Lourenço, Transfigured Night, and Musical Writing

Abstract

Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht had a privileged place in Eduardo Lourenço’s personal musical canon. He referred to it, along with Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, as his sonic ‘true soul’ (alma verdadeira), and he cites the work multiple times in his refractory ‘musical diary’, the recently published Tempo da música, música do tempo. While Lourenço’s discussions of Schoenberg’s sextet are highly poetic and elusive, the present essay approaches the work from the opposite direction, deploying the technical discourse of transformational music theory. The article as a whole explores the methodological dialectic that Lourenço outlines between comprehension (compreender) and feeling (sentir) in musical experience, relating these ideas to recent debates in Anglo-American music scholarship regarding musical ineffability and the efficacy (or inefficacy) or talk about music. The article ultimately argues that talk about music—whether in Lourenço’s poetic vein, or in the more technical terms of recent music analysis—is best understood as a product of the encounter between the interpreting subject, music, and language, rather than as a rationalist explanation of musical experience.