Non-integrative Harmony in the Music of Dmitri Shostakovich

• Applicant: Dr. Tobias Schick
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 540514463

The characteristic tone of Dmitri Shostakovich's music is largely based on idiomatic melodic progressions and harmonic turns. It is all the more astonishing, therefore, that to date there are no monographic accounts, either in English or in German, that focus explicitly on pitch relationships in Shostakovich's music. To fill this gap is the main goal of my project. Previous work on this topic has mostly fallen into one of two main research strands: Soviet or Russian research, in which modal theoretical concepts predominate, and more recent approaches, mostly of U.S. provenance, which approach the interplay of diatonic (major-minor or modal) and chromatic (post-tonal) moments with analytical methods from the environment of pitch class set theory and neo-Riemannian theory. In both cases, the tendency to attribute divergent phenomena to uniform principles and regular patterns cannot be overlooked, which is somewhat at odds with the perception of Shostakovich's music, for which it is precisely unpredictable volts and sudden breaks that are characteristic. The prerequisite for my perceptual approach is first of all to present the music-psychological mechanisms effective in the grouping of musical sections. The actual main part of my project is to develop a typology of recurring melodic turns, voice-leading patterns, and chord connections that condition the idiomaticity of Shostakovich's music. Since there is little evidence that Shostakovich composed using a priori defined rules or systems beyond the traditional harmonic theory taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, this can hardly be accomplished other than through an inductive abstraction of recurring patterns from a variety of case studies. The heart of my work will therefore be analyses of at least 30 to 40 works, which must of necessity be tailored to the phenomena in question. However, since the pitch constellations in Shostakovich's music can hardly be abstracted from their value-specific as well as higher semantic and expressive contexts, Shostakovich's harmony will be related to other aspects of the music in more extensive analyses of some works. A series of exemplary comparisons with works from Sergei Prokof'ev to Béla Bartók serve to contextualize it in terms of music history. At the same time, they allow the specificity of Shostakovich's music to emerge more clearly, with the aim of tracing its power of fascination to some extent.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants