Hearing, Feeling, and Interpreting the Gothic in Franz Schubert’s Music for Four Hands
The genre of the piano duet – four hands, two bodies, one instrument – offers rich territory for reflecting on the nature of musical meaning, both textual and performative (see especially Philip Brett 1997; Adrian Daub 2014; Richard Leppert 2005). Central to this is its blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private, the physical and the intimate, between individual subjectivity and meanings that arise through the four-hand collaboration. This talk, drawing on material from my forthcoming monograph, grapples with these conundrums vis-à-vis intimations of the gothic in duets ranging from Franz Schubert’s Fantasie in C minor, D 48, to his Grande Marche Funèbre, D 859, and the F minor Fantasie, D 940. My exploration moves from tracing the sonic properties of this music, with a particular emphasis on death, to a consideration of its visceral and emotional resonances with ideas of fantasy, the sublime, and the grotesque. As it does so, it offers a response to Scott Burnham’s dictum that Schubert’s music opens up ‘not just spaces, but subjectivized spaces, imaginary spaces’; to inhabit these is to enter ‘that hallowed, terrible place where we remember what we are’ (2000).
Dr Joe Davies is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Maynooth University and the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on the aesthetics and cultural history of music of the long nineteenth century. He is editor of Clara Schumann Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2021), co-editor (with James Sobaskie) of Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert (Boydell & Brewer, 2019), co-editor (with Roe-Min Kok) of the forthcoming Clara and Robert Schumann in Context (CUP), and author of Franz Schubert and the Gothic, forthcoming with Boydell. He has chapters forthcoming in Schubert’s Piano (ed. Matthew Gardner and Christine Martin), Schubert in Context (ed. Christopher Gibbs), The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers (ed. Matthew Head and Susan Wollenberg), and Joseph Joachims Identitäten (ed. Katharina Uhde and Michael Uhde). As part of his current project, he co-leads, together with Yvonne Liao, the Women in Global Music Research and Industry Network (WIGM), which seeks to develop ways of engaging with women’s voices and experiences across global musical contexts.
This seminar will take place over Zoom, at THIS LINK.