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Thursday, June 02, 2005
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APPOGGIATURA Let us pause in life’s pleasures (to quote the beginning of a wonderful Stephen Foster song) and consider today’s winning spelling bee word, “appoggiatura.” The newspapers are defining appoggiatura as “a melodic tone,” but all sorts of sounds are melodic tones. Appoggiatura is very special. UD has for years enjoyed sitting at her trusty upright and reading and playing through Leonard Bernstein’s book about music, The Unanswered Question (it’s full of musical examples). Appoggiatura is important to Bernstein’s rather complicated argument about how music - pure sound - is able to convey so much content to us. We are hearing an appoggiatura when a tone seems to us in need of resolution, when we sense a “relatively discordant note which carries a weight and tension that must be resolved.” It’s a “leaning tone (meaning that it ‘leans’ on its consequent resolution.)” Here’s an example, from Bach. [Update: Here's a better example - one you can listen to - via Instapundit.] Appoggiaturas successfully resolve themselves in earlier music; but modern music, Bernstein suggests, is to a significant degree about unresolved tones. In the case of Mahler, for instance, his “musical schizo-dynamics” and “ambivalent tonal attitudes” are expressed in part through his complex nonresolution of appoggiatura. Mahler’s “reluctant attempts to let go of tonality,” his “nonresolution of tensions,” conveyed, Bernstein believed, “the essence of the tonal crisis” of the twentieth century. |
