1.2. Analyzing Musical Analysis: A Case Study of the Reception of Chromatic Completion in the Works of Fritz Heinrich Klein and Nicolas Obouhow

Although musical analysis often suggests a more or less objective judgment of works through various theoretical models, in reality the outcome of an analytical consideration is highly dependent on which method is applied to a composition and how its outcome is interpreted by the analyst. Moreover, musical analyses can also serve as a basis with which the analysts can lend a more objective-seeming ...foundation to personal interests and thus serve the pursuit of specific agendas. Musical analyses reveal themselves to be the expression of a highly individual subjectivity, which presents musicology with a dilemma: On the one hand, the recognition of one’s own subjectivity is a basic prerequisite for every analyst to conduct a concise analysis of a work; on the other hand, musical analyses must constantly justify their actual epistemological value. The lecture discusses how musicology can make use of this subjectivity in order to turn musical analyses into insightful objects of investigation. The works and writings of the Russian-French composer Nicolas Obouhow and the Austrian Alban Berg student Fritz Heinrich Klein will be used as case studies. Although both composers could hardly be more different in their aesthetic ideas, both analyses by the artists themselves and observations by third parties reveal a tendency to equate the two repertoires. The reason for this is to be found in the use of chromatic completion in the work of both composers, which has been interpreted as a central symbol of artistic innovation, especially – but not only – through the influence of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve- tone music. This observation reveals the potential that musical analyses hold for insights, apart from concrete works, about the analysts and the zeitgeist in which they operate. Conversely, this reveals the necessity of constantly taking these factors into account in the interpretation and contextualization of musical analyses.
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