Chopin’s Silent Chord and the Nineteenth-Century Cycle

Tuesday, November 5, 2019 at 5:00pm CST

Ryan Center for the Musical Arts, Room 1-180

Modern scholarship on Chopin’s Preludes Op. 28 encompasses a broad range of views on the question of how its constituent parts relate to the whole. The diversity of approaches reflects the coexistence of contingent elements which resist simple structural assimilation on the one hand and systematic intelligible structures on the other. In this sense, the Preludes could be said to betray Rose Rosengard Subotnik’s characterization of Chopin’s style in general: that its intelligibility lies “in his successfully projected and explicitly sensuous interweaving of the fragmentary and particular against a lingering background of tonal tension…” The characterization points to a significant phenomenon underlying the Preludes that has so far been unexplored: the capacity for contingent, structurally dissonant elements to connect across the opus and interweave with such elements. The purposes of this talk, therefore, are to identify as-yet unexplored ways in which the Preludes create meaning while developing a new analytic perspective that engages with the discourse of nineteenth-century cyclicism beyond the “unified vs. fragmentary” debate. Dr. Lee aims to reveal large-scale networks of contingent connections in Op. 28 that are palpable but open-ended, intelligible but not cyclically integrated in the traditional sense.