Rudolph Reti

Last updated • 5 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Rudolph Reti, also Réti (Serbian : Рудолф Рети, romanized: Rudolf Reti; November 27, 1885 – February 7, 1957), was a musical analyst, composer and pianist. He was the older brother of the chess master Richard Réti, but unlike his brother, Reti did not write his surname with an acute accent on the 'e'.

Contents

Biography

Reti was born in Užice in the Kingdom of Serbia and studied music theory, musicology and piano in Vienna. Among his teachers was the pianist Eduard Steuermann, an eminent champion of Schoenberg and a supporter of modern music. Reti was in contact with Schoenberg at the time of that composer's earliest atonal works, and in 1911 gave the first performance of his Drei Klavierstücke Op.11. [1]

Reti's compositions have not remained in the repertoire, but he was an active composer and received a number of high-profile performances. At the end of the first International Festival of Modern Music in Salzburg, in 1922, his 'Six Songs' were performed alongside Schoenberg's Second Quartet; three years later, at the 3rd ISCM Festival in Prague, his Concertino for Piano and Orchestra shared a programme with Martinu's 'Half-Time' and Vaughan Williams's 'A Pastoral Symphony'. In 1938, his David and Goliath Suite was performed by Eduard van Beinum and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra. In 1948, Jean Sahlmark was the soloist in her husband's First Piano Concerto. Reti's output also includes several volumes of piano pieces and songs, an opera (Ivan and the Drum), as well as symphonic and choral music.

Between 1930 and 1938 Reti was chief music critic for the Austrian newspaper Das Echo. Together with the composer and musicologist Egon Wellesz, he was involved in establishing the International Festival of Modern Music, and founded the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1922. In 1939 Reti emigrated to the United States and later became an American citizen. He became a member of the American Musicological Society, and came to hold a fellowship at Yale. From 1943 he was married to the pianist, teacher, musicologist and editor Jean Sahlmark, who helped prepare for publication his two posthumous books. He died in Montclair, New Jersey.

Reti is best remembered today for his distinctive method of musical analysis, which he claimed revealed the 'thematic process' in music. His approach did not concern itself, however, with tracing the obvious thematic and motivic 'developments' displayed on the musical 'surface', but rather sought to demonstrate the way in which surface thematic variety is underpinned by a less apparent unity. For Reti, "the different movements of a classical symphony are built from one identical thought", [TPM, p. 13] and the composer "strives toward homogeneity in the inner essence but at the same time towards variety in the outer appearance. Therefore he changes the surface but maintains the substance of his shapes." [TPM, p. 13]

Reti's way of showing 'maintained substance' would usually involve constructing a music example which juxtaposed a number of contrasting themes; the 'homogeneity in the inner essence' was represented by the notes printed at full size; the 'variety in the outer appearance' would be relegated to small type. In focusing on shared features and hidden similarities in shape and contour, the tonal or harmonic significance of the various 'significant' notes in the themes would usually be ignored. So too would rhythm—with the result that Reti's method focuses on relatively abstract 'pitch cells' rather than rhythmically defined 'motifs'. In addition to admitting inversional and retrograde relationships between cells, Reti also introduced the process of 'interversion', in which the notes of a cell would be re-ordered.

Reti's analytical procedure is best understood concurrently to the work of other contemporary German analysts of the time such as Schenker and Schoenberg. Like Schenker, and Schoenberg, Reti's analysis of musical works was primarily motivic, tracing the evolution of a musical work from a melodic kernel. The preoccupation the three aforementioned theorists had with such procedure stems from a metaphysical belief that the works of the "great masters" (as exemplified in the First Viennese School) were unified thematically often, from a single idea. The metaphysical basis of this idea was the fact that such unity, was thought to be a metaphor for the unity of God's creation. Thus in Reti's analysis the "thematic process" is explored, in Schenker the analysis takes the form of a reductionist procedure, and in Schoenberg the unity of a musical work from a "Grundgestalt" (basic shape) is asserted.

Reti's method, which is to be seen in the context of early-20th-century musicology, has been criticized by the music theorist Nicholas Cook, who regards Reti as having been over-concerned with proving the validity of his method, at the expense of producing convincing analyses of individual works. [2]

Writings

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sonata</span> Type of instrumental composition

In music, a sonata literally means a piece played as opposed to a cantata, a piece sung. The term evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms until the Classical era, when it took on increasing importance. Sonata is a vague term, with varying meanings depending on the context and time period. By the early 19th century, it came to represent a principle of composing large-scale works. It was applied to most instrumental genres and regarded—alongside the fugue—as one of two fundamental methods of organizing, interpreting and analyzing concert music. Though the musical style of sonatas has changed since the Classical era, most 20th- and 21st-century sonatas still maintain the same structure.

Music history, sometimes called historical musicology, is a highly diverse subfield of the broader discipline of musicology that studies music from a historical point of view. In theory, "music history" could refer to the study of the history of any type or genre of music ; in practice, these research topics are often categorized as part of ethnomusicology or cultural studies, whether or not they are ethnographically based. The terms "music history" and "historical musicology" usually refer to the history of the notated music of Western elites, sometimes called "art music".

The sonata form is a musical structure generally consisting of three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation. It has been used widely since the middle of the 18th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Musical analysis</span>

Musical analysis is the study of musical structure in either compositions or performances. According to music theorist Ian Bent, music analysis "is the means of answering directly the question 'How does it work?'". The method employed to answer this question, and indeed exactly what is meant by the question, differs from analyst to analyst, and according to the purpose of the analysis. According to Bent, "its emergence as an approach and method can be traced back to the 1750s. However it existed as a scholarly tool, albeit an auxiliary one, from the Middle Ages onwards."

Schenkerian analysis is a method of analyzing tonal music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935). The goal is to demonstrate the organic coherence of the work by showing how the "foreground" relates to an abstracted deep structure, the Ursatz. This primal structure is roughly the same for any tonal work, but a Schenkerian analysis shows how, in each individual case, that structure develops into a unique work at the foreground. A key theoretical concept is "tonal space". The intervals between the notes of the tonic triad in the background form a tonal space that is filled with passing and neighbour tones, producing new triads and new tonal spaces that are open for further elaborations until the "surface" of the work is reached.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Rosen</span> American pianist and writer on music

Charles Welles Rosen was an American pianist and writer on music. He is remembered for his career as a concert pianist, for his recordings, and for his many writings, notable among them the book The Classical Style.

In music, form refers to the structure of a musical composition or performance. In his book, Worlds of Music, Jeff Todd Titon suggests that a number of organizational elements may determine the formal structure of a piece of music, such as "the arrangement of musical units of rhythm, melody, and/or harmony that show repetition or variation, the arrangement of the instruments, or the way a symphonic piece is orchestrated", among other factors. It is, "the ways in which a composition is shaped to create a meaningful musical experience for the listener."

"Form refers to the largest shape of the composition. Form in music is the result of the interaction of the four structural elements described above [sound, harmony, melody, rhythm]."

New musicology is a wide body of musicology since the 1980s with a focus upon the cultural study, aesthetics, criticism, and hermeneutics of music. It began in part a reaction against the traditional positivist musicology—focused on primary research—of the early 20th century and postwar era. Many of the procedures of new musicology are considered standard, although the name more often refers to the historical turn rather than to any single set of ideas or principles. Indeed, although it was notably influenced by feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and critical theory, new musicology has primarily been characterized by a wide-ranging eclecticism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Subject (music)</span> Musical melody on which a composition is based

In music, a subject is the material, usually a recognizable melody, upon which part or all of a composition is based. In forms other than the fugue, this may be known as the theme.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Egon Wellesz</span> Austrian, later British composer, teacher and musicologist (1885–1974)

Egon Joseph Wellesz, CBE, FBA was an Austrian, later British composer, teacher and musicologist, notable particularly in the field of Byzantine music.

Hans (Heinrich) Keller was an Austrian-born British musician and writer, who made significant contributions to musicology and music criticism, as well as being a commentator on such disparate fields as psychoanalysis and football. In the late 1950s, he invented the method of "wordless functional analysis", in which a musical composition is analysed in musical sound alone, without any words being heard or read. He worked full-time for the BBC between 1959 and 1979.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Piano Sonata No. 30 (Beethoven)</span> Piano sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109, composed in 1820, is the third-to-last of his piano sonatas. In it, after the huge Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106, Beethoven returns to a smaller scale and a more intimate character. It is dedicated to Maximiliane Brentano, the daughter of Beethoven's long-standing friend Antonie Brentano, for whom Beethoven had already composed the short Piano Trio in B major WoO 39 in 1812. Musically, the work is characterised by a free and original approach to the traditional sonata form. Its focus is the third movement, a set of variations that interpret its theme in a wide variety of individual ways.

Avo Sõmer is an American musicologist, music theorist, and composer, of Estonian birth.

Wordless functional analysis is a method of musical analysis developed in the 1950s by the Austrian-born British musician and writer Hans Keller. The method is notable in that, unlike other forms of musical analysis, it is designed to be presented in musical sound alone, without any words being heard or read, and without analytic diagrams of any kind. For this purpose, Keller would construct an analysis in the form of an analytic score written for the same forces as the work under consideration and structured as a succession of 'analytic interludes' designed to be played between its movements.

In musical composition, developing variation is a formal technique in which the variations are produced through the development of existing material. The term was coined by Arnold Schoenberg, twentieth-century composer and inventor of the twelve-tone technique, who believed it was one of the most important compositional principles since around 1750:

Music of the homophonic-melodic style of composition, that is, music with a main theme, accompanied by and based on harmony, produces its material by, as I call it, developing variation. This means that variation of the features of a basic unit produces all the thematic formulations which provide for fluency, contrasts, variety, logic and unity, on the one hand, and character, mood, expression, and every needed differentiation, on the other hand—thus elaborating the idea of the piece.

Thematic transformation is a musical technique in which a leitmotif, or theme, is developed by changing the theme by using permutation, augmentation, diminution, and fragmentation. It was primarily developed by Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz. The technique is essentially one of variation. A basic theme is reprised throughout a musical work, but it undergoes constant transformations and disguises and is made to appear in several contrasting roles. However, the transformations of this theme will always serve the purpose of "unity within variety" that was the architectural role of sonata form in the classical symphony. The difference here is that thematic transformation can accommodate the dramatically charged phrases, highly coloured melodies and atmospheric harmonies favored by the Romantic composers, whereas sonata form was geared more toward the more objective characteristics of absolute music. Also, while thematic transformation is similar to variation, the effect is usually different since the transformed theme has a life of its own and is no longer a sibling to the original theme.

Arnold Whittall is a British musicologist and academic. Whittall's research areas have primarily been centred around the musical analysis of 20th-century music and aspects of the nineteenth-century, such as the music of Richard Wagner. He is Professor Emeritus of Musical Theory and Analysis at King's College London, having worked as Professor there between 1975 and 1996.

Ernst Oster was a German pianist, musicologist, and music theorist. A specialist in the use of Schenkerian Analysis, he was the English translator of Heinrich Schenker's final work, Free Composition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Józef Michał Chomiński</span> Polish musicologist

Józef Michał Chomiński was a Polish musicologist of Ukrainian origin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timothy L. Jackson</span> American music theorist (born 1958)

Timothy L. Jackson is an American professor of music theory who has spent most of his career at the University of North Texas and specializes in music of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, Schenkerian theory, politics and music. He is the co-founder of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. In 2020, he became controversial for editing a special issue of that journal containing articles criticizing Philip Ewell's plenary talk "Music Theory's White Racial Frame".

References

  1. Morgan, Paula. "Rudolph Reti". Grove Music Online. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
  2. Cook, 1987, pp.2-3