Abstract
How might the musical practices of interpretation and performance inform the practices of reading and writing? Using a phenomenological approach, this chapter follows a pianist as she learns the opening of Chopin’s Ballade in F Minor and then transfers the same musical tools to read Barthes’s “Death of the Author.” Examples include shaping ideas in sound and in words; developing instrumental technique and writing mechanics; and honing one’s voice within intertextual communities of sound and the written word. The final section explores this interdisciplinary connection between sound and word using Merleau-Ponty’s concept of body motility and Barthes’s ideas about play.
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Notes
- 1.
Daniel H Pink , A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), 1.
- 2.
Multi-disciplinary inquiry views a subject from two or more different disciplinary perspectives.
- 3.
Multiple recordings of the Chopin Ballade are available on various streaming services. Given the focus on the physical experience in this chapter, viewing a video performance is recommended (e.g., You Tube, Vimeo).
- 4.
The score is the sheet music.
- 5.
Daniel Barenboim, “The Phenomenon of Sound.” Daniel Barenboim, 2004, accessed June 17, 2016, http://danielbarenboim.com/the-phenomenon-of-sound.
- 6.
The musical terms “shaping” and “phrasing” are used interchangeably, referring to how a musician uses momentum, volume, and other expressive tools to turn a group of individual notes into a sonic idea.
- 7.
Alfred Brendel, “The Process of Foreshortening in Music,” in Alfred Brendel on Music: Collected Essays (Chicago: Cappella Books, 2001) 58.
- 8.
A secondary melody, like a descant, interacts with the main melody.
- 9.
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 142. Is our pianist shaping the sentences of Roland Barthes or Stephen Heath? Clearly it is both, and given the focus on the prose, Heath’s voice plays an important role.
- 10.
A “cadence” is a pause in the momentum of music. There are different types of cadences depending on what is happening musically, much like punctuation marks: a colon pauses differently than a semicolon and a sentence period pauses differently than one concluding a paragraph.
- 11.
A “deceptive cadence” occurs when the music prepares the listener for one kind of chord, but then delivers a different, unexpected one.
- 12.
Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 157.
- 13.
It is not necessarily the students with a musical background who have an affinity for phrasing sentences.
- 14.
Barthes , “The Death of the Author,” 162–163.
- 15.
Elizabeth A Behnke, “At the Service of the Sonata: Music Lessons with Merleau-Ponty,” in Merleau-Ponty: Critical Essays, ed. Henry Pietersma (University Press of America, 1989) 24. Behnke quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London: Rutledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 137.
- 16.
An operatic reading would involve larger gestures of sound at the expense of the intimate character the pianist wishes to achieve.
- 17.
Since a performance or recording can never achieve a definitive ideal, a pianist’s process of shaping and reshaping never ceases.
- 18.
Although dealing primarily with writing , David Bartholomae’s idea of risk applies to reading as well as music. He compares two college-placement essays: the first is grammatically sound and the second is riddled with errors. Yet, Bartholomae argues that the second essayist is stronger because, unlike the first, the writer takes the risk of engaging more complex ideas in a less familiar discourse. The first writer, in contrast, will need to be pried loose from safe, but constrained prose in favor of writing a “muddier and more confusing prose” in order to reach college level of writing . David Bartholomae, “Inventing the University” Journal of Basic Writing Vol. 5, No. 1 (1968): 20.
- 19.
Roland Barthes, “Musica Practica,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 153. Barthes further writes about the loss of “muscular playing” as part of a wider cultural move away from the body. In “Musica Practica” Barthes provides a history of this change as the amateur pianists at the parlor piano gradually gives way to the long-playing record. “Musical activity is no longer manual, muscular, kneadingly physical, but merely liquid, effusive, ‘lubrificating,’ to take up a word from Balzac.”
- 20.
“Sprechgesang” or “Sprechstimme” asks the singer to approximate the pitches indicated in the score. The result is a voice which plays in the space between singing and speaking. In Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) the entire soprano part is written in Sprechstimme.
- 21.
François Noudelmann. The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano, trans. by Brian J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 99.
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Pane, S. (2018). Playing Chopin, Playing Barthes: Bringing Musical Practice to Reading. In: Hensel, N. (eds) Exploring, Experiencing, and Envisioning Integration in US Arts Education. The Arts in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71051-8_4
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