UNTITLED

posted by James Reel

    Over at the NewMusicbox, the American Music Center’s Web zine (to which I have contributed on a couple of occasions), editor Frank Oteri wonders “why do so many composers still insist on numbering their works rather than naming them? … Sure, we're no longer living in the era of Haydn, Beethoven, and the gang where everything was either Piano Sonata No. 28 or Symphony No. 6, but this strangest of naming games has yet to completely disappear from our collective reflexes. … Why must [compositions] be named as if they were volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica?”
    Well, classical compositions can be about something beyond music, but often they aren’t. What purpose is served by assigning some fanciful title to an abstract work? A certain popular Beethoven piano sonata sounds nothing like “moonlight” to me despite its title (awarded by someone other than the composer); the nickname, at best, is just a faster way to refer to the work than Piano Sonata No. 14 in c-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2. The title doesn’t change the character or the content of the work, which exists independently of any description.
    Many compositions have been deeply inspired by some poem or story or character, and truly deserve to carry fanciful titles. Liszt first popularized this practice, although he was hardly the first to employ it; today, such composers as Michael Torke and Michael Daugherty almost always write music that refers to something beyond the score—color and texture, if nothing else, in Torke’s case. Some composers have devised titles and narratives for their compositions, but ultimately decided it was best to let the music stand on its own; Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 are examples of this.
    But what point is served by assigning some imaginative title to a piece of music merely as an afterthought? What, exactly, do titles like Structures and Synchronisms, so popular in the 1950s and ’60s, mean? Nothing more, I suppose, than that the works don’t follow some traditional structure like sonata or symphony, and aren’t written for a conventional combination of instruments, like piano trio or string quartet. Well, OK, except that such titles were so abstract as to be ultimately meaningless.
    In traditional forms, calling something merely “symphony” or “sonata” is fine by me; if words could adequately describe what music expresses, we wouldn’t need the music.