Abstract
A hermeneutic, performative analysis implies going beyond formal, harmonic analysis to include rhetorical, topical, and dramaturgical issues. Musical aspects related to language, such as rhetoric and narrativity, tend to enliven a performance with a communicative sense. This paper draws specific performative conclusions from its analytical findings, regarding tempo, articulation, timbre, or dynamics. Musical signification has been occasionally equated with a bodily reaction to listening, singing, dancing, and playing. Hepokoski and Darcy, in their turn, have underlined the importance of the “presence of absences” in analysis, that is, of looking into what is missing in the score. Both assertions have inspired this author and performer a hermeneutic analysis of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata “Appassionata”. In his op. 57, Beethoven seems to be experimenting with the symbolic value of a represented absence. Fundamental musical parameters such as harmony, melody, or movement are systematically ruled out in the three main themes of the sonata. How can these voids be understood hermeneutically? Too often, academic analysis remains unrelated to anything else but itself, as if mirroring the outdated ideology of so-called “absolute music”. On the other hand, performers have been relying on their only intuition to reach conclusions that go beyond harmonic and formal scrutiny, ignoring decades of serious study on music’s semantics and symbols. Establishing links between performance and analysis enriches performers with criteria and theorists with signification and cogency.
Keywords: Beethoven, “Appassionata” op. 57, performative, hermeneutic analysis, expressive absence.
About the author
Orchestra conductor (Vienna University), philologist (Barcelona University), PhD in musicology (UAB) with a thesis on Gustav Mahler, supervised by the late Raymond Monelle. After a decade devoted exclusively to interpretation, conducting above all opera in Central Europe, he combines since his going back to Catalonia practical musicianship with teaching and research at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya. As a conductor, his former involvement with the Vienna Volksoper (1995-1997) stands out. Joan's main field of research is Musical Signification, especially those regions on the edge to literature and language: hermeneutic, rhetoric, poetic metres, narrativity. In recent years, he has also been involved in research projects on performance studies, where his experiences as a performer and as a teacher converge in a hermeneutic, performer-oriented analysis. Grimalt is a member of the international research group on Musical Signification led by Eero Tarasti. He has presented and published most of his research at the periodical international conferences of this group. In his last book, Mapping Musical Signification (Springer, 2020), Joan gathers his colleagues' and his own research on musical meaning in a systematic textbook. He is currently preparing a continuation of that volume, Analysing Musical Signification, focused on case studies and on a theory of musical rhetoric and narrative.
DOI: 10.47809/MP.2023.38.01.01
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