Beyond Homage and Critique? Schubert’s Sonata in C minor, D. 958, and Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations in C minor, WoO 80
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When Schubert’s instrumental pieces seem to directly quote or allude to Beethoven’s works, some music scholars have interpreted these forms of appropriation either as musical homage or as evidence that Schubert modeled several of his works on Beethoven’s. Other scholars have encouraged us to rethink these perspectives, suggesting instead that the same forms of appropriation can be read as active responses or antipodes to Beethoven’s music. This paper reconsiders the topic of influence in Schubert’s music from a post-structuralist position, drawing from Jacques Derrida’s writings on grafting—the act of placing separate texts side by side to produce a new structure. Using the first movement from Schubert’s Sonata in C minor, D. 958, and Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations in C minor, WoO 80 as examples, my paper seeks to rethink the categories of homage and critique by considering the following two ideas: (1) if “[t]o write means to graft” (Derrida [1972] 1982, 355), each composition contains a heterogeneity of texts, challenging the possibility of an original text; (2) matters concerning appropriation do not lie solely within either musical text, but rather between them, inviting us to reconsider how constructions of history and criteria for originality can affect our understanding of appropriation and our music-analytical readings of Schubert’s works.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".