Desire in Chromatic Harmony - Kenneth M. Smith

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Résumé :
How does musical harmony engage listeners in relations of desire? Where does this desire come from? Author Kenneth Smith seeks to answer these questions by analyzing works from the turn of the twentieth- century that are both harmonically enriched and psychologically complex. Desire in Chromatic Harmony yields a new theory of how chromatic chord progressions direct the listener on intricate journeys through harmonic space, mirroring the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. Smith extends this mode of enquiry into sophisticated music theory, while exploring philosophically engaged European and American composers such as Richard Strauss, Alexander Skryabin, Josef Suk, Charles Ives, and Aaron Copland. Focusing on harmony and chord progression, the book drills down into the diatonic undercurrent beneath densely chromatic and dissonant surfaces. From the obsession with death and mourning in Suk's asrael Symphony to an exploration of perversion in Strauss's elektra...

Biographie:

• Acknowledgements


• Preface


• Chapter 1: A Linguistic Theory of Chromatic Harmonic Substitution and Progression in the Diatonic Unconscious


• Chapter 2: Romantic Provenance


• Chapter 3: Transcending Root Motion: Productive Death Drives and Cybernetic Cycles in Charles Ives and Aaron Copland


• Chapter 4: Karol Szymanowski's Dominant Drive Model and the Excess of the Cycle


• Chapter 5: Tragedy and the Gaze of the Living Dead: Functional Harmonic Rotation in Strauss's Elektra


• Chapter 6: The Thanatonic and the Hexatonic: Repetition, Mourning, and Mother in Suk's Asrael


• Chapter 7: When Octatonic and Hexatonic Collide: Skryabin's Accelerationist Last Piano Sonata


• Epilogue: The Way Forwards (and Backwards)


• Bibliography