The Haydn Economy: Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century by Nicholas Mathew (review)

Abstract

balderdash. And the notion that what’s saliently troubling about Milton Friedman is that his prose is overly musical is almost too frivolous for words. The parts of The Sonic Episteme that pay close attention to particular songs, such as its discussion of “Love is a Bourgeois Construct” by the Pet Shop Boys (pp. 23–24), are intermittently interesting. Be warned, however, that James sometimes plays fast and loose with musical terminology. She goes on at some length about “soars” and “drops,” but gives only the most cursory description of how those devices work (pp. 129– 30). I had never once run across the word soars (used as a plural noun) and couldn’t deduce its meaning from context clues. Mildly ashamed at my complete unfamiliarity with what James seemed to be employing as a piece of standardly accepted music-analytical lingo, I googled the term, to discover that the only hits online were an obscure 2011 article that seems to have coined the term and a blog post by James. The article says that soars are: “That surge from a dynamically static mid-tempo 4/4 verse to a ramped-up major-key chorus, topped, in the case of female singers, with fountaining melisma; the moment the producer deploys the riff, the synth-gush, the shouted vocal-hook for which the whole of the rest of the song is a mere appendage, a prologue and epilogue that only the chorus validates” (Daniel Barrow, “A Plague of Soars—Warps in the Fabric of Pop,” Quietus, 13 April 2011, https://thequietus.com/articles/06073 -a-plague-of-soars-warps-in-the-fabric -of-pop [accessed 2 March 2023]). This description does not seem to me to detectably resemble the single thumbnail sketch of soars that James gives, so I’m still uncertain of what soars are. At one point in The Sonic Episteme James says, puzzlingly, that “arpeggios are figures that play all the notes of a chord in ascending or descending sequence rather than simultaneously; church bells are a commonly heard arpeggio” (p. 191, n. 2). (The first bit is okay as a description of an arpeggio, but I have never heard a church bell that was just a broken chord, and the church bell tune everyone knows, “Westminster Quarters,” is decidedly not an arpeggiation.) James then refers to a bass motive in Love is a Bour­ geois Construct as “those arpeggios” (p. 23) even though the motive under examination doesn’t at all fit her definition. Her discussion of metric organization in Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” (pp. 82–86) is nearly impossible to follow because she talks about this unnotated music in terms “bars” (presumably in 4/4 time) without noticing or noting that the pulse pattern is an additive 3+2+3 scheme. And I could not make heads or tails of the claim that in Rihanna’s song “we have the music-box synth on a 2/4 pattern and the vocals on a 1/3 pattern— which is totally common. What’s uncommon about [“Bitch Better Have My Money”] is that it’s really a 4/2 and a 3/1 pattern” (p. 85). Maybe I’m missing something simple and obvious, but the difference between repeatedly emphasizing beats 1 and 3 and repeatedly emphasizing beats 3 and 1 eludes me. In any case, if you decide to read The Sonic Episteme, I recommend fast forwarding to the music-analytical passages, but be sure to approach James’s formalistic descriptions with some caution.