Unsuspected Eloquence
Henry, Derrick
Unsuspected Eloquence: a History of the Relations between Poetry AND MUSIC, by James Anderson Winn, Yale University Press, $18.95, 381 pp. James Winn, a Yale English professor and a flutist of...
...Far-reaching harmonic experiments by Italian madrigal composers "began as attempts to find musical equivalents for the persuasive power of Petrarchan rhetoric...
...It taught me much...
...Least convincing is the discussion of this century's music...
...There are problems...
...He equates chance procedures with total serialization, precise oppo-sites...
...This is a work both challenging and stimulating...
...The Romantic literary myth about music affected music itself, and when it did, the resulting music came to cherish and prolong harmonic ambiguity in much the way that Romantic poetry had celebrated and enacted syntactic ambiguity...
...his constant shifting from one author and viewpoint to another precludes a coherent overriding style...
...An effort to restore the primacy of words over music "by denying all the ways in which music was not like speech" was at the heart of the humanist movement beginning around 1575...
...the single most important factor in the growing independence and appeal of instrumental music in the eighteenth century...
...This is more than mere quibbling, for the book is most clear and penetrating when Winn himself does the synthesizing and writing...
...Winn overinter-prets Charles Rosen's theories on dissonance...
...Polyphony . . . was initially a metaphor, an attempt to create a musical equivalent for the literary and theological technique of allegory...
...Undue significance gets attached to the abolishment of tonality by practitioners of the twelve-tone system when in truth many eminent twentieth-century composers never rejected tonal restraints...
...DERRICK HENRY...
...Enough...
...James Winn, a Yale English professor and a flutist of professional competence, manages his difficult and ambitious topic without favoring or shirking either poetic or musical issues, and in so doing produces a monograph of value to both disciplines...
...The clarity of tonal grammar was...
...His musical examples disappoint: they are not so much simplistic as underexplained...
...Winn relies far too heavily upon quotations from modern-day analysts...
...Provocative hypotheses abound...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 9
