Kenneth M. Smith

This article considers music that stages the decline of the tonal system through “entropy”—the process conceived in the domain of thermodynamics by which energy is wasted through randomized dispersal or decrease in organization. Tonal organization faced challenges at the turn of the twentieth century, much of the music possessing a sense of tonal drive but with an increased array of outlets for this drive’s tension to be released. This article regards the dominant-seventh complex and its variant configurations as paradigms of this tonal drive and attempts to understand their new ambiguities and the increased richness of possibility they enjoy. In order to achieve this, the study engages in probability theory to create a unique profile for each tonal drive in a given piece, effectively measuring its strength. The fluctuating strengths can be mapped and the process of entropy tracked through a single piece, potentially even across repertoires. Using a new method of visually laying out the patterns of these dominant drives, combined with concepts from information theory that allow us to measure and compare levels of entropy mathematically, I attempt to combine qualitative and quantitative data to model the entropic processes that inhere in early twentieth-century music.

Extending Stan Hawkins' work on Jarvis Cocker as a 'British Pop Dandy' (2009), and his analytical reading of Cocker's use of multiple voices in 'Common People', this chapter argues that a vital aspect of Pulp's allure was their confrontation with perversion. Prima facie, Cocker's perverse aspect is part of the ironic sexualised display of the pop dandy.

Laura Mulvey coined the term ‘male gaze’ (1975), using Lacanian theory as a ‘political weapon’ against the standard mode of viewing in which the viewing subject turns onscreen women into fantasy objects. While politically laudable, her article misconstrues Lacan's concept of ‘the gaze’, the power of which emanates from the object itself. We might better serve Lacanian theory by inverting Mulvey's reading of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo to suggest that Scottie (James Stewart) is himself objectified by the mystique of the ‘object’ he watches and follows: Madeleine (Kim Novak). The screen's gaze reduces spectators to objects too. From this perspective, rather than watching the film, the film can be said to be watching us.

This extends to Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack, famously influenced by the yearning of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Developing David Schwarz's (2006) musical gaze (in which repeated pedal points of Schubert songs gaze at us), I analyse Vertigo’s frequent emphasis on the pitch class D. A pedal D is often repeated in alluring yet sinister bare octaves as Scottie follows Madeleine. But at key moments in the film, the pitch becomes a sophisticated tool that captivates us in unique ways. Around this central pitch third-relationships circle. These resonate with neo-Riemannian theory, particularly in their hexatonic ‘poles’, which Cohn shows to be agents of the Freudian ‘uncanny’ (2004) and which here also serve as an alternative gaze to the reiterated D. Other pitch constellations, in symmetries or spirals, form similar obsessional musical ‘gazes’ that, using Lacanian theory, prompt the question about whether we are listening to the music or the music is listening to us.

The first two studio albums from Suede (in America, ‘The London Suede’), fruits of a collaboration between Bernard Butler and Brett Anderson, served as the erotically twisted underbelly of early 1990s Britpop, adding bizarre, seductive alternatives to the relatively normalised sexual experiences described in the songs of Pulp or Blur. A vital part of the band’s aesthetics, Suede’s harmonic progressions prove to be extremely dexterous, with sinuous voice leading and meandering key changes, often based on common-tone modulations and parsimony rather than any sense of dominant-to-tonic resolution. Using a range of songs from an extensive corpus study, I theorise the chord patterns
that were to become recognisable Suede clich´ es (the bVI–V progressions and the III/bVII/bII dominant substitutes). In doing so I posit a sense of substituted functionality (T,SorD) and a sense of flow in aD-wards orS-wards direction. Uncovering a strong predilection for the latter, I return to examine their earlier work in a new light with readings of ‘Sleeping Pills’ and ‘Pantomime Horse’ from their debut album,Suede.

Indie-rock band Modest Mouse's earliest music connects aphoristic fragments into uniquely disjointed narratives that resist standard formal categorisation. The band's homespun narratives make us process dramatic interactions between drastically opposed musical paradigms as we search for new formal schema by which to classify them. This, I argue, is one answer to the ‘negative dialectic’ that Adorno thought was missing in popular music. In this paper I analyse three songs in particular depth, extending a methodology borrowed from the ‘classical tradition’ that extends Edward T. Cone's ‘stratification’ analyses of Igor Stravinsky. In Modest Mouse's later work, which seemingly signals a return to simpler strophic song forms, this dialectic is spread across entire albums such as Good News for People Who Love Bad News; but even in individual songs, despite a simplistic façade, my ‘stratification graphs’ reveal deep dialectical negativities

This article illustrates the Lacanian theory of fantasy and proposes a model by which it can correspond to harmonic progression in music. This is attempted through an analytical exploration of Zemlinsky’s opera Der Zwerg, which is saturated with fantasy at every level, and whose fantasies find correlates in certain harmonic procedures. An analytical theorization of these procedures is based on Ernö Lendvai’s concept of axial substitution whereby four minor-third related chords can express the same tonal function. In Lacanian spirit, it is the metaphorical and metonymical relationship between these chords and the function they express which makes them perfectly suited to Zemlinsky’s opera. Fantasy, for Jacques Lacan, is a process by which we can articulate our innermost desires, and, just as the character of the dwarf consciously creates fantasies, so too does he use these fantasies to channel his over-active libido. To accompany this libidinal investment, Zemlinsky continues the Wagnerian tradition of encapsulating desire with tensile dominant-based harmonic language but, through the structure of metaphor, avails himself of chordal substitution to perpetually reroute and reformulate its coordinates, whilst metonymically projecting us along a potentially endless cycle of fifths. The article considers three key scenes from Der Zwerg but discusses examples from Zemlinsky’s earlier repertoire, as well as the early 19th-c. canon.
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Leonid Sabaneyev attested that Skryabin's compositions contained within them ‘a science of tonal love’, and Skryabin himself described his two Op. 57 pieces –Désir and Caresse dansée– as ‘new ways of making love’. But what makes this music so erotic in nature? The composer theorised about the nature of desire and sexuality in his writings, but this discussion rarely spills over into analysis of his compositional system. Given that Skryabin was so steeped in psychology throughout his life, I appeal to the work of Freud and Jacques Lacan, and particularly to their distinction between drive and desire (essentially, the fundamental instinct of the id versus its imaginary representation), a distinction found in Skryabin's own philosophical writings. But the progression between these two states bears comparison with both his philosophy and his harmonic processes, and I thus focus on the function of the dominant chord, exploring ways in which it can replicate the structures of drive and desire. In so doing, I scrutinise several piano miniatures to show that part of Skryabin's method of embodying drive in music lays out ambiguous chord structures which bear simultaneous tendencies to move in a number of different directions, as multivalent as the drive in the human subject. Further, I attempt to show that, out of mystical sonorities, Skryabin temporally unfolds a dialogue of different dominant ‘drives’, and eventually selects and nurtures a single one at the expense of others, a motion equivalent to desire.

A musical response to Lacan's concept of the objet petit a – the imaginary ‘object-cause’ of desire – accounts for certain songs by Charles Ives in which ‘tonic’ chords are signified by complex networks of dominant-seventh harmonies. These objects of tonal desire adopt the structure of both lack (as absent centre) and surplus (as multiple tonal centres). In each song, Ives employs individual harmonic techniques to question the ability of tonic chords to coordinate a fractured tonality. Investigating Afterglow, Serenity, At Sea and Mists from the 1922 collection of 114 Songs, I explore the Lacanian dimensions of each text and setting, bringing out the message that each song offers about the function of the tonic. An analysis of Premonitions exemplifies a distinction Slavoj Žižek proposed between a functional system in which the object a coordinates desire as absent centre, and a system in which the object is stripped of its organizational power.

That Skryabin's harmonic language is rooted in dominant functionality is commonly acknowledged. However, the flow of his tensile dominant-based sonorities has not been adequately explored. This article seeks to correlate his harmonic processes with his erotically charged philosophy. It sketches ways in which our understanding of Skryabin's harmonic ‘flow’ can be reinforced by analytical thinking in both psychoanalysis and music theory, bringing Jacques Lacan's semiotic model of the circuit of human desire into dialogue with Hugo Riemann's Funktionstheorie. Two of Skryabin's harmonic proclivities direct the chosen analytical approach: 1) sequential chains of fifths and 2) transposition by multiples of the minor third. The interchange of these two characteristics is explored, with Riemann's categories of chordal function (T, S, and D) grafted onto a model of tonal pitch space derived (via Fred Lerdahl) from Gottfried Weber. The way in which Skryabin ‘rotates’ tonal functions sequentially (i.e., T→S→D→T) in a potentially infinite cycle of fifths, rerouted occasionally through minor-third transposition, is correlated with Lacanian drive theory. The article's concluding analysis of Skryabin's late octatonic Sonata no. 6, Op. 62, takes this ‘rotation’ of tonal function to a deeper structural level. The labelling system of Funktionstheorie, which is stretched at this point, is reconceptualized through Lacan's extension of his theory of desire into semiotics

Of the many composers in the Western classical tradition who celebrated the marriage between psyche and sound, those explored in this book followed the lines diverging from Wagner in philosophizing the nature of desire in music. This books offers two new theories of tonal functionality in the music of the first half of the twentieth century that seek to explain its psychological complexities. First, the book further develops Riemann's three diatonic chord functions, extending them to account from chromatic chord progression and substitution. The three functions (Tonic, Subdominant, Dominant) are compared to Jacques Lacan's twin-concepts of metaphor and metonymy which drive the human desiring apparatus. Second, the book develops a technique for analysing the "drives" that pull chromatic music in multiple directions simultaneously, creating a libidinal surface that mirrors the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud and post-Freudians, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze.

The harmonic models are tested in psychologically challenging pieces of music by post-Wagnerian composers. From the obsession with death and mourning in Josef Suk's "Asrael" Symphony to an exploration of "perversion" in Richard Strauss's "Elektra"; from the post-Kantian transcendentalism of Charles Ives's "Concord" Sonata to the "Accelerationism" of Skryabin's late piano works; from the Sufi mysticism of Szymanowski's "Song of the Night" to the failed fantasy of the American dream in Aaron Copland's "The Tender Land", the book cuts a path through the dense forests of chromatic complexity, and digs deep into the psychological make-up of post-Wagnerian psychodynamic music.