Abstracts - American Musicological Society

28
FridaY morning
the music on purely nuslcal, analytical grounds-' wi.th
examples fron Mahler's syurphonies (especially the
Ninth), I examine the conventionally acquired semantic
and syntactic meanings carried by the heterogeneous
"typ." of materials" incorporated into the nusic' Th'
significative network generated hereby interacts with
the new, non-conventional context in which it appears'
Fron this dialectic results that story- like quality
rrhich gives the expressiveness of Mahler' s music a
universality not allowed by the concreteness of the
autobiographical thesis .
CRITICAL VOCABULARIES
Piero Weiss, Peabody Conservatory of Music Chair
'ELEGANCE' AS A BASIC CRITERION IN MUSIC CRITICISM
Don Harr6n, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
The term elegance is one of a number of terms
borrowed from rhetoric and applied to music, in
theoretical Lrritings, from ancient tirnes on. It is
considered here for its impact on music criticisn, with
special enphasis on the earlier period (until the
seventeenth century) .
1. Elegance as defined by the literary critics,
among them Horace and Bernbo. Beyond the various
meanings they assigned to elegance, three points are
examined: the relevance of Iiterary doctrine to music
as gag and scientia; the difference between elegance
and eloquence; the relation of elegance to model
theory, linking improvements in the practice of speech
to the initation of worthy examples.
2. Barbarism, the contrary of elegance. The
notion wil be traced as a constant in early grammatical
and music theory (the critics asked to rid language of
its corruptions, i.e., its vitia and barbarisni).
3. To be distinguished frorn elegance is the term
propriety, likewise fundamental to licerary criticism,
It wiIl be explained by reference to what the music
theorists described as "proprieties" of composition, of
text placement, of singing.
4. The notion of elegance as an aesthetic
desideraturn implies a novel view of the musican as
orator, as poet. Renaissance ttreorists will be
considered for their observations on the particular
kind of musician who responds to the urge for elegance.
Clearly, the term elegance is so broad as to be
useful, beyond the temporal confines of the pru"".ra
report , for nusic criticisn at 1arge. It o,l r, .
discussed, tn conclusion, for irs
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