The Concept of Disunity and Musical Analysis

Author(s): Jonathan D. Kramer

Source: Music Analysis, Vol. 23, No. 2/3 (Jul. - Oct., 2004), pp. 361-372
Published by: Wiley
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3700452
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JONATHAN D. KRAMER

THE CONCEPT OF DISUNITY AND MUSICAL ANALYSIS

Recently, unity and disunity have been much discussed in the context of
analysis. We should be grateful to Robert P. Morgan for continuing the de
However, rather than directly engaging the often subtle formulation
various theorists, his article 'The Concept of Unity and Musical Analy
oversimplifies, misrepresents, and sometimes outright falsifies what s
theorists have been saying. Despite what Morgan claims, for example, non
the analyses he criticises states that the pieces under investigation lack un
but only (a weaker yet richer claim) that they have aspects that can profi
be understood as disunifying.
One problem with Morgan's discussion is that he does not directly say w
he means by 'unity'. His meaning seems to shift throughout the article, no
because the theorists he examines do not use these terms in consistent ways.
does not define 'unity', then he surely does not define 'disunity' either. It i
to follow some of his arguments because of a lack of clarity over how he
basic terms. It seems to me that Morgan is thinking of disunity as the abse
unity, but if so I believe he is oversimplifying. The theorists he criticises at
a finely nuanced continuum between unity and disunity - he grants o
Agawu and Chua a view of 'disunity in a dialectical relation to unity' (p
whereas Morgan himself operates from the standpoint of a stark bi
opposition.' This position is not totally unreasonable, but finally it i
restrictive. What I am calling disunity entails a specific feeling, not just th
of one.

Nor does disunity need to be equated with lack of coherence. Morgan writes,
'When the analysts we are considering state that a certain musical event, or
formal segment, lacks unity, they are in essence claiming that some aspect of
the work is lacking in coherence.' (p. 22) But the Mozart passage that I cite,
and others that I analyse in other contexts, attracts me precisely because it does
seem coherent but in a way that has only a little to do with traditional notions
of musical unity as espoused by analysts like Morgan. I am seeking to under-
stand means of musical coherence beyond unity, which I believe exist, even
though they have not been given sufficient attention in the analytical literature.
Although Morgan seems to accept it uncritically, the unity-disunity binary
opposition is problematic. Let me try to explicate it by analogy. Consider the
concepts 'consonance' and 'dissonance'. As most music students begin to learn
about these ideas, they usually think of consonance as an ideal, as comfortable,

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362 JONATHAN D. KRAMER

as somehow natural. Dissonance, however, is the threatening other.

Dissonance has to be resolved to consonance, since it is understood as the
absence of consonance, and that absence needs to be remedied. Hence dis-
sonance is subordinate to consonance, at least in modal and early tonal music.
As students become more sophisticated, and as they confront other kinds of
music, they begin to understand dissonance as a musical experience in and of
itself, not just as the lack of consonance. They also come to understand that
there are varieties of consonance and dissonance. For example, consonance and
dissonance may be either acoustical or contextual (or, of course, both). A root-
position major triad may be understood as acoustically consonant, in part
because its upper pitches correspond to overtones of its root. A second-
inversion major triad may be understood as acoustically dissonant, in part
because it contains a perfect fourth above the bass, and a perfect fourth above a
fundamental does not occur in its overtone series. However, a Db major root-
position triad may be understood as contextually dissonant in a passage in C
major, despite its acoustical consonance. It is out of place, to some extent, and
needs to be resolved. Once a student has developed the sophistication of
thought and hearing to deal with these more nuanced concepts of consonance
and dissonance, dissonance becomes more of an experience - a valued
experience - in itself, and not just the absence of consonance. Indeed, as the
student becomes more involved in late nineteenth-century tonal music, the
status of dissonance as the threatening other becomes questionable: dissonance
becomes as common as, and as valued as, consonance. By the time the student
encounters Schoenberg's 'emancipation of the dissonance', he or she is (we
hope) able to understand that a reversal has taken place: consonance
(particularly acoustical consonance) has become the threatening other, while
dissonance has become the more comfortable acoustic experience.
And so it is - or should be - with unity and disunity. Disunity needs to be
appreciated not only as the absence of unity, but also as a musical experience in
and of itself. By the time we get to the twentieth century, as Morgan
acknowledges (pp. 7, 22), we encounter an emancipation of disunity. What we
need in studying earlier music is a comparable acknowledgement of the positive
impact of disunity, an understanding of it as an expressive force, not just as the
lack of something we like. As all five of the authors Morgan criticises try to
show, disunity need not be thought of negatively. None of us wants to replace
unity in music analysis, but only to acknowledge that it is not a universal, and
that another force, which some of us call disunity, can offer decidedly different
but nonetheless valuable musical experiences.
Since Morgan seems to think of disunity as the absence of unity, it is hardly
surprising that he believes that analysis fails in the face of disunity.2 1 confess to
having felt similarly myself when I first began to write about musical disunity.3
I was then at a stage in the development of my understanding of disunity

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 DISUNITY AND MUSICAL ANALYSIS 363

comparable to that of beginning harmony students

only as the absence of consonance, an absence that needs to be corrected.
However, I now find this view of disunity too impoverished. Musical analysis
can, in fact, operate within the paradigm of disunity. As I have pointed out
(Kramer 1995, p. 15), Dubiel's article 'Senses of Sensemaking' (Dubiel 1992,
pp. 217-18) contains an example of an analysis that shows how disunity works
and how and why its impact is felt. So, even in the small group of articles before
him, Morgan should have been able to find at least one instance of analysis
serving, and being served by, the concept of disunity.
Although he acknowledges that Kramer 1995 is 'wide-ranging' (p. 9),
Morgan gives only selective indications of what the article's concerns are. As I
have been trying to show here, there are ideas in my study that Morgan does
not address but which are germane to his arguments. To read Morgan's essay
is perhaps to acquire the impression that I wrote an article devoted in large part
to an analysis of a passage from Mozart's G Minor Symphony, considered
from the viewpoint of disunity. This is not true. The Mozart 'analysis' is
actually not mine at all, but Brian Hyer's, as I state quite clearly4 - though
Morgan says that I merely 'acknowledge ... an unpublished paper by Brian
Hyer as influencing [my] view of the passage' (p. 44, n. 3). Furthermore, my
discussion hardly constitutes what I would call an analysis. It barely deals with
analytical issues at all, but rather uses Hyer's analysis as an example - a very
good example - of analytical thinking that is not bound solely to principles of
unity. Here, in its entirety, is what I wrote about K. 550 (Kramer 1995, p. 16):
One theorist who is willing to confront discontinuities without smoothing them
over into textual unities is Brian Hyer. He has studied a passage in Mozart's G
Minor Symphony, although he is careful to point out that the discontinuity in
this excerpt is typical rather than unique. 'The point is that if discontinuities
can be found in this most unified of all compositions, then discontinuities can be
found anywhere.' He demonstrates that mm. 247-51 from the first movement's
recapitulation are locally necessary, because of the need to return from a far-
flung but structurally inessential motion away from the tonic, although they are
not organically necessary to the unfolding of the piece. They have neither
motivic precedent nor consequent, they do not appear in the corresponding
place in the exposition, and - most significantly - they are motivated not by any
global harmonic plan but only by the tonal logic of the preceding few measures,
which move the music into a strange and distant area from which return is
locally imperative. This passage is exciting because of its textual disunity rather
than any sense of belonging organically. The textual unity it contains is, by
comparison, rather ordinary: the realization of implied tonal return. A
traditional analysis would point to the voice-leading connections between this
passage and the previous and subsequent music, thereby positing both unity
and continuity; this passage is not, after all, divorced from the movement's
continuity in every possible way. But such an analysis privileges continuity over
discontinuity, textual unity over disunity. This excerpt in some ways fits in and

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364 JONATHAN D. KRAMER

in other ways does not; it is the prejudices of analys

and more willing, to understand and accept the form

Since Hyer chose not to publish his analysis, yet I

do not want to saddle him with responsibility fo
like it, and I stand by it. But it is curious that
particular 'analysis', which is reported only second-hand and in a most
incomplete manner, especially when I have published other analyses from the
standpoint of disunity (and unity as well). Morgan could have referred to my
remarks on a passage from the first movement of Beethoven's A Minor String
Quartet, the very work that he discusses most extensively in his article. Morgan
surely knows my discussion, since it appears in my book The Time of Music
(Kramer 1988, pp. 29-32), which Morgan reviewed (Morgan 1990).5 He also
chose not to confront a more extensive analysis of mine, in the article
(mentioned in Kramer 1995, p. 13, n. 5) 'Unity and Disunity in Carl Nielsen's
Sixth Symphony' (Kramer 1994). Probably Morgan chose not to address this
article because it does not deal with classical-period music, the focus of his
study. But when he dismisses all analysis conducted from the standpoint of
disunity, I wonder what he would make of an extended analysis that tries to
accept disunity alongside unity and consider the impact of their opposition
throughout an entire work.6
Morgan offers an analysis of the Mozart passage in question. His analysis
shows smooth voice-leading (which he correctly sees as what I was alluding
to) and the derivation of motion in parallel sixths from the corresponding
passage in the exposition. I have no quarrel with what this analysis says: it is
rather standard, and it is at least modestly perceptive, and it does offer a way
to hear the passage Hyer discusses. In fact, Morgan's analysis well fits my
description of work that, as I characterise such studies, 'privileges continuity
over discontinuity, textual unity over disunity' (Kramer 1995, p. 16, quoted
above).
Indeed, Morgan seems proud of his discovery that the 'disputed passage
thus transforms and intensifies its predecessor'. That is certainly one way to
hear those five bars from the recapitulation. But it is not the only way to hear
them. Although Morgan criticises me for allegedly essentialising the music
(p. 10), here he too essentialises by saying not just that there are rising sixths in
both passages but also that they are related and that their relationship is one of
unity. For Morgan, apparently, unity exists when there are similarity relations
to be found, and once this unity has been established, any alleged disunity must
disappear, banished by the force of resemblance. I feel, on the contrary, that
similarities can be discovered in many comparisons of different parts of pieces,
that such similarities may or may not be valued during a particular listening,
and that they may or may not inform a listener's sense of unity.

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 DISUNITY AND MUSICAL ANALYSIS 365

In some parts of his article, Morgan seems to a

of unity. Although he writes approvingly of 'un
(p. 26), his criticisms of my work seem to emanat
thing that exists (and, presumably, sometimes d
concept of unity is enormously complex and ba
notion. I would have preferred more discussion of
it resides - in the score, in the performance, in
listener's mind, or elsewhere - though Morgan
intriguing questions (p. 22). My article is also h
these challenging questions, since its main top
acknowledges some of the complexities: I ment
musical unity, including nineteenth- and twentiet
1995, pp. 11-13), and although this distinction d
least acknowledges the shifting meanings of th
aspects of unity, one ('textual unity') seeming to e
the other ('perceptual unity') being part of the list
am not claiming that these ideas constitute a very
unity, but at least they point in some fruitful
omits all reference to this aspect of my essay. It i
bypasses such issues and tacitly adopts a reified not
in the earlier parts of his article.
Morgan claims that Mozart's rising parallel sixths are 'derived most
immediately from the exposition's corresponding moment' (p. 10). I do not
quarrel with the idea of similarity between the two passages, but I think
Morgan's locution is unfortunately vague. By using the passive voice ('derived
from'), he avoids the intriguing and, to my way of thinking, important question
of who did the deriving. Did Mozart, the metaphorical composer, do it? Or
Mozart the actual flesh-and-blood man? Or the piece itself? Or sympathetic
performers? Or Morgan? Or the listeners? If so, which listeners? If we do not
know who uncovered the similarity relationship, or who uses it and how, then
how can we evaluate its impact in any meaningful way?
Similarly, after placing voice-leading reductions of the exposition and
recapitulation passages side-by-side, Morgan concludes that the 'disputed bars
are thus clearly motivated' (p. 11). Again, the question of agency is left un-
addressed. Who does the motivating of the disputed bars? If, as I would prefer
to believe, it is the listener (possibly influenced by the performance and/or
various analyses), then for whom is the motivation for these bars 'clear'? Is it
clear to everyone, or clear only to those who hear, or choose to hear, according
to Morgan's analysis?
Morgan also points out a 'quasi-palindromic relationship' between the
exposition and recapitulation passages. While I find this discovery interesting,
I wonder why a palindrome is (necessarily?) a device of unification. Why is

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366 JONATHAN D. KRAMER

similarity, even retrograde similarity, automatically privileged over

dissimilarity?
Morgan concludes his discussion of my 'analysis' by asking, 'Does some
deeper truth lie beyond these connections that can be revealed by a unity-
denying analysis? If so, Kramer does not say what it is' (p. 13). A truth deeper
than what, I wonder? Morgan's truths do not strike me as particularly deep,
though they may certainly inform a listener in a positive way. But they may
also influence a listener in a negative way, leading him or her away from
appreciating the 'disputed' bars for the surprise that they can potentially
provide. I am not arguing against Morgan's analyses; as I have stated, they
strike me as competent and possibly useful. I am only arguing against the idea
that accepting them necessarily entails that all passages must be unified with
their immediate contexts in overarching ways, or precludes hearing the passage
in a different way which challenges this idea. I am arguing against a notion of
musical analysis that necessarily privileges similarity over difference. In fact, I
am not comfortable with the idea, implied (but not directly discussed) in
Morgan's article, that music analysis consists primarily in the discovery of
resemblances. My brief discussion of the Mozart passage was intended to
suggest a way of hearing that would value the surface dissimilarity of these bars
as much as (but not necessarily in replacement of) appreciating their voice-
leading connections and motivic similarities to other passages. This is my
'deeper truth'.
In his concluding section, Morgan accuses the five of us of drawing 'a
common false conclusion: that the compositions they consider contain
unbridgeable conflicts and inconsistencies, defying rational explication' (p. 42).
But it is Morgan's conclusion that is false. I, for one, certainly did not claim,
and do not believe, that conflicts and inconsistences are contained in music.8
Only two sentences later, he states that the 'unifying elements' he has
'uncovered' do not 'reside "objectively" in the compositions' (p. 42). So, our
'conflicts and inconsistencies' are (for Morgan) contained within music, but his
'unifying elements' are not objectively in the music! He does not say where
these elements of unity do reside, but he does seem to acknowledge the listener
when he says that they are 'demonstrably linked to perceptible features of the
music' (p. 42). If he wants his readers to grant that his analyses of unity are
'linked' (whatever that might mean) to perception, why does he distort my
analysis so that it comes out looking as if I have posited the music, rather than
the listener, as the locus of disunity? And do the five of us really say that the
'conflicts and inconsistencies' we have noted are 'unbridgeable'? I am not sure
exactly what Morgan means by 'unbridgeable,' but I maintain that analyses
that seek to understand the means and purposes of musical disunity - such as
those by Dubiel and myself cited above - do indeed offer listening strategies to
deal meaningfully with the experiences of musical conflicts and inconsistencies.

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 DISUNITY AND MUSICAL ANALYSIS 367

Citing Derrida, Morgan writes about

eliminat[ing] the possibility of an objective account of

musical analysis cannot escape language's open-ended universe of plural
meanings. Works of art are not simply there ('present') as independent objects,
but are in constant transformation, linked to the shifting cultural and historical
conditions that shape them and our understanding of them'. (p. 22)

This statement resonates quite closely with my own thinking. Indeed, it is hard
for me to see how Morgan can believe this and still criticise me in the way he
has. The parallel sixths he shows in the exposition and recapitulation of the first
movement of K. 550 are indeed demonstrably in the score. Eliminating 'an
objective account of music' might prevent us from noticing them. What
significance one draws from them is the interesting question. For Morgan, they
are sufficient to render the recapitulation passage unified in its context. For me,
I understand the passage as also presenting a healthy measure of the musical
experience I call disunity. Morgan does not apparently feel that disunity. To
me, his understanding seems too limited and too wedded to finding, and
promoting to a privileged status, similarity relations. My way of understanding
the passage surely seems equally limited to him. But if, as Morgan says in the
passage quoted above, music is 'in constant transformation', then why can I not
appreciate the passage as an instance of disunity while he also hears it as an
instance of unity? If works of art are indeed fluid, why must Morgan go to such
lengths to try to show that my understanding is 'wrong' (p. 42)?
Morgan writes something else with which I can identify, although in this
case he seems to be offering up ideas to be discounted later: 'Unity no longer
resides in the composition [did it ever?] but is subjectively posited solely by the
analyst, with no more value than any other judgement. A focus on unity,
moreover, exaggerates the integrity of the whole, making us blind to incon-
sistencies and discontinuities that would emerge under less restrictive
interpretative rubrics' (p. 23). Here Morgan is summarising Alan Street's
position, which he later condemns. Actually, I quite like Morgan's summary
and only wish he could see its utility and non-threatening nature. He goes on to
develop a 'deterministic view' (p. 26) of analysis, which he attributes to
Schenker, and which he accuses Street, Dubiel, Korsyn and myself of taking as
our target - and a 'straw target' at that! Morgan is referring to the concept of
analytical necessity, which posits a musical event as a necessary consequence of
what went before.
Once again, he has misunderstood me, attributing to me ideas that no
reasonable person would hold and that are conveniently easy to attack. What
evidence does he offer that I equate unity with necessity? All he invokes is my
calling the Mozart second theme '"organically unnecessary" because it has
"neither motivic precedent nor consequence"' (p. 26). If I find the bars in

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368 JONATHAN D. KRAMER

question 'organically unnecessary', it does not

unity-based analysis of them would have to rest
leap of logic works only if everything in the
unnecessary, which is not true. (Consider a diffe
you are reading is certainly not necessary: I could
Morgan, or not responded at all. However, Mor
things I have written, and he has come to some conclusions that I feel are
wrong, and so a response such as this is not unnecessary either. It is neither
necessary nor unnecessary.) Thus I do not believe in musical necessity (or
inevitability), nor do I know any reasonable analyst who does (including
Morgan 2004, p. 26).9
What I do recognise, along with most other analysts, is similarity relations.
Similarities abound in musical analysis, and many claims for unity are based on
them. As my concept of textual unity attests, I do not deny their existence; but
I do bemoan the tendency of some analysts to prioritise them over other kinds
of relationships. Dissimilarity is also a kind of relationship, and it can be just as
relevant to the experience and understanding of music. Often similarity and
dissimilarity coexist: in the Mozart passage, Morgan has demonstrated inter-
vallic similarity to an earlier passage, and I have claimed motivic dissimilarity
to immediately and distantly preceding music. Must the recognition of the
similarity preclude appreciating the lack of motivic precedent? Morgan would
seem to believe 'yes.' I am pleading for a resounding 'no.' Dissimilarity - one
kind of disunity among many - can be powerful, beautiful and meaningful, and
it can share an uneasy coexistence with unity.
Morgan might agree with this statement, since he certainly does admit that
there are unexpected and surprising events in music.10 Perhaps, then, we
disagree mainly about to what we attach the label 'disunity'. I acknowledge
that my article (Kramer 1995) may not be as clear as it ought to be about just
how I understand this loaded term. But I also feel that Morgan could have
gone further - much further - in defining his own usage(s) of 'unity' and
'disunity' and in trying to distinguish how the theorists he attacks actually
understand these concepts.
It is unlikely that I will convince Morgan to value disunity alongside unity in
music analysis. After all, as I discuss at the outset of this article, Morgan accuses
the five writers he criticises of believing the music they study is incoherent, a
characterisation that is untrue. What we are (or at least I am) arguing for is a
looser and larger notion of coherence, based on differences as well as
similarities, on lack of precedent (of certain events or segments) as well as
clear precedent. The interplay of the experiences of unity and disunity can be
among the richest of musical experiences. Morgan seems to want to deny this
interplay, in favour of an overriding unity. In order to do so, he tries to banish
all serious consideration of moments of disunity. His view is as restrictive as it is

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 DISUNITY AND MUSICAL ANALYSIS 369

bound by tradition. I readily admit that musical unity

not the only way music can be potent. It is time
attention to other means by which music makes a pr
For my epilogue, I should like to take a step back f
Morgan's attacks to write a few words about the ent
Analysts who utilise traditional unity-based met
threatened by exhortations to pay attention to disuni
non sequiturs, etc. Their feeling of being threatened
all, such analysts have invested years honing their s
operated within the paradigm of unity for gene
particularly challenged these days, when the very
called, condescendingly, 'formalist analysis' is bein
It should be clear from my defence here, and from
that I have no quarrel with formalist analysis in itse
years, and it remains an important part of my teach
times my understanding of a composition has fre
reading a sensitive and perceptive analysis. Eventuall
of the analysis, but the new perceptions it provided
Thus I have no wish to overthrow formalist analys
needs to join other kinds of musical studies, to help
of individual works. Indeed, Morgan feels the same w
concerned solely with how music is constructed; it c
communicates, reflects aspects of the composer's
relates to social or political issues, or whatever' (p. 26
how music unfolds in time, how it may be heard, ho
performed, and how it may be understood.
Morgan goes on: 'There is no reason, in other word
purely "formalistic" - though for some reason t
ideological divide often seem to think there is' (pp. 2
several analysts are actually advocating, and pro
impurely formalistic, that mix the formalistic with
My concern here, however, is not so much the
include non- or anti-formalist methods, but rat
formalistic analysis while opening it up to assum
that are not based solely on the elucidation of
meaningful analysis is an interpretation, and a pro
like a sensitive performer, who uncovers new way
piece. The analyses that I most value do not try to p
to be heard, but rather they suggest ways that it m
ways should, and for me sometimes do, respond to o
than just its unity. A piece of music is like a person,
neat. Not all parts of it belong together in clear-c

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370 JONATHAN D. KRAMER

things. It can be easier to love than to understan

irrationality, of disorder, even of chaos"1 -
important contributors to meaning and experien
To repeat: I do not want to remove unity fro
want to demote it from its privileged position as a universal or necessary
condition. I want to try to use formalist analysis - as it has existed and also,
where possible, in new ways - to try to understand how irrationality, disorder,
chaos, disunity and so on, can make musical experience richer and more varied
than is suggested in traditional analyses. This goal may strike some analysts as
irresponsible or threatening, but it should not. I do not want to deny or destroy
any kind of music analysis. In an unabashedly eclectic manner, I want to use
whatever tools and whatever assumptions can enrich my musical experiences.
And I want to share my enriched experiences with other listeners, through my
sometimes formalist analyses - not to convince them how they ought to
understand the music, but to suggest ways of hearing that may become
uniquely their own.

NOTES

. Morgan claims that it is those who espouse what he calls the 'anti-
who see unity and disunity as a binary opposition (p. 43).

2. 'None of the five analysts ... can draw analytical conclusions fr

disunity, or even suggest what such an analysis might entail' (p. 4
mere claim that a composition lacks unity [which none of the theo
discusses does, in fact, claim of any entire work] necessarily silenc
as is confirmed by all three analysts considered here: once disunit
analytical commentary ceases, immediately and entirely' (p. 27).

3. I wrote, 'We have well-developed theories of musical unity but nothing

comparable for disunity. ... We tend to believe in our demonstrations of how a
piece is unified, but the notion of showing that or how a piece might be disunified
probably strikes us as more than a little bizarre' (Kramer 1995, p. 12).

4. A footnote on the same page refers to 'a preliminary version (read at Columbia
University, April 1989) of the [Hyer's] unpublished paper '"Them Bones, Them
Bones, Them Dry Bones": Discontinuities in the First Movement of the Mozart
G Minor Symphony' (Kramer 1995, p. 16, n. 12).
5. Since I accuse Morgan of misrepresenting me in several instances, I should also
mention an egregious falsehood in this review (Morgan 1990). In positing an
alleged 'slip' on my part, he writes,
In discussing the opening of the third movement of Mendelssohn's Symphony
No. 4 ('Italian'), the author states categorically that the downbeat at m. 4 is the
'only viable candidate for metric accentuation in mm. 1-4' (p. 91), coinciding
with the close of the first four-measure phrase and giving rise to a series of
hypermeasures 4-7, 8-11, 12-15, and 16-19. Some 12 pages later, however, on

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 DISUNITY AND MUSICAL ANALYSIS 371

returning to the piece, he states equally categorically

correspond with the beginnings of the phrases: 'mm. 9
bar hypermeasure, articulated by repetition of the
'similarly' mm. 13-16 (p. 103), giving rise to a series o
4, 5-8, 9-12, 13-16 directly contradicting the previous

On p. 91, I do state that a four-bar hypermeasure beg

16-19 constitute an unequivocal four-bar hypermea
that the intervening hypermeasures are what Morgan
12-15. In fact, bars 4-8 constitute a five-bar hyperme
hypermeasures mm. 9-12 and 13-16, the latter ove
hypermeasure 16-19. On p. 103 I say just that: I identi
four-bar hypermeasures. Nowhere on p. 103 (or any
bars 1-4 or 5-8 constitute hypermeasures. Morgan fal
and then criticised me for saying things that I, in fa
6. Another article of mine ('The Finale of Mahler's Se
from a Postmodernist Perspective') attempts a simi
Morgan for not knowing this particular article, howev
published. Some of it appears in 'Postmodern Concepts of Musical Time'
(Kramer 1996). The article was originally delivered as a paper at the Music
Analysis Conference at Lancaster University (1994).

7. In a revision of this material [to be published in Kramer's forthcoming book,

Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening - Editor's note], I discuss how both
textual and perceptual unity are listener-oriented. In this later formulation, I
rename 'perceptual unity' as 'experiential unity':
Textual unity does not exist physically: we cannot point to the unity in a score
or a performance but only to the elements that are allegedly unified or, in
Webern's terminology [Webern 1963, p. 35], interrelated. Although I
informally refer to textual unity 'in' music, textual unity actually exists in
relationships between events or qualities of music. The simplest kind of textual
unity is similarity: two events or figures can be shown to have some degree of
similarity. The figures have an objective existence in the piece, but the
similarity relationship is something discovered by analysts or listeners: the
similarity is in the perceiver. ...
Experiential unity also does not exist physically but resides in relationships -
but not among aspects of the music-out-there but among aspects of music-in-
here: music as perceived, as encoded in short- and then long-term memory, and
as recalled. To the extent that unity involves similarity, textual unity resides in
the perceived similarity between events, while experiential unity is the
experience of relatedness one may have when noticing similar (or even
dissimilar) events. Not all unity is the product of similarity relationships,
however. While most textual unity involves - in practice (of traditional music
analysis) if not in theory - similarity between events that can be shown to have
properties in common, experiential unity - being more an experience than an
observation - can go beyond simple similarity.

8. I do state (Kramer 1995, p. 16, quoted above), referring to the Mozart passage,
that 'the textual unity it contains is, by comparison, rather ordinary: the
realisation of implied tonal return' (emphasis added). I trust it is clear that my use

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372 JONATHAN D. KRAMER

of the word 'contains' is metaphorical here, sin

unity, the type of unity that listeners feel to be

9. In my article I do state that Hyer finds the M

this choice of term is unfortunate; a better locution would have been 'locally
motivated.'

10. 'My claims for unity do not deny the significance of "unexpected moments"'
(p. 42).

11. I discuss musical chaos in Kramer 1995, pp. 16-20.

REFERENCES

Dubiel, Joseph P., 1992: 'Senses of Sensemaking', Perspectives o

pp. 210-21.
Kramer, Jonathan D., 1988: The Time of Music (New York: Schirmer Books).
, 1994: 'Unity and Disunity in Carl Nielsen's Sixth Symphony', in Mina
Miller (ed.), A Nielsen Companion (London: Faber and Faber), pp. 293-344.
, 1995: 'Beyond Unity: Toward an Understanding of Musical Post-
modernism', in Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann (eds), Concert
Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies (Rochester:
University of Rochester Press), pp. 11-33.
, 1996: 'Postmodern Concepts of Musical Time', Indiana Theory Review,
17/ii, pp. 21-61.
, forthcoming: Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening [posthumous
publication].
Morgan, Robert P., 1990: 'Review: Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music',
Music Theory Spectrum, 12/ii, pp. 247-55.
, 2003: 'The Concept of Unity and Music Analysis,' Music Analysis, 22/i-ii,
pp. 7-50.
Webern, Anton, 1963: The Path to the New Music, trans. Leo Black (Bryn Mawr:
Theodore Presser).

? Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 Music Analysis, 23/ii-iii (2004)

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