Felix Salzer and the Principle of Variation
SMA Zoom Colloquium, 29 June 2023, 6:30pm BST
Please use the following Zoom link: https://newcastleuniversity.zoom.us/j/86512906596 [newcastleuniversity.zoom.us]
Meeting ID: 865 1290 6596 Passcode: 795240
Abstract
Over the course of his career as a music analyst and historian, Felix Salzer (1904-1986) remained steadfast in his conviction that tonal music, at least within a “Western” context, was amenable to a type of listening that could account for its goal-directedness as well as its hierarchic-architectonic nature. His coinage of the term “Structural Hearing,” built upon the notions of “structure” and “prolongation,” provided the basis for his widespread pedagogical and scholarly program. While less directly influential today, Salzer’s work of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s was vital to the subsequent development of graphic music analysis in the United States, the U.K., and elsewhere.
What is less known about Salzer’s approach to music analysis, but which turns out to be crucial for an understanding of his work, is that it leans heavily on the technique of variation, or what Salzer called in 1935 “das Variationsprinzip.” Surprising as it might seem at first, Salzer’s teacher Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) theorized little about variation technique, focusing instead on the transformation of musical content through various layers of voice leading (the Verwandlungsschichten). By contrast, Salzer used the principle of variation as a thread through which to weave much of his analytic and historiographic agenda—in the former case, the way in which the varied regeneration of musical content can provide insight into musical unity and form; in the latter, the means by which composers throughout Western music history could develop novel ways of expanding upon similar types contrapuntal, harmonic, and/or motivic models. One could even suggest that Salzer’s principle of variation offers a unique point of contact with Schenker’s concerns, some of which are musical (especially as regards improvisation and the musical fantasy), others of which touch upon a more general intellectual and ideological outlook. His approach also finds resonance in some of the broader concerns of musicology as he absorbed them during his years as a budding scholar in Vienna in the 1920s and 30s, which he then carried forward in his publishing and teaching activites in New York after the Second World War.
In this talk I therefore cast a bird’s eye perspective on Salzer’s work with the principle of variation over the course of his analytical career: from his 1935 book Sinn und Wesen der abendländischen Mehrstimmigkeit (The Meaning and Essence of Western Polyphony); to his published pedagogical books of the 1950s and 60s (Structural Hearing and Counterpoint in Composition); to a number of published and unpublished variation analyses from the 1970s and early 80s, the latter of which are located in the Felix Salzer Papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. This final group of analyses was to be Salzer’s last major project in music analysis, but it was only partially realized due to illness and to his death in 1986. Rather than focusing on just one or two musical examples, this talk will instead survey the larger landscape that forms Salzer’s thinking about variation. It will therefore touch upon numerous musical examples that demonstrate just how infused the principle of variation was in Salzer’s musical-analytical worldview.
Biography
John Koslovsky is on the music theory and history faculty at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and is an affiliate researcher in the humanities at Utrecht University. His research deals broadly with the history of music theory and musicology, music analysis, analytical intertextuality, performance, and performativity; more specifically, he has been active as a Schenkerian analyst and historian since graduating from the Eastman School of Music in 2010—his paper for the SMA online colloquium continues his research into the history of Schenkerian analytical traditions, and forms part of his current book project, entitled *Felix Salzer and the Making of American* *Schenkerism*. In November a co-edited volume with Michiel Schuijer will be released by Routledge, with the title *Music Performance Encounters: Collaborations and Confrontations*. Starting on 1 October 2023 he will become part of the faculty at KU Leuven, as Professor of Musicology.