Desire in Chromatic Harmony

Kenneth M. Smith is Professor of Music Theory at University of Liverpool and serves as Vice President of the Society for Music Analysis. He is the author of Skryabin, Philosophy and the Music of Desire and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis.

• AcknowledgementsPreface Chapter 1: A Linguistic Theory of Chromatic Harmonic Substitution and Progression in the Diatonic UnconsciousChapter 2: Romantic ProvenanceChapter 3: Transcending Root Motion: Productive Death Drives and Cybernetic Cycles in Charles Ives & Aaron CoplandChapter 4: Karol Szymanowski's Dominant Drive Model and the Excess of the CycleChapter 5: Tragedy and the Gaze of the Living Dead: Functional Harmonic Rotation in Strauss's Elektra Chapter 6: The Thanatonic and the Hexatonic: Repetition, Mourning, and "Mother" in Suk's AsraelChapter 7: When Octatonic and Hexatonic Collide: Skryabin's Accelerationist Last Piano SonataEpilogue: The Way Forwards (and Backwards) Bibliography

In this simultaneously psychodynamic and music-theoretical discussion of the Oedipal triangle of Tonic, Subdominant, and Dominant functions in fin-de-siècle music, Kenneth Smith offers a potent new theory of how late tonal musicplayed its part in the development of modern concepts of psychological desire. Scintillating, challenging, and always engagingly written, this book makes a decisive contribution to our understanding of the libidinal landscape of musical modernity.