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From the Spring 2004 Issue of CMP Insight

by Randy Swiggum

(This article is the second in a series that revisits a familiar idea to veteran CMPers—the “heart of the music.”)

My 1990 article “Going to the Heart” was written from an essentialist viewpoint, with the belief that the musical meaning of a piece somehow comes from its essence, from its inside, from its musical elements and how they are organized—that the piece of music is an autonomous, self-enclosed entity whose meaning exists apart from me as a listener, and will remain the same and unchanging, throughout time, even for different listeners.

This way of thinking naturally emphasizes a single, important, and all-encompassing heart—a musical element, a compositional device, something “in the notes”—that gives the piece its meaning. Anyone who has attended the Summer Workshop probably remembers struggling to find the heart of a piece they were analyzing—a process we sometimes make unnecessarily difficult because of emphasis on finding the right answer, i.e. a single, correct “heart” for each piece of music.

But this seems counterintuitive, in a way. We all recognize that different listeners hear music differently. Isn’t it possible to have several hearts, one for each listener? And don’t some pieces seem to have hearts that are more complex than a single musical element?

It was these thoughts which made me come to grips with the difference between an essentialist view of the music’s meaning versus an externalist view, where the meaning of the piece doesn’t come from within it, but is attached to it by me as a listener. This meaning is constructed from many factors: my understanding of music at the time, my listening skills, all the other music I’ve heard up to that point, etc. For example, I may analyze “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and discover that the entire piece is organized around the character of a half-step, hinted at even in the first measure. This would be an essentialist analysis—the meaning/heart is in the notes. Or I might decide that the heart is the way the lovely trio melody, both strong and lyrical, is set in relief and prepared so beautifully by the very different, more aggressive melodies which precede it. Or I may decide that the particular combination of timbres (especially the piccolo versus trombone soli) gives the piece its distinctive American military feeling which is its heart. Or I might even say that the heart of the piece is its status as an icon of musical patriotism in the U.S.A.—that it somehow “means” patriotism, at least musically, because of how most Americans tend to hear it and the associations they make when hearing it.

One could make a case for all of these hearts. The first three are more essentialist in nature—they depend on isolating a compositional aspect of the piece and identifying it as the one that gives the piece its unique character.

A problem with the essentialist approach is that it sometimes it seems to limit great masterworks to one musical element, when in fact they typically combine several elements in such an interlocking relationship that they can be teased out only with difficulty, or by doing damage to the full understanding of the piece. I learned this the hard way when I tried to state clearly the heart of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Mvt. I. Is it the piece’s perfectly structured sonata form? The charm and elegance of its gracious melodies? Or the contrasts built into its main themes (a combination of both of the previous possibilities)?

One could argue for all of these possibilities. Why? Because the heart is merely an artificial construction, a pedagogical tool to help in analysis. It is a way of stating, succinctly, a fundamental aspect of the piece, something that is most striking, gives the piece meaning, or seems to be compositionally most important.

But to say the heart is a mere “pedagogical tool” is not to diminish its importance in the analysis process. Struggling to find the heart can help in two ways, one of which leads to the other:

1. It helps me, the teacher, in the process of analyzing the piece by forcing me to come to grips with how the piece is constructed, what is important about it, and what its meaning might be.
2. It helps my students, in turn, because I will probably choose more relevant outcomes and strategies for them to discover if I am working backwards from the heart of the piece. For example, if I decide that the heart of a young band piece like Frank Erickson’s Balladair is its ABA form, and especially the wonderful feeling of “homecoming” on the return of the A theme, I’ve already started thinking differently about the piece and my students’ experience of it. It will help me (and them) focus on a very important aspect of the piece that might be overlooked otherwise, and will give students at least one solid and concrete aspect of the piece to think about and understand.

Frankly, a good analysis is going to reveal many possible outcomes, but because of time we are usually limited to just a few (sometimes only one) to actually focus on with our students. Deciding upon a heart for the piece—even a heart that might be different when you teach the piece again in 5 years—gives tremendous pedagogical focus and clarity. So though it may not be the one and only possibility, it is one strong one which students can latch on to, understand clearly, and remember. And that’s how a great piece finds a welcome home in the hearts of our students.