Alfred Schnittke once wrote that he was dreaming of the "Utopia of a united style, where fragments of ‘U’ (Unterhaltung) [entertaining] and ‘E’ (Ernst) [serious] are not used for comic effect but seriously represent multi-faceted musical reality."[1] In order to represent such a Utopia, he combined, in a single piece, some excerpts from his cartoon music, a tango, an atonal serenade, a children chorus, and "a piece of hundred percent-guaranteed Corelli (Made in the USSR)."[2] As they emerge from the texture, the musical borrowings chosen by Schnittke create abrupt shifts in the stylistic fabric of the work. They attract the attention of the listener on themselves, and as such, they act musical signs. As Miall and Kuiken explained, the borrowings are detached from the context, they are "defamiliarized" and ask to be "refamiliarized" in the listener's mind.[3]
In my presentation, I demonstrate how Schnittke's polystylism encourages listeners to construe a narrative in order to conceptually soften the many stylistic gaps and ruptures implied by the compositional procedure. Inspired by the works of French literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, and by the semiotic theories of Umberto Eco, I explain how polystylism allows a narrative layer to emerge atop a number of works: the Symphony No.1 , the Concerto Grosso No. 1, and Moz-Art à la Haydn. In each case, the musical processes involved are different, causing divergent narrative implications: if the Symphony testifies of the compositional crisis of a young Soviet composer, the Concerto Grosso represents its "Utopian" solution.
[1] Schnittke’s notes are reprinted in Alexander Ivashkin, Alfred Schnittke, ed. Norman Lebrecht (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), 140.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Miall, David S., and Don Kuiken. “Foregrounding, Defamiliarization, and Affect: Response to Literary Stories.” Poetics 22, 5: 389-407. http://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/reading/foregrd.htm (Accessed 30 April 2008).
