Music in context : Four case studies

Abstract

In his thesis entitled “Music in Context. Four Case Studies”, R.J.C. van Randwijck investigates the context in which music has been created. It is a search in Four Case Studies, approaching four pieces of music from the context in which they were written in order to understand their meaning. The investigation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chaconne in D minor for solo violin BWV 1004 can justify the conclusion that everything seems to indicate that it was a part of the musica sub communione and that it has been written within this context. One can assume that Bach manipulated the heading “ciaccona” in order to put this piece in the context of Last Supper. Approaching the Chaconne proceeding from its context seems to reveal its underside meaning and Bach’s intention. What is the context of Bach’s cantatas BWV 34a and 34 and the relationship of these works? BWV 34a was most probably written for the wedding of a minister. It can be assumed that BWV 34a was composed earlier than BWV 34. BWV 34 was composed for Pentecost. Both the ministry and the feast of Pentecost are related to the dissemination of the Gospel; it may be assumed that this was the reason Bach chose to rework BWV 34a as the Pentecost cantata BWV 34. Seen from the cultural context of that era and supported by Robert Schumann’s writings, his Carnaval (op. 9) is a collage, a potpourri of personages, situations, and carnivalesque personalities tumbling one over the other. In totality these elements have little in common, but they fit within the entourage of a carnival celebration. In Carnaval – in which everyone, hidden behind masks as mystification like Schumann, does as he or she pleases – the various elements fit each other wonderfully. In Carnaval humor holds this clownish parade together as Romantic resistance to the rational and cerebral attitudes that dominated the preceding age. In the postwar period after World War II, in which the whole world – the musical world included – lay in pieces, Pierre Boulez and others sought to build a new musical language and syntax from the ground up. Within this context, Structures I was created. It was the first work by Boulez with a strictly through-composed serial organization in all parameters. In finding this new language, Boulez has been influenced by the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) and by the German/Swiss painter Paul Klee (1879-1940). One can typify postwar avant-garde music, including Structures I, as an experiment. In contrast to their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century counterparts, composers of this music were more interested in compositional techniques than in completed works. The structure rather than expression of music is determinative for Boulez. Serial functions serve within this structure as a binding element of organization. Aestheticizing the experiment, in this case serial organization, takes the place of the aestheticizing of “beauty”. It is in the desperate anti-humanism of the early atomic age that Structures I as experiment came into being.