Sio Pan Leong | Rethinking the 'Dreamlike' in Schubert’s Sonata Forms

Event details

Speaker: Sio Pan Leong (University of Edinburgh)

Date: 17 March 2021

Time: 4.15-5.45 pm

Online

About this seminar

Schubert’s sonata forms have long struck commentators as containing formal and tonal processes that disagree with contemporary conventions. In the early reception of this music, they were frequently denounced as the illogical products resulting from the composer’s anecdotal ‘somnambulist’ way of composition and incapability of handling large-scale, learned forms. Accompanying the growing recognition of the important role the concept of dreams plays in Schubert’s music, in modern scholarship, labels such as ‘dream’ and ‘dreamlike’ have been regularly used to describe these peculiar modulations. The current use of the dream-metaphor, however, remains a controvertible one, for, on one hand, it still carries such undertones as ‘irrational’ and ‘illogical’—albeit not necessarily in a disapproving sense—on the other hand, recent perspectives from Neo-Riemannian theory show that the irrational in Schubert’s music is, in fact, perfectly logical. Better substantiation is therefore needed if we are to continue using the dream-metaphor to characterise Schubert’s sonata forms.

 Addressing this issue, I propose to rethink the ‘dreamlike’ in Schubert’s sonata forms in line with the notion of the fantastic in Romantic art, fundamental to which is not so much irrationality as anti-rationality—the latter emphasises its critical positioning against what is taken for granted as the rational, normative, or objective truth. In Romantic fantasy literature, the ‘rational’, mundane literary reality is often suddenly challenged by the anti-rational presence of the fantastic, leaving the protagonist to wonder whether he or she has in fact been dreaming. I argue that it is through a similar contradiction or coalescence between two disconcerting principles—the established norm and the anti-conventional other—that the dreamlike is brought into play in Schubert’s sonata forms. In conclusion, I expand on this argument and briefly discuss the extent to which, in addition to the liminal dreamlike effects, a musical dream scene might also be postulated in our hermeneutic interpretation of Schubert’s sonata forms. Ultimately, my aim is to facilitate a new and potentially rewarding avenue to engage with the dream aesthetic in Schubert’s music.

Biography

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