Abstracts - American Musicological Society

30
FridaY morning
musical and artistic value to less exalted genre.s' by
recognizing the common roots in appar€nt1y
phenimena l!Iagner/Brahns, Beethoven/Rossini)' ^1iY::t" DahrrLaus
has raised the level of discourse about
nineteenth-century nusic and cornpelled scholars in all
specialized areas to expand thelr concerns above the
particular.
Yet there ate serious problems with Dahlhaus'
approach to music history, many centered on his crucial
concept of the " ideal type. " Holtever intellectually
appealing his critical speculations and syntheses rnay
be, they often rest not on a careful consideration of
the nusical evidence but on abstract "ideal types'
which, upon examination, too often fail to describe
accurately his oltn examples, 1et al-one the broader
musical phenomena they are meant to exenplify. Drawing
upon various sections of Die Musik des 19.
Jahrhunderts, this paper will attempt to explore the
critical problern of reconciling brilliant insights qtith
faulty evidence and to consider alternatives to the
"ideal type. "
ERLAUTERUNG AND SCHENKER
Ian Bent, University of Nottinghan
and Colunbia University
In the literature of music, the term Erleuterung
is now inseparably linked with Heinrich Schenker. In
1910 , he issued his study of J . S . Bach: Chronatische
Fantasie und Fuge, subtitled Erlbuterungsausgabe. In
L9l3-2L, he published his stil1 more famous Beethoven:
Die letzten funf Sonaten, widely known as the
ErlSuterungsausgabe. What did ErlSuterung mean to
Schenker? Did it have an ancestry in writing about
music? Investigation shows the tern to have been used by
many vriters, including Moritz Hauptmann (1841) , Ernst
von Elterlein (1854, 1856) and F. L. S. Dtirenberg
(1853). Later, two najor series were predicated on it:
Bechhold's Meisterfiihrer (1894- ) , whose anaLysts
included ErIanger, Helrn and Riemann, and Reclam's
ErlAuterungen zu Meisterwerken der Tonkunst (c. 1900) .
Does this succession represent merely a weak usage of a
comrnon term? Or does it constitute a genre of writing,
with its own aesthetic basis? And does it connect up
with Mattheson's so-designated self-analyses in his
Exenplarische Organisten-Probe of L7 19? What can hte
learn from observing the use of such terms as
analysieren. d6composer and clq-Ulqlsli4 about the strands
of analyticaJ- actiwity in the nineteenth century, and
their convergence at that significant Point in history
about 1910?