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Off‐Tonic Culmination in R achmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Author(s) -
Johnston Blair
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
music analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.25
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 1468-2249
pISSN - 0262-5245
DOI - 10.1111/musa.12035
Subject(s) - theme (computing) , rhetorical question , coherence (philosophical gambling strategy) , relation (database) , musical , concerto , literature , history , art , art history , computer science , physics , operating system , quantum mechanics , database , piano
This article considers the implications that S ergei R achmaninoff's concept of the ‘culminating point’ has for the analysis of his music, using the off‐tonic climax in his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini , Op. 43, as exemplar and case study. In the first part of the essay I position R achmaninoff's idea in relation to S choenberg's and S chenker's contemporaneous views of musical coherence and goal orientation, and in relation to recent hermeneutic approaches to music from R achmaninoff's era (especially those derived from H epokoski's work), showing how R achmaninoff's idea, although it shares a nineteenth‐century heritage with those theorists' ideas, has its own analytical and hermeneutic entailments. In the second part of the essay, drawing on metaphors used by R achmaninoff and on theoretical work by C andace B rower, I outline a model for understanding a culminating point as a moment where contextually determined rhetorical‐structural features map in striking, potentially ‘extraordinary’ ways onto physically oriented ‘image schemas’. I demonstrate the model in brief analyses of four R achmaninoff works and then treat the Rhapsody at length, showing how image schemas involved at the culminating point interact with the work's generic‐ formal features and large‐scale tonal plan.