AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts Friday afternoon 91
ROBERT SCHUMANN AND THE AGENCIES OF IMPROVISATION
Dana Gooley
Brown University
During his student years (1827–31) Robert Schumann improvised avidly at the piano and
developed some of his early compositions out of his spontaneous fantasies, to the delight of
friends and audiences in Heidelberg and elsewhere. In his later years, by contrast, he advocated
and strove for a mental approach to composition that implicitly critiqued the values of
improvisation-fed composition. This paper takes a close look at Schumann’s early improvisations,
as evinced in his diaries and contemporary accounts, in order to reconstruct (to the
limited extent possible) his improvisational practices, set them in the context of the virtuoso-composer
tradition he aspired to be a part of, and examine traces of them in his early
compositions. Traces of improvisation can be demonstrated for several early pieces (the Variations
op. 5, the Toccata op. 7, the Allegro op. 8, and the F-sharp minor Sonata op. 11), but my
main case study will be the finale of the Abegg variations op. 1, which is marked “alla Fantasia.”
Musicologists have tended to rely on stylistic markers of the free fantasia in identifying
improvisational influence (especially in the case of the Fantasia op. 17), but improvisation was
a far more generalized practice among pianist-composers and could manifest in a wide range
of genres and forms. The Abegg finale, though containing no traces of the free fantasia, bears
several marks of “postclassical” improvisation, such as the recurrent dominant pedal tone,
the multiple reiterations of a simple chord progression, and the near-total lack of melodic or
motivic content in favor of figuration. The finale is also set in the fast triple-pulse meter that
Schumann demonstratively gravitated toward in his early improvising.
The latter part of the paper examines Schumann’s eventual renunciation of improvisation
as part of his gradual self-identification as a “composer.” Whereas the roles of composer and
improvising performer were essentially united in figures such as Hummel and Moscheles,
whom Schumann admired immensely in the 1820s, the influence of the ideology of Bildung
produced a “sorting out” of these functions so that improvisation and composition, process
and product, came increasingly to be seen as antithetical. Schumann not only absorbed this
ideology but also played a leading role in articulating its implications for the musical world
in journalism. I historicize the developing critique of improvisation by drawing parallels to
Hans Christian Andersen’s breakthrough novel The improviser (1835). The novel’s hero is a
gifted young poetic improviser who learns, after a long period of wandering and experimentation,
that he must transcend the frivolous entertainment of salon patrons by channeling
his extemporaneous talent toward public and productive ends. Schumann articulated similar
values when he dismissed certain early piano works as “too small and too rhapsodic to make
any great impact.”
HOME ANd ALONE: CHILDREN’S MUSIC AS POETICS OF EXILE
Roe-Min Kok
McGill University
Spatial allusions are embedded in the imaginative titles of Schumann’s instrumental music
(Hoeckner 1997, Jost 1989), perhaps most densely and consistently in his works for children.
Probed beyond the surface, references to seasonal rites (winter evenings by the hearth, Sylvester),
mythic figures of yore (Knecht Ruprecht, Haschemann, Sheherazade) and musical genres