (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 116.
Foucault, Michel, 1972: The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Pantheon Books).
Eagleton, Terry, 1990: The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).
Kerman, Joseph, 1980: `How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out', Critical
Inquiry, 7, pp. 31131.
Korsyn, Kevin, 1988: `Schenker and Kantian Epistemology', Theoria, 3, pp. 158.
_____, 1991: `Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence', Music Analysis,
10/iii, pp. 372.
_____, 1993a: `Brahms Research and Aesthetic Ideology', Music Analysis, 12/i,
pp. 89103.
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_____, 1993b: `J.W.N. Sullivan and the Heiliger Dankgesang: Questions of

Meaning in Late Beethoven', Beethoven Forum, 2, pp. 13374.
_____, 1994: `Schenker's Organicism Reexamined', Integral, 7, pp. 82118.
_____, 1996: `Directional Tonality and Intertextuality', in William Kinderman and
Harald Krebs (eds), The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press), pp. 4583.
_____, 1999: `Beyond Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Influence, and
Dialogue', in Cook and Everist (eds), Rethinking Music, pp. 5572.
_____, 2003: Decentering Music: a Critique of Contemporary Musical Research (New
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Lewin, David, 1990: `Brahms, His Past, and Modes of Music Theory', in George
S. Bozarth (ed.), Brahms Studies: Analytical and Historical Perspectives
(Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 1328.
_____, 1993: personal communication.
Morgan, Robert P., 1999: `Article/Review: Are There Two Tonal Practices in
Nineteenth-Century Music? The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century
Tonality, William Kinderman and Harald Krebs, eds.', Journal of Music
Theory, 43/i, pp. 13564.
_____, 2003: `The Concept of Unity and Musical Analysis', Music Analysis, 22/iii,
pp. 750.
Whittall, Arnold, 1999: `Autonomy/Heteronomy: the Contexts of Musicology', in
Cook and Everist (eds), Rethinking Music, pp. 73101.

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