Music scholarship has been rethinking its understanding of Franz Schubert and his work. How might our modern aesthetic values and historical knowledge of Schubert's life affect how we interpret his music? Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation demonstrates how updated analysis of Schubert and his instrumental works reveals expressive meaning. In six chapters, each devoted to one or two of Schubert's pieces, Rene Rusch explores alternate forms of unity and coherence, offers critical assessments of biographical and intertextual influence, investigates narrative, and addresses the gendering of the composer and his music. Rusch's comparative analyses and interpretations address four significant areas of scholarly focus in Schubert studies, including his use of chromaticism, his unique forms, the impact of events in his own life, and the influence of Beethoven. Drawing from a range of philosophical, hermeneutic, historical, biographical, theoretical, and analytical sources, Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation offers readers a unique and innovative foray into the poetics of contemporary analysis of Schubert's instrumental music and develops new ways to engage with his repertoire.
Rene Rusch is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance.
Preface 1. Schubert's Musical Reception and Contemporary Schubert Criticism 2. Rethinking Conceptions of Unity 3. The Value of Diatonic Indeterminacy When Traveling through Tonal Space 4. Sonata Forms, Fantasias, and Formal Coherence 5. Biography, Music Analysis, and the Narrative Impulse 6. Beyond Homage and Critique: Rethinking Musical Influence Closing Remarks Works Cited Index
"Rusch's book is a valuable addition to the analytical literature on Schubert. . . . Her analyses consistently embrace multiple subjectivities and subject positions and decline to "give . . . unqualified allegiance to unity as the supreme value for analysis" (Korsyn 2004, 338). Like Rusch, I find poetic correspondences between this open-ended analytical approach and the strange or uncanny qualities of Schubert's music, and I think her analyses reveal the potential for others to attempt a similar approach with the music of other elusive composers (Faure comes to mind). Even if one is not persuaded by Rusch's "postmodernist reluctance to accept a single or objective reality and engage with master narratives," it is important to note that she never rejects other analyses that privilege unity (194). The reader is rather repeatedly "invited" to contemplate Schubert's music from multiple different angles-the word "invite" is somewhat of a leitmotif in the book-and it would seem churlish to decline such a graciously offered invitation. I should also add that Rusch's embrace of multiple perspectives and subjectivities does not come at the expense of analytical detail or rigor. Her analyses are copiously illustrated with meticulous annotated examples that range from extremely detailed Schenkerian voice-leading graphs to neo-Riemannian Tonnetze to score excerpts annotated with formal labels."-Andrew Pau, Theory and Practice
