The Musical Work as Discourse and Text

Abstract

For a musician, to talk of music as discourse and as text is essentially to talk of his art in terms of process and writing. Might there not, however, be a certain uneasiness in the employment of this notion of language? This question, whilst often mooted, has never received an unanimous response. For the musician, the text is above all a given, which he knows intimately and into which he pours his thoughts; it is the reference point for his craft. He conceives of it as the field in which his art operates and through which it is mediated. Historically, it is the text that reflects the slow tension of invention aimed at attaining coherence, the source of which has been the generation of an invariant. This manifests itself in the form of a thematic nucleus or Crundgestalt, the term used by Schoenberg to refer to the totality of the form's potential. The story of this invariant and its deployment in spawning variation is present throughout the history of polyphony. Having reached its zenith, however, the curve of thematic function plummeted in an instant. As a result, the relation of text to discourse, of writing to process, was hurled into profound disarray.