How does musical harmony engage listeners in relations of desire? Where does this desire come from? Author Kenneth Smith seeks to answer these questions by analyzing works from the turn of the twentieth- century that are both harmonically enriched and psychologically complex. Desire in Chromatic Harmony yields a new theory of how chromatic chord progressions direct the listener on intricate journeys through harmonic space, mirroring the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. Smith extends this mode of enquiry into sophisticated music theory, while exploring philosophically engaged European and American composers such as Richard Strauss, Alexander Skryabin, Josef Suk, Charles Ives, and Aaron Copland. Focusing on harmony and chord progression, the book drills down into the diatonic undercurrent beneath densely chromatic and dissonant surfaces. From the obsession with death and mourning in Suk's asrael Symphony to an exploration of "perversion" in Strauss's elektra; from the Sufi mysticism of Szymanowski's Song of the Night to the failed fantasy of the American dream in Copland's The Tender Land, Desire in Chromatic Harmony cuts a path through the dense forests of chromatic complexity, revealing the psychological make-up of post-Wagnerian psychodynamic music.
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.
AcknowledgementsPrefaceChapter 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.
Jonathan De Souza, University of Western Ontario Don Wright Faculty of Music) De Souza, Jonathan (Assistant Professor, Assistant Professor, Jonathan de Souza, Jonathan, de Souza
Steven Rings, University of Chicago) Rings, Steven (Assistant Professor of Music and the Humanities, Assistant Professor of Music and the Humanities, RINGS, Rings
William Rothstein, City University of New York) Rothstein, William (Professor of Music Theory, Professor of Music Theory, Queens College and The Graduate Center