Review of Markand Thakar, Looking for the "Harp" Quartet: An Investigation into Musical Beauty (University of Rochester Press, 2011)

[1] Markand Thakar currently serves as the conductor of the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, Director of the BCO Summer Conducting Seminar and Winter Conducting Workshop, Co-Director of Graduate Conducting at the Peabody Conservatory, and was formerly the Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Looking for the "Harp" Quartet builds upon the ideas in his previous book, Counterpoint: Fundamentals of Music Making (1990), in considering the transcendent experience of musical beauty, the musical work as a unitarily apprehensible object, and the ways in which impulse may be generated and consequently resolved. Thakar's ideas are valuable, his exposition of them is clear, and the book is supported by materials on his website, including sound files for the musical examples, analytical graphs, and a list of omissions and corrections. While Thakar discusses only music literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this book would be useful as the main text in an upper-level or graduate seminar, or as a component of a survey of analytical techniques or aesthetics.[2] The text is arranged as a sequence of five dialogues between a conservatory teacher and a violin student, allusively named "Daedalus" and "Icarus." These dialogues occur periodically during Icarus's imagined senior year, as he rehearses and performs Beethoven's "Harp" Quartet (op. 74) with another coach. He and Daedalus begin by discussing what constitutes a "musical object," and then consider the contributions of the listener, composer, and performer in the ultimate experience of musical beauty. The final dialogue summarizes their conclusions and provides direction for further study.[3] Although the dialogues present the principal ideas, Thakar includes three supplemental essays at the end of the book. These provide more focused, technical discussions of the phenomenological basis for the conception of the "musical object," the conception of tonicization and musical structure as "patterns of energy" created by the composer, and finally, techniques for the "dynamic analysis" intended to uncover this patterning. These articles are intended to supplement the dialogues, and Daedalus actually refers to them at specific points in the text, but they may be read independently without any loss of coherence.[4] Thakar's primary theme is that masterworks of art are those that can be perceived as single "objects in time," and it is this essential property that allows the ultimate aesthetic experience. Composers contribute the potential for this experience by suggesting a succession of tones in which the energy can be created and resolved within a singular hierarchy. Performers, in turn, must realize this potential, recognize the hierarchy and craft their spectra of intensity and tempo in accordance with its inherent design. If both the composer and the performer are successful, an experience of transcendent beauty will be available to the listener, who must only be open to receiving it.[5] Thakar's conception of the "object in time" is indebted to Edmund Husserl's The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (1964), and the substance of the first dialogue, concerning the essential qualities of a piece of music, also recalls ideas from phenomenology. Unlike other theorists writing from a phenomenological standpoint, such as Lawrence Ferrara and Thomas Clifton, however, Thakar is less concerned with description than he is with a pragmatic understanding of how transcendent experiences are achieved. As he argues, the experience of transcendence involves a "loss of self" that is, the separation between subject (the one perceiving the work of art) and object (the work of art) is erased. Thus, it follows that any distraction from the perception of the artwork as a single object in time eliminates the possibility for the experience. As one might expect, this leads to a discussion of intonation, articulation, balance, and so forth, not as objective, quantifiable entities, but rather as contextual parameters. …