Welcome!

From the Editor. We are pleased to announce in the coming weeks the publication of Vol. 29, no. 2 of Indiana Theory Review, which is currently being printed!

Whatever the anthropological facts, many cultures have long presumed singing—the artful production of euphonious sound by larynx and lungs—to be the primordial fons et origo of music. Such an idea is surely embedded in our myth, and if Kokopelli, deity of the Hopi, stands out by limiting himself exclusively to the flute, we may note that he is also, after all, a trickster god. The more usual situation throughout history has been one in which the differing degrees of esteem once accorded by Boethius to musica humana and musica instrumentalis—the harmony of body and soul as opposed to that of mere sound—have found their analogue in the elevation of vocal song—truly human music—over its instrumental proxy, that progeny of technological artifice. This precedence of song is even sedimented in our science: no less than Charles Darwin claimed, in The Descent of Man, that “human song is generally admitted to be the basis or origin of instrumental music.”

In light of this situation, music scholarship marvels at the dramatic reversal in the respective fortunes of vocal and instrumental music witnessed in the waning years of the Enlightenment, a shift consolidated well into modernity by a variety of well-studied social and intellectual forces. A self-aware music scholarship also notes that our Musikwissenschaft itself was, after all, largely birthed and weaned in the age of Schopenhauer. We note the historicity of our ideas about the best music to contemplate, and the best tools for doing so, and we may even admit intimations of a reciprocal relationship between the two. But this does not mean that the historical specter has been exorcised, and if the critical re-revalorization of music married to the voice has come far, one suspects that it still incomplete, even today.

Indiana Theory Review is therefore pleased in this issue to present four contributions that engage issues bearing—directly or fortuitously—on the relationships between song, structure, and the stuff of music. Intriguingly, our issue juxtaposes analyses of works by a Mendelssohn and by a née Mendelssohn, and so—however accidentally—gender ambles into the room as the elephant that we would ignore only to our demerit. Returning to The Descent of Man, we see shocking proof of the intellectual ooze whence we have emerged: “If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, [and] music (inclusive both of composition and performance) . . . with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer . . . that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.” Our reasoning now differs radically from Darwin’s as to the causes of the disparity between these hypothetical lists; yet once again, how fully has the specter been exorcised? Binding our two essays by Samuel Ng (College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati) and Michael Baker (University of Kentucky) is a common objection to prevailing assumptions about Hensel and Mendelssohn—that the former, even in her instrumental works, is indifferent to organic development, and that she exhibits an orientation toward evocative color and local detail (perhaps best suited to a composer of song?); and that the latter’s songs, in their orientation towards the traditional structural concerns of instrumental music, neglect their texts. To what extent does our sensitivity to gender in the wake of the New Musicology (and even its occasional tendency towards gender essentialism) inflect our appreciation of these issues? We may unavoidably see sister Hensel’s entire œuvre in contradistinction to brother Mendelssohn’s, and brother Mendelssohn’s song catalog in the light of the thriving interest in sister Hensel’s. Yet does this not prompt us once again to consider the extent to which gendered thinking might just shape our understanding of the types of composition “appropriate” for song and absolute music—and indeed our relative valuation of the two? In any case, our two authors each endeavor to explode myths, as Baker shows us how Mendelssohn’s keen sensitivity to the meaning of his chosen texts informs even his strophic song settings; while Ng shows us how Hensel’s seeming flights of fancy in fact belie a masterful and calculated discourse with the rotational principle, organic motivic development, and other traditional elements of structure.

As misguided as Darwin appears on matters musical, we cannot help, however, but follow him from the Gewandhaus to Animal House—a place one indeed expects him to be an expert. He informs us that, among the animals, the males “are provided, either exclusively or in a much higher degree than the females, with organs for vocal or instrumental music, and with odoriferous glands.” But we are being unfair to “Louie Louie”—the subject of Christopher Doll’s contribution. Doll (Rutgers) shows us how this song (recorded most famously by The Kingsmen) has sounded its barbaric yawp across the rooftops of a world far beyond Fraternity Row. Indeed, as an “archetypical American icon” (to use Frank Zappa’s characterization), this song and its signature riff may be revealed as a fascinatingly robust cultural structure, one keeping “its aural and expressive identity intact under even the most drastic his- torically and musically transformative circumstances.” From this undergirding icon we then turn our attention to opera, a genre whose relation to song may, in contrast, be envisaged as a superstructure. Of course, like gender, issues of geography may often skew our thoughts about the proper relationship of song and musical substance. We look for structure everywhere in 1920s Vienna, and perhaps especially in its most famous opera, but we are much more rarely wont to seek it a thousand kilometers southwest in Torre del Lago. Yet Andrew Davis’s ongoing work has done much to revise our picture of Giacomo Puccini, a composer whose systematic and calculated manipulation of musical styles suggests a striking admixture of modernist sensibility—including its affinity for structure—into the putative conservatism of his language. Matthew Franke (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) reviews Davis’s recent book “Il Trittico,” “Turandot,” and Puccini’s Late Style with a special eye to the aspects of lateness and Italian-ness that Davis observes in those operas.

In summary, we at Indiana Theory Review do hope that you enjoy this issue that restores song to its rightful place of prominence—not only in our esteem, but also in our theorizing. All arguments aside, the four contributions herein should suffice to justify this special treatment. Should they not, what can we do but appeal to Darwin, and to assert that, after all, song probably got here first. His reasoning may be fishy, but—at least within the covers of this issue—this fish has legs.

—William Guerin
Bloomington, Indiana

Indiana Theory Review, Volume 29, No. 2
Michael Baker (University of Kentucky)	Completion and Incompletion in the Solo Songs of Felix Mendelssohn
Samuel Ng (College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati)	Rotation as Metaphor: Fanny Hensel’s Formal and Tonal Logic Reconsidered
Christopher Doll (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)	A Tale of Two Louies: Interpreting an “Archetypal American Music Icon”
Matthew Franke (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)	Review of Andrew Davis, “Il Trittico,” “Turandot,” and Puccini’s Late Style