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In Alexander Dumas' classic tale The Count of Monte Cristo , the hero Edmund Dantes is an unsophisticated commoner, unjustly imprisoned. During his brutalincarceration, he befriends a fellow inmate, who secretly teaches him the skills of the nobility, and eventuallyshares with him the location of a secret treasure. Dantes escapes, finds the treasure, and transforms himself into aCount with extraordinary wealth. When he returns home, neither his beloved nor his enemies recognize him--theeffects of time have been too pronounced.
A musical return may be similarly disguised. If most of the qualities of the original are preserved, recognition of a reprise is within the reach of an alertlistener. But if the transformations are extreme--if only a shadow of the original is preserved--then time's effect maybe so overpowering as to make recognition very difficult.
Listen to Beethoven's Bagatelle , opus 126, no.1 in its entirety. As you will recall, the movement opens with alyrical theme, which is immediately repeated with more embellishments. Does the main theme ever return at all?If so where and how?
The melody does return: it is played in the bass.
However, many of the opening's original features have been modified: the melody is in a much lower register; fasterrhythmic values predominate in the accompaniment; the harmony is different. Rather than being stronglyarticulated, the reprise is obscured by the radical transformations that have taken place.
Similarly, in Schoenberg's Piano Piece , opus 33a, the refrain of the opening may be hard to grasp:
The pitch patterns at the opening and in the piano's right hand at the return are exactly the same. But many of theopening's defining features have changed: the opening is made up strictly of chords; at the reprise, there arestill chords, but are broken, creating a more rhythmically fluid surface. The texture is also thickened: the lefthand is playing an independent part. The register is expanded. Though the opening is being recuperated, thenovelties make the recognition challenging.
Disguising the return makes the music inherently more open-ended and dynamic. The music does not acknowledge its return, but rather maintains its uninterrupted development. Instead of a sense of circling back to a familiar place, the music offers a particularly forceful sense of progress.
When you go to a class reunion, you are not there just to recognize old classmates. You are there to see whether time“has been good to them.”Who has aged, who remains youthful? Who has fulfilled the ambitions oftheir youth, who has faced greater disappointment or veered off in unexpected directions? One classmate remains asstraight-laced as ever. Another has gone from being a businessman to being an organic farmer. You mill about thecrowd, analyzing time's effect in all its dazzling variety and potency.
Similarly, when listening to music, identifying the return of a familiar passage is not enough. Evaluating whether thepassage is restored intact or has changed is crucial to understanding the significance and poetry of the return. Thepossibilities range from time having no effect whatsoever--the music is restored intact, exactly in its original form--totime's effect being so powerful and the transformations so extreme that the original passage is barely recognizable.
Time's effect may be sudden or gradual. It may render the music more secure or more unsettled, more refined or moreelaborate, more delicate or more forceful, compressed or expanded. Through careful hearing and comparison of relatedpassages, it is possible to carry an aural analysis quite far. The progression from analysis to interpretation may work both ways. You may begin with a more immediate, intuitivereaction, and then examine the music carefully to understand its cause. Or, you may begin with a collection ofobservations, which then yield a more comprehensive conclusion. Across styles, eras and cultures, time's effect on the material may be the single most crucial feature of music.
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