AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts saturday afternoon 145
revolution, the eruption of the people’s might, elitist oppression, the judgment of God. Volcanoes,
storms, avalanches and explosions were also a popular trope in theatrical tableaux that
were intended and received as metaphors for recent experiences: in the first boulevard melodramas
the intense moral struggle between good and evil was writ large in visual and aural
scenes of chaos and destruction. Such tableaux have been understood as both gesturing towards
the unrepresentable nature of revolutionary experience and acknowledging its power.
In this paper I build on the work of Michael Fend and Michael McClellan, and situate
the cataclysmic tableaux of two Cherubini operas from the 1790s (Lodoïska (1791) and Médée
(1797)) in this context of specifically French discourses about the sublime during the Revolutionary
decade. I outline some of the political debates and theatrical examples alluded to
above, and then examine the characteristics of music and mise en scène deployed in Cherubini’s
works and the intended effect on the spectator. Finally, I consider their reception in the press.
I conclude that Cherubini and his collaborators were exploring similar issues about the relationship
between the empirical and the transcendental to those being examined by Kant in his
Critique—in a manner that was to leave its mark on French opera for the next half century.
Moreover, such tableaux contribute to a (French) conception of the sublime rooted in Revolutionary
experience that complements the German Idealist view that has tended to dominate
nineteenth-century studies.
TONALITY BEFORE AND AFTER
Thomas Christensen
University of Chicago
In a series of popular music lectures attended by the elite of Paris society in 1832, François-
Joseph Fétis made the startling announcement that the birth of modern tonality could be
precisely dated; it was the year 1605, and the chrysalis for this new musical language was none
other than Monteverdi’s fifth book of Madrigals. For Fétis, tonalité moderne was characterized
above all by the affective tendency of the leading tone to define a central tonic. Prior to
Monteverdi’s “discovery,“ he argued, Western music was characterized by a primitive form of
diatonic tonality (”tonalité du plainchant”) devoid of any attractive (or “appellative”) force.
But could all music prior to 1605 really just be consigned to a single category of plainchant
tonality? For a number of skeptical audience members, tantalizing signs of modern tonality
could surely be found in some early music repertoires, thus suggesting that modern tonality
had a longer and more complex evolution than that proposed by our Belgian musicologist.
As with almost any intellectual debate in France during this period, the question of musical
tonality and its beginnings inevitably became politicized. For many Republican sympathizers,
traces of nascent tonality were to be found in much early music—particularly of vernacular
folk origins. (It was just at this time that scholars such as Julian Tiersot and Jean-Baptiste
Weckerlin were compiling their massive anthologies of French folk melodies, music that
suggested unambiguous tonal orientation.) Still, the issue was not clear cut. For the chant lexicographer
Joseph d’Ortigue, just the opposite conclusion could be drawn when one analyzed
the most primitive folk tunes and peasant intonations he had observed among the peasantry
of Brittany and the Pyrenees.
On the other side of the political spectrum, many of the first, pre-Solesmes generation of
church musicians active in the reformation and restitution of chant practice were adamant
that all sacred chant must be purged of the affective, worldly taint of modern tonal practice.