Mortification and fragment: A music-analytical application of Walter Benjamin's critical methodology (Samuel Barber)

Walter Benjamin is widely acclaimed as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His work has gained a foothold in the disciplines of history, literary criticism, philosophy, urban studies, linguistics, aesthetics, and anthropology. This study attempts the first application of Benjamin's critical methodology in the field of music analysis. Grounding the discussion is an examination of a wide array of his writings, including "On Language as Such and the Language of Man," "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," "Goethe's Elective Affinities," The Origin of German Tragic Drama, One-Way Street, the Berlin studies, the aura essays of the 1930s, "On the Mimetic Faculty," the Proust and Baudelaire studies, "Franz Kafka," "Theses on the Concept of History," and The Arcades Project. The study explores correspondences between Benjamin's concerns and musical issues, examines the concepts of aura and nonsensuous similitude as they relate to his theory of cognition, and articulates his critical strategy. Benjaminian critical principles are then applied in analyses of Prokofiev's song "The Butterfly" and Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915. These analyses introduce an original method of graphic representation of tension and opposition, treating words and music as complementary forces. In doing so they seek a reappraisal of the composers' contributions to musical modernity and new possibilities for song as an analytic subject.