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The Tonic Chord and Lacan's Object a in Selected Songs by Charles Ives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2011
Abstract
ABSTRACT
A musical response to Lacan's concept of the objet petit a – the imaginary ‘object-cause’ of desire – accounts for certain songs by Charles Ives in which ‘tonic’ chords are signified by complex networks of dominant-seventh harmonies. These objects of tonal desire adopt the structure of both lack (as absent centre) and surplus (as multiple tonal centres). In each song, Ives employs individual harmonic techniques to question the ability of tonic chords to coordinate a fractured tonality. Investigating Afterglow, Serenity, At Sea and Mists from the 1922 collection of 114 Songs, I explore the Lacanian dimensions of each text and setting, bringing out the message that each song offers about the function of the tonic. An analysis of Premonitions exemplifies a distinction Slavoj Žižek proposed between a functional system in which the object a coordinates desire as absent centre, and a system in which the object is stripped of its organizational power.
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References
1 See David Schwarz, Listening Awry: Music and Alterity in German Culture (Minneapolis, MN, and London, 2006); idem, Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham, NC, and London, 1997). Alastair Williams invokes Schwarz's application of Lacan's three registers in songs by the Beatles in his own vision of the role of Lacanian psychoanalysis in musicology (Constructing Musicology (Aldershot, 2001), 71–5).
2 Michel Poizat, The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera (Ithaca, NY, 1992); Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, IN, 1988).
3 Schwarz finds an embodiment of the gaze relationship in Schubert's Der Doppelgänger (Listening Subjects, 64–86); Lawrence Kramer explores the gaze and scopophilia in Liszt's ‘Faust’ Symphony (Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 102–35); and Ian Biddle finds the dialectics of the gaze at work within the art of music criticism itself (‘The Gendered Eye: Music Analysis and the Scientific Outlook in German Early Romantic Music Theory’, Music Theoryand Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding (Cambridge, 2001), 183–96).
4 Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar draw a Lacanian history of opera – its plots, characters, composers, trends – which revolves around its ‘second death’ (Opera's Second Death (New York and London, 2002)). Charles Dill offers a reading of Rameau's Castor et Pollux, focusing on the role of ‘the Other’ not only within the opera itself, but also in Rameau's professional relationships (‘Rameau avec Lacan’, Acta musicologica, 80 (2008), pp. 33–58). For a representative sample of attempts at locating the ‘gaze’ in opera (which extends to a dialectic between the stage action and the audience) see Carolyn Abbate, ‘Opera or the Envoicing of Women’, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 225–58, and Linda and Michael Hutcheon, ‘Staging the Female Body: Strauss's Salome’, Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 204–21.
5 See, for example, Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge, 1998). Kramer's analysis of numerous Schubert songs invokes Lacan at suitable junctures, though there is understandably no proposal of a broader Lacanian theory.
6 Quoted in Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London, 1998), 275; the source of this quotation not given there, but see Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Seymour Feldman (Indianapolis, IN, 1982), 188 (‘Desire, considered absolutely, is man's very essence’). This linguistic inscription of desire is adumbrated in Lacan's ‘Graph of Desire’. Explanation of Lacan's obscure and enigmatic graph is beyond the scope of this article, and the reader is directed to Jacques Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 2004), 33–125. On this general topic see also Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York, 1980).
7 Critiquing Ferdinand de Saussure, Lacan generally uses the term langage to refer to the system of language in general rather than specific languages. For Lacan, langage pertains to all structures that are composed of signifiers. Unlike Saussure's definition of a signifier as something which signifies something for someone, Lacan's definition – ‘a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier’ – allows musical signifiers (chords, pitches, harmonies) without any semantic meaning to function as elements of a linguistic system. See Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’. A discussion of Wagner's ‘transfigured or transfiguring language’ is held in Lydia Goehr, ‘Schopenhauer and the Musicians: An Inquiry into the Sounds of Silence and the Limits of Philosophizing about Music’, Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Dale Jacquette (Cambridge, 1996), 200–28 (p. 219). Arnold Schoenberg's words are found in his Style and Idea, trans. Leo Black, ed. Leonard Stein (Berkeley, CA, 1984), 193.
8 Most notably in Žižek and Dolar, Opera's Second Death.
9 Thomas Mann, Thomas Mann Presents the Living Thought of Schopenhauer (London, 1939), 24.
10 Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2 ([n.p.], 1966), 456.
11 Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London, 2000), 207–9.
12 Jean-Philippe Rameau, Génération harmonique, ou Traité de musique théorique et pratique (Paris, 1737), 109; Thomas Street Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1993), 189 and 120. Elaborations of this basic premiss arguably fuel Schenkerian analysis, in which tension flows through a matrix of unstable pitches that are coordinated around a single tonic. The Schenkerian Ursatz, however linear, is essentially structured by motion away from and back to a tonic key: ‘the fundamental line signifies motion, striving towards a goal, and ultimately the completion of the course. In this sense we perceive our own life-impulse in the motion of the fundamental line, a full analogy to our inner life.’ Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition (1935), trans. Ernst Oster (New York and London, 1979), 4; quoted in Candace Brower, ‘A Cognitive Theory of Musical Meaning’, Journal of Music Theory, 44 (2000), 323–79 (p. 333).
13 See Ernst Kurth, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners ‘Tristan’ (Berne and Leipzig, 1920); Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 135–75. Of course, psychoanalysis lies behind many attempts at decoding Wagner's ideological message, the most rigorous being Robert Donington's Jungian analysis (Wagner's ‘Ring’ and its Symbols: The Music and the Myth (London, 1963)).
14 The lower-case a (autre), opposed to the capital A, refers to the ‘little other’ rather than the ‘Big Other’.
15 Lacan, Seminar XI, 83.
16 Lacan, ‘On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’, Ecrits, trans. Sheridan, 198–249 (p. 247).
17 Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Montré à Prémontré’, Analytica, 37 (1984), 27–31 (pp. 28–9), quoted in Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 94.
18 See Lacan, ‘Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’, Ecrits, trans. Sheridan, 323–60 (pp. 346–7).
19 Ironically enough, this objet petit a registered in musicology through Slavoj Žižek's excavation of the liminal space between Schumann's piano accompaniments and his vocal melodies (The Plague of Fantasies (London, 1997), 192–212). But, as desire exerts its pressure on so many distinct planes of musical enjoyment, we can find the object a showing its power in other parameters, not least harmonic discourse. As Rameau indicated, our desires can be drawn towards a tonic chord, and perhaps we may now see this in a Lacanian light as one form of ‘object a’.
20 Kenneth Smith, ‘“A Science of Tonal Love”? Drive and Desire in Twentieth-Century Harmony: The Erotics of Alexander Skryabin’, Music Analysis, 30 (forthcoming, 2011); Richard Taruskin, ‘Scriabin and the Superhuman: A Millennial Essay’, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 308–59.
21 Judith Tick, ‘Charles Ives and Gender Ideology’, Musicology and Difference, ed. Solie, 83–106.
22 On Ives's views on Wagner, Jan Swafford quotes from an interview with Slonimsky (16 November 1988): ‘[The] boy of twenty-five was listening to Wagner with enthusiasm … But when he became middle-aged … this music had become cloying, the melodies threadbare … These once transcendent progressions … were becoming slimy’ (Charles Ives: A Life with Music (New York and London, 1996), 51). By 1932, Ives's soprano friend Mary Bell, who often performed his songs, was to claim in an interview on 10 December 1970: ‘He couldn't stand Wagner. He couldn't even talk about Wagner and you just didn't’ (Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (New Haven, CT, and London, 1974), 190–2 (p. 192)). Oddly, Ives clearly had a ‘soft spot’ for Skryabin's Poem of Ecstasy, which he heard in 1924, and which features this same Tristanesque long-range deferral of the tonic chord. See Lincoln Ballard, ‘Scriabin and Ives: An Unanswered Question?’, Journal of the Scriabin Society of America, 9 (2005), 37–61. Ballard also discusses Ives's use of Skryabin's ‘mystic’ chord (set 6-34), which shares many properties of the Ivesian harmony that will soon be the topic of this article.
23 J. Peter Burkholder, ‘The Critique of Tonality in the Early Experimental Music of Charles Ives’, Music Theory Spectrum, 12 (1990), 203–23 (p. 222).
24 Anthony Pople, ‘Using Complex Set Theory for Tonal Analysis: An Introduction to the “Tonalities” Project’, Music Analysis, 23 (2004), 153–94 (p. 153). Pople disliked the polarization of ‘atonal’ analytical techniques against ‘tonal’ ones: ‘many works from this repertoire can be, and have been, addressed from both perspectives’ (p. 154).
25 Referring to Lockung, op. 6 no. 7, Schoenberg shows how the tonic E remains absent: ‘I call this “schwebende Tonalität” (suspended tonality)’ (Arnold Schoenberg, Structural Functions of Harmony, ed. Humphrey Searle (London, 1954), 111).
26 Jim Samson, Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900–1920 (London, 1977), 110–12. Samson quotes from Schoenberg, Style and Idea, trans. Black, ed. Stein, 86, and further suggests that tonal allusions are brought to the fore through classical phrasing, punctuation and counterpoint (‘Schoenberg's “Atonal” Music’, Tempo, 109 (1974), 16–25 (p. 17)).
27 Bryan R. Simms, The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg, 1908–1923 (Oxford, 2000), 28; Daniel Harrison, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music: A Renewed Dualist Theory and an Account of its Precedents (Chicago, IL, 1994), 78–9.
28 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN, and London, 2006), 32.
29 Richard S. Parks discusses such interaction of genera in Debussy's music (The Music of Claude Debussy (New Haven, CT, 1989)). But Samson laments the inability of Fortean set theory adequately to provide for ‘suppressed tonal structures’, citing op. 19 no. 2, which ends on a C triad that Allen Forte, adding to Roy Travis's reading of this piece, tonally reduces to a ‘non-set’ (Samson, ‘Schoenberg's “Atonal” Music’, 18). Samson quotes from Allen Forte, ‘Sets and Nonsets in Schoenberg's Atonal Music’, Perspectives of New Music, 11/1 (autumn–winter 1972), 43–64 (p. 52). Roy Travis: ‘Directed Motion in Schoenberg and Webern’, ibid., 4/2 (spring–summer 1966), 85–9 (p. 86). Samson suggestively remarks that ‘it is often more profitable to examine those features which an “atonal” work shares with its tonal ancestry than to underline the differences’ (p. 16).
30 Steve Larson, ‘A Tonal Model of an “Atonal” Piece: Schoenberg's Opus 15, Number 2’, Perspectives of New Music, 25 (1987), 414–33 (p. 418).
31 John Williamson, ‘Wolf 's Dissonant Prolongations’, The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality, ed. William Kinderman and Harald Krebs (Lincoln, NE, 1996), 215–36 (p. 234). Williamson follows implications from Kurth, Schoenberg and Schenker and admittedly takes ‘suspended tonality’ to its analytical limit in his analysis of Wolf 's Seufzer. He comments on a ‘gap in theory [that] can be defined as the absence of explanation for that species of directional tonality whereby suspended tonality clarifies itself toward a final resolution’ (p. 219).
32 See Robert P. Morgan, ‘Spatial Form in Ives’, and Allen Forte, ‘Ives and Atonality’, An Ives Celebration, ed. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis (Urbana, IL, 1977), 145–58 and 159–86, and Philip Lambert, The Music of Charles Ives (New Haven, CT, and London, 1997). See also the recent article by Scott Murphy which refers to studies that draw on the theoretical systems of David Lewin and Henry Klumpenhouwer in an analysis of Ives's ‘The Cage’ (‘A Composite Approach to Ives's “Cage”’, Twentieth-Century Music, 5 (2010), 179–93).
33 See James Baker, The Music of Alexander Scriabin (New Haven, CT, 1986). While Baker's methodology is applied to some degree by Lambert (The Music of Charles Ives), the Schenkerian-tonal angle is downplayed in favour of largely post-tonal analyses of atonal sets and interval cycles. The issue of post-tonal prolongation is perhaps most cogently formulated in Joseph Straus, ‘The Problem of Prolongation in Post-Tonal Music’, Journal of Music Theory, 31 (1987), 1–21.
34 Harald Krebs, ‘Alternatives to Monotonality in Early Nineteenth-Century Music’, Journal of Music Theory, 25 (1981), 1–16.
35 Pople's Tonalities Project sought to correct such bias through his computer software's ability to process numerous expected harmonic types; but, as we shall see, Ives's multilayered approach to composition would preclude even the most refined ‘segmental’ analyses.
36 Daniel Harrison, ‘Bitonality, Pentatonicism, and Diatonicism in a Work by Milhaud’, Music Theory in Concept and Practice, ed. James Baker (Rochester, NY, 1997), 393–408.
37 H. Wiley Hitchcock, ‘Ives's “114 [+ 15] Songs” and What He Thought of Them’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 52 (1999), 97–144 (p. 97).
38 Stuart Feder, Charles Ives: My Father's Song: A Psychoanalytic Biography (New Haven, CT, 1992).
39 Aaron Copland, ‘One Hundred and Fourteen Songs’, Modern Music, 11/2 (January–February 1934), 59–64; quoted in Hitchcock, ‘Ives's “114 [+ 15] Songs”’, 103.
40 The poem is found in James Fenimore Cooper Jr's collection Afterglow (New Haven, CT, 1918), 4.
41 See Harrison, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music, and particularly Kevin J. Swinden, ‘When Functions Collide: Aspects of Plural Function in Chromatic Music’, Music Theory Spectrum, 27 (2005), 249–82.
42 Stephen Downes, ‘Szymanowski and Narcissism’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 121 (1996), 58–81 (p. 60). The chord Downes explores is actually a Skryabinesque ‘mystic’ chord, comprising the pitches B, D F A (B7) and A, C G (A7).
43 Charles Edward Ives, Charles E. Ives: Memos (n.p., 1972), 140.
44 Harrison, ‘Bitonality, Pentatonicism, and Diatonicism’.
45 This opening chord comprises two tritone-related, chromatically aggregated tetrachordal cells that comprise set class 8–9, a highly symmetrical class which is invariable upon T6 operation. To achieve a vague, impressionistic atmosphere, Ives requested, at the foot of the printed score, that ‘the piano should be played as indistinctly as possible, and both pedals used almost constantly’ (see Example 1).
46 Example 2, although Schenkerian in its reductive presentation, charts the ‘potential’ dominant-seventh implications above the stave and in no way attempts to posit a Schenkerian ‘tonal’ background. Indeed, notwithstanding its similar graphical technology, my method diverges from Schenkerian orthodoxy in several ways (even as it is generally applied to post-tonal repertory: see James Baker, ‘Schenkerian Analysis and Post-Tonal Music’, Aspects of Schenkerian Theory, ed. David Beach (New Haven, CT, 1983), 153–86). First, the graphs show purely hypothetical local terrain, mapping potential tonal impulses that are not, as yet, orientated around a global tonic. I draw out ‘bitonal’ implications where I believe these can be reasonably experienced. (Given that I am situating this within a discourse on desire/subjectivity, these tonal impulses consolidate, and are suggested by, the nature of the excessive surplus of the object a found in Ives's text: an extension to desire theory offered by Lacan.) Orthodox Schenkerian practice could not cope with such bitonal inclinations (indeed, it radically problematizes even ‘directional tonality’). Secondly, my figures demonstrate the process by which tonality (fragmented as it is) emerges (and later dissipates); this rather than the Schenkerian paradigm, where it is established globally from the outset. Thirdly, I am concerned not so much with voice-leading as with predominantly harmonic parameters in which voice-leading – so central to Schenker – is reduced to a network of potentials, not all of which follow through on their implications.
47 To note: in some future instance of this configuration of E A and C, an F is added to the texture.
48 Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real: Selected Writings (New York and London, 2005), 308.
49 This form of harmonic tension is of a very different order from the kind of ‘wandering tonality’ that Anthony Newcomb found in Wagner (see his ‘The Birth of Music Out of the Spirit of Drama: An Essay in Wagnerian Formal Analysis’, 19th-Century Music, 5 (1981–2), 38–66), where keys fluidly slip from one to another, seemingly without any global orientation. Here, in my reading, various tonalities are implied in Ives's mystery chords, but one is ‘selected’ (see the later discussion on how this reflects the process of ‘interpretation’ as a vital aspect of desire) and eventually comes to fruition.
50 The French-sixth chord can behave as a dominant chord with a flattened fifth. In this way, its pc content is identical to its own tritone transposition despite enharmonic differences. Thus C, E, GBunder T6 procedures can be spelled F A C, E. The same chord, when used as dominant, could discharge in two separate ways.
51 Colin Sterne, ‘The Quotations in Charles Ives's Second Symphony’, Music and Letters, 52 (1971), 39–45; J. Peter Burkholder, ‘“Quotation” and Paraphrase in Ives's Second Symphony’, 19th-Century Music, 11 (1987–8), 3–25. Faint Tristan allusions like this are found in ‘Things our Fathers Loved’; see Robert P. Morgan, ‘“The Things our Fathers Loved”: Charles Ives and the European Tradition’, Ives Studies, ed. Philip Lambert (Cambridge, 1997), 3–26 (p. 14).
52 This F triad, which I hear as an element strategically placed to undermine the otherwise powerful effect of the C, may in fact hold a more structural function as an ‘alternative tonic’, as indicated by the frequent play between C and G7 sonorities. While seeming to run counter to my argument that the dense harmonic profile of the piece leads towards an ineluctable C major, this new F rather serves as a reminder that the stronger C – spread between both hands – has stepped forward with greater affirmation at the expense of other ‘repressed’ impulses. This quite forcibly embodies the excessive nature of the desiring search for an object of satisfaction.
53 Point de capiton refers to the pins in mattresses which prevent the foam from slipping too far. For Lacan, ‘slippage’ is concerned with the signifier and the signified, which share a loose relationship. Such points of fixity, illusory though they are, provide our points of mental stability in the normative human subject. Lacan, ‘Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’, Ecrits, trans. Sheridan, 323–60 (p. 335).
54 Žižek, Looking Awry, 91.
55 Lacan, Seminar XI; see particularly the seminars on ‘The Deconstruction of the Drive’ and ‘The Partial Drive and its Circuit’, pp. 161–73 and 174–86.
56 Lacan, Seminar XI., 185–6. The Lacanian spelling generally favours ‘ph’ rather than the more general ‘f ’.
57 Burkholder, ‘The Critique of Tonality’, 221.
58 Lacan, Seminar XI, 176.
59 Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, Ecrits, trans. Sheridan, 311–22 (p. 321).
60 This G7 is, of course, only intimated in the bass; the third is minor and the fifth is diminished (spelled as C to accompany the A element).
61 Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 135–75.
62 H. Wiley Hitchcock, Critical Commentaries for Charles Ives, 129 Songs (Middleton, WI, 2004), 130.
63 As Yannis Stavrakakis observes, ‘It could be argued that the concept of the objet petit a gradually takes, in the work of Lacan, the place of the symbolic phallus. The object-cause of desire takes the place of the signifier of desire. It could even be possible to view these two terms as identical’ (Lacan and the Political (London, 1999), 50).
64 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (New York and London, 1998), 80.
65 Lacan, Seminar XI, 79–90.
66 Lacan, Seminar XI., 88–9.
67 Žižek, Looking Awry, 90.
68 The image of the ‘footfall, scarcely noted’ near the door is particularly reminiscent of Lacan's seminar on the gaze, a concept inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre's discussion of the sounds heard while peeping through a keyhole. These sounds objectified the listener as the object of some Other's gaze, providing the feeling of being watched. Lacan, Seminar XI, 84.
69 An e in the upper bass also reinforces the B7 element, acting as an enharmonic d (as it is shown in Example 12), and an upper f♮′ also chromatically slides to f ′.
70 This is doubtless an unusual alliance, as Lacan and Deleuze make ‘strange bedfellows’, Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus being a critique of the Lacanian model of desire based on lack. But Žižek's wider project, both in his article ‘Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze: Three Strange Bedfellows’ (Žižek, Interrogating the Real, 169–89) and as part of the more sustained comparison in his ‘Phallus’ (Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York and London, 2004), 87–93), is to unmask a ‘different’ Deleuze, the Deleuze of The Logic of Sense, certain of whose ideas, notwithstanding his critical assault on Lacan, can be supplemented/supported by certain tenets of Lacanian dogma. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze proposes these two registers (phallic coordination and phallic castration), which, as Žižek is at pains to show, are of fundamentally Lacanian conception.
71 Žižek, ‘Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze’.
72 See Žižek, ‘Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze’., 173.
73 Žižek, ‘Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze’., 174. Short Cuts (1994), directed by Robert Altman, distributed by Fine Line Features, USA.
74 Žižek, ‘Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze’, 178.
75 Žižek, ‘Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze’, 175.
76 Žižek, ‘Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze’.
77 The chord is enharmonically altered from the score in Example 13 to highlight the C 7 implications. Notably, the diminished fifth of the dominant-seventh chord is identical to its own tritone transposition. Thus C 75 is identical to G75 in terms of pc content. The switch between C and F implication is extremely smooth, and this highly ambiguous chord may well be heard as an altered G7 function (if, indeed, it is experienced diatonically at all by this point) before its ‘discharge’ into F .
78 These ‘tonics’ are hypothetical precisely because I find no global ‘tonic’; there is no Schenkerian tonal ‘background’, and any triad's position must be highly questionable. What is vital here is the implied motion around the cycle of fifths involved in the motion toward such triads. In this case, the F that follows the C 7 establishes that, in this local instance, the F has been selected at least as a temporary pathway, although C →F could well be heard as V7→I in F or II7→V in B, or even VI→II in E. However, the purely triadic nature of F leads me to suggest tentatively that we may hear it as a potential ‘local tonic’.
79 Pitches D F and A pertaining to the vi7 chord, are co-mingled with the C 7 in different ways through its various presentations. The second presentation of C 7 is slightly less obscured.
80 Lacan, Seminar XI, 270.
81 While other interpretations of this ambiguous passage are doubtless plausible – indeed my Lacanian analysis relies on the multiple tonal impulses that operate beneath the surface – I find the move towards a G7 chord after the prevailing dominant pedal and the frequent array of C major triads in the passage to be indications that C major at least holds some tonal governance here, even if this is only retroactively asserted by the end of the passage.
82 ‘Der fortgeschrittenste Stand der technischen Verfahrungsweise zeichnet Aufgaben vor, denen gegenüber die traditionellen Klänge als ohnmächtige Clichés sich erweisen’ (Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der Neuen Musik (Tübingen, 1949), 22). Mitchell and Bloomster's translation uses ‘impotent’ (Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Bloomster (London, 1948), 34), whereas Robert Hullot-Kentor uses ‘powerless’ (Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Hullot-Kentor, 32).
83 Charles E. Ives: Memos, 134.
84 Burkholder, ‘The Critique of Tonality’, 222.