Oct 30, 2016 - Music as Performance: And how âhearingâ a text can lead to further insight. In âTwelfth Night. â by William Shakespeare, recognizing the ...
Riley Miller 10/30/16 HACU-139T Brown Kennedy Tan, Marcus Cheng Chye. "(Dis)Harmony in Illyria: Music, Order, and Time in Twelfth Night." Academia.edu . Litteraria Pragensia 12.23, 2002. Web. 31 Oct. 2016. .
Music as Performance: And how “hearing” a text can lead to further insight In Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, recognizing the importance of the performance aspects of music plays a key role in understanding what a playgoer may experience when seeing a performance of this play, especially during the aural experience of hearing Feste the Fool’s final song in the play. In “(Dis)Harmony in Illyria: Music, Order, and Time in Twelfth Night” by Marcus Tan, he states that although the dramatic action resolves somewhat satisfyingly as do all Shakespearean comedies, the audience is left to ponder on many questions, many of which are contributed by music. The music, if understood as music, is hence able to modulate and redefine our understanding of the play’s elusive nature.1
Analysis of music in Shakespeare’s text has “seldom considered the performative aspects of music or music’s musicality,”2 and has only been focusing on its melodiousness only as a second hand topic. As an alternative to only looking at the thematic understanding of the lyrics written into Shakespeare’s text in Twelfth Night, it is important to recognize the significance of the actual way that the music sounds and is performed. Being able to grasp the effects of music in the applications of Twelfth Night 1 2
Tan, Abstract Tan, 3
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comes from to ability to acknowledge music as performative, focusing on its musical properties rather than simply on recognizing the significance of its lyrical content. Because music as music exists only in performance as an ‘immaterial entity,’ invisible yet powerfully present and able to trigger specific responses through an aural experience, music understood as performative is essential to the understanding of music’s musicality.3
The key to understanding music’s musicality is framing music as a language that encodes meanings within the distinct sounds that are created. “These meanings… are emotional domains triggered by, and characteristic of, movements in melodic patterns.”4 By regarding music in this way, one is able to glean further insight into the emotion that lays behind the lyrics of a song in the text. For example, Tan writes that Feste’s final song seems to restore harmony and reestablishes the comic genre as it recovers the play from its melancholic beginnings by ending on a joyous note. “‘When that I was and a little tiny boy,’5 seemingly serves to restore order and harmony to Illyria and untangles the knots of confusion by reasserting its presence at the end of all dramatic action.”6 However, upon closer analysis of the score, the musicality of the song creates a sense of a dark shadow that challenges what Tan claims has a restorative function. The version below7 is set in the key of E minor, a key that evokes the melancholic moods that are characteristic, in current musicology, of such a key
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Tan, 3 Tan, 3 5 Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 5, Scene 1, line 382 6 Tan, 12 7 There are two known scores of this song: the first is composed by Joseph Vernon; the second, which scholarship has come to accept as the most common version, is composed by W. Chappell. The version composed by W. Chappell is what this paper will explore. 4
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signature.8 Alongside the key signature being a minor key, the actual distance relations between the notes also heavily influences the overall mood of the piece. The melodic movement of the piece is comprised almost exclusively of full-tones and semi-tones, excepting the first and third measures where there are leaps of a third; the range is also extremely compressed--the song only extends from the seventh below the tonic to the dominant. Both of these components create an extreme sense of restraint, of being held back, and establishes a double meaning to the lyrics that Feste is singing. “The melody’s restraint and its minor key pull back upon [the] lyrics… ‘hey ho,’ a somewhat playful and impish term, becomes one of dark foreboding within this melody.”9 The lugubrious moods that come about from hearing music performed in minor keys undercut the overall comedic mood of the play, reminding readers and playgoers that foolishness is not only prevalent in the world, but it is part of what makes the real world so harsh. In the article, “(Dis)Harmony in Illyria: Music, Order, and Time in Twelfth Night” by Marcus Tan, he claims that music needs to be viewed in scholarship the same way that it is experienced by audience members. He argues that in order to gain further insight into the context of the play, one needs to hear the musical qualities of the text, rather than simply analyzing the lyrics of the text. Yes, the lyrics are important, as they are what the audience members, and readers, are paying attention to. But, their minds are also experiencing the haunting qualities of music in the minor key that is also limited
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Tan, 12 Tan, 12-13
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to a range of six notes, which creates an experience that is entirely dependent on actually hearing the expression of emotion musically.
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Tan, 12 (See F.W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearean Tragedy, 189-192 for more information)
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