Review of Alexander Rehding, <i>Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought</i> (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The transformation of Hugo Riemann from obsolete pedant to influential thinker has been one of the most remarkable developments in North American music theory within the past twenty years.Those who have been intellectually and musically formed by Schenkerian ideas have likely not welcomed this development, since the views of Schenker on Riemann-the great Un-Ohr-were strong and unambiguous.Indeed, the relegation of Riemann's theoretical ideas to risible futility was a kind of recreational activity among ardent Schenkerians.Oswald Jonas, for example, after arguing for the uselessness of function theory and noting that "such harmonic hearing and interpretation can even surpass a manner of composing-although the two are obviously interdependent," cites a passage from a string quartet by Max Reger-the great Gegenbeispieler-analyzed in the Riemannian way."Need anything further be added?," he sarcases in the following, one-sentence paragraph. (1)] The ascendancy of Schenkerian theory in America in the 1960s did not displace a previous Riemannian episteme, for Riemann's ideas had already lost whatever purchase they had on American theory long before, the decisive event likely being the First World War.Before that calamity, Americans seeking advanced training in composition (and, therefore, theory) generally sought it in Germany (e.g., MacDowell, Chadwick) and brought back German methods of instruction.As Riemannian ideas began to be widely adopted in Germany in the years before the war, they started to show up on these shores (e.g., Dirk Haagman's Tonal Function: Harmony, Scales, and Intervals, the first volume of which was published in 1916). (2)ut the war exposed North Americans to powerful anti-German propaganda of a then unprecedented force: not only was sauerkraut restyled as "liberty cabbage" and the city of Berlin, Ontario, renamed Kitchener over the objections of its inhabitants, but all things German were subject to patriotic disapproval, leading even to the public abuse of Germanspeaking immigrants and their descendents.After such a dose of cultural vitriol, it is hardly surprising that the second volume of Haagman's book never appeared, that Copland, Piston, and other post-war composers journeyed to France instead of Germany, and that Riemann's ideas gained no new advocates on this side of the Atlantic.[3] The rehabilitation and neo-logizing of Riemann occurred thanks to David Lewin's admirable ability to adopt (or at least try out) a modus audiendi from historical music theory.His 1982 article "A Formal Theory of Generalized Tonal Functions" (3) took the fun out of Riemann jokes, and subsequent important work by Lewin, his students, and other interested scholars succeeded in making them politically incorrect.The culmination of the first phase of revisionist activity was Richard Cohn's "survey and historical perspective" that prefaced an issue
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".