Review of Suzannah Clark, Analyzing Schubert (Cambridge University Press, 2011)

[1] The genial discussions of analytic tradition and Franz Schubert's music in Suzannah Clark's Analyzing Schubert retain some of the flavor of a lively graduate seminar in comparative analysis, for which her book might well provide a foundation, perhaps in conjunction with another recent volume that places similar emphasis on the pedagogical benefits of comparative study, David Damschroder's Harmony in Schubert (2010). Each chapter reviews and critiques scholarship around a few pieces or an issue, spotlighting the insights gained or shortcomings and blind spots in different approaches (Schenkerian, neo-Riemannian, sonata theoretical, or even multiple Schenkerian readings of the same passage). The thought is also to pinpoint aurally salient features that go unaddressed, and to imagine new analytical lenses with which to survey Schubert's tonal landscapes. (Clark does not say so but her focus is nearly exclusively on ways of construing pitch relations.) Promising initiatives towards a "distinctly Schubertian paradigm" for analysis (270) are sketched, astute criticisms offered, and personal reactions to current work in the field freely shared: dozens of colleagues may be pleased to discover their work addressed.[2] The book is divided into four chapters, three of them dedicated to specific analytical issues, while an initial chapter takes up themes that run throughout nineteenth-century commentary on Schubert's creative process. Here Clark appears determined once and for all to debunk those appeals to clairvoyance and somnambulism that still delighted Victorian critics but are of little help to the modern analyst. Chapter 2 concerns mainly songs beginning and ending in different tonal regions, the subject of several recent studies, while chapter 3 looks at lyrical passages in the instrumental music often explained as "digressions." Chapter 4 examines the various Stufen Schubert found to create a symmetrical balance between sonata expositions and recapitulations, relating this to Schenker's "sacred triangle" and his early theoretical position that, in Clark's words, "a range of keys may substitute for the so-called natural or conventional keys of the dominant and relative major in secondary themes. . . "(213). That "so-called" in her formulation seems to issue from a general ideological discomfort with hierarchy more than any concrete reflection on acoustics or statistics ("natural or conventional"). At any rate, despite this attempt at reconciling early Schenkerian thought with neo-Riemannian tonal geometries (less-flexible mature Schenker comes under fire) the book's broad narrative is a tale of progress: the un-technical nineteenth century is dispensed with in a chapter, the twentieth century's predominantly fifth-based approach to Schubert's harmony is cast as a lens made to fit a member of an earlier generation, newer neo-Riemannian approaches are likened to precision scientific instruments, the best technology to hand. This emerges decisively in her remarks on a colloquy between Charles Fisk and Richard Cohn (159). How readily we clothe our latest explanatory models in high-tech metaphors today! (I shall leave readers to discover the whimsical chain of association by which Clark links Richard Cohn's representation of hexatonic cycles to Josef Kupelwieser's watercolor of Schubert peering into a kaleidoscope, her book's emblem: on a collision course with the enthralled Schubert is a figure riding a pedal-less bicycle; the spokes remind Clark of a circle of fifths.)[3] As outlined briefly above, the opening chapter lays out how Johann Michael Vogl's characterization of Schubert's songs as the products of a "musical clairvoyance" gradually took on mythic status after Victorian-era Schubertians embraced and elaborated this picture even more eagerly than had the composer's acquaintances. Since appeals to supernatural states or a divine hand could mask the learning and effort that went into Schubert's composing, this may have forestalled close analytic engagements with his music. …