Conference Booklet - Music - National University of Ireland, Maynooth

conventional mode of listening demanded by the unequivocal compositional voices of the First
Viennese School must be abandoned. In its place a new phenomenology of musical experience
must be adopted, one able to attend to the composed world of the work as an intuiting subject
and, at the same time, account for the listener‘s virtual presence in the work‘s musical world. By
way of conclusion, this paper will take up the questions of whether or not such a ‗weak‘
phenomenology of musical experience, pace Gianni Vattimo, is requisite for other of Schubert‘s
late works and the degree to which a ‗weak‘ phenomenology of aesthetic experience should be a
topic in more general discussions of stylistic lateness.
KEYNOTE II
Susan Youens (University of Notre Dame)
The Grit in the Oyster, or How to Disagree with a Poet: Schubert and Einsamkeit
When Schubert‘s ‗Der Einsame‘ (The Solitary Man), D800, first appeared in a supplement to the
Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literature, Theater und Mode for 12 March 1825, it was immediately
popular ... but later generations have lost sight of the context that made its critics hail it for its
‗profound and beautiful content‘. In this poem, the poet Karl Lappe, who first published it in
1801, proposes a methodology for artistic creation and the moral life, with reference to a long
Greek and Roman antique tradition of lyric poetry and to the ‗problem of solitude‘ in 18 th -
century popular philosophy and literature. ‗Einsamkeit‘ in all its various shadings is contrasted
with ‗Alleinsein‘, its pathological cousin, in these sources, and Lappe weighs in with his view. A
revised version of the poem was published in the Blätter von Karl Lappe of 1824, with Schubert
setting it to music the following year and – I believe – conducting a musical disputation with
Lappe‘s aesthetic. Sometimes, the best songs are born when a composer does not agree with the
poet‘s propositions.
Sunday, 23 October 2011
Session 8.1 SCHUBERT’S MATURE HARMONY
David Kopp (Boston University)
Toward an Understanding of Schubert’s Late Harmonic Style
Within the musicological and music‐theoretical literature, the concept of late style
encompasses a diverse set of special musical characteristics above and beyond the literal
association with a composer‘s last years. These encompass both positive and negative attributes:
from mature mastery, transcendence, freedom from constraint, and essential
paring‐down, to decay, disability, deterioration, and death. In a typical study in the latter vein,
Joseph Straus has recently suggested (2006) that the prominent, strategically organized
chromaticism of Schubert‘s later music embodies a presence of the abnormal and diseased,
mirroring Schubert‘s own syphilitic state. Deeply invading the work, aberrant chromaticism
must eventually be ―overcome‖ and normalized. This tonally conservative view contrasts
markedly with work in transformational theory by Richard Cohn (1999) and David Kopp
(2002), among others, that models Schubertian chromaticism as healthily normative within an
expanded, transcendent system of chromatic, or common ‐tone, tonality.
Data‐oriented studies by Daniel Jacobsen (1986) and Nigel Nettheim (1999) have probed
the development of Schubert‘s harmonic practice through statistical analysis, examining the