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Patterns of Hybridity:
An Analytical Framework for Pluralist Music
A DISSERTATION
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
By
EVANSTON, ILLINOIS
December 2017
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ABSTRACT
style and genre interactions as an analytical layer of combinations of identities. It engages with
the structural, contextual, and perceptual aspects of music by mixing perspectives from music
studies with postcolonial studies, situated cognition, and genre studies. Hybridity is treated as a
common communication tool and, as such, goes beyond the expected repertories of polystylism
and musical collage from the 1960s and 1970s. In this way, this study approaches diverse works
ranging from seventeenth- to twenty-first-century Western music, embracing concert and popular
traditions within the same framework. In this dissertation, I engage first with perspectives on
hybridity from the field of postcolonial studies, and trace a brief summary of their different
general stances before moving to iterations of hybridity in a wide musical repertory. Next, I
investigate the literature on the notions of style and genre, and define them as the main
perspectives in a dynamic and fluid way. The proposed analytical framework treats moments of
clash, coexistence, distortion, and trajectory. These mixture strategies are perceptible processes,
given the familiarity with a shared knowledge within a musical community; they can be
are, then, lenses for interpretation of hybridity in music, which I discuss in detail, with definition
This dissertation marks the completion of a decade-long endeavor that goes well beyond
its pages and academia. It started in 2008, when I decided to migrate to the United States and
spend even more time with music and books. Throughout this journey, many people crossed my
path and contributed in different ways. In Brazil, Any Raquel Carvalho was a great mentor, and
was crucial in fostering my interest in music scholarship. Any Raquel, along with other
Antonio Carlos Borges Cunha, Celso Loureiro Chaves, and Fernando Mattos—prepared me for
the many challenges to come; more than that, they made me proud of being part of UFRGS and
to a new country. Robert Hatten, Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, Gretchen Horlacher, Kyle Adams,
and Roman Ivanovitch made me feel at home, and helped develop my ideas and academic
advisor, was a great guide, supporting my ideas from the first days of my doctoral studies.
Vasili’s highly engaged reading and criticism of my work shaped these following pages, and
were invaluable in the completion of this document. It was always a pleasure to share ideas with
Richard Ashley, whose encouragement throughout these five years was crucial to this project.
Mark Butler provided wise guidance and opportunities for scholarly development. Yayoi Uno
Everett donated her time and attention to my ideas, and I appreciate the coffee, conversations,
and support. Classes with Ryan Dohoney and Robert Gjerdingen were also part of this process,
Nathan Beary Blustein, Chelsey Hamm, Matthew Boyle, Simon Prosser, Lucy Liu, and Paul
Child were not only highly qualified colleagues, but also great friends. At Northwestern, Cora
Palfy, Janet Bourne, Melissa Murphy, Karen Chan, Kristina Knowles, Ciarán Doyle, Sarah
Gates, Anjni Amin, Miriam Piilonen, Stephen Hudson, and Luis Fernando Amaya made my time
in Evanston considerably richer from personal, intellectual, and artistic standpoints. Rosa
Abrahams and Olga Sanchez-Kisielewska went through this dissertation together with me,
engaging with support, criticism, and companionship. Thanks for being great friends, great
minds, and all-around excellent humans, making me feel part of a community, and dealing with
criticism and support always pushed me forward. Regina Bones Barcelos and Guilherme
Carneiro Monteiro Nitschke were friends from an early age, we discovered a lot together, and we
walked together much of our lives—I hope that we keep striding our paths jointly. I am also
grateful to Gabriel Schmitt and Marcela Andrade, Chico Mattoso and Isabelle Moreira Lima,
Renata Graw and Ansgar Graw, with whom I shared my discoveries of Chicago. Thanks, all of
Garcia Alcalde, who always showed excitement with my developments, and pride in even my
meager achievements. Thanks to one of the strongest and wisest persons I know—my
grandmother Maria Clari Moschini—who understands and believes in me. Thanks for showing
that the clashes, coexistences, distortions, and trajectories of identities between Europe and
South America can, after all, create happiness and serenity, which I share with the Moschini and
7
Alcalde families. Thanks to my brother, André Moschini Alcalde, who shared a bedroom for
most of his early years with me and my insomnia, who calmly shared space with my guitars, my
metronome, and my books. Thanks to Ondina de Souza Carneiro, for always taking care of me.
[Obrigado aos meus avós, Maria José de Bittencourt Alcalde e Hildebrando Garcia Alcalde, que sempre
celebraram e se orgulharam do meu desenvolvimento e meus sucessos mais simples. Minha avó—Maria
Clari Moschini—é uma das pessoas mais fortes e sábias que eu conheço, e sempre me entendeu e
acreditou em mim. Obrigado por mostrar que colisões, coexistências, distorções e trajetórias de
identidades europeias e sul-americanas, podem, afinal de contas, criar alegria e serenidade—das quais eu
aproveito junto com as famílias Moschini e Alcalde. Obrigado ao meu irmão, André Moschini Alcalde,
por dividir o quarto durante anos comigo e minha insônia, por dividir espaço com minhas guitarras,
metrônomo, e livros. Obrigado à Ondina de Souza Carneiro, por sempre cuidar de mim. Às famílias por
escolha—Eguia e Guimarães—obrigado por me receber tão bem.]
Bittencourt Alcalde, who taught me early on to be curious and pursue whatever paths I wanted to
take, who do not read English, but paid for my lessons since I was a nine-year-old Brazilian kid,
trying to understand foreign guitar magazines. They supported me and my many idiosyncrasies,
and if I can make them proud, I am happy. I owe them everything, and this dissertation, with all
[Meus pais, Liane Moschini Alcalde e José Carlos de Bittencourt Alcalde, me ensinaram desde cedo a ser
curioso e a seguir meus caminhos, quaisquer fossem eles. Eles não falam inglês mas pagaram pelas
minhas aulas desde os nove anos, quando eu tentava entender as revistas estrangeiras de guitarra. Eles
sempre me apoiaram, e se eu puder fazê-los orgulhosos—em qualquer idioma ou país—eu sou feliz. Eu
lhes devo tudo, e essa tese, com todas suas imperfeições, mas também com sua sinceridade, é dedicada a
eles.]
Finally, none of this would have happened if I did not have the sweetest person I know by
my side: my wife, Lis Eguia Guimarães, who gives me reason to believe in life and smile every
day. You are in each page of this work, and it is yours as much as it is mine. There are no words,
in any language, that could properly represent my gratitude, love, and admiration for you. Thank
you.
8
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................. 14
CHAPTER ONE : HYBRIDITY ................................................................................................................. 21
1.1 WHAT IS HYBRIDITY? ................................................................................................................ 22
THE CONCEPT OF HYBRIDITY ........................................................................................................................................................ 22
SOCIAL SCIENCES AND POSTCOLONIALISM: THINKING HYBRIDITY IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY ................................... 25
BACKLASH TO HYBRIDITY THEORIES ............................................................................................................................................. 28
1.2 HYBRIDITY IN MUSIC ................................................................................................................. 29
HYBRIDITY IN THE RENAISSANCE: SACRED AND SECULAR, VOCAL AND INSTRUMENTAL COMBINATIONS ............................... 32
BAROQUE, MIXED TASTE, NATIONS, AND GENRES ...................................................................................................................... 34
CLASSICAL STYLE, STABILITY, AND TOPOI ..................................................................................................................................... 38
THE ROMANTIC, EXOTICISM, AND NEW NATIONALISM .............................................................................................................. 39
EARLY MODERNITIES, RUSSIAN ORIENTALISM, STRAVINSKY, AND IVES ..................................................................................... 45
THE POST-1950s ........................................................................................................................................................................... 48
1.3 HYBRIDITY AND MIXTURE TERMINOLOGY IN MUSIC ......................................................................... 56
1.4 INTERPRETING HYBRIDITIES ......................................................................................................... 60
1.5 THE BOUNDARIES VS. HYBRID CONUNDRUM .................................................................................. 68
CHAPTER TWO : STYLE AND GENRE .................................................................................................... 71
2.1 THE MULTIPLE FACETS OF STYLE: NORMS, ORIGINALITY, AESTHETIC HISTORICISM, ORGANISM, AND
DISCOURSE ................................................................................................................................... 72
THE REJECTION OF STYLE ............................................................................................................................................................. 81
2.2 GENRE: FROM RIGID TYPOLOGIES TO DYNAMIC COMMUNITIES ......................................................... 82
THE DECLINE AND RECONCEPTUALIZATION OF GENRE .............................................................................................................. 84
GENRE IN POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES ........................................................................................................................................... 88
2.3 STYLE VS GENRE ....................................................................................................................... 93
2.4 PROTOTYPE THEORY, TYPICALITY, GRADIENCE: A COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE ON STYLES AND GENRES ........ 100
2.5 MAPS, TREES, AND NETWORKS: GENRE AND STREAMING IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY .................... 103
2.6 OPERATIONALIZING STYLE AND GENRE ........................................................................................ 110
IDEALIZED STABLE STYLE OR GENRE .......................................................................................................................................... 110
STYLE AND GENRE FIELDS, SUPERGENRES, MACROGENRES, CLUSTERS, AND GAPS ................................................................ 111
STYLE AND GENRE MARKERS (OR FLAGS); SYNECDOCHE .......................................................................................................... 112
STYLE AND GENRE SYSTEM ........................................................................................................................................................ 114
List of Tables:
14
Introduction
A lion, Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, a South Korean flag, and a violin. A trumpet, an
African American woman with an afro, balloons, a calendar, and a harmonica. A lamp, a star-
shaped guitar, a bed, and a dove. These are only some of the more than forty icons that appear on
my screen when I open Spotify’s “genres & moods” tab. If I click the lion, it takes me to many
reggae playlists, including Reggae Classics, Reggae en Español, Just Smile, and Reggae
Infusions—the latter of which is described as “[r]elax and slip into this eclectic mix of reggae
infused tracks;” it has 153,659 followers. I can click back and try the Ray-Ban aviator, which
stands for R&B. If I follow the violin icon, captioned Classical, I am again met with many
playlists: Pop Songs based on Classical Music, Medieval 50: Spotify picks, Contemporary
Chinese Classical, All about that Brass, and Classical X: 50 best tracks from genre-bending
musicians that incorporate classical tradition into their own music languages. Classical X,
which has 28,862 followers, includes composers such as Brian Eno, Morton Feldman, a piece by
Kate Bush performed by Anne Sofie von Otter and a string quartet, John Cage, Terry Riley,
Bernard Hermann’s main theme for the movie Taxi Driver, Arvo Pärt, and Enio Morricone. And
this eclectic playlist is a mere two clicks away from another titled K-Hip-hop beats, which can be
A listener can navigate swiftly through these musical genres, and engage with a wide
variety of sounds within a dynamic system of associations—yes, with Ray-Ban sunglasses and
lions, but also with social, economic, and ideological values that shape the listening experience
as a whole. The icons and labels serve to suggest, establish, or reinforce hierarchies and qualities
15
of music as much as their actual sonorities. As such, these representations are not fixed, but in
constant interaction with each other, as well as the sounds and experiences they aim to mediate,
as hinted in some of the playlist descriptions above. The simultaneous access to many disparate
musical identity categories creates a fluid mix of references. All these visually separated music
containers, side by side in the same virtual space, dissolve when they trigger a complex network
of associations, creating friction between their idealized rigidness and their contextual volatility.
***
Hybridity’s related notions of difference, otherness, belonging, and the status of being
mixed are also recurrent issues in today’s social and political discourse, but not in the same
creative and positive way as above. The stigmatization of the other, of those who do not conform
historically used as a way of separating and controlling minorities, can have a veil of cultural
innovation and integration, as seen above, but only along with many layers of prejudice,
privilege, and manipulation. In Brazil, for instance, more than 20,000 people signed a petition
for a law that qualifies a specific Brazilian genre—Funk Carioca—as “a public health crime,
against children, adolescents, and families,” the petitioner claiming it a “fake culture.”1 Funk
Carioca mixes Miami Bass sounds, Brazilian syncopated rhythms, and rapping (with social
commentaries and very pronounced sexual messages), and has been successfully exported to
1
My translation from Portuguese of the official law suggestion. See original (accessed July 3, 2017) at
http://legis.senado.leg.br/sdleg-getter/documento?dm=5299757&disposition=inline
16
North America and Europe in the last decade, with the involvement of mainstream artists such as
Diplo.2 Thus, the musical genre, sounds, and community of Funk Carioca were stigmatized by
the conservative ideals and values of the Brazilian petitioners, and the entire musical experience
became criminalized as a result. This is neither a new nor localized case; time and again,
prevailing groups impose and emphasize boundaries, filtering difference, the other, the mixed,
and dictate what does and does not constitute “good music” or “real culture.” Genres and styles,
then, are not mere categories, but dynamic mediators, which articulate hybridity and go well
***
The second movement from Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso, no. 1 (1977) starts with
a Baroque-like violin duet: the lines are clearly tonal, they imitate each other at the unison, and
the counterpoint is, for the most part, idiomatic of eighteenth-century music. The duo is joined
by other instruments of a string ensemble; they also imitate the line, but do so at the minor
second, gradually changing it from a Baroque reference into a massive cluster, related with
specific mid-twentieth-century concert music idioms. So, in the first twenty seconds of the
movement, a listener is presented with a path between two sonorities at least 250 years apart.
Later in the piece, other disparate stylistic references appear, such as the brilliant style, Alberti
bass, and hints of tango. Schnittke writes thoughtfully about his “polystylistic method,” citing
diversity, manipulation, taboo, individual reflection, dreams of a unified style, and freedom from
For several years I experienced an inward urge to write music for the cinema and
theater. At first I enjoyed doing this, then it became a burden, and then it dawned
2
As James McNally (2016, 435) discusses, this brings different problems of appropriation, and a “glamorization of
the favela in US and European culture, as well as a more general fetishization of impoverished subaltern
communities of color.”
17
on me: my lifelong task would be to bridge the gap between serious music and
music for entertainment, even if I broke my neck in the process. I have this dream
of a unified style where fragments of serious music and fragments of music for
entertainment would not just be scattered about in a frivolous way, but would be
the elements of a diverse musical reality: elements that are real in the way they
are expressed, but that can be used to manipulate—be they jazz, pop, rock, or
serial music (since even avant-garde music has become a commodity). An artist
has only one possible way of avoiding manipulation—he must use his own
individual efforts to rise above materials that are taboo, materials used for
external manipulation. In this way[,] he will gain the right to give an individual
reflection of the musical situation that is free of sectarian prejudice, as, for
example, in the case of Mahler and Charles Ives. So[,] into the framework of a
neoclassical Concerto Grosso[,] I introduced some fragments not consonant with
its general style. (Schnittke, 2002, 45)
***
How can the mixture of identities presented in the Classical X playlist, in the Brazilian
petition about Funk Carioca, and in Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso be articulated (and interpreted)
so differently and, at the same time, be so effortlessly accessible?3 Perhaps because, even though
hybridity is recurrent—maybe even ubiquitous—it is not a unitary concept; there are many types
purposes.
Musical hybridity is no exception to this diversity, and has the potential to productively
access many other dimensions of music communication. And yet, no specific framework
currently exists to analyze and interpret hybridity in music. I develop such an analytic framework
in this dissertation, while exploring the textual, contextual, and communal realms of musical
hybridity. I proceed not in a linear, chronological manner, but rather by considering different
repertories, events, and perspectives synchronically, thus reflecting the dynamic scenario of style
and genre interaction. I suggest an approach to different instances of musical mixture with a
3
As of July 2017, there are more than ten albums containing Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 on Spotify, as well
as many playlists and albums of the Brazilian style.
18
framework that is flexible enough to operationalize, but not formalize, hybridity. For its
foregrounded thematization of style and genre mixtures, the polystylism of 1960s becomes an
invaluable case study, to be sure. But many other repertories will be used to diversify views on
musical hybridity. In the end, this is not a dissertation about a specific repertory, but about a
process that is shared by many musical expressions and their surrounding communities.
This work builds on that of a number of scholars who have previously tackled these
matters. Hybridity in music has been addressed by a few authors under the guises of exoticism
(Day-O’Connell 2007), and nationalism (Bohlman 2004), all distinct examples of hybrids.
Focusing on the diverse twentieth century, other authors have narrowed their investigations to a
specific composer (Burkholder 1995) or a type of hybrid (Losada 2004, 2008, 2009, on collage
works; Berry 2006, on specific political articulations of hybridity in George Rochberg, Herbie
Hancock, and Bob Dylan). More general perspectives on matters of musical hybridity—again,
under the different guises of orientalism, nationalism, folk and world music—have been
provided in the volume edited by Born and Hesmondhalgh (2000). Watkins (1994) investigates
the concept/technique of collage as a unifying trace from Stravinsky to the late twentieth century.
Taylor (2007, 2015) focuses strictly on the relation of the capitalist project and exoticism.
Finally, the surge of interest in the subfield of topic theory (Mirka 2014, as a recent example) has
helped bring discussions of style and genre back into the discourse of music theory. All these
important works articulate, in some way, the notion of hybridity and boundary permeability;
however, few of them focus on the relationship between the specific ways the distinct musical
materials are combined in music, and the interpretative tropes with which hybridity is usually
19
4
addressed. The main contribution of the analytical framework developed here, then, is to bridge
In order to explore these many issues, the present study will be guided by five general
questions:
These questions will be addressed throughout four chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 establish the
conceptual and historical background for the analytical framework by delving into different
perspectives about hybridity and styles and genres, respectively. Chapter 3 introduces, defines,
and demonstrates the framework, while Chapter 4 applies it to entire movements or pieces.
Chapter 1 is a brief survey of the history of hybridity and its application in several
Western musical expressions from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. It illustrates the
prevalence of hybridity in many repertoires, even though the term is usually attached to its
clearly foregrounded iterations in 1960s and 1970s polystylism. The chapter also discusses many
interpretations of hybridity from the perspective of postcolonial studies, engaging with the
different parameters, though the vast majority are attached to concepts of musical style and
genre. In Chapter 2, I explore these complex notions, which may involve social or cultural
identity, difference, community, politics, as well as the structural and sonic characteristics of a
musical text.
4
Hatten (2004, 2014) are important exceptions.
20
Chapter 3 presents the main goal of this dissertation: the development of a flexible
framework for analyzing musical hybrids. The framework emerges from four critical realizations
that stem from the two previous chapters: (1) that music hybridity is not confined to
“polystylism;” (2) that hybridity can be analyzed not only by determining what sources are used
in combination, but how they are combined; (3) that these different ways of combining materials
can be approached by four mixture strategies—clash, coexistence, distortion, and trajectory; and
(4), that these mixture strategies are perceptible to listeners who possess the styles and genres in
Chapter 4 applies this framework in eight different analyses. Six of these concern
polystylism, again, one of the repertories in which hybridity is most clearly foregrounded;
sections 4.3 and 4.6 expand the repertory: the former focuses on Baroque hybridities, and the
latter analyzes recorded popular music from 1971, 2001, and 2016. These two groups serve not
only to demonstrate the wider application of the framework, but also to point to paths for future
This project is fostered by my own experience of navigating the many realms of music
academic dissertations to be narrow in focus; however, the subject of this study does not allow
for such restriction, since it is in its very essence plural, open, and dynamic. It is my hope, then,
that the diversity presented in the following pages stimulates the discussion about the many
facets of hybridity by embracing, rather than inhibiting, the interaction of multiple types of
In general, hybridity references the process or result of combining two or more races,
languages, identities, objects, or any other clearly bounded concept, be it virtually, conceptually,
or physically. But it is also a contentious term that has been used in a variety of contexts––from
biology to culture––to support a wide range of political and ideological projects. As such, it can
of vigor and strength; it can be a virtual, at times physical, space for subversion or dialog that
suits political forces that wish to establish inequalities. Both positive and negative values are
assigned to the hybrid category, depending on the conditions and motivations of the mixture, and
well as tracking the associated biases and values of their contexts.5 The conceptual building
blocks of hybridity are boundaries (segmentation and grouping), identities (labels and values),
and difference (consolidation of identity and hierarchy of values). When an object, place, person,
or process combines two or more identities, it disrupts the contextually constructed boundaries
Music articulates many of these ideas of hybridity, and relies heavily on the framing
capacities of styles and genres to define its boundaries, identities, and difference. These
5
By operationalizing, I mean to develop and establish a conceptual framework for analyzing hybridity.
22
political, structural, technical, and aesthetic—and are the main, albeit not the only, agents of its
hybridity. The present study develops an interpretive framework for hybridity in music that
integrates both the cultural and technical/structural aspects of its sonic expressions. But in order
to develop the framework, it is essential to carefully review the established ideas on hybridity not
only in music but also in general, which is the purpose of the present chapter. First, I will briefly
trace and situate hybridity’s use in different political and cultural projects, some of its different
meanings, conditions, and motivations. Then I address the concept specifically in music, tracking
examples of musical hybrids from the Renaissance through the twenty-first century, and
The Latin word hibrida was initially used in pastoralism (Nederveen Pieterse 2001, 100)
to indicate a mix of a domestic sow and a wild boar, but quickly expanded to agriculture and
horticulture, referring to mixtures of any two different animals or plants. With the rise of
genetics in the nineteenth century, the term became a tool for racial discourse. Young (1995)
explains the context in which hybridity became a subject matter of racial theories in the
nineteenth century, when alterity and difference were used to enforce dominance, engaging with
Within this context, the concept of hybridity was used to counteract the perceived
“neutralization” of the culture and ethnicity of European dominant classes by proposing that
humanity was composed of different species. The fact that genetic hybrids may have limited
fertility—the mule, for instance, a mixture of a horse and an ass, cannot usually procreate—
served as enough evidence for some polygenists to address mixtures of white Europeans with
other peoples as something to be avoided. In other words, this outlook was employed as a
generalized pseudo-scientific argument to protect the status, identities, and ideologies of the
dominant classes. Contrasting perspectives from genetics showing the utility of hybridity were
overlooked or discarded by most racial discourses. For instance, the same infertile mule
exemplifies hybrid vigor: it can endure harder work considerably better than either the pure horse
or ass. Nevertheless, with the rise of racial theories and polygenism to justify supremacy of a
few, “hybrid” was turned into a pejorative term in the nineteenth century’s essentialist world; it
The term soon started to be used metaphorically to denote mixtures in the cultural realm.
Notions of ethnicity, class, and nation are intertwined with “culture,” another contentious term
attached to the colonial system. Culture, once again a terminological and conceptual borrowing
from agriculture, is used here not as an embracing term—the different environments within
which humans create—but, in the singular, to represent the “Western civilization’s” values and
24
development. These exclusive notions were essential in attempting to create and protect a clearly
bounded identity. Thus, the same fears of impure ethnicity in the racial discourse were promptly
transposed to the cultural one. Hybridity, in both its biological/genetic and cultural versions,
became strongly attached to racial and identity politics, and acquired a negative value in all these
In order for something to be impure, there must exist the disputable concept of
[i]n biological terms “purity” results from breed “isolation” (or “inbreeding”),
leading to biological homozygosity (or genetic homogeneity). In cultural terms,
“purity” results from “refinement” or “conventionalization” of a tradition—
processes sometimes assisted by authoritarianism, by small community size, and
by a selection for speed in adapting to new environments—and implies
minimizing variability within the cultural tradition, a condition associated with
cultural homogeneity. (Stross 1999, 258)
In this way, purity, especially within the cultural realm, is always idealized and never
actualized. This emphasizes the importance of contexts and ideologies in investigating these
matters. The observer (the one engaging, labeling, valuing, listening, and judging) obtains these
idealized pure categories either from statistical frequency or, more important in some cases,
explicitly learns rigid labels that influence how they organize and value the stimuli. When social
sciences scholars in the late twentieth century began to engage and problematize concepts related
to hybridity, they highlighted asymmetrical contexts and ideologies that surround it. Hybridity
then became a loaded notion for scholarly debate in the field of postcolonialism.
25
SOCIAL SCIENCES AND POSTCOLONIALISM: THINKING HYBRIDITY IN THE LATE
TWENTIETH CENTURY6
According to Nederveen Pieterse (2001, 100), hybridity entered the realm of social
sciences through studies in anthropology of religion in the 1970s, more specifically syncretism,
followed by works on creole languages.7 Research on hybridity soon moved beyond religion and
language, and eventually was grouped under the moniker of postcolonial studies. The earlier
stages of postcolonialism are marked by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), who applied French
poststructuralism in studying “the East” (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000, 4); Mikhail Bakhtin
(1981) is also considered a precursor in the use of hybridity, bringing the notions of mixture to
connected with certain types of hybridity at the discourse level. Bhabha (1994) uses Bakhtin’s
notions of hybridity in discourse, and transforms it “into an active moment of challenge and
6
Still connected to the field of postcolonialist studies, Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (2000) edited a
volume of texts dealing with issues related to postcolonialism in musical expressions and interpretations. I will
engage with this text in the next section, which deals more directly with music.
7
Roger Bastide defines syncretism as “uniting pieces of the mythical history of two different traditions in one that
continued to be ordered by a single system” (1970, 101; quoted in Nederveen Pieterse 2009, 100).
26
resistance against dominant cultural power” (Young 1995, 21). Bhabha’s politically charged
316) where power can be negotiated, reinforced the focus on matters of race, class, language,
nation, and, to a lesser extent, aesthetics. His term helped define postcolonial studies as a field
for exploring, recovering, and problematizing hybrids and their asymmetrical power relations
resulting from colonial imperialism. According to Prabhu (2007), the field developed in two
main contrasting narratives in this regard: one of victimhood (diasporic takes on hybridity,
subversive agency). These two main narratives of cultural hybridity discourse, which appeared in
many works, become important catalysts for much of the disagreement in interpretations of
Different takes on these matters are explored in works by Garcia Canclíni (1990), who
investigates hybridity in Latin America, Gilroy (1993), in his study of the diaspora of the “Black
Atlantic,” and Young (1995), who provides a detailed account of the concept of difference
throughout history, with some critique of hybridity based on its historical uses in imperialist
discourse.
While a thorough investigation of these studies is outside the scope of this dissertation,
their perspectives are unified by an intention to foreground inequalities developed by the colonial
system; it should suffice to highlight their general focus on “the geopolitical directionality”
(Kraidy 2005, 68), present in many hybrid encounters. Thus, power relations are constantly at
play, and should not be overly simplified; they must inform, and be informed, by specific
circumstances surrounding any hybridity, given that “discourses of cultural mixture have
historically served ideologies of integration and control—not pluralism and empowerment” (vii).
27
More recent contributions to the field of postcolonial studies include attempts to theorize
hybridity on a case-by-case basis, addressing each by its unique conditions and motivations
instead of relying on a rigid interpretive perspective. For instance, both Nederveen Pieterse
(2001, 2009) and Kraidy (2005) dynamically connect hybridity to processes of globalization, the
latter suggesting a framework called “critical transnationalism,” which contextualizes each case
by assigning agency to both sides of a hybrid encounter. In a more critical vein, and moving
beyond the usual tropes that may carry tacit asymmetries forward, Puri (2004) and Prabhu (2007)
localize the investigation of their theories. Puri investigates the postcolonial Caribbean, and
offers criticism related to “[t]he tendency to abstract hybridity into an epistemological principle”
(Puri 2004, 20), which is wrongfully achieved when used as an umbrella explanation for
disconnected cases, homogenizing their subtleties. Puri also condemns the implicit privilege of
focusing on metropolitan centers in several of these hybridity accounts, especially that of Bhabha
(1994). Notwithstanding the (at times exaggerated) criticism, Puri attempts to elaborate a more
nuanced approach, considering the option between hybridity and essentialism a misleading
simplification; she claims that “[t]he real question has never been ‘hybridity or not?’ but rather
Prabhu focuses on the discourse of Indian Ocean mixtures, exploring the terminology and
the most productive theories of hybridity are those that effectively balance the
task of inscribing a functional-instrumental version of the relation between culture
and society with that of enabling the more utopian/collective image of society.
(Prabhu 2007, 2)
28
Prabhu’s premises for a theory of hybridity are especially important for the project pursued in the
following chapters of this dissertation, which analyze structural aspects of musical hybrids, and
The ubiquity of the concept of hybridity in postcolonial studies is not without criticism
(see, for example, Friedman 1999). As a potentially diffuse and contradictory concept, hybridity
can mean many things when used metaphorically in the cultural realm. It can also obscure
nuances of specific cases, as mentioned above in Puri’s (2004) perspective. Kraidy (2005) briefly
reviews various critiques of the term, and mentions two main paradoxes: the first is that hybridity
is proposed as, at the same time, “subversive and pervasive, exceptional and ordinary, marginal
yet mainstream”; second, hybridity also shows “foggy conceptual boundaries and extreme
semantic openness [that] invite arbitrary and at times exclusionary usage” (2005, 65-66). And, he
adds:
These criticisms are not unfounded, and must be foregrounded in this kind of research.
Nederveen Pieterse (2001, 101) identifies the main topics of what he calls the “antihybridity
backlash.” He dispatches the claims of antihybridity in short order, and his list of answers calls
Nederveen Pieterse’s retorts to the condemnations of hybridity reinforce the idea that
hybridity deserves careful attention rather than dismissal. Symptomatic of these issues of
antihybridity is the fact that, despite the pervasive existence of hybrids in several periods of
aforementioned geopolitical directionality in arts, and touch, at least tangentially, upon musical
hybridity. These scholars have analyzed works that deal directly with notions of exoticism and
orientalism, East/West (Taylor 2007; Locke 2009, 2015), African American diasporic music
(Brackett 2005), and the musical “other” from a Western perspective (Born and Hesmondhalgh
2000; Taylor 2007). Few of these works offer comparison-based approaches to musical hybridity
per se, thus omitting a thorough discussion of its variety of expressions and nuances, as well as
Two examples of a more general perspective include the introduction to Born and
Hesmondhalgh’s (2000) edited volume, which thoroughly addresses notions of difference and
30
hybridity, while each of its chapter contributions deals with specific cases of musical “others,”
and Taylor (2007), who approaches music’s alterity in Western culture through the lenses of
colonialism, imperialism, and globalization. These examples illustrate how simply addressing
difference and alterity in music, and the political forces behind it, will not necessarily directly
engage with the specific issues of hybridity; what we have are two insightful and important
works focusing on the dominant West’s perspectives on other musics, and the asymmetries that
offer conditions and motivations for mixture of identities in musical compositions. Even though
these unbalanced cultural encounters are common spaces for hybridity, the writers mostly treat it
Mixture and hybridity are not only connected with issues in postcolonial studies, nor are
they a feature specific to twentieth-century music—even if a large part of the repertory explored
in this study comes from that period. Many musical contexts exhibit mixture and the interaction
of allegedly stable identity concepts, which can be triggered through allusions or quotations of
communication, however, the main markers of identity affording conceptual and structural
mixture are styles and genres. Style and genres articulate socially and musically constructed
boundaries that are used in any discourse about music: journal or newspaper articles, concert
programs, interfaces of music streaming services, and ordinary conversation. These musical
boundaries can carry all the baggage of racial, national, and class inequalities addressed by
postcolonialist theories at different degrees; hence, styles and genres and their cultural
associations have a particularly important role in musical hybrids. Labels as general as classical
31
and popular, Western and non-Western, tonal and non-tonal, world music, or as narrow as
mathcore and folktronica serve to map a considerable part of many musical engagements, both at
a structural or technical level, and a sociopolitical one. These categories are also simultaneously
compositional and listening tools, and, directly or indirectly, imbued with subtle (or less subtle)
As examples of works dealing with these concepts, Dreyfus (1996) and Zohn (2008)
discuss the notion of mixed genre in Baroque music, the first in J. S. Bach and the latter in Georg
Philipp Telemann. Boone (2011) deals with mashups in popular music, and discusses mixture of
genres in that specific environment as meaningful statements. David Brackett (2005) considers
cases of diasporic popular music genres, and, in a more recent book (Brackett 2016), discusses
the constant interaction of categories in the development of popular music genres, and cases of
Thus, given the breadth and multifaceted focus of this body of works, rather than detail a
comprehensive literature review, I instead provide examples of different types of hybridity from
Western music, which show how pervasive the phenomenon really is. Highlighting the
What was seen as hybrid in the 1800s can certainly become a trivial intersubjective
category later. Thus––as pointed out in the previous section––it is vital that every approach to
hybridity take into consideration its conditions and motivations, as well as its technical
similarities by way of a definition. Musical hybridity, as defined here, is expressed when works
32
present more than one identity category in the same musical environment, via structural or
contextual markers. Again, these identity categories in music are usually attached to styles and
genres, but can be more general or narrow identifiers, depending the situation. The following
thorough, aims, first, to shift the focus from the twentieth century and, second, to illustrate its
many levels and types, which can begin to highlight the different roles that context and
signification play in hybridity. In subsequent chapters, this diversity will lead to my development
INSTRUMENTAL COMBINATIONS
The categories of sacred and secular served as general categories of Renaissance music,
defining and being defined both by structural and contextual features. Any composition that
crossed those boundaries could create a sense of mixed identity. An example of such categories
is the contrafacta (plural for contrafactum) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,8 which kept
the same music but substituted the text of a sacred song for a secular one, or vice-versa.9 While
the agent of hybridity here is the text, it is a crucial component of this music, and one that would
directly affect the classification of the repertory. Similarly, there is some level of hybridity in
cantus firmus masses, such as Josquin des Prez’s Missa de l’Homme armè (published ca. 1492-
95), which uses a secular melody as its tenor in a sacred musical environment; paraphrase masses
8
Robert Falck and Martin Picker, “Contrafactum,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford University
Press), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/06361
(accessed December 8, 2016).
9
Contrafacta existed well before the 15th century, as can be noted in Butterfield’s (2002) work on 11th-century
French poet and composer Gautier de Coinci (1177-1236).
33
(with variation on a borrowed cantus firmus) and imitation masses (in which several voices of
other compositions are imitated) are also examples of Renaissance hybridity. Intabulations—
boundaries of early music, those between instrumental and vocal music. The common theme in
all of these cases is the migration of a recognizable musical category from one domain into
Quodlibet (Latin for “what you please”) are pieces which contain known melodies, or
cantus prius factus, either in sequence or simultaneously. The practice was pervasive enough to
Many types of compositions related to quodlibet can be found with different names
in Italy, and medley in England. All these terms indicate pieces formed by the combination of
known melodies or styles and bring in their titles a hint of mixed signification. For example,
Mateo Flecha’s (1481–1553) collection of ensaladas juxtaposes many different styles and
textures sequentially in pieces such as El Fuego, El Viejo, and La Bomba, all with humorous
10
Grove Music Online, s.v., “Quodlibet,” by Maria Rika Maniates et al. Oxford Music Online (Oxford University
Press), accessed December 12, 2016, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/
subscriber/article/grove/music/22748
34
connotations, emphasized by the gastronomic metaphor (“ensalada” means “salad” in Spanish).
J. S. Bach famously used a quodlibet in the last variation of the Goldberg Variations
(1741), intricately combining within the same harmonization two German folksongs: “Ich bin so
35
lang nicht bei dir g’west” and “Kraut und Rüben.” Beyond the mixture of two distinct pre-
composed melodies, the mixture in the quodlibet can be recognized as crossing the boundary
between folk and “serious” music, since the variations were a keyboard study collection. Bach
and other Baroque composers also explored mixtures with notions of national styles—German,
Italian, French, and Polish—which became distinguishable categories during that period, with
explicit musical features and established expectations and associations, as maintained in Johann
The Italian sets great store by the agreeableness and sensual elaboration of the
melody (and consequently also to taste); the Frenchman loves a sprightly and
piercing free spirit; the German is particular about good and thorough
workmanship and harmony. Thus, whoever unites these three pieces with one
another must produce a perfectly beautiful work. (Scheibe, quoted in Dreyfus
1996, 132)
The combination and control of these national styles was common, and to an extent
expected, from German composers of the Baroque, a style that was referred to as “mixed taste.”
The importance of this mixture in the compositional process is addressed by Georg Muffat: “I
dare not employ only a single style or method, but rather the most skillful mixture of styles I can
manage through my experience in various countries” (Muffat, quoted in Zohn, 2008, 3). He
further points to a unifying perspective on these musical hybrids: “[a]s I mix the French manner
with the German and Italian, I do not begin a war, but perhaps rather a prelude to the unity, the
dear peace, desired by all the peoples” (ibid.). Johann Joseph Fux explored the mixed taste in his
Laurence Dreyfus (1996) goes into some detail about Bach’s tendencies to compose “against the
grain,” by combining or altering not only national styles, but also specific genres and
compositional types such as concerto, aria, fugue, minuet, and sonata. These categories also
developed into stable references whose expectations could be played with creatively by a
composer.
More explicit cases of hybridity also appear in the Baroque, especially with
(1673). In Die liederliche Gesellschaft von allerley Humor, Biber depicts a battle with multiple
distinct lines, achieving a rare kind of harsh foregrounded hybridity for the period. The last
movement of Telemann’s Gulliver Suite (1728) for two violins, uses contrasting styles
simultaneously for programmatic purposes, depicting distinct people from the story. Its hybridity
slow, cantabile melody, while the “wild dance” on the lower violin showcases fast scale runs and
arpeggios (Ex. 1.2.3). The simultaneity of these two very contrasting styles is achieved by the
alignment of their harmonic, voice-leading, and metric characteristics—an alignment that affords
coherence while still allowing for some independence of each material. Telemann’s piece still
sounds as a coherent amalgam, whereby the potential friction of the contrasting materials is
Example 1.2.3. Telemann’s Loure of the Well-Mannered Houyhnhnms and Wild Dance of the
Untamed Yahoo, from Gulliver Suite (1728)
38
CLASSICAL STYLE, STABILITY, AND TOPOI
stability in terms of its style and genre system.11 This stable syntactical framework offered many
possibilities for importing bounded identity categories, which are commonly addressed in music
studies as musical topoi. These topical importations are not necessarily all examples of hybridity,
since their identities might be associated with similar concepts, thus lacking the necessary
contrast. But there are many opportunities for use of contrasting style importations. Many
instances of music mixture can be seen in the galant style use of dance topics, and how their
specific associations create friction within a particular environment. These cases abound in the
humorous scenarios of opera buffa. An especially adventurous example is the ending of the first
act of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787). Mozart simultaneously combines a Minuet, an Allemanda
(Teitsch), and a Contredanse. Each dance is played by a different group on stage, as three smaller
scenes/dances take place concurrently with 2/4, 3/8, and 3/4 meters. Julian Rushton’s (1981) apt
description of the scene points to the chaotic blend created by Mozart’s mixture not only in terms
of meter but also the associations of each dance within this context:
The Minuet is played by a small string orchestra with oboes and horns; the second
group, consisting of a violin and double bass, is heard tuning. Leporello is ordered
to busy himself with Masetto, and Giovanni approaches Zerlina. The Contredanse
is played by the second group and danced by Giovanni and Zerlina; a dance
neither aristocratic nor merely bucolic, but the middle ground on which these two
meet. The third group, constituted like the second, is heard tuning. Ottavio and
Elvira are occupied with supporting Anna. Leporello bullies Masetto into dancing,
and they begin the Teitsch (third group). At this point there are three simultaneous
dance-metres, the governing 3/4 (Minuet), 2/4 (Contredanse, three bars to two of
the Minuet), and 3/8 (Teitsch, three bars to one of the Minuet). Each person
dancing adheres to the metre of the dance when singing, so that Zerlina’s cry “O
numi, son tradita” fits with the Contredanse but not the Minuet, Masetto’s agitated
11
The notion of style and genre systems and their varying stability will be discussed in chapter 2. For now, suffice it
to say that they are the collection of options of idealized bounded and recognizable stylistic categories in any
context.
39
cries adopt the faster notes of the Teitsch, and the maskers sing resolutely with the
Minuet. The music is not loud, so that every word can be heard, and, in order to
fit the dances together, Mozart had to eschew any but the simplest harmony.
Nevertheless by this combination of metres (which is incidentally the only
passage in Don Giovanni for which a sketch survives) he works up an almost
unbearable tension. (1981, 16)
Generally speaking, the gradual expansion of options and rules in the stable classical
system dissolved into more subjective and personal musical expressions in the nineteenth
century. There are several cases of hybrids that fostered personal innovation through combining
previously established genres of nineteenth-century music. Kallberg (1988) notes that these
mixed compositions are often indicated in the title: “Sonata quasi una fantasia, Polonaise-
Fantasy, Ode-Symphonie” (245). However, even when they are not directly hinted at by the
mobility and cultural exchange through the nineteenth century also influenced the types and
pervasiveness of musical hybrids in the form of otherness—what is outside and distant from the
West European world. This technological progress allowed musicians and audiences to “get to
know different peoples and cultures by travel . . . and for performers from other cultures to
perform in Western theatres and world’s fairs.”12 In this way, notions of exoticism and
orientalism developed into recurrent tropes in the nineteenth century, even though exoticism is
not particularly restricted to that period, as noted by Locke (2015).13 In certain cases, these
12
Grove Music Online, s.v. “Exoticism,” by Ralph P. Locke, Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press),
accessed March 14, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/subscriber/article/
grove/music/4564
13
The pastoral, for instance, is an early type of exoticism.
40
concepts of the exotic resemble an expansion of the musical topoi established in the previous
century, but they certainly have a history of their own, which highlights the changing ways that
the “other” was perceived and used in Western music.14 What is exotic or oriental is not only
different and marked, but carries a set of pre-established values guided by the geopolitical
directionality of the encounter: the West’s moral superiority, a dangerous and eroticized “they,”
which served as a proxy for expression of the repressed and morally conservative West (Born
of topics of the nineteenth century, which expands those of the classical period by adding a
category of “exotic dialects and folklorism.” The labeling of these signifiers of the “other” as
musical topoi facilitates an analytical engagement (which is also afforded in slightly different
Some of the topics Dickensheets lists under this category are: Style Hongrois, “Oriental”
Style, Spanish Style, Chinoiserie, and Indianist Style. Their presupposed intersubjective
agreement at the time––despite the variety of ways of expressing them––affords associations that
might potentially be mixed with distinct references in cases of hybridity. Also, whatever is
considered exotic has to be so in relation to something else, imagined or present in the music. To
14
See Bellman 1998; Locke 2007, 2009 and 2015; Taylor 2007.
41
be “exotic in style” implies a mixture either with the expected context—which makes the exotic
material a reference to something, or somewhere, outside it—or in contrast with some other
material that is “native” to the original style or genre. The latter case is a clear hybrid of two
styles/topoi, while the former presents only a contextual hybridity, which involves the
seems appropriate given Locke’s perspective that it “has been treated less as a broad mindset or
artistic approach and more as a lexicon of specific stylistic devices that the composer—and
presumably many of his or her listeners—associated, rightly or wrongly, with the distant country
The opening theme of the fourth movement of Schubert’s Quintet in C Major, op. 163, D.
956 brings a clear reference to the exotic style hongrois (Ex. 1.2.4). Forty-five measures later it is
followed by a second theme reflecting what Dickensheets (2009, 101) calls Biedermeier style
(Ex. 1.2.5). The composer creates hybridity not only in the musical realm, through the
contrasting characteristics of each theme, but also contextually and structurally through the
[g]iven contemporary Gypsy stereotypes and the relative positions of the Austrian
middle and upper-middle classes, this contrast is more than musical. Schubert has
brought together two cultures—castes, races, lifestyles—within a form that
traditionally requires a final reconciliation. Knowing that, due to their musical
languages and attendant cultures, these two themes are irreconcilable, Schubert
nevertheless erodes the standard function of a sonata form’s recapitulation, and
thereby appears to comment on proper Viennese culture and the position of
certain outsiders relative to it. (Dickensheets 2009, 100)
42
Example 1.2.4. Schubert, Quintet in C Major, Op. 163, iv, first theme in style hongrois
Example 1.2.5. Schubert, Quintet in C Major, op. 163, iv, second theme in Biedermeier style,
starting at m. 45
exoticism.15 I consider Schubert’s example above as a case of the overt kind—the foreign
15
Locke (2009), also discusses “transcultural composition,” which addresses later cases in the twentieth century
where the boundaries and geopolitical directionality become blurred.
43
material is imported and framed as exotic, not being fully integrated into the composer’s style.
Locke’s submerged exoticism occurs when the originally exotic material is highly integrated into
a Western composer’s expression, losing the clearly exotic frame of the overt cases. This creative
integration for personal expression is a more common characteristic in the nineteenth century,
Pentatonicism
One of the common structural features of exoticism or orientalism is the use of pentatonic
investigates different potential significations of the “gapped” scale in contrast to the Western
Debussy, and Ravel—is associated with “antirationalist, anticultivated realms,” such as the
pastoral, “primitive,” and the spiritual, all of which are aspects that deal with “‘lost’ aspects of
human cultures, the perceived utopias” in a spectrum from earthly to transcendent (6). Because it
can be used as a very direct marker of otherness, many cases of hybridity involve pentatonic
waltz from his fourth Ballade in F Minor, op. 52 (1843), mm. 38-45 (Ex. 1.2.6). The foreign
reference, when interpolated, creates a secondary layer that contrasts with the aristocratic waltz
surrounding it.16
16
This piece will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3.
44
Example 1.2.6. Chopin, Ballade no. 4 in F Minor, op. 52 (1843), mm. 32-49
The further and more diverse characterization of national styles in the nineteenth century
is also related to the depiction of “distant” cultures in European music. In this process of
“authenticity” to the “real” music of one’s country, representing the peculiar roots of the
nationhood (Bohlman 2011, 10). Bohlman (2011) criticizes the incorporation of these folk-
relying on an “aesthetic leveling” that communicates tradition as kitsch (11). Nationalist musical
trends continue for some composers well into the twentieth century (for example, Béla Bartók
and Manuel de Falla), but Bohlman, in discussing European music, also points to a new
interpretation of later cases of nationalism, which “represent the nation as an amalgam of border
The old regionalism was used to justify the nation and the extension of its power
in Europe. This was the regionalism that the Austro-Hungarian Empire
represented. The new regionalism draws attention to Europeanness that forms at
the overlapping areas of borders. The hybridity and multiculturalism that form at
borders lend themselves to celebration in the New Europe, whereas in the Old
Europe it served as a symptom of disintegration at the fringes. (Bohlman 2011,
237)
These mixture elements related to exoticism are employed in many repertories and with
different connotations in the twentieth century, but important examples in the first decades are
connected to the specific reading of the East by Russian composers—what Taruskin (1992)
called “Russian musical Orientalism.” Russian orientalism was widely spread at the turn of the
century by the Ballet Russes, championed by Diaghilev, and their “seduction of the audience by
sex-drenched Eastern fantasy” (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000,10). Examples of this evocation
of the “allure of the East” can be found, for instance, in Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird (1910),
Other than hybridities that dialog with Western European notions of the East, Stravinsky
also engaged with earlier musical traditions in developing his personal style. Schumann (2015)
Stravinky’s specific strategies for modification of idealized stable styles with contemporary
elements, which may carry expressive potential connected to parody and irony, but also afford
Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat (1920), which uses many dance styles modified both
rhythmically and metrically, as well as in terms of pitch content. For instance, the first movement
contains a hybrid march (Ex. 1.2.7), while movement four brings a mixture of modified tango,
Other notable examples of hybridity in the earlier twentieth century come from Charles
Ives, who in very idiosyncratic ways foreshadowed strategies of hybridity typical of the second
half of the century, by foregrounding the mixture of styles and genres.17 According to
Burkholder (1994, 1), more than a third of Ives’ output uses borrowed music, ranging from one
to twenty sources in the same piece. These are used in a variety of ways, among them modeling,
patchwork, collage, paraphrase, and allusion. Not all borrowings in Ives clearly invoke
contrasting identities, and thus do not constitute a musical hybrid in the sense discussed in this
text. But in many cases, these hybrid pieces trigger what Burkholder addresses as “aesthetic
dissonance”:
17
While notions of explicit hybridity may not be directly attached to Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, one can see
specific types of mixtures in their use of traditional forms with contrasting “content.” Berg’s uses of tonal-like series
in his compositions are a hybrid of the new serialist technique and earlier vocabularies, which in that specific
context brought enough friction to be noticed as a sort of “other.” See Byros (2008) for an investigation of the
interaction of old/tonal and new/atonal in Berg’s Sonata for Piano, op. 1.
48
Listeners accustomed to European art music from Corelli to Webern may
experience Ives’s borrowings as a kind of aesthetic dissonance, violating the
expectation that compositions should be original, self-contained, and based on
newly invented ideas. Some borrowings are readily understood. . . . But other
borrowings may make little sense if we cannot perceive their purpose or relation
to the surrounding music. If the borrowings have no clear function, we may like
the music or not, but it will remain for us a jumble of apparently arbitrary
gestures. And as the quotations stick out inexplicably from the musical texture,
Ives’s music in turn will seem to stand apart from the European tradition as an
unintegrated mixture of heterogeneous elements. (Burkholder 1994, 2)
Hybridity in Ives also results from combinations of disparate style fields, commonly
Here, consonant long notes in the strings are joined by bursts of non-tonal material in the flutes
THE POST-1950S
The group of mid-century composers that attempted to “reset” the Western European
concert music tradition—the modernist project in which “the past had gone forever,” according
It was at this point that the avant-garde most obviously ceased to take account of
the majority of its potential audience. Immersed in the heady excitement of their
new-found control over manipulation of sound, none of its composers seem to
have faced the fact that, in an effort to arrive at what Boulez called a totally “non-
hierarchical distribution,” they had unwittingly deprived themselves of context.
(Bradshaw 1995, 140, my emphasis)
The situation triggered diverse reactions from composers, the one most relevant for this study
being the polystylistic composers of the 1960s’ strong reengagement with the very past that had
been shut out. Influence from movements from visual art forms such as Dadaism played a role in
guiding some of these responses, helping to expand notions of coherence and teleology in music.
49
Whereas Bradshaw recognizes the hybrid tendencies of the 1960s onward as a reaction to
the integral serialism of the 1950s, she addresses the former with certain prejudice, in one
paragraph even attacking both hybridity and popular music with broad strokes:
In her criticism, while despising the polystylistic composer’s nostalgia for pre-1900s music,
Bradshaw is involved in nostalgia for the certainty and sense of control afforded by Boulez’s and
the first Darmstadt school’s project. This type of umbrella criticism of hybridity, including
analogies with cannibalism, the digestive system, and blatantly superficial evaluation of a corpus
(i.e., popular music as a homogeneous block), is indicative of a fear of losing control, of not
having the idealized clear rules that a restrictive style or genre might afford. It also recalls those
meanings that racial discourse in the nineteenth century assigned to hybridity, owing to fears of
impure ethnicity, as detailed in the previous section. Bradshaw’s attempted articulation of this
“call to essentialism” is important, and underlies the lack of investigation of hybridity in music
theory—after all, analysis is difficult when essentialist categories become permeable, and their
permeability normalized.
examples in this section, hybridity is not new; but the recurrent thematization of hybridity is a
peculiar characteristic of the late twentieth century. It is novel to foreground hybridity processes
not solely for programmatic purposes—as was mostly the case in previous repertories—but to
unveil the mechanism of its combinations, making the rearrangement of established categories
50
18
itself the raw material and subject of discourse of a composition. If one looks at the increased
use of orientalist and exotic musical gestures in the nineteenth century partially as a result of
increased mobility and possibilities for cultural exchange, one could suggest the same for new
possibilities of communication and traveling, and music recording and reproducibility in the
post-1950s, which also fostered new musical imagination, encounters, and expressions.
Additionally, popular cultures acquire gradually more space, both economically and as agents of
foregrounded, and becomes increasingly more problematic and questionable as the latter decades
of the twentieth century arrive; within each of these music categories many other boundaries are
established, with ever-increasing genres, subgenres, and macrogenres disrupting any potential
stability of style and genre systems in general. This intensification of subdivisions and labeling
of musical worlds is also due to the increasing connection of musical genres with identity and
community, which fostered personal associations with different types of music. These changes
are certainly not restricted to music. They reflect an entire age that witnessed various reuses and
recombinations of periods, places, and cultures. Hybridity (or its avoidance) becomes not only a
technical procedure or an expressive tool, but a guiding aspect of many cultures, communities,
and lives.
The polystylistic works circa 1960s and 1970s show distinct ways in which this
thematization of hybridity can occur, showcasing perhaps the clearest and most objective
formed by the composers, one can infer, who Bradshaw indirectly attacks in the quote above:
18
Again, Ives and Stravinsky can be considered important exceptions in relation to this.
51
among them Alfred Schnittke, Luciano Berio, Peter Maxwell Davies, George Rochberg, Bernd
Alois Zimmerman, and Mauricio Kagel. In this new pluralist scenario, Schnittke, while
discussing his Concerto Grosso, no. 1 (1977), can mention the inclusion of “genuine Corelli
made in USSR”19 (Schnittke 2002, 45), and Rochberg can write a variation of Pachelbel’s canon
in his String Quartet no. 6 (1978). According to Metzer (2003, 110), collage idioms (by which he
means polystylistic works that use quotations) are centered around the dynamics of “expansion
and connection”; quotation as a musical resource opened up “worlds of unequaled breadth and
richness,” making their “musical reality . . . no longer an isolated abstract realm but, as Berio put
But this burgeoning and acceptance of foregrounded hybridity is certainly not restricted
to concert music polystylism; other repertories of the post-1950s also show these processes. In
popular musics, the development of technologies for capturing, processing, and reproducing
sounds, along with the increasing reliance on the recording studio as a creative tool, facilitated
the combination of distinct stylistic or generic material, of fluidity of boundaries, and the
reevaluation of the strict essentialist perspective on music. Dickie Goodman’s “The Flying
Saucer” (1956) is an early, if crude, example of the programmatic uses of slicing and mixing of
distinct compositions, voiceovers, and sound effects in the same recorded track. The Beatles’ “A
Day in the Life,” the last track from Sgt. Peppers and the Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967),
19
“So into the framework of a neoclassical Concerto Grosso I introduced some fragments not consonant with its
general style, which had earlier been fragments of cinema music: a lively children’s chorale (at the beginning of the
first movement and at the climax of the fifth, and also as a refrain in the other movements), a nostalgically atonal
serenade—a trio (in the second movement) guaranteed as genuine Corelli, “made in the USSR,” and my
grandmother’s favorite tango (in the fifth movement), which her great-grandmother used to play on a harpsichord. . .
. But all these themes are perfectly consonant with each other (a falling sixth, the sighs of seconds), and I take them
all completely seriously” (Schnittke 2002, 45-46).
52
potential of a song to refer to a diverse network of styles and genres, among other musical
signifiers. On this track, a symphonic orchestra of forty musicians performing a glissando cluster
(1:54–2:15) was recorded on a separate tape, then played simultaneously with the rock band
recording; the glissando was overdubbed four more times, creating a 200-musician orchestra.20
The studio tools allowed the Beatles to make reference to modernist concert music as a distinct
interpolated genre interrupts the tonal popular song; this reference is triggered through the
specific choice of instrumentation and material—a 20-second cluster glissando from the lowest
note on each instrument. While this “200-musician orchestra” alongside a rock band could have
been achieved outside the recording studio, its reach and reproducibility in live performance
would be considerably smaller. The fact that a “200-musician” cluster glissando appears as an
interpolation in a Beatles song––number one in virtually all music charts of the time, and the
album selling 2,360,423 copies by the end of its release year––provides a glimpse into how
or not— but it becomes especially prominent in repertories that make use of sampling. The
Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), commonly acknowledged as one of the first hip-
hop songs to reach a wider audience, quotes and loops actual excerpts of Chic’s “Good Times”
(also from 1979), which serves as the accompaniment for the rapping verses. Studio-mediated
hybridity develops into a common tool and part of the vocabulary of genres like hip-hop or
mashup, the latter of which is entirely built upon mixtures. Specific timbres and effects carrying
20
https://www.beatlesbible.com/1967/02/10/recording-a-day-in-the-life-4/. See also, Lewisohn’s The Complete
Beatles Recording Sessions (2005).
21
David Kronemyer, “How Many Records Did the Beatles Actually Sell?” in Deconstructing Pop Culture, accessed
January 10, 2017, http://deconstructingpopculture.com/2009/04/how-many-records-did-the-beatles-actually-sell/
53
strong associations with particular styles or genres can also be exploited to produce hybrid
structures.
also be used as agents of musical hybridity. An example of such a signature sonority is Phil
Spector’s “wall of sound,” a production process that involves many doubled instruments playing
the same lines in the same room; the result is sent through a reverb or echo chamber, which adds
a very specific quality to the sound, as if the performance space was extremely wide. Among
many other recordings, the “wall of sound” can be found in the Ronette’s “Be My Baby” (1963).
In later decades, this peculiar sonority became a signifier of 1960s recordings, and was used as a
way of referring to that period, mixing new musical expressions with older sounds. In its subtler
versions, hybridity becomes the norm rather than the exception in popular music; the
increasingly expanding network of styles, genres, and sub-genres makes the constant potential
A different kind of hybridity, the crossover in popular music, ties mixtures of genres,
identities, and communities to matters of market and authenticity.22 Brackett (2016) notes a new
interest in the relationship between musical and social and racial categories, triggered by the
emergence of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, which “encouraged media writers to think of the
way (281). Initially the crossover was used to indicate the migration of genres, such as rhythm
and blues, and country, to mainstream pop, and later expanded to discourse about “soul, Latin,
22
By identity, a concept that is going to be used several times throughout this document, I mean the social
recognizability that is afforded by a set of structural and contextual features of a musical work, artist, style, or genre.
This identity—a musical identity—can only be consolidated, discussed, criticized, or changed if there is some
degree of intersubjective agreement upon it.
54
classical, and MOR (middle-of-the-road)” (282). It is significant that these labels and their status
as crossover music are coordinated with radio stations and the market, thus a strong economic
Artist managers or producers often pressed the artist to do a crossover in order to increase
his or her popularity (Brackett 2016, 282). The artist in turn would neutralize some musical
elements to make the crossover more “palatable” to a different public, compromising its role as
“uneasiness over crossover” both in the economic realm, by decreasing the potential of
competing markets (tied to radio stations with distinct characteristics), because of its
“homogenizing effect on radio stations” (282), and due to authenticity issues, when musicians
and the public consider the genre a type of “selling out.” Crossovers highlight the managers,
media, and audience as fundamental agents in shaping music communication, as well as music’s
potential to serve as an important identity flag for specific groups. Furthermore, these cases offer
a perspective on hybridity that is rather well documented and cuts across musical structure,
culture, ideology, race, market, media, and audience. The crossover in many of these cases is not
predominantly musical; it is a crossover of the market categories and their associated audiences,
an intentional and strategized kind of hybridity that is also overtly racialized, articulated by
striking generalizations. This is clear in the article “The Dilemma of the Soul Producer” (1969)
The soul record as a particular kind of music geared to appeal to only the black
segment of the population is becoming outmoded. Many black record company
executives and producers believe that soon a substantial percentage of the r&b
product released will be designed to appeal to the white as well as the black
audience. “R&b producers may be making r&b records with the pop charts in
mind,” says Gordo Bossin, national LP sales manager of Bell Records. . . . In
agreement is Al Riley, national sales and promotion manager of Minit Records.
55
“We cut a certain number of our artists so that they can be geared to both
markets,” says Riley. “For instance, Bobby Womack is both an r&b and pop
artist. . . . We record him so that he can go into both markets. I guess you could
call it r&b pop.” . . . Here, then, exists the dilemma of the soul executive and soul
producer: to push pop oriented product in both pop and r&b markets
simultaneously or to produce only r&b records and then let them go pop.
(Robinson 1969, S-24)
As the scope of the investigation of hybrid works is widened, one is faced with the
challenge to distinguish the hybridity in a country crossover to mainstream pop, Girl Talk’s
mashups, or uses of sampling in hip hop music. It is considerably more challenging to articulate
the latter hybridities in relation to Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso, the last scene in Act 1 from
Mozart’s Don Giovanni, or Telemann’s mix of widely contrasting dances in Gulliver Suite. Their
differences, as concerns production and composition––or what Jean-Jacques Nattiez called the
“poietic level”––can be addressed along the following lines: (1) contextual conditions, (2)
contextual motivations, and (3) how the mixtures are achieved structurally in the music. From
the listener’s perspective, or Nattiez’s “esthesic level,” the variables are: (1) recognizability, (2)
conditions and motivations can be roughly inferred by the period and personal history, but afford
only a partial view of a musical hybrid if not related to the details of how the distinct materials
are combined. From the listener’s side, the variables are widely dynamic, changing from person
to person, place to place; to an extent, one can rely on some generalized intersubjective
agreements, but even these communicational pacts will fluctuate. The purpose of this study is to
develop a model for the operationalization of hybridity, organizing the many aspects discussed
above. Thus, its framework must be flexible enough to embrace all the dynamic variables of
mixtures, and be adjusted accordingly; otherwise one runs the risk of disconnecting hybrid
fascination with marginalized musics” (2000, 8). The authors remind us that this perspective can
Western Culture” (ibid.). Bohlman argues that “[b]ecause music has multiple functions, it
hybridizes [geographical, performative, and ontological] spaces in many different ways” (2011,
213). Thus, as many postcolonial studies scholars also insisted (among them Kraidy 2005;
Prabhu 2007), every case of hybridity needs to be situated within a context, addressing the
periods and repertories. Another possibility for engaging with hybridity is to gather the vast
terminology used to refer to mixtures in music at all levels, of all types and perspectives. I will
focus on grouping these terms into classes, provided either by their etymology, goal,
environment, or the value attached to the term, also indicating which terms are restricted to one
specific period or repertory. These terms can originate from or refer to: (1) general
and techniques, (4) value-attributing words, (5) spatial/visual organizations of different material,
and (6) piece/song-level concepts. Not every example connected with these terms will
57
necessarily be a musical hybrid, since the contrast in sources is part of defines hybridity; these
terms should be understood as potential indicators for musical hybridity because of the
The wide network of terms related with musical hybridity reinforces the need for their
operationalization. Many of these labels can reflect a similar strategy of hybridity or musical
technique or process, and some are used to articulate the same trope of hybridity in different
periods and repertories. Nevertheless, they illuminate the different perspectives on musical
hybridities, and help frame the contextual aspects surrounding the production and reception of a
specific musical hybrid, informing the interpretation by suggesting attached values and
ideologies.
intertextuality being the most general of them and embracing every other concept.
Intertextuality
Blend
Mixture
Importation
Topoi
2) Referential Concepts:
These concepts are grouped because of a directionality and hierarchy involved in the
mixtures—they point to something else with different emphases. They are listed on a spectrum
Influence
Borrowing
58
Emulation
Allusion
Paraphrase
Appropriation
Quotation
technique. These can at times be imprecise depictions of the processes, and most are attached to
Arranging
Intabulation
Parody (Renaissance)
Variations
Modeling
Programmatic
Contrafact (Jazz)
Cantus Firmus
Contrafactum (Renaissance)
Cumulative Setting (Burkholder on Ives, 1994)
Sampling
Quodlibet, Ensalada, Incatenatura, Medley, Fricassé, Misticanza (Renaissance, mostly)
Fusion (post-1950s)
Remix (post-1950s)
Mashup (post-1980s, mostly)
Polystylism (post-1960s)
4) Value-attributing Concepts:
Some of the terms in this category refer to a specific type of musical composition (e.g.,
ensalada, fricassé), which use certain techniques to achieve a hybrid status. But all labels
describe the perceived intention in the manipulation and choice of materials, and attribute value
Parody
Pastiche
59
Imitation
Simulation
Ensalada, Fricassé (Renaissance)
Exoticism
Orientalism
Nationalism
Syncretization
These terms focus on the way disparate materials are manipulated, and while some of
them acquired a specific set of values (collage/bricolage, patchwork, mashup), they all tend to
Interpolation
Juxtaposition
Superimposition
Patchwork
Collage
Bricolage
Assemblage
Mashup
Montage
6) Song-level Concepts:
The basic building blocks of the terms in this category are songs or pieces, even if only
parts of them are used. Importantly, these terms deal with mixtures of musical texts that can
Mixtape
Potpourri
Medley
Playlist
60
broad spectrum of positive and negative significations, a variability connected to changing views
on the concepts of “pure” and “mixed” in different periods and contexts. The musical examples
of hybridity from the previous section could be interpreted with quite distinct tropes, such as
parody (subversion, mockery), pastiche (homage), dramatic effect, unification and creativity,
engagement or reaction to tradition, and political and economic control or subversion. 23 In order
to facilitate navigating hybridity’s multiple potential meanings, this section approaches its
symbolic power by embracing sociocultural, political, and economic stances; some of these
stances focus on hybridity’s segregating functions, indicating power asymmetries, while others
are egalitarian and globalized. This kind of categorization was pursued by several writers, in
different guises and with different intentions, as will be seen in the discussion below.
For Bakhtin (1981) there are two kinds of hybridities: one is organic, unintentional and
reflected in circumstantial amalgamation; the other is intentional, with political purposes and
one voice is used to unmask the other. This is the point where authoritative
discourse is undone. Authoritative discourse, Bakhtin argues, must be singular, it
“is by its very nature incapable of being double-voiced; it cannot enter into hybrid
constructions”—or if it does, its single-voiced authority will immediately be
undermined (Young 1995, 21).
But Young does not consider Bakhtin’s two perspectives exclusive; they can work
23
Parody and pastiche also change meaning and value depending on the specific perspective taken.
24
N.B., Bakhtin (1981) was published posthumously.
61
‘intentionally’, diasporizing, intervening as a form of subversion, translation, transformation”
Prabhu (2007, 3) similarly sees “two salient and opposed types of politics in the discourse
of hybridity”: diaspora and creolization (or postdiaspora hybridity). The former is a political
enterprise related with the power asymmetries of the colonial system and forced migration, as
formulation, focuses on the dynamic and practical ways migrants connect with the “motherland.”
For Prabhu (2007, 14), “[w]hen creolization . . . dominates, there is a disregard for history and a
utopianism that is, in the end, unrealizable within current realities; when diaspora dominates,
there is a tendency to fall into a discourse of victimhood and/or of narrow ethnicities.” While one
can connect these categories with Bakhtin’s original classification of hybridity in verbal
discourse—intentional hybridity is similar to diaspora, and organic hybridity connects with the
notion of creolization—there are specific values and political nuances imposed by Prabhu’s
classification. In this way, one might profit from the combination of these several binaries that
contribute for a more fluid multidimensional network of the symbolic power of hybridities,
transnationalism.” Kraidy also sees hybridity in tandem with power, a discourse articulating
geopolitical hierarchy, but one which should not only be approached through the generalizing
heroism/active and victimhood/passive axes. The author highlights the cultural neutralization
process carried out by cultural imperialism in the form of mestizaje; in Latin American and
62
Caribbean countries, in his estimation, mestizaje was a “bleaching” device, a way to deactivate
This process allowed nonthreatening arts, crafts, and rituals, but imposed the
Spanish language, the Catholic faith, and colonial political and social
organization. As a discourse that recognizes, even celebrates, cultural difference,
mestizaje in effect is a tool for “bleaching’’ all but the most benign practices that
gave pre-Hispanic natives their identities. (Kraidy 2005, 67)
The aim of Kraidy’s model is to address “how structures and discourses operate in a variety of
contexts to shape different hybridities, and how, in turn, hybrid cultural forms . . . reflect at once
the presence of hegemony and its limitations” (Kraidy 2005, 156). This attempt to critically
assess power is not only restricted to exogenous forces, but also to local power relationships
of hybridity oscillate between generalized and pluralistic views. The generalization is present, for
instance, in cultural imperialism studies, which assume no agency on the part of the
“colonized,”25 as if there is tacit and complete acceptance of any element of the dominant
culture; a pluralistic perspective claims diversity of cultures and finds agency in the local
individual (Kraidy 2005, 149). Kraidy’s critical transnationalism integrates both views in a
Musical representations of identity, which serve as the main tools for the interpretation of
hybridity, are categorized by Born and Hesmondhalgh (2000, 35-36) into four possibilities: (1)
music developing an imaginary identification, never actualized; (2) music serving to indicate or
reinforce emergent sociocultural identities; (3) music being used to “reproduce, reinforce,
25
Criticizing Bhabha (1994), Puri (2004, 22) also highlights these problems in postcolonial discourse: “[b]ut when
postcolonial and minorities are defined as disruptions of the national narrative, deemed significant only insofar as
they interrupt the center, what these people actually say or do become quite irrelevant.”
26
Along the same lines, Nederveen Pieterse (2009) offers related interpretive axes related to power and identity:
center and margin, hegemony and minority (78), and homogenization and diversification (86).
63
actualize, or memorialize” existing identities, sometimes also repressing alternatives; and (4)
music representing an identity after the fact. Musical hybrids can relate to any of the four
possibilities, and the specific role they take will be inferred by considering music, composer,
context, and listener. The musical hybrid, considered from a production standpoint, is also a self-
reflective act by the composer, adding personal layers of signification to the choice of
techniques, combinations, materials, and identities being mixed. The specific choices may also
reflect a critique of a current identity’s state of affairs, or the imagination of a solution for an
issue related to those identities; all of these concern political and social aspects of which musical
categories serve, directly or indirectly, as markers. Born and Hesmondhalgh (2000, 39) mention
that these situations require an analysis that goes beyond formal aspects, pointing to the
properties.”
Furthermore, the different uses and interpretations of these musics by a listener can
attribute specific identity values, and the potential for disrupting or renovating identities. Given
these distinct capacities of music—and especially of a musical hybrid—to articulate identity, one
could also ask whether a mixture might be a “purely aesthetic play with other sounds . . .
unburdened by ideological association and the psychic dynamics of projection and splitting”
(Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000, 41). Again, these decisions are a matter of informed, situated
interpretation, but the potential for these categories (and their mix) to articulate no symbolic
power at all is also a possibility from certain points of view. Born and Hesmondhalgh also point
to distinct interpretations of different uses of “others” in music, which brings their discussion
These significations of hybridity as politics of power and identity are articulated mostly
through elements representing nation-states, languages, classes, and races. But hybrids can also
be formed by mixtures of past and present, which are addressed by the notion of nostalgia: “. . .
(from nostos return home, and algia longing) a longing for a home that no longer exists or has
never existed . . . a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own
fantasy” (Boym 2001, xiii). Boym describes two different types of nostalgia: restorative and
reflective––the latter of which engages directly with the concept of hybridity. Whereas
restorative nostalgia attempts to reconstruct the past in place of the present, reflective nostalgia
embraces the “contradictions of modernity,” and “does not follow a single plot but explores ways
of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones” (Boym 2001, xviii).
Interessante, highlights the trivial, day-to-day potential evaluation of a hybrid, in which there is
an “interpenetration of art and theory” (2012, 6), unveiling the processes behind the interesting
art. Ngai writes that “[s]tylistic variety and fluctuation are thus, in a certain sense, not only the
‘inner’ content or meaning of the interesting but also a formal, outwardly visible aspect of the
aesthetic style itself” (33). She also calls attention to the “reducibility of aesthetic experience to
selective attention” as a characteristic of the explicitly more “rational” style of conceptual art of
the late twentieth century (ibid.), in the same way that Schlegel approaches the Interessante as a
65
“style about stylistic eclecticism and hybridity” (ibid.). In a later work (2017) Ngai addresses the
notion of “gimmick,” which potentially relates to hybridity and mixture of styles when these are
interpreted as labor-saving devices, through simple amalgamation of ideas. Merely interesting art
can be “cool” (Ngai 2008, 789), gimmicks can be “comically irritating” (Ngai 2017, 466); such
judgments imply subtle but important values of postmodern cultures and their conflicts with
Even though getting into a more detailed investigation of the politics of hybridity is
outside the scope of this study, I suggest that these often contradictory perspectives, while
certainly not an exhaustive list, can assist in interpreting different cases of hybridity in a less
restrictive manner. Tables 1.1 and 1.2 summarize the axes of signification and tropes discussed
above, and may serve as a guide for a contextualized engagement with musical mixtures, so that
one can locate a potential interpretation of a hybrid work. In other words, a dialog between all
these axes and tropes can help answer the question posed by Puri (2007, 41) and many other
Heroism and Victimhood (Jameson 1998, but also discussed in Prabhu 2007)
27
In a particular engagement in which I presented many examples of nuanced hybrid music, a person asked (I
paraphrase): “Ok, but is there more to this than just a bunch of cool mixtures?”
66
Axes of Signification of Hybridity
Center and Margin (Nederveen Pieterse 2009, 78)
Pure aesthetic difference and Power/political difference (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000)
Developing new forms, fusion (Young 1995, 22; Puri 2004, 54-55)
Hybridity as restorative nostalgia (the past, diasporic, imaginary homeland, Boym 2001)
28
There are, of course, many other tropes of hybridity. For instance, in what relates to exoticism, Locke (2009)
discussed overt and submerged exoticism, transculturation, and appropriation. Everett (2004b) discusses syncretism
and synthesis of instruments coming from different cultural traditions.
67
Hybridity as reflective nostalgia (present and future, creolization, Boym 2001)
Use of “non-Western cultures purely as a resource for the reinvigoration of Western Culture.”
(Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000, 8)
Hybrid as interesting (Ngai 2012)
related areas, needs the boundaries it criticizes in order to exist—race, nation, and class. The
attempts to focus on hybridity as a way to reverse the effects of power inequality and racial
discourse rely on the very essentialist categories that were reinforced by colonialists and
styles and genres, despite questioning their permeability. It seems inevitable that we engage with
these concepts despite—but not overlooking—their imaginary and imposed rigidness. The
purpose of the postcolonial-based hybridity project is then built upon a paradox: to shift the
focus away from the boundaries of pre-established categories by attending to how these
categories interact, while depending on a somewhat clear definition of these same boundaries in
order to investigate their combinations. Whereas this seems like an unsolvable conundrum, the
majority of criticism aims not toward the categories themselves but toward the segregation,
inequalities, and restrictive ideologies their enforced impermeability serves. Moreover, not
addressing the interactions that integrate and diffuse these categories only serves to preserve the
timbres, melodic/harmonic, rhythmic features, as well as other contextual aspects such as place,
time, and function—but most of them are embraced by the notions of musical style and genre.
These group identifiers are especially pertinent because music, as a temporal art, relies on the
listeners’ quick recognition, familiarity, and categorization in order to fulfill any communicative
potential. Music inevitably depends on those “clear” identity concepts as both compositional and
listening frames. So essential are these categorizations, that they permeate all types of
69
engagements with music: be it in the concert hall, in day-to-day conversations, in reading New
In fact, the boundaries that delimit concepts and categories are essential for general
cognitive processes and sense-making; to engage with the complexities presented to our senses
we tend to abstract features and group external elements as an offload strategy. Stross reminds
us:
The human being is sometimes referred to as a classifying animal, and indeed our
very survival depends on our ability, usually quite out of awareness, to divide and
organize the welter of information that we perceive about our environment into
classes of things so that we can treat one thing like another that we perceive, or
believe, to be in the same class . . . whether or not natural categories exist, our
named categories are all socially constructed. (Stross 1999, 255)
That categories such as styles and genres are socially constructed indicates that, besides being
influenced by biases and interests, they are also not as rigid and stable as they are commonly
portrayed; their rigidness is in service of specific goals. Young (1995) claims that “[t]he question
is whether the old essentializing categories of cultural identity, or of race, were really so
essentialized, or have been retrospectively constructed as more fixed than they were” (Young
1995, 25).
In dealing with musical hybridity, there is no reason why a category in itself, a cognitive
and framing tool, should be taken as a negative thing. Potential problems arise when values are
assigned to a category, attaching it to specific classes, races, and nations, which might be used
for sustaining power dynamics; a musical category then becomes a flag for specific groups, and
its uses, changes, and mixtures carry sociopolitical weight. The purpose of this study is not to
29
Note how pervasive the notions of style and genre—and their mixture—are in this recent article by Amanda
Petrusich for the New Yorker, March 13, 2017, accessed May 17, 2017,
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/ maggie-rogers-an-artist-of-her-time
70
erase musical boundaries, nor to necessarily subvert the rigidness, impermeability, and values
attached to the original styles—even though in certain cases, there is potential to do so—but to
offer tools to engage with their blending and address their dynamic and processual status,
characteristics that form an essential part of the compositional and communicative processes.
Music analysis has few tools with which to approach mixtures in general. It is a field that relies
on stylistic and generic stability by default. Thus, before addressing the characteristics and
processes of combinations of styles and genres in detail, one should investigate these concepts on
idealized boundaries. As mentioned in chapter 1, these boundaries are often represented and
discussed through the notions of musical style and genre—two complex concepts that are related,
and have a long history of uses and practices that influence their dynamic, and perhaps
confusing, statuses as identity markers. Style and genre are often used interchangeably in many
settings, an ambiguity that obscures any attempt to define and differentiate them. Nevertheless,
their connection lies in the fact that both deal with categorization, grouping, and the labeling of
identities, albeit of varying aspects and with different purposes. Even though styles and genres
are subjects of scholarship in many areas of study, the current focus is limited to art history,
genre studies (including literature and film), and music studies. Despite differences of domain,
these distinct fields converge on recurrent themes surrounding the ontology, functions, and
values of style and genre. In this chapter, I will briefly review their historical roots and varying
definitions, both in general and in music. I will also discuss the differentiation between style and
genre, their relation with cognitive studies on categorization, and with their wide use in
streaming services and big data classification of music based on algorithms. Finally, I will
explain a few concepts that should facilitate the operationalization of style and genre in musical
hybridity. To be sure, restricting the exploration of such complex and wide-ranging topics to a
single chapter will inevitably result in omissions and limited depth. That said, I hope my ideas
are sufficient to illustrate my approach to styles and genres and their role in operationalizing
musical hybridity.
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2.1 The Multiple Facets of Style: Norms, Originality, Aesthetic Historicism,
Organism, and Discourse
Style comes from the Latin word stilus, a tool for writing. The term, first used to indicate
an instrument, was quickly adapted by rhetoricians, who applied it figuratively in prescribing the
expression and register of a speech. This was the first in a series of uses and transformations of
the term: from a normative rhetorical concept, accounting for regularities in expression, to
shift from the normative to the individual.30 Zedler discusses style in music as “the kind or
manner, which a person has for himself in composing, executing and performing, and all this
varies according to the genius of the author, to the country and to the people” (Zedler 1750,
quoted in Sauerländer 1983, 256). Style changed from being a “recipe” to being “originality
understanding the modern views of the notion. Notably absent in Zedler’s definition of style is
any reference to period—a conception that was articulated a few years later by art historian
Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1764). At this point, style was transformed into a “category of
claimed “an inherent analogy between style in the art of a period and the political climate of the
same period” (ibid.), and style turned into a “nostalgic mechanism” (Sauerländer 1983, 262).
Montesquieu and Voltaire, “became ‘aestheticized’ and the rhetorical and aesthetic concept of
30
Zedler’s Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon (Great Complete Universal Lexicon) was a 64-volume
encyclopedia published between 1732 and 1750.
73
style became ‘historical’” (260). This historicization of style was prone to evolutionary
perspectives that became prominent in the nineteenth century. Winckelmann transformed the
concept of style from a normative concept into a flexible hermeneutic instrument (259).
The last turning point in Sauerländer’s account—the “most radical”—is one where style
becomes “style for style’s sake” (Sauerländer 1983, 264). Heinrich Wölfflin describes, in 1886,
an agenda involving psychology and classification: “[o]ne can only work with precision when it
is possible to gather the stream of appearances into clearly defined, stable forms” (Wölfflin 1886,
quoted in Sauerländer 1983, 264). This scientific conception of style defines it as less restricted
by norms, which, according to Sauerländer, “enabled the art historian to recognize styles in the
same manner a botanist identifies plants” (ibid.). Thus, style became a “hermeneutical engine
which was constructed in the laboratories of German and Austrian university-thinking between
In Principles of Art History (1915), Wölfflin develops a system with five pairs of polar
first term of each pair characterizes the “Renaissance” stage of the development of a style, while
the second refers to the “Baroque” stage. In Wolfflin’s view, this development was considered a
natural and necessary process. The theories of Wölfflin (and also of Alois Riegl) focused on
systematizing, searching for patterns of evolution as a way of explaining style change and
aesthetic ideas prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century, and in many ways still part of the
discourse on style.31
31
See, for instance, LaRue’s Guidelines for Style Analysis (1970), which systematizes the analysis of music through
parameters that define style.
74
To summarize Sauerländer’s tracking of the complex developments of the concept of
style in art history, there is a general change from a (1) normative paradigm to another focusing
on (2) individuality and innovation (person, country, people), which mostly coexist. This
prompts (3), the “aesthetic historicization” of style, connecting style and a time period’s
ideology, making it prone to (4) evolutionary perspectives on the concept. Finally, in the first
decades of the twentieth century, another related perspective emerges which views style as (5) a
detailed, development of the concept with three stages: style as taste (which stands for the
individuality and innovation perspective above, similar to Zedler), style as organism, and,
finally, style as discourse. Mundy derives the style-as-taste perspective from her reading of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau’s 1768 definition from the Dictionnaire de musique: “a characteristic of music
that varies according to country, personal preference, and the composer’s muse; an acquired taste
that could be learned and taught” (Rousseau 1768, quoted in Mundy 2014, 736-37). Mundy’s
second stage of style-as-organism is represented by Guido Adler’s Der Still in der Musik (1911),
highly influenced by Spencerian evolutionism. For Adler, musical style is “based on the laws of
becoming, on the construction and descent of organic evolution” (Adler 1911, 13, quoted in
Mundy 2014, 737). The third, and last, stage of Mundy’s “trajectory” (2014, 737) is present in
Robert Pascall’s 2001 entry on style, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, “as
a manner of discourse,” a definition as open as it is complex, and that serves as a reference for
of presentation” deserves a more thorough exploration. In the New Grove Dictionary entry, he
addresses different uses and functions of the term in music aesthetics and music history,
emphasizing the importance of context and purpose for an understanding of style: “[f]or the
aesthetician style concerns surface or appearance. . . . For the historian a style is a distinguishing
and ordering concept.”32 Pascall (2001) writes that style is “the general which surrounds the
particular and gives it significance.” His definition and investigation strongly connects style to
structural characteristics—a widely spread and accepted perspective—by dividing it into form,
texture, harmony, melody, and rhythm. This perspective is tied to LaRue’s (1970) understanding
of style in his SHMRG model (sound, harmony, melody, rhythm, and growth––to be discussed
below).
According to Pascall, these elements “present style” and form “unique blends by unique
expressive purposes,” which can acquire significance contextually and in relation to specific
functions. He is careful to not define the term merely as a structural phenomenon; his definition
highlights both a friction between originality and generality, as well as between structure and
context, both dichotomies that are crucial to the complexities of the concept. When he discusses
contextual aspects more closely—that is, the conditioning of styles by “expectations and
requirements of an audience”—Pascall refers to genre and ethos as its main triggers. The
tendency implicit in this and many other definitions of the term in music is that, generally,
32
I used the New Grove Music Online (Oxford Music Online), which contains the same entry by Pascall. Robert
Pascall, “Style,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2017), accessed June 1,
2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/27041. All
citations from Pascall are from this same source.
76
discussions of structure invoke the term style, whereas for matters of context and reception genre
The transition from Mundy’s “taste” or normative stage of style to “organism” aligns
with many prominent ideologies of the nineteenth century, mentioned above. She also discusses
the pathway from the “organism” to “discourse” stages, which is achieved through an abstraction
of style, and disconnects style criticism from evolutionary perspectives and related discourses on
race and nationalism. In order to demonstrate this focus on the “music itself,” Mundy (2014)
uses Leonard Ratner’s definition of the classical style, expressed in his analysis of Beethoven’s
Violin Concerto, op. 61 (in Harmonic Aspects of Classic Form, from 1949), and mentions
analyses by Richard Crocker, Jan LaRue, Charles Rosen, and Leonard Meyer as adopting similar
analytical discourse. According to Mundy, “this new style-criticism made available a history of
music that rejected racial politics by abstention, focusing on musicological attention on music’s
formal elements instead of its national or ethnic features . . . what Klára Móricz calls ‘castle[s] of
purity,’ utopias of modernist aesthetics haunted by the failure to extricate composers from
feature that partially connects his book to theories of style by art historians in the first decades of
the twentieth century, like Wölfflin and Riegl. LaRue states that, at least at the theoretical level,
style concerns musical characteristics, and rejects the philosophical, social, ethical, and cognitive
evaluation––thus addressing, to an extent, context and reception. But, in the end, this heightened
focus on structural analysis comes at the expense of the social and historical aspects of style,
with, as Mundy writes, “the formal elements of a musical ‘typology’ supersed[ing] historical
change” (Mundy 2014, 757). If, as LaRue tells us, style amounts to the “choices of elements and
procedures a composer makes” (LaRue 1970, xxv), a sole focus on the elements and procedures
disregards two other perspectives that can be implied by this definition: that of the composer,
and, especially, that of choice as an act. For LaRue, style is musical organization, and something
subject to detailed analysis. Despite his stated openness to variability of interpretation, context,
and audience, the extreme systematization of stylistic elements and the meticulous process of
examining them, connects with perspectives on style as something closed, and confined to the
music. If we understand style solely as the “manner of doing things” or the “choice of elements
and procedures,” this restriction is mostly fine. However, manner and choices are fostered by
specific contexts and, furthermore, when a style becomes a label, it acquires a social and
discursive dimension; in this way, a sole focus on structure fails to provide a comprehensive
behavior or artifacts produced by human behavior, resulting from a series of choices made within
some set of constraints” (Meyer 1989, 3). For Meyer, style is a constrained act that goes beyond
structure, since “works of art are understood and appreciated not only in terms of what actually
occurs, but in terms of what might have happened given the constraints of the style and the
particular context in which choice was made” (6). Meyer disagrees with LaRue by stating that
style is not in the constancy (in the synonymity of “the manner” between works, as can be
inferred by LaRue’s definition and project), nor in the deviations from it. While uses of style as
classifying and labeling tools may rely on some kind of synonymity, Meyer highlights the
importance of choices, what is not chosen, and the constraints that establish them. Thus, he
warns that many perspectives on style confuse its recognition and classification with an
explanation or analysis: “[w]hat the theorist and analyst want to know about, then, are the
constraints of the style in terms of which the replicated patternings observed can be related to
one another and to the experience of works of art” (Meyer 1989, 12); one “must infer the nature
of the constraints—rules of the game—from the ‘play’ of the game itself” (ibid.). Meyer
discusses three perspectives based on different uses of the concept of musical style:
on the first of these, while Meyer cuts across all three; in fact, these three perspectives are
intrinsically connected. Perhaps because the term came to refer, in general, only to structural
aspects in analytical discourse, it lost prominence in scholarship around the turn of this century,
overlooks his seminal work on musical topics in the 1980s. Ratner’s understanding of musical
style goes beyond this alleged “castle of purity,” and shaped much of the twenty-first century
scholarship on the subject. Danuta Mirka’s (2014, 3-9) topic-theory oriented account of style
intersects connotations of the normative, taste, and style as discourse. Musical topics are styles
and genres used as cross-references in eighteenth-century music, which have the potential to
evoke a network of signification that involves structure, context, and listener. Mirka locates the
onset of the use of the term style in music theory in the distinction between stilo antico and stilo
moderno, derived from Claudio Monteverdi’s and Giovanni Artusi’s discussion about prima and
seconda pratica. In the eighteenth century, these become known as strict and free (or galant)
styles, but further subdivisions of musical practice based on function and place were also used.
Scacchi (1649) discusses church, theatrical, and chamber styles––addressed later by Mattheson
(1739) as genera stylorum––which subsume the species stylorum, a different subdivision made
by Kircher (1650). There are other distinct and overlapping categorizations of music in the
eighteenth century made by Scheibe (1745), Forkel (1788), Sulzer (1792), and in the nineteenth
and seconda pratica would become a prescriptive and normalizing category. This latter
music. He refers, for instance, to “the good style,” evoking a judgment of taste, of what is
“proper.” Style is used, then, throughout the long eighteenth century as a way to orient
composers as well as to set standards of evaluation and criticism, always backed up by agendas
33
See Mirka (2014, 3-9) for a more detailed discussion.
80
and ideologies. It is at the same time a pedagogical tool (prescriptive/normative) and a judgment
measure (taste)—fitting into Mundy’s stage of “style as taste.” When used as topics, however,
musical styles have a contextualizing function and discursive dimension, both of which involve
audience, performer, and composer. While these categories may seem rigid and prescriptive, it is
important to highlight that Mirka, and topic theory scholars (Agawu 2009; Byros 2009, 2014;
Hatten 2004, 2014; McKee 2014; Monelle 2000, 2006; Sisman 1993, 2014), generally treat them
as hermeneutic tools that shape musical discourse, which are not mere labels but means for
interpretation. While mostly restricted to eighteenth-century categories, the topical use of styles
continued well into the nineteenth century (see Agawu 2009, 41-49). The older categories
continued serving as a backdrop for unique musical expressions, even while they were being
negated. This idea resonates with Sauerländer’s discussion of the dual-faced nature of style as
Even though in its development the term has passed through all three stages of Mundy’s
reigning ideologies, especially in the contemporary perspective on style as discourse. As one can
gather from my brief summary of Sauerländer’s (1983) fairly detailed account of the concept in
art history, the development is more haphazard than a trajectory, more like an accumulation of
perspectives not necessarily forgotten or left behind. It becomes difficult not to mix these stances
according to the many possibilities of use and users of the term given the ubiquity of style in
formal and informal discussions about music.34 In other words, the paradigms of style, taste,
norm, organism, individual genius and innovation, and discourse––or “music itself”––are all still
34
This diversity is something hinted at in Pascall’s discussion above on the difference between the uses of style for
the music aesthetician and historian.
81
in use somehow, and inform each other constantly. Thus, I prefer to see the current situation of
style as a set of different paradigms that are filtered through contextual use, function, and
Paul Butler’s (2007) account of the invisibility of style in recent studies of rhetoric is
helpful in understanding why it also disappeared from much music scholarship after the 1980s,
both as a theoretical concept and analytical tool.36 He suggests that the concept was absorbed
into several other areas; for instance, one finds it “‘lurking’ behind areas of critical theory like
deconstruction, which shares with style the search and play of tropes, and reader-response
35
As will be seen in the following sections, many of these paradigms are also valid for the concept of genre.
36
A potential exception is topic theory, even though its focus is not on conceptualizations of style per se, but on
their use as importations.
82
literary criticism” (Butler 2007, 5). Importantly, there was considerably more engagement of
music studies with critical theory in the late twentieth century, thus influencing the treatment of
the term in music as well. Butler claims that style “in its dispersed form is often not called style
but instead is named something else within the field” (ibid.). Medzerian (2008, 87) agrees that “it
is not the concept of style that has been rejected from scholarship, it is the name.” In music, style
was mostly reserved for technical and structural matters, the “music itself.” Its use as a more
embracing concept was substituted by genre, which stands in a somewhat confused relationship
Jim Samson defines musical genre as a “class, type or category, sanctioned by convention.”37
Samson continues by claiming that genres both “codify past repetitions, and they invite future
repetitions.”38 Differing from Pascall’s perspective on style above, which is also conditioned by
context and reception but occurs in music, for Samson “the repetition units that define a musical
genre can be identified on several levels . . . social, behavioural and ideological domains as well
as in music materials.” Samson calls attention to the classificatory tendency of genre, which
serves not only “to organize, but also to close or finalize, our experience” as it “implies a closed,
37
Grove Music Online, s.v. “Genre,” by Jim Samson, accessed April 12, 2017,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/40599.
38
Ibid.
83
conceptual unity. Only then it is classifiable.” He compares this characteristic of genre with
style, which he assumes is related to originality and innovation: “[i]ndeed a genre, working for
stability, control and finality of meaning, might be said to oppose the idiomatic diversity and
The concept of genre goes through similar stages of development and understanding as
those mentioned by Sauerländer (1983) and Mundy (2014) in relation to style. However, it
followed a different path in the second half of the twentieth century. The development of the
concept of genre is strongly tied to literary theory, with its roots, according to Rick Altman, in
“Aristotle’s categorization of kinds of poetry” (Altman 1999, 2) into epic, tragedy, and comedy,
for instance. The classical theory of genre understands it as post-factum, taking the existence of
genres for granted. Aristotle’s perspective is mostly descriptive, while Horace, centuries later,
accepts the existence of fixed genres and uses them prescriptively, as a means for imitation:
Horace’s perspective aligns with rhetoricians’ conceptualization of style as normative, but also in
many ways with the idea of “style as taste,” prevalent in musical discourse of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Genre theory also goes through an aesthetic historicization in the latter
eighteenth century, similar to that exemplified by the work of Winckelmann above (1764), in
[t]he romantics quickly discovered that new genre theories can be skillfully
buttressed by adducing a carefully concocted new canon . . . [they] fully revealed
39
Ibid.
84
for the first time just how effectively genre theory (and even the production of
generically marked literary works) can be pressed into the service of broader
institutional goals. (1999, 6)
This realization later afforded a connection between genre theories and biological and
evolutionary perspectives, in similar fashion to the development of the concept of style. Genres,
as organisms, could then be addressed with the scientific models of Charles Darwin and Herbert
Brunetière, genres “have distinct borders, that can be firmly identified[,] . . . operate
In the beginning of the twentieth century, Italian literary critic Benedetto Croce writes
that “[a]ll the books dealing with classifications and systems of the arts could be burned without
any loss whatsoever” (Croce 1909, quoted in Kallberg 1988, 239). Croce’s claim, however, does
40
not stop Russian formalists like Viktor Shklovsky from continuing to develop theories of genre
based on “struggle and succession” among competing major and minor lines (Samson, Grove
Music Online). Theodor Adorno’s perspective on the decline of genre shifts the focus to a
historically contingent social dialectic between “universal and particular,” in which deviations
40
Croce’s rationale for the rejection of the concept of genre relies on its aesthetic inexistence: “[t]he things called
Arts have no aesthetic limits, because, in order to have them, they would need to have also aesthetic existence; and
we have demonstrated the altogether empirical genesis of those divisions. Consequently, any attempt at an aesthetic
classification of the arts is absurd. If they be without limits, they are not exactly determinable, and consequently
cannot be philosophically classified” (Croce 1909, accessed June 1, 2017, http://www.aolib.com/reader_9306_56.
htm). He understands genres as located in the text, instead of distributed between individual, text, and context.
85
from an established genre create new ones. Thus, according to Adorno, there has to be an
assumed and shared universal for genres to develop: thus “a countervailing dynamic” that affords
Within this context, Carl Dahlhaus (1967) suggests that during the course of the
nineteenth century the importance of musical genres declined, claiming its complete demise after
the turn of the century. A work-centered perspective that began in the Romantic period changed
the focus from exemplification of established genres to individual statements, explaining genre’s
Dahlhaus understands “genre as an idea strongly linked with the metaphorical concept of
‘tradition’” (quoted in Kallberg 1988, 239), and given the demise of the latter notion in the
the concept after the 1960s, especially in literary studies. (The same did not happen, as
mentioned above, with the concept of style, which remained connected with formalist
categorizations in musical discourse.) However, the lesser importance given to genre continued
in disciplines such as music theory, which oftentimes has a work-centered perspective on the
musical experience. Eric Drott (2013) challenges this decline-of-genre thesis, claiming that
Note that Drott discusses this decline of genre specifically in “concert music”—as Dahlhaus also
does—since in other repertories, such as popular music, the importance of the notion of genre
did not wane. In fact, with the multiplication of the number of genres and the increased
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accessibility brought about by the internet and music streaming, genres are both essential market
and reception categories in popular music. Drott points out that “[t]he denial of genre was less
body of musical texts” (2013, 6). The rejection of established genres created new ones, which
formulation (2000, 107), which viewed genre’s inevitability as “a by-product of the relational
nature of genre.” To negate a genre is also to endorse some type of connection with it (Drott
2013, 7). In investigating the terms used to refer to twentieth-century music (such as
experimental, avant-garde, modern, serial, and atonal, all usually referred to not as genres but as
activity, no matter how vocally they are rejected in the discourse of contemporary music,
reemerge in the form of a metalanguage that shapes the limits of this discourse” (2013, 8).
Within this context, a renewed conceptualization of genre was developed. Drott defines
41
Drott problematizes the meaning of categorizations through genre labels, which is also valid for style labels:
“even something as simple and apparently unproblematic as asserting that a work belongs to a genre is not devoid of
the specter of this violence, insofar as the ascription of the specific to the general that occurs when a text is classed
within a genre necessarily minimizes certain features and exaggerates others. . . . Given this legacy, it is small
wonder that genre has often been regarded as an impediment, a filter that impoverishes rather than enriches musical
practice” (2013, 9).
87
This embracing definition also suggests that genres are unstable and in constant change, needing
to be “continually enacted and reenacted” in order to establish or keep their status. This is a
relational understanding, based not only on the work of a composer, but also on the acceptance
of audience members who can “recognize them, take them up, and thereby reproduce the specific
configuration of texts and contexts that they establish” (Drott 2013, 12). Audience members,
critics, performers, and managers have as much a role in the establishment, management, and
Notably, almost nothing that surrounds the musical experience is left untouched in
Drott’s definition, which goes considerably beyond the older rigid and prescriptive notions of
genres as musical ideal types to be decoded and repeated. For Drott, as well as for most of the
recent scholars working with these issues, style is contained by genre, the former being reserved
to address structural and technical aspects of music. It is interesting to contrast this style-
contained-by-genre perspective with Franco Fabbri’s (and also Philip Tagg’s) notion that these
two concepts overlap but cover different semantic areas. For Fabbri, a “genre is a kind of music,
as it is acknowledged by a community for any reason or purpose or criteria, i.e., a set of musical
events whose course is governed by rules (of any kind) accepted by a community” (1999, 7).
This inclusion of community is what, most often, differentiates genre from style, even though
this is sometimes not enough to distinguish the two terms. In his definition of style, however,
Fabbri brackets out the social: style is “[a] recurring arrangement of features in musical events
With this renewed understanding of genre, what was historically a tool for stability and
prescription is now used, contrastingly, to address pluralism by providing “a point of entry for
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considering how the plural and agonistic character of the cultural field, by imprinting itself upon
ourselves, shapes our perception and understanding of music” (Drott 2013, 40). Drott claims that
this plural condition is to be found in each text, agent, and genre. Genre is then a dynamic and
useful tool to engage with pluralism, which suits the purposes of this study and the framework
for musical hybridity that follows. Furthermore, I would add that the notion of style is also
subject to the same reconceptualization, despite its uses in music being more related to structural
matters: structure is not constrained by the score, but also involves the listener and context. Thus,
both concepts used for categorizations and connected to formalism, essentialism, and
Genre here assumes the character of a resource that is summoned to help answer
the question, What kind of thing is this? And, as John Frow has observed, this is a
necessary preliminary to answering another, more crucial question: What is it
that’s going on here? (Drott 2013, 16)
There are multiple answers to these questions for any single text, since style and genre are
relational and their framing effects constantly changing depending on perspective and purpose,
In the realm of popular music, the more embracing conception of genre is frequently
dividing genre’s characteristics into five groups: (1) formal and technical, (2) semiotic, (3)
behavior, (4) social and ideological, and (5) economic and juridical rules. These, of course, are
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only theoretically isolated, and can be weighed differently within each genre. Simon Frith (1996)
engages with Fabbri’s work and expands the discussion on genre’s instability and complex ties
with ideologies, market, lifestyle, as well as music-making. Frith addresses three distinct ways
“in which genre labels work in popular music evaluation” (1996, 87): organizing music-making,
organizing the playing process, and organizing the listening process. Scholars such as Negus
(1999), Toynbee (2000), Holt (2007), Lena (2012), and Brackett (2016), among others, also
explore “a more flexible, pragmatic understanding of the concept” (Drott 2013, 9) in popular
music.
Frith states that genre is not determined by the form or style itself, but “by the audience’s
perceptions of its style and meaning” (1996, 94); again, a genre does not exist for the composer
only, but needs an audience to confirm it. To exemplify this point, Frith uses indie music: a genre
label that indicates “both a means of production (music produced on an independent rather than a
major label) and [. . .] an attitude, supposedly embodied in the music, in its listeners, and,
perhaps most important, in the relation between them” (1996, 86). That is, indie music is
characterized by its means of production and attitude; in other words, the how of music-making,
but a “how” that is localized around the sound, not solely in its structure. Even though sonic
characteristics can also, very generally, connect with an “indie” sound, they do not suffice to
define it—they need to be connected to social, behavioral, and market characteristics that are
also part of the category. In this way, style and genre are entangled, and unraveling them proves
difficult. But the main point is that genres (and style) only work within cultures that recognize,
Toynbee builds upon Frith’s perspective, and posits that genre can be understood as an
expression of a community (2000, 111-13), highlighting the paradox intrinsic to the term:
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[I]t becomes impossible to define a genre in terms of a complete set of rules.
Exceptions keep cropping up. Still, genres do have rules. Repetition and
variations are regulated and musicians, inevitably, follow convention in their
creative practice. Such is the paradox of genre. (Toynbee, 128)
illustrating how a community establishes, confirms, and values the boundaries of a genre. For
Holt, who grounds his investigation in field-work, Fabbri, Frith, and Toynbee’s work “suffer[s]
from typical problems of armchair research” (2007, 8). He contributes several case studies of
popular music in the United States, including two chapters on the indie jazz community in
Chicago, and its discourses surrounding genre. Even though systemic aspects of genre can be
approached in light of structuralist thinking, Holt claims that genres “have system functions but
are not systems in a strict sense and certainly not mechanical or bounded entities” (2007, 23),
community.
Jennifer C. Lena (2012) builds her approach to genre entirely from a sociological
popular music. In her account, echoing many scholars of popular music, a genre can only be
formed in the conflation of a community with a musical style. In this way, a musical style relates
to musical conventions, rules, and sonic identities, which at times are coupled with a community.
Lena’s definition of genre includes musical style (the musical text) as only a small part of a
genre; for her, “musical genres [are] systems of orientations, expectations, and conventions that
bind together industry, performers, critics, and fans in making what they identify as a distinctive
sort of music” (2012, 6). Genre comprises the “social arrangements that link participants who
believe themselves to be involved in a collective project” (ibid.). Thus, not all musical styles can
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be analyzed as genres, which appear in the community surrounding a musical style, not in the
music itself. In Lena’s account, style is a set of cohesive aesthetic traits that may be used by a
Lena’s project is similar to Holt’s (2007), in its focus on community and discourse, but
her main argument is that musical genres can be analyzed and systematized as a “structure” of
the social realm. Whereas Holt’s framework is open-ended and adaptable to many different
cases, Lena perceives “formal similarities across musical communities” (2012, 5), which are
Traditionalist, which she summarizes by the acronym AgSIT.42 The acronym encapsulates the
stages through which a genre develops. Even though Lena mentions that many genres do not
follow this specific path—they can stop before the traditionalist stage, or they can start at the
scene-based form—there is a hint of imposed teleology in her account. Genres have a birth,
proposed by Adler in the beginning of the twentieth century, which was criticized by many post-
1950s scholars.43
The dangers of a general systematization such as Lena’s—or even the one proposed in
this study—are to find stabilities where none exist. Her concept of musical community, albeit
crucial and identifiable, is also, to a certain extent, idealized as groupings of musical works
sharing certain characteristics. The boundaries between communities, as with the identification
of musical categories, are not rigid, and the stages of a genre’s development can, as Lena herself
42
For Lena, each genre form is characterized by a set of attributes or dimensions: organizational form, scale, and
locus, source of income, press coverage, genre ideal, codification of performance conventions, technology, boundary
work, dress/adornment/drugs, argot, source of music name. Noteworthy in this list is the absence of any musical
feature: there is no reference to timbre, textural, rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic characteristics. Granted, Lena’s
project is not a music analytical, but a sociological one.
43
For a review and criticism of these evolutionary perspectives specifically on musical styles, see Mundy (2014).
92
notes, overlap or exist simultaneously (2012, 62-63). Lena’s work contributes to a better
understanding of how classificatory systems are used by communities and the market; however,
the manner in which musical characteristics, genre dimensions, and genre forms interact needs
much more investigation. Thus, the interaction between the affordances of a musical text and the
twentieth-century American popular music; “[r]ather than focusing on what constitutes the
contents of a musical category, the emphasis . . . falls on how a particular idea of a category
emerges and stabilizes momentarily (if at all) in the course of being accepted across a range of
discourses and institutions . . . to emphasize the conditions that support the singularity of the
function, use, and meaning of particular genres” (2016, 6). Brackett’s genealogy, following
Michel Foucault’s understanding of the term, “seeks both to analyze the conditions that make it
possible for an event to occur and, at the same time, to not occlude the current events to which an
interest in the past is responding, what Foucault termed a ‘history of the present’” (2016, 6).
Brackett writes that “genres are not static groupings of empirically verifiable musical
characteristics, but rather associations of texts whose criteria of similarity may vary according to
the uses to which the genre labels are put” (2016, 4). He observes that “‘[s]imilar’ elements
include more than musical-style features, and groupings often hinge on elements of nation, class,
race, gender, sexuality, and so on” (ibid.). Brackett strongly engages with Fabbri’s 1982 theory
(discussed above) promoting a divided focus on technical, historical, and socioeconomic aspects
twentieth century.
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2.3 Style vs Genre
The similarly changing ideologies, values, and functions surrounding the concepts of
style and genre reinforce their corresponding ranks as means for classification. Even when
approached distinctly by different areas of scholarship, they still bear similarities in their uses.
The above accounts engage in both style and genre from the angles of typology, description,
discursiveness. Nevertheless, as similar as they may be, style and genre are not synonymous. It is
noteworthy, then, that most theoretical accounts of one concept do not interact in any depth with
the other. The two classificatory terms, even though sometimes used interchangeably in practice,
bring different hierarchies in their classically rooted etymologies. Style’s etymology from stilus,
an instrument for writing, and appropriation by rhetorical tradition indicate a specific register of
discourse; genre is derived from genus, meaning kind, sort, or class. Style originally meant the
manner in which something is done, while genre meant a type or class of things, which includes
as one of its parameters the manner in which things are done. This distinction is also valid when
both concepts are used to classify something: style classifies the manner, while genre classifies
the type. Problems begin to arise because this separation between how and what is artificial.
Oftentimes, the relationship between the two terms is unclear, as in the following excerpt
by Mirka:
Affects were associated with genres. If styles encompass broad affective zones,
genres composed in these styles are related to specific affects. This concerns, in
particular, the instrumental genres that Mattheson called ‘small Pieçes’ . . . each
genre receives its typical affect. (2014, 7)
44
The ambiguity is increased when one thinks of other terms used as parameters for classification of identities:
mode, register, technique, character. None of these are strictly equivalent with style or genre, but constitute potential
(idealized) subdivisions of the aspects that form them.
94
Some music scholars use the term interchangeably, as in this excerpt from Toynbee (2000), in
[Neale’s] notion of genre as a social process enables a much more flexible and
comprehensive approach. For the present argument its importance lies in the
suggestion that style cannot be the exclusive domain of musicians. Rather it will
tend to be contested, becoming the subject of struggles for definition across the
continuum from production to consumption. (2000, 103, my emphasis)
Above all identification depends on being able to read a generic signature right
through the fabric of the music; indeed, a style will usually “introduce itself” in
the first few bars of a song. But genre is also constructed through the structure of
record labels, the layout of bins in a record shop, in the constitutions of music
magazines or radio station formatting. (2000, 115, my emphasis)
Fabbri (1999) and Tagg (2012) explicitly differentiate between style and genre, with
accounts that point toward a better understanding of the problem. In Fabbri’s perspective, the
two terms “clearly cover different semantic fields,” since “style implies an emphasis on the
musical, while genre relates to all kinds of codes that are referred to in a musical event” (Fabbri
1999, 8-9). Genres operate in “[r]ituals, etiquettes, proxemic codes, the division of labour,
economic procedures and laws, common assumptions based on the music’s function shared in a
community, be it a rural community, an urban subculture, a group of people who have the same
religious or political beliefs” (10). Style is “at a level where more specific information is
articulated” (11); genre, according to Fabbri, “appears to be a less specific concept than style . . .
more about beliefs and practice than about theory” (ibid.). But Tagg, referring to Fabbri’s
distinction, warns that this does not make style a mere subset of genre. As an example, Tagg
cites the personal style of the composer Enio Morricone, which is “unmistakable whichever
head-on engagement with their confusing use in music, comes from Allan F. Moore (2001).
Moore provides a brief but thorough investigation of the distinct uses of these music categories,
which ranges from Schlegel to Adler, from Dahlhaus to Ratner and Meyer, as well as recent
musicological accounts by Kallberg (1988), Walser (1993), Krims (2000), Fabbri, and Tagg,
among many others. Departing from the idea that the terms have overlapping but different realms
of reference, Moore points to “four ways of distinguishing” between them (2001, 441). These
subdivisions cover a sizeable part, but certainly not all, of debates about style and genre in
music.
Moore’s first way of distinguishing style and genre is through understanding style as the
“manner of articulation of musical gestures” and genre as the “identity and the context of those
gestures” (2001, 441). Another possibility is to address genre as emphasizing the esthesic level,
while style pertains to the poietic. A third distinction is to address genre as constituting socially
constrained meaning; style would then “bracket out” the social and emphasize technical aspects.
Lastly, Moore regards the distinct hierarchy in the usage of both terms: “style operates at various
hierarchical levels, from global to the most local” (2001, 442); genre also has hierarchy, but
“sub-genres cover an entire genre territory in a way that ‘sub-styles’ do not” (ibid.). Moore
highlights the cognitive aspects of genre and style by suggesting that “much of the interest in
music comes from the realization of friction between awareness of stylistic [and generic]
conventions that appear to be relevant to a particular piece of music, and the sonic experience
itself” (ibid.). Style and genre, in the end, belong to the listening act as much as the
compositional one.
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Altman (1999, 49-68) thinks about genre as adjective and as noun, in discussing the
process of gentrification in films—when an adjectified noun is stable and accepted enough that it
becomes a compound noun in its own right.45 Building upon Altman’s idea, one could consider
the differences between style and genre by thinking of style as adjectival and genre as
substantival (noun). However, this falls short because in music-making (and also in other areas)
the kind, or noun, directly influences the manner in which (style, adjective) something is made,
and vice versa: the manner in which something is made (its style) influences its affiliation to a
kind. In music, style is recurrently used in a substantival way, to signify “kind.” Rarely,
however, is genre used to signify “manner.” This creates a lopsided and confusing hierarchy,
which very few scholars have tackled so far. Besides this skewed differentiation between manner
and kind, there is also the possibility of separating text and social, which is proposed by many
music scholars as defining, respectively, style and genre. Again, text and social (or context) are
not separate entities, and any attempt to divide them will overlook important dynamic aspects of
discourse. It is imperative, then, to acknowledge the fluidity between these two terms, especially
in relation to the varying purposes and contexts of their usage in music, which constantly affects
their definition.
music analysis as a flexible and dynamic tool, forms a useful perspective. The fixity of genres or
styles, when recognized and labeled, constitute a performative act that puts as much weight on
the reception as it does on the production or distribution of musical texts. Even when these
categories are determined by, for instance, a streaming service, the friction generated by other
45
Altman uses noir an example of genrification: it started as identifying a particular quality of a film, as in film noir,
but later used as a genre in itself.
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possible interpretations or disagreements creates a dynamic space for enactment and re-
enactment. Importantly, it is not because style is more related to “structure” in its use that it
should be less flexible (more formalistic, rigid) term than genre; structure goes well beyond the
sound or the page—it needs context and reception in order to exist. Styles and genres are not
classes, but “classifying acts” or “statements” (Altman 1999, 85) that serve communities in
different ways, and at different levels. Brackett (2016) discusses these different levels at which
genres simultaneously operate, an idea also based on Fabbri’s 1982 theory (more specifically, his
notions of “sets” and “subsets”). Brackett exemplifies these simultaneous, singular levels of
genres through marketing categories—chart name, radio format, critic-fan genres—which range
from vaguest to most specific uses of the concept and its potential signification (Brackett 2016,
11).
If one relies on recurring usage in music scholarship, genre is more often connected with
community, the discursive, and the pragmatic realm. Style, on the other hand, is employed as a
group of works that share a manner of doing things, or as a unique manner of making music—its
aesthetic characteristics. Style, I should emphasize, relies as much on the audience, performers,
and critics as it does on composers and technique to exist. So, in reality, style cannot completely
bracket out contextual and social matters, as many definitions imply (see LaRue 1970, for
instance). In fact, I suggest that none of these terms are constrained to structure or to community.
The answer to “where is genre?” or “where is style?” involves both structure (semantics and
syntax, form, and content), and the discursive (identity, sociopolitical, economic, and communal
aspects). Both terms cut across semantic, syntactic, formal, and discursive fields. They do not
exist in one specific place; both are spaces of struggle involving categorization, identity,
difference, value ascription, and sense-making. They are constructs for communication, and
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serve as mediators between an individual, a community/context, and text. This tripartite
It is important to differentiate this “modern” perspective on styles and genres from their
use as more rigid and formalistic concepts, and, at the same time, not to overlook the normative
and organicist history of these ideas—which are still influential. Styles and genres are employed
in this study as the main identity categories that afford musical hybridity, throughout a spectrum
ranging from the structural/textual to sociopolitical levels. Thus, the two terms are understood
here as categories that create a set of expectations and form relational, and ever-changing,
systems of differences. As just mentioned, when an interpreter chooses to use the term style there
is a tendency (which will be adopted in this study) to refer to musical (textual, aesthetic)
differences and expectations; a choice to use genre denotes emphasis on social differences (race,
function, locale, fashion, behavior, economy, value) coupled with musical categories, hence
community’s specific kind of engagement, be they in social, political, or economic aspects. The
non-overlapping parts of the concepts are, for style, the more detailed level of structural and
technical characteristics; on the other hand, not all social, political, and economic aspects which
organize a community surrounding a genre will directly overlap with textual characteristics of its
musical style. Both terms are involved in identification and differentiation with style doing so
predominantly among musical texts, whereas genre deals mostly with contexts. The Venn
diagram in Ex. 2.3.2 shows merely an abstract representation of this basic interaction between
Example 2.3.2. Style and genres and their overlapping and separate semantic fields
Styles, even if not clearly pertaining to a genre proper, can be used to create associations
with specific communities. Even in their more textual and technical focus, styles are not isolated
from the network of genres—they serve as triggers of socially based categories. The
aforementioned fluidity between levels in terms of association becomes a crucial factor when
investigating musical hybrids, from production, reception, or critical perspectives. Thus, the
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hierarchy of style and genre is not fixed. There is musical style in genre, but there is also genre in
musical style: for instance, when the function or political perspective of a specific genre
influences the aesthetic, structural, or textual choices made by an artist. Brackett writes that “the
‘effects’ of genre cannot be traced to the ‘cause’ of musical style in a direct, one-to-one
relationship” (2016, 4). This happens because the changing hierarchies within this ambiguous
condition of style and genre is highly dependent on perspective, purpose, and the context of the
Brackett draws on J. L. Austin’s and Jacques Derrida’s ideas on these matters, but leaves aside
the important works on concepts and categories by Eleanor Rosch and others, on prototypicality
and gradience, which address the issue from a complementary, and equally important, cognitive
styles and genres work. The theory appeared in response to the difficulties faced by the rigidity
There are better examples of a style or genre that have more prominence, or a higher number of
its typical characteristic features; however, examples without all of these characteristics need not
be excluded from the category, although would be less typical members of the same category.
This gradience is useful in understanding the absence of single exemplars of styles or genres;
that is, there is no one instantiation that serves to characterize the entire category, but many
musical ones for style, and more general ones for genre.
Rosch (1978) systematizes this perspective by defining two dimensions of categories, one
vertical and the other horizontal. The vertical dimension addresses the hierarchical aspects of a
category, and the possibility of a “basic-level” category—a term that “refers to a particular level
of inclusiveness” (Rosch 1978, quoted in Laurence and Margolis, 1999, 192) afforded by being
neither too restrictive nor too inclusive. The verticality of categories, according to Rosch’s view,
puts the basic level at the center of the hierarchy, which she exemplifies with chair—a basic
level category—having furniture as its superordinate (too abstract), and kitchen chair and living-
room chair as its subordinates (offering more detailed information). Much of this can be used in
music, especially in considering the hierarchical notions of micro- and macro-genres or styles,
style streams (Lena 2012), clusters, or individual/geographical/period style. At the basic level,
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recognition and categorization are faster, even if not precise, cognitive processes, helping with
general musical engagement. The fluidity between levels of classification, as well as between
textual or contextual cues, is essential to understanding how one recognizes and labels music in a
less rigid way. A detailed cue (a style flag, indicator, or synecdoche, as per Tagg 2012, 268) can
trigger a macro-genre or cluster at a high level of abstraction (thus, having a high degree of
inclusiveness). This might be sufficient for some musical engagements, but others might require
attention to other cues that will locate the music at a more detailed level. Rosch further defines
“Cues” and “cue validity” can easily be transferred to music as style/genre markers or flags.
Rosch’s horizontal dimension deals with the rigidness of the boundaries separating
categories. “Most, if not all, categories do not have clear-cut boundaries. To argue that basic
object categories follow clusters of perceived attributes is not to say that such attribute clusters
are necessarily discontinuous” (Rosch 1978, quoted in Laurence and Margolis 1999, 196). As a
way of navigating the horizontal dimension of categorization, Rosch discusses the formation of
prototypes, which serve as “centers” of the clusters. Prototypes develop through “maximization
of cue validity and maximization of category resemblance” (Rosch 1978, quoted in Laurence and
Margolis, 197). In an earlier study, Rosch and Mervis (1975) have pursued empirical evidence
proving that (for their objects and concepts) “the more prototypical of a category a member is
rated, the more attributes it has in common with other members of the category and the fewer
attributes in common with the members of the contrasting categories” (Rosch 1978, quoted in
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Laurence and Margolis 1999, 197). While Rosch’s work does not deal directly with music, these
notions find their way in much of the discussion about music categorization, even if with
different terminology.
Whereas Prototype Theory has its problems, it serves to mitigate essentialist views of
musical style and genre—which are, in fact, closely connected to the more rigid Classical Theory
of concepts—since it describes graded concepts that involve typicality judgments and implies
challenges.47 Perhaps the most problematic is that mixtures themselves may not be prototypical
by any measure: a musical hybrid might combine features never before combined, thus rendering
the mixture entirely unfamiliar as far as categorization is concerned. Such a combination of two
different, potentially unrelated categories, can have their conceptual blend explained, at least in
part, by the mixture strategies proposed in the next chapter, which work as processual
prototypes.
2.5 Maps, Trees, and Networks: Genre and Streaming in the Twenty-first
Century
Fabbri, discussing attempts to map music for market purposes in the, now gone, web
46
For a discussion of the potential issues of Prototype Theory, see Laurence and Margolis 1999, 32-43.
47
A related, but different, take on these problems is Smith and Medin’s “exemplar view,” which posits that concepts
are represented by their exemplars rather than by the statistical clusters proposed by Prototype Theory. That is, that
people use one instantiation as representing the highest level of typicality of a category. See Smith and Medin’s
chapter in Laurence and Margolis (1999, 207-21).
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across the borders, rather than account for the differences and nuances that can be
found even at the most basic level of musical categories. (Fabbri 1999, 13)
Fabbri focuses mostly on what is dismissed or overlooked when using abstract models to
Moretti’s research is based on a quantitative analysis of literature, which affords a specific kind
of engagement with a large, and more easily analyzable, corpus. Music is certainly a more
difficult “text” to quantify; nonetheless, given the multiplication of musical categories in digital
access to music, and the possible analysis of listeners’ habits by streaming services, much can be
learned about how music categorization—that is, styles and genres—works in practice.
Every Noise at Once (ENAO), a project based on the streaming service Spotify, attempts
an abstract and dynamic visualization of the organization of music genres. Its website has been
developed by Glenn McDonald, identified as a “Data Alchemist” for the Echo Nest at Spotify.
The Echo Nest, bought by Spotify in 2014, developed an API that relies on big data analysis of
the sonic signal to provide curation and information about music. ENAO uses the Echo Nest’s
music data analysis API to explore Spotify’s database of more than thirty million songs as well
as the behavior of its hundred million users, and to create a constellation of the available music
clustered by its more than 1500 genre labels (Example 2.5.1).48 When one clicks on a genre, it
opens a different map of the artists included in that category (Example 2.5.2). Echo Nest’s
48
According to their website, Spotify has over 100 million active users as of June 2016 (50 million are subscribers).
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interface uses eleven song attributes: energy, loudness, danceability, liveness, speechness,
hotttnesss (sic), tempo, duration, key, time signature, and mode.49 McDonald describes the
project as
49
Echo Nest, http://developer.echonest.com/tutorial-overview.html
50
Glenn McDonald, Every Noise at Once, accessed July 6, 2017, http://everynoise.com
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Example 2.5.1. Every Noise at Once map, with 1526 genres available on Spotify as of June 2017
(please access everynoise.com for a more detailed view of the names)
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Example 2.5.2. Echo Nest visual organization of artists included in the category of “Classic
Rock”
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While the main feature of ENAO is its large map, McDonald can tailor the algorithm to filter
specific information and correlate musical categories with other user data. For instance,
McDonald used data concerning political filiation from some American users to find alignments
with genre preferences, and offered the algorithm online so that users could themselves
Rather than delving more deeply into the specific possibilities of categorization, or even
their accuracy, my objective here is to point to different, and more fluid ways of engaging with
genres in the age of big data, streaming services, and the ubiquitous and mostly unlimited access
to music. Moretti asks: “Do maps add anything to our knowledge of literature?” (2005, 35). One
could ask the same for our knowledge of music: Do these data-based maps, which only recently
became possible, help us to understand musical styles and genres? I believe they can, especially
when these two categories are used as the principal mediators of access to and discourse on
music. These maps are not only “mere structures,” they signify, as Moretti insightfully puts,
[I]f I keep making diagrams, then, it is because for me geometry “signifies” more
than geography. More, in the sense that a geometrical pattern is too orderly a
shape to be the product of chance. It is a sign that something is at work here—that
something has made the pattern that way it is. But what? (Moretti 2005, 56)
51
The algorithm can be found at http://everynoise.com/genrepolitics/. McDonald also presented this analysis of
genre and politics at the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPoP) Conference 2017, in Seattle. An adapted version of the
talk can be found at http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=456
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Drott relates the reconceptualization of musical genres (discussed above) with actor-network
theory (ANT), as developed by Callon (1987) and Latour (1987, 2007). Latour’s introductory
paragraph from his 2007 book summarizes many of the problems in considering styles and
The argument of this book can be stated very simply: when social scientists add
the adjective “social” to some phenomenon, they designate a stabilized state of
affairs, a bundle of ties that, later, may be mobilized to account for some other
phenomenon. There is nothing wrong with this use of the word as long as it
designates what is already assembled together, without making any superfluous
assumption about the nature of what is assembled. Problems arise, however, when
“social” begins to mean a type of material, as if the adjective was roughly
comparable to other terms like “wooden,” “steely,” “biological,” “economical,”
“mental,” “organizational,” or “linguistic.” At that point, the meaning of the word
breaks down since it now designates two entirely different things: first, a
movement during a process of assembling; and second, a specific type of
ingredient that is supposed to differ from other materials. (Latour 2007, 1)
Latour, among others, develops ANT by assigning agency to every item in a network of
associations, be they human or non-human, and redefining “the notion of social by going back to
its original meaning and making it able to trace connections again” (2007, 1). In light of this
theory, the visual, abstract representation of the connections among musical categories, along
with the acknowledgment of the many agents involved in their establishment, maps of styles and
genres are a useful tool, which allows for a clearer conceptualization of their dynamic status. The
pertinence of these maps to this study is related to potential ways of navigating style and genre
“systems,” as well as their “distances,” “clusters,” and associations, which depend on the
few specific concepts should be defined in order to facilitate their use in the following chapters.
This operationalization of style and genres will engage with their aforementioned system- and
network-like characteristics, and ideas mostly suggested by or adapted from the authors
discussed above.
In order to address the ineffability of styles and genres and their dynamic relational
status, they first have to be understood as concepts. The boundaries of concepts are not rigid; in
fact, there are no clear boundaries other than in attempts at classification. In this way, their
cases of hybridity in this study. Hybridity, as mentioned before, relies on boundaries at the same
time that it argues for their permeability. This in itself is not a problem as long as we are aware
of the volatility of these boundaries, as well as their contingent, (inter)subjective, and situated
condition. The boundary versus permeability conundrum need not be solved, but certainly
engaged with, which I do by considering any judgments of styles and genres as idealized stable
concepts. In other words, they only are neatly bounded in their temporary and imagined status.
Idealized stable styles or genres organize musical information influenced by ideologies, values,
conditions, and motivations; thus, they do not exist “out there,” they are constructs in response to
constancy in musical characteristics and influence of contextual aspects. These constructs may
be imposed, personal, communal, goal-directed or, most often, a combination of these. Despite
their potential for indoctrination (especially if taken for granted and accepted as truth), they are
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vital for communication—they establish an intertextual background, a shared knowledge
allowing composer, performer, and listener to interact conceptually. Again, these concepts are
mediators between individual, textual, and contextual discourses. Idealized stable styles or
genres, then, are a possible response to the question: “where are styles and genres?” They are not
anywhere specifically, but in a relational space between music, mind, and community.
Membership to an idealized stable style and genre is temporary, situated, and goal-directed, and
can only be assessed in the aforementioned combination of context, ideology, purpose, and
personal aspects. This makes them tools, not strict categories. They are classification constructs
that can afford engagement with and interpretations of the musical act.
When I use the term “idealized stable styles and genres” throughout this study, I address
the contingency and impermanence of these kinds of categorizations, a feature that when
overlooked, taints these notions with tinges of rigid formalism, and is, perhaps, why they have
often been treated as taboo terms in music scholarship. Categorization in this study cannot avoid
“imposing” boundaries, a fact that, I hope, is mitigated by the acknowledgement of the idealized
status of these acts. Thus, when one indicates membership to a style or genre in an analysis, it is
not a strict membership, but a wide nexus of meaning within the network of musical
communication.
Given the system of hierarchies and connections among genres and styles at any given
time—which have to do not only with structural features but also, importantly, with the social
and political values of each of these styles or genres and their associated communities—one can
obtain their visual representation as maps, networks, or constellations. A generic or stylistic field
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indicates the region surrounding a specific style or genre, which has categories with similarities
in some respect, depending on the type of map and the parameters used to create it. Style and
genre fields with a central category, hierarchically higher than the others, can also be addressed
map can create style and genre clusters that can be referred to more generally, and differ from
fields for not having a specific central category. Maps such as the ones presented in ENAO,
discussed above, provide somewhat clear visual representations of style and genre fields and
clusters. While not absolutely accurate, a virtual space in which genres and styles are located and
grouped by musical and social characteristics and usage is perhaps the most common form of
interaction with these concepts. Also, the map-like conceptualization of such systems affords the
notion of style and genre gap, which is the relative distance between categories or fields/clusters
Tagg (2012, 522) defines the concept of style flag, which I will also refer to as a style
marker, as a “sign type [that] uses particular sounds to identify a particular musical style and
often, by connotative extension, the cultural genre to which that musical style belongs. They are
the elements that trigger the recognition of a style.” Whatever structural aspect may be triggering
or an effect—it can simultaneously refer to a related genre. Because stylistic characteristics are
connected to the recognition of genres, they can also be generic markers, which involve extra-
musical aspects also surrounding a musical text, such as locale, the audience, or the purpose of a
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52
certain musical engagement. Tagg also suggests a systematization of the style flags (or
markers), dividing them into two types: style indicators and genre synecdoche. Style indicators
are musical features that establish the “home” style (2012, 522-28). Genre synecdoche, akin to
musical topics, are references to external styles and their associated genres, also triggering
styles and genres, both those that are most prominent in a certain work (the host or home style or
genre), and potential importations. These importations, if also intersubjective conventions, can be
understood as topics. Styles and genres can also be triggered by what might surround the
music—such as fashion, behavior, or locale. Because fluidity occurs between levels of stylistic
and generic categories, a clear-cut directionality in these types of associations (as in an arrow
from style to genre) may not exist. Thus self-explanatory terms, such as trigger, marker, flag,
indicator, or unit, may be used interchangeably (as I do throughout this dissertation), oftentimes
52
It is important to remind that for Tagg, who follows Fabbri, style and genre have different, albeit overlapping,
semantic fields: style concerns structure, while genre includes structure but embraces sociocultural aspects that
surround music.
53
Tagg’s explanation echoes the definition of topics in the recent work of topic theory scholars (Mirka 2014; Hatten
2004, 2014).
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Frow (2015) writes that “language is systemically organised not only at the level of
phonetics or syntax but also at the level of use . . . constrained by the norms of rhetorical
appropriateness that I called genre” (2015, 134). According to Frow, genre systems are “neither
closed nor stable” (ibid.), and as an alternative to the formalist term, suggests Amy Devitt’s idea
of a “repertoire” genres (Devitt quoted in Frow 2015, 135). The notion of repertoire, however,
does not imply the hierarchy and specific relations that a genre system has, at any given moment,
from a given perspective. The notion of a system, even if a cause of concern among humanities
scholars,54 “is a way of talking about the formal and informal hierarchies of value that operate
any period” (ibid.). Thus, a genre system is a way to synchronically map the generic context that
is available at a given time, or diachronically, to consider the distance between a listener and the
context being engaged with. A genre system embraces clusters, gaps, and fields, all of which are
defined and valued based on contextual hierarchies and distributions. The same applies for style
Now, combining the investigations of the concept of hybridity in chapter 1 with the study
of style and genre in the present chapter, I can start developing an analytical framework for
musical hybridity. The following chapters will, then, define, exemplify, and apply this
54
As mentioned above, Holt claims that genres “have system functions but are not systems in a strict sense and
certainly not mechanical or bounded entities” (2007, 23).
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CHAPTER THREE: An Analytical Framework for Musical Hybridity
mixtures of styles and genres, as discussed in chapter 1. These can involve, for instance, notions
of chaos, all of which are inferred from contextual cues, but also from the specific ways in which
the mixture is realized in music. Analytical discussions of musical hybrids have mostly focused
on listing sources and highlighting their characteristics. But this occurs to the exclusion of the
structural means by which hybrid conditions emerge in different repertories. Hybrid works offer
of recognizable and idealized stable categories. In order to examine the subtleties and
idiosyncrasies of a particular stylistic and generic mixture—be it in the Baroque period or in the
to take into account the musical processes of a mixture along with its contextual aspects.
Musical hybridity appears throughout the common practice period up to the present.55
The Baroque era, often compared with the twentieth century for exhibiting a similar change and
crisis in expression (Lobanova 2000; Baler 2016), presents several cases. The use of musical
Popular music has, in particularly clear ways, used hybridity as a catalyst for change and
innovation (Brackett 2016), as well as for the establishment of communities and group identities
55
This is not to say that there are not cases of hybridity before the common practice period. In Chapter 1 I indicated
some occurrences in Renaissance music, for instance.
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(Frith 1998; Holt 2007). Processes of hybridity become a significant, if not the most important,
layer of activity in the so-called polystylistic concert music of the post-1960s, and have the
potential to contribute to the internal development of a work as much as other, more commonly
addressed musical parameters.56 The combining and manipulating of styles and genres, as shown
in chapter 1, permeates musical expressions regardless of time period. Granted, these expressions
have different characteristics and peculiarities connected to their respective milieus; but the ideas
proposed in this chapter––because they are general and flexible––might be applied to any
repertory. Furthermore, the lack of an interpretive and analytical apparatus for investigating
musical hybridity per se causes many other less foregrounded cases to be overlooked,
consequently important layers of signification in these compositions remain obscure. The aim of
the present chapter is to introduce an analytical framework that might bridge this gap, addressing
mixtures of styles and genres structurally and contextually, and affording ways to connect their
historical, social, and cultural circumstances with their particular musical articulations, which
simultaneously inform and are informed by them. I should make it clear that the goal of this
chapter is not to provide a “hermeneutics of musical hybridity,” but to establish tools that, in
combination with the previous chapters, might afford a hermeneutical approach to mixtures of
56
This music has been generally addressed by some music scholars as collage music (e.g., Watkins, 1994), a term
based on visual arts indicating cutting and pasting of disparate elements. Although certainly belonging to the
polystylistic repertory, collage works are only a part of it. I agree with Losada (2004), for whom collage works are
particular cases of hybridity in which elements of the mixture have clearly separate identities. Schnittke’s term
“polystylism” (Schnittke, 1971 in Schnittke 2002, 87-90) serves as a more embracing term, which points to the
plurality of styles as the main characteristic of a large and varied group of pieces in which he includes the third
movement of Berio’s Sinfonia, a staple collage work, as well as many other pieces from Webern to Ligeti.
Polystylism, and “polystylistic” works are present in many repertories, and will be used here interchangeably with
hybrid, mixed, or pluralist works. For further reading on musical collage and its origins see Losada (2004).
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I will first briefly discuss the rather thin literature on the analysis of hybridity in music,
and how earlier studies compare and contrast with this study. I then introduce the main concepts
Schnittke (2002) and Rochberg (1984, 2009, 2012), both prolific composers of hybrid
music, also contributed important writings about the subject of polystylism from a compositional
and aesthetic standpoint. Meyer (1967), Lobanova (2000), and Metzer (2004) approach hybridity
and the notions of style and genre in the twentieth century mostly from historical and
sociocultural perspectives. Here I shall only discuss writings that offer somewhat systematized
analytic stances of musical hybridity, and that serve as the background for the framework
proposed in this study. I divide my discussion of these analytic writings on the mixture of styles
and genres into four groups: works that focus on structural matters of twentieth-century music
(Burkholder 1995; Losada 2004, 2008, 2009), popular music (Boone 2011), those influenced by
literary criticism and narrative (Berry 2006; Tremblay 2007; Dixon 2007), and topic theory
(Hatten 1994, 2014; Sheinberg 2000; Schumann 2015). Many other works touch on the subject
of hybridity and provide some analytic engagement with pluralist compositions;57 while I do not
engage with these writings here, they will inform the explanation of strategies below.
57
Dreyfus (1996) and Zohn (2008) are two examples that deal with hybridity in Baroque music, and will be engaged
with in specific cases in later discussions.
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Hybridity in the Twentieth Century and Structural Analysis
Peter Burkholder (1995) is one of the first scholars to address the analysis of style and
genre mixture in music. He develops a refined categorization of the uses of “borrowed” music
within works from Charles Ives’s entire output. Ives’s mixture of styles is normally achieved via
different kinds of musical borrowing. His extensive categorization of Ives’s practice includes 14
techniques (1995, 854), many of which are used by later composers in the post-1960s:
they are taken from the work of a single composer in the first half of the twentieth century. These
fourteen techniques also share many characteristics with general mixture strategies (discussed
below), and, in the end, Burkholder categorizes not techniques of hybridity, but types of mixed
58
According to Burkholder (1995:854), cumulative setting is “a complex form in which the theme, either a
borrowed tune or a melody paraphrased from one or more existing tunes, is presented complete only near the end of
a movement, preceded by development of motives from the theme, fragmentary or altered presentation of the theme,
and exposition of important countermelodies (Fugue in Four Keys on The Shining Shore and perhaps the lost organ
prototypes for Thanksgiving, both 1897).”
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compositions in Ives. Furthermore, the term “musical borrowing” should be used carefully in
other repertories, even though it can be accurate for some uses of style and genre mixture, as in
direct quotations, for instance. The notion of borrowing implies that what is borrowed does not
belong in that environment, that it is taken from somewhere or someone else. This is decidedly
not the case with many polystylistic works in the second half of the century. In fact, hybridities
that stem from postmodernist ideologies in the later twentieth century promote a full accessibility
and fluidity of influences, and downplay notions of ownership and barriers between styles and
genres. This idea is made clear by Rochberg, one of the most prominent composers of 1970s
polystylism, in his essay No Center (1984, 158): “I stand in a circle of time, not on a line. 360
degrees of past, present, future. All around me. I can look in any direction I want to. Bella vista.”
Later, in the same text, he addresses the problematic notion of property, implied by the term
“borrowing,” more directly: “Everything we love belongs to us. That includes the past and the
future. We are the present” (159). Given these ideas, I prefer to use the term mixture instead of
Losada (2004, 2008, 2009), who departs from Burkholder’s research, changes the focus
from Ives to collage works by Berio, Rochberg, and Bernd Alois Zimmerman. She clearly
defines collage, not as a general aesthetic embracing every kind of style mixture, but a specific
quotations from diverse sources within a single movement” (Losada 2004, 23). Losada details
pitch, rhythmic, and motivic strategies that afford simultaneities and transitions between
disparate music in a select group of collage pieces by the three composers. She uses formal and
motivic analysis, but the main ideas deal with pitch techniques specific to collage works:
modulation, chromatic saturation, and the “significant gap.” According to Losada (2004, 2008,
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2009), the process of modulation—how one type of material transitions to the next—can be
convincingly achieved by: (1) converging on a specific overlapping pitch or motive, (2)
fragmentation of the texture, which blurs borders via chromatic insertions, or (3) alteration of the
rhythms of the excerpts. Chromatic saturation defines the pitch selection of both juxtaposed and
superimposed materials, which tends toward aggregate completion. The notion of the
“significant gap” addresses matters of expectation and larger-level coherence in determining the
completion of a chromatic space or range. Losada carefully explains the craft that goes into the
combination of contrasting materials, detailing techniques specific to this repertory, its demands,
and goals; these techniques show different kinds of coherence that mixtures afford, which are
sometimes atemporal. Although modulation, chromatic saturation, and the significant gap
elucidate many aspects of a collage work’s construction, and also serve as a guide for pitch
analysis of other pieces within the polystylistic repertory, the focus on detailed technical matters
can obscure other types of engagements with these processes. An important characteristic of
every technique discussed in her work is that they are mostly processual: they rely on
balance). Changes between styles and genres at a larger level—the focus of the present study—
are more easily grasped by a listener and are a result of the more detail-oriented structural
their strong connection with group identities make pluralism a common, almost normalized
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feature, with listeners having to navigate their musical experiences through an ever-widening
number of categories. This constant pluralism also fosters creativity, innovation, and the
development of new styles and genres. However, few scholars have addressed the processes that
underlie this pluralism and the hybridity it affords, especially in terms of musical structure. This
is not to say hybridity has been completely overlooked. Recent work by Brackett (2016)
highlights the importance of categorization and mixtures of styles and genres in understanding
the development of American popular music, even though structural analysis is not the main
goal. Christine Boone (2011) addresses analytical issues more directly, in what are perhaps the
most foregrounded cases of hybridity in popular music—the mashup repertory. Boone’s analyses
of techniques and meanings of mashups, despite the delimited repertory, align with this study.
Mashups are entirely based on mixtures, and use only pre-recorded, mostly popular,
music. In chapter 1 of her dissertation, Boone defines four types of mashups, which are based on
the number of sources used, whether or not they are recognizable, and their interaction: this
are variable characteristics, and certainly not restricted to this genre’s hybridity. In chapter 5, she
lists three main aspects that define the principles of construction of a mashup work: tempo, beat-
level rhythmic patterns, and the key of the sources. These aspects are also applicable to other
repertories, but vital to mashup music because of the constraints of pre-recorded music. Boone’s
important contribution, which becomes crucial in any attempt to engage with hybridity. Her
analyses go into details of rhythm, tempo, and harmonic and melodic adjustments, all used to
integrate disparate works in a mashup composition. Boone also addresses the reception of these
59
Boone’s basic typology of mashups is: basic mashup, cover mashup, paint palette mashup, and megamix.
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works by the mashup community, providing an insider’s perspective to her theoretical
framework.
In an attempt to systematize this type of composition and its analysis, Boone determines
“five constructive principles of the mashups:” matching tempos, goodness of fit of beat patterns
(the quality of the alignment of beat and meter in the mashup), alignment of keys, clear lyrics,
and use of common formal structure for a popular song (Boone 2011, 168). As for the structural
friction in these combinations of songs, she discusses the concept of clash, as understood by the
mashup community. The concept is ambiguously used in mashups both as key clash, denoting
failure to integrate the tonalities in the mixture, and genre clash, which stands for the conceptual
friction of a combination of disparate music.60 The latter acquires a subversive, often ironic or
hybridity in popular music is certainly not restricted to mashups, and one of the benefits of
having a general framework for mixtures is that one can address other, less foregrounded cases,
Another strain of research approaches the polystylistic repertory using concepts from
literary criticism, especially those developed by Bakhtin, as a way of interpreting the interaction
between multiple musical styles and genres, along with their cultural associations.61 Mark
Andrew Berry (2006) offers a fruitful perspective in his investigation of the political and cultural
60
These categories will be further compared with the strategies proposed in this study in the next sections.
61
Bakhtin proposed a dialogic, instead of monologic, view of the text. Concepts such as dialogism, heteroglossia,
double-voicedness or multi-voicedness, and polyphony (this one borrowed from music), serve to engage with the
verbal text, its multiple layers of discourse and meanings in the social and cultural contexts.
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environment of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the authorial aspects of this type of music. Berry
interprets the dialogism afforded by mixtures in pieces by Bob Dylan, George Rochberg, and
Herbie Hancock, and shows the plural and oppositional contexts within which each of these was
created: American folk music and pop, concert tradition and new music, and black nationalism,
respectively.
Other studies rely mostly on narrativity to interpret polystylistic works. While this
approach has been productive, it has a tendency to promote teleological interpretations of such
music. It also proceeds immediately to a reading of music through the lens of verbal texts, by
projecting narratological models onto a musical work. Narratives can provide a compelling
interpretation, but also run the risk of quickly bypassing the actual musical material being used,
and the interactions and processes that develop a hybrid composition. An example is Dixon’s
(2007) dissertation, in which the author explores three symphonies by Schnittke in light of
musical novel, approaching the identity of materials as characters. Tremblay (2007) also explores
Schnittke’s music, and posits that the gaps in discourse formed by the use of contrasting styles
especially because these works present marked interactions between different styles and genres,
with distinct, idealized identities and meanings. Furthermore, a surrounding context of cultural
practices fosters and informs this kind of mixture, connecting it to different artistic expressions
and affording new possibilities of communication. However, imposing a narrative (and often
teleological) framework to this repertory also forces a specifically traditional kind of structure at
odds with the tenets of postmodernism, which underlie some of the music analyzed by these
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authors. The gap that, according to Tremblay (2007), needs to be filled is a result of the
fragmentation of the discourse, which promotes new ways of dealing with coherence. Attempts
to fill this gap “fix” it only by bringing us back to the older paradigms. Thus we should avoid
beginning the analytical process by readily adapting musical strategies to literary narratives.
Strategies for musical style and genre interaction can afford teleological readings—as in many
cases in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music—but this should be a decision made among
other possibilities of signification. It is the goal of this chapter to define the general musical
strategies that may afford interpretations of different kinds from a more hermeneutically neutral,
For Mirka, echoing Ratner’s 1980 definition, topics are “musical styles and genres taken
out of their proper context and used in another one” (2014, 2); they are stylistic cross-references
(2014, 3). But while topics are connected to styles and genres, and would point toward mixture
and permeability of categories, they might not bring identities contrasting enough to form
hybrids. The mere combination of different stylistic identities, which are still understood as
being within the same realm, may be hybrids conceptually, but may not be easily recognizable as
such. Cases of topical importation in classical music are hybrids primarily when the topic (or
62
Mirka raises the important question of how topical importations are compatible with the “eighteenth-century
music aesthetics premises, according to which all dimensions of musical structure stand in service of affect and
character, which, in their turn, are closely related to styles and genres” (2014, 3). Mirka finds the answer in the
different functions and expectations of small and large works; the function provides the topics, while the expectation
is the place for topical play (2014, 21). This also explains the smoother integration of many cases of topical
interplay, which guarantee a general non-harsh musical surface in term of hybridity.
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The notion of troping in topic theory, first advanced by Hatten (1994, 2004, 2014),
engages with particular kinds of combinations of more contrasting topics. For Hatten, troping in
music is a kind of dynamic creative metaphor, in which “two different correlations are brought
together to produce a third meaning” (1994, 166). He establishes three conditions for troping,
closely related to the notion of musical hybridity proposed in this study: (1) it “must emerge
music, I would also add superimposition); (2) it “must arise from a single functional location of
process”; and (3) “there must be evidence from a higher level . . . to support a tropological
(170). Thus, the study of the troping of topics in Classical and Romantic music is, in fact, an
investigation of hybrids in that particular environment. Troping is present when two contrasting
topics, or a topic and its surrounding host environment, are mixed and alter each other’s
signification potential, thus affording emergent meanings. Hybridity here is usually clearer at the
referential than at the structural level, since in most cases of troping there is a musical integration
compared with other examples of hybridity, which is telling of the style and genre system and
the context of this music.63 Hatten systematizes the analysis by indicating four axes of
relationships between the imported topic’s correlations and its environment (or another topic):
63
The constraints of hybrids’ stable style and genre system narrows down the possibilities of mixture and their
interpretations. Because the aim of this study is to approach hybrids in general, I chose a different, more general,
nomenclature, able to embrace a wider repertory, but that is certainly related to these matters raised by topic theory.
Hatten’s detailed axes of relationships between topics and their environments (or other topics) are powerful
interpretive tools for this repertory, and, in certain cases, can add to interpretations of other works and periods. I see
them as complementing this framework, especially in dealing with or referring to the long eighteenth century.
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Sheinberg (2000), following Clark (1970, 1987), notes that “[i]ncongruities seem to be
related to humour and to laughter,” and are often “classified as comic” (Sheinberg 2000, 27). But
she suggests that “it is not just the presence of an incongruity that will hint at the presence of
irony, but also its functioning as an indicator of structural negation” (57, my emphasis), which
can occur in the actual musical structure or in its contextual associations.64 Incongruities can
have more nuanced signification potential, those that need not rely solely on negation, as
Sheinberg maintains. They can also hint at integration, subversion, disruption, or innovation, for
instance. Because disparate contrast—and not negation—is the prerequisite for hybridity, the
Schumann (2015) expands Hatten’s ideas in order to engage with the music of Igor
Stravinsky, specifically to explore the composer’s reuse of early styles in his neoclassical
compositions. Schumann applies Hatten’s (2014) four tropological axes as a way of interpreting
the interplay of topics in this repertory, which differs from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
defamiliarization of the dance topics of march, sarabande, and waltz; the manipulation of metric
and rhythmic aspects, as well as pitch content, alters the recognized topics and creates a mixture
involving old and new, tradition and innovation. Schumann’s work provides an engagement with
musical hybridity, at many levels in Stravinsky’s music, through the lens of topic theory, with
analyses that range from minute structural aspects to large-scale forms, as well as the potential
64
Nevertheless, Sheinberg’s criteria for different types of irony in music (2000, 64) goes against the framework
proposed in the present study by subsuming any type of incongruity, discontinuity, and juxtaposition—structural or
contextual—as conveying irony.
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In the present study, rather than rejecting these previously available analytical approaches
and start afresh, I expand them. Specifically, I organize them into a common basic framework,
which addresses mixture according to two main premises: (1) style and genre mixtures have
structural functions that play out dynamically on a large- and small-scale level, and that are
coordinated by general processes of interaction; and (2) these general strategies for style and
genre mixture apply in the organization of any hybrid work. In principle, any hybrid repertory
can be approached by four mixture strategies, each with different characteristic and effects,
which will be carefully addressed in the following sections. Clash identifies harsh and abrupt
juxtaposition or superposition of disparate styles and genres. Coexistence involves more unifying
incongruous musical agent. Finally, trajectory describes cases in which there is a gradual
transition from one style or genre to another. These strategies, alone or in combination, form
what I call chimeric environments: any musical excerpt formed by a mixture and/or distortion of
disparate styles, genres, topics, or more general fields of musical reference. Thus, a chimeric
hybridity by conceptually framing it. In this way, the mixture strategies provide opportunities for
engagement and interpretation of such chimeric environments. The amalgams can be of any size,
sometimes embracing an entire movement, and thereby determining the overall activity of a
piece; in other cases, they last a few measures and quickly give way to other hybrid or
stylistically stable music. The openness of this suggestion may appear superficial or
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overgeneralized, but as embracing as it may seem to be, hybridity in music is organized by the
Given their more general perspective, it should be made clear that the ideas proposed here are
not a substitute for any of the more localized theories or analytical models that touch on
characteristics and meanings in a larger repertory. Because of the wider focus and embracing
perspective, they in fact benefit from being used in combination with any other analytical tool
mixture strategies. In this sense, they are roughly similar to Hatten’s (1994) concept of
expressive genre.65 For Hatten, expressive genres in the music of Beethoven function at an
archetypal level, and implicate “an adeptness at both [the] typological identification of topics and
temporal and processive interpretation of these” (1994, 70). Hatten uses expressive genres to
frame marked oppositions between styles and topics, their musical characteristics, and associated
of musical hybridity, the chimeric environments in hybrid works afford and evoke the
identification of the stylistic sources and their processes of interaction; they serve as a substitute
of the framing provided by uniform styles in non-hybrid pieces. The framing of hybridity
patterns pursued in the present study, along the same lines, helps to engage with what on the
surface might seem a strange inconsistence or ambiguity, or even a chaotic musical texture, and
go beyond the mere labeling and listing of elements. The comparison with Hatten’s theory must,
65
Hatten defines expressive genres in the music of Beethoven as “the largest types encountered in a style . . . at a
more archetypal level. As schemata, they direct a wide range of different events and their interpretations, without
specifying precise outcomes in terms of formal design” (1994, 69).
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however, stop at this schematic/strategic level given the diverse repertory under investigation
here.
The goal of using more neutral and general descriptive concepts—mixture strategies and
chimeric environments—is to address the musical plurality on its own terms. The focus shifts to
the processes that shape this kind of work, those most often perceptually evident. Putting less
weight on pitch strategies, which are more carefully addressed in other works such as Losada
(2004, 2008) and Boone (2011), creates opportunities for communication-based analyses that
involve recognition and familiarity. These categories of style- and genre-interaction take into
consideration and identify the more direct affordances of the work, hinting at possible modes of
This framework cuts across theory, analysis, and interpretation. The categories developed
throughout this chapter are theoretical abstractions, but ones based on the experience of this
music—they come from listening with a focus on the style and genre layer of the compositions
and the processes that occur at that level. Establishing these processes as theoretical categories
can help guide an analysis, but also inform an existing interpretation. Thus, a cycle is formed by
experience, analysis/interpretation, and theory, which feeds back to experience. The concepts
proposed here are present in any of these stages, ranging from abstract constructions to
perceivable characteristics; thus, the theoretical categories are always being informed by the
listening experience, the analytical act, the potential signification of a piece, and its labeling.
These categories are not fixed. Nor should their boundaries be a constraint, but rather suggested
As the following sections show, similar basic strategies can be perceived in a diverse
range of periods, composers, and pieces; this connects a considerably wide group of works under
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66
the main perceptual and structural effects of hybridity. Such connection affords a more in-depth
perspective, as well as the potential to compare these expressions, highlighting characteristics not
only of the pieces themselves, but also their contexts—how hybridity is differently expressed
depending on the world in which it is inserted. Furthermore, because these strategies neither
focus on one specific layer of the composition (pitch, rhythm, texture, for instance), nor reduce
an analysis of this repertory to a catalogue of the sources alluded to or quoted, they allow flexible
and dynamic engagements with this body of work, a body connected only because of the works’
styles and genres. These “patterns of hybridity” (Nederveen Pieterse 2009, 118) can afford not
only a chronological perspective, following different ways that hybridity takes shape as
influenced by its surroundings, but also a comparative take of the many structures and cultures
expressing hybrids.
there is a restricted number of perceptually-evident strategies that serve to form them. The four
strategies briefly described above —clash, coexistence, distortion, and trajectory—are used
because of their perceptibility as distinct processes applied to the idealized stable concept of each
of the styles and genres used in a hybrid work. Importantly, analyzing chimeric environments is
not an objective process. As such, choosing one or more of the four strategies as the acting
(inter-) subjective perspective, as much as the structural and perceptual characteristics of a given
passage. In the following sections, I explore each of the four mixture strategies in detail, with
66
By addressing these mixtures in terms of relationships and processes between categories from a cognitive
standpoint, the present approach allows a connection with signification frameworks in cognitive sciences and
discourse processes. While this path is not considered in detail in this study, it affects many of its ideas.
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examples ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Each strategy is represented by
a symbol (shown in Example 3.1.1), used as an annotation in the analytic examples of the
following sections.
3.2 Clash
The first movement of George Rochberg’s String Quartet no. 3 (1971) displays stylistic
and generic stability for approximately eighty measures. It has clear non-tonal vocabulary
throughout, and relies on bursts of short repetitive gestures that orient its fragmented thematic
identity. At m. 87, however, a chain of major seconds in the violins, derived from the whole-tone
scale, is suddenly joined by a tonal chorale texture in B Major, which shows no relation to the
material and B major chorale not only creates structural friction and instability, but also contrasts
references to two styles: the whole-tone sound can be associated with modernist sonorities, such
as those found in Debussy; the B major chorale is potentially associated with sacred music by J.
S. Bach. Acknowledging Rochberg’s selection of combined materials, and the references they
trigger to different periods and styles or genres, is part of the listener’s engagement with this
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brief musical moment. But it is also important to engage with the characteristics of the
combination, which add to potential interpretations of the excerpt. In this case, the identities of
both layers are kept intact, with no interaction between them other than their superimposition.
The harsh friction among the simultaneous elements, along with the almost stubborn
avoidance of integration in order to preserve their separate identities, illustrates a clash mixture
strategy. The strategy is not merely a structural phenomenon. In choosing to create friction
between the styles, Rochberg also influences how one might ascribe meaning to the piece,
especially after eighty measures of stability. The chorale seems to strive for its own new and
sudden allotted space, while the whole-tone material in the violin, related more to the non-tonal
vocabulary of the piece before that point, reclaims its former prominence. If one accepts my
perceived associations with the modernist stylistic unit and the Baroque genre, this specific
moment of hybridity highlights a conflicted opposition between sacred and secular, distant and
close past, as well as the relation of this music with the tonal tradition, all in service of
This acute sense of difference, the harsh friction, and the separateness of identities
present in the excerpt of String Quartet no. 3 are characteristics of hybridity via the clash mixture
strategy. Not every contrast is a clash, however. The contrasting elements in a clash must be
juxtaposed, as in the next example by Arvo Pärt. In his Sarabande from Collage über B-A-C-H
(1964), the clash mixture strategy occurs through the alternation of two contrasting
environments: a typically Baroque dance played by oboe, harpsichords, and strings, and thick
clusters in the piano and strings, which are completely disconnected from the previous material
(Example 3.2.2). These widely divergent musical idioms alternate without any transition
throughout the entire piece, as two different worlds sliced and pasted together, evoking a gap
between their associations that remains unfilled. In contrast with Rochberg’s fleeting moment of
clash, Pärt’s Sarabande movement is entirely organized by the alternation of these two disparate
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environments. Its hybridity, characterized by the juxtapositions of the clash mixture strategy,
Clash is the central strategy in the collage repertory of the post-1960s. The third
movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1968), a staple of collage in music, relies on many
carefully crafted juxtaposition and overlap clashes, along with other mixture strategies. Clash
appears often in the polystylistic repertory of the post-1960s, in general (not only in collage
works), becoming a marker––perhaps the most easily recognizable feature––of its style. Despite
their close connection with these particular mid-twentieth-century repertories, clash strategies
also appear in hybrid environments of earlier and later music, albeit with varying frequency,
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depending on the different contexts and level of stability of the style and genre systems in
question. As detailed in the previous chapter, this level of stability fluctuates widely according to
several sociopolitical and cultural factors that influence the communicative potential of
techniques and sounds belonging to a repertory within any period. Thus, it becomes important to
take contexts and ideologies into consideration while investigating any case of hybridity.
The instability of musical style and genre systems, which culminated in the artistic
responses of the post-1960s, is unique in many ways. But the Baroque, despite its embracing
tonal idiom, also displayed hybrid characteristics, as can be gathered from its reliance on
oppositions as a means for expression.67 Whereas materials in the Baroque were often combined
in less harsh ways, at least when compared to the cases discussed above, there are moments of
extreme friction that serve specific expressive, mostly programmatic purposes in that context.
Heinrich Biber’s Battalia à 10 (1673) is such an example, where the composer uses hybridity to
depict a battle (Example 3.2.3). In the short second movement, “Die liederliche Gesellschafft
von allerley Humor” [The dissolute company of all types of humor], eight popular song melodies
are played in quodlibet fashion, contrasting nationalities and dance/style types with aggressive
harmonic and metric dissonance. The identities and keys of each melody are preserved as they
clash with one another other, amounting to a cacophonous environment that requires listeners to
split their attention to individual features. Biber is aware of this; he indicates in the score “hic
dissonat ubique nam ebrii sic diversis cantilenis clamare solent” [here it is dissonant everywhere,
for thus are the drunks accustomed to bellow with different songs] (quoted in Brewer 2011, 251),
which also hints (because of the title) at soldiers taking a break from battle to drink and sing.
67
See Lobanova (2000) on the polystylistic situation in the Baroque.
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This interpretation of the clash strategy with programmatic motivations in the piece views its
hybridity as a distinct and more direct process which helps in depicting the scene.
Example 3.2.3. Biber’s Battalia a 10, II, „Die liederliche Gesellschaft von Allerlei Humor“
Despite the Battallia’s completely distinct context from the examples above, Biber’s efforts (or
lack thereof) to maintain the clashing identities are similar, and the harshness in the music is
clear.
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Musical, cultural, and communicative characteristics used to differentiate between the
Baroque and Classical periods in music are partly related to the increased stylistic and generic
stability of the latter. But the Classical style is not immune to mixtures. At times, these mixtures
may be less pronounced, and generally they rely on importations usually interpreted as musical
topoi. More rarely, they appear as cases of foregrounded hybridity in this context. Such an
example occurs in the closing scene of Act I of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), in which a clash
with programmatic motivations helps to express the narrative of the libretto (Example 3.2.4).
Again, such harsh instances of the clash strategy are difficult to find in such a stable music-
communicative system, but the humorous conditions of opera buffa can easily support this type
of hybridity.
different group of musicians. The intense overlap clash combines the 2/4, 3/8, and 3/4 meters of
each dance, creating a harsh friction. In this case, the mixture does not highlight the clash’s
potential to evoke discontinuity—as is usually the case with juxtaposition-type clashes. This
owes mainly to the underlying tonal structure that ties all three dances together. However, the
overlap in this case foregrounds the simultaneity of distinct scenarios, offering the listener a
bird’s-eye view of the action. The overlap clash of the dances also informs the interpretation of
their characters’ socio-economic statuses: the musical friction of the “aristocratic” minuet, the
“middle-ground” contredanse, and the “peasant” Teitsch represents clashes of class and
68
See Allanbrook (1984, chapter 2) for a contextualized investigation of the social associations of specific dances in
Mozart’s time.
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Beethoven’s Third Symphony, ten days after its premiere in Vienna. The review discussed the
utterly denie[d] this work any artistic value and fe[lt] that it manifests a
completely unbounded striving for distinction and oddity, which, however, has
produced neither beauty nor true sublimity and power. Through strange
modulations and violent transitions, by placing together the most heterogeneous
things, as when for example a pastorale is played through in the grandest style. . .
. The third, very small group stands in the middle; they admit that the symphony
contains many beautiful qualities, but admit that the context often seems
completely disjointed. (Der Freymüthige, quoted and translated from German in
Senner, Wallace, and Meredith 2001, 15, my emphasis)
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The reviewer refers to the listener’s opinions using a terminology related to hybridity: in
modulations,” and “violent transitions,” for example. Specifically, this “disjointed context
formed by heterogeneous things” is related to the clash strategy, and raises the question of
whether one can find such an abrupt process of hybridity in Beethoven’s symphony. Vasili Byros
(2014) interprets the conflicts between musical materials, as well as between their respective
references in the context surrounding the Eroica, in viewing the work’s opposition between the G
minor and Eb major tonalities as general elements with a crucial semantic role throughout the
symphony. Both keys—abruptly juxtaposed in the beginning and end of the work—bring
contrasting musical material that refers either to specific topics or harmonic schemata, which
provide “the structural and expressive basis for communicating a cultural unit of ‘abnegation,’
The Eroica opens with a subtle, but important, appearance of a clash that requires the
control of a specific shared knowledge from the listener’s perspective. Byros maintains that the
opening Eb major hammer blows and fanfare material contrast with an ombra topic, signified by
the le-sol-fi-sol schema, textural changes (tremolandi strings), syncopations in the first violins
(Example 3.2.5). These two types of material create contrast not only in their syntax, but in their
respective associations as well. Thus, the opening ten measures show two disparate musical
worlds, both at the intra- and extra-musical levels. When juxtaposed, these materials may seem
ambiguous and unsure, leading some critics at the time to differ in opinion as to how to interpret
it.69 But if understood from the vantage point of the entire composition they can highlight deeper
potential interpretations. This is especially the case in the shared associations of the ombra topic,
69
See Byros (2009) for a careful “archeology” of interpretation of the first measures of the symphony.
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in contrast to the more danceable fanfare, which, Byros suggests, denote the initial amalgamation
of suffering and death (represented by the ombra), and life (contrastingly depicted by the
fanfare). These pairs of structural and cultural units, when juxtaposed, connect with the “the
spiritual consequences of suffering, self-sacrifice, and death,” (2014, 382), and the expressive
genre of “tragic-to-transcendent,” defined by Hatten (1994) and which serves as the scaffolding
of Byros’s analysis. The very disconnectedness of this clash is the source of its interpretive
possibilities.
Example 3.2.5. Measures 1-11 from Beethoven's Third Symphony, I (reduced version). Figure
from Byros (2014, 387, with additional annotations of the clash symbols)
Contrasting the overt disruption in Mozart’s Don Giovanni example, the disruption
representative of a clash is here more covert, even though the textural and extra-musical
characteristics act as triggers of a crucial opposition. The clash appears most clearly in two
syntactical disruptions: first in the le-sol-fi-sol in G minor perturbing the key of Eb major;
second, in the interruption of a cadence in G minor, by turning back to Eb. The remaining
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intensity of the clash is provided solely via situated associations with that material and its
The initial clash relies on many subtle references and the harmonic syntax for its lighter
disruption. The process, however, is revisited at the end of the symphony’s finale, widely
emphasizing its disruptive effect (Ex. 3.2.6). Now, the ombra material that begins at m. 410 is
abruptly disrupted at m. 433, when the fortissimo Eb major and fanfare material (m. 437) return.
For Byros (2014, 405), the “conclusion thus presents a magnified mirror image of the tonal and
topical confrontation between E flat major and G minor from its very opening gestures.” Byros’s
use of the word “confrontation” supports the interpretation of a clash strategy in the excerpt,
which creates a hybrid that never resolves or reconciles, keeping the two tonalities separated
even in their final cadences. Byros notices “an impression of two independent tonal endings for
the symphony,” calling the G-minor ombra’s sudden move into the fortissimo Eb major fanfare a
“rupture” (2014, 407) rather than a resolution. He further interprets the potential signification of
Example 3.2.6. Measures 429-42 from Beethoven's Third Symphony, IV. Score reduction from
Byros (2014, 406, with my annotation of the clash symbol)
No doubt, it takes a competent listener to engage with this clash, which differs from the above
cases. But Byros’s analysis of these hybrid musical moments and their context explains and
As the stability of the Classical style gave way to Romantic ideals of subjectivity, there
was a corresponding multiplication of genres and styles in the nineteenth century. We might
view the clash mixture strategy (as well as other kinds of hybridity) as affording different ways
revolutions of 1848 were, in part, a culmination of an upsurge in nationalist thinking, one closely
tied to the consolidation of group identities, which give particular mixture categories political
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connotations. These potential political associations can be read in Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne
in G minor (1840), where a mazurka and a chorale are clash-juxtaposed to articulate a new
section of the piece. At first sight, the rather disparate references evoked by the two materials—
Polish dance and religioso—can be interpreted, according to Kallberg (1988), as related to Polish
nationalistic ideals. For Kallberg, “[t]he central tenets of the messianic brand of Polish Romantic
nationalism practically read like a description of the piece, particularly in its blend of the
‘nationalistic’ mazurka and the ‘religious’ chorale” (1988, 256). But he avoids discussing the
specific way in which the two references are disposed in the piece—as an abrupt juxtaposition
clash. The focus on the strategy between the environments serves to further clarify that these two
fields of Polish culture are intertwined, but not without opposition and friction.
Another example from Chopin is the Ballade no. 4 in F Minor, op. 52 (1842), which
features several sudden shifts (Example 3.2.7). The opening of the work establishes the key of C
major, and its texture and stylistic identity are distinct from what will preside throughout the
piece, thus a sense of discontinuity follows. The introduction sounds more like an ending (post-
cadential or “after-the-end,” in Caplin’s [1998] terminology) than a beginning. Besides the form-
functional discrepancy, Klein (2004) calls attention to the religious tone of the excerpt, which
becomes noticeable in the brief plagal motions at m. 7. When the slow waltz starts, after the
opening, there is a disruption of cause and effect when the initial material does not support what
comes next, an important characteristic of the clash strategy. This discontinuity, beyond the style
and genre layer, is also present in Chopin’s key choices. Even though the opening motto’s key of
C major could work as the dominant of the main key of the piece (F minor), the material creates
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Granted, nationalities as categories were used in the Baroque, but in the nineteenth century there is a much more
acute sense of national politics and identity in general.
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no expectations for an F minor tonality, which appears at m. 8 with some level of
unpredictability. Whereas the stylistic reference of the F minor waltz is recognizable, the
previous opening motto lacks a clear identity due to its cadential characteristics, which rely on
the liquidation of defining stylistic units. The introduction, however, has traces of a broader
religious register, connecting with affective and expressive intersubjective categories that
contrast with the ballroom dance that follows. Ultimately, a juxtaposition clash emerges through
the opposition of the waltz’s clearly defined characteristics, beginning at m. 8, and its omission
in the opening motto—what happened previously is of a different ilk, even if a precise label is
elusive.
Example 3.2.7. Chopin, Ballade no. 4 in F Minor, op. 52, mm. 1-14
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More defined style fields appear in a subsequent clash in the piece, when an unprepared
appearance of Gb and Fb pentatonic material (mm. 38-45) is interpolated between two waltz
segments (Example 3.2.8). The pentatonic mode here can be read as a kind of orientalism, a
defined marker of “otherness,” contrasting with the waltz that surrounds it. Later in the work
(mm. 204-11), a juxtaposition clash between the waltz and a chorale creates a sudden opposition
between a religious genre and a ballroom dance. In this particular case, not shown here, a brief
transition makes the clash less harsh than a completely unprepared change; however, it brings
Example 3.2.8. Chopin, Ballade no. 4 in F Minor, Op. 52, mm. 32-49
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Klein (2004) views all these clashes in the ballade as oppositions between rural (religious
opening motto and chorale) and urban (waltz), certainly a productive interpretation. The use of
the clash strategy in combining these materials highlights the sense of an uneasy relation
between Klein’s categories, a discontinuity or an either/or dynamic between two worlds tied to
the effects of the industrial revolution at the time of the composition. The parenthetical uses of
the religious register, pentatonic material, and the chorale, also determine a specific hierarchy in
relation to the waltz, which remains the primary style throughout the piece. Additionally, all of
these elements are contained by the host genre of the ballade, which evokes a sense of
storytelling. The characters and scenes of this story are shaped by stylistic and generic
interactions. Finally, Klein also addresses this discontinuity in terms of past and present. For
him, the waltz in Chopin is a reference to something occurring in the past, while the religious
opening motto and chorale signify the present—a reversal of the rural and urban categories
mentioned above (2004). Even though it could be argued they refer to specific time periods,
these associations appear more connected with past and present states of the projected narrator of
the ballade.
Similar clashes that disrupt the temporal discourse appear in some of Debussy’s preludes,
written decades later, such as La Sérénade Interrompue (1909-10). Here, as the title implies,
there are many sudden interruptions of a serenade (Example 3.2.9). The most contrasting
interruption occurs through the interpolation of a march at mm. 74-84, creating a juxtaposition
clash, only slightly attenuated by a common-tone modulation (Gb = F#). Its parenthetical
character clearly separates it from the main environment of the piece—a serenade with lyric
melody and hints of Spanish music. The clash here brings a humorous effect, triggered by a
with clash mixtures in different ways, these are substantially more common in the polystylistic
repertory, whose mixture strategies became crucial features. Importantly, the responses of
experiments with mixtures—are in many ways foreshadowed by mixture categories and markers
of hybridity I find in the music of Ives and Stravinsky, more than a half-century earlier. Both
composers make consistent use of the characteristics of discontinuity afforded by the clash
mixture strategy, among other types of hybridity. In The Unanswered Question (1908), Ives
constructs a clear overlap clash that anticipates the later collage works of the polystylistic
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repertory. In his personal notes, Ives describes the programmatic intentions of the use of
overlapping disparate material (Example 3.2.10). Chelsey Hamm (2016, 112-23), while
suggesting that Ives’s hidden program is not necessary for an engagement with the clear
oppositions in the piece, discusses the composer’s intended associations with the use of this
particular mixture of consonant and dissonant sounds. For Ives, dissonance is attached to
strength and freedom, and disrupts the primary, consonant stylistic layer. The latter he describes
in his writings as “tyrannical” (quoted in Hamm 2016, 123), and associates it with tonality,
which he compares to a “fenced-in field” (122). These personal associations, not in the least
implausible for the audience, are related to tonal and non-tonal style fields, and inform the
Clashes are possible not only through opposing stylistic traits that rely on pitch, harmony,
and rhythm. The use of instrumentation with contrasting stylistic and generic associations can
also create hybridity. This occurs more often, especially, after the development of technologies
for music recording and reproduction in the twentieth century, where the actual sonic
characteristics of a recorded track trigger distinct musical categories. Hybridity can then result
from the use of stylistic units such as soundstage, effects, and other production techniques that
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become sonic synecdoches of musical genres. Oftentimes timbral stylistic triggers are
combined with pitch and rhythm to emphasize their specific associations. Studio tools and
but the wide network of genres and subgenres of popular music also offers great potential for
The introduction of David Bowie’s “Changes,” the opening track from the 1971 album
Hunky Dory, is divided into two subsections; it starts with mellow strings and a piano with jazz-
orchestra. Suddenly, a rock ensemble takes over, with piano, bass, drums, and saxophone playing
a simple boogie-woogie pattern. The juxtaposition clash of these two popular genres is somewhat
mitigated by the piano serving the role of a pivot in the instrumentation, but the change in the
style of the accompaniment pattern and harmony is apparent. Each subsection of the introduction
and its group of instruments––along with the choice of harmonic and rhythmic profiles––carries
specific stylistic and generic associations. The first subsection might be associated with big band
jazz, while what follows directly uses traditional patterns and timbres of boogie-woogie and
blues-rock. The track involves different combinations of these two references throughout, with
clash and other mixture strategies dialoging with the song’s theme, expressed in the lyrics:
Another case of a juxtaposition clash created through timbre can be found in the Beach
Boys’ “God Only Knows,” from Pet Sounds (1966). In this case, the stylistic and generic
associations are less defined than in Bowie’s example, pointing to wider genre and style fields
and their affects rather than a definite identity. Brian Wilson’s arrangement of the piece is
71
On the concept of genre synecdoche, see chapter 2 and Tagg 2012, 524-28.
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complex and uses atypical instruments for a rock band album, especially in the prominent use of
accordions and French horns. After two verse-chorus pairs, a contrasting interlude (1:03–1:11)
that foregrounds the woodwinds and snare drum carries associations with marching bands, as
opposed to the big-ensemble love ballad before and after that point. The melodic and rhythmic
elements certainly help identify the potential stylistic references, but the precise selection of
instruments, as well as a slight change in tempo, produce a more direct trigger. Remarkably,
Bowie’s version of the same song (1984) retains the instrumentation, rhythm, and tempo
throughout, which ends up obscuring the clash and its referential and affective possibilities; this
points to timbre and tempo as the main agents of the discontinuity of the original recording. This
is the only appearance of that material and specific selection of instruments in “God Only
change perceived narrative time, albeit within a very different context. Given the lyrics, which
For mashup musical artists of the late twentieth century, like Girl Talk, clash serves as
one of the possible tools for the combination of contrasting, mostly popular, styles and genres—
the crucial and defining characteristic of the genre. As mentioned earlier, the mashup community
uses the term in two ways: key clash and genre clash (Boone 2011). While key clash refers to a
genre clash in mashup is a default label for the conceptual difference in the repertory combined,
and not necessarily the specific way genres are mixed. The mashup genre often aims for the
integration of disparate elements, even if conceptually contrasting, thus attempting to make two
or more songs “fit together,” most often in a way not typical of the clash strategy discussed
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here. In this way, not all “clashes” in mashups are clash mixture strategies; very often they
indicate conceptual friction of fairly integrated music. One must, however, avoid generalization
and note the distinct uses of the term in practical and analytical discourse: genre clash in
mashups is used ambiguously to indicate both structural and conceptual clashes, even if they are
realized in an integrative manner; in genre clashes as proposed here, there must be a friction at
the structural and conceptual levels, as well as an awareness of the degree of integration of the
materials. Also, key clashes, which affect the technical or structural level, are negatively
evaluated within the mashup community, which generally aims for traditional constructive
Other examples of the clash mixture strategy can certainly be found in different
repertories of the post-1960s and earlier.73 Such a focus on this mixture strategy helps to
compare these works, their contexts, and to discover the different expressive potential of distinct
musical hybrids at different periods. It should be clear throughout this section that the different
uses of a mixture strategy such as clash inform and are informed by the contexts surrounding
them.
INTERPRETING CLASH
Mixture strategies are at the same time structural and cognitive, cultural and aesthetic.
Structurally they serve to label techniques for combining disparate musical material. In terms of
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This is made clear in Frere-Jones’s 2005 article on mashups titled “1+1+1=1: The new math of mashups,” thus
implying unity and integration. Mashups are very often cases of coexistence, which I discuss in the next section.
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As examples not discussed here, in works of composers such as Dimitri Shostakovich (his symphonies), Béla
Bartók (string quartets), and Sergei Prokofiev (the piano concerti, for instance), the sense of discontinuity provided
by clashes are crucial to personal style, and also serve as articulations of the pluralism of the twentieth century
around them.
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cognition, mixtures strategies are specific types of conceptual blends, and point to the role of
the listener in recognizing the emergent features of these processes, which in clash often require
dealing with a divided focus. Culturally they address music’s referential capabilities to places,
times, and people. But mixture strategies are also triggers of aesthetic judgments; they are
attached to situated and intersubjective agreement on the values of their particular features. The
characteristics of the processes involved in a clash mixture strategy—in ways similar to how I
discussed the interpretation of the hybrid, in chapter 1—have a changing set of values related to
specific ideologies. The clash strategy highlights discontinuity, displacement or disjunction, and
disruption of cause and effect, characteristics that might be interpreted negatively as shock,
surprise, mistake, and lack of organization or incoherence. On the more positive side of the
spectrum, clash offers possibilities of commentary, or opening a new layer of discourse, which
can elucidate or problematize matters via musical and referential friction of contrasting material.
Generally, the disruption of a causal chain can be negatively valued from a rationalist and
have been historically attached to mental illness, a possibility Peter Maxwell Davies used
productively in Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), which I discuss in detail later in this study.
But clash also affords an interference of time and space, a utopian perspective on music, where,
as Schnittke writes, one can create “the links between the ages” (Schnittke 2000, 90), and the
their interpretation along the spectrum of aesthetic value. The two different types of clash—
juxtaposition and overlap—have distinct signification potential. So do the levels of friction and
74
See previous discussion in chapter 1; also Fauconnier and Turner, 2002.
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contrast between disparate musical elements, the specific hierarchy perceived, and the presence
or absence of silence or a brief transition. For example, a parenthetical use of juxtaposition clash
can, as in the Chopin, Debussy, and Beach Boys examples above, be interpreted as commentary,
alternation of reality, such as in daydreaming. Clashes through juxtaposition can arguably afford
a more accessible, milder, kind of hybridity than overlap clashes, one where it is possible to rely
on the return to the “original” material as a way of creating a separation between the primary and
parenthetical musical discourse. An overlap clash can create multiple simultaneous discourses,
which inform one another in a more literal manner than Bakhtin’s concept of double-voicedness,
since in the musical clash the two references are actually present.75 Thus, for instance, if one
references, the latter displays an acceptance of the conflation of time and space, a characteristic
of many twentieth-century ideologies and musical practices, which might help explain the higher
on the other hand, still distinguish between elements in time; that is, they are never literally
synchronic as is an overlap.
The variety of potential interpretations of this hybridity strategy can be seen by briefly
comparing some of the examples discussed. To be sure, they all present situations of the same
mixture strategy: Biber’s and Mozart’s use of clash with clear programmatic intentions, Chopin’s
parenthetical use of chorale juxtapositions, Ives’s use of intermittent overlap of dissonant sounds
within the host style-field of tonality/consonance, Pärt’s use of juxtaposition clash in Collage
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Bakhtin applied the concept of double-voicedness in analyzing Dostoevsky’s work (Bakhtin 1984) and the
capacity of the same words to address, in different ways and with different meanings, more than one public sphere.
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über B-A-C-H with no clear subordination, and Bowie’s “Changes” and the dialog between
alternating textures/styles. But each brings specific situated meanings, further explored by
focusing on the particular characteristics of their hybridity. Indeed, contexts directly influence
these different types and effects of clash, but contexts are also informed by the specific musical
features that give rise to them. Whereas one can think of these comparisons as anachronistic, my
purpose is to highlight their common hybridity, their compositional layering of style and genre,
and establish a framework that can approach the situated expressive subtleties of each mixture.
Further, more than one mixture strategy may appear in a single chimeric environment and piece,
and thus influence the effects and interpretations of all strategies being used; I explore these
other strategies and their simultaneous use in the next sections of this chapter, as well as in
analyses of chapter 4.
To summarize, clash is the strategy most commonly associated with the polystylistic
separate identities and form a unique type of mixture. Clash between disparate material does not
necessarily imply the absence of organization, rather an increased sense of friction between the
elements due to a lack of stylistic alignment. This friction is achieved by keeping the different
strands structurally and perceptually distinct through the use of different tonalities, tempi,
register, texture, instrumentation, and timbre. A collage work, as defined by Losada (2004, 2008,
2009), has a prominence of clashes throughout the piece in order to achieve its typically
fragmented musical surface. Other hybrid works, which are neither collages in the sense of
Losada’s conception of the term, nor belong to the wider polystylistic repertory of the post-
1960s, also use clash to create abrupt changes and overlaps as expressive devices. This mixture
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strategy depends on stylistic or generic contrast locally, within a movement; thus, not every
change of material or texture can provide the contrast necessary for a clash.76
The two basic types of clashes, juxtaposition and overlap, are graphically represented in
Example 3.2.11.77 Overlaps are necessarily harsh because of the efforts needed to keep both
strands separate while sounding simultaneously. Juxtapositions can be abrupt or have a brief
transition, using texture dispersal (Losada 2004, 2008), a very short overlap, or brief silence.
These different clash types lie on a spectrum of harshness illustrated in Example 3.2.12. At a
mild level we find juxtapositions with some transitioning material, or brief overlaps of the
contrasting ideas; in the middle of the spectrum are abrupt juxtapositions with no transitions; and
the harshest of the clashes are overlaps of contrasting styles. This spectrum should serve only as
a general guide, since several other factors can further influence the perceived harshness of a
specific clash, the clearest of which are volume, texture, and the level of musical contrast
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There are several levels of pluralism, and the contrast between the materials being mixed directly affects their
level of complexity and type of hybrid. There are possibilities for mixtures at the level of movement, but also album
or playlist levels, for instance. A clash can happen at m. 1 of a piece, for example, if it is clearly contrasting with the
contextual stylistic expectations for that composer or style/genre. In this chapter, I will focus on more prominent
mixtures.
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Interpolation is a case of juxtaposition clash.
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Example 3.2.11: diagram of the clash mixture strategy (juxtaposition and overlap)
3.3 Coexistence
Scott Joplin’s Pleasant Moments (1909) begins with a syncopated pentatonic line in
octaves, an expected characteristic of the many rags that made him famous. The pattern is,
however, played in a slow tempo and establishes a triple meter. After the introduction, as the
accompaniment pattern is established, the left hand plays an “oom-pah-pah” waltz pattern, while
the right hand continues with the syncopated line in 3/4 (Example 3.3.1). There are, then, clear
references to two popular styles: the syncopated pentatonic in the introduction and right hand
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material point to ragtime pieces, and the triple meter and the “oom-pah-pah” accompaniment can
be associated with waltzes. These different characteristics and the potential classificatory friction
of an otherwise musically unified piece is a type of hybridity, one indicated by the publisher on
the score beneath the title: this is a “ragtime waltz by Scott Joplin, composer of the Maple Leaf
Rag,” highlighting the triple meter of the composition.78 Whereas the contextual information
provided in the published score certainly helps to understand the elements of the mixture, a
situated listener could recognize the interplay of identities, as well as the smooth, mild manner in
which they were combined. Unlike the clash mixture strategy explained above, here no distinct
conflicting layer occurs, no foregrounded friction or sudden change. The two references and their
musical characteristics are integrated into one compound hybrid style. Joplin’s piece is both a
syncopated waltz and a triple meter rag, thus a hybrid––ragtime waltz––as the score implies. It
aligns the waltz accompaniment in the left hand, the “oom-pah-pah,” with the “oom-pah” of the
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The label always referred to any waltz in the era of ragtime; in this way, the coexistence would be only
contextual—what was expected from a piano composition by ragtime composers, and the waltz actually being
written. Joplin’s foregrounded potential references to two styles was a clearer example of the hybrid, even if
considerably less pronounced than other cases discussed in this section. I thank Jennifer Griffith for remarking that
ragtime waltzes account for about 1/8 of Joplin’s repertoire. The triple meter, while certainly not as prevalent as the
duple meter rags, was by no means a rare case.
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More than seventy years later, Mauricio Kagel revisits this hybridity in “Ragtime-Waltz,”
from Rrrrrrr . . . : 8 Orgelstücke (1980/81). While in Joplin’s mixture the waltz still dominates,
Kagel attempts a more symmetrical combination of the two styles implied by the title. This is a
re-imagined 1900s mixture in a 1980s postmodernist light. Kagel departs from the
accompanimental alignment mentioned above, but builds upon it. In this case, other than the
syncopations to counterbalance the prominent triple meter of the waltz, the melody brings clearer
characteristics of a rag through the use of chromaticism and large leaps (Example 3.3.2).
both styles; it also serves as a “bridge” for integrating the styles in the piano right hand. The
resulting amalgam is, even more literally than in Joplin, what the title implies: a Ragtime-Waltz,
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not one or the other. None of these styles is hierarchically more important. No clash occurs in
Kagel’s piece because the two identities are combined, with a few concessions from each style,
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The slight difference in the title of the old 1900s’ style and Kagel’s piece is notable. For Joplin, Pleasant Moments
was a ragtime waltz, placing emphasis on the fact that it is, de facto, a waltz, and the “ragtime” signifies the quality
of it. Kagel uses the term perhaps as a paying tribute to Joplin, but with a hyphen that hints at the codependency of
both styles. Granted, this might be reading too much from a single hyphen, but it works well as a synecdoche for the
difference in the use of the same strategy in both pieces.
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Both Joplin’s and Kagel’s pieces use the same mixture strategy of coexistence to
articulate their hybridity, even if separated by more than seventy years.80 Coexistence designates
not only existing at the same time or place; it also implies a smooth, “pacific” relationship. This
mixture strategy provides a more nuanced way of combining disparate styles or genres, one in
which a new amalgam is formed without the harsh friction of a clash. In coexistence, contrasting
materials are put together by aligning some of their characteristics, while maintaining the identity
of their unaligned features and creating only slight friction. This alignment is normally formed
by exploiting the few similar traits of each of the references, which serve as pivots, or a bridge,
for the styles’ coexistence; they cohabitate without struggling to assert or keep their separate
identities. Examples of this strategy use part of each identity to create something new—a
compound of a few elements from each style or genre, forming a new amalgam with a hybrid
identity, as shown in the two works above. Any situation of coexistence relies heavily on the
listener’s recognition of the elements of each style, more so than in the clash strategy where the
perceptual separateness of the material is crucial and serves as a clue for this type of hybridity. In
cases where one of the coexisting elements is not clearly recognized, the listener may perceive a
sense of inaccuracy, inconsistency, or strangeness in the initially recognized style, until the other
is also identified.81 The analytical symbol for coexistence is based on the triangle formed from
the different stylistic elements in the diagram below (Example 3.3.3), which represents their
80
Please note that the analytical symbol for the coexistence strategy, an inverted triangle, the styles or genres mixed
written above it. This is influenced by the abstract diagram shown in the next pages.
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This strangeness and inaccuracy are typical of another mixture strategy, distortion, which I discuss in the next
section. If one of the styles is not recognized in a case of coexistence, it has similar perceptual effect to that of a
distortion.
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The overture of Thomas Adès’s opera Powder Her Face (1995) alludes to stylistic
identities through instrumentation characteristics, which contrast with other disparate melodic,
harmonic, and rhythmic elements; it thus expands the coexisting elements to include timbre.
Beginning around m. 6, Adès creates a nuanced chimeric environment that mixes two popular
styles—tango and jazz, the latter having a sonority influenced by Duke Ellington’s music
(Example 3.3.4). The tango allusion is clear in the rhythmic and melodic patterns of the
Meanwhile, typical voicings of jazz harmony, chromatic runs, and glissandi on brass emphasize
the jazz style field. The overall emphasis on quarter-note accompaniment serves to align the
stylistic interplay, bringing associations with both the traditional tango rhythmic pattern and
some early examples of jazz, such as Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy (1927). The string
ensemble acts as a stylistic mediator, a more neutral element in this environment that aggregates
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characteristics of both coexisting style fields. In these measures, Adès merges both styles in a
way that makes it difficult to disentangle them. Furthermore, he creates an amalgam that
involves disparate potential meanings and values, by mixing idealized categories of popular and
concert, African American, and South American styles. Thus, the overture both eclipses and
subverts these conceptual and musical gaps. Adés’s composition seemingly aims for a unified
I have this dream of a unified style where fragments of serious music and
fragments of music for entertainment would not just be scattered about in a
frivolous way, but would be the elements of a diverse musical reality: elements
that are real in the way they are expressed, but that can be used to manipulate—be
they jazz, pop, rock, or serial music (since even avant-garde music has become a
commodity). (Schnittke 2000, 45)
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Example 3.3.4. Thomas Adès, overture to Powder Her Face, mm. 6-10
I mentioned Telemann’s Gulliver Suite (1728) for two violins in chapter 1 as an example
of Baroque hybridity; in fact, it also demonstrates coexistence. The last movement, as already
seen, is a superimposition of the “Loure of the Well-Mannered Houyhnhnms and the Wild Dance
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of the Untamed Yahoo;” the slow, cantabile loure dance in the first violin contrasts with the fast-
paced and dynamic “wild dance” in the lower violin (Example 3.3.5). Despite their distinct
identities, the potential friction of the contrasting materials is mitigated by the use of elements
shared by the two styles: harmonic progression, voice-leading, and meter. The coexistence
strategy integrates the distinct identities in such a way as they can still be recognized; though
they are superimposed, the harsh friction of the clash is not apparent. The mixture reflects
directly Jonathan Swift’s 1726 story, in which Houyhnhnms and Yahoos coexist, despite their
widely contrasting characteristics, and the dominance of the former over the latter.82 Both
peoples define a spectrum of existence in Gulliver’s narrative: the horse-like Houyhnhnms (the
fictional etymology of which is, according to Swift, “the perfection of nature”) are rational and
lead an almost stoic life; the human-like Yahoos, on the other hand, are considered “abominable
animal[s]” (Swift). In this way, the stylistic gap between the two violins can be interpreted as
establishing a range of musical affect: from the constrained and elegant loure dance of the horse-
82
In Swift’s story, Yahoos are servants to Houyhnhnms, who control the land.
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Example 3.3.5. Telemann, Gulliver’s Suite, “Loure of the Well-Mannered Houyhnhnms and the
Wild Dance of the Untamed Yahoo”
and French styles, aiming at the mixed taste celebrated by many composers of the period. In
“Aria Italiana-Aire Françoise,” from the seventh piece of the work, the flute/recorder and oboe
have different meters, rhythms, and ornamentations, which signal their associated
nationality/style. The Italian aria is played by the flute in 6/8 meter, and superimposed over a 2/2
French aria in the oboe (Example 3.3.6). While this might seem like a clash characteristic—the
abrupt overlap of distinct and unintegrated characteristics—Fux aligns the triple subdivision of
the flute’s 6/8 with the long notes of the cut-time oboe. When they do produce friction, the result
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is diffused by dotted rhythms in the oboe (mm. 6-7, for instance); these adjustments are
indicative of an integration of both references. The two melodic instruments also have
contrasting rhythmic patterns, which reinforce their intended associations—the flute tends
toward regular patterns, while the oboe emphasizes dotted rhythms common in the French style.
The “Italian” flute is conservative in its trills, which appear only at important cadences of the
piece (mm. 18, 26, and 35); the “French” oboe has many trills, which are not constrained to
cadential points (for example, the trill at m. 2). This excessive ornamentation alone might not be
a clear demarcated reference, but the combination of the distinct metric, rhythmic, and
ornamental features can be associated— emphasized by their opposition—with the two identities
indicated in the title, at the same time preserving their characteristics throughout.
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The continuo acts not as a mediator of these two styles, rather more strongly supports the
French aria by adopting a 2/2 meter. This choice of emphasis, in fact, creates a more stable
environment (a French one), so that the differences brought by the Italian material can be
highlighted. Dreyfus (1996, 120) is more precise in labeling the two contrasting styles in Fux’s
trio as a combination of the Italian giga and the French entrée. Unlike my reading above,
Dreyfus views the interaction between these two categories as “forced and harsh: each voice
proceed[ing] as if oblivious to the presence of the other” (1996, 120). While the identities are in
fact recognizable and, to an extent, separate, they do interact—they afford each other space to be
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foregrounded at different times. While for a specialist or a learned contemporary listener the
combinations between the Italian and French genres can be interpreted as harsh, given the
expected stability of affect in Baroque compositions, within the spectrum of mixture strategies
interpretation of the example as harsh and forced points to the clear recognizability of contrasting
identities, a discourse that would certainly put the Concentus trio within the realm of a clash.
However, the Baroque mixed taste mindset (goûts reünis) that prompts this mixture focuses on
unification rather than friction, coexistence rather than clash, as their musical interaction makes
clear.83
In fact, Dreyfus (1996, 120) contrasts this “forced and harsh” and “brutally
superimposed” coexistence with J. S. Bach’s Sonata for viola da gamba and harpsichord in G
minor (BWV 1029; Example 3.3.7). According to Dreyfus, Bach’s piece “conceals” beneath its
surface a French Sarabande and an Italian Adagio, again evoking the Baroque notion of mixed
taste: “they hibernate in a structure guaranteed to cover them up” (1996, 120). If this were
actually the case, the hybridity would be inaudible and the identities cancelled out (Dreyfus’s
own words)—only a conceptual mixture, after thorough analysis. Dreyfus dedicates almost an
entire chapter to disentangling these two “hidden” identities, an enterprise prompted by the
difficulty of categorizing the piece with an established genre label. Nevertheless, he discusses
elements of the two contrasting identities, which are indeed foregrounded, even if not in as clear
a way as Fux’s Concentus. In the first half of the piece the harpsichord plays musical markers of
83
During the Baroque period, the intention of combining several national styles in vogue was called mixed taste, or
goûts reünis. The Italian and French styles were characterized by clearly different features, and their combination
served as the musical and narrative basis for some works like François Couperin’s L’Apotheose de Lully and
L’Apotheose de Corelli.
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the French Sarabande identity, while the viola da gamba emphasizes features of an Italian
Adagio. Markers of these contrasting identities coexist throughout the sonata, and they do not
sound musically disconnected (as, for instance, in Biber’s clash in the Batallia discussed above).
Dreyfus provides a list of the characteristics of audible markers for each of these styles. In the
melodic realm, the Sarabande is represented in the sonata by a prevalence of stepwise motion,
“runs in the style of double, and the use of essential ornaments (die wesentlichen Manieren),”
belonging to the French style. The Italian Adagio is signaled, contrastingly, by large leaps,
arpeggiated lines and scalar flourishes, and arbitrary ornaments (die willkürlichen Manieren). In
terms of phrase structure, the Sarabande is associated with “marked 4-bar phrases” (1996, 118),
whereas the Adagio is characterized by the avoidance of clear divisions. Rhythmic markers are
among the most noticeable signs of each style/nationality. The Sarabande stresses the second
beat, with dotted patterns at phrase endings, and hemiolas preceding the cadences; the Adagio’s
contrasting rhythmic features include “long sustained notes tied over the bar line” and “running
Example 3.3.7. J. S. Bach, Sonata for viola da gamba and harpsichord in G minor, I (BWV 1029)
Such integration of divergent elements is typical of the coexistence mixture strategy, and
the Adagio and Sarabande features also “affect each other,” as Dreyfus acknowledges (1996,
122). Furthermore, the two styles relate to specific affects and values: the Sarabande is a dance
of “gravity . . . [and] expresses ambition, grandeur, and dignity” (ibid.); the Italian Adagio is a
more improvised style, which “evokes the passions of fantasy, spontaneity, and astonishment”
(ibid.). In this way, the coexistence is not only of geographical markers reflected in the music,
but also of the notions of arbitrary or measured and restricted, which are associated with the two
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styles. The contrasting musical categories of dance and lyricism also act as elements in Bach’s
hybrid. But here, as in Fux (and Telemann, Joplin, Kagel, and Adés), many aligned features
allow for them to coexist in a unified amalgam: harmonic progressions and cadences,
counterpoint, and form, all contribute to integrating the contrasting elements in the work, while
music, imported elements are musically integrated into the prevailing environment. This occurs
by combining features associated with two or more contrasting categories, while aligning many
others, such as harmonic progressions, melodic contour, and rhythmic/metric profiles. In other
words, these cases of topical hybridity are largely examples of coexistence. As mentioned earlier,
Hatten’s notion of troping attempts to understand and systematize these hybrid features in topic
theory. Though troping is certainly not limited to the coexistence strategy, in the repertory Hatten
Other than the four tropological axes mentioned above—degree of compatibility, degree
main potential significations for the hybridity achieved through troping in Classical and
A merger of the imported topic with the prevailing style (or with other imported
topics) produces a trope akin to a metaphor in poetic language. The trope of irony,
on the other hand, typically avoids such a merger; instead the topic maintains its
distinct character and plays a role in contradistinction to, or even outright
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contradiction of the prevailing discourse. Thus, in the case of Romantic irony, the
unassimilated topic may be interpreted as commenting on the prevailing musical
discourse. A combination of metaphorical merger and ironic commentary may
result in parody or satire, since the potential merger is subject to critique (as
implied by its lack of fit, its exaggeration, or its deliberate distortion by other
means . . . ) (Hatten 2014, 515).
These meanings are, in part, conditioned by the mixture strategies applied in each case—
coexistence most often in this repertory—but are ultimately determined by the type of material
used and their potential associations. If one reads the above definitions broadly, the merger trope
is akin to the coexistence mixture strategy; Hatten’s trope of irony relates to the clash strategy,
but usually lacks the surface harshness typical of those cases; and the third—a combination of
both, creating a potential parody or satire—relates to the distortion strategy, discussed below.
However, as discussed in chapter 1, the range of significations of musical hybridity can go well
beyond metaphor, irony, and parody.84 These are simply characteristic in the stable constrained
The mixture strategies for hybrids proposed in this study help to locate eighteenth- and
components are emphasized differently across historical periods. Cases of metaphor, irony, and
parody in Classical music are, more often than not, related to the variable incompatibility of their
associations, not to their perceptible characteristics on the musical surface. Most friction here
then is at the referential level, which determines the nuances of the troping. It is often a
hermeneutic hybrid process, but not always a musical one, a characteristic that might be sparked
by the aforementioned stylistic and generic stability of the period. An example of this subtle type
of troping, with relatively compatible musical elements, can be seen in Hatten’s analysis (2014,
84
Even though they may serve as a starting point for more nuanced significations.
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516-17) of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in F major, K. 332, I, which features no fewer than six topics
blended in the first twelve measures of the piece: pastoral, singing style, yodel, Ländler,
empfindsamer Styl, and learned style (Example 3.3.8, mm. 1-12). In Hatten’s words, “it requires
a higher degree of interpretive abduction—exceeding mere recognition of style types and topics”
(2014, 519). These topics all coexist to an extent, but are not readily recognizable, differing from
other cases of mixtures because of the compatibility and integration of the musical surface.
afforded by a stable system, cases of coexistence abound in the Classical and Romantic periods.
The same movement from Mozart’s sonata combines three other styles and topics in a unified
musical surface a few measures later. Here, according to Hatten (2014, 520), after the minuet is
established in the first measures (comprising the six topics mentioned above), mm. 13-16 bring
clearer correlations with the music-box topic in terms of register, and the hunt topic, in its
rhythms and voicings (Example 3.3.8). The music-box register may be interpreted as adding a
melodic layer reminiscent of children’s songs (subversive?), to the other more serious elements
Example 3.3.8. Mozart, Piano Sonata No. 12 in F major, K. 332, I, mm. 1-18
Another example of this subtle coexistence with troping in Mozart, which Hatten discusses,
occurs in the combination of the march topic with the learned, imitative polyphonic style at the
beginning of the first movement from the Piano Concerto in C major, K. 415 (Example 3.3.9).
Musically, these materials convey no friction whatsoever; however, the social environments with
which both styles are associated are perceptible, creating an incompatibility that adds extra layers
Since nineteenth-century music continued and expanded the use of topics, Hatten also
interprets Robert Schumann’s “Chiarina,” the eleventh piece in Carnaval, op. 9, as a case of
troping: a “waltz-metered march” (2004, 71; Example 3.3.10). But despite the waltz being a
quality of the march in this Hatten’s description (it is a waltz with the meter of a march), no clear
asymmetry appears in these measures, no dominance of one over the other, but rather a
coexistence of the two styles that might force the listener’s attention to alternate between both
perspectives, and which results in a third compound style. The potential interpretations of this
troping, thus are informed by the integration of the associations of both styles, which adds a
more serious, perhaps military tone to the ballroom dance, or, seen from the other perspective,
A related, later case of coexistence is found in Debussy’s Estampes, II, “La Soirée dans Granade”
(1903), which combines a habanera accompaniment pattern with harmonies that correlate with
the composer’s modernist style (Example 3.3.11). Again, there is no clear prevailing style, except
the two identities: this is neither a habanera with modernist harmonies, nor a modernist piece
85
This relates, albeit from a more general perspective, to Ralph Locke’s notion of “submerged” exoticism (2009,
217).
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Timbre or instrumentation are effective elements for creating coexistence because of their
separation from what Leonard Meyer called “syntactical” parameters.86 One can use, for
instance, rhythm, melody, or harmony belonging to one genre or style, and timbres and
instruments from another disparate style, without any necessarily apparent friction on the
86
According to Meyer’s highly influential perspective—one built in order to approach a very specific repertoire—
these primary parameters stand for the “syntactical” and usually statistical, quantifiable, aspects of music such as
harmony, melody, rhythm and meter. It would follow then that secondary parameters—tempo, sonority, and timbre,
according to Meyer—be the ones that cannot be quantified and cannot serve to organize a musical composition. But
this separation between “primary” and “secondary” parameters in musical thinking seems less rigid and restrictive if
one reads Meyer carefully (Meyer 1989, 14-15), and takes into consideration that he is addressing eighteenth- and
nineteenth- century concert music.
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musical surface; but there is friction nonetheless. While this appears in many repertories—such
associating to Baroque music––or Adés’s overture from Powder Her Face (discussed above),
in repertories that centralize their production in the studio. Timbres or instruments attached to
specific styles and genres can act as topics—timbre topics—and follow the same signification
processes, mentioned by Mirka and Hatten, in achieving cross-references and troping; or they
might also correlate with wider and less defined fields of signification. Many popular musics of
the post-1950s, because of their use of the recording studio as a creative tool, contain examples
Timbres are also used in order to categorize and label; thus, an ambiguous combination of such
identity markers with other contrasting elements (timbre-related or otherwise) can create
The Alabama Shakes’ “Sound and Color” (2015), the first track from their eponymous
album, shows how this relationship among timbral layers, styles, and hybridity can occur.
simultaneous styles. Even though market-wise the band is labeled as a rock group—which, on
this track, might serve as an idealized background—few elements on it clearly relate to rock.
“Sound and Color “(Example 3.3.12) opens with just vibraphone and bass (0:00 to 0:25). The
generic inferences made during this first twenty-five seconds rely largely on context. Thus, the
first contextual friction and opposition occur because (if) the listener knows Alabama Shakes as
a rock group, even though no clear elements of the style appear in the music. Second, the
contrast in the timbres—the vibes associated with jazz, as a contrast of rock, for instance. At
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around 0:26, faint harmonics on bowed instruments slightly alter the generic scenario, hinting at
a string quartet, or even an orchestra on the track. Drums, potentially more often associated with
rock, come in at 0:50, but create friction within themselves: the timbre of the drum set is typical
of the Motown sound (especially the bass drum, prominent in the mix), but the rhythms are not
so much native to R&B or rock as they are characteristic of electronic sequenced beats. The
strings’ harmonics disappear with a glissando as we hear the vocals entering the mix at 1:00. The
vocals are a prominent feature of the song, with a delivery that mixes rock and R&B influences,
while vocal timbre (with added reverb and a higher harmonizing voice) seems again to reference
the Motown sound. At 1:28, a repetitive guitar line with a low-frequency oscillator creates a
pattern mixing rock and electronic genres. At 2:03, a fuller-sounding string ensemble connects
with the layer of the orchestral reference hinted at the beginning of the track, and is soon joined
by a synthesizer sound (I refer to this as a “click” in Example 3.3.12, below), which lasts until
2:20. The only additional element until the end of the track is the guitar playing a bent note at
2:50, which again associates closely with rock and blues. The elements combined, even in
contradicting expectations and referring to multiple genres, work together to create a unified
amalgam. They coexist, aligning rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic features to create a hybrid
Because subtle timbre combinations act as accompaniment to the more dominant vocal
and lyrics, such interactions between timbre elements often go unnoticed, especially because
they form a unified coherent amalgam through coexistence. But in this specific track, words are
scarce––with many repetitions of “sound and color with me on my mind.” These repetitions,
combined with the few clear harmonic patterns, and lack of harmonic direction, bring listener
attention back to the timbral interplay—the most dynamic feature of the song—helping to
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emphasize their associated styles. Thus, timbres become the subjects of musical discourse, to use
Ratner’s (1980) oft-cited definition of topics. Example 3.3.12 below shows these pluralist
interactions on a timeline of the recording, and Examples 3.3.13 and 3.3.14 illustrate my
Example 3.3.12. Timeline of the timbres in Alabama Shakes’ “Sound and Color”
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Example 3.3.13. Stylistic and generic associations of timbre and instrumentation in Alabama
Shakes’ “Sound and Color”
Example 3.3.14. “Distance” of styles and genres interpreted in “Sound and Color”
The variety of the interplay of timbral elements in the track demonstrates that hybridity (and
especially coexistence) need not rely on pitch and rhythm to be expressed musically. In fact, the
subtlety and ease of mixing these elements with the “syntactical” parameters render them
many popular genres, and which question the restrictive perspective of assigning syntactical
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status only to pitch and rhythm. Moreover, this kind of timbral hybridity also commonly fosters
Spatiality, another aspect of a recorded track, can be easily altered and used as a creative
tool in the studio; that is, the location of instruments in the “soundbox” and the size of the
producer’s sonic signature, which develops into another category for cross-reference and
established an intersubjective association with the producer’s sonority and the popular music of
the 1960s, as well as with the specific cultural and social aspects surrounding this music.89
Spector’s use of considerable amounts of reverb and doubling of instruments in the track—which
caused a “blurring” of the sources—acquired the status of a meaningful stylistic marker. In this
way, a sonic signature coexists with contrasting features belonging to other styles, genres, and
periods, such as in Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” (Born to Run, 1975), Super Furry
87
A soundbox “provides a way of conceptualizing the textural space that a recording inhabits, by enabling us to
literally hear recordings taking space” (Moore 2012, 30). This spatial representation deals with the perceived
location of the sources in a recording in terms of laterality, prominence (how close the source is to the listener), and
the register of the source, using the typical high-low mapping of the pitch spectrum. The soundbox is notated—if
needed—by placing figures of each instrument inside a three-dimensional box.
88
Gillespie (2007, 31) defines the term as follows: “[s]ound-signatures” refer to non-vocal sonic material meant to
help signify production authorship in a recording. As the text will explain, this refers to various levels of musical
material: discrete-sound, abstract, performative, structural, orchestral, non-musical, and phonographic sound-
signatures.”
89
The Wall of Sound is a production technique that consists in having several musicians playing the same line on
the same instrument, as well as the use of an echo chamber to create a massive space in the recorded track. An
example of this sonority can be found in Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep-Mountain High” (1966)—Spector’s
favorite among his productions— in which one cannot tell clearly the individual sources that contribute to the sonic
result. Spector’s influence in music production made this sonic signature not only something of a personal trademark
but also a marker of a specific historical moment in music and music technologies. It directly influenced other artists
such as Brian Wilson (specifically the “Pet Sounds” album [1966], which in itself became another marker of the
sound and spread it even further).
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2010). In recognizing Spector’s sonic signature alongside contrasting elements that identify each
of these other artists, an added sense of homage occurs, of the “vintage” and raw sound—a
The coexistence of Spector’s sound and Springsteen’s musical identity in “Born to Run”
was not accidental, as becomes clear in Mike Appel’s—one of the producers of the track—
account:
Bruce had just finished a concert in Richmond, Va. He was in the back seat of the
car. He leaned over the front seat and said, ‘Mike, I’m trying to meld my lyrics
with more Phil Spector-type songs and I’d like to use his production values.’ And
I said, ‘O.K., I got it.’ Then he said, ‘Do you know anything about Phil Spector
production values? And I said, ‘Yes, I do.’90
Springsteen’s to meld in the quote indicates his intention not to create friction, but to integrate
both identities, creating something new from the combination. The use of the sonic signature to
add an “old” sound did not go unnoticed by media and critics of the album either, as is clear in
In one sense, all this talk of epic comes down to sound . . . . [E]ditor Jon Landau,
Mike Appel and Springsteen produced Born to Run in a style as close to mono as
anyone can get these days; the result is a sound full of grandeur. For all it owes to
Phil Spector, it can be compared only to the music of Bob Dylan & the Hawks
made onstage in 1965 and ’66. With that sound, Springsteen has achieved
something very special. He has touched his world with glory, without glorifying
anything: not the romance of escape, not the unbearable pathos of the street fight
in “Jungleland,” not the scared young lovers of “Backstreets” and not himself.91
Similar cases of integrating the “wall of sound” with other identities appear later in Super
Furry Animals’s 2007 track “Run-Away” and MGMT’s 2010 “It’s Working.” In “Run-Away,”
90
Peter Gerstenzang, “How Bruce Springsteen Made ‘Born To Run’ an American Masterpiece,” (accessed March 8,
2017), http://observer.com/2015/08/how-bruce-springsteen-made-born-to-run-an-american-masterpiece/
91
Greil Marcus, “Bruce Springsteen—Born to Run,” (accessed March 27, 2017)
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/born-to-run-19851001
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the homage aspect is more noticeable; the band seems to be trying to record a “Phil Spector”
song (using even Spector’s typical tambourine trills, for instance), but the timbre and prominence
of the guitars and voice bring a contrasting style and period to mind, thus, achieving a
coexistence of the 1960s and 2000s, of millennial rock and Spector. MGMT’s example is more
distant from an outright copy of Spector’s sonic signature, establishing a more even blend of the
In mashup music, as mentioned in the previous section, the term genre clash is most
often used not as a clash strategy (as understood in this study), but as coexistence. Key clashes,
the actual structural clash in mashups through disparate keys or other rhythmic and melodic
structural frictions, is usually assigned negative aesthetic values; on the other hand, conceptual
92
Boone is also citing Raju Mudhar (see Raju Mudhar, “Five Years After the Genie-us, Mashups May Go
Mainstream,” Toronto Star, December 24, 2006, sec. Entertainment).
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Thus, the coexistence strategy is a common feature in mashup compositions. One early example
is Alan Copeland’s 1968 mashup “Mission: Impossible Theme/Norwegian Wood,” often referred
to as the first mashup. Here, Copeland aligns the 3/4 of the Beatle’s song and the 5/4 of
“Mission: Impossible” without any harsh clashing characteristics. A choir sings the melody of the
Beatles’s “Norwegian Wood,” adjusted over Lalo Schifrin’s orchestral recording of the TV
show’s theme.93 The result is a coexistence hybrid that carefully avoids friction, but still refers to
two disparate pieces/styles/contexts, and, at the same time, adds another layer of meaning
through the use of the choir. Since both pieces used in the mixture have very clear associations—
one with a mystery/action TV show (and later film) and the other with a famous love song—they
affect each other without undermining one another, creating a humorous combination.
CAMOUFLAGED COEXISTENCE
There are some less clear cases of coexistence, which purposefully hide or subtly
camouflage material of a contrasting style or genre within an established one. I call these rarer
coexistence might have a hidden quotation, strict paraphrase, or very strict allusion smoothly
integrated into a stable style, creating no clear structural friction between the two styles.
Compared to what might be called ordinary coexistence cases, an additional effort is required on
the listener’s part to recognize the camouflaged elements. Because the camouflage purposefully
veils the extraneous material with puzzle-like characteristics, most of its identifying features are
93
Alan Copeland, “Mission Impossible Theme/Norwegian Wood” (1968), (accessed March 21, 2017),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUV-WghBifc
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94
aligned with the environment. On the surface, then, no perceivable mixture or friction is
apparent until the listener identifies the camouflaged material along with its contrasting
referential level, but not so much (at times not at all) on the surface. Hence, the hidden elements
usually bring contrasting stylistic or generic associations, so that a chimeric environment can
actually exist. The enhanced challenge of recognition makes this strategy subtype temporary.
Once the camouflaged material is identified, the environment can be dealt with as if it were a
simpler case of a coexistence strategy, since the listener can now track two integrated layers and
their references.
solo (1981; Example 3.3.15), in which the melody of “Singin’ in the Rain” is “hidden” in a
texture built from quotations of Ravel’s piano music—Jeux d’Eau––and later in Sciarrino’s piece
a brief reference to “Une barque sur l’océan” from Ravel’s Mirroirs.95 The pluralism in
and high-brow references are combined. Because of the dual perspective that the piece affords,
there is a temporal misalignment, which is distinct from the effects achieved in other cases of
coexistence. In Anamorfosi, the constant change of focus, as we recognize the melody, changes
94
The puzzle-like aspects of camouflaged coexistence are widely explored on the NPR radio show Piano Puzzler, a
5-minute game show. A piano puzzler is a composition that hides the melody of a famous tune (usually Broadway
songs or well-known folk songs) within the style of a major composer from the classical music canon. The “style” is
expressed in texture, rhythm, melody, and harmonies, and several times even using quotations from a piece by the
specific composer being emulated. The pianist/composer Bruce Adolphe, weekly writes a puzzler, performs it, and
helps the contestant with pertinent information and hints, if necessary. The overall format is simple: (1) the
contestant is identified and asked about musical background; (2) Adolphe performs the puzzler; (3) the contestant
tries to guess the hidden tune and style; (4) from the correct or wrong answers provided, Adolphe helps the
participant with verbal and musical cues until there is a final answer. A similar earlier show is BBC’s Hidden
Melodies.
95
Please note that the symbol for coexistence is slightly altered in camouflage cases, with the added grid over the
triangle.
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our perception of time flow as well, since the two materials appear at different rates. Sciarrino
makes it more difficult to spot the melody of “Singin’ in the Rain,” in the following ways: (1) the
composer aligns the melody to coincide with the articulation of rhythms of Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau;
(2) the vast majority of the melody notes make sense within Ravel’s harmonic vocabulary; (3)
both Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau and “Singin’ in the Rain” are based on pentatonic material; (4)
Sciarrino avoids putting the melody in the upper or lower voice of the overall texture; (5) he fits
two measures of “Singin’ in the Rain” (in 2/2 meter) in every measure of Jeux d’Eau (in 4/4),
thus creating the temporal misalignment mentioned above; and (6) the popular tune begins after
almost one full measure of Ravel’s music, which constrains the listener to focus first on the
repetitive arpeggiated texture rather than attend to the horizontal, melodic aspects of the piece.
frames the hidden quotation or allusion is usually at a higher hierarchic level, differing from the
more usual balanced combination in regular coexistence. Also, in more ordinary cases of
coexistence, concessions are made by each style so as to form a chimeric third style; in
camouflaged coexistence, nothing changes in the ruling style. It absorbs the hidden quotation,
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which only creates friction when discovered in the texture, and is perceptually segregated as a
camouflaged examples, only a coexistence of contrasting references of the combined layers after
the hidden material is discovered. This reliance on the recognition of the hidden strands and
quotations, or very clear paraphrases of melodic fragments. In order to allude to a more general
style field or genre, the composer needs to foreground its defining traits, thus making it difficult
Even more complicated cases of camouflaged mixture, while not the main focus of this
study, may occur when a clear quotation of or allusion to obscure material occurs, usually with
strong cultural meaning, creating an environment where a quotation “can be noticed but not
identified” (Metzer 2004, 7). This kind of occurrence creates a camouflage coexistence only at
the referential level: one can perceive a different strand in a piece, but not create any specific
associations that could be knowingly contrasting and indicative of mixture. An example given by
Metzer (2004) is Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen, which contains a collage of hymns from
specific case of this referential camouflage occurs when Stockhausen mixes, for instance, West
Germany anthem “Deutschlandlied” with “Horst Wessel Lied,” the anthem of the Nazi party
(Metzer 2004, 142, n. 90). The listener can hear two different strands but in order to understand
the somewhat sordid referential contrast one needs to have a deeper knowledge of the uses of this
music in history.
INTERPRETING COEXISTENCE
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Much of the potential signification in cases of the coexistence strategy directly contrasts
counterpart to the harsher clash strategy. Thus, it brings unifying, integrative meaning by not
between the disparate associations, coexistence can add a sense of coalescence. Coexistence, as
an integrative type of mixture, has innovative potential usually reflected in a third, compound
identity created without much friction. While clash might be interpreted as shock, surprise,
enriched potential for development of the combination. The possibility for any hybrid to open a
second layer of discourse as commentary is still valid in the coexistence strategy; however, the
nature of the commentary tends to be interpreted differently in these cases. In the clash strategy,
the second layer of discourse is mostly a critical, potentially subversive, or political act; on the
other hand, coexistence tends to lean toward utopian and pacific cohabitation, albeit not
restricted to it.
synthesis or ironic subversions as the main categories of interpretation (a mix of both would
carry potential for parody or satire). While this approach can embrace the significations of works
within the constraints of a stable system of styles and genres, these need to be expanded for
different repertories and uses of the coexistence strategy. Parody and irony can still be
communicated by an integrative musical surface if its associations are harshly contrasting. For
instance, Hatten (2014, 522-23) suggests a parody in the childlike evocation of the march topic
in the coexistence of the first movement from Mozart’s Piano Concertos No. 13 in C Major, K.
415, and No. 21 in C Major, K. 467. Importantly, the level of incompatibility of associations also
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affects the interpretation of a musical surface built through coexistence, which can influence the
The strategy of clash is associated with a fragmentation of the discourse and, in some
specific cases, connected to mental illness (such as in Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad
King). Coexistence, on the other hand, can be ambiguous; it lacks a defined identity, and can
discussed above.
What is it then, in the Adagio movement that encourages one historian to refer to
Beethoven, and another to objectify processes inconsistent with any contemporary
genre? How, in fact, can a sonata movement of the eighteenth century sustain
such a suspension of time and place? One approach to these problems is to take
the absence of clear signs of genre or style as a significant omission (1996, 116,
my emphasis).
In such cases, this ambiguity is interpreted as a negative characteristic. But it can also yield
positive interpretations as an original blend that fosters innovation. Coexistence can be used to
develop new styles and genres by merging previously established categories into new ones that
[w]hen strategic juxtapositions and superpositions of even highly contrasting topics have
occurred often enough, they may enter into the style as fully troped blends that require no
interpretive labor . . . their interpretation is then deproblematized into an act of mere
recognition.” (Hatten 2014, 521-22)
3.4 Distortion
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In the seventh piece of her Musical Toys, “A Bear Playing the Double Bass and the Black
Woman” (1969), Sofia Gubaidulina presents a walking bass, reminiscent of jazz but that follows
no clear harmonic progression, as would be expected from this accompaniment pattern. In fact,
the pitches delineate no tonal or jazz harmonies at all; rather, they emphasize a non-tonal or
chromatic collection (Example 3.4.1).96 The piano right hand plays a pentatonic melody, evoking
the blues—a choice stylistically representative of jazz pieces—but this material is interrupted
suddenly by a few clusters, destabilizing or undermining any style continuity. The coexistence of
jazz and blues is a natural one, since the two styles are combined often enough (and are
genealogically related) to become a common and unsurprising combination. But a strange sense
of incongruity within each layer occurs: some of their defining elements are either suppressed
(the harmonic progression of the walking bass) or altered and expanded (pitch collection, sudden
clusters in the right-hand melody). The jazz/blues styles are recognizable, but appear in a
“strange” manner, altered by incongruous non-tonal elements. While these elements might be
loosely connected to a wide non-tonal style field, is not specific enough reference to be identified
as a style or genre. This distortion, active throughout the entirety of this short piece, forms
another strategy for hybridity. Distortion differs from clash or coexistence primarily due to its
asymmetry—one clearly recognizable style or genre is altered by elements incompatible with the
primary reference. These incongruous elements are distortion agents, which affect the primary
96
Please note the analytical symbol for distortion in the example.
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Example 3.4.1. Sofia Gubaidulina, Musical Toys, VII. “A Bear Playing the Double Bass and the
Black Woman”
A similar example appears in the first piece of Rochberg’s Carnival Music (1971),
“Fanfares and March,” in which the composer employs the rhythms and gestures of a traditional
fanfare while distorting its pitch elements by substituting tonal with non-tonal material (Example
3.4.2). The first fanfare excerpt, occurring in the first system, relies on a repeated stepwise
gesture of a major second. The second––on the third system, after a long-note interruption––uses
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an ascending gesture with emphasis on minor and major seconds. Both gestures avoid the usual
arpeggiated lines of typical fanfares and bring alterations in the pitch domain, but the stylistic
association with a fanfare remains clear due to the rhythmic aspects, ascending gesture, and
elements that are not clearly recognized as another category of musical identity. This can
perceived as outside and unfamiliar to that style. Schumann (2015) discusses distorted topics,
defining them “as any topic in which one or more of its defining components or characteristics is
altered, suppressed, or entirely removed” (2015, 60); the same ideas can be used more generally
with genres and styles. The degree to which a style or genre is distorted will vary, depending on
how many of its defining characteristics are altered by processes of suppression, substitution, or
addition. Of these processes, suppression is the weakest; and at times, the mere suppression or
removal of less important components of a style will not even be perceived as a distortion, since
other important traits might remain and serve to represent it.97 Stronger distortions arise when
extraneous features are added, or suppressed features are substituted by incongruous material,
thus creating a mixture between the idealized stable style and these new elements. The level of
contrast and incongruity between the added material and the established style or genre will affect
the intensity of the distortion. Again, I refer to this incongruous idea or process as the distorting
agent, which is not always neutral. It can refer minimally to another stylistic field, but a clear
hierarchy appears between the main style being altered and what is causing the distortion. If this
hierarchy is more balanced, the strategy can be potentially interpreted as (or confused with)
coexistence, in which the contrasting elements are of roughly the same importance in forming
97
This is related to the notion of membership gradience in theories of categorization. These ideas can be found in
Eleanor Rosch’s work, as well as in George Lakoff’s 1992 review of these theories.
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the chimeric environment. Finally, it is common for distortion to be nested in other strategies,
Distortion is an instance of hybridity, even though it does not equally treat two distinct
identities. The hybridity here is not created by alluding to two disparate styles, but by changing
an established category and questioning its identity, thus opening space for instability. Distortion
emphasizes a single stylistic identity, but one that is, as Baler put it, “a manifestation of
imbalance (an intrinsic failure of agreement) destined to upset the mechanisms of transmission”
(2016, 8). Example 3.4.3 displays an abstract graphic representation of the strategy and the
can very often be considered as coexistence. The decision is an interpretive one and relies on
how strongly and well-defined the distorting agents are in each case. Since the mixture strategies
are interpretive categories, labeling an excerpt as one or the other is less important than the
elements (the distorting agents) alter a fairly recognizable style or genre; the distorting agents do
not establish a clear reference other than that of being external, unfamiliar, and inconsistent with
respect to what they are altering. In coexistence, two recognizable identities are combined in a
The beginning of Adès’s Piano Quintet, I (Example 3.4.4) features a very local case of
distortion. The violin plays an iteration of the “do-re-mi” galant style schema (Gjerdingen 2007)
in C major, which Adès distorts on reaching the “mi” stage of the model, altering the I chord
with D# and A#, as well as adding notes from a whole-tone scale (WT1) in a descending line.
The gesture is repeated twice, with the same strategy, leading into a non-tonal environment in the
violin. This distortion is part of a larger tonal to non-tonal motion that organizes the beginning of
the piece.98
98
This is in fact also a trajectory strategy at a higher level. Trajectories will be discussed in the next section.
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and Adès’s Piano Quintet, even though composed in 2007, derives from a similar style.99 The
post-1960s is a period whose stylistic and generic instability was compared to the Baroque by
Lobanova (2000), who focused on music, and by Baler (2016), who focused on visual and
literary arts. For Baler (2016), distortion is an embracing concept defined only in contrast to
clarity: in sculpture, for example, he cites the “contorted bodies of Gianlorenzo Bernini as
opposed to the static figures of the High Renaissance” (Baler 2016, 2), and in rhetoric, the
hyperbaton (the inversion of the order of words), compared to an earlier “restrained fluency”
(ibid.). Finally, Baler mentions the distortion of “atomized landscapes of the historical avant-
gardes in contrast with mimetic realism of positivist hue” (Baler 2016, 2), which echoes the
99
Even though Adès’s Piano Quintet I was published in 2007, I still consider it part of the stylistically unstable
period that had its origins in the 1960s.
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metonymic series of imbalances, disfigurements, monstrosities, chaos, and
uncertainties. (Baler 2016, 2)
Baler points to anamorphosis as a staple case of distortion in Baroque visual arts, one
which can serve here as a starting point to approach the strategy’s musical counterparts in the
period. Even though cases of anamorphosis appear before the Baroque, such as the infamous The
Ambassadors by Hans Holbein in the sixteenth century, the technique was widely embraced in
the seventeenth century. Taking Holbein (1533) as an example, however, one can see how the
visual distortion is quite literal in these cases (Example 3.4.5). In The Ambassadors we have a
central naturalistic scene with two august figures standing in a room, a distorted skull apparent in
the lower part of the painting. In fact, if we stay with the mixture strategy terminology proposed
here, the naturalistic scene and the skull overlap in a clash.100 But the skull itself looks out of
place; it needs the viewer to observe it from a different perspective so its distortion is “fixed.” At
a more conceptual level, there is also a distortion of the consistency of the perspective in the
100
The skull served as a symbol of the vanitas topos in 16th- and 17th-century paintings. Vanitas paintings and
symbolism reminded of the “inevitability of death and transience of life” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Vanitas.”
https://www.britannica.com/art/vanitas-art (accessed October 1, 2017). Baler aptly describes the disruption of the
skull over the primary scene in Holbein’s painting: “[t]he French envoys to Henry VIII are haughtily watching over
instruments that symbolize the spheres of knowledge (astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music) while at their
feet, from an anamorphic perspective, a skull intrudes, threatening, as an infallible symbol of death, the attainments
of all knowledge, temporal and spiritual” (Baler 2016, 20).
101
Baler (2016) makes a good point that any two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object is in fact
a distortion of reality, a thought that, analogous to music, would by equivalence make any extra-musical meaning,
any association made from music with the external world a distortion.
200
But what is the musical equivalent of the Baroque anamorphic distortion? Treadwell
(2010) suggests the bastarda style as the musical counterpart of visual anamorphosis. She
exemplifies the style as threatening “the assumed authoritative ‘voice’ of the composer,” with the
incorporation of
A bass singer’s part could, for instance, thread through all voices with virtuosic embellishments,
subverting its supporting, foundational role in a four-part harmony (Treadwell 2010, 31), a
characteristic that was criticized at the time. The bastarda style was not mere ornamentation; it
was a considerable alteration of the composition that opened a layer for commentary by the
distorting agent: the singer or the viola da gamba player, for example.
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Michael Praetorius’s understanding of the bastarda style creates close links with the
subject of hybridity. The German theorist, according to Treadwell (2010), implied that the style
was some sort of “mongrel,” since it involves the appropriation by the musician of other parts of
the composition and the addition of new material. Emphasizing this perspective, is the
etymology of the term bastarda: “literally one who is born outside of the legitimate social
contract of marriage. Socially and musically, the bastarda [or bastardo] is one who moves both
If the bastarda style—an excessive alteration of a model which reflects the identity of the
one delivering the performance—is an example of distortion, many other cases in music would
be as well. This more embracing perspective on distortion is, in fact, supported by Baler, who
writes about the “aesthetics of distortion” as being useful to understanding the logic of instability
that permeates “crucial moments of the visual and literary production” both in the twentieth and
seventeenth centuries, as briefly discussed above (Baler 2016, xi). Distortion, if understood as a
kind of creative instability of defiguration and refiguration (Snyder 2010), does happen
recurrently in many subtle and not-so-subtle cases, thus bringing hybridity closer to common
discourse. Indeed, the general idea of distortion is crucial to any kind of hybridity, even if in
many cases it only forms a part of the resulting amalgam. In clash, the notion of linear time and
unified whole are commonly distorted. In coexistence, certain features are altered via distortion
“My Favorite Things” (from The Sound of Music 1965), uses similar processes to those in the
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early Baroque bastarda style. A comparison of the original melody to Coltrane’s recomposition
shows the detailed ways in which he altered the song’s identity. Both the album name and the
track title emphasize the Broadway musical’s song identity—this is still “My Favorite Things”
but distorted, defamiliarized. Other than the obvious omission of the lyrics and original timbres,
both less essential for the recognition of the song, the main “carriers” of the song’s identity are
melody, rhythm, and harmony.102 And each of these three elements is considerably altered by
As shown in Example 3.4.6, Coltrane’s version begins with the original first measure of
melody, albeit shortening the duration of three quarter notes, and changing the harmony to a
tonic pedal in the first four measures. In the second measure Coltrane’s alters clearly the rhythm
and melody: a half note prolongs the resolution of scale degree 2 to 1, which contrasts with the
original version (here shown in the Real Book transcription).104 In measures 3 and 4 Coltrane
considerably alters the original by adding a note and changing the rhythmic profile. In these four
measures he progressively distorts the identity of “My Favorite Things”—setting the stage and
giving the listener time to recognize the tune in the first two measures, and then starting to
diffuse its identity at mm. 3 and 4. The second 4-bar phrase (mm. 5-8) carries similar alterations,
but here the first measure of the group (m. 5) is also changed, since the identity of the source
102
Since many jazz musicians played the repertory from Broadway musicals, the omission of the lyrics is a fairly
common feature, thus less essential for identifying the work. Perhaps the most effective of Coltrane’s distortions are
his rhythmic alterations of the melody. Thanks to Jennifer Griffith for the “insider’s perspective” about this
repertory.
103
I am not even considering here the hybridity (a coexistence) that happens between the genre of musical, or
Rodgers & Hammerstein, or Tin Pan Alley, conflated with the bebop group or Coltrane’s own identity. Nor am I
dealing with the duration of each version: Coltrane’s stretched-out version lasts fourteen minutes.
104
I am aware of how fallible the Real Book transcriptions are, but use it here only for comparative purposes. Julie
Andrews’s recording of the song in the original soundtrack add fair amounts of rubato to the melody but it is still
based on constant quarter notes, in general. Nevertheless, Coltrane’s version is very different if compared with the
original recording.
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song has already been clarified enough in the previous measures. The second half of the A
section (mm. 9-16) has fewer pitch alterations but the underlying rhythm is distorted at mm. 9,
10, and 15, providing more of a “swing” feel to the melody. The harmony continues with slight
alterations throughout, but conflicts less with the original than do pitch and rhythmic
modifications. The distortion strategy, which constantly places Coltrane’s version against the
backdrop of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s original, is a crucial characteristic; the resulting friction
and novelty defines the hybrid identity of this iteration of the tune.
Example 3.4.6. Comparison of the first 16 measures of the original (Real Book) and Coltrane’s
versions of “My Favorite Things”
This process of altering a famous work is not restricted to jazz, and raises questions
pertaining to the ontology of music: how is it that hybrid variations, and at times perhaps even
extreme variations of a work, do not prevent listeners from perceiving the source of the
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105
recomposition? In “My Favorite Things,” the absence of the words in Coltrane’s version does
not prevent its recognition in the harmonic and melodic elements. On the other hand, Bob
Dylan’s two versions of “Forever Young” have completely distinct musical characteristics with
the same words—one is a lullaby, the other a rock song. These two related tracks are put back to
back in the album Planet Waves (1974), indicated as a slow and fast version, respectively. Since
in the folk genre the lyrics are a central part of the composition, one could also consider Dylan’s
case as a distortion of the identity of the song, preserved by the words in both versions. This
characteristics can be a catalyst for creation and innovation; in other words, creative acts are
fostered by this specific kind of interplay of identities.106 To use another Coltrane example, in his
1966 live version of Naima (his own composition), at Temple University, he distorts the original
piece as a catalyst for developing the performance. The piece acquires a different and unique
identity, built against the backdrop of the original version, creating friction by his modifications.
A clearer case of hybridity through distortion appears in the third movement from Gustav
Mahler’s Symphony no. 1 (1888), in which he alters the popular French nursery rhyme “Frère
Jacques” (“Bruder Jakob,” in German) by recasting it in the minor mode (Example 3.4.7). While
the mode switch is certainly not a clear reference to a defined style or genre, it signifies an affect
incongruous with the traditional musical setting of the nursery rhyme. Mahler also adds passing
105
The notions of thin and thick ontologies, proposed by Geertz (1973), even if potentially problematic, can
illuminate how these processes of identity change from genre to genre or even from composer to composer.
106
Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1997) provides a thorough account of these processes in poetry. In
Remaking the Past (1990), Joseph Straus similarly approaches the influence of tonal tradition in the developments of
the earlier twentieth-century music.
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tones, ornamenting the melody and emphasizing the descending motion, which helps to highlight
the distortion. This relatively simple iteration of the strategy triggers a happy/sad opposition that
creates a hybrid-like friction, but with a clear sense of hierarchy between what is being distorted,
and the distorting agent. Thus Mahler resists a coexistence of these two affects, but one affect
alters the other, which is attached to the identity of a lullaby. Along with the distortion of “Frère
Jacques,” this section of the symphony combines a lullaby with a march topic, implied by the
accompanying bass line, an example of coexistence: thus, a lighthearted tune (made sad) is
combined with an austere style, evoking a nostalgic, but depressive, childhood environment.107
107
Sheinberg discuses the relationship between march and lullaby: “the active, choleric import of ‘the military’
excludes the passive and mild character of a ‘lullaby’, so that their coexistence will certainly create a confusing
musico-semantic paradox” (7). Sheinberg also indicates the lullaby in the first act of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (Maria’s
lullaby) as an example of this coexistence with march (2000, 8-9).
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Satire as a manifestation of irony strongly relies on distortion. Sheinberg writes that
“[b]eing always based upon the violation of a set of norms satire is structurally bound to distort
its object” (Sheinberg 2000, 82). There are three devices for “structural distortion:” removal,
insertion, or replacement of characteristic elements.108 While these devices can indeed create
distortion, the specific characteristics of insertion or replacement may also lean toward
coexistence or clash, which changes the potential engagement with the mixture. Sheinberg also
express one’s reaction to specific situations and contexts” (107), and is categorized into two
primary types: qualitative and quantitative, the latter being articulated either through repetition or
accumulation. But, as mentioned above, not all cases of distortion are hybrids; an exaggeration
through repetition can create a second layer of discourse, a commentary, but it might not
generate enough instability in terms of identity so as to put it in question and create ambiguity.
The waltz from Modest Mussorgsky’s Rayok (1870) is used by Sheinberg to illustrate a
caricature satire through distortion (Example 3.4.8). The distortion is achieved by exaggeration
through repetition in the vocal part, which also emphasizes the repetitive text of the composition.
Even if in a subtle way, this repetition creates a sense of hybridity: the nineteenth-century
ballroom dance, associated with elegance and status, is tinged with—in Sheinberg’s own
opposition and ambiguity. This specific comic distortion was directed at Mussorgsky’s “personal
enemy” Theophil Tolstoy, who praised popular virtuoso soprano Adelina Patti. The exaggerated
108
Sheinberg (2000, 82) defines structure as “the proportions among its components and their essence, and/or one or
more of its components.”
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repetition in the waltz is also a synecdoche for virtuosity, satirizing “the blind idolatry that [the]
public and critics alike tended to cultivate for vocal virtuosos” (Sheinberg 2000, 116).
connotations, there are cases in which exaggeration is indicative of other modes of expression.109
An example would be Maxwell Davies’s many uses of distortion through exaggeration in Eight
Songs for a Mad King, linked to the King’s mental illness, which, if misread as comic or a
Piano, op. 34, can be understood, in Sheinberg’s terms, as a qualitative exaggeration (Example
3.4.9). The “D minor” prelude moves in and out of the key, through the replacement of diatonic
pitches by incongruous (“incorrect”) ones that have no tonal functional purpose;111 it also has
unusual changes in the chord progression and suggestions of other incongruous triads and
tonalities. In this way, not only “D minor,” but the entire notion of tonality is distorted—the
109
I do not mean to imply that Sheinberg is unaware of the varied uses of exaggeration; in her text she clearly
delimits this type of distortion for satirical, comic situations.
110
Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.
111
In other words, these pitches do not act as chord extensions, chromaticism, or modal inflections, even though the
latter could be claimed for certain notes like the B natural in m. 8. Furthermore, the clear cadences in D minor at
mm. 9 and 17 emphasize the key being distorted by these processes.
112
Shostakovich’s example differs slightly from Gubaidulina’s walking bass, discussed in the beginning of this
section, because here there is a hint of tonality with the initial arpeggio and the right-hand accompaniment. In
Gubaidulina’s piece, there is never a “regular” walking bass.
209
Example 3.4.9. Shostakovich, Preludes for Piano, op. 34, Prelude 24, mm. 1-17
Schumann (2015) has discussed distorted dance topics in the composer’s work, focusing on
rhythmic and metric alterations and manipulations of eighteenth-century styles. The march from
The Soldier’s Tale, briefly cited above in chapter 1, is a staple case of hybridity triggered by
metric and rhythmic distortion of defining aspects of a march, further altered by the use of non-
tonal pitch content. Schumann (2015) points out that the contrabass keeps a 2/4 ostinato
throughout almost the entire piece, while the other instruments either imply different meters or
create friction by displacing metric layers, distorting one of the most characteristic features of a
march (2015, 73-74). Stravinsky achieves distortion at rehearsal mark 8 (Example 3.4.10) by
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delaying the beginning of the motive in the winds and brass by one beat, as well as extending
Example 3.4.10. Schumann’s (2015, 76) comparison of rehearsal mark 8 in Stravinsky’s The
Soldier’s Tale with a normalized model
Schumann (2015, 77) suggests a programmatic motivation for the march’s distortion, since
Joseph, the soldier in question, lacks the virtuous characteristics of “heroism and victory . . . or
exemplified by Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” appear for many popular music repertories,
and such processes should certainly not be constrained by the idealized boundaries of either
113
Schumann is quoting Monelle (2006, 113) and Ratner (1980, 16) here.
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popular or concert music. For instance, Sciarrino’s Pagine (1998) produced arrangements for
saxophone quartet of music by J. S. Bach, Carlo Gesualdo, Domenico Scarlatti, Mozart, Cole
Porter, and George Gershwin. The fact that, throughout his career as a composer, Sciarrino re-
read and adapted many works of differing styles suggests that his arrangements and adaptations
Other cases of distortion in recorded popular music tie more closely to situations of
foregrounded hybridity discussed in this study.115 The combination of elements coming from
diverse styles and genres is common in Daft Punk’s music, providing many instances of mixture
strategies. “Give Life Back to Music” (from Daft Punk’s 2013 album Random Access Memories)
was produced by Nile Rodgers from Chic, and exhibits hybridity at different levels. First, there is
a juxtaposition clash between the introduction and the verse, where rock-influenced material
shifts abruptly into a funk environment in order to articulate the new section.116 The introduction
is also formed by a coexistence of melodic material and instruments from rock, combined with
the style field of electronic music, triggered by the use of synthetic instruments and texture. The
verse that follows has characteristics of funk: drums, bass, guitars, keyboard, and claps, all of
which belong to that style. However, when the voice comes in, it uses an incongruous vocoder—
a synthesizer that uses the voice as an input—which distorts the prevailing style. The asymmetry
is clear, making the verse not a coexistence of funk and EDM, but an alteration of the vocal
timbre by a diffuse incongruous element within a clear host style. If the effect were to be
disabled in the voice, this track would be a staple example of funk, with no friction in the verse.
114
Tre canzoni del XX secolo (1983) and Brazil (1988) are, among others, examples of Sciarrino’s adaptations.
115
It is important to discern between the specific effect of distortion, widely used in rock music and related genres
(which can also articulate a distortion strategy) and the mixture strategy.
116
This acts as a clash divider, discussed later in this chapter.
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“Digital Love” (2001, from the album Discovery) is another case of distortion from Daft Punk.
Here, the French duo samples the song “I Love You More” (1979) by George Duke, altering its
timbre with a frequency filter and other added sounds. The original music is clearly recognizable,
but the added elements provide a sense of re-reading, re-utilizing the material in an electronic-
influenced environment.
The Beatles’ “Don’t Pass Me By” (1968, from the White Album) also uses effects to
distort a popular style. While it is difficult to label the song’s style or genre exactly, it makes
clear reference to country and polka, thus situating it within that wider style field. The reference,
however, is distorted by recording the timbre of the grand piano through a Leslie 147 speaker.117
While this procedure might have been used as a way to get closer to an accordion sound,
belonging to the style field, it ends up rendered ambiguous. In support of the country/polka style,
the violin/fiddle in the track is played with clear country characteristics, and the bass plays
mostly the root and fifth of each chord in quarter notes. The location of the instruments in the
track emphasizes the distortion, creating a lopsided sound box, with drums on the far left, bass
and fiddle on far right, and the vocals and piano occupying the center of the recording.118
Distortion can also be achieved by a musician’s particular delivery that creates friction
between the peculiarities of the performance and a standard or predictable way to sing or play a
piece within a certain style or genre. Bowie presents “It’s No Game,” from Scary Monsters (and
Super Creeps) (1980), in two versions, Parts 1 and 2, which respectively open and close the
album.119 Part 1 has a rather complex arrangement, with words in Japanese in the introduction, a
117
A Leslie speaker has a peculiar sound because of its rotating loudspeakers.
118
This lopsided in relation to the prevalent triangular sound box in recorded popular music, with drums around the
center, and bass and guitar or keyboards on each side.
119
It’s No Game Parts 1 and 2 was produced by Tony Visconti and David Bowie.
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distorted guitar (played by Robert Fripp), and a head-turning vocal performance by Bowie, who
adds ambiguity to the track by screaming suddenly on specific notes. Part 2 is similar to the
initial composition, and serves as a background against which to compare the distorted version; it
has no screaming, and includes a simpler arrangement of the same song. Bowie included both
versions to bookend the album, the two tracks perhaps having an effect of “hell-heaven
opposition,” given their sonic characteristics and the content of the lyrics.120 Example 3.4.11
provides a transcription of Part 2’s non-distorted melody and bass line, with the circles indicating
the distorted notes in Part 1. The distorted version also bypasses mm. 8-15; the phrases are
rearranged by shortening the first verse to eight rather than sixteen measures (it bypasses the
second phrase “just walkie-talkie, heaven or hearth...”, connecting mm. 7 to 16). Transcribing the
more stable performance helps to identify the changes in Part 1; several of the 2-bar semi-
phrases release tension by using longer, sustained notes after more active rhythms (mm. 2, 4, 7,
10, 12, 14, and 17 in Example 3.4.11). The distorted version in Part 1 (0:41–1:04), reduces (or
omits) this release of the long notes and their melodic function; however, instead of achieving
this through a change of rhythm or pitches, the more obvious syntactic choice, Bowie adds
tension in his screams, marked at the points circled in the example.121 In this case, the tension
and release determined by the rhythmic and melodic profile of the piece is reversed by the sonic
characteristics of the voice. The expected delivery from a singer in a pop/rock song would be to
clearly present the lyrics; Bowie expresses ambiguity by omitting this in Part 1, he creates
metal or punk.
120
An interpretation hinted at by the lyrics of the song mentioning the opposition “heaven or hearth.”
121
The only rhythmic and melodic changes happen in m. 16, not transcribed herein, and the subtle inflections in
tuning that Bowie uses in the “screamed” version.
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Example 3.4.11. Transcription of bass and vocals from David Bowie’s “It’s No Game,” Part 2.
Circles indicate screamed notes in Part 1
Distortions via timbre alteration or exaggeration occur outside the realm of recorded
popular music as well. An example comes from George Crumb’s Makrokosmos (1974). In
volume 3, the fifth piece (“Music of the Starry Night,” Example 3.4.12) interpolates a direct
quotation of the D# minor fugue from J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, into a non-
tonal environment through a juxtaposition clash. Along with the clash, the Bach material is
distorted by Crumb’s use of a prepared piano, with a piece of paper over the strings, and an echo
of the melody played by a vibraphone. Additionally, the composer indicates in the score that the
Bach quotation should sound like a “ghostly-surreal harpsichord.” The distortion is achieved
exclusively through timbre, with both the prepared piano and the vibraphone echo contributing to
Example 3.4.12. George Crumb, Makrokosmos, volume 3, V, “Music of the Starry Night”
INTERPRETING DISTORTION
In his popular TV shows for young audiences, Leonard Bernstein discussed incongruity:
Incongruous means, for example, Alice in Wonderland, when she gets all mixed
up in that strange new world of hers, and can't remember anything right; so she
suddenly begins to recite:
Along these lines, distortion is expressed through a sense of incongruity, deviation, or a sign of
imbalance, as Baler (2016) puts it. He writes that “the works that partake of this distorting
impulse tend to evoke an imaginative universe that is connected to the metonymic series of
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Leonard Bernstein, “Humor in Music,” Young Peoples Concerts (accessed March 31, 2017),
https://leonardbernstein.com/lectures/television-scripts/young-peoples-concerts/humor-in-music
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distortion and its opposite category of clarity as dynamic concepts that move between two poles
along “the chain connecting a signifying center with its representation” (2); distortion, then,
In other words, distortion plays a central role in questioning “the legibility and illegibility of the
universe” (23). It affords and emphasizes “the simultaneity of identity and alterity, the coinciding
of contradictory readings” (33-34), thus becoming a common means for hybridity in moments of
Given these ideas, distortion can be seen as an aesthetic category with attached values.
concurring with Baler. But he also indicates the strategy’s role in alternating the focus between
Snyder uses Lyle Massey’s (2007) take on this ambiguous alternation of anamorphosis:
In other words, the anamorphic image is not solely a passive recipient of the gaze,
but ambiguously makes the viewer at once subject and object of a reconfigured
123
Baler mentions a few mechanisms related to visual arts and literature that can be transferred to music, to an
extent: “angle, distance, focus, syntax, viewpoints, illumination, legibility, causality, temporal linearity, or narrative
continuity” (2016, 8).
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viewing space, as Lyle Massey has brilliantly argued (Massey 2007, 68-69). As
she points out, one is forced to move, or to move something, in order to see
properly the anamorphic picture: in some cases the viewer may feel compelled to
push the subject-object distinction to the very limit, by bringing herself or himself
hard up against the plane of the picture in an effort to resolve the visual enigma.
(Snyder 2010, 21).
“Twinkle, Twinkle” above, but are achieved by similar means. Other than substituting elements
and omission/suppression, often interpreted as “mistakes” of some kind. A case in point would
to such common reactions, it is not surprising that distortion tends to be perceived as ironic, with
(potentially) comic significations. In fact, the ironic, satirical, and caricatural connotations of
incongruity and distortion drive much of Sheinberg’s (2000) discussion of these processes as
the reason for our perceiving things without becoming aware of them. Things can be
defamiliarized if our attention is attracted to their conventionality, an end that can be achieved by
distorting the convention” (2000, 161). This process of defamiliarization is also the subject in
Sheinberg’s investigation of the grotesque, a trope often related to hyperbole, and based on
accumulation and exaggeration. But the author states that a “grotesque object is . . . never
‘comic,’ but rather ‘ludicrous’; never just ‘unpleasant’, but rather ‘repellent’ or ‘horrifying’”
(2000, 210). Thus, the signification potential of the distortion strategy is broadened, even though
still restricted to ironic utterances in Sheinberg’s account. But irony can also be skeptical, not
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necessarily comical. When combined with other strategies in a hybrid expression, with a diverse
Distortion can also be assigned negative values, such as in Schumann’s (2015) reading of
Stravinsky’s “Soldier’s March,” in which the soldier’s lack of virtues is expressed musically by
the composer through distortion. Distortion also had a pejorative connotation for some critics of
the bastarda style in the early Baroque, represented in Praetorius’s aforementioned comparison
Finally, the complexity and apparent ubiquity of the concept of distortion makes it crucial
to distinguish it from cases of coexistence. Coexistence and distortion both rely on ambiguity
and incongruity, but these are emphasized differently in each strategy. Coexistence emphasizes
the ambiguity—a dual reading derived from a more symmetrical combination of styles or
genres. Distortion, on the other hand, emphasizes incongruity, the defamiliarization of one
prevailing style or genre, altered with incompatible elements to that idealized category. Whereas
some instances can certainly include more than one interpretation, the clear prevalence of one
style is indicative of distortion, making critical one’s attention to the hierarchy between the
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Treadwell writes: “[t]he question of illegitimacy is key here: the bastarda is The creative insights gleaned from
such a position, and the practical results of such insights—most significantly the potential to reproduce—were
clearly threatening to musical (and social) order as traditionally understood, hence the derogatory implications of the
term bastarda, adopted to describe a musical practice that nevertheless produced awe and astonishment in those who
witnessed performances” (Treadwell 2010, 34).
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3.5 Trajectory
In the introduction to this dissertation, I noted the beginning allusion to Baroque music in
the second movement of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 (1977), entitled Toccata. The
movement begins with two violins, which play the same melodic line in canon at the unison and
separated by a quarter note. With a casual hearing, one would not realize the piece was
composed in 1977, the first few measures containing no hint of mixture. Schnittke establishes
this material as a traceable feature and, beginning at rehearsal mark 1 (Example 3.5.1), gradually
transforms it through more canons at the unison, with entrances an eighth note apart, into a
different environment. The “toccata clusters” keep the rhythmic profile of the initial material but
bring in clusters resulting from the overlapping of the multiple lines in canon. Example 3.5.1
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A similar example by Schnittke happens at the beginning of the third movement of his Concerto Grosso No. 2.
This example is less clearly gradual. Again, a typical Baroque allusion is transformed into non-tonal material, a
common opposition for Schnittke—and other polystylistic composers.
Example 3.5.1. Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, II
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221
One could perhaps read this transition between these two styles as an example of the distortion
strategy, since one can follow Schnittke gradually altering the toccata material before finally
forming it into clusters. Indeed, this distortion is nested, participating in a larger process that I
call trajectory. The distorted environment cannot be isolated from the materials that surround it;
thus, in this example, the process encompasses the initial stage of stable Baroque music, its
gradual distortion through the reiterated canons, and its final stage as a hybrid non-tonal
environment, keeping the rhythmic characteristics and imitation of the Baroque but with different
pitch content. In this specific case, it is as if Schnittke sought to legitimize the non-tonal
environment by rooting it in the “pure” past, while distorting it into an expanded, mixed idiom. It
becomes difficult to understand the resulting environment apart from the initial one, since there
is connection between all stages of the trajectory. One stage leads gradually into the other,
forming a single chimeric environment. The matrix of structural oppositions in Example 3.5.2,
based on Hatten’s (1994) matrices, shows how this strategy shapes the first section of the piece,
and affords interpretations that rely on the listener’s capacity to trace the gradual change, along
with its contrasting characteristics and associations. A focus solely on the distortion process that
sets the trajectory “into motion” would overlook important characteristics of this particular
hybridity. In the opening section of Schnittke’s piece, the strategy of trajectory exploits
oppositions of past and present, and tonal and non-tonal, determining the initial form of the work
narratologically.
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through a traceable, gradual process. This strategy can connect any setting, hybrid or otherwise,
given that they are momentarily established—one before and the other after the transition
process. In its clearer examples, both the initial and ending materials are uniform/stable styles or
genres, but contrast with respect to one another—the transition serves to progressively change
one into the other. The crucial characteristics of the strategy of trajectory are the perceptible
process of somewhat gradual change (especially in large-scale examples), and the traceability of
the elements of that change. I propose trajectory as the last strategy of hybridity here because it is
be incorporated during the transition. In this way, trajectories operate at a higher hierarchical
level, and use gradual distortion, momentary coexistence, or brief overlap clash to achieve
gradual and traceable changes. The transformation of one stylistic or generic environment into
Although the strategy of trajectory requires another nested strategy to exist, it is a specific and
recurrent kind of interaction of disparate materials achieves a particular effect, and thus warrants
blocks of increasing alterations. The dimension of this strategy also varies, ranging from a short
transformation, not a plain juxtaposition. In larger examples of trajectory, the strategy itself can
determine the formal aspects of a work, while “mini-trajectories” can take part in more complex
stages: Stage 1 establishes the first style or genre; Stage 2 is a perceptible and traceable
transition; and Stage 3 is the establishment of the second style or genre. This creates a linear
process that embraces the two established environments and the transition between them.
opposition between tonal and non-tonal materials, as will be noted in some of the examples
below. But they can potentially involve any two styles (or hybrid environments) that bring
enough contrast in their structure and associations. An abstract diagram of the strategy is
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Please note I use the arrow as the analytical symbol for trajectory in the examples below.
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Trajectory occurs mostly in post-1960s music and is restricted to the twentieth century,
thus the only mixture strategy of this study localized within a specific period. Perhaps the
heightened thematization of hybridity in the 1900s accounts for fewer cases of trajectory as a
strategy in earlier music.127 To organize mixture strategies into the compound and linear hybrid
environment of trajectory requires that the hybridity control the musical discourse, that it be at
the forefront of the processes developing the piece; and there were few repertories before 1900
that could afford, both in terms of communication and syntax, such a prominence of hybridity.
Trajectories always involve some combination of the mixture strategies placed along a timeline,
and it is this compound and linear status that allows this compound hybrid process to define the
form of a piece––or parts of a piece––more easily than other strategies. The example here from
Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 is such a case; hybridity is determinative of form, which I
Rochberg’s Caprice Variations for Unaccompanied Violin (1970; Example 3.5.4). In this
127
I found no examples of trajectory occurring before the twentieth century.
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example, the tonal/non-tonal opposition is still the main guide for the small-scale process, with
the arpeggiation of an A-major triad quickly changing into a non-tonal melodic fragment: at m.
11, a repeated a3 creates momentum for an upward arpeggiation of the A-major triad, a gesture
that carries the expectation of tonal continuity (Stage 1); however, it dissolves the briefly
established tonal sense by adding notes outside the triad (Stage 2). This new environment is
suddenly interrupted by a juxtaposition of pizzicato chords, making the first attempt a failed
trajectory, lacking Stage 3. At m. 15, the trajectory from A major to non-tonal restarts, this time
achieving Stage 3, and establishing the non-tonal environment for one measure. As a way of
compensating for the failed initial trajectory, a third iteration appears at m. 18, now compressing
Stages 1 and 2, while widely expanding Stage 3 with three measures of clear non-tonal material.
The transition of all these trajectories involves a nested distortion, expanding and adding new
elements to the triadic arpeggiation. The annotations in the score of Example 3.5.4 show this
chimeric environment formed by three trajectories (the first of them failed), and their specific
stages. The smaller scale of the excerpt raises the question as to whether an actual gradual
process takes place, but the group should be clear as a unique block of ideas with directionality:
an A-major triad moving, via brief distortion, toward the non-tonal melodic fragment. The style
fields framing this process are both a kind of synecdoche: the A-major triad representing
tonality, and the non-tonal line standing for post-tonal styles. Despite the lack of specificity of
these style fields, their contrast works well in establishing the trajectory.
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Example 3.5.4. Rochberg, Caprice no. 33, Moderato-con amore, mm. 11-23
A similar use of triadic arpeggiation to represent tonality in the context of a trajectory appears in
the third movement of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 3, III (Example 3.5.5). In this case, the
composer establishes a long initial environment of non-tonal counterpoint that gradually gives
way to the D major arpeggio, enabled by an overlap clash, with notes from the D-major triad
appearing in one instrument at a time. At Stage 3, the texture is entirely composed of notes from
the D-major triad, with the exception of the solo violins, which keep their non-tonal material,
sustaining dissonances, and clash against the newly stablished major chord.
Example 3.5.5. Schnittke, Concerto Grosso no. 3, III, r.m. 11+4128
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128
R.m. 11+4 means the fourth measure after rehearsal mark 11.
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Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) is formed by multiple chimeric
environments involving trajectory. In the seventh song, “Country Dance (Scotch Bonnet),” the
composer progressively transforms a B-major chord in the piano (which concludes a distortion of
Handel’s “Comfort Ye’ My People”) into clusters, another example of a small-scale trajectory
(Example 3.5.6). Stage 1 is formed by the major chord tremolo for the duration of a half note. In
the transition (Stage 2) Maxwell Davies uses a clear graphic notation indicating the increasing
chord until it contains the complete chromatic scale. This is a gradual distortion of the major
chord through substitution and addition of elements. A fermata over the resulting sonority
Example 3.5.6. Maxwell Davies, Eight Songs for a Mad King, no. 7, “Country Dance,” mm. 38-
40
The polystylistic repertory, as can be seen above, is the main locus for the compound
strategy of trajectory, but examples abound in popular music. I have already discussed Bowie’s
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“Changes” to exemplify clash between two disparate style fields: rock/blues and big
band/orchestral jazz. However, the track also brings an instance of trajectory, even if in a more
veiled manner when compared to the polystylistic repertory. In “Changes,” when the chorus
enters, a somewhat gradual transition occurs from the big band/orchestral environment to the
typical rock instruments. Following a quick ascending string line (0:55–0:57), which serves to
articulate the transition, the volume of the drums and bass in the mix slowly increases until they
are completely foregrounded (0:58–1:11), thus smoothing out the change of texture. This is a
good example of how mixing techniques can be incorporated into hybridity processes.
Daft Punk’s “Digital Love” samples and distorts George Duke’s “I Love You More,” as
mentioned above. Additionally, an instance of trajectory occurs in the bridge of the song (2:46–
3:47). As acknowledged by the musicians in Daft Punk, timbre triggers the association that will
In at least one instance on Discovery, Daft Punk used a vintage keyboard to evoke
a specific artist from another era. “On ‘Digital Love,’ you get this Supertramp
vibe on the bridge,” remarks de Homem-Christo. “We didn't sample Supertramp,
but we had the original Wurlitzer piano they used, so we thought it would be more
fun to have the original instrument and mess around with it.”129
At 2:46, the “Supertramp” keyboard plays alone, establishing Stage 1 of the trajectory (Example
3.5.7). After fifteen seconds it is gradually joined by elements related to Daft Punk’s original
sonority, as well as a slow unveiling process of the sample of Duke’s “I Love You More.” The
sample achieves gradual prominence through the simultaneous use of a sweeping frequency filter
and slow increase in volume, which emphasize the gradience of the trajectory’s Stage 2. The
final stage (ca. 3:34–3:47) arrives at a triple coexistence of references, gradually added or
129
“Daft Punk,” Brian Reesman. Mix Online (accessed March 31, 2017),
http://www.mixonline.com/news/profiles/daft-punk/372628.
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unveiled in the track—Supertramp (rock style field), “I Love You More” (funk), and Daft Punk
(EDM). Equalizer and volume play a key role in defining this musical hybrid; their linear
controls serve well to establish trajectories, creating gradual transitions between disparate
Example 3.5.7. Graph depicting the trajectory in Daft Punk’s “Digital Love”
INTERPRETING TRAJECTORY
On the one hand, the repertory in which one finds the clearest trajectory strategies is post-1960s
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polystylism—music connected to postmodernist impulses, and that generally articulates
avoidance or, at least, a problematization of teleological narratives. On the other hand, trajectory
is the strategy that most strongly affords a teleological narrative in cases of hybridity. It
establishes a literal musical path or connection between disparate styles or genres, which can
provide goal-directed organization to post-1960s works. This reliance on linking oppositions can
be interpretively highlighted with matrices, such as the one used for Schnittke’s Toccatta above,
demonstrating the dynamics between the oppositions between styles and genres (or wider style
relates to the trajectory strategy, and can help inform potential teleological interpretations.130 For
Brower, this schema “organizes our experience of motion, specifically goal-directed motion”
(2000, 331). If the trajectory strategy in music can be compared to the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL
schema, it needs a force (or agent) that can propel that motion, as well as a definition of the goal
of the process. Brower describes a general tension-release organization for the goal-directed
schema: “the approach to a goal tends to be accompanied by an increase in tension and arrival at
a goal by a relaxation and the slowing and/or stopping of motion” (2000, 331). This can indicate
clear in every case of trajectory. However, these ideas can help inform an interpretation. The
status of agent of the trajectory can be assigned to the music, objectifying (or
anthropomorphizing) the category of a style or genre that sets itself into motion, becoming the
focus of the hybridity process and musical work. Alternatively (and perhaps the default option),
130
Brower (2000) uses all capital letters to indicate a schema.
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one can consider the composer (or the performer, or even a combination of the two) as an agent,
one who triggers the sonic/conceptual processes of the trajectory. Yet another perspective can
place the listener at the center of the experience: they move along with the trajectory from one
style and genre category to another. These perspectives on goal-directed agency focus on change,
and the varying tension that it may establish can be combined, and will influence, the
signification of a trajectory strategy. Example 3.5.8 shows Brower’s diagram for this schema.
Situating the listener, performer, or composer within the embodied schema also relates to
what the “goal” of the trajectory may be, as well as to the quality of the tension and release in the
process—definitions that can afford different perspectives. By taking these variables into
perspective of trajectories becomes feasible. In fact, narrative has been recurrently explored as an
option, for instance, in studies of Schnittke’s music, which tend to rely on these kind of
processes more than any other polystylistic composer (see, for instance, Tremblay 2007, and
Dixon 2007). The strategy of trajectory, with its marked oppositions and linear characteristics,
has more teleological and narrative potential than any of the others discussed in this study.
Narratological interpretations of trajectories are more convincing when dealing with larger
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examples of the strategy, but there is also a possibility of reading “mini-trajectories,” or a
The objective of the transition from one material to another might be assigned different
meanings, and this will be affected, among other things, by the kind and level of opposition they
evoke. Nevertheless, the two main perspectives of a trajectory’s goal are related to change: (1)
substitution, when one is taking over the other (as in Example 3.5.6 above by Maxwell Davies),
or (2) unification, when they are being combined into a pluralist environment (as in Schnittke’s
Example 3.5.1).131 These interpretations vary case by case, and depend on several contextual and
structural aspects, such as the characteristics of the materials, the length of the trajectory, and the
processes used in Stage 2 to move from one to the other. Additionally, one has to deal with the
interpretation of any other hybridity in Stages 1 and 3, in cases where styles are unstable.
interact through nesting, vertical, and horizontal combinations of these processes. In what
follows, I will explain the possibilities and characteristics of these combinations of mixture
strategies.
131
Schnittke discusses the polystylistic method’s merits as being the widening of the expressive means through an
integration of disparate styles, as well as expressing the philosophical idea of “the links between ages” (2000, 90).
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The examples in this section will come mostly from the polystylistic concert music post-1960s. This is due to the
fact that these more intricate combinations happen considerably more often in this repertory, and because the scores
help to better understand them.
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NESTING
Strategies are combined through nesting when one process is contained by a larger one.
Since trajectories are a compound strategy, they always contain coexistence, distortion, or brief
clash, and always have some kind of nesting. But coexistence with nested distortion is also a
recurrent case of such a combination. An example of the latter is Adès’s first piano mazurka
from Mazurkas, op. 27 (2009), discussed above as an instance of coexistence: specifically, the
bass line and pentatonic blues melody coexists with the rhythm, meter, and rubato feel of a
mazurka. But a third style field is triggered by the dissonant harmonic filling of the
accompaniment, which references, albeit less specifically, a non-tonal style field (where Adès
borrows from his own music). These sonorities (see Example 3.6.2) are the distorting agent, and
constitute nested distortions of both the blues and mazurka that coexist. This nested distortion
blurs the borders of the styles, facilitating their combination. Example 3.6.1 shows an abstract
depiction of this kind of nesting. Another nesting of strategies can be found in Daft Punk’s
“Digital Love,” discussed in the previous sections. In this case, the bridge (2:46–3:47) develops a
large trajectory, formed by a nested, and gradual, triple coexistence of three references—
Supertramp, George Duke, and Daft Punk (see Example 3.5.7 in the previous section).
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Example 3.6.1. Diagram of nested strategies (e.g., coexistence with nested distortion)
VERTICAL COMBINATION
Vertical combination occurs when distinct layers or levels of the composition have
Example 3.6.3. Diagram of vertical combination of strategies (e.g., simultaneous clash and
distortion)
3.6.4), a chimeric environment is formed by clash and coexistence, each at a different level, with
no interaction between the two strategies. The non-tonal material in the violins clashes with the
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Several times, what seems to be a vertical combination of strategies may be interpreted as a nesting. This should
be decided individually in each case, taking into consideration the hierarchy and separation of the layers being
affected by the strategies.
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Example 3.6.4. Schnittke, Concerto Grosso no. 1, II, r.m. 17+4, showing vertical combination of
strategies (simultaneous clash and coexistence)
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HORIZONTAL COMBINATION
appears, not necessarily connecting, but still within the same chimeric environment. Any pair of
mixture strategies can be horizontally combined in the hybrid repertory, having no strict
hierarchy or restrictions (Example 3.6.5). The horizontal combination highlights, however, the
problem of segmentation, which is not uncommon for analyses of post-tonal music (for instance,
Hasty 1981 and Hanninen 2012). The choice of whether or not to define a border between one
environment and the next is an interpretive decision; as such, it should be based on the motivic-
thematic identity of the amalgam, the processes and mixture strategies involved in its formation,
and general articulations in the structure and gestures of the piece. The first movement of
Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater (Example 3.6.6, r.m. 19-20) horizontally combines two
strategies within a single chimeric environment: a clash between a descending minor seconds
line in the piano, and the following distortion of Mozart’s Divertimento K. 287, I, mm. 60-66, in
the strings. The distortion transpires with the piano and tuba playing I–V7 in B major (a tritone
above the Mozart), with plausible rhythms for the style. I analyze this excerpt as forming a single
environment because the piano creates a connection with the following material as it continues to
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Example 3.6.7. Schnittke, Concerto Grosso no. 1, II, r.m. 14, showing a clash divider
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of disparate styles, genres, and topics. The four mixture strategies that form chimeric
environments, discussed in this chapter, are types of mixture, characteristics of the interaction
between materials in a hybrid musical excerpt. Each of these strategies has distinct perceptual
qualities along with structural possibilities and constraints. They are simultaneously
characteristics of the musical surface and compositional procedures, and because of this dual
function they may serve as a way of highlighting active two-way communication between
listener (reception) and composer (production). The varying familiarity, background, and context
of a specific listener may alter the type of interaction between materials perceived, or even
obscure a process, thus affording flexibility to the analytic framework. At the core of these
strategies are the notions of reference and association, concepts that work both at the esthesic and
poietic levels of the signification process. Mixtures can also raise expectations and goals of the
musical discourse relating to hybridity. In other words, chimeric environments and mixture
strategies can articulate musical form. In this brief section, I discuss the larger formal
sections and hybridity plan graphs—that organize what has been discussed so far in this chapter
In a similar way that Caplin’s (1998) and Hepokoski and Darcy’s (2006) theories focus
on deeper details of Classical forms by assigning functions, harmonic goals, and signposts to
elements of that repertory, the mixture strategies carry potential to understand how certain hybrid
articulation of a piece defined by aspects unrelated to hybridity. But chimeric environments can
also be grouped into chimeric sections, a related group of distinct hybrid moments in sequence,
which might also articulate the form at a higher hierarchic level. In this way, a grouping
hierarchy involves hybridity patterns: mixture strategies form chimeric environments, which can
CLASH DIVIDERS
A recurrent case of a strategy that acquires the status of a formal device is that of clash
dividers. Clash dividers are instances of clash that designate the articulation from one chimeric
environment to another through a juxtaposition clash. This divider status can be achieved by the
change itself—a clash with an added role of dividing sections—or by a brief interpolation of
unrelated material. An example of a clash divider occurs in Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, II
(Example 3.6.7). Here, a trajectory ends and new material is abruptly juxtaposed at r.m. 14,
introducing an unrelated chimeric environment formed by distortion. I use the same symbol for
clash divider as that used for other clashes, and indicate its function inside the box, “divider.”
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In cases where hybridity influences form, the composer strings together chimeric
environments or chimeric sections, creating a formal design particular to the work and connected
to its mixtures. The perceived hybridity is then organized by the types of interaction of the
material within each chimeric environment or section, as well as by their disposition and
characteristics. The specific pattern of hybridity of a piece can be shown in a hybridity plan
graph, serving both as a summary of the composition’s structure and a potential listening guide
that works as a formal plan. A hybridity plan graph abstracts the main processes and materials of
the work, showing the interpreter’s segmentation of the piece into chimeric environments (which
can possibly form chimeric sections), and further defines these with common strategies of
mixture, with their particular characteristics and set of variables. There is plenty of flexibility in
how to notate hybridity plan graphs, but a general guideline is to use the symbols of each
strategy within dotted line circles, which represent hybrid styles and genres, reserving solid line
circles for stable moments (Example 3.7.2). These graphs work well in cases where hybridity
influences the formal aspects of a piece; on the other hand, they inform little in works with
Example 3.7.3 shows the simple hybridity plan graph of Arvo Pärt’s Sarabande from
Collage über B-A-C-H. The piece, briefly discussed in the section on the clash strategy, is
Example 3.7.3. Hybridity plan graph of Pärt's Sarabande from Collage über B-A-C-H.
Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 3, III. Even though I discuss only parts of the work in the
present study, the analytic summary in Example 3.7.4 demonstrates the visual and graphic
Example 3.7.4. Hybridity plan graph of Schnittke's Concerto Grosso no. 3, III
structurally, and applied these ideas to a repertory ranging from eighteenth- to twenty-first
century concert and popular music. The aim of developing four basic mixture strategies—clash,
coexistence, distortion, and trajectory—is, first, to afford general analytical and interpretive tools
for a compositional layer that has lacked a detailed perspective. Second, the same basic strategies
might be applied to a diverse range of musical works, and allow for a contextualized, diachronic
comparison through the central perceptual and structural effects of hybridity. Furthermore, these
strategies need not focus on one specific compositional aspect (pitch, rhythm, texture, for
instance), nor do they reduce an analysis of this repertory to a listing of sources alluded to or
quoted; they focus on flexible engagements with expressions of hybridity. Finally, the notions of
chimeric environment and mixture strategies proposed here help to investigate patterns of
hybridity in music. Once we consider contextual aspects, conditions, and motivations of specific
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cases of hybridity, the present analytical framework provides a way to connect compositional
strategies, values, ideologies, and perceptually evident patterns, thus emphasizing the
analytical process, involving context, familiarity, and recognition as important variables of the
musical experience. These variables highlight the potential for multiple meanings in the network
of stylistic associations and the processes that affect them in hybrid compositions.
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CHAPTER FOUR: Analyses
application of the analytical framework developed in chapter 3. The concepts introduced there
are meant to address moments of mixture and hybridity; some pieces rely entirely on these
processes, while others have only short sections with mixture. That said, in cases of intermittent
moments of mixture, it is also useful to understand the relationship between hybrid and non-
hybrid environments and how they interact with the general layout of the work. Furthermore, in
all analyses of musical hybridity one might profit from using different tools and perspectives
pertinent to specific pieces, both in terms of structural and/or sociocultural aspects. Concerning
the latter, the concepts of mixture strategies and chimeric environments (or sections) serve to
These can be used as mediators between musical and extra-musical features. In the analyses that
follow I tackle the musical intricacies of the work, and with a hybridity plan graph in hand,
articulate extra-musical perspectives in dialogue with structural ones to varying degrees. Sections
4.1 and 4.2 are the most comprehensive analyses, exploring in more detail the sociopolitical and
cultural realms surrounding the hybridity in works by Schnittke and Maxwell Davies. Sections
4.4, 4.5, 4.7, and 4.8 closely investigate the structural organization of hybridity in Schnittke,
Rochberg, and Adès. While most of the pieces in this chapter come from the post-1960s
polystylistic repertory, sections 4.3 and 4.6 deal with Baroque and recorded popular music,
respectively, and demonstrate the potential of this framework to approach hybridity in many
types of music.
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4.1 ALFRED SCHNITTKE, CONCERTO GROSSO NO. 1, II
The second movement of Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 (1977), Toccata, used to
exemplify the strategy of trajectory in the previous chapter, showcases all four mixture
strategies. A recurrent descending minor-second motive and overall emphasis on ic1 establish a
unifying sonority of the piece, with its predominance of clusters, minor seconds, major sevenths,
and minor ninths. These sonorities help to make the mixtures throughout the piece more
cohesive, despite their at times abrupt appearances and disparate stylistic references. The
movement begins with three large trajectories with gradual distortion, which depart from stable
tonal idioms into clusters or non-tonal counterpoint. After these linear, and less sudden,
transformations, the composer uses coexistence, distortion, and clash with additional allusions to
tango and waltz, creating a complex network of stylistic and generic associations.
The first trajectory (discussed in chapter 3) begins with tonal material that references
Baroque music. This material Schnittke gradually transforms through canons into a cluster
environment that preserves the same rhythmic characteristics—or “toccata clusters” (see
Example 3.38 above). An abrupt change functions as a clash divider at r.m. 6, articulating a new
version of the trajectory “tonal to non-tonal,” this time starting with an Alberti bass
accompaniment and imitation in the two violins—referencing Classical style as well as, more
specifically, a learned style topic. This gradual transition in Trajectory 2 establishes another clear
non-tonal environment, which also incorporates ideas from the beginning of the movement,
maintaining the cluster until the end of the trajectory at r.m. 11 (Example 4.1.1). Trajectory 3
begins at r.m. 12, articulated by another clash divider, when the sudden appearance of a “brilliant
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134
style” pedal is gradually taken over by clusters. I interpret this trajectory as developed with a
nested distortion, in which the pedal notes in the strings progressively imitate a chromatic line in
the violins. All strings adhere to the chromatic motive at the trajectory’s final stage except the
violins, which play motivically contrasting material that still aligns with the non-tonal style field
This group of three trajectory environments forms a chimeric section, not necessarily
because of their motivic relationships, but in their related hybridity strategies. This chimeric
section contains the only trajectories in the entire movement, which are placed together at the
beginning of the piece as if to show the gap between the styles, genres, and style fields in use.
Further, this section connects these references to Baroque and Classical music with Schnittke’s
style, demonstrating how one can smoothly become the other through canons. The strategy of
trajectory fittingly fulfills that role, setting the stage for the more complex non-linear chimeric
environments that follow. Again, trajectories allow for more linear relationships interpreted, for
example, as teleological narratives. In this case, the transformation of one stylistic reference into
another can be heard as aiming at the “unified style,” which Schnittke mentions in his discussion
of this piece.135 The perspective of unification is also supported by the avoidance of abrupt
134
Ratner identifies the brilliant style as referring to “the use of rapid passages for virtuoso display or intense
feeling” expressed “by systematic repetitions and sequences” (1980, 19).
135
Part of Schnittke’s quote about the Concerto Grosso that follows appeared in the introduction to this dissertation,
but I repeat it here to make it more easily accessible. “For several years I experienced an inward urge to write music
for the cinema and theater. At first I enjoyed doing this, then it became a burden, and then it dawned on me: my
lifelong task would be to bridge the gap between serious music and music for entertainment, even if I broke my neck
in the process. I have this dream of a unified style where fragments of serious music and fragments of music for
entertainment would not just be scattered about in a frivolous way, but would be the elements of a diverse musical
reality: elements that are real in the way they are expressed, but that can be used to manipulate—be they jazz, pop,
rock, or serial music (since even avant-garde music has become a commodity). An artist has only one possible way
of avoiding manipulation—he must use his own individual efforts to rise above materials that are taboo, materials
used for external manipulation. In this way he will gain the right to give an individual reflection of the musical
situation that is free of sectarian prejudice, as, for example, in the case of Mahler and Charles Ives. So into the
framework of a neoclassical Concerto Grosso I introduced some fragments not consonant with its general style,
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interruptions, other than those separating the three trajectories, making more difficult the
which had earlier been fragments of cinema music: a lively children’s chorale (at the beginning of the first
movement and at the climax of the fifth, and also as a refrain in the other movements), a nostalgically atonal
serenade—a trio (in the second movement) guaranteed as genuine Corelli, “made in the USSR,” and my
grandmother’s favorite tango (in the fifth movement), which her great-grandmother used to play on a harpsichord . .
. . But all these themes are perfectly consonant with each other (a falling sixth, the sighs of seconds), and I take them
all completely seriously.” (Schnittke 2002, 45)
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Example 4.1.1. Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, II, r.m. 6-8, second trajectory
Example 4.1.2. Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, II, r.m. 12-13, third trajectory
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254
Chimeric Section 2 involves faster changes of environments and the simultaneous use of
several strategies through nesting, vertical, and horizontal combinations. This section begins with
an abrupt change in material after Trajectory 3, which ends at r.m. 14, and this juxtaposition
trajectories. Here, a tango accompaniment and melody (in harpsichord and Violin 2,
respectively) are distorted by non-tonal pitch material (Example 4.1.3). The first violin plays
tango-influenced rhythms with dissonant leaps evoking the minor seconds used by Schnittke as a
motive throughout the piece. The melody in Violin 2 is based on a descending chromatic scale
with octave displacement, but its rhythms and contour—a stepwise descent, followed by a large
upward leap and another stepwise descent—are closer to the tango style. Additionally, the
constant downbeat rhythmic profile in Violin 1 and harpsichord, along with the contour of the
Violin 2 melody, reinforces the tango allusion. At r.m. 14+4, the harpsichord maintains the
distorted tango accompaniment, but now with an overlap of the toccata material from the
beginning of the movement, thus forming a clash environment with nested distortion: the clash
between the Baroque material in the violins and the distorted tango accompaniment (see
This pair of related chimeric environments forms a unit that will appear twice more in
this section. At r.m. 15 (Example 4.1.4), a sudden cluster interrupts the texture for a single
measure. It works as a divider, after which the pair of environments—distorted tango (r.m. 15+1)
and clash between tango and Baroque (r.m. 15+6)—repeat. The same alternation between
distorted tango, overlap clash, and abrupt cluster interpolations appears once more at r.m. 16.
This repetition creates a connection between these three pairs of chimeric environments within
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Chimeric Section 2, each presenting a simple distortion in alternation with the more complex
Example 4.1.3. Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, II, r.m. 14, distorted tango
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Example 4.1.4: Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, II, r.m. 14+4, clash overlapping with
distorted tango
At r.m. 17, the last of these one-measure cluster interpolations (exactly like the one
depicted at r.m. 15 in Ex. 4.1.4), functions as another clash divider, articulating a different but
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related environment formed by clash, coexistence, and distortion. Violins 1 and 2 play a
repeated-note pattern that creates a cluster sonority, which overlaps with the tango-like melody
in the cellos, this time accompanied not by harpsichord, but by violas and double basses
(Example 4.1.5). The addition of double bass only on the downbeat changes the overall accent
pattern to that of a waltz. This creates an intricate network of potential stylistic references seen
more clearly in Example 4.1.6 and forming a coexistence of tango and waltz, both distorted,
while overlapping with the cluster sonority of the solo violins. If we take into account the
previous chimeric environments at r.m. 14, 15 and 16—the three similar pairs articulated by
complexity, as each new pair occurs. The three iterations of this process have linear/goal-
directed characteristics, which find fulfillment and climax with the chimeric environment at r.m.
17.136 There is a sense of propulsion in this section, even though less prominent than in the first
trajectories. After this environment, no more references to tango or waltz appear, reinforcing the
136
Please consult the hybridity plan graph in Example 4.1.8 for an abstract visual depiction of these processes. In the
graph, the pairs of environments in Chimeric Section 2 are joined by a dotted-line oval shape, and the climax is
indicated in the last environment of the section.
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Example 4.1.5. Schnittke, Concerto Grosso no. 1, II, r.m. 17, coexistence, distortion and clash
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Chimeric section 3 differs in its lack of linear processes. It begins at r.m. 18, with
momentary stylistic stability for four measures of a strictly non-tonal environment. Here, the
concertino (harpsichord and solo violins) play material based on the seconds motive, with a
predominance of minor ninths in the violins, creating a fairly stable cluster environment. At r.m.
18+5, however, the harpsichord’s return creates a mixed environment, where the music suddenly
changes to a “C-minor” lullaby, thus forming an overlap clash with the non-tonal material in the
violins.137 Here an abrupt change occurs only in the harpsichord material, rendering the
segmentation of these two chunks ambiguous and subject to interpretation. I consider the
remaining of r.m. 18 (from r.m. 18+5 onward) as a single chimeric environment (Example 4.1.7).
A clash divider at r.m. 19 articulates a new stable environment formed again by descending
counterpoint in the solo violins at r.m. 20. The descending seconds resume in all strings at r.m.
137
This lullaby material returns from the beginning of the first movement of the concerto, where it is played by a toy
piano.
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21, but with material from the interpolation persisting in the solo violins, creating an overlap
clash.138 Finally, at r.m. 22, the full texture is interrupted by a stuttering motive in the solo
violins and harpsichord, which then overlaps with triadic material a minor second apart in the
other instruments at the last measure, thereby clearly articulating the end of the movement.
Example 4.1.7. Schnittke, Concerto Grosso no. 1, II, r.m. 18, overlap clash
This admittedly somewhat clinical analysis is important for demonstrating how the
hybridity processes explained in the previous chapter may give rise to crucial interpretive
insights that otherwise go unnoticed. Specifically, the characteristics of the mixture strategies
and hybridity complexity of the chimeric environments foster a grouping of the Toccata into
three large chimeric sections, each treating the disparate materials in a progressively harsher
manner. Thus, there is a teleological sense to the movement’s often-contradictory surface both at
the chimeric environment level (from one chimeric environment to the other), as well as at the
chimeric section level, each with added friction. One gets a bird’s-eye view of these processes in
138
Despite the overlap of two very distinct layers, the stylistic contrast is not as clear. The association of the
“seconds material” on the string ensemble with the first measures of the movement makes it trigger—albeit only
slightly in my interpretation—the previous Baroque environment, which clashes with the strictly non-tonal material
of the solo violins.
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the hybridity plan graph of Example 4.1.8, which summarizes the strategies and mixtures that
This structural analysis is not meant to exist in isolation, but ultimately brought to bear on
perspectives of hybridity in the sociocultural and political realms. Thus, we have a situated
interpretation of the work and its potential significations within these other dimensions of
hybridity. Schnittke claimed that his intentions in using the “polystylistic method” are grounded
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in the search for a unified style (Schnittke 2002, 45)—a personal quest for settling the conflicts
of his own plural musical background by combining, what he calls, “serious music” and “music
for entertainment.” From this perspective, then, the Toccata becomes a field for the articulation
of contrasting, and at times taboo, identities. His choice of references, according to the categories
of this analysis—of Baroque, classical, waltz, tango, along with non-tonal elements and
clusters—triggers different identities. Here, stylistic and generic aspects such as tonal/non-tonal,
concert/popular, and past/present, become the building blocks with which Schnittke pursues a
“unified style.” But the specific ways these elements are combined can also inform (and be
informed by) the work’s connection with sociocultural and political layers of hybridity and
difference.
Cues for engaging interpretively with these layers come not only from the composer’s
motivations and conditions—expressed thoughts and intentions on polystylism and the piece
itself—but also directly from Schnittke’s musical articulation of the aforementioned markers of
identities. As shown above, there is an emphasis on linear processes: first clearly in Chimeric
Section 1 through the use of trajectories, then less evidently in Chimeric Section 2, with the
increasing hybrid complexity of the pairs of chimeric environments. Finally, Chimeric Section 3
lacks any linear process, with harsher mixtures of disparate material. A way of operationalizing
this relationship between musical and non-musical aspects of hybridity—which, once again, I
have kept separate thus far for purely methodological and practical purposes—is to engage with
the axes of signification and tropes of hybridity defined in chapter 1. In this way, I interpret
Schnittke’s movement as engaging with three axes of hybridity signification, organized here
from subjective to collective: (1) past and present, (2) parody and pastiche, and (3) aesthetic,
present. To that end, the ideas of Svetlana Boym, briefly discussed in chapter 1, are instrumental.
As a reminder, Boym (2001) defines two types of nostalgia: restorative or reflective. The former
focuses on the past, or an imaginary homeland, similar to the one articulated by “diasporic”
time. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be both about past and future, akin
to “creolization” interpretations of hybridity, engaging with the past while embracing modernity
and exploring the outcomes of its many contradictions (Boym 2001, XVIII). Schnittke’s
nostalgia in composing a concerto grosso is not necessarily related to a return to tradition, but
rather to exploit it for developing new expressions: a fusion of past and present aimed at the
utopian future of his unified style—and here the aim is quite clear if we follow the linear and
gradual processes discussed in the previous paragraphs. For Boym, nostalgia “is a sentiment of
loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy” (2), one that seems to be
Furthermore, Schnittke’s individual path as a composer during the Soviet “Thaw” (in the
1950s and early 60s) contributes to a more complex relationship with the constraints of tradition,
pointing to the second proposed axis of signification—that of parody and pastiche (closely
related with the trope of hybridity as a subversive space [Bhabha 1994]). Commonly, musical
hybrids are addressed as expressions of irony or parody. But a more nuanced view of mixtures
allows also for a different interpretation, more akin to pastiche, in which there is no mocking or
irony by default in the use of disparate styles or genres. The hybridity in the Toccata exemplifies
such a nuanced approach. The composer claimed to “take them [the styles] all seriously”
(Schnittke 2002, 45), but how, if at all, is this expressed in the way the materials are combined?
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Does the Toccata sound like a parody? Are its processes reinforcing an expression of irony? I
suggest neither is the case. Schnittke carefully prepares the harsher mixtures in the piece by
creating linear and gradual chimeric environments in the first two sections. This care in treating
stylistic oppositions distances the work from parody, and the sense of subversiveness it
articulates does not rely on mockery. The subversion here is, in fact, that of attempting to treat
material and, again in Schnittke’s words, “the right to give an individual reflection of the musical
At this point in the discussion it becomes difficult to consider the mixtures in the Toccata
(2000) in considering music and alterity. Hybridity in Schnittke’s movement engages with-–
whether the composer intended it or not––politics of difference and the geopolitical directionality
involved in hybridity, our third and last axis of signification. For the most part, Schnittke alludes
to stylistic features and concepts that belong strictly to the Western concert music tradition
(concerto grosso, toccata, learned style, Alberti bass, non-tonal counterpoint, and clusters), the
only potential exoticism being the allusion to tango. However, as the composer writes, it was the
tango his grandmother used to play for him, which provides a completely different take on the
appropriation of a non-Western style: this is rather an autobiographic marker. Also, having lived
completely clear. This ambivalence blurs the geopolitical lines of power, and mitigates an
culture”—in this case, the concert music tradition. Nevertheless, Schnittke’s Toccata is not a
non-threatening hybridity, going much further than a simple mindless patchwork of appropriated
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styles. It is an engaged exploration of plural musical identity at the personal level (Schnittke’s
own search for expression), questioning the place for hybrids in the concert music tradition.
Schnittke’s hybridity engenders, in this way, an empowering condition, one of taming tradition
4.2 PETER MAXWELL DAVIES, EIGHT SONGS FOR A MAD KING, NO. 5
AND NO. 7
Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) differs from most pieces analyzed
in this chapter because it portrays a specific story that directly connects with the hybridity in the
work.139 It tells, of course, a story about madness: King George III’s attempts to teach birds to
sing while succumbing to his mental illness. The sudden change of styles, cacophony, and the
“sounds made by human beings under extreme duress, physical and mental” (Maxwell Davies
2005, 3) provide rich combinations that can be addressed by mixture strategies. Davies describes
Until quite recently “madness” was regarded as something at which to laugh and
jeer. The King’s historically authentic quotations from the Messiah in the work
evoke this sort of mocking response in the instrumental parts—the stylistic switch
is unprepared, and arouses an aggressive reaction. I have, however, quoted far
more than the Messiah—if not the notes at least aspects of the styles of many
composers are referred to, from Handel to Birtwistle. In some ways, I regard the
work as a collection of musical objects borrowed from many sources, functioning
as musical “stage props,” around which the reciter’s part weaves, lighting them
from extraordinary angles, and throwing grotesque and distorted shadows from
them, giving the musical ‘objects’ an unexpected and sometimes sinister
significance. (Maxwell Davies 2005, 3).
139
Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso no. 1 had a secret program (Tremblay 2007, ii), but the inaccessibility to it does not
prevent engaging with the hybrid aspects of the music.
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I will focus on two songs from the set, no. 5 (“The Phantom Queen”) and no. 7 (“Country
Dance”), which provide many opportunities for the application of the framework proposed here.
I also engage with the notions of madness, power, and hybridity informed by the mixture
instrumental parts” (Maxwell Davies 2005, 3): Rondino, Arietta, Allemande, Courante, and a
return to the Rondino. The first dance starts with a typical Alberti bass pattern in the piano left
hand, accompanying a distorted “tonal” melody in the other (Example 4.2.1). The melody stays
consonant for two beats, but soon begins to oscillate in and out of key. This combination of
distorted Alberti bass and melody simultaneously clashes with the King’s conversations with
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I used the Boosey & Hawkes vocal score published in 2005 for the present analysis.
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Example 4.2.1. Maxwell Davies, “The Phantom Queen,” beginning, clash with nested distortion
of Alberti bass
A three-measure Arietta follows this brief opening at m. 3 (Example 4.2.2). As the King
continues his monologue, the material is again tonally distorted: the clarinet plays an A-major
melody. The piano adds to the amalgam by playing minor thirds (Eb–Gb) for the first measure.
The voice switches from reciting to singing during the second measure of the Arietta, albeit with
Example 4.2.2. Maxwell Davies, “The Phantom Queen,” mm. 3-4, clash with nested distortion of
arietta
The Allemande (m. 6) considerably changes the environment, now with the use of a
harpsichord instead of piano (Example 4.2.3). It starts with a do-re-mi schema in C# minor,
followed by a modulation to V (G# minor). There is only a slight distortion in the harpsichord,
but the “singing” clashes with the more stable accompaniment. The King is talking, and
attempting at singing, albeit out of tune, with the words “you too, my darling.”
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Example 4.2.3. Maxwell Davies, “The Phantom Queen,” m.6, distorted do-re-mi schema nested
within an overlap clash
A short trajectory strategy appears in the Courante (m. 14), Stage 1 starting where a more
drastic change of tempo occurs (Example 4.2.4). The clarinet and flute play typical Baroque lines
against the King’s inner dialogue and shouts. According to Maxwell Davies, after the words
“strike you,” “the flute part hurries ahead in a 7:6 rhythmic proportion, the clarinet’s rhythms
become dotted, and its part displaced by octaves, the effect being schizophrenic” (Maxwell
Davies 2005, 3). There is goal-directedness from the stable Courante to a gradually distorted
environment formed by the rushing flute and wide leaps in the clarinet, while the singer is asked
Example 4.2.4. Maxwell Davies, “The Phantom Queen,” mm. 14-25, trajectory
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The Rondino (m. 26) fulfills its intended role by abruptly returning with mostly stable material,
with subtle distortions, for five measures (Example 4.2.5). The Alberti bass accompanies the
singer’s shouts and moans with the same kind of intermittent “out-of-key” melody, which is then
interrupted by non-tonal melodic and percussive fragments, and minor thirds in the piano,
Example 4.2.5. Maxwell Davies, “The Phantom Queen,” mm. 26-31, clash with nested distortion
Example 4.2.6 shows how these hybridity strategies develop the form of the piece generally.
Example 4.2.6. Hybridity plan graph of Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King, V. “The Phantom Queen”
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COUNTRY DANCE (SCOTCH BONNETT)
In song no. 7, Maxwell Davies writes, “the sense of ‘Comfort Ye, My people’ is turned
inside out by the King’s reference to Sin, and the ‘Country Dance’ of the title becomes a foxtrot”
(Maxwell Davies 2005, 3). Handel’s introduction is turned into a popular dance, but keeping
roughly the same harmony and melody (Example 4.2.7). After seven measures, the King sings
the words of the Handel piece, creating a distortion of the composer’s melody and style in
general. It has hints of mockery, as shown by the indications in the score: the baritone starts the
melody as a “female vocalist” in falsetto, then suddenly changes into “in style”—meaning a
141
See Everett (2004) for a brief discussion of this piece through the lenses of irony and parody.
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Example 4.2.7. Maxwell Davies, “Country Dance,” beginning, distortion of Handel's “Comfort
ye’ my people”
Abruptly changing the texture, a series of arpeggiations of four chords moves from piano
to forte throughout the entire ensemble, resembling a pre-cadential environment. This entire
section works as an interpolation (juxtaposition clash) between the previous “Comfort Ye’ my
People” foxtrot (Chimeric Section 1) and its return at m. 13 (Chimeric Section 2), with the King
rhythmically reciting the text, bawling into the cupped hand as a megaphone, and clashing with
the accompaniment by the piano, violin, and percussion. After sixteen measures (m. 33), a
distortion of gradually added clusters appears in the left-hand piano pattern (Example 4.2.8).
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A constant eighth-note pattern follows, yet another distortion of Handel’s piece, still
keeping the harmony and melody evident while continuing to clash against the King’s deranged
singing (Chimeric Section 3). This new distortion of “Comfort Ye’” then progressively
transforms into clusters, which creates another small trajectory (Example 4.2.9).
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Example 4.2.9. Maxwell Davies, “Country Dance,” mm. 36-40, distortion nested within clash
and small trajectory
Finally, Chimeric Section 4 begins with a very sparse environment formed by percussion sounds.
the King’s last words in a cadential melodic pattern (Example 4.2.10). This is tailed by a short
non-tonal section at the end, representing the death of the King. Example 4.2.11 shows the
Example 4.2.11. Hybridity plan graph of Maxwell Davies’s “Country Dance,” from Eight Songs
for a Mad King
mental health, and difference. Madness as a framework for Maxwell Davies’ hybridity differs
from Schnittke’s personal pursuit of a unified style. The axes of signification suggested here are
“intentional/organic and non-intentional” and “parody and pastiche.” The character (King
George III) “on display” with a monologue creates a dual perspective of agency (or lack thereof):
there is hybrid intentionality in Maxwell Davies’s composition, of course, but the character’s
expressions of hybridity are unintentional. They are representations of a lack of control. This
ambiguity between the uncontrolled character and the controlling composer becomes then an
plurality of associations, but in the specific choice of references and the ways he combines the
disparate material. The chimeric environments in the two songs, for the most part, make no
attempts to unify styles and genres, but rather show the ruptured boundaries as a sign of the
King’s madness, emphasizing their gaps as mistake or misreading. Maxwell Davies resists the
notion of madness “as something at which to laugh and jeer” (Maxwell Davies 2005, 3). The
alterity and difference. A superficial rendering would associate concepts of sanity, control,
and pureness with stable music environments, while mixed musical contexts signify madness,
lack of control (and uncontrolled emotional state), and hybridity. The subtlety here lies in going
beyond the idea of “hybridity as chaos,” common in much essentialist and organicist music
analysis, and that emphasizes it hybridity as simple lack of organization. Rather, this is a
complex process—an irregular, non-linear one—of maddening. The strategies in the work
support this latter interpretation, which echo the composer’s stated intention of “throwing
grotesque and distorted shadows from them, giving the musical ‘objects’ an unexpected and
distorted eighteenth-century suite. The dances offer associations with a fading court life, even
though the King cannot notice. This blurred perspective of reality is depicted in the local
distortions and overlaps, which sound like mistakes, not like unified disparate styles. The King’s
“singing,” filled with shouts and noises, links the mistakes directly to the character’s mental
health. There are no attempts to show connections between contrasting material in the song, with
the exception of Courante’s trajectory. Rather than integrating one style (eighteenth-century
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dance) into another (non-tonal style field), or filling in the gap between them, this a trajectory
moves into mayhem and confusion, a depiction of loss of control inside the King’s head and his
surroundings.
The distortions in “Country Dance (Scotch Bonnett),” on the other hand, sound nothing
like mistakes, but the stylistic gap is much wider than in “The Phantom Queen.” Here, Maxwell
Davies’ combination of the serious religious reference in Handel’s “Comfort Ye’” and the
foxtrot––a twentieth-century jazz dance––disrupts not only the boundaries between style and
genre, but also popular and concert, and past and present. These referential gaps render this
song’s hybridity more audacious compared to the eighteenth-century suite in the earlier song
“The Phantom Queen,” a characteristic representing the King’s increasingly disturbed mental
state. The anachronistic use of the jazz dance in the depiction of a nineteenth-century character
points to the agency of the composer in creating a sense of misreading. This anachronism has
Puri observes that hybridity also has disempowering effects (2004, 25), in reaction to
people to use cultural representations of power in their favor. Puri claims that some hybridities
have the opposite effect, disempowering the groups colonized (some instances and uses of the
concept of “world music” with capitalist/imperialist intentions come to mind). The relationship
between musical hybridity and madness in Maxwell Davies’ piece depicts a different kind of
disempowerment, but disempowerment nonetheless. In these two songs from Eight Songs for a
Mad King, the weakening of the King’s control over his own mind is at play. While this also
reads as a metaphor for the weakening of royalty and its power asymmetries (thus, the possible
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trope of “hybridity as subversiveness”), the more salient and universal reading points to the
While the connection between musical hybridity expressions and madness has yet to be
widely explored, this example from Maxwell Davies offers opportunities for doing so. The story
of Eight Songs for a Mad King singles out one mind that, in its deterioration unobstructed by the
conventions of normalcy, now runs free between ideas, realities, and different styles and genres.
This depiction of madness does not mock, but in fact humanizes the King through hybrid
music.142 Even if madness and hybridity are concepts of difference, through a careful choice of
mixture strategies Maxwell Davies provides an empathetic look at a King, who, by losing control
Polystylism allows for perhaps the most foregrounded cases of hybridity, with materials and
identities contrasting enough to become themselves the subjects of discourse. However, both
music from the common practice period––especially the Baroque––and recorded popular music
also find in hybridity a means for creativity and communication, as I show throughout the
142
This is not to say that audiences cannot find it humorous, or that the composer would necessarily have a problem
with that reaction.
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previous chapter. In these repertories, mixture strategies tend to either be used more
changes—or they are momentary within a composition. Thus, instead of providing complete
analyses of a single piece, I will group some works and offer a comparative perspective on their
uses of hybridity. First, I will discuss examples from the common practice repertory, in which
programs and national identities orient the mixtures. In section 4.6, I also provide a similar
comparative approach using examples from recorded popular music, with effects, instruments,
I focus the first comparative analysis around two themes: battles and nations. These two
subjects are, in different ways, spaces that afford hybridity in Baroque music. Battle music is, for
the most part, programmatic and––given the peculiar characteristics of its subject––suitable for
mixtures, contrasts, and the dynamic interplay of identities. National identity played an important
role in the Baroque era and the formation of Baroque composers (see discussion in chapter 1).
The notion of mixed taste (goûts réunis)—for François Couperin, the conflation of Italian and
French styles—provided space for hybridities both in musical text and its surrounding context.
Unlike other analyses in this chapter, the approach to identity mixture through the four strategies
will serve as a means for comparison rather than showing measure-level changes. As mentioned
before, this repertory does not always reveal mixture strategies that develop the shape of a
a recurrent theme in the Baroque period, for example, Heinrich Biber’s Battalia à 10 (1673),
discussed earlier, and––in a different way––the fifth piece from Jean-François Dandrieu’s Les
Charactères de la Guerre (1733). The depiction of battles is recurrent enough to grant the genre
label “Battle Music,” and is explored by other composers such as Couperin, Girolamo
Frescobaldi, and William Byrd.143 The subject of war and battle is certainly prone to many levels
of social commentary, even though Alan Brown writes that “Battle music of the Baroque period
is only occasionally linked to recent events. Rather, composers cultivated the genre for its
Dandrieu’s “Deuxième Fanfare – Minuet” mixes the two references in its title through the
coexistence strategy, which lasts for the entire piece. The minuet markers are clearly demarcated
in triple meter, accents on the first and third beats, and the overall form and harmonic plan—a
simple binary with the expected modulation to V at m. 8, even with the insistent D pedal that
connotes a fanfare. The fanfare also appears prominently in the rhythmic figure of the bass, as
well as in upper lines in thirds (Example 4.3.1). We might compare the coexistence in
Dandrieu’s piece with Biber’s harsh clashes in the Battalia, discussed in chapter 3. Dandrieu’s
programmatic reasons for mixing a minuet and a fanfare are unclear; the sonic result is
“ballroom fanfare,” thus one of the “characters of war” might relate to a connection with the
court. The imitation in the inner voices evokes the learned style, a topic relating to the church
143
Couperin’s La Triomphante, Frescobaldi’s Cappriccio sopra la battaglia, and Byrd’s The Battell are examples of
battle music without clearly foregrounded hybridity as discussed here.
144
Grove Music Online, s.v. "Battle music," by Alan Brown, Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press
accessed June 16, 2017), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/subscriber/article/
grove/music/02318.
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and sacred music. Hybridity then is not used here to depict a story per se, but, as in many other
later cases, potentially adds tinges of social commentary by conflating disparate identities. Even
though both fanfare and minuet are eighteenth-century topics, they work less as an importation to
an established environment and more like a chimeric compound identity in themselves. While
topic theory engages with the sociocultural signification of these conventions when mixed, a
Sixty years separate the overlap clashes in songs of Biber’s Battalia (1673) and the
smooth coexistence between minuet and fanfare in Dandrieu’s Les Caractères de la Guerre
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(1733). The subject of these pieces facilitates the use of hybridity, even though in many other
instances of battle music around the same time, mixtures are not used as prominently as in these
two examples. Furthermore, despite being part of the “long eighteenth century,” the distinct
environments of Biber and Dandrieu influence what strategy for hybridity might best fit (and
choice of subject, of course). Biber’s piece is more prominently programmatic, in the sense that
noises and scenes of war are depicted more literally. Dandrieu, on the other hand, avoids
clashing the two contrasting identities, and instead prefers their conciliation, keeping the musical
notion of mixed taste or goûts réunis, which is especially clear in the music of Couperin,
Telemann, and, in a more integrated manner, in J. S. Bach. For instance, two of the pieces
discussed in the previous chapters—Bach’s Sonata for Viola da Gamba BWV 1029 (1720) and J.
J. Fux’s Aria (1701)—mixed national identities in coexistence, as the notion of mixed taste
would imply. However, Bach’s iteration of the mixture between the Italian Adagio and French
Sarabande, despite having foregrounded elements of both identities, creates a much more
cohesive compound. (As a reminder, Dreyfus dedicates an entire chapter of his 1996 book to
disentangle the two genres, which evoke national styles). Fux, on the other hand, already makes
the mixture clear in his title—“Aria Italiana-Aire Françoise”—and separates the instruments with
distinct meters, rhythmic profiles, and ornamentations.145 Both Fux’s and Bach’s works are
145
See the section on Coexistence in chapter 3, for a more detailed discussion.
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examples of coexistence, but differ in their level of foregrounding the strategy. These differences
also affect the interpretation of coexistence as innovation and creativity, or as homage and utopia
of unification.
Couperin engaged with national identities in many of his compositions, but only created
Couperin’s use of coexistence as homage or utopia rather than a means for innovation of
personal style. In Les Goûts-Réunis ou L’Apotheose de Corelli (1724) and L’Apothéose de Lully
(1725), as programmatic means, the composer uses Corelli and Lully to personify two national
identities (Italian and French), cultures, and their identifying musical characteristics. In the
Italian and French styles have for a long time (in France) shared the Republic of
Music; for my part, I have always esteemed those things which have merit,
without distinction of author or nation; and the first Italian sonatas which
appeared in Paris more than thirty years ago, and which afterwards encouraged
me to compose some, did no disservice to my mind, either to the works of Lully
or to those of my forebears, who will always be as admirable as they are
inimitable. Thus, by the right which my neutrality confers on me, I always sail
under the favourable auspices that have guided me up to the present. Italian music
having the right of seniority over ours, there will be found at the end of this
volume a grand Trio Sonata entitled The Apotheosis of Corelli. A little flash of
self-esteem made me publish it in score.146
In L’Apothéose de Lully, a similar programmatic work published a year later (1725), the
fictional “Apollo persuades Lully and Corelli that the bringing together of French and Italian
styles must create musical perfection.”147 Couperin’s aim with any mixtures of the two national
styles is to achieve musical perfection. I will base this analysis of hybridity on Tunley (2004, 89-
93), who writes that “[a]s well as giving us some of Couperin’s most attractive pages,
146
Quoted and translated in Tunley 2004, 143.
147
This is the subtitle of the ninth movement—“Essai in form d’Overture”—translated by Tunley (2004, 89).
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L’Apothéose de Lully provides a witty commentary in music on the two main national styles of
the day, the significance of the subtly allusive writing no doubt being clear to Couperin’s
contemporaries” (2004, 89, my emphasis). Tunley thus reads (and I agree) the foregrounding of
While the first movements of the composition are solely in the French style, the ninth,
“Essai en forme d’Overture,” presents the mixed taste in juxtaposition (Example 4.3.2).
Importantly, the juxtaposition implies no harsh contrast, but instead creates a cohesive and
unified piece. The subtitle explains the program, and emphasizes the smooth coexistence, the
“bringing together,” of the nationalities in the movement. As in Fux’s Concentus, the national
identities in the “Essai” are emphasized through characteristic articulations and ornamentations
of each style, although difficult to perceive aurally. The two melodic lines are mostly the same,
but one is “played” by Lully and his French muses, while Corelli and his Italian muses
“perform” the other. The audibly perceptible hybridity occurs in juxtaposition, akin to Bach’s
combination of styles in BWV 1029: the first half of Couperin’s piece reads as French, and the
second, a faster Italian style, is reminiscent of an Italian Baroque sonata (Example 4.3.3). As
So, in the Essai we find Lully’s style in evidence in the opening section, and
Corelli’s in the second; as a compliment to each other both composers and their
Muses play very largely in unison, as though to show that each is capable of
playing like the other. Thus, the first section having paid tribute to the originator
of the form, the second offers homage to Corelli and the Italian sonata style.
(Tunley 2004, 90-92)
Example 4.3.2. Beginning measures from the first section of Couperin’s “Essai en Forme
d’Ouverture,” ninth movement from L’Apothèose de Lully
Example 4.3.3. Beginning measures from the second section of Couperin’s “Essai en
Forme d’Ouverture”
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The two styles are more distinct in the tenth movement, now a superposition of the two
contrasting references, which are more clearly presented in the musical structure. First, the
fictional Lully plays the melody of an aria, with Corelli accompanying; this is followed by the
reverse: Corelli takes the lead and Lully provides the accompaniment. Tunley describes the
movement and the interaction between the two styles, which I marked in Example 4.3.5:
The music is a duet (without continuo) between Lully and Corelli. The
Frenchman leads off with a terse fugue-like subject and, as though bowing in
response to this most tactful opening gambit, Corelli replies with the same. The
courtesies having been observed, Lully’s theme dissolves into a sweet and
flowing melody adorned with coulades—typically French ornaments that add
smoothness to expressiveness—while Corelli develops the sonata-style opening
into an accompaniment largely made up of arpeggios and almost wholly devoid of
ornamentation. It is only in the second half of this air that Lully adjusts his style
to catch the Italian spirit of his partner. The roles of melodist and accompanist are
then reversed in the second air, and the key now being minor, Corelli can exploit
something of the famous Italian pathos, this reaching its peak four bars from the
end in a poignant chromatic chord––the so-called Neapolitan sixth. These two
short airs thus present a microcosm of the two different worlds of French and
Italian styles, sometimes juxtaposed, sometimes united in Couperin’s works.
(Tunley 2004, 90-92)
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Example 4.3.5. The two airs that form the tenth movement from Couperin’s
L’Apothèose de Lully
Even if in a smooth coexistence, Couperin’s “subtly allusive writing” (Tunley 2004, 89) might
easily be apprehended in the context it was composed. The hybridity is there, even if for our
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148
twenty-first-century ears (and eyes) it seems more veiled. This is especially the case if one
compares this hybridity with the more extremely foregrounded cases of the post-1960s. Given
the context and motivations for this specific hybridity in Couperin’s pieces, the interpretation
regarding its mixture strategies, and the differences in their coexistence, validates Tunley’s
perspective when he says that this “is thus not a work in imitation, but a work in homage” (2004,
94).
A superficial comparison of the different iterations of mixed taste in Bach, Fux, and
Couperin through the lenses of mixture strategies might simply reveal the use of coexistence in
these composers’ combinations of national identities. This is an important first step in better
understanding musical hybridity; but within this same strategy, the nuances of its realization
substantially inform the composers’ unique motivations and contexts, enhancing our engagement
with these works. Couperin makes his intentions quite clear in his preface, and uses coexistence
accordingly. While clearly labeling the different identities musically, his characteristics remain
too mild to create harsh hybridity—an integrative trait that underlies the coexistence strategy.
The composer explains that his attempt to write in both the Italian and French styles “did no
148
About the visual aspects of the score, Tunley writes that “[a]lthough having no impact on the actual sound, in the
original score Couperin visually reinforces the stylistic differences by writing Lully’s part (and that of his Muses)
using the French violin clef––a kind of ‘in-joke’ for the performers. . . . Convinced by this demonstration, all the
musicians are called upon to execute a splendid finale, described, of course, by the newly-coined term Sonade en
trio, in which French and Italian styles join together to confirm Apollo’s declaration that musical perfection will be
achieved through their union” (Tunley 2004, 93). The same can be said about the b2 of the Neapolitan sixth chord in
the second air, occurring only on Corelli’s line (see Example 4.3.5)—the chord is in the combination of both lines,
but the care in choosing which composer takes the b2 is, as Tunley says, an “in-joke.”
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disservice to [his] mind” and asserting his “neutrality.” This justification also points toward a
political discourse, even if not foregrounded. Fux’s Aria and its “national coexistence” is
interpreted along the same lines of Couperin’s smooth references. On the other hand, Bach’s
coexistence in the Sonata for Viola da Gamba (BWV 1029) is a more veiled mixture, only
clearly perceptible when one untangles the many frictions that characterize the piece, as Dreyfus
(1996)—even if slightly at odds with my reading—did in his thorough analysis. Bach uses
coexistence for innovation and the development of personal style; Fux and Couperin use the
same strategy for its conciliatory possibilities. Finally, a different take on the distinct shades of
coexistence is afforded by each composer’s national identity. The most clearly utopian
conciliation is provided by the Frenchman Couperin—thus, one of the national identities in the
mixture is his own. For Bach, on the other hand, there is the third, German identity, which might
serve as an explanation for the more veiled and creative use of the coexistence strategy. Again,
the conflation of identities, styles, nations, and strategies in hybridity afford nuanced
problem of familiarity and the recognition of contrasting materials used in polystylistic pieces.
The composer uses slightly altered, but fairly clear, quotations from two composers: an
embellished suspension cadence from Lasso’s Stabat Mater (mm. 7-8 to G and 17-18 to D, both
from the second piece of the setting), and the dissonant motive from Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue.
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After the Beethoven quote, Schnittke transposes that material to D, creating yet another
reference, now to the DSCH motive—an homage to Dimitri Shostakovich. This entire network
of references appears in the first eight measures of Schnittke’s first movement, and serves as
both a compositional and listening guide, establishing the materials developed throughout the
piece. Schnittke even references the titles of the pieces and composers by name in the published
At r.m. 1 (m. 9), Schnittke provides a sample of what will occur throughout the entire
quartet: he takes Lasso’s G cadence and distorts it with unexpected dissonances (Example 4.4.2).
149
Schnittke, Alfred. String Quartet no. 3. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1983.
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With the reference established a few measures earlier, the distortion strategy becomes clear; even
without the score to view the Lasso reference, the cadential pattern still creates a strong
association with tonal and pre-tonal idioms, a style field distant from Schnittke’s non-tonal
manipulations of the material. This distortion is followed by his original material from mm. 11 to
23, which includes what I will refer to as the “Schnittke motive” at mm. 15-16.
Example 4.4.2. Schnittke, String Quartet no. 3, I, r.m. 1 (m. 9), distortion and Schnittke motive
At r.m. 2 (m. 17), the four strings outline a C-minor chord, beginning a small trajectory
(Stage 1), through a chromatic wedge that gradually accelerates at m. 19 (Stage 2), arriving at a
cluster (mm. 20 and 21). The C-minor chord and cluster act as opposing synecdoches of tonal
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and non-tonal style fields, respectively. The cluster serves both as Stage 3 at m. 20 and Stage 1
for a new trajectory at m. 21, which quickly reaches a D unison at m. 23, and connects with the
tonal style field. All instruments then play a distorted “Lasso cadence” separated by a half-step
Example 4.4.3. Schnittke, String Quartet no. 3, I, r.m. 2 (m. 17), trajectories and
distortion
Rehearsal mark 3 (m. 27) begins with new mixolydian material, influenced by Lasso’s
music, and strongly resembling mm. 22-24 of the cadence quoted at the beginning of the quartet.
Besides the association with the melodic line, the canonic technique at the unison that develops
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the section is an additional reference to the style; however, Schnittke allows for more
dissonances than the original, creating a slight distortion emphasized by the sul tasto sonority of
the excerpt (Example 4.4.4). The canon ends on an embellished suspension cadence, first on D
(m. 32 and 33), and then on G (mm. 35 and 36). Schnittke uses the same canon technique at r.m.
4 (m. 36), but now a distortion on different starting pitches (G, D, A, and E) produces more
dissonance (Example 4.4.5). Back to back, these two canons create a hint of trajectory from a
“modal” to a cluster environment, which occurs with more distortion in the repetition of the
contrapuntal process with similar material. When the second canon concludes, the texture
Example 4.4.4. Schnittke, String Quartet no. 3, I, r.m. 3 (m. 27), beginning of first canon creating
distortion
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Example 4.4.5. Schnittke, String Quartet no. 3, I, r.m. 4 (m. 36), beginning of second canon
creating distortion
Still a third distortion by canon appears at r.m. 5 (m. 48), now with Beethoven’s motive,
which leads to a cluster accompaniment at m. 54 (Example 4.4.6). On top of this new cluster
environment, Violin 1 plays variations on the Schnittke motive, and ends at m. 64 with a
juxtaposition clash of the Lasso cadence in an extreme high register (Example 4.4.7).
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Example 4.4.6. Schnittke, String Quartet no. 3, I, r.m 5 (m. 48), distortion of Beethoven
motive through another canon
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Similar blocks of material and processes recur at r.m. 6 (m. 65), where a return of the
“Schnittke motive” appears over clusters, followed by a weak reference to Beethoven’s theme in
Violin 1, with cluster accompaniment. The last measures of the movement are built from another
canon of the mixolydian melody, beginning on Db, G, and D every quarter note (r.m. 8, m. 73),
creating an even more distorted reference to Lasso (Example 4.4.8). Overall, a weak hint at a
large-level trajectory emerges in these canonic environments, one that takes us through a
Example 4.4.8. Schnittke, String Quartet no. 3, I, r.m. 8 (m. 73), distorted Lasso
Movement I of the quartet uses at least three different style fields: (1) Schnittke’s cluster
environments, chromatic/non-tonal lines, extreme registers, and constant trills; (2) a reference to
Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue via its characteristc motive and the imitations/canons used
throughout the music; and (3) Lasso’s Stabat Mater (and pre-tonal idiom) expressed in the
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embellished suspension cadential pattern, mixolydian material, and canons. Several alignments
appear among the characteristics of these different styles. First, the chromaticism in Beethoven’s
theme aligns with Schnittke’s melodic style. Second, Schnittke’s canonic technique echoes its
use both by Beethoven (in the fugue’s imitations) and Lasso’s Stabat Mater, suggesting another
coexistence. The reference to Shostakovich’s name at the beginning of the movement, which
could be a fourth style field, serves as a general homage, and always implied in Beethoven’s
motive, one a transposition of the other—thus one could view an additional contextual
A good overview of these hybrid process and manipulation of previously quoted material
(1977), the composer distorts a military/hunt topic through repetition and pitch deflection (an
out-of-tune effect). The rounded binary uses specific expectations of that form as a backdrop.
The A section (mm. 1-8) is stable, with the hunt/military topic being presented over a I–IV–V–I
The contrasting middle (m. 9) uses a fragment of the A section material and begins a
sequence with secondary dominants. But it widely deviates from G major with an ascending
major-second pattern: V/E, V/F#, and V/Ab. The key of Ab major is established for five
measures through repetition of a V–I motive, although distorted because of the uneven
repetitions, creating a stuttering effect (Example 4.5.2). After a few measures of this Ab major
stuttering, the pattern returns to G major, but the resolution (mm. 15-16) is deflected by the
sforzando chord in a higher register, still on an Ab triad, forming another distortion of the
pitch/harmonic layer. The stuttering continues with the distorted resolution until m. 21, where the
A section material is fully recapitulated, now in Eb major. We might read hybridity not only in
the invocation of a different style, but also in the altering of important features and expectations
of a stable style. In this case, phrase structure is distorted through “stuttering,” and the tonal
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organization is altered using “wrong note” chords. These specific aspects of distortion-based
hybridity might be interpreted as a parody of the material and styles being manipulated.
activity, if we assume that more hybridity equals more tension. There is no mixture in the A
section, a considerable increase of tension through distortion in the contrasting B section (along
with the typical chromaticism of the sequence material), and then release of that tension with the
return of the A material, which now lacks mixture. Example 4.5.3 shows the piece’s hybridity
Much of my discussion throughout this study has dealt with parameters related to pitch or
rhythm. Associations with styles, genres, and other fields of signification can indeed be triggered
150
Meyer (1989, 14-15) called “primary” the statistical, or syntactical musical parameters, reserving the problematic
term “secondary” for the non-statistical, non-syntactical ones. He writes: “[b]ecause of the nature of the
perceptual/cognitive capacities of the human nervous system, some of the material means of music can be readily
segmented in constant, nonuniform, proportional ways. In most musics of the world, this is the case with those
parameters that result from the organization of, and interaction between, pitches and duration: melody, rhythm, and
harmony. When the relationships within such a parameter are governed by syntactic constraints, the parameter will
be called primary. The material means of other parameters cannot be readily segmented into proportional
relationships. There is, for instance, no relationship in the realm of dynamics that correspond to a minor third or a
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parameters also function as markers of styles and genres in musical hybridity. In fact, some cases
discussed in the previous chapters highlighted the use of instrumentation, timbre, texture,
articulation, and studio effects and techniques to evoke musical identity. From the 1950s
onwards, samples of other musics served as quite literal triggers of associations. The
development of hip-hop and mashups was, to different degrees, based on sampling. Recorded
popular music, having a considerable part of its creative production inside the studio with
possibilities of multi-tracking and overdubbing, recurrently uses these dimensions, as well as the
recorded “space” of the track, to add potential layers of signification. In the present study, no
parameters. Regardless of how identities are triggered, listeners may use them as cues for various
associations. In the following comparative analyses, I will focus on different popular music
repertories that use non-statistical parameters, as well as statistical ones, to create mixtures.
Daft Punk’s Digital Love. Bowie’s piece exemplified both clash and trajectory in recorded
popular music, mixing statistical and non-statistical parameters. “Digital Love” contained
through the two pieces more thoroughly, and provide a hybridity plan graph for both. Their
dotted rhythm. And the same is true of tempo, sonority, timbre. . . . It is then the presence of syntactic constraints
that distinguishes primary from secondary parameters. . . . Secondary parameters tend to be described in terms of
amount rather than in terms of classlike relationships . . . as the primary parameters are.”
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comparison—now that all four mixture strategies are explained—will allow us to reflect upon
viewpoints.
Bowie’s “Changes” creates contrasts between two disparate stylistic and generic
references: an orchestral jazz environment, and boogie-woogie or rock/blues.151 These two stable
environments can be clearly heard, one after the other, at 0:00–0:10 and 0:11–0:21, respectively.
The two stylistic fields are triggered by several different markers: the orchestral jazz section is
established by the instrumentation and melodic and harmonic content, as well as Bowie’s mellow
vocal timbre and austere delivery.152 The rock/blues environment changes all of these aspects,
including the vocals, which acquire a harsher timbre and delivery. Their abrupt juxtaposition at
the beginning of the track highlights the stylistic and generic gap that can influence the
interpretation of the song and its lyrics about growing up and changing. This gap (Example
4.6.1) between the two genres and specific categories surrounding them, the generic fields, evoke
many potential associations, which, when abruptly juxtaposed, become more marked: 1920s or
1950s, old or young, slow- or fast-paced, very different levels of connection with concert music
and the Western European tradition, and elegant or raw, for example.153
151
The album Hunky Dory, which includes “Changes,” was co-produced by Bowie and Ken Scott.
152
This orchestral sound could very well be considered a pop orchestra, but the harmony on the piano makes me
choose the jazz reference.
153
This visualization of the generic gap is taken from Glenn McDonald’s Every Noise at Once (accessed June 19,
2017) everynoise.com, which, as mentioned before, uses Spotify’s algorithms to map these categories. This is only
one possibility of visualization.
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The chorus, even though empty of any boogie-woogie patterns, relates to the former
environment at 0:11–0:21 due to its similar instrumentation. It now emphasizes the rock
characteristics, part of the second general style field in the track. The gradual increase in volume
of the drums and electric bass (rock-and-roll markers) feature significantly in the arrival of the
chorus. Instead of a clash, a trajectory is realized through this gradual volume build-up (0:58–
1:11), which is emphasized by the ascending line in the strings that precedes it (0:55–0:57).154
The chorus also features backing vocals—all performed by Bowie—that create a compound
persona (or a hint at a community), in contrast with the single vocal during the jazz orchestra
section. At 2:29, the bridge in between the last choruses retains the rock-and-roll style field, but
the string ensemble—a marker of the jazz orchestra environment—joins in a conciliatory effort
through coexistence, bridging the evoked gap for the first and only time. The track ends with a
sax solo over the orchestra and piano texture (3:15), with no vocals, denoting an absence (or
154
The ascending string line can be understood as an analogy of the trajectory in the pitch realm.
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disappearance of the persona from that environment). The hybridity plan graph in Example 4.6.2
illustrates the details of these processes in Bowie’s (and the co-producer Ken Scott’s) 1971 track.
In Daft Punk’s example, the stylistic gap is created, highlighted, and bridged differently
from the Bowie example. “Digital Love,” produced thirty years after the volume trajectory and
turn of the century to construct different hybridities. In this work, as I pointed out in chapter 3,
one finds a manipulated sample from the introduction to George Duke’s “I Love You More,” and
a timbral reference to the rock band Supertramp (through the use of the same Wurlitzer keyboard
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model they used in the bridge), combined with the French duo’s EDM/House characteristics, the
latter of which creates the host style for the other disparate elements mixed in. Duke’s sample is
manipulated through a frequency filter and other added electronic sounds doubling the original
lines. These create a coexistence of EDM and Duke (attached to Funk/R&B/Disco), as well as a
distortion of the recognizable quotation from “I Love You More.” This coexistence is apparent
from 0:07–0:23, when the distortion of the sample and coexistence with EDM materials first
appears. In addition, a trajectory forms via volume increase of the sampled material and
alteration of the filter used on it. The sample serves as the background for the verses (0:23–1:08)
and chorus (1:09–1-35), joined by a synth pad, electronic beats, and an original vocal melody
with vocoder. At the repetition of the chorus (1:29) the insertion of a trumpet phrase contrasts
with the other style markers in the track, which is vaguely reminiscent of Baroque music (the
arpeggiation is similar to the theme from J. S. Bach’s Invention no. 8 in F major, with scale
degrees 1-3-1-5-1-8). At 2:45, the Wurlitzer keyboard appears abruptly, starting a trajectory that
gradually adds material toward a triple coexistence of rock (Supertramp), EDM/House, and
a synth pad and the filtered Duke sample create another trajectory, the sample gradually
fields combine creatively on “Digital Love,” using the four mixture strategies discussed in this
study. The disposition and attributes of these combinations—depicted on the hybridity plan
graph shown in Example 4.6.3—in and of themselves, suggest a communicational layer of the
composition.
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Daft Punk approaches the idealized gaps between these musical categories in a different manner
—specifically in the use of sampling and distortion through studio techniques—if compared with
Bowie’s “Changes.” In the latter, more opposition appears between disparate categories, which
are kept more separate. In Daft Punk’s track, integration becomes prominent, even with some
well-established identities, as with the Duke sample. These elements are tangled into a complex
compound within Daft Punk’s sonority, the predominant identity, which could just as easily (and
In mid-2016, unsurprisingly, another YouTube video went viral. In the video, NYU
student Maggie Rogers participates––along with other aspiring artists––in a masterclass with
music producer and songwriter Pharrell Williams. The viral fragment begins with a nervous
I grew up in a very rural area, in the eastern shore of Maryland, and I grew up as a
banjo player; and always made folk music, and love being outside. And that’s my
space (. . .) All I wanna do is, like, kind of combine that folk imagery and
harmony, and natural samples that I have been picking up while hiking over the
last couple of years, with that sort of backbone and energy of dance music.155
Next, they listen to “Alaska,” composed by the student. In a New Yorker article about the
Rogers wears her long blond hair loose. She is dressed in worn jeans, woollen
socks, and a plain black shirt; elk vertebrae hang on a string around her neck.
There is something elemental about her presence that feels at odds with the
metallic studio equipment gleaming in the background. When Rogers’s song
starts to play, Williams is visibly affected. The beat is skeletal and twinkling. In
the pulsing pre-chorus, Rogers’s voice leaps an octave and thins out, like a candle
flame stretching for more oxygen. As the chorus begins, Williams scrunches his
face, as if someone had told him something ridiculous. Because the class is being
filmed, there’s an inevitable element of performance to their reactions, but his
incredulousness and her nervousness—she appears deeply uncertain of where to
direct her gaze—feel true. They sneak anxious looks at each other. Williams
periodically shakes his head in disbelief. “I’ve never heard anyone like you
before,” he says when it’s over. “That’s a drug for me.”156
“Alaska” mixes many stylistic references through distinct means (Example 4.6.5). The
first twenty-five seconds, including introduction and verse, bring low hip-hop bass and bass
drums, mellow finger snaps, an ethereal synthesizer (with a catchy, repetitive riff), Rogers’ folk-
155
iamOTHER, “Pharrell Williams Masterclass with Students at NYU Clive Davis Institute,” 2016 (accessed June
20, 2017). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0u7lXy7pDg. Transcription of selected dialog from 18:36 to 19:59.
156
Amanda Petrusich, “Maggie Rogers, An Artist of Her Time,” The New Yorker (accessed June 25, 2017),
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/maggie-rogers-an-artist-of-her-time. All quotes from Petrusich
come from this article.
315
like vocal melody sung in a slurred, laid-back manner, along with samples from conversations.157
The pre-chorus (0:26–0:45) maintains all the previous elements, but adds a more constant bass in
eighth-notes. The chorus (0:46–1:22) arrives to only partly fulfill the expectations of more active
subdivisions of the beat. The bass and bass drum become more persistent, and hint at a more
danceable environment, even though still restrained. The most palpable change in the chorus is
articulated by Rogers’ voice: the melody moves to a higher octave, and she sings with a more
“airy” timbre, reminiscent of pop divas and R&B. The second half of the chorus (1:04–1:22)
adds a snare drum and sparse hi-hat to the mix, and provides the most danceable feel in the track
so far.
music, is established, the second verse (1:23–1:40), already starting with a “four-on-the-floor”
bass drum, leaves space in the sound box for more elements to join. The ensuing pre-chorus
(1:41–2:00) brings even more constant snare and hi-hat to the beat—and the stylistic trajectory
appears to repeat, albeit departing from a more advanced stage indicated by the ever-increasing
dance music elements and attributes (see Example 4.6.4 for an opposition matrix depicting these
two trajectories). This process of accumulation culminates in the second chorus (2:00-2:54), with
its more crowded sound box, which, beyond a more complete beat, adds other synthesizers and
sustained guitar chords. At this stage, there is no question as to whether this is music for the
dance floor, even with the many elements mixed into its development. The track ends with a
brief return to the introduction material (2:55–3:06), as if to remind us where it came from. The
157
According to Petrusich (2017), “Rogers deploys several original samples, drawn from recordings of a mourning
dove, found conversations from a marketplace in Morocco, finger snaps, and the patting of her own thighs through
her jeans.”
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finger snaps, as in the beginning, bring organic and introspective qualities that could perhaps
oppose the EDM chorus; however, they seem more to address the gap just bridged—from grass
Petrusich also discusses the manner in which the diverse influences are mixed in
“Alaska,” writing that “most of its borrowing is less explicit. Hip-hop, folk, dance, rhythm and
blues, gospel: they’re all here. Some of these traditions have been crossbred before. . . . But
‘Now That the Light Is Fading’ [Roger’s 2017 album that contains the song] is being released
into a culture that no longer thinks the organic and the synthesized are in opposition. All our
musical planes are lateral; all our inspiration is ambient” (Petrusich 2017, my emphasis). When
the audience corroborates the impermeability of these boundaries, such oppositions, commonly
used to expand specific styles, can only have innovative effect via clash strategy. When “the
musical planes are lateral,” as Petrusich writes, it is the particular means of integration that
counts. In organic and synthesized, dance music and folk music, or any other opposed categories
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used to confine specific creative fields, the communication of hybridity has become
progressively more important at the processual level, whether combined through conspicuous
“Alaska” this process occurs through coexistence and trajectory, a subtle use of mixture
strategies also a characteristic of Alabama Shakes’ “Sound and Color” (2015; see chapter 3)—
another hybrid that exhibits the same “lateral musical planes” of today’s popular music, and
A mix of statistical and non-statistical features establish the hybrid identity of “Alaska,” a
work which, partly for not being easily labeled, is praised as innovative and unique by critics.
But it is not only the diversity of elements mixed that affords this perspective—the subtlety of
means for their combination and disposition also influences this reading. In “Alaska,” no
apparent intention to shock is suggested by mixing electronic and folk music. The song reads not
considering their permeability and “laterality” to find means of expression. Disentangling these
layers of influence and reference is complicated, and, perhaps, one of the reasons behind the
astonishment and excitement that Pharrell (a seasoned producer) expresses in the video.
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Petrusich also mentions this broader characteristic of contemporary music consumption: “[w]hen an immense
library of songs can be tucked into your pants pocket, the spirit of the past is always close. It is how that influence
manifests that is changing” (Petrusich 2017).
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4.7 THOMAS ADÈS, MAZURKAS, OP. 27, FIRST MAZURKA
In chapter 3 I briefly examined Adès’s “First Mazurka,” from Mazurkas, op. 27 (2009),
an example of coexistence strategy. Here, I analyze the piece more deeply, detailing its use of
coexistence, distortion, and clash strategies. The title already creates contextual expectations,
fulfilled by musical characteristics that allude to the mazurka genre (or generic field, rather): the
triple meter underlying most of the piece, the bass line reinforcing the downbeat, the rubato feel,
and the arpeggiations, recurrent in the piece. Whether or not this mazurka strictly follows the
“rules” of the genre is less important than that these musical features indicate expectations of an
They create a background against which to listen to the actual music and perceive its alterations,
deviations, additions, and combinations. These mixtures rely on the listener’s awareness and
conceptual understanding of the specific genres and styles in use, and are actualized only when
this familiarity is triggered. Hence, the present analytical framework is dynamic and subjective
in the sense that it implies the contrast between generic fields I have perceived, and could change
The first sixteen measures of “First Mazurka” are divided into four-measure chunks,
articulated by the varied repetition of the motive in the right hand along with an A–F bass, each
lasting two measures (Example 4.7.1). This even-numbered subdivision reinforces the dance-like
characteristics implied by the title. Furthermore, the first eight measures form a larger unit
because of the continuity of the A–F bass. These aspects alone do not imply mixture, but there is
a contrast in the use of non-tonal sonorities against a tonal genre. That is, the mazurka genre is
distorted by a selection of pitches at odds with its harmonic model. The opening measure’s
harmony could be interpreted as a first-inversion F7/13 chord but, as we move to measure 2, the
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159
added notes mitigate any clear tonal sense. Similar sonorities appear in mm. 3-8 with some
variation.
Example 4.7.1. Adès, “First Mazurka” from Mazurkas, op. 27, mm. 1-16
A closer look at the melody in the right hand brings other possible generic oppositions
that help disentangle Adès’s amalgam. The melodic pattern has clear traces of an A blues scale—
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Specifically, the descending line Eb-D-C-A-F in the right hand, along with the A bass, provides cues for my
hearing of F7/13.
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A-C-D-Eb-E, changing the G that would complete an A minor pentatonic (with a blue note) for
an F. Also, the trill on D-Eb is a characteristic bended note (adapted to the piano) of the “blue
note” in blues, and the dotted-eighth rhythm resembles the swing feel in blues and jazz (notated
in triplets), but in a more Europeanized manner.160 If these aspects are recognized by the listener,
a wide generic gap is formed by the two styles: mazurka to blues or, more generally, nineteenth-
century triple meter dance to African American popular styles of the twentieth century. Measure
swing feel from the previous measure. The pitch material in the right hand of m. 2, a mixture of a
B-major triad with C, Ab, and G, unsuitable for either mazurkas or blues, vaguely foregrounds a
third generic field—the non-tonal characteristics hinted at above. However, because “non-tonal”
is a diffuse generic field, compared to mazurkas and blues, it serves as a distorting agent more
than a coexisting style in this context. These three generic fields, then, are constantly at play
through coexistence (blues and mazurka) and distortion (mazurka and blues distorted by non-
tonal sonorities). There is no clash between these allusions, but rather an amalgam formed by
Yet another allusion to the blues occurs as a larger level distortion: the change of bass
pattern moves up a perfect fourth, to D–F#, inverting the major third relation of the A–F. This
takes place at m. 9—exactly where the 16-bar blues progression moves from I (after eight
measures) to the IV.161 Adès’s distortion of the progression overrides the expected change at m.
11 (usually a tonic chord in the blues), but articulates the last two changes in the 16-bar blues: m.
160
Thanks to Jennifer Griffith for this insight.
161
The 16-bar blues has several versions. The one that resembles Adès’s composition the most is I-I-I-I/I-I-I-I/IV-
IV-I-I/V-IV-I-V, an example of which is Willie Dixon’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” first recorded by Muddy Waters
in 1954 (accessed July 11, 2016), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoochie_Coochie_Man
322
13 and m. 15, in which the bass line changes, but not to the expected V and I (E and A in the key
of A), respectively. It moves to G and C, the V and I of a different key. All these aspects
illustrate how dense the initial sixteen measures of the “First Mazurka” become once we focus
At the new section, mm. 17-32, a non-tonal distorted march contrasts the previous music
with both its stylistic difference and its musical characteristics: the specific rhythmic patterns,
sudden short gaps in the melody, and faster tempo (Example 4.7.2). No other mixture appears
within the section, only the distortion of march material creating a clash divider from the
Example 4.7.2. Adès, “First Mazurka” from Mazurkas, op. 27, mm. 17-32
At m. 33, with the instruction “Avanti,” Adès returns to the mazurka allusion with a
distorted descending-second sequence in both its whole-step and chromatic versions (Example
4.7.3).
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Example 4.7.3. Adès, “First Mazurka” from Mazurkas, op. 27, mm. 33-52
The reduced analysis in Example 4.7.4 shows the two eight-measure chunks forming the
sequence. The first (mm. 33-40) is a distorted whole-step descending-second sequence beginning
on Ab, moving to Gb and E.162 Along with the bass pattern, a descending chromatic scale in the
right hand is transposed down a major second in sequence every two measures. Most steps of the
sequence present a minor ninth accompanying the bass line instead of triadic harmonies. The
162
This descending-seconds sequence that occurs at every two bass notes is, in other words, a circle of fifths at every
note.
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only exception is the hint of F major over the F bass at m. 38. Despite this local hint at tertian
harmony, the vertical sonorities that rely on the minor 9th distort the sequential bass pattern,
which alludes to the traditional harmonic sequence. After the arrival on E, a double-neighbor
bass note embellishes that step and completes the first 8 measures of the section.
Example 4.7.4. Reduced analysis of the sequences from mm. 33-48 in “First Mazurka”
The second phrase of the distorted sequence begins at m. 41, and descends chromatically
every two measures: Gb-Cb, F-Bb. The melodic material is again based on the descending
chromatic scale, and follows the bass pattern transposition in the first four measures of the
second chunk. The expected E in the bass, continuing the descending seconds transpositions, is
embellished by an Eb at m. 53, and the sequence ends at that point. In the two phrases of this
distorted sequence, one can see how phrase structure, bass, melody, and harmony are in dialogue
with the common cycle of fifths pattern at different levels of compliance (phrase structure, most
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of the bass, and transposition of the melodic pattern remain close to the original model) or
interference (harmony, melody, and some bass notes deviate from the model).
Two measures of march-like material (mm. 49-50) indicate a clash divider, and separate
the sequence from the varied return of the mazurka-blues theme that follows. Measures 51-52
reduce the harshness of the articulation, leading to the last iteration of the theme (mm. 53-60),
which focuses more on the distorted blues melody than the mazurka-blues coexistence. The
accompaniment, which clearly references a traditional mazurka earlier, is idiosyncratic and lacks
the strong downbeat accent of the beginning (Example 4.7.5). But little more than the pentatonic
line is needed to create a sense of return to that previous coexistence environment. This final
section preserves the two-measure modules of the initial idea, and repeats three times, with the
last two measures of the piece serving as a cadential marker by expanding in register and coming
to a sudden halt.
Example 4.7.5. Adès, “First Mazurka” from Mazurkas, op. 27, mm. 53-end
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The following hybridity plan graph (Example 4.7.6) serves as a summary of this analysis,
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To review, the first section (mm. 1-16) of the “First Mazurka,” a chimeric environment
formed by coexistence with nested distortion, mixes mazurka and blues or, more generally,
nineteenth-century salon dance and African American popular music styles. The mazurka
contributes the 3/4 accompaniment pattern and the rubato feel (and at a contextual level, the title
that implies Adès’s overt intention of writing a mazurka). Adès alludes to the blues using the 16-
bar blues progression and a pentatonic melody. Within this coexistence are three nested
distortions: (1) the mazurka accompaniment is altered pitch-wise by the use of, almost
exclusively, non-tonal elements; (2) the blues pentatonic melody is also altered with non-tonal
material, especially in the second measure of the pattern (mm. 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on); and (3) at
certain points (detailed above) Adès changes the harmonies of the traditional 16-bar blues
serving as a more general model. In this analysis we might question whether or not the non-tonal
material used as a distorting agent in all the three distortions is a third generic field in
coexistence with the other two. But the non-tonal idiom gives no clear allusion to a style; rather,
its purpose is to smoothly merge the mazurka with the blues form and melody. The march
section (mm. 17-32) begins with an abrupt juxtaposition, indicating a clash. This march reference
is also distorted by non-tonal material, relying primarily on major and minor seconds along with
a general lack of tonal orientation in the excerpt. Measures 33-48 constitute a chimeric
environment formed by distortion of a staple harmonic sequence of the common practice period.
with the idealized pattern of the descending-seconds sequence (or cycle of fifths). The march
interrupts the sequential environment, functioning as a clash divider. Finally, this passage
smoothly leads to the return of the initial theme, now with no clear allusions to the mazurka,
using only the distorted blues melody and a high-register, sui generis accompaniment.
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4.8 GEORGE ROCHBERG, MUSIC FOR THE MAGIC THEATER, ACT I
Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater, composed in 1965, is a collage work that
precedes Berio’s notorious Sinfonia (1968). Superficial engagements with collage works have
been limited to an indexing of the different materials used and highlighting their mélange in a
very general way. Losada (2004, 2008, 2009) goes into considerably more detail in her analysis
of Rochberg’s piece, and highlights several pitch-related aspects that serve to organize it. She
considers the first movement a “prototypical model of a musical collage” (2009, 299), and
It is composed of numerous successive short segments which are set off from the
surrounding sections either by textural, stylistic or tonal juxtapositions, or by
rests. These sections correspond to fragmentary quotations from a variety of
pieces, with original material by the composer interspersed and superimposed in
newly composed sections which relate to the quoted content in a myriad of ways.
These layers again provide a form of commentary incorporating a broad range of
styles and textures, from freely atonal lyrical passages in the solo flute to strident,
hocket-like passages in the upper woodwinds and brass which, although aggregate
based, are not strictly serial. Likewise, the distinct musical languages of the
incorporated quotations (from Mahler, Mozart and Varèse) contribute to the
formation of an extremely disjunct musical texture. Furthermore, though both
quotations and commentary surface in different guises throughout the piece, the
various recurrences form no distinguishable pattern. (Losada 2009, 299-300)
Losada’s focus on the pitch realm of the composition illuminates several crucial
characteristics of the piece, such as the pitch aggregate of the materials overlapping in the music
that simplify their integration and manipulation by the composer.163 While drawing considerably
on Losada’s efforts, my focus will be on the hybrid processes that take place in this piece with its
There are at least five idealized stable styles used in the Act I of Music for the Magical
Theater: (1) Rochberg’s original music, (2) Mahler’s Symphony no. 9, I and IV (3) Mozart’s
163
This also happens in Schnittke’s quotation of Beethoven in String Quartet no. 3.
331
Divertimento K. 287, I, (4) Varèse’s Déserts, and (5) Miles Davis-style trumpet with Harmon
mute, which also serves as a synecdoche for jazz in general.164 The use of these elements range
from direct quotation to slight allusions, using their key characteristics to compose new material.
Clash and distortion mixture strategies are prominent throughout the movement, as expected in a
staple collage composition, and form eleven different chimeric environments in total.
Coexistence at the motivic level occurs through the use of a descending chromatic line motive
that belongs to Mozart’s Divertimento, Mahler’s Adagio from Symphony no. 9, and Varèse’s
Déserts.
To provide a linear perspective of the movement, the table in Example 4.8.2 shows a
brief description of the materials, labeled by rehearsal mark, along with a description of the
chimeric environments that form the piece. I use a description of the movement in list form as it
thorough description of the chimeric environments must be done in a blow-by-blow fashion; the
piece provides no clear linear narrative that could be used to create a condensed take of its
features. The table format is also better suited as a detailed listening guide, or to elucidate
specific sections that peak the listener’s curiosity in terms of mixtures. Example 4.8.2 is followed
by the annotated scores of ten out of the eleven chimeric environments in the piece (Examples
4.8.3 to 4.8.10).165 First, however, the hybridity plan graph below in Example 4.8.1 more clearly
illustrates the mixtures of the entire movement and its overall structure. In the graph, I chose to
164
There is no mention of Miles Davis until r.m. 51 of Act II, where the cadenza material is “[t]o be played like
Miles Davis—intense, felt, singing.”
165
Chimeric Environment 11 is very similar to the Chimeric Environment 2 in terms of hybridity, so I opted not to
include the score of that excerpt in this analysis, even though I still discuss it in the text.
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divide the movement in three chimeric sections, defined by the type of material used in the
Example 4.8.1. Hybridity plan graph of Rochberg’s Music for the Magic
Theater, Act I
Table 4.8.1. Table of Hybridity in Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater, I
R.M DESCRIPTION OF THE MUSIC CHIMERIC ENVIRONMENTS (C.E.)
The introduction material, which bears Varèse-like characteristics, is followed by widely contrasting string music from Mahler (m. 13 from
Symphony no. 9, IV). The juxtaposition is preceded by brief texture dispersal and 2-3 seconds of silence, making it less harsh than a sudden
change.
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C.E. 1: [COEXISTENCE (Miles Davis/Jazz + Mahler) +
CLASH (Interpolation between strings and trumpet)]
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R.M DESCRIPTION OF THE MUSIC CHIMERIC ENVIRONMENTS (C.E.)
[CLASH DIVIDER (juxtaposition of m. 14 from Mahler and Varèse allusion)]
The clash divider happens when Rochberg changes from a held chord prolonging m. 14 of Mahler’s Adagio into an allusion to Varèse’s
sonority.
r.m. 3 Allusion to Varèse’s Déserts sonority, which prepares a direct
quotation of m. 242 of Déserts. The Varèse fragment also contains a
descending chromatic motive, played by piano and flute in a high
register; this is structurally related to the Mahler excerpt, facilitating
combinations and manipulations of this material.
r.m. 4 A direct quotation of m. 242 of Varèse’s Déserts. This excerpt also
has a descending chromatic motive; from now on, whenever this
idea appears, it has the potential to allude to both composers.
r.m. 5 Descending chromatic line on trombone with long notes on bassoon
and double bass. The motive, which at this point was used in
Mahler’s and Varèse’s quotations, can create associations at the
structural level more than at the stylistic one. This sounds like an
extension of Varèse’s quotation, so no clear mixture occurs.
r.m. 6-7 Material from the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony no. 9. C.E. 2: [DISTORTION (of Mahler’s first movement from
Symphony no. 9, mm. 3-6)]
The cello plays a distortion of melodic material from the
harp in the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony no. 9,
mm. 3-6, overlapping with long notes on trombone and
horns. At r.m. 7, the horn plays mm. 4-5 of Mahler with
more rhythmic freedom, followed by the harp material
again. This chimeric environment is mostly a temporal
distortion of mm. 3-6 from Mahler, with added long notes
on other instruments. The change from Varèse to Mahler
environment is not clearly articulated, so no clash divider
occurs.
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R.M DESCRIPTION OF THE MUSIC CHIMERIC ENVIRONMENTS (C.E.)
r.m. 8-11 Rochberg, influenced by Varèse’s Déserts sonority.
r.m. 12-14 Direct quotation of mm. 6-24 from the first movement of Mozart’s C.E. 3: [DISTORTION (of Mozart’s Divertimento K.
Divertimento. After the first measure of Mozart’s music in Bb 287, mm. 6-24) + CLASH (overlap of non-tonal
major, the dominant chord is prolonged while clarinet and piano sonorities)]
play a string of thirds beginning on Db. Mozart’s material returns
beginning exactly from where it stopped, only now superimposed
by intermittent non-tonal chords in the woodwinds. Rochberg also This chimeric environment is formed overall by a
adds a diatonic ascending scale to m. 24, a cadential moment. quotation of Mozart, overlapped by non-tonal sonorities,
Measure 24 from Mozart also presents the descending chromatic creating a clash through an overlap of distinct layers.
line used by Mahler and Varèse. From this point on, it has potential Additionally, Mozart’s quotation is distorted by the added
to represent a coexistence of the three composers at a contextual thirds and scale runs in the first and last measures of the
level. excerpt (r.m. 12 and 14).
[CLASH DIVIDER (between Mozart material and Rochberg’s music)]
r.m. 15-18 Rochberg’s material. Twelve-tone outbursts on woodwinds, C.E. 4: [CLASH (overlap of the F dominant pedal from
trumpet, and piano, while horns hold the F (the dominant) from the Mozart and 12-tone music) + CLASH (interpolation of a
previous Mozart quotation. At r.m. 17, the horn plays a variation of different texture/style)]
the descending second motive while a cluster is held on cello, brass,
and bassoon. At this point, this material can potentially be Twelve-tone outbursts, overlapping with F dominant
motivically associated with Mahler, Varèse, and Mozart. It serves as pedal, interrupted by the horn motive and then return.
an interpolation between the previous 12-tone environment and its
return at r.m. 18, now with no F pedal from Mozart.
[CLASH DIVIDER (at r.m. 19, descending line on solo piano separates 12-tone outbursts and Mozart material)]
r.m. 19-20 Mozart’s mm. 60-66 on the string orchestra. The piano and tuba
play I–V7 in B major (a tritone above the Mozart). C.E. 5: [DISTORTION (piano chords a tritone above
Mozart quotation of mm. 60-66)]
[CLASH DIVIDER (between distorted Mozart and flute solo)]
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R.M DESCRIPTION OF THE MUSIC CHIMERIC ENVIRONMENTS (C.E.)
r.m. 21-22 Rochberg’s material. Flute solo with 12-tone influence and (012)
trichords.
r.m. 23 The horn plays the pitches from mm. 381-82 of Mahler’s first
movement of Symphony no. 9. The fourth note is prolonged while C.E. 6: [DISTORTION (of Mahler mm. 381-2)]
the flute comments on the motive, creating a temporal distortion of
the quotation before it resumes.
r.m. 24-25 Flute, horn, and bass play a direct quotation from mm. 383-90 of
Mahler’s first movement. This material is accompanied by the rest
of the ensemble holding long and ppp non-tonal sonorities, C.E. 7: [DISTORTION (of Mahler’s mm. 383-390)]
distorting the original material.
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R.M DESCRIPTION OF THE MUSIC CHIMERIC ENVIRONMENTS (C.E.)
piece. At r.m. 31, the harp motive from Mahler’s first movement These Mahler quotations may not always directly
(mm. 3-6) appears in Horn 2, accompanied by a (0148) chord. reference a style or style field, and, as such, do not form a
distortion with the same communicational potential as
others discussed in this chapter. They provide, however, a
second-level association as motives belonging to
Mahler’s piece, which is associated with a style, if
recognized.
[2-3 seconds of silence]
r.m. 32 Varèse-influenced gradual clusters on woodwinds and brass.
r.m. 33 Return of the harp minor-third motive from Mahler’s first C.E. 11: [DISTORTION (of Mahler’s mm. 3-6)]
movement at mm. 3-6 in the horn.
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Example 4.8.2. Chimeric Environment 1 (and CE 1a) from Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater, Act I
339
340
Example 4.8.3. Chimeric Environment 2 from Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater, Act I
Example 4.8.4. Chimeric Environment 3 from Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater, Act I
341
342
Example 4.8.5. Chimeric Environment 4 from Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater, Act I
Example 4.8.6. Chimeric Environment 5 from Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater, Act I
343
Example 4.8.7. Chimeric Environments 6 and 7 from Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater, Act I
344
Example 4.8.8. Chimeric Environments 8 and 9 from Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater, Act I
345
Example 4.8.9. Chimeric Environment 10 from Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater, Act I
346
347
The details of this analysis and of some of Rochberg’s quoted material make
inconspicuous several of the mixtures on the surface. I have described them, in part, for the sake
of completeness, but also to highlight how recognition, familiarity, and background become
perceive all the chimeric environments in this piece, a listener needs not only familiarity with the
quoted pieces, but also access to the scores. Above all, this analysis shows that, despite the
peculiar formal and surface characteristics of each piece in the polystylistic repertory, the entire
The goal of this study was to develop a flexible but consistent analytical framework to
approach the mixture of styles, genres, and other triggers of musical identity, in order to
operationalize music’s patterns of hybridity.166 The choice of the term hybridity—a loaded and
complex term, with a long history of pejorative uses—to indicate these mixtures adds a
sociopolitical layer to any combination of musical categories. I have discussed these categories
primarily through the notions of style and genre, idealized concepts that serve as synecdoches for
many layers of associations, musical or otherwise, and that articulate musical hybridity. In order
to develop an analytical framework for the mixture of styles and genres, I needed first to engage
with both the concept of hybridity itself (chapter 1), and to attempt disentangling complex
perspectives on style and genre (chapter 2). In chapter 3 I presented the actual framework, and
focused on defining and exemplifying chimeric environments and the four mixture strategies that
form them—clash, coexistence, distortion, and trajectory. I included the variable characteristics
of these interpretive tools in this discussion, and demonstrated some interpretive insights
developed with them. Finally, in chapter 4 I showcased the potential of these ideas by applying
The ideas developed in the previous chapters were based on a few important assumptions
that underlie this study: (1) musical hybridity goes beyond the polystylistic repertory from the
1960s and 1970s; (2) the analysis of hybridity should be more than the determination of the
sources mixed, and should also embrace the processes acting upon these sources; (3) there are
166
Nederveen Pieterse (2009, 118) calls attention to the importance of the different patterns of hybridity from a
cultural perspective, listing their many variables.
349
four mixture strategies that may be used to identify and engage with these processes; and (4)
these four strategies are subject to perception, assuming a set of intersubjective agreements from
Another important idea pervading this study is that structural characteristics are
inevitably connected to contextual ones. Thus, hybridity has structural effects, and one cannot
bracket out the musical text or musical technique. In the analyses of musical hybridity in this
study I attempted, as much as possible, to transcend text, context, individual, and communal
perspectives. The examples and analytical insights in chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate the flexibility
of this framework, and indicate how, when clearly operationalized, attention to this level of
musical experience (styles, genres, and their interactions, alterations, and associations) can be
By way of summary and reflection, my conclusion attempts first to answer the questions
composition. These combinations occur in many different ways and with varying prominence of
the identities involved. Any musical characteristic that triggers an identity for a specific, situated
listener can articulate hybridity when it contrasts with another in the same or different
compositional realm. Most often, these identities are connected to, and mediated by, categories
of musical style and genre. Musical hybrids, by having two or more identities triggered in the
same environment, share a discursive space, idealized as being a single, unified entity.
Importantly, this is not restricted to the polystylistic repertory of the post-1960s and 1970s,
350
although that era most clearly foregrounded the expression of hybridity within the concert music
tradition.
knowledge within a community—especially through the notions of styles and genres, common
generalized, even with enough room for variability of interpretations. Given that identity
categories are idealized as bounded entities, the manner in which they interact, or are
upon them or as an autonomous work. I labeled these processes as clash, coexistence, distortion,
and trajectory in this study—as strategies for identity mixtures, each with peculiar characteristics
and significations contingent on their use structurally and contextually. Furthermore, the gap
3 - Is musical hybridity, and the layers of style and genre, analyzable? If so, why analyze
hybridity?
Analyses of hybridity can address both structural and contextual parameters, and, ideally,
will combine both. Essentialist thinking is ingrained in many music theory perspectives for its
generalizing and systematizing ambitions, characteristics that I share to some extent. Using the
351
present framework I have attempted to mitigate this essentialism by engaging with the analytical
layer of style and genre as a parameter—a variable means for musical expression and
interpretation. This parameter affords opportunities to address the dynamic status of boundaries
style and genre occurs, moving beyond their essentialist perspective, these categories may serve
to guide and organize, while not rigidly defining or restricting musical engagements.
boundaries” (2009, 5). Furthermore, in music, a focus on matters of identity through hybridity
can connect structural choices with their social, political, and economic contexts. This focus may
elucidate as much about an individual musical work and its technical characteristics as the
common and ubiquitous cultural process, also helps to counter pejorative perspectives on
mixture (which can have, for instance, essentialist connotations of impurity or inauthenticity).
Instead, hybridity may highlight the fluid and contingent status of identities—a subject
increasingly vital in the twenty-first century, as we face far-reaching discussions about identity
politics. In this way, music is––as it always has been––a space for a projection of these matters;
styles, genres, and their manipulations in hybridity become important tools in this equation.
One of the motivations behind this study was to address the hesitation or resistance
around embracing analytical perspectives on styles and genres, and, more specifically, their
interactions and manipulations. The few scholarly exceptions either focus on a specific repertory
(for instance, Losada 2004, 2008, 2009; Burkholder 1994; Hatten 2004, 2014), or discuss mostly
352
the social aspects that surround styles, genres, and hybridity (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000;
Locke 2009; Lena 2014, among other works discussed in previous chapters). My analytical
framework in this dissertation attempts to bridge this gap between different perspectives,
allowing a more flexible understanding of the interactions of stylistic and generic domains,
inevitably intertwined as they are. Even though the initial ideas for this study surfaced while
engaging with 1960s and 1970s polystylism, it became increasingly clear that strategies heavily
foregrounded during this period in concert music—within a very particular sociopolitical and
organize, and expand them. Having such scope and flexibility, the framework focused not on a
single repertory, but on a layer of musical expression that forms part of many different
style, and genre) in order to organize the potential musical experiences with hybridity.
INTERSECTIONS
I developed the very initial ideas for this analytical framework when thinking about
Schnittke’s use of the musical “past” as a topical field, thus connecting with the music-
theoretical discourse of topic theory. This connection was especially strong with Robert Hatten’s
work (1994, 2004), and became particularly important in light of his 2014 chapter on
instrumental music. In a similar fashion, while writing chapter 1, on the concept of hybridity,
many intersections with studies of musical exoticism could have been made, especially with
353
Ralph Locke’s work (2009, 2015). As my thoughts developed, I felt the need to work on the
periphery, not basing my ideas on any single music-theoretical discourse. This necessity became
more urgent when I decided to expand the framework to embrace other repertories, moving
beyond the foregrounded mixtures of styles in polystylistic composers and their specific
relationship to tradition. The wide scope of the framework made it difficult to relate to a single
discourse. However, now that the framework has been established, I believe it can be fruitful to
go back and discuss how it can connect with these intersecting areas of scholarship.
If topics are stylistic importations—as, for instance, Mirka (2014) and Hatten (1994,
2004, 2014) define them—there is a potential level of hybridity in their uses and interpretations.
A large part of what topics do is to refer to something “outside” a host musical environment,
given their conventionality (recognizability) and the specific shared associations they bring to a
particular, situated listener. In many ways, these signification processes belong to the more
general category of musical hybridity. Mixture strategies are, after all, distinct ways of
combining disparate materials, and a view of topics through these lenses can further inform how
they achieve a specific effect. Mixture strategies inform how these imported elements are
included in a context, which can in turn emphasize, illuminate specific hues, or counteract and
reverse expected significations. Whereas many cases of topical importations in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries rely on what I call the coexistence strategy, as discussed in chapter 3,
others do not. Even within coexistence, there are variables that can help interpret each particular
case.
354
As Hatten’s (2014) account of Mozart’s instrumental music highlights, topical
importations and combinations do not all happen in the same way. There are many situated
variables that can change the signification of a topic or troping of topics. The manner in which
they are combined (both with a host style or with another topic) becomes, then, an important
layer for interpretation. Hatten’s terminology, albeit applied to Mozart’s instrumental works, is
closely related to the mixture strategies proposed here. And I shall return briefly to one of his
Hatten discusses the “fresh meanings” (2014, 515) of musical tropes as articulated by
strategies discussed in my framework: coexistence, clash, and distortion, respectively. The latter
terms, in many ways synonymous with Hatten’s categories, are studied in detail as more general
strategies in this dissertation, beyond their connection with musical topics. These mixture
strategies can further inform Hatten’s merger, for instance, by zooming in on the alignments and
misalignments of the topics being merged by considering it a case of coexistence. While Hatten
clearly notices the subtleties of such a mixture, a more systematized discussion of these cases in
relation to general mixture strategies could be potentially profitable. For instance, take the
disruption (in the context of eighteenth-century musical topics) in the first eight measures of
Mozart’s K. 332, I, briefly discussed in chapter 3 (Ex. 3.3.8). Hatten leaves open the question of
how to connect the first four measures of the excerpt to the latter ones, instead suggesting that
“one might develop a higher-level trope that somehow integrates ... the two four-measure topical
characters” (2014, 518). An analysis through the perspective of the clash strategy affords such a
higher-level trope, and connects this particular case with many others, evoking the entire range
355
of interpretations of a juxtaposition clash: from shock and disruption to a secondary layer of
discourse or commentary. The idea of a commentary is, in fact, mentioned by Hatten, but it lacks
the more embracing and detailed support that is afforded by the framework in this dissertation.
Moreover, this approach could afford comparisons that would not be explicit at first
sight. Note, for example, how the clash in K. 332 is different from the juxtaposition clashes in
the final scene of the first act from Don Giovanni (Ex. 3.2.4), or from the G minor and Eb major
clashes in Beethoven’s Eroica (Ex. 3.2.5 and Ex. 3.2.6), analyzed by Byros (2014). This
comparison might seem exaggerated, but when focusing on the details of strategies for topical
combination—all three are cases of clash, despite their differences—it becomes a bit more
framework does not substitute for or criticize topic theory or Hatten’s troping discourse; rather, it
has the potential to expand the interpretive details of these mixtures, as well as embrace them in
a wider collection of uses of these processes—in Hatten’s words, “higher-level trope[s]” (2014,
518). The hybridity framework proposed here can help investigate the “mechanics” of musical
topics and troping, connecting them to a number of other uses of hybridity in music.
Lastly, for some years now, there has been a welcome tendency to expand topic theory
beyond the stable stylistic and generic systems of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concert
engage with topics in Mozart or Beethoven, as much as they can illuminate music by Schnittke,
356
Adès, or Daft Punk. All of these works, in their own way, use “ever more specialized” (Atkinson
Locke’s thorough work on musical exoticism through many historical periods (2009,
2015) also warrants attention for its intersections with the framework proposed here. Again, in an
attempt to avoid confusion, exoticism has been kept somewhat at bay, as just another kind of
hybridity, without getting a detailed discussion of its history and nuanced significations—a job
that Locke does in a flexible and coherent fashion. Locke (2009) defines different kinds of
exoticism, all of which are intertwined with the mixture strategies discussed here. Three of his
categories become especially relevant: overt exoticism, submerged exoticism, and transcultural
composition. Overt exoticism occurs when the foreign material keeps its exotic frame—that is, it
is not widely integrated into the host style or the composer’s personal style. This use contrasts
with later cases of submerged exoticism, when the integration of foreign sounds blurs an
interpretation of the exotic in its earlier, “distant,” sense. Finally, Locke uses the term
transcultural composition (also used by Loya [2008, 2011], in his analyses of Liszt’s “gypsy”
tradition) as a way of addressing cases where the boundaries are even less clear, and the sense of
167
Some examples are Yayoi Uno Everett’s study of parody in György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre (2009), Johanna
Frymoyer’s topical investigation of waltzes in Arnold Schoenberg’s works (2017), and Edward Venn’s (2013)
survey of the pianto topic in the music of Thomas Adès (as well as his 2016 book on Adès). Nicholas McKay (2013)
uses a topic-theoretical approach to Stravinsky’s music, a repertory that was also tackled by Scott Schumann (2015),
who focused on distortion of dance topics in the composer’s output (discussed in chapter 3).
357
cultural boundaries in the twentieth century. One need not go into much detail in order to see the
potential intersections with mixture strategies as a way to help disentangle (or further
problematize) many of these cases. The variable here seems to be the level of integration, which
Death in Venice, Locke quotes Annegret Fauser’s description of these sounds as “abstract rather
than picturesque engagement with alterity” (Fauser 2005 in Locke [2009, 242]).168 In Locke’s
terms, Britten’s uses of gamelan sounds in these pieces are cases of submerged, rather than overt,
exoticism.169 Mixture strategies offer the possibility to focus on the processes of integration (or
lack thereof) of these “foreign sounds.” Moreover, my hybridity framework allows for a
comparison of these potentially exotic (or transcultural) hybridities with other contemporary
cases, especially in the twentieth century, when other composers combine or import a diverse
range of styles, foreign or not, in many different ways. Mixture strategies are tools for bringing
focus to the level of symmetry and the manner of stylistic combination, as well as providing
options for interpreting cases of exoticism: for instance, via clash or coexistence of elements,
(the latter could address the submerged or half-submerged cases). However, these alone cannot
interpret the kind of exoticism; rather they provide support to better understand these questions.
Furthermore, I believe that other cases of hybridity which somehow relate to exotic
elements and practices at a less conspicuous level can, in turn, largely profit from Locke’s
categories and careful investigations. A caveat, however, is not to frame any case of hybridity as
168
Fauser, Annegret. Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair. Rochester: University of Rochester Press,
2005.
169
Locke (2009, 242), emphasizing the difficulty in labeling these cases, asks: “[o]r is it only half-Submerged?”
358
an instance of exoticism, since the latter has a history of its own, and thus tends to engage with a
Locke is very aware that this is not necessarily the case in many examples from twentieth-
century music. The terms “transcultural composition” and “submerged exoticism” both tend to
mitigate the appropriation narrative, when the boundaries of the categories of West and East (and
many others) become increasingly problematic. In the post-1960s—what Locke calls “exoticism
in a global age” (2009, 276)—rigid cultural categories are not always sustainable, and the
hybridity framework proves even more useful in addressing the different, and fluid forms of
***
Perhaps one of the most productive aspects of the framework proposed here lies in its
potential to compare widely distinct repertories through the strategies they use to combine and
manipulate musical identities. Such a comparative approach need not overlook the motivations
and conditions surrounding a musical hybrid, as should be clear from the previous pages. In fact,
the framework might emphasize these contextual aspects by showing how idealized boundaries,
and the processes used to disrupt or integrate them, are influenced by different factors. Thus, a
“picture” of a localized identity system or network emerges, with all the tacit biases and purposes
incorporated in its establishment and communication. This perspective understands styles and
genres, their manipulations, and combinations as important mediators of the musical experience,
serving as means for assessing diverse music, given a familiarity with the constellation of
periods. Styles and genres—as well as races, ethnicities, social status, nation, and political
goal, but are actually fixed only when idealized. The twenty-first century brought, for some
privileged groups, accessibility to multiple cultures and ideas, and, to an extent, a “laterality” and
fluidity of many categories, once imposed as neatly hierarchical (even though, depending on the
However, since old habits die hard, a constant friction persists between the tendency to
impose values and ideologies through difference and hierarchy, and the new scenario—what
Petrusich (2017), for instance, called the “lateral planes” of today’s mainstream musical
culture.170 The study of musical hybridity serves well our attempts to address this friction both in
the musical “texts” and the communities and contexts surrounding them, along with variations
that depend on specific individual perspectives. There is considerable potential to engage with
these matters in different repertories and perspectives, and in order to pursue future research, it is
important to consider the connected, but different, spaces of signification of styles and genres, as
discussed in chapter 2. The concept of style embraces a more detailed structural level, while
genre covers contextual aspects beyond the conception of style proposed here. Both, however,
share a large portion of the spectrum between the technical and the sociocultural/political
aspects, whose borders are constantly in flux. Styles and genres are thus not literal containers,
but situated mediators between individual, textual, and contextual domains. Mixture strategies
170
Petrusich (2017) was discussing mainstream musical culture, but I consider this true for other creative
environments as well. This concept also relates to Loya’s (2008, 2011) and Locke’s (2009) “transcultural
composition.”
360
operationalize their dynamic statuses, serving as interpretive tools connected with both
Further, timbre, effects, instrumentation, and spatiality in recorded music all trigger
associations with styles and genres, thus are worthy of more attention. Even though scholars in
sound studies and phonomusicological studies have more carefully addressed the sound,
especially in approaching recorded popular music, there yet remains opportunity for further
study have shown, these sonic parameters are compositional features, not mere auxiliary
ornamentations. Record producers (or often composers themselves) think of the sonic parameters
identity categories. There is certainly much more to be developed in relation to the recorded
track and a potential future path of the research presented here is to engage more thoroughly with
Even though I mention cognitive studies, especially in relation to styles and genres as
concepts and categories, there is much to be pursued in engaging musical hybridity with
cognitive science. Future research can also investigate mixture strategies in an experimental
setting, given a degree of ecological validity. More specifically, this can happen through the use
of dynamic tracking of listener associations, using, for instance, eye-tracking devices. The
intersections with the areas of study mentioned above further emphasize the importance of this
kind of study, which can support perspectives—or propose new ways of thinking—about the
combinations of distinct musical styles and genres from the viewpoint of an engaged listener.
171
Phonomusicological studies is the area that approaches the recorded track and its productions features as part of
the musical text and context. See, for instance, Moore 2012; Zagorski-Thomas 2014; and Bennet 2015.
361
***
The variety of analyses in the present work––embracing repertories from the seventeenth
to the twenty-first centuries, and crossing idealized boundaries between concert and popular
style, genre, and hybridity. From a broad perspective, the future of this research lies in
demystifying the hybrid in cultures where it has become a ubiquitous feature, but which is still,
search for the “patterns of hybridity,” can be used to engage with these matters, combining
musical structures, communities and their practices, and the individual. It must be said, however,
context are still artificially separated in the previous pages. Thus, the investigation of patterns of
interactions of musical styles and genres, with their entire signification potential, should foster
operationalizing mixtures might generate some promising ideas for such studies, pointing toward
other potential applications, and inviting scholars to investigate any music through the lenses of
hybridity.
362
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