Doctoral Colloquium (Music) | Laurence Willis

The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.

Doctoral Colloquium: Laurence Willis, Guest Speaker, Kunst Universität Graz

Title: Approaches to Musical Function: William Caplin, Bruno Haas, and Carl Dahlhaus

Abstract: This talk explores the concept of musical function from two primary perspectives: that of Bruno Haas’s concept of “funktionelle Analyse” (Die freie Kunst 2003), and from the Schoenbergian perspective developed most recently William E. Caplin (Classical Form 1998). These two traditions are rather different, but ultimately involve the analysis of wholes according to the contextualization of their parts, which I view as the definitive nature of functional analysis.

I start with a description of analytical method from Carl Dahlhaus’s critique of Schenker (“Im namens Schenker” 1983), before developing the above views of a musical function. I argue that Dahlhaus’s statements on music analysis (i.e., philosophical hermeneutic method expressed in an idealistic way), and a theory of musical function applied to music analysis are fundamentally incompatible. Ultimately Dahlhaus’s individualist view produces one accent of music analysis, while more theoretical apparatuses produce another, contrasting accent.

Bio: Laurence Sinclair Willis is a music researcher at the Kunst Universität Graz, Austria where his project “Postwar Germanic and Anglophone Formenlehre” investigates the history of Formenlehre in the late-twentieth Century. His research interests include Formenlehre, late-Romantic harmony, and microtonality. He translated the monograph Musical Composition in the Context of Globalization (2021) by Christian Utz.