Bakhtin, Beck, and Brahms: Toward a new poetics of musical analysis.

Abstract

Bakhtin, Beck, and Brahms: Toward a New Poetics of Musical Analysis outlines a conceptual framework for musical analysis based on the work of the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Chapter One introduces Bakhtin's concepts of excess of seeing, outsidedness, and dialogue. Chapter Two is a critique of the aesthetic ideology that forms the foundation of contemporary practice in the analysis of popular music. The assumptions underlying current analytical methods, I argue, constitute an ideological framework that is inappropriate for popular music, and consequently obscure important musical features. Chapter Two concludes by offering an alternate analytical approach, based on the Bakhtinian concepts introduced in Chapter One. Chapter Three applies this alternative approach in an analysis of a popular song, Beck's Where It's At, showing that a Bakhtinian approach yields insights into popular music in ways traditional methods cannot. The final chapter extends the alternate model to music of the common practice, via an analysis of Ein Deutsches Requiem by Johannes Brahms. In the Wind My Rescue Is is a composition for orchestra, tenor solo and mixed chorus in six movements, approximately twenty-three minutes in length. The instrumentation is as follows: two flutes, two oboes, Bb clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, two F horns, trombones, tuba, vibraphone, marimba, harp, celesta, mixed chorus and strings. The text is a collection of three poems drawn from the work of A. R. Ammons: So I Said I Am Ezra (second movement), In the Wind My Rescue Is (fourth movement), and Mansion (sixth movement). Movements for orchestra alone precede each choral/orchestral movement.Ph.D.EducationEducational philosophyMusic educationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132955/2/9909859.pd