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Music and/as Process
Music and/as Process
Edited by

Lauren Redhead and Vanessa Hawes

Music and/as Process

Edited by Lauren Redhead and Vanessa Hawes

This book first published 2016

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2016 by Lauren Redhead, Vanessa Hawes and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-9491-5

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9491-3
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations and Tables .................................................................. vii

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1

Part I: Analysis as/of Process

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 10

Introversive and Extroversive Processes: Rethinking Stravinsky’s Music
as Dialogue between Formalist and Expressive Paradigms
NICHOLAS MCKAY

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 34

On the Nature of Subjectivity in Music Analysis: Some Observations
on Analysing an Early Score by Philip Glass
SUZIE WILKINS, KEITH POTTER AND GERAINT A. WIGGINS

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 56

Perception of Structure as a Learning Process in a Schoenberg Song
VANESSA HAWES

Part II: Performing Processes; Performance Processes

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 80

Performing Transformations (a Risky Approach)
ELLEN HOOPER

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 97

Risky Business: Negotiating Virtuosity in the Collaborative Creation
of Orfordness for Solo Piano
DAVID GORTON AND ZUBIN KANGA

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 116

Notation as Process: Interpretation of Open Scores and the ‘Journey Form’
LAUREN REDHEAD
vi Table of Contents

Part III: Composition of/with Processes

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 136

Temporality, Structure, Symbols, and the Social: Graphic Notation
as Process
CHARLES CÉLESTE HUTCHINS

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 156

Navigating the Uncertain: Performers in Devising Processes
MICHAEL PICKNETT

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 173

Translation as Paradigm and Process for Pre-Composition in Leiden
Translations Installation and Film
ALISTAIR ZALDUA

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 194

Subjectifying the Objective: Mathematical Processes and the Search
for Balance
STEVE GISBY

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 210

‘I am just Practising’: A Personal Conversation among the Boundaries
and Subjectivities of Current Musicologies
CHARLOTTE PURKIS

Bibliography ............................................................................................ 230

Contributors ............................................................................................. 243

Index ........................................................................................................ 248

 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES

1.1a: Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, opening bassoon melody from

the introduction to the ‘Adoration of the Earth’ with melodic cell
labels referring to Nattiez’s distributional analysis in Fondements
d’une sémiologie de la musique. ......................................................... 16
1.1b: Representation of Nattiez’s distributional analysis of the opening
of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, as shown in Figure 1.1a. .............. 16
1.2: Stravinsky, Oedipus Rex, Act 2, Shepherd’s aria. .............................. 20
1.3: Stravinsky, Piano Sonata, First Movement, bb.12-31, paradigmatic
analysis. ............................................................................................... 23
1.4: Stravinsky, Piano Sonata, First Movement, bb.12-31 refracted
through Rosch’s tripartite model of basic level prototype effects........ 25
1.5: Stravinsky, Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, First
Movement, Figures 11-13. ................................................................... 30
2.1: Glass, Gradus, bb.1-2. ........................................................................ 38
2.2: Glass, Gradus, bb.8-9. ........................................................................ 39
2.3: Glass, Gradus, bb.20-21. .................................................................... 40
2.4: Glass, Gradus, b.28. ........................................................................... 40
2.5: Glass, Gradus, b.42. ........................................................................... 41
2.6: Glass, Gradus, b.60. ........................................................................... 41
2.7: Glass, Gradus, b.66. ........................................................................... 42
2.8: Glass, Gradus, b.70. ........................................................................... 43
2.9: Glass, Gradus, bb.82-83. .................................................................... 43
2.10: Glass, Gradus, b.87. ......................................................................... 44
2.11: Glass, Gradus, b.94. ......................................................................... 44
2.12: Glass, Gradus, b.6. ........................................................................... 45
2.13: Glass, Gradus, bb.8-10. .................................................................... 46
2.14: Glass, Gradus, bb.17-18. .................................................................. 47
2.15: Glass, Gradus, bb.18-23. .................................................................. 48
2.16: Glass, Gradus, b.35. ......................................................................... 49
2.17: Glass, Gradus, b.57. ......................................................................... 49
2.18: Glass, Gradus, b.71 .......................................................................... 50
3.1: Self-reported structure of Schoenberg, Das Buch der hängenden
Gärten, Song IV. .................................................................................. 65
3.2: Schoenberg, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, Song IV, b.18. ......... 67
3.3: Schoenberg, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, Song IV, b.21. ......... 68
viii List of Illustrations and Tables

3.4a: Comparing b.18 to b.21 in Schoenberg, Das Buch der hängenden

Gärten, Song IV. .................................................................................. 70
3.4b: Comparing bb.18-20 to bb.15-17in Schoenberg, Das Buch
der hängenden Gärten, Song IV. ......................................................... 71
3.4c: Comparing bb.21-22 to bb.18-20 of Schoenberg, Das Buch
der hängenden Gärten, Song IV. ......................................................... 72
3.5: Comparing some attributes of b.18, b.21, and the opening material
of Schoenberg, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, Song IV. ............... 74
4.1: de Falla, ‘Polo’ from 7 Canciones populares Españolas, bb.5-12. .... 90
4.2: de Falla, ‘Polo’ from 7 Canciones populares Españolas, bb.29-36. .. 92
4.3: de Falla, ‘Polo’ from 7 Canciones populares Españolas, bb.37-44. .. 93
4.4: de Falla, ‘Polo’ from 7 Canciones populares Españolas, bb.86-89. .. 94
5.1: The opening of Gorton, ‘Evacuation of the Civil Population
from Shingle Street, Suffolk’ from Orfordness. ................................ 102
5.2: Damping an e-bow note with a dulcimer hammer. ........................... 105
5.3: Gorton, ‘Cobra Mist’ from Orfordness, extract. ............................... 107
5.4: Gorton, ‘You Can’t Tell the People’ from Orfordness, extract. ....... 108
5.5: Gorton, ‘Blue Danube’ from Orfordness, extract. ............................ 110
5.6: Orford Ness as it is today. ................................................................ 111
5.7: Gorton, ‘The Island’ from Orfordness, extract. ................................ 113
6.1: Mc Laughlin, Music in Two Dimensions: No. 2a. ............................ 122
6.2: Fergler, Image, Music, Text, p.12. .................................................... 127
6.3: Lucas, [Unnamed Maps Series], notation extract............................. 129
7.1: Cardew, Treatise, p.2. ....................................................................... 137
7.2: Applebaum, Medium, p.3. ................................................................ 139
7.3: Braxton, Falling River Music (Piece #365b). ................................... 141
7.4: Braxton, the title of Piece #69Q. ...................................................... 142
7.5: Redhead, Concerto, parts 3 and 4 on p.4. ......................................... 146
7.6: Hutchins, Imramma panel................................................................. 150
7.7: Hutchins, Imramma panel (2). .......................................................... 151
7.8: Hutchins, Imramma panel (3). .......................................................... 153
9.1: Zaldua, Leiden Translations, notation of recipe number 51
for contrabass: Gilding of Silver. ....................................................... 179
9.2: Zaldua, Leiden Translations, sigil formula for Leiden Papyrus
X recipe number 20............................................................................ 180
9.3: Zaldua, Leiden Translations, pre-compositional sketch showing data
derived from the sigils created from recipe number 20...................... 181
9.4: Zaldua, Leiden Translations, notation of recipe number 20,
‘Another Formula’ for solo contrabass. ............................................. 182
9.5: Zaldua, Leiden Translations, still of installation showing contrabass
(Adam Linson) coupled with a blank (dark) screen. .......................... 189
 Music and/as Process ix

9.6: Zaldua, Leiden Translations, still of installation showing writing

(Alistair Zaldua) coupled with BSL interpretation (Lauren Redhead).. 190
9.7: Zaldua, Leiden Translations, the author writing the sigil formulae.. 192
10.1: Gisby, Coming Home, the first sixteen patterns. ............................ 199
10.2: Gisby, Symmetry | Reflection, the seven basic structures. .............. 201
10.3: Gisby, Symmetry | Reflection, the additive process. ....................... 201
10.4: Gisby, Point To Line, the process over one octave. ........................ 203
10.5: Gisby, Fragmented Melodies, basic scale material. ....................... 204
10.6: Gisby, Fragmented Melodies, opening eight patterns. ................... 204
10.7: Gisby, Iterative Music, segmentation of audio material. ................ 205
10.8: Gisby, Iterative Music, the first pattern. ......................................... 205
10.9: Gisby, Iterative Music, first displacement and addition. ................ 205
10.10: Gisby, Iterative Music, end point. ................................................ 205
10.11: Gisby, Iterative Music, process of subtraction. ............................ 206
 INTRODUCTION

VANESSA HAWES AND LAUREN REDHEAD

‘Process’ links many different threads of contemporary musical

research. The most well-established use of the term in music is in relation
to process music, given focus and definition in Steve Reich’s essay,
‘Music as a Gradual Process’. Reich wrote, ‘the distinctive thing about
musical processes is that they determine the note-to-note (sound-to-sound)
details and the overall form simultaneously.’1 Of course, this description is
not limited to music of the style of Reich’s early minimalist works: music
to which the definition can be applied includes much contemporary music,
experimental music, improvisation and improvisatory practices, devising
practices, and practice-led approaches to (the understanding of) music, all
of which are represented in this volume. 2 The term ‘process’ has been
understood broadly in order to incorporate a range of perspectives.
However, rather than simply processes of interpretation, performance,
composition, or analysis, these and other processes can be found in the
music discussed in each chapter. Inspired by Reich’s definition, the
processes discussed here are audible or perceptible in the music
concerned. This includes occasions when musical processes are made
perceptible through the experience of iterative processes, or of traces from
rehearsal or the creative process. The acknowledgement of a musical piece
being and also having a process, and that these two concepts may be
linked or even ostensibly the same thing, necessarily requires an
understanding of the notion of a musical ‘work’ that goes beyond seeing
that ‘work’ as an object to be studied from without, but, rather, recognizes
it as a process to be experienced from within.

1
Steve Reich, ‘Music as a Gradual Process’, in Writings About Music, ed. by Paul
Hillier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp.9-11 (p.9).
2
Further areas of interest—including early music and non-western music—can be
identified. These, and other, areas could be considered as areas for development for
future publications in this field.
2 Introduction

This volume draws on practice-led research, with core areas of interest

in compositional issues, performance practice, and the musicology of
process in music, including its analysis. By its nature, research in this area
is cross-disciplinary, taking in approaches from other creative arts and
social science practices. In recent years, practice-led research has
represented a challenge to musicology, in that the frameworks of
contemporary musicology—with a long history of the study of music as an
object—cannot always present, support and assimilate practice-led work.
The musicology of musical processes provides one model of how practice-
led and ‘traditional’ musicology might support and complement each
other, and may contribute to thinking about how practice-led research is
disseminated and evaluated for exercises such as the UK’s Research
Excellence Framework.
In the late twentieth century musicology began to challenge the terms of
its own discourse through the consideration of subjectivity and the social
dimension of music, particularly through the ‘New Musicology’ movement,
and the increasing influence of cultural studies, ethnomusicology, popular
music studies and music psychology. The nature of the ‘work’ of music
has been addressed and problematized by scholars such as Lydia Goehr,3
and the nature of the score and its information has been questioned and re-
addressed in both the experimental music and historically-informed
performance movements. But it is no longer enough only to problematize
the ‘work’, and address the work concept, in terms of ontology—although
there is undoubtedly still work to be done in addressing the ontology of the
musical work—and contemporary scholars are beginning to interrogate
and embody what Foucault describes as the ‘space left empty by the
author’s disappearance’. 4 This empty space, and the question of what
might fill it, invites the exploration of the experience of the practitioner,
and processes of collaboration, communication, creativity, and sociability.
An example of this is in the interpretation of graphic notation, a subjective
and personal experience of the process of transforming one kind of
musical information into another; here control and responsibility are
distributed among practitioners and processes. The challenge of graphic
notation provides further context to the debate on authorship and ontology
from the empirical experience of the practitioner.

3
Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992).
4
Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul
Rabinow (London: Pantheon, 1985), pp.101-120 (p.105).
 Music and/as Process 3

The composer-author and performer-interpreter are not the only

practitioners whose role is under construction in the post-New Musicology
frameworks of music study, and the space left empty by the analyst’s
disappearance in the aftermath of the problematization of analysis as an
objective discipline is also one which provides opportunities for exploration.
Joseph Kerman, 5 Kofi Agawu 6 and Jean-Jacques Nattiez 7 have all
addressed this issue within the fields of hermeneutics and semiotics. Just
as processes of interpretation and construction can be interrogated through
a consideration of graphic notation, more traditional forms of notation can
also be considered from new perspectives in the tradition of these ‘new
analysts’. Examples of this are the social and/or personal dimension of
music addressed within the musical discourse itself and the processes
through which this discourse is experienced. Experience and structure are
entwined, and the analyst becomes an acknowledged active agent in the
process of generating musicological work.
The re-framing of the traditional roles of objects and practitioners in the
work of music, and in the work of musicology, invites a perspective with
its origin as the active interaction between objects and practitioners:
practice-led research, including the work of composers as composers and
performers as performers and not just as musicologists writing about
composition and performance. As such, the notion of music and/as process
addresses some of the themes of one of the most important and
comprehensive edited volumes about the study of music in the past,
Rethinking Music, 8 and those of Nicholas Cook’s more recent book,
Beyond the Score. 9 Cook outlines a scholarship for music in which
meaning is generated in real time through the process of performance.
There is also an expanding literature in the area of practice-led research
and its methodological critique. Edited books by Hazel Smith and Roger

5
Joseph Kerman, ‘How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out’, in Write All
These Down: Essays on Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
reprinted from Critical Inquiry, vol.7 (1980), 311-331.
6
Kofi Agawu, ‘How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back In Again’,
Music Analysis, vol.23, no.2/3 (2004), 267-286.
7
Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiology of Music, trans.
by Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
8
Rethinking Music, ed. by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
9
Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013).
4 Introduction

Dean,10 Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt,11 and reflections such as those by
Patricia Leavy,12 have all begun to address aspects of the processes and
practices of practice-led research, although with very little focus on music.
This book emphasizes the foregrounding of the active agent in musical
activity, auto-ethnography as a method of empirical study, and self-
reflexive practices—which may include writing—as a method for
research.
Although the diverse topics in this volume can be roughly categorized
into sections written from the point of view of the analyst, performer and
composer, each of these is much more than that categorization implies.
Composers are also performers, performers compose: all are analysts. The
analysis presented concentrates on the active in music making, and on the
non-traditional and interdisciplinary in analysis. Investigating process
rehumanizes analysis and so-called mathematical approaches to
composition; performance and composition are employed in investigations
of musical meaning as well as of individual creativity. The three sections
of the book represent the familiar categories of analysis, performance and
composition, but this is just one way of grouping the authors’ work here.
Themes and threads generated by an interrogation of the notion of music
and/as process are many and varied, and readers will find fruitful
connections between chapters across and between the three sections.
This book will be of interest to those working in process music, new
music, composition, interdisciplinary issues, performance studies,
aesthetics and the philosophy of music, music analysis, multimedia and
creative arts research and those interested in the evolution of the idea of
music as a subject of research: the accelerating transformation of its
consideration from object to process, and the challenges this presents both
in terms of disciplinary development and wider academic frameworks. In
addition, the approach to music analysis, performance, composition, and
practice-led research taken by the authors should be of interest to those
involved in the practice of music both as professional performers and
composers within and outside of the academic profession.

10
Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, ed. by Hazel
Smith and Roger T. Dean (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
11
Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, ed. by Estelle Barrett
and Barbara Bolt (London: I.B. Taurus, 2007).
12
Patricia Leavy, Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice (New York: The
Guilford Press, 2009).
 Music and/as Process 5

Many of the authors included are practitioners themselves. The volume,

then, is very personal to those authors presenting individual and
developing approaches to the problem of doing music in contemporary
academia. The perspective is from the inside, the reflections are based on
experience and the possibilities are exciting. The range and breadth of
perspectives presented also give rise to surprising connections, often at the
philosophical level.

Analysis as/of Process

The first section of the book deals with the analysis of performance and
the performance of analysis. The historical nature of music and the
recognition of pieces—by Igor Stravinsky, Philip Glass and Arnold
Schoenberg—as musical ‘works’ in the traditional sense, is questioned by
the authors, and is a factor in the analyses which address processes in
composing, performing, and listening, and the links and overlaps between
these, in three very different but interconnected ways. These three
approaches posit new directions and territory for musical analysis.
Nicholas McKay directly addresses the process of analysis and the
nuanced way in which it can understand process. The notion of
introversive and extroversive processes is used as a tool to understand
Stravinsky’s compositional approach and to address the ability of score-
based semiotic analysis to interrogate processual elements of music.
McKay’s method has implications for the understanding of Stravinsky, of
process, and of semiotics: it is a subtle approach to explaining how the
focus on process in analysis might recontextualize some of its existing
methodological tools, and demonstrate that the social dimension of music
can be addressed within its musical discourse, and that such an approach
might considerably contribute to the understanding of musical processes
even in works as well known as The Rite of Spring.
This exploration of the poietics of a work is contrasted with the
consideration of esthesic information within a computational analysis in
the chapter by Suzie Wilkins, Keith Potter, and Geraint Wiggins. These
authors bring the examination of experience and self-reporting into the
sphere of analysis when considering the actual experience of the listener in
the case of process music. Wilkins, Potter, and Wiggins address a strategy
for the analysis of process music, with reference to Gradus by Philip
Glass. They focus on the experience of the listener’s real-time encounter
with the piece: the idea of a ‘surprise’ is conceptualized as a key moment
for the listener and a structural understanding of the piece is drawn from
an analysis of these surprises.
6 Introduction

Vanessa Hawes furthers this model of engagement with the piece as a

method of analysis by following the developing understanding of structure
in a single participant’s engagement with a Schoenberg song from Das
Buch der hängenden Gärten. Examining the relationship between
performer and score, her analysis considers structure as a process and
investigates how meaning in the music and its performance might be
developed in and of this process of interaction and learning, while
suggesting how an ecological approach to perception may be
recontextualized for this kind of analysis, inspired by approaches to
process music.

Performing Processes; Performance Processes

The second section builds on—and overlaps with—the first, framing
performance and/as process from the individual perspectives of the authors
and their experiences as practitioners. Music by Berio, de Falla, music by
the authors and their collaborators, and music composed for the authors, is
explored through looking at processes of interpretation and risk; processes
which further undermine the ontology of the musical ‘work’ as
traditionally understood, and bring the practitioner as active agent to the
foreground of an examination of musical discourse.
Ellen Hooper examines the performance of, and link between, register
and timbre in music by Berio and de Falla. She addresses risk in
performance as an expressive and transformative technique, offering new
perspectives on sung performances of the work from a performance-
analysis perspective. The emphasis is on understanding performance as a
personal interpretation of experience rather than a realization of elements
within the score.
David Gorton and Zubin Kanga examine their own collaboration in the
preparation of the extremely virtuosic solo piano piece Orfordness. They
examine the concept of risk and its implications for collaboration in the
development and performance of the work, and express the collaboration
as a process of mitigating and re-introducing risk into the music.
Lauren Redhead’s chapter is a reflection both on her own performance
for organ and electronics of works of graphic notation, and on the
relationship between the consideration of graphic notation and the
ontology of the ‘work’ of music. Through looking at examples by Lucas,
Fergler, and Mc Laughlin, she considers how these issues reflect a
perceived hierarchy of composition and performance in the work concept,
and how a strategy which considers works as a multiplicity might shed
light on the process of the work.
 Music and/as Process 7

Composition of/with Processes

The third section encounters and questions the musical ‘work’ at its
inception, exploring composition and/as process through its encounters
with performance, analysis, collaboration, improvisation, translation,
experimentation and cross-disciplinarity. Through explorations of a
number of new ‘works’ the way in which practitioners relate to music, to
musical processes, and, finally, the processes of talking about those
relations, frames a personal and reflective account of the creative process,
finally looking beyond music to musicology.
Charles Céleste Hutchins addresses graphic notation as a tool for
composition, situating his own practice in the context of a collaborative
approach to performance by the group, Vocal Constructivists. He examines
the interpretation of graphic scores beyond musical considerations: drawing
inspiration from media studies literature on comics and graphic novels in
his analysis of works by Cardew, Applebaum, Braxton, Schaeffer and
Redhead. The process of developing a taxonomy of notation through
engagement and multiple performances reveals the deep and rich
interaction between performer and graphic score.
Michael Picknett addresses performance as composition, reflecting on
approaches to devising in music and their compositional outcomes. The
processes of research, creation, rehearsal and performance in theatrical
devising are discussed in a musical context, providing a framework for
examining collaboration, improvisation and experimentation in a musical
process, and a completely new paradigm for relating to music.
Alistair Zaldua’s chapter describes how the notion of translation can be
applied to an understanding of pre-compositional processes in the
collaborative composition of an audio-visual installation work. Drawing
on post-structuralist translation theory, he outlines how ‘translation’ might
be employed as a process for the creation of musical meaning, and how
these meanings might be analysed or approached in an open-ended and
multi-modal work such as his installation, Leiden Translations.
Steve Gisby addresses the composition of processes in five of his own
works for various forces, with reflection on their relationship with other
process compositions; particularly those by Tom Johnson. With
mathematical processes at the heart of Gisby’s compositional approach, he
interrogates the interaction of the personal and impersonal, the subjective
and the objective, problematizing the notion of the composer’s role in
relation to his own and Johnson’s work.
Charlotte Purkis’s chapter completes the focus on auto-ethnography and
self-reporting found throughout the volume, through a feminist exploration
8 Introduction

of her experience and compositional practice. This chapter presents

writing about process and practice as its own process. Purkis extends the
connecting thread of process and subjectivity through an engagement with
both its subject matter and with the process of musicology itself, posing
further-reaching questions about the re-thinking of musicology and its
processes.
 PART I:

ANALYSIS AS/OF PROCESS

 CHAPTER ONE

INTROVERSIVE AND EXTROVERSIVE

PROCESSES:
RETHINKING STRAVINSKY’S MUSIC
AS DIALOGUE BETWEEN FORMALIST
AND EXPRESSIVE PARADIGMS

NICHOLAS MCKAY

This chapter is drawn from a keynote that comprised a series of

examples, many of which I have previously published in other contexts,
that together offer a miniature compendium of introversive and
extroversive processes at play in Stravinsky’s music. As I have formerly
observed, 1 many commentators 2 have identified compositional and
aesthetic processes of defamiliarization (or alienation) as the default
rhetorical gambit of Stravinsky’s musical language. In so doing, they have
trained their analytical eyes on predominantly introversive syntactic
moments of ungrammaticality operating through a variety of techniques.

1
Nicholas McKay, ‘Dialogising Stravinsky: A Topic Theory and Gestural
Interpretation’, in Igor Stravinsky: Sounds and Gestures of Modernism, ed. by
Massimiano Locanto (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp.175-85, excerpts from which
appear throughout this chapter.
2
Cf. Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (London: Sheed and Ward,
1973); Daniel Albright, Stravinsky: The Music Box and the Nightingale (New York:
Gordon and Breach, 1989); Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks
at Harvard (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1976);
Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: Oedipus Rex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993); Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from
Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Harvard: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1994).
 Introversive and Extroversive Processes 11

These have included polyrhythm and polychords,3 so-called ‘wrong-note’

neoclassic harmony, 4 iterative algorithmic cell sequences, paratactic
juxtaposition structures and stratified textures 5 and dialogized genres
evident in symphony and sonata forms that question the very formal
conventions they simultaneously evoke.6
Discussion of Stravinsky’s extroversive processes—the referential signs
of stylistic topical references, allusive gestures and quotations—by
contrast have remained relatively neglected, under-interpreted7 or misread
as personal stylistic idiolects 8 more than the commonalities of style
required of musical topoi. 9 This marginalization and misreading of
referential processes in Stravinsky scholarship is perhaps to be expected in
light of the composer’s well-documented anti-expressive aesthetics; 10
however dubious, ghostwritten and problematic they may be. Music that is
‘sufficient in itself’ 11 and ‘essentially powerless to express anything at
all’ 12 does little to prompt one to even begin to look for referential
processes.

3
Bernstein; Pierre Boulez, Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. by Stephen
Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
4
Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork on Stravinsky
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Bernstein.
5
Edward T. Cone, ‘Stravinsky: The Progress of a Method’, in Perspectives on
Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. by Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1968), pp.156-164.
6
Jonathan Cross, The Stravinsky Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998); Martha Hyde, ‘Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism’, in The Cambridge Companion to
Stravinsky, ed. by Jonathan Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp.98-136; Joseph N. Straus, ‘Sonata Form in Stravinsky’, in Stravinsky
Retrospectives, ed. by Ethan Haimo and Paul Johnson (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1987), pp.141-61.
7
Angelo Cantoni, ‘Verdi E Stravinskij’, Studi Verdiani, vol.10 (1994), 127-154.
8
Joseph N. Straus, Stravinsky’s Late Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), pp.183-248.
9
Nicholas McKay, ‘On Topics Today’, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie,
vol.4, no.1 (2007), pp.159-83 (pp.160-161).
10
Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (Harvard: Harvard
University Press, 1994).
11
Igor Stravinsky, ‘Some Ideas About My Octuor’, The Arts (1924), 4-6.
12
Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (1903-1934) (London: Marion Boyars
Publishers Ltd, 1990), p.53.
12 Chapter One

Despite these claims—but also as a strategy towards encoding them—

Stravinsky’s music in fact relies on rhetorical processes of stylistic
defamiliarization just as much as it does syntactic. Prototypically these
extroversive processes are subjected to three notable forms of alienation
analogous to the inherent ungrammaticality found in the composer’s
introversive syntax. These result from deploying referential signs in states
that could be summarized as: deracinated (displaced from their geographic
and/or temporal associations), dysphoric (in a depressed, anxious or
agitated state; contrary to the natural euphoric tendency of most musical
topoi) and dialogized (contested with another—typically opposed—topic
or allusive gesture). 13 Recognizing and interpreting these extroversive
processes of defamiliarization on a par with the more commonly cited
introversive ones prevalent in much Stravinsky scholarship prompts a
reassessment of Stravinsky’s music in more expressive terms. It offers a
potential and vital means of re-humanizing Stravinsky’s music in the wake
of its objectified, machine-like, dehumanizing legacy 14 and modern-
postmodern bind.15 This chapter thus offers a rethinking of Stravinsky’s
music through a dialogical exchange between its introversive and
extroversive processes; the two nodes around which much music
semiotics—topic theory in particular—gravitates with its conceptual
framework of ‘pure’ (syntactic) and ‘referential’ (stylistic) signs.16
The privileging of introversive, and marginalization of extroversive,
processes in Stravinsky’s music is in large part a consequence of the
contested identity of The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s claim in 1920 that he

13
Cf. for a further discussion of these three terms Nicholas McKay, ‘Deracinated,
Dysphoric and Dialogised: the Wild and Beguiled Semiotics of Stravinsky’s
Topical Signifiers’, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Music
Semiotics in Memory of Raymond Monelle, ed. by Nearchos Panos, Vangelis
Lympouridis, George Athanasopoulos and Peter Nelson N., (Edinburgh:
University of Edinburgh Press, (2012) 2013) pp.193-201; Edinburgh: International
Project on Music and Dance Semiotics.
14
Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical
Essays (Princeton; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp.360-88.
15
Pieter C. van den Toorn, ‘“Will Stravinsky Survive Postmodernism?” Review of
Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works
through Mavra (1996) and Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical
Essays (1997)’, Music Theory Spectrum, 22 (2000), 104-21.
16
Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); McKay, ‘On Topics Today’, p.163.
 Introversive and Extroversive Processes 13

had written ‘an architectonic, and not an anecdotic, work’ 17 pointedly

denied the composer’s originally claimed extroversive inspiration for the
work (the vision of a virgin dancing herself to death in a sacrificial rite) in
favour of a seemingly new-found introversive point of departure (a purely
syntactic musical construct). Whether to better align the work to his new-
found formalist aesthetic ideology or to distance the work from its
infamous premiere or both, Stravinsky’s volte-face bifurcated the ontology
of the work. Today, The Rite’s identity resides as much, if not more, in the
introversive media of a score or concert-hall/audio-recording performance
than it does in the more extroversive medium of a danced theatrical ballet
(built upon ethnographic, primitive, folk fragments). It is more often seen
as a forward-looking radical marker of European twentieth-century
modernism than it is the product of its nineteenth-century Russian
compositional heritage.18
The Rite has thus established a polemical dialogue between formalism
and contextualism like almost no other work; a dialogue played out
between its conflicting compositional, performance-practice, reception-
theory and academic identities, ideologies and interpretations.19 Today The
Rite has become a work foregrounding the dialogism of its introversive-
syntactic, and extroversive-semantic, processes—even if historically ‘it’,
and branches of formalist musicology, were complicit in privileging the
former and marginalizing the latter. The work itself thus embodies what
literary theorists term a ‘double-voiced discourse’20 in its very ontology. In
particular, it epitomizes Bakhtin’s concept of a ‘vari-directional discourse’:
one that pulls in different directions; a concept Korsyn 21 finds in his
application of Bakhtin’s theory to Brahms’ music to account for its

17
Stravinsky’s claim that he had written ‘une oeuvre architectonique et non
anecdotique’ (my translation in text) first appeared in a 1920 interview in Michel
Georges-Michel, ‘Les deux Sacres du Printemps’, Comoedia, 11 December 1920,
quoted in Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p.370.
18
Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the
Works through Mavra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
19
Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, pp.360-388.
20
Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. by Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The
Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
21
Kevin Korsyn, ‘Beyond Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Influence and
Dialogue’, in Rethinking Music, ed. by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.55-72 (p.62).
14 Chapter One

simultaneous pull towards, and annihilation of, Beethoven’s influence. The

Rite, in short, is une oeuvre at odds with itself; une oeuvre in constant
hermeneutic dialogue with itself; une oeuvre replete with both introversive
and extroversive processes writ large by their inherent syntactic, stylist
and strategic ungrammaticality and alienation.

Music Semiotics and Topic Theory’s

Architectonic-Anecdotic Dialogue
The Rite’s architectonic-anecdotic split personality draws a striking
parallel with the theoretical underpinnings of music semiotics; one of the
last, major music analysis methodologies to emerge (somewhat belatedly)
in the twentieth century. Unlike The Rite, music semiotics originated in
architectonic structuralism—epitomized in the 1970s and 80s work of
distributional analysis22 and paradigmatic charts23—before undergoing its
hermeneutic-semantic drift towards anecdotic topic theory. 24 Agawu 25
draws this distinction, contrasting hermeneutics and analysis as a
manifestation of music’s ‘ultimately false’, ‘extrinsic–intrinsic dichotomy’;
further listing ‘rough equivalents’ of these poles: ‘semantic–syntactic’,
‘subjective–objective’, ‘extra-musical–musical’, ‘extra-generic–congeneric’,26
‘exosemantic–endosemantic’, 27 and, of course, ‘extroversive semiosis–

22
Nicolas Ruwet, ‘Methods of Analysis in Musicology’, Music Analysis, 6 (1987), 3-
36.
23
Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Fondements d’une sémiologie de la musique (Paris: Union
Générale d’Editions, 1975).
24
Cf. for example: Agawu, Playing with Signs; Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in
Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press, 2004); Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le
Nozze Di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983);
Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000); Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form and
Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980); a summary of which is presented in
McKay, ‘On Topics Today’.
25
Kofi Agawu, ‘The Challenge of Semiotics’, in Rethinking Music, ed. by Nicholas
Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.138-60 (p.145).
26
Wilson Coker, Music and Meaning: A Theoretical Introduction to Musical
Aesthetics (New York: The Free Press, 1972), pp.60-88; 147-170.
27
Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Fragments of a Musical Hermeneutics’, Current musicology, 50
(1991), 5-20.
 Introversive and Extroversive Processes 15

introversive semiosis’.28 They are in essence all manifestations of Stravinsky’s

anecdotic–architectonic dichotomy articulated over The Rite. They all
prompt the kind of dialogue between formalism and ‘expressive discourse’
that Whittall 29 finds in Hatten’s approach to topic theory and that is
advocated here as the key to re-humanizing Stravinsky’s musical discourse
and reception.

Pastoral Processes 1: The Rite, Part I,

‘Adoration of the Earth’ Introduction
An example of such an interpretative dialogue between these meta-
ideological discourses surrounding The Rite is found at the very beginning
of the work itself. The famous opening bassoon melody offers a primitive
version of the pastoral,30 heard in the mock Ukrainian dudki (peasant horns
and pipes of wood and bone). This anecdotic, meandering evocation of
primitive pastoralism, however, is immediately at dialogical odds with the
architectonic, iterative, additive machinations of its concealed paradigmatic-
chart-like construction. Anathema to the natural quasi-improvisatory ideals
of pastoralism, this introversive precision-engineered syntax is highlighted
in two landmark analyses: Boulez’s 31 detailed, cell-structure, rhythmic
analysis and Nattiez’s 32 subsequent, Ruwet-inspired, paradigmatic

28
Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in Semiotics: An
Introductory Anthology, ed. by Robert E. Innis (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1985), pp.147-175.
29
Whittall, Arnold, ‘Review of Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness,
Correlation, and Interpretation by Robert S. Hatten’, Journal of the Royal Musical
Association, 121 (1996), 116-124 (p.116).
30
Discussions of Stravinsky’s use of the pastoral topic are not uncommon (Geoffrey
Chew, ‘Pastoral and Neoclassicism: A Reinterpretation of Auden’s and Stravinsky’s
Rake’s Progress’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 5 (1993), 239-263; Edward T. Cone,
‘Stravinsky’s Version of Pastoral’, in Hearing and Knowing Music: The Unpublished
Essays of Edward T. Cone, ed. by Robert P. Morgan (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009), pp.181-189; Straus, Stravinsky’s Late Music). See McKay, ‘Dysphoric
States: Stravinsky’s Topics—Huntsmen, Soldiers and Shepherds’, in Music
Semiotics: A Network of Significations—In Honour of Raymond Monelle, ed. by Esti
Sheinberg (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp.249-261 (pp.258-259), for a summary and
critique of their scope and limitations. McKay, ‘Dysphoric States’, excerpted by
permission of the Publishers, Copyright © 2012.
31
Boulez, pp.60-62.
32
Nattiez, pp.281-285.
16 Chapter One

distributional chart analysis of Boulez’s cell sequences (resummarized in

Figures 1.1a and 1.1b).

Figure 1.1a: Opening bassoon melody from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring:
Introduction to the ‘Adoration of the Earth’. All melodic cell labels refer to
Nattiez’s distributional analysis, presented in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Fondements
d’une sémiologie de la musique (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1975), pp.282-
3.
 Introversive and Extroversive Processes 17

Figure 1.1b: Representation of Nattiez’s distributional analysis of the opening of

The Rite of Spring, as shown in Figure 1.1a.

The extent of Stravinsky’s introversive precision tooling is evident in

Boulez’s analysis of what he terms ‘fragment I’—the first four cells (a1,
a2, a3 and a4). Boulez’s descriptions add a further layer of methodological
dialogism, conflating Stravinsky’s native Russian compositional technique
of additive, asymmetrical sequential processes with more Darmstadt-
inspired serialist terminology and ideology. Note, for example, his
observation that:

a4 is symmetrically a retrograde—in sound-time, that is—of cell a1, with

however a rhythmic acceleration in a4 which distinguishes them, as does
the number of units. On the other hand cells a2 and a3 are related by
inversion in sound-time and by symmetry in sound-space.

He further observes a process in which there is an ‘increasing number

of unit values which supports these structural symmetries and
parallelisms’ (a hallmark Stravinskian additive process) and that ‘no value
or subdivision in any one cell is repeated in any other’: 33 another
Stravinskian hallmark process of juxtaposing cells with maximized
variability and unpredictability.
Nattiez’s paradigmatic alignment of Boulez’s analysis better discloses
the iterative, additive, permutational processes at play in the bassoon
melody: a kind of lyrical monody version of the abrupt block juxtaposition
textural and structural principles of construction essayed in the first

33
Boulez, pp.61-62.
18 Chapter One

tableau of the earlier Petrushka (1911). The processes of altered repetition

in Stravinsky’s mock dudki pipes draw obvious parallels with those
Nattiez also found in Debussy’s Syrinx (1913). 34 Stravinsky’s micro-
managed altered repetition, however, is less that of Debussy’s quasi-
improvisational feel—befitting its pastoral topic—and more the
dialogized, introversive, constructivist precision engineering articulated by
Boulez and Nattiez’s analyses.
This is not the only important difference between Debussy and
Stravinsky’s pastoralism, however. Even within the domain of the
extroversive referential sign alone, whereas Debussy ‘correctly’ evokes the
imagined idealism of the pastoral topic prototype (the misappropriated
soft, caressing flute—a surrogate for the ancient panpipe syrinx),
Stravinsky’s mock dudki ‘incorrectly’ depicts something approximating
the actual shepherd’s instrument (the aulós or tibia; closer to an oboe or
shawm; a double reed instrument of great power, usually played in pairs
and very hard to blow). The Rite’s mock dudki pipes thus depict, rather
than evoke, nature’s primordial awakening of spring. As such, as I have
previously argued, 35 they breach topic theory convention by rooting
themselves more in social ethnography than idealized cultural imagination.
This moment of extroversive ungrammaticality fails to adhere to the all-
important topic-theory separation of signifieds from signifiers: 36 though
more practical in shepherding, powerful reed instruments seldom figure in
the pastoral topic.
The topical reference is therefore dysphoric, its uncomfortably high
asthmatic bassoon register an extension of Stravinsky’s native stikhíya
dialect. Taruskin37 attributes this term to Stravinsky’s rougher, ethnographic,
folk-inspired, discontinuous, juxtaposing, paratactic language style,
epitomized in works like The Rite and Les noces and defined in polemic
with kul’túra, a language style built on the western, Germanic hallmarks
of high eighteenth-century classicism. The usual kul’túra: signifiers of
musical pastoralism (perfect fifth musette drones, 6/8 dotted Siciliana
rhythms and simple scalic melodies moving in step) are notably absent;
replaced here with an obsessively fixed, repeated sustained C falling to A

34
Nattiez, pp.330-54.
35
McKay, ‘Dysphoric States: Stravinsky’s Topics—Huntsmen, Soldiers and
Shepherds’.
36
Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp.207-208.
37
Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, pp.951-966.
 Introversive and Extroversive Processes 19

(a linear substitute for a vertical bass drone, set on a minor third in place of
the musette’s fifth). This displacement of more commonplace euphoric
topical conventions with a stikhíya dialect grounded in social ethnography
comes as little surprise given The Rite’s anecdotic origins as an
ethnological ballet under the guidance of Roerich. Nonetheless this
classical ungrammaticality in Stravinsky’s use of a rhetorical topic
constitutes a stylistic analogue of the syntactic ‘dissonance’ of his
polychordal, polyrhythmic, dialogized language.
Stravinsky’s turn to social reality in The Rite’s dysphoric topical
opening may well have been inspired as much by earlier Russian stage
music pastoral takes as it was by the composer’s own attempts at
ethnographic, folkloric echoes. Taruskin cites the near identical ‘leit-
timbres’ of the woodwind colours in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mlada and
Snegurochka (‘springtime fable’) as a certain influence, noting that
Rimsky ‘even prefaced his latter opera with an Introduction that depicts
the awakening of spring’. 38 Either way, the sophisticated, introversive,
architectonic, mathematical, calculated, engineered processes of the
bassoon’s opening cell structures remain dysphoric and therefore
dialogized against the conventional quasi-improvised naturalism of the
extroversive processes of the anecdotic, dudki pipe’s primitive
pastoralism. Rather like siding with one particular meter over another in a
polyrhythmic texture such as the ‘Procession of the Sage’, to hear one
without the other of these irreconcilable sound worlds is to misapprehend
the music; to misread The Rite; to glimpse only a partial picture of The
Rite’s processes, a failure to inter-animate the play of introversive and
extroversive processes. The Rite is neither an architectonic nor an
anecdotic work but an allotrope of the two in constant dialogical
interchange witnessed through the interchange and exchange of
introversive and extroversive semiotic processes. The challenge it poses
for hermeneutic readings is to simultaneously grasp and grapple with its
pure and referential sign processes, moving beyond attempts to privilege
one over the other to better comprehend the primitive sophistication of its
anecdotic-architectonic dialogues.

38
Ibid., p.934.
20 Chapter One

Pastoral Processes 2: Oedipus Rex, Act 2, Shepherd’s Aria

Stravinsky’s turn to social reality in place of topical pastoral evocation
is by no means unique to The Rite in Stravinsky’s output. Act 2 of Oedipus
Rex employs a pastoral aria,39 shown here in Figure 1.2. The bass drone
signifier is not that of a prototype zampogna (the Sicilian peasant
shepherd’s instrument) or musette (the refined, delicate, pastoral-imitating
instrument of the French nobility), but a curious ranz des vaches: the
traditional alpine horn music of Swiss herdsmen. 40 As with The Rite’s
mock dudki pipes, the shepherd’s pipes again highlight Stravinsky’s predilection

39
This reading of the Shepherd’s aria from Oedipus Rex is previously published in,
and excerpted by permission of the publishers from, Nicholas McKay, ‘Dysphoric
States: Stravinsky’s Topics—Huntsmen, Soldiers and Shepherds’, in Music
Semiotics: A Network of Significations—In Honour of Raymond Monelle, ed. by
Esti Sheinberg (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp.249-261, Copyright © 2012 and
‘Dialogising Stravinsky: A Topic Theory and Gestural Interpretation’, in Igor
Stravinsky: Sounds and Gestures of Modernism, ed. by Massimiano Locanto
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp.175-85.
40
Walsh, p.53.
 Introversive and Extroversive Processes 21

Figure 1.2: Stravinsky, Oedipus Rex, Act 2, Shepherd’s aria.

for substituting conventional topical evocation with social reality: an off-

the-peg pastoral signifier geographically and temporally deracinated (i.e.
displaced from its native home or culture) from the twentieth-century
Swiss Alps (where Stravinsky resided in exile) to the Ancient Greece of
Oedipus Rex’s diegesis. The deep percolating double reeds of the bassoons
in the Shepherd’s aria—a marked contrast in register to the high bassoon
22 Chapter One

of The Rite’s ‘Adoration of the Earth’—function as ‘surrogate stimuli’41

for the more imagined cultural ideal of pastorally figurative flutes. They
may better reflect the shepherd’s aulós pipes of Sophocles’ time but, as
noted above, historical accuracy is a game seldom played by topical
references: signifiers and signifieds tend to separate in the world of topic
theory.42
Stravinsky’s turn to a more dysphoric, concrete, distorted sense of
social reality here—against the precepts of topic theory’s imagined,
idealized evocation—attests to the ungrammatical processes to which he
subjects his extroversive stylistic rhetorical topics. The same
compositional processes of alienation and distortion seem to control the
extroversive elements of Stravinsky’s musical style as they do the
introversive icons of his musical syntax.
The dysphoric state of Stravinsky’s Shepherd’s pastoral topic is further
compounded in two compelling rhetorical processes borrowed from
Robert Hatten: 43 the ‘troping of topics’ and the ‘strategically marked’
absence (in this case) of stylistic irony. Here pastoralism is ‘troped’
(suffused or dialogized) with the lament of the weeping pianto topic (the
sighing, leaning, falling appoggiatura), amplified by its ‘infinity of
laments’ figure,44 the passus duriusculus: descending minor seconds over
the interval of a fourth. The aria is therefore ‘strategically marked’ in the
context of this opera-oratorio’s discourse by its almost unique absence of
the stylistic irony characterizing all other numbers. In an opera-oratorio
Stravinsky described as a ‘Merzbild’ 45 of mismatched, incongruous
stylistic components,46 this dialogized, deracinated and dysphoric trope of
the pastoral-lament—the product of carefully engineered and interpreted

41
Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus (London: Vintage, 2000), pp.353-357,
defines a surrogate stimulus as a phenomenon that ‘acts on the eye [or ear] of the
observer in a way “similar” to the real scene’: it functions as an equivalent stimulus
relying on ‘a calculated distance’ to ‘obtain its iconic effect’.
42
Monelle, The Musical Topic, p.35; pp.207-208.
43
Robert S. Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart,
Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004), p.15;
pp.68-69.
44
Monelle, The Sense of Music, pp.66-76.
45
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and a Diary (London: Faber, 1968),
p.27.
46
See, for example, Bernstein’s description of Jocasta, the royal queen, admonishing
her princes in a ‘hoochy-coochy dance’ or ‘one of Carmen’s sexier moments’!,
pp.391-405.
 Introversive and Extroversive Processes 23

extroversive processes—is thus curiously apt for its character and moment
in a manner unlike almost any other found in Oedipus Rex. (Even its
deracinated ranz des vaches befits a shepherd, albeit a geographically and
temporally displaced one.)
Taruskin reads Oedipus’s stylistic ‘salad of clichés’ as the macabre
product of the ‘musical Mussolini’s’ neoclassic return to order—an
attempt to ‘undo the Renaissance’, eradicating secular humanism from his
scores.47 The pastoral-lament of the Shepherd, however, is its rehumanizing
moment; transcending its subtle extension of introversive processes of
defamiliarization to the extroversive domain of his music.

Processing Linguistic Syntax and Language Style

in the Piano Sonata
These extroversive processes of alienation are by no means confined to
Stravinsky’s theatre music; the explicit narratives of which offer ready-
made hermeneutic windows through which topical references are usually
all the more easy to read. Figure 1.3 presents bb.12-31 of the first
movement of Stravinsky’s Piano Sonata as a simple Nattiez/Ruwet-styled
distributional chart in four paradigms: an inverted mordent feature; a
melodic antecedent in parallel thirds rising over a perfect fifth; a
consequent answer filling the gap back down the perfect fifth; and a
mechanical cadence feature. The three syntagms are labelled ‘a’, ‘b’, and
‘c’—where ‘c’ is shown in two alternative paradigmatic subdivisions,
labelled ‘d’ and ‘e’.48
There is an evident dialogism between the faux-classical hypotactic
appearance of proportion and even phrase structure versus the juxtaposing
parataxis of iterative repetition (not at all dissimilar to the dialogism
between the natural pastoral lyricism of The Rite’s opening and the
precision-engineered paradigmatic processes of altered repetition
discussed above). Stravinsky’s stikhíya processes of defamiliarization and

47
Richard Taruskin, ‘Un Cadeau Très Macabre’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 72
(2003), 801-816.
48
This reading of the Piano Sonata is previously published in Nicholas McKay,
‘Ethnic Cleansing, Anxious Influence and Secret Codes: A Semiotician’s Guide to
Stravinsky’s Musicological Afterlife and Its Archaeological Contra-Factum’, in
Before and After Music: Acta Semiotica Fennica, ed. by Eero Tarasti (Helsinki: The
International Semiotics Institute, 2009), pp.565-74 and ‘Dialogising Stravinsky: A
Topic Theory and Gestural Interpretation’.
24 Chapter One

ungrammaticality, moreover, are bubbling away beneath the façade of this

seemingly kul’túra-styled innocent music; an innocence itself dialogized
by the historical-political contextual knowledge that the work was
dedicated to, and premiered for, Mussolini at a time when Stravinsky was
openly pronouncing himself something of a ‘musical Mussolini’.49

Figure 1.3: Stravinsky, Piano Sonata, First Movement, bb.12-31, paradigmatic

analysis.

Figure 1.4 summarizes how these subtle alienation processes can be

read as an opposition between linguistic syntax and language style
distributed across three levels of music. These levels are derived from

49
Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p.452; ‘Un Cadeau Très Macabre’, p.804.
 Introversive and Extroversive Processes 25

Eleanor Rosch’s linguistic theory of prototype effects.50 Rosch demonstrates

that prototype effects (the ease of identifying typical features) are most
prevalent in categories at the basic level of syntax (e.g. ‘dog’) and less
evident at the superordinate (‘animal’) or subordinate (‘Labrador’) levels.
On the matrix level of the linguistic syntax all appears allusive of
Classical/Baroque contrapuntal brisé figuration. The constituent
parameters of melody-accompaniment and harmony-counterpoint appear
as they ‘should’. They strike the right pose and ape the correct
mannerisms: a right-hand melody is balanced by a texturally ‘correct’
accompaniment pattern in the left hand and the bass triplet figures of that
left hand serve ‘rightly’ to arpeggiate harmonic chords as a means of
prolonging them through linear musical time; all is correctly synchronized.
On the model level, however, all is distorted and far from prototypical.
Although the parameters of accompaniment and melody are correctly
superimposed, their harmony is cross-matched in a false counterpoint:
‘dominant’ chords are maliciously aligned with tonic chords and vice
versa in cubist bichordal composite harmonies. This distortion is
compounded further on the minutia level with leading-note chords acting
as ‘surrogate stimuli’ for under-coded dominant sevenths. From a distance
all appears allusive: a sublime classical evocation with tonic-dominant
brisé harmony. Move closer and the illusion is revealed: all is chaotic
disorder and cubist refraction built from surrogate stimuli with cross-
matched harmony and melody. This is classical counterpoint only by
virtue of our misperception.

50
Eleanor C. Rosch, Carol Simpson, and R. Scott Miller, ‘Structural Bases of
Typicality Effects’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2 (1976), 491-502; cited in
George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About
the Mind (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp.39-57.
26 Chapter One

Level of Music Linguistic Syntax Language Style

MATRIX appears like
Double-voiced language types
Superordinate Synchronized Parameters
Stikhíya Kul’túra
melody accompaniment
Inorganic Organic
counterpoint harmony
Turanian Baroque/Classical

Double-voiced language styles

MODEL prototype deviation
Personified
Basic Harmonic cross-matching:
tropes of prosopopoeia
Stravinsky’s voice
Bach’s voice
Petrushka
Two-part inventions
tonics ‘dominants’ Symphonies of
Winds
‘Quonium’
The Rite

Characteristic
tropes of ethopoeia

pastoral moto perpetuo

aria style pedagogic etude
 Introversive and Extroversive Processes 27

MINUTIA Surrogate stimuli:

Double-voiced stylistic traits
Subordinate ‘wrong note’ chords
paradigms linear sequences
additive blocks Stile Brisé
vii ‘V’ disruption continuity
interpolations parallel thirds
harmonic stasis teleology

Figure 1.4: Stravinsky, Piano Sonata, First Movement, bb.12-31 refracted through Rosch’s tripartite model of basic level prototype
effects.
28 Chapter One

A number of semiotic processes are at play in these carefully engineered

moments of musical ungrammaticality; most of which are lost in the sonic
equivalent of blind spots. On the matrix level, Stravinsky has lulled the
listener into what Monelle terms an act of apodeitic complicity,1 moving
from the peculiar particularity of the sonata to the familiar generality of
classical brisé figuration. Passively accepting the allusive matrix-level
mannerisms of melody and accompaniment at face value as a truthful
assertion of classical style overlooks the prototype deviation and surrogate
stimuli concealed on the model and minutia levels. In semiotic parlance,
Stravinsky evokes the classical style as an icon, not as an index2 and the
Sonata is read with ‘encyclopaedic’ (perceptual, stylistic, referential), not
with ‘dictionary’ (categorical, syntactic, pure), knowledge. 3 Stravinsky
neatly dialogizes perceptual and categorical understanding of the processes
at play.
A similar dialogism to that found in the introversive sign processes of
the linguistic syntax, occurs in the extroversive processes of the language
styles evoked in the Sonata. On the matrix level, the Sonata appears like
‘kul’túra’: the ethnic Russian term for hypotactic organicism (typified by
the Austro-German first Viennese school) in contradistinction to the
characteristic discontinuity of parataxis, or ‘stikhíya’ found in The Rite’s
musical discourse.4 There is an inbuilt parataxis to the Sonata’s discourse,
however, that dialogizes against the linear flow of classical phrase
structure. That parataxis is evident in the juxtaposition antics (the cut-and-
paste structure, the interpolated phrase disruption, the additive iteration)
highlighted in the distributional analysis. The juxtaposing is so disruptive,
that one single interpolated meter (b.28) throws the final phrase before the
cadence to E minor (b.31) into paradigmatic chaos with three competing
syntagmatic readings (labelled c, d, and e).
At this matrix level, then, the Sonata dialogizes the meta-language
styles of stikhíya and kul’túra. Its stikhíya dialect (the cubistic dissection
of syntactic-linguistic components) appears as if it were classical, thus
dialogizing itself with a kul’túra-inspired illusory hypotaxis. The Sonata
thus conceals the same parataxis overtly displayed in earlier Russian-
Turanian works such as the Symphony of Winds or Rite of Spring. Its

1
Monelle, The Sense of Music, p.134.
2
Charles Sanders Peirce, The Philosophy of Peirce, Selected Writings (London:
Kegan Paul, 1940).
3
Eco, pp.224-229.
4
Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, pp.1678-1679.
 Introversive and Extroversive Processes 29

melodic cells are no longer tiny folk fragments, but chunks of classicism;
the four paradigmatic abstract, geometric, Apollonian nuts and bolts of a
classical sonata theme engineered to the simultaneous points of perfection
and banality.
This Bakhtinian double-voicing of hypo- and para-taxis is yet another
form of ‘ungrammaticality’, a process embedded as much in the music’s
extroversive language style(s) as it is in the music’s introversive linguistic
syntax. It is a sign of disunity but not one that can be resolved dialectically
from a hermeneutic position privileging unity. The disunified dialect of
stikhíya is Stravinsky’s native, authorial voice; kul’túra is merely the
‘reflected discourse’5 through which Stravinsky refracts it. To marginalize
one against the other is to miss the point of dialogics. Expressive meaning
arises from the interanimation of both discrepant, referential, language
styles. Making block juxtaposition behave as if it were classical teleology
and vice versa is a classic double voicing strategy of Stravinsky’s
neoclassicism played out across the three language-linguistic levels. The
matrix level dialogizes familiar meta-language dichotomies: parataxis–
hypotaxis; stikhíya–kul’túra; inorganic–organic; Turanian–Baroque/Classical.
The model level double-voices the discourse in two ways: one, through
personified double-voicing (tropes of prosopopoeia) between language
styles and ideologies belonging to Stravinsky and Bach, the other through
characteristic double-voicing (tropes of ethopoeia) in which conventional
language styles (generic topics, genres, gestures) are conflated—as seen in
the ethopoeitic inter-animation of mechanical formulae (the automata-like
‘moto perpetuo’ and incremental mechanical modulations of a ‘technical
etude’) and expressive evocations of lyrical nature (the cantabile rising and
falling melody of ‘aria style’ and the implicit 6/8 lilt, open octaves and
simplicity of pastoral style). The constituent components of these model
language styles similarly double-voice the minutia level: Bachian linear
sequences and stile brisé construction refracted through Stravinskian
harmonic stasis, and paradigmatic and additive juxtapositional
construction.

5
Bakhtin, pp.205-207
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
 “Where is Joshua?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said his wife, anxiously. “He wasn’t here to dinner.
I hope he hasn’t gone out on the pond and got drowned.”
“No fear,” said her husband, philosophically. “He’s got a sullen fit
and wandered off somewhere. He’ll be back some time this evening.”
“I wish I was sure nothing had happened to him,” said Mrs.
Drummond.
“I’ll risk him. His being away won’t spoil my appetite,” said the
father, rather contemptuously.
“I don’t think you treat him just right, Jacob,” said Mrs.
Drummond; “he’s been looking down for some days.”
“I know what it’s about. He wants me to increase his allowance.”
“Twenty-five cents does seem small for a boy of Joshua’s age.”
“If he wants more, let him go to work and earn it. That’s the way I
had to do when I was of his age. I’ll tell you what it is, wife, Joshua
is a lazy, good-for-nothing boy. If he had his own way, he’d spend
five dollars a week, and do nothing but loaf around the village. Now,
I’m not going to permit this. He shan’t squander the money I have
worked so hard for.”
The suspicion that Joshua had run away from home had not
entered his father’s mind. He did not think that his son, for whom he
felt contempt in spite of the relationship, had spirit enough to take
such a step; and, besides, he knew that he could not go far without
money.
After supper Mr. Drummond went back to the store, and did not
return till it had closed.
“Has Joshua got home?” he asked.
“No,” answered his wife, anxiously. “I am afraid, Jacob, you have
driven him to some desperate step.”
 “Nonsense! I am not in the least troubled about him. A bad penny
always returns.”
He went upstairs to deposit the money he had brought from the
till, in his little black trunk. Two minutes afterward he hurried
downstairs, pale with passion.
“What do you think your son has done?” he demanded of his
startled wife.
“What?” gasped she. “Tell me, quick.”
“He has robbed me of over six hundred dollars. If I ever catch him
I’ll flog him within an inch of his life.”
 CHAPTER XVI

IN THE SPIDER’S WEB.

Joshua and his friend, Sam Crawford, having selected Niblo’s

Theatre as the one which on the whole seemed most attractive, left
their boarding house at a quarter past seven o’clock.
“Shall we walk?” asked Joshua.
“No,” said Sam; “it’s too far. We should get there late.”
“How much do they charge in the horse cars?”
“Only five cents,” answered Sam, thinking that Joshua must be
mean to trouble himself about such a trifle, and that he might find it
a harder job than he anticipated to get money out of him. “That’s
cheap enough.”
“Yes,” said Joshua, doubtfully.
They stopped the next car and got in. They were lucky enough to
find just two seats unoccupied, which they at once took.
When the conductor came round, Joshua put his hand into his
pocket, but Sam said, in an offhand manner: “Never mind, Joshua;
I’ve got the change. I’ll pay for both.”
“Thank you,” said Joshua, his face brightening, as he withdrew his
hand from his pocket, with alacrity. He did not know that Sam meant
to get twenty times as much out of him before the evening was over.
They reached the theatre some minutes before the performance
commenced. There was a popular play to be performed, and there
was a line of men waiting their turns before the ticket office.
“Join the line, Joshua,” said Sam, “and get two reserved seats in
the parquet.”
“Two?”
“Yes, one for me. I’ll pay you afterward.”
“How much will they be?”
“Two dollars.”
“Isn’t that high?” asked Joshua, alarmed. “They only charge
fifteen cents for concerts at home.”
“This is much better than a concert. Take your place, quick.”
Thus exhorted, Joshua took his place in the line, and in due time
purchased the tickets.
“Now, come along,” said Sam, seizing him by the arm. “It’s about
time for the performance to commence.”
So they passed the wicket, giving up their tickets, and were
speedily ushered to their seats. Joshua looked around him with
curiosity, for to him it was a novel scene; but even this did not lead
him to forget that Sam was indebted to him.
“You owe me a dollar,” he whispered.
“All right,” said Sam; “I’ll pay you afterward. I don’t want to take
out my pocketbook here.”
Joshua would have preferred to be paid on the spot, but no
suspicion had yet entered his mind that Sam intended to cheat him,
and he made no objection to the delay.
“Who are those men playing?” he inquired of his more
experienced friend.
“That’s the orchestra.”
“When does the show begin?”
 “You mustn’t call it a show, Joshua,” said Sam, “or people will
think you green. Say the play, or the performance.”
“Then, when does the play begin?”
“In about five minutes.”
At the time specified, the curtain rose, and Joshua’s eager
attention was soon absorbed by the play. It interested him so much
that he temporarily forgot how much it had cost him. He asked
various questions of Sam, which led the latter to smile, though but a
year before he had been quite as unsophisticated. It is not my
intention, however, to follow the course of the performance. Suffice
it to say that at a quarter to eleven o’clock the curtain fell, and the
audience rose and made their way out of the theatre.
“How did you like it, Joshua?” asked Sam.
“First-rate,” said Joshua. “It cost a good deal, though.”
“It’s worth the money. Everything is much higher in the city than
in the country.”
“In Stapleton they never charge more than twenty-five cents
admittance to anything.”
“There’s some difference between Stapleton and New York.”
“I know it, but----”
“You must enlarge your ideas, Joshua. People make money here
fast, and they spend it fast. Country people are mean. They count
every cent, and are more afraid to spend a cent than city people are
to spend a dollar.”
“My father’s mean,” said Joshua. “What do you think he used to
allow me a week for spending money?”
“A dollar?”
“Only twenty-five cents.”
“The old man was tight, that’s a fact. A young man of your age
ought to have had five dollars. However, you’re in the city now, and
are better off. I feel hungry. Shall we go in and get some oysters? I
know a tiptop place.”
“How much will it cost?”
“Oh, I’ll treat!” said Sam, nonchalantly. “Come along.”
As Joshua had no objection to the oysters, but only to the
expense, he readily accepted the invitation, which he would hardly
have done had he known that his companion had but ten cents in
his pocket.
Sam led the way into a recess, and, in a tone of authority, ordered
“stews for two.”
They were soon brought, and speedily disposed of.
“How did you like them?” asked Sam.
“Splendid!” said Joshua.
“Suppose we order a fry?” suggested Sam; “I think I can eat a
little more.”
“I don’t know,” hesitated Joshua.
“I’ll treat. Here (to the waiter), bring us two fries, and be quick
about it.”
Joshua likewise ate his plate of fried oysters with relish.
When the repast was concluded, Sam felt for his pocketbook. First
he felt in one pocket, then in the other.
“How stupid I am!” he muttered.
“What’s the matter?” inquired Joshua.
“It’s a good joke. I came from home and forgot my pocketbook. I
must have left it in my other pants.”
“You paid in the cars.”
“Yes; it was a little change I had in my vest pocket. See, I’ve got
ten cents more, enough to pay for our fare home.”
 “What are you going to do?” asked Joshua, uncomfortably.
“I shall have to borrow a little money of you to pay for the
oysters. Let me see; it’ll be a dollar and ten cents.”
“Won’t they trust you? You can come in to-morrow and pay them,”
suggested Joshua.
“No they won’t trust. They don’t know me.”
“They’ll have to, if you haven’t got the money.”
“No; they’ll hold you responsible.”
“That isn’t fair. I didn’t order the oysters.”
“You ate part of them. There won’t be any trouble. I’ll pay you as
soon as we get back to the room.”
“I wish we hadn’t come in,” said Joshua, uncomfortably.
“Why? It won’t do you any harm to lend me the money for an
hour.”
“You owe me a dollar already for your ticket.”
“I can pay you for both together. You ain’t afraid to trust me, are
you?”
“No-o,” said Joshua, slowly; and very reluctantly he drew out a
dollar and ten cents, and placed it in the hands of his friend.
“That’s all right,” said Sam, and he stepped up to the counter and
settled the bill.
It was now half-past eleven o’clock.
“It is time we were setting home, Joshua,” said Sam. “We’ll cross
Broadway, and take the University place cars. We’ll get home by
twelve, or before. That would be pretty late hours for the country.”
“Yes,” answered Joshua. “At home I always was in bed by ten
o’clock.”
 “Oh, well; no wonder! There was nothing going on in Stapleton.
It’s an awfully slow place. Not much like the city.”
“That’s so.”
“You don’t want to go back, do you?”
“No, I never want to go back,” answered Joshua, thinking of the
money and bond he had stolen, and rightly reflecting that the
reception he would get from his father would be a disagreeably
warm one.
“So I thought. Everybody likes the city. Why, in ten years you’ll be
richer than the old man!”
“Will I, do you think?” asked Joshua, eagerly.
“Yes, I think so. There’s Ned Evans, a young man not thirty, who
came to the city ten years ago, who is worth now--how much do you
think?”
“How much?”
“Fifty thousand dollars!”
“You don’t say so!” exclaimed the gratified Joshua. “Did he have to
work very hard?”
“Oh, pretty hard; but, then, it’s a good deal easier to work hard
when you are well paid for it.”
“Yes, that’s so. Do you expect to get rich soon?”
“You won’t repeat it if I tell you something, will you?”
“No.”
“You mustn’t breathe a word of it, for it’s a secret. When I am
twenty-one, old Craven is going to take me into partnership.”
“Is he?” said Joshua, looking at his companion with new respect.
“Does he make much money?”
“Made fifteen thousand dollars last year. Half of that’ll be pretty
nice for me, won’t it?”
 I need not remark that Sam Crawford had told two most
unblushing falsehoods. He had grossly exaggerated the profits of the
establishment, and, moreover, Mr. Craven was no more likely to take
him into partnership than I am to be appointed prime minister to the
Emperor of Japan. But he had a purpose to serve in imposing upon
his companion’s credulity.
“You’re in luck, Sam,” said Joshua. “Do you think I’ll ever get such
a chance?”
“I think you can, with my influence,” said Sam, loftily. “I’ll do my
best for you.”
Here a car came along, and the two jumped on board.
 CHAPTER XVII

SUBTLE FLATTERY.

The two boys reached their boarding house as the clock struck
twelve.
“The best thing we can do is to get to bed as soon as possible,”
said Sam, as they entered the room and locked the door.
“You might as well pay me what you owe me,” suggested Joshua,
who did not intend Sam to forget his indebtedness.
“Oh, yes!” said Sam. “Let me find my pocketbook.”
He felt in the pocket of his “other pants,” but of course did not
find what was not there. To let the reader into a secret, he had,
before leaving for the theatre, carefully locked it up in his trunk,
where it was even now, as he very well knew.
“By Jove!” he exclaimed, whistling, as he withdrew his hand,
empty.
“What’s the matter?” inquired Joshua, anxiously.
“My pocketbook isn’t there!”
“Isn’t it? Where is it, then?” demanded Joshua, beginning to be
alarmed.
“I must have taken it with me to-night, after all,” said Sam. “I
understand now,” he added, suddenly. “I must have had my pocket
picked in the car.”
 “Had your pocket picked?” repeated Joshua, as ruefully as if it had
been his own.
“Yes; didn’t you notice that black-whiskered man that sat next
me?”
“No.”
“I am sure it was he. I thought he looked suspicious as I entered
the car. If I hadn’t been talking with you, he couldn’t have robbed
me without my knowing it.”
“Was there much in the pocketbook?” inquired Joshua.
“Not much,” said Sam, indifferently. “Between twenty-seven and
twenty-eight dollars, I believe--a mere trifle.”
“I call that a good deal.”
“It’s more than I like to lose, to be sure.”
“Then, you can’t pay me what you owe me?” said Joshua, soberly.
“Not just now. In fact, I must wait till the end of the week, when I
get my wages.”
“How much do you get then?”
“Twenty dollars.”
“You will surely pay me then?”
“Of course. You ain’t afraid to trust me?” said Sam, in a tone
indicating his enjoyment of the joke.
“No,” returned Joshua, slowly; but he would have much preferred
to receive payment there and then.
“I don’t think I shall run away on account of such a debt,” said
Sam, laughing. “If it was two thousand dollars, instead of two, I
might, you know.”
“Two dollars and ten cents,” corrected Joshua.
 “What a mean hunks!” thought Sam. “He’s going to be worse than
his father, and that’s saying a good deal.”
Had Joshua known the real state of the case, he would have been
more alarmed for his money, but, as he supposed that Sam really
received twenty dollars a week, and was to be taken into partnership
at twenty-one by his employer, and thenceforth to be a prosperous
business man, with a large income, he was reassured, and did not
doubt that he should be paid.
“Well, Joshua, what are you going to do with yourself?” asked
Sam the next morning, as they rose from breakfast.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve got to go to business, you know. I’d like to go round the city
with you, but I can’t be spared.”
“I’ll walk down to your store with you.”
“All right; only I wouldn’t advise you to stay very long in the
store.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, Craven would think I was neglecting my business, and, as I
am to be his future partner, I want to keep his good opinion.”
“To be sure,” said Joshua. “I suppose I can walk round?”
“Yes, you can go around and see the city--only keep your eyes
peeled, so you will know the way back. And, if you ride in the cars,
look out for pickpockets.”
“Is there much danger?” asked Joshua, hastily thrusting his hand
into his pocket, to ascertain the safety of his money.
“Plenty of danger. If I am in danger of being robbed, you are
much more so, not being used to the city. If you like, I’ll take your
money--that is, what you don’t need to use--and lock it up in the
safe.”
 “I guess I’ll keep it,” said Joshua, hastily. “I’ll look out for
pickpockets. Besides, I don’t think I’ll ride in the cars--I’ll walk.”
“You’ll get tired if you tramp about all day.”
“If I get tired, I’ll come back to the room and rest a while.”
As proposed, Joshua accompanied his friend to the shoe store,
and entered, but, after a few minutes, went out to see what he
could of the city. He wandered about for two hours, looking in at
shop windows, and examining with curiosity the many unusual
objects which everywhere met his view. It was interesting, but it was
also tiresome, particularly as he walked everywhere. At length, his
attention was drawn to a car going uptown, on which was printed its
destination, “Central Park.” Joshua had heard a good deal of Central
Park in his country home, and he naturally was curious to see it. The
car was nearly empty, and, therefore, as it struck him there could
not be much danger of pickpockets, he resolved, especially as he felt
quite tired, to get in and ride to the park, even if it did cost five
cents. Getting into the car, he seated himself at a distance from
other passengers, and kept his hand on his pocket. After a time, he
reached Fifty-ninth street, and had no difficulty in guessing that the
beautiful inclosed space before him was the park of which he had
heard so much. He was a little afraid, on seeing the policeman at the
entrance, that there was a fee for admission, but was gratified to
find that no money was required.
He wandered on, with the other promenaders, and by and by sat
down on one of the seats considerately placed at intervals for the
benefit of weary pedestrians.
He had not been sitting there long, when a dark-complexioned
man of forty also seated himself on the bench. Joshua took no
particular notice of him till the stranger looked toward him, and
remarked, politely: “It’s a fine day, sir.”
“Yes,” said Joshua, who was secretly flattered at being called “sir.”
“It is a fine day to enjoy the park.”
 “Yes,” said Joshua.
“I suppose you live in the city?”
“Yes; that is, I do now,” answered Joshua, flattered again at being
mistaken for an old resident of New York.
“I am a stranger in the city,” said the other; “I live in the country. I
came up here on a little business. I never was in the park before.”
“Weren’t you?” asked Joshua, with the air of one who had visited
it a great many times.
“No; I like it very much. It reminds me of the country where I
live.”
“It is very pretty, we city people think,” said Joshua, swelling with
satisfaction as he classed himself among the city people.
“I ought to like it,” said the stranger, laughing, “for I have had a
piece of great good luck here this morning.”
“Indeed!” said Joshua, pricking up his ears, with curiosity.
“I was walking just above here, when I found this in the path.”
As he spoke, he drew from his pocket what appeared to be a
handsome gold watch of considerable size.
“Did you find that?” said Joshua, enviously, wishing he had had
the same good fortune.
“Yes; somebody must have dropped it. It must be worth a
hundred dollars. Why, the chain is worth thirty, at least,” and he
pointed to the chain, which also was, to all appearances, gold.
“I wish I had been as lucky,” said Joshua, gazing at the watch and
chain with longing eyes. “How long is it since you found it?”
“About twenty minutes. However, I’ve got another watch at home.
I don’t need it. I’d sell it for a good deal less than it is worth,” and
he looked suggestively in Joshua’s face.
 Now, Joshua had long cherished the desire of having a watch,
though his hopes had been confined to a silver one, and a chain of
silk braid. Never, in his wildest and most ambitious dreams, had he
thought of an elegant gold watch and chain like this.
“How much will you take?” he asked, eagerly.
“Why, it’s well worth a hundred dollars,” said the stranger, “but I’ll
take half price.”
“That is, fifty dollars?”
“Yes; it’ll be a great bargain at that. Any jeweler would give more,
but I haven’t time to go and see one; I must go out of this city in an
hour.”
“I can’t afford to give fifty dollars,” said Joshua.
“I might take a little less,” said the stranger, “considering that I
found it; but it’s well worth fifty dollars, or seventy-five, for that
matter.”
“I’ll give you thirty dollars,” said Joshua, after a little pause.
“That’s too little,” said the other. “I’d rather stay here till the next
train, and sell it to a jeweler. I feel sure they would pay me sixty, at
least.”
If that was the case, it would certainly be a good speculation to
buy the watch and sell it again. Joshua began to be anxious to get
it.
“I want it for myself,” he said, “but I can’t afford to pay fifty
dollars.”
“Will you give forty-five?”
“I’ll give thirty-five.”
“Say forty, and it’s yours; though I ought not to sell it at that. Just
put it on, and see how well it looks.”
Joshua put it in his watch-pocket, and was conquered.
 “All right,” he said; “I’ll take it.”
He paid the forty dollars, and bade farewell to the kind stranger
who had given him so good a bargain.
“You city people are sharp,” said the stranger, as he bade him
good-morning. “We poor countrymen don’t stand much chance with
you.”
This remark flattered Joshua immensely, and he strutted about the
park, glancing continually at his new acquisition, and fancying that
he already had quite a city air.
 CHAPTER XVIII

TROUBLE IN STAPLETON.

“I could never have got such a bargain if I had stayed in the

country,” thought Joshua. “I don’t believe I should have had a watch
until I was thirty years old. The old man is awful mean. If he had
treated me right, I shouldn’t have had to help myself; that’s certain.”
Joshua congratulated himself that, though he now possessed a
hundred-dollar gold watch and chain, purchased at less than half
price, he still had left considerably more than five hundred dollars.
When he purchased the watch, his first thought was to sell it almost
immediately, and so realize something by the speculation. But, being
well provided with money, he decided, on the whole, to keep it, for
the present, at least, and not to sell unless he should stand in need
of money. That would not probably be for a long time, as five
hundred dollars seemed quite a fortune to him. Besides, in a short
time, probably, he would get a place, with a salary large enough to
pay his expenses.
Joshua wandered about the park a short time, but returned to his
boarding house in time for lunch. Here he met Sam Crawford. The
latter looked with surprise at the watch and chain so ostentatiously
displayed by his friend.
“Where did you get that watch and chain?” he asked.
“I bought it,” said Joshua, in a tone of importance. “I made a
pretty good bargain, too.”
 “At what jeweler’s shop did you buy it?” asked Sam, rather vexed
that Joshua should have made so important a purchase without
consulting him. If any money was to be spent, he wanted to have
something to do with it.
“I didn’t buy it at any jeweler’s,” answered Joshua. “If I had, I
couldn’t have got it so cheap.”
“Didn’t buy it at a jeweler’s!” repeated Sam, suspiciously. “Where
did you buy it, then?”
“I bought it of a man I met in Central Park.”
“A man you knew?”
“No; a stranger--a man from the country.”
“Let me see the watch,” said Sam, abruptly.
He took it in his hands, and looked at it, but, not being a
professional, he could not tell whether it was genuine or not.
“I shouldn’t wonder if you had got swindled,” he said, handing it
back. “How much did you pay for it?”
“Forty dollars. The man said it was worth a hundred,” said Joshua,
beginning to feel uncomfortable.
“Of course, he would say so,” returned Sam, contemptuously.
“They always do. What made him sell it to you so cheap, then?”
“He found it in the park, and had to go out of the city very soon.”
Sam shook his head.
“You ought not to have bought a watch without my being with
you. If you are swindled, it is your own fault. I don’t believe it is
gold.”
“It looks like gold,” said Joshua, soberly. “How shall I find out?”
“Come out with me, when I go back to the store. We’ll stop at a
jeweler’s on the way, and he will tell us.”
 It must be confessed that Joshua ate his lunch in a state of painful
suspense. Forty dollars was a good deal to lose. Besides, it was, or
would be, mortifying to feel that he had been swindled. The watch
and chain looked all right. He could not help thinking that it was
gold, after all.
When lunch was over, he went out with Sam. Two blocks distant,
there was a small jeweler’s shop. Sam led the way in, and he
followed.
“Give me the watch,” said Sam.
He handed it to the clerk behind the counter.
“Will you tell me what this watch and chain are worth?” he asked.
The clerk took it, and, after a slight examination, said, with a
smile:
“I hope you didn’t give much for it.”
“It does not belong to me. My friend purchased it this morning. Is
there any gold about it?”
“A little--on the outside. It is covered with a thin coating of gold. I
will tell you in a moment what is underneath.”
“It is a kind of composition,” he announced, after a pause.
“How much is the whole thing worth?”
“Three or four dollars, at the outside. The works are good for
nothing. It won’t keep good time. If you want a really good gold
watch, I will show you some.”
“Not to-day,” said Sam. “I may be getting one soon; then I will call
on you.”
The feeling with which Joshua listened to this revelation may be
imagined better than described. He followed Sam out of the store,
with a very red face.
“I’d like to get hold of the feller that sold me the watch,” he said,
elevating his fist.
 “Serves you right,” said Sam, coolly, “for not waiting till I was with
you. I shouldn’t get swindled easily. I’ve been in the city too long. I
know the ropes.”
“You had your pocket picked last evening,” said Joshua.
“That’s true,” Sam was forced to answer--though it was not true.
“I was talking with you, and that made me careless. But I shouldn’t
be cheated on a bargain. How much did you give for the watch?
Forty dollars?”
“Yes,” answered Joshua, wincing.
“Then it’s forty dollars thrown away, for the watch won’t go, and it
will never do you any good.”
“I should like to sell it for as much as I gave,” said Joshua, not
very honestly. “I might go out to Central Park this afternoon.”
“You wouldn’t catch a greenhorn every day that would let himself
be taken in as you were.”
“Do you call me a greenhorn?” added Joshua, angrily.
“Of course, you’re a little green,” said Sam. “I was myself, at first,”
he added, in a conciliatory manner. “But you’ll soon get over it. Only
don’t buy anything of importance unless I am with you. That will be
your safest way for the present.”
Joshua did not reply, but he reluctantly decided that perhaps he
would do better to follow Sam’s advice. Evidently, the city was full of
snares and swindlers of which he had no idea, and it wouldn’t do for
him to lose forty dollars very often. He felt unhappy whenever he
thought of his loss. He had been in the city only twenty-four hours,
yet it had cost him in the neighborhood of fifty dollars. He decided
henceforth to beware of plausible strangers, especially if they
professed to hail from the country.
We must now return to Stapleton, where Mr. Drummond was still
nursing his indignation at the audacity of his son, whom he had