A concert waltz is a waltz. But it is not a waltz for dancing. So is it still a waltz?
It is a waltz that waltzes. It is a representation of a waltz that not only has the rhythmical patterns typical of waltzes, but also evokes a wealth of movements and gestures. You can dance to it, but it would be more of an illustration or accompaniment to the music than the other way around. A kind of ballet, rather than social dancing.
I call it a meta-waltz, an instance of metamusic; music that represents music, and therefore can indirectly represent things like body movement, human action and behaviour.
This is the gist of episode 5 of the podcast Beyond the Bony Labyrinth (episode 18 of the Dutch version, Voorbij de oren), which is complemented with a recital of dance cycles by Schubert-Liszt (Soirées de Vienne no. 6), Schumann (Papillons) and Ravel (Valses nobles et sentimentales). What I offer here is a terminological footnote.
‘μετα’
The term ‘metamusic’ is not found in the most important English-language music encyclopaedia, Grove Music Online, nor in the Oxford English Dictionary. It occurs but is not common.
The Greek preposition μετα has as its first meaning ‘with, together with’; in academic usage, however, it usually indicates that a study or discipline reflects on itself. The classic example is ‘metaphysics’, but that is a notoriously confusing case.
In literary studies, the terms ‘metalanguage’, ‘metatext’ and ‘metafiction’ are well established, and their meaning is intuitively obvious: there is a ‘meta’ level whenever when we think about language in language, speak about what we say, write about writing, or create fictional fiction.
Music about Music?
It is tempting to look for musical analogies: music that is somehow ‘about’ music. But then you immediately run into an obstacle. Music is not ‘about’ something, like a text is about something. ‘Music about music’ makes sense only when we greatly stretch the meaning of ‘about’.
The expression Musik über Musik has some currency in German. It is even the subject and title of a lexicon (Schneider 2017), which relates it to “all compositions that have an explicit, tangible relationship to existing music or its author” (p. 6, my transl.). That includes musical phenomena such as variations on an existing theme (‘über ein Thema’).
This meaning of ‘über’ may be exclusive to the German language: one wouldn’t say that Beethoven’s Variations on Rule Britannia WoO79 are ‘about’ Thomas Arne’s song, and I am reluctant to call this ‘metamusic’. Still, in WoO79 the original song is first stated as a distinct, intact foreign element, a ‘text’, which is subsequently approached from different angles (‘metatext’). Moreover, the listener is no doubt expected to recognise the theme, and Beethoven’s choice may be considered significant. Metamusic after all?
Metamusik
The German term ‘Metamusik’ is more common than its English equivalent; but its use lacks the self-reflective ‘meta’ aspect that is central to literary and media studies. The Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (dwds.de) defines Metamusik as “music that combines elements of rock and pop music and jazz as well as forms of non-European and Asian music” (my transl.). Its statistics indicate a heyday in the 1970’s. ‘Metamusic’ in this sense is similar to ‘metacuisine’; it is just a formerly fashionable term for musical ‘fusion’, just as ‘metacuisine’ (29.400 Google hits) is cookery fusion.
That definition does not do justice to what was labelled Metamusik in the 1970s, according to Hermann Danuser, whose Metamusik (2017) is the most comprehensive publication to have appeared under that title. The Berlin musicologist characterises Metamusik of the former avant-garde as “something different, something new and foreign outside the traditional music of Europe […]” (p. 38, my transl). That still suggests exoticism, but more significant is the dissolution of boundaries between art forms and genres.
Danuser’s broader concept of Metamusik relates to music as metaphyics to physics; it “refers […] to everything connected with music that exists beyond the audible and can therefore be understood as ‘music about music’” (p. 24, my transl.).
Many things can be in some sense about music without being music, and eo ipso, metamusic: metamusic is first and foremost a kind of music. This common sense assumption seems to be lost in Danuser’s extraordinarily broad ontology, which assigns music four ‘equivalent modes of existence’ (Existenzformen, p. 25): as sound, as musical notation, as pictorial representation and as speaking and writing about music. The first, sound, is prevalent in music as commonly understood; for metamusic, all are of equal rank (p. 30). It seems to follow that Danuser’s Metamusik itself is a piece of metamusic (and that this essay is meta-metamusic). Is Magritte’s pipe a metapipe?
Reference and Representation
Music’s lack of ‘aboutness’ raises the question of whether music is, after all, more like cooking than like language or literature. Does it have a ‘meaning’ that allows for a meta-dimension?
The answer lies, I think, in the fact that the two levels essential to ‘meta’ phenomena are not limited to semantic ‘aboutness’. In visual arts and drama, it is realised in representation. The television cartoon The Simpsons may count as metafilm because it recognisably and ironically reflects or represents well-known movie scenarios, not because it says something ‘about’ them.
Music that somehow represents other music has become more common as musical creation and appreciation have become increasingly burdened with an accumulating past. The fact is obvious, but it is rarely spoken of in terms of ‘metamusic’.
There have been occasional hints to the concept, however. ‘Meta’ theorists have cited the novelist Jean Paul’s phrase Musik der Musik, which is the heading of a chapter in Flegeljahre (1804); it was a favourite of the young Robert Schumann, and a source of inspiration for his Papillons. It contains the description of a concert, a description that abounds in metaphores (but with Jean Paul, all description is metaphorical). However, the title remains ambiguous, and its interpretation is left to the reader.
An idea of the concert waltz as metawaltz that represents a waltz (or the waltz), and thus carries a wealth of connotations, is conveyed by this footnote by Friedrich Jähns, the cataloguer of Weber’s oeuvre. Jähns observes that the particular significance of Weber’s Aufforderung zum Tanz…
[…] lies in the fact that what in this beautiful musical poem is portrayed with such rare charm, nobility and splendour is not a dance, but the dance as a poetic idea, and thus at the same time the rich forms that this idea encompasses (Jähns 1871: 283, my transl. and emphasis).
Friedrich Nietzsche used the phrase Musik über Musik to characterise Beethoven’s practice of using, as basic thematic materials, the simple, more elementary forms of music that could be found on the streets. The aphorism is worth quoting in full:
Beethoven’s music often seems like a deeply moving contemplation on unexpectedly hearing again a long-lost piece of ‘innocence in tones’: it is music about music. In the songs of beggars and children in the street, in the monotonous melodies of wandering Italians, at the dance in the village tavern or in carnival nights – that is where he discovers his ‘melodies’: he collects them like a bee, catching a sound, a short sequence, here and there. (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Nietzsche 2013: 229-230; my transl.)
Implicitly, Nietzsche contradicts in this passage a remark by Eduard Hanslick, the patriarch of musical formalism. For Hanslick, music is music; that music could refer to music is unthinkable. What serves as a model in painting and literature is, according to classicist aesthetics, Naturschönes, natural beauty; for music, however, there is no such model.
The composer cannot recreate anything, he must create everything anew. What the painter, the poet finds in contemplating the beauty of nature, the composer must bring forth through the concentration of his inner being. (Hanslick 1854: 92, my transl.)
In any case, the music Beethoven may have heard in the streets or countryside is not a kind of objet trouvé represented in his music:
The singing shepherd is not the object, but already the subject of art. If his song consists of measurable, ordered sequences of notes, however simple, it is a product of the human mind, whether it was invented by a shepherd boy or by Beethoven.
Folk song is not a found object, not a kind of natural beauty, but the first stage of true art, naive art. (ib.)
If, on the contrary we can hear some of Beethoven’s music as a “deeply moving contemplation” on a lost musical innocence, we discern an implicit metatext that is perceived from a distance, and with a tinge of nostalgia. It may also be irony, as I suspect is the case with Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, or a peculiar Jean-Paul-ian sentimental irony, as in Schumann’s Papillons.
Modernism, or various 20th century modernist tendencies, could be characterised as an attempt to escape the pervasive meta-isation of music, to create music without a reverberating past. Postmodernism, on the other hand, embraces that historical dimension, but from beyond a breaking point: as a lost, though not so innocent tone world. Among postmodern compositions the term ‘metamusic’ is found occasionally as the title or subtitle of a composition (e.g. Valentin Silvestrov’s Metamusik: Symphony for Piano and Orchestra (1992)).
References
Danuser, Hermann. Metamusik. Schliengen: Argus, 2017.
Daverio, John. Robert Schumann: Herald of a ‘New Poetic Age’. New York etc.: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Hanslick, Eduard. Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: ein Beitrag zur Revision der Aesthetik der Tonkunst. Leipzig: Weigel, 1854.
Jähns, Friedrich Wilhelm. Carl Maria von Weber in seinen werken [etc.]. Berlin: Schlesinger, 1871.
Nichols, Roger. Ravel Remembered. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Edited by Claus-Artur Scheier. Vol. 2. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2013.
Puri, Michael J. Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
———. ‘Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales and Its Models’. Music Theory Online 23, no. 3 (2017).
Ravel, Maurice. L’intégrale: correspondance (1895-1937), écrits et entretiens. Edited by Manuel Cornejo. Paris: Le Passeur, 2018.
Schneider, Klaus. Lexikon ‘“Musik über Musik”’: Variationen – Transkriptionen – Hommagen – Stilimitationen – B-A-C-H. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2017.
Wolf, Werner. Selected Essays on Intermediality by Werner Wolf (1992-2014) [etc.]. Edited by Walter Bernhart. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2018.
Wolf, Werner e.a., eds. Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies. Amsterdam ; Rodopi, 2009.
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