Entextualization and Clara Schumann’s Nineteenth-Century Pianism

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

4:30-6:00 p.m.

Logan Center 801

Please join the Sound and Society Workshop this Wednesday, March 11, as we return to our regular location in Logan Center 801 to welcome Andrew Malilay White (PhD Candidate, Music). Caleb Herrmann will serve as a discussant. Andrew will present on a chapter-in-progress from his dissertation, which he describes as follows:

How did pianists of the nineteenth century practice for improvisation, and how can their ways of practicing affect our view of musical texts and works? This paper develops an entextualization framework to describe how composer-improvisers assembled their musical materials in the mid-nineteenth century. Entextualization describes a process where utterances are taken out of their original settings and re-used with new contexts and aims. I establish a theoretical framework and then use it to describe Clara Schumann’s improvisatory and compositional process, showing how she alters not only her musical materials (as practiced “passages”) but also her fashioning of her own image as a performer.

A musical vocabulary based on works and authorship may not adequately address the gradations of contingency beneath the veneer of musical works the composition process in this time period. Instead, this paper starts with is the dissemination and acquisition of skills and bodily techniques. I cast mid-nineteenth century piano improvisation as a practice that draws from tried-and-true “passages.” These passages are defined by figuration and physical approach rather than scale-degree patterns or middleground structure. I trace the changes undergone by a “double-stopped” figuration from one of Hummel’s 24 Études, Op. 125 (1831). This figure appears in new contexts not only in Clara Schumann’s Caprices en forme de valse, Op. 2 (1832), and Romance variée, Op. 3 (1833), but also in Friedrich Wieck’s Pianoforte Studien (1875), a collection Schumann used in her practice before its posthumous publication.

Entextualization, a concept from the work of Michael Silverstein and Gregory Urban in linguistic anthropology, is used to describe how portions of continuous discourse are adapted and treated as objects in new contexts—how utterances “become text” in what we might understand as a Barthesian view of “cultural text.” Music contributes something crucial and corporeal to this anthropological framework. The regimented context of daily practice at the piano in the mid-nineteenth century shows how bodily skill acquisition is essential to the re-use of “texts.” The social position of the performing body, furthermore, has more relevance for the process of entextualization than previously discussed. This is illustrated here by examining Schumann’s self-fashioning of her image as an actor within a bygone music history, and thus as an authoritative “interpreter.”

This attitude toward text differs significantly from the one that Robert Hatten and Michael Klein exemplify in their work. Hatten and Klein begin by “factoring out the work’s ‘proper’ style features” in the attempt to avoid “a trivial intertextuality with endless other works in the same style” (Hatten 75). “Intertext,” for them, must contribute to a hermeneutic reading of a work. The framework established in this paper, in contrast, treats all instances of shared figuration as intertextual (or, more properly, entextual). Ingrid Monson (2009), in reference to ensemble jazz performance, has discussed the cycle of “co(n)textualization,” a concept also coined by Silverstein and Urban that is complementary to the entextualization discussed here. Gjerdingen and Bourne (2015) and Zbikowski (2017) have established construction-grammar theories of music that show similarly “flattened” properties. This paper, however, focuses on the bodily mode of construction and does not set musical meaning as an end goal.

Midcentury piano repertoires, I ultimately argue, are best served by a decentered theory of musical creation based on entextualization and bodily skill, rather than theories that prioritize musical works, hermeneutic interpretation, or “originary” views of authorship. This makes vivid Barthes’s claim that “Text is experienced only in an activity of production” (1988).