Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age

Author(s): Richard Cohn

Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society , Vol. 57, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp.
285-324
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological
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Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2004.57.2.285

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Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification
in the Freudian Age
RICHARD COHN

S
omething is wrong with Figure 1:1

Š ² ÐÐÐ −¦ ÐÐÐ
Ý Ð Ð
Figure 1

Hugo Riemann characterized this harmonic pairing as among “the weirdest

cases that arise.” Ernst Kurth finds it “supernaturally strange,” Susan Youens
“magical.” For Dahlhaus, the pairing “depicts a paradox”; for Adorno, it “oc-
cludes daylight”; for Lendvai, it induces “tonal death.”2 Paradoxical, supernat-
ural, magical, weird, dark . . . dead! When combined, these ingredients blend
into a potent brew. The German bottlers of that brew label it unheimlich; their
Anglophone colleagues, uncanny.

This paper develops an argument first sketched on pages 21 and 22 of my article “Maximally
Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Music,” Music
Analysis 15 (1996): 9–40. Between 1998 and 2003, versions of “Uncanny Resemblances” were
presented at Harvard, Yale, Ohio State, Louisiana State, and the universities of Cincinnati,
Connecticut, Wisconsin, Illiniois, and California at Santa Barbara. Questions and comments from
Alain Frogley and Nicholas Temperley, as well as from Berthold Hoeckner and Yonatan Malin of
my home department, were particularly useful.
1. Figure 1 should not be interpreted as pitch- or order-specific. It represents a harmonic rela-
tionship that can occur in either order, and at any of twelve transpositions and with any enhar-
monic substitutions.
2. Adolf Bernhard Marx, Die Lehre von der Musikalische Komposition, Praktisch Theoretisch,
9th ed., rev. and ed. Hugo Riemann (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1887), 1:525; Lee A. Roth-
farb, ed. and trans., Ernst Kurth: Selected Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 124; Susan Youens, Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s “Winterreise” (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1991), 161; Carl Dahlhaus, “Zur chromatischen Technik Carlo
Gesualdos,” Analecta musicologica 4 (1967): 79; Theodor Adorno, Moments musicaux: Neu
gedruckte Aufsätze 1926–1962 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964), 32; and Ernö Lendvai, The

[ Journal of the American Musicological Society 2004, vol. 57, no. 2]

© 2004 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. 0003-0139/04/5702-0002$2.00

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286 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Something else is wrong: the progression lacks a name. The only histori-
cally plausible candidate, Riemann’s Gegenkleinterzwechsel, rests on an obsolete
theoretical basis;3 moreover, both the term and its English translation, antino-
mic minor third exchange, are cumbersome. No other label, whether gener-
ated systematically or ad hoc, has achieved anything close to standardization.
This essay explores the relationship between the discursive and affective
problems: the difficulty of talking about the progression and of conceptualiz-
ing it, the sense of spontaneous disorientation that the progression engenders
and the nameless sensations stimulated by that sense. The harmonic pairing
represented in Figure 1 is shown to acquire its signifying power not only by
convention, but also in part from a homology between the properties of un-
canniness (as a reaction to expectations of how the world works) and those of
the harmonic progression (as a reaction to expectations of how triadic music
goes). The title of this essay, then, refers to resemblances that both co-relate
individual musical representations of the uncanny, and bind those representa-
tions to the uncanny (as a unitary phenomenon or sensation).
Although the triadic pairing has no name, we need to provide it with a
John Doe for consistency of reference. In more systematic writings about
chromatic harmony under the “neo-Riemannian” rubric, I have referred to the
type of progression exemplified in Figure 1 as a hexatonic pole.4 For the pur-
poses of this essay, this label may be regarded as arbitrary, or theoretically neu-
tral. The paper is intended not as a contribution to neo-Riemannian theory
per se, but rather as a historical and psychological study of a harmonic phe-
nomenon that has elsewhere engaged me from a more systematic perspective.
Few documents from the early decades of the twentieth century have
drawn as much scholarly attention as Sigmund Freud’s essay on the uncanny,

Workshop of Bartók and Kodály (Budapest: Editio Musica, 1983), 707. The Adorno quote in this
context is perhaps not quite sanctioned: he is referring to the more general phenomenon of sud-
den third-related modulations from a major to a minor key. Yet two of the three examples that he
offers, from Schubert’s B  Sonata and E  Trio, contain the progression represented in Figure 1.
3. On this term and its position in Riemann’s conceptual world, see David Kopp, Chromatic
Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 72–73.
4. I introduced the term in “Maximally Smooth Cycles.” The cycles of the title are derived by
arranging the twenty-four major and minor triads such that two triads are adjacent if they are re-
lated by semitonal displacement of a single pitch class. This arrangement yields four cycles, each
containing three major and three minor triads. The triads of Figure 1 are included in a cyclic or-
dering of E major, E minor, C major, C minor, A  major, and G  minor. The cycles are hexatonic
because their constituent triads draw from a fund of six pitch classes; the source hexachord for the
Figure 1 cycle is {C, D /E , E, G, G  /A , B/C }. E major and C minor are hexatonic poles
because they lack common pitches, partitioning the source hexachord into two complementary
triads. E minor is likewise the hexatonic pole of A  major, and C major of A  minor. See also my
“As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert,” 19th-Century
Music 22 (1999): 213–32.

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 287

published in 1919.5 Initially intended as a contribution to the psychology of

aesthetics, “Das Unheimliche” has become “a key reference-point in discus-
sions of art and literature, philosophy, film, cultural studies, and sexual differ-
ence.”6 Literary historian Terry Castle considers Freud’s paper “first and
foremost a sort of theme-index: an obsessional inventory of eerie fantasies,
motifs, and effects, an itemized tropology of the weird.”7 Although “Das
Unheimliche” does have some qualities of what Nicholas Royle calls a
“strange conceptual shopping-list,”8 Castle’s formulation undervalues its the-
oretical aspirations. Freud intended, above all, to pull this wide-ranging inven-
tory of stimuli and symptoms under the canopy of a single explanation, whose
central component is the tendency of the repressed familiar to emanate in a
strangely defamiliarized form.
Freud’s poly-thematic essay has crossed over into musical writings at several
checkpoints. Some musicologists have focused on how distinct items from
Freud’s shopping list, such as ventriloquism, automata, doubleness, and repe-
tition compulsion, lend themselves to musical manifestation or depiction in
ways that draw out their uncanny qualities.9 Others have worked more closely
with the theoretical core of Freud’s essay, suggesting that musical uncanniness
results from failed attempts to repress familiar or “homelike” musical ele-
ments, which upon resurfacing are heard as newly defamiliarized.10 The cur-
rent essay works to coordinate aspects of these two levels. I begin with a sketch
of pertinent aspects of Freud’s essay, many of which had already been intro-
duced in an earlier psychological paper of Ernst Jentsch. In the second part,
“A Gallery of Hexatonic Poles,” I present evidence that composers frequently
use hexatonic poles when they seek to depict the range of phenomena that
Jentsch and Freud identify as inducing the uncanny. This range is wide, in-
cluding dead bodies, necroanimism, reincarnation, magic, and spirits. But it
does not match psychological writings term for term, in part because certain
tropes of weirdness, such as wax figures, epileptic seizures, and numerological
coincidences, are not topics that composers are moved to depict.

5. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, vol. 17
(1917–1919) of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed.
James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 217–52.
6. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003), 12–13.
7. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4.
8. Royle, The Uncanny, 13.
9. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 56; Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice,
1800–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 203–9; and David
Schwarz, Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1997), 66–72.
10. Michael Cherlin, “Schoenberg and Das Unheimliche: Spectres of Tonality,” Journal of
Musicology 11 (1993): 357–73; and Nicholas Marston, “Schubert’s Homecoming,” Journal of the
Royal Musical Association 125 (2000): 248–70.

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288 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Psychological theory is supplanted by music theory in the next two parts of

the paper, which explore the syntactic properties that provoke the signifying
power of hexatonic poles. I suggest in “Harmonic Theory and the Signifying
Potential of Hexatonic Poles” that these properties are largely suppressed by
recent theories of tonality, and in “Hexatonic Poles and Harmonic Theory in
the Freudian Era” that they are more successfully illuminated by tonal theo-
rists of Jentsch’s and Freud’s time and place. Psychological theory resurfaces
in the finale, in which I seek to align aspects of Freud’s explanatory model of
“das Unheimliche” with what has been observed about hexatonic poles.
Again the psychological model serves as a selective rather than comprehensive
source of musical explanation. Freud’s ideas about the defamiliarized home
play a central role in the model of the musical uncanny developed here, but I
have envisioned no musical equivalents for such central components of the
Freudian uncanny as repression and castration.

The Psychological Uncanny in the Early Twentieth Century

Jentsch’s “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen” of 1906 appeared in a rela-

tively obscure publication, and until its recent English translation by Roy
Sellars it was known mainly through the filter of Freud’s commentary.11
Anticipating Freud, Jentsch begins by observing that the word unheimlich
embeds the word for home (Heim). Accordingly, “someone to whom some-
thing ‘uncanny’ happens is not quite ‘at home’ or ‘at ease.’. . . a lack of orien-
tation is bound up with the impression of the uncanniness of a thing or
incident” (p. 8). Jentsch clusters those stimuli that induce an uncanny sensa-
tion around a set of terms related to disorientation, including uncertainty, in-
determinacy, undecidability, ambiguity, doubt, paradox, and liminality. Of
particular interest is “doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate
and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be ani-
mate.”12 The former case includes spasmodic behavior induced by epileptic
seizures, where, to the “unschooled observer . . . mechanical processes are
taking place in that which he was previously used to regarding as a unified
psyche” (p. 14). Examples of the reciprocal category are life-size automata,
wax figures, and—above all—“a dead body (especially a human one), a

11. Ernst Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie der Unheimlichen,” Psychiatrisch-Neurologische

Wochenschrift 8, nos. 22–23 (1906): 195–98, 203–5; translated by Roy Sellars as “On the
Psychology of the Uncanny,” in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2, no. 1 (1995):
7–16. All page references are to the Sellars translation. It may interest readers to know that Jentsch
also authored a two-volume monograph entitled Musik und Nerven (Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann,
1904, 1911).
12. Jentsch, “Psychology,” 11. This is one of the two sentences that Freud quotes directly
from Jentsch’s essay; see Freud, “Uncanny,” 226. Strachey’s translation differs in some particulars.

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 289

death’s head, skeletons, and similar things” (p. 15). These phenomena induce
“thoughts of latent animatedness”: they literally “embody” human forms that
lack the potential for human action.
Freud imports Jentsch’s roster of stimuli and symptoms wholesale, includ-
ing some items that Freud accuses his predecessor of overemphasizing.
Specifically, the explanatory power that Jentsch attributes to undecidability
makes Freud particularly uncomfortable.13 Freud nonetheless declares near
the end of his essay that “an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when
the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something
that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality.”14
Wax figures, epileptics, and automata find their way into Freud’s roster of un-
canny stimuli. So, too, does Jentsch’s prototypical case: “Many people experi-
ence the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to
the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts.”15 Freud embellishes this
idea with some supplementary examples of his own: “Dismembered limbs,
a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, . . . feet which dance by themselves
. . . —all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially
when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity in
addition.”16
Freud ultimately judges those themes that he appropriates from Jentsch to
be more symptomatic than central. Disorientation and undecidability may be
common components of the uncanny, but Freud argues that these and similar
qualities are not sufficient in themselves.17 Similarly, uncanniness is often iden-
tified with the gruesome, frightful, and terrible. For Freud, these qualities
“overlay” more fundamental characteristics.18 Nor does uncanniness reduce
(in the words of Anthony Vidler) to “the parapsychological—the magical, the
hallucinatory, the mystical, and the supernatural . . . ; nor was it present in
everything that appeared strange, weird, grotesque, or fantastic,” although it
shares qualities with all of these phenomena.19

13. Freud, “Uncanny,” 221, 230.

14. Ibid., 244.
15. Ibid., 241.
16. Ibid., 244.
17. Freud is not entirely consistent on this matter: “an uncanny effect is often and easily pro-
duced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced” suggests that undecidabil-
ity is sufficient after all. In the preface to his translation of Jentsch, Sellars captures Freud’s
ambivalence on this question in a characteristically fractal formulation: “Jentsch emphasises that
the uncanny arises from a certain experience of the uncertain or the undecidable, and this seems
to be intolerable for Freud. Freud decides, in other words, that the undecidable cannot be toler-
ated as a theoretical explanation, but it nonetheless recurs in his own essay, undecidably” (Jentsch,
“Psychology,” 7). Royle engages similar themes: Freud’s efforts to repress Jentsch’s ghost, to
bury him alive, are uncanny in their futility (The Uncanny, 52, 149–50).
18. Freud, “Uncanny,” 219, 241.
19. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1992), 22.

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290 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Freud identifies the component that is central to his own account through
an etymological tour de force that runs rings around the meager observations
with which Jentsch began his more modest essay. Jentsch believes that unheim-
lich denotes the unfamiliar, tout court, because he only noticed its antonymic
relation to heimlich. What he misses is that heimlich also refers to that which is
private, secret, clandestine. In regard to this latter set of meanings, unheimlich
is an intensification: the clandestine is transformed into something so interior,
so familiar, that it is hidden from the viewing eye and the inquiring mind.
Freud’s essay famously formulates the uncanny as “that class of the frightening
which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”20
The coincidence of the alien and the hyper-familiar, in this single word, re-
flects the psychological proximity between the apparent comfort and orienta-
tion afforded by the bourgeois home, and the terrifying, disorienting, and
grotesque, which lie close at hand, if just out of sight. Vidler refers to “a dis-
quieting slippage between what seems homely and what is definitively un-
homely,”21 highlighting the continuum on which the heimlich and unheimlich
coexist, and the difficulty of discerning the moment when the border that sep-
arates them is traversed. Here is where Jentsch’s notions of undecidability,
doubt, and paradox have a very particular role to play in Freud’s vision of the
psychological uncanny. They will come to play a quite similar role in the vision
that we will develop of the musical uncanny.
We will return to these themes quite explicitly in the final part of this paper;
in the interim it will be sufficient to rest them on a nail on the wall, and experi-
ence an occasional shivering anxiety as their strings sound sympathetically
when touched by the breeze or by the wings of a bee.

A Gallery of Hexatonic Poles

What resources are available to a composer who wishes to depict death,

grotesquerie, disorientation, paradox, or the living dead on stage or in song?
What stimuli evoke those phenomena for an acculturated listener, even in
response to “absolute” music lacking para-musical cues? In this section, we
consider some examples of hexatonic poles, together with a set of associated
verbal texts. Some of the texts are provided or selected by the composer:
words that the music sets, an operatic stage direction that the music accompa-
nies, a title or a programmatic commentary. Others are inferred by critics,
scholars, or performing musicians who seek to articulate their responses to
events in instrumental music. The gallery of examples is intended to suggest,
through sheer weight of accumulation, that hexatonic poles are invoked by
composers to express a significant range of the sensations that Jentsch and

20. Freud, “Uncanny,” 220.

21. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, ix–x.

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 291

Example 1 Carlo Gesualdo, “Moro Lasso,” opening and closing measures (Sämtliche madri-
gale für fünf stimmen, bk. 6 [Hamburg: Ugrino, 1957], 74, 77)

(a) (b)

$
Š ô ½ ð ¼
ð ²Ł Ð ²Ð
ahi, mi dà mor - te!

Š  ²Ð ¦Ð −ð Ł Ł ² ð ð ð ²ð Ð
²Ð ¦ Ðý
Mo - ro, las - so, al mi dà mor - te!

Š  ²Ð ð
Ð Ð ð Ł Ł Ð Ð Ð
Mo - ro, las - so, al ahi, mi dà mor - te!

Š  ²Ð ²Ð ¦ð Ð ¦ð Ł Ł Ð Ð
Ð
+ Mo - ro, las - so, al - te, ahi, mi dà mor - te!

Ý −ð ð ¦ Ð Ð
%  ²Ð ¦Ð Ð Ð Ð
Mo - ro, las - so, al mi dà mor - te!

Freud associate with the uncanny, and that they spontaneously evoke the same
in knowledgeable listeners.
We begin with the depiction of “proto-uncanny” phenomena in music of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Example 1 presents the opening
and closing of the Gesualdo death madrigal “Moro lasso.” The opening
(Ex. 1a) famously juxtaposes C major with its A-minor pole; the progression
is transposed and reversed, as C minor to E major, just prior to the final
A-major cadence (Ex. 1b). Example 2, from Gesualdo’s “Languisce al fin,”
joins two phrases whose texts refer to death’s affliction. The cadence of the
first phrase juxtaposes C minor and E major; the echoing pole in the following
phrase, B  minor to D major, transposes the cadential progression down a
whole step. The four chords together exhaust the stock of available pitch
classes under equal temperament, a feature also found in some of the chrono-
logically later excerpts treated below. Example 3 presents the moment when
Orfeo banishes Euridice netherward with a backward glance. Monteverdi sets
this moment by juxtaposing C minor and E major across a long silence.22

22. Daniel Chua writes of this passage that “magic, monody, and vision collide with such
force that they repel each other as a kind of epistemic fissure between the ancient and modern
world” (Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning [New York: Cambridge University Press,
1999], 48–49).

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292 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 2 Carlo Gesualdo, “Languisce al fin,” mm. 13–15 (Sämtliche madrigale für fünf
stimmen, bk. 5 [Hamburg: Ugrino, 1958], 45–46)

14
$ Ł −ðý Ł ¦Ð ô
Š
L’af - flig - ge sı̀

Š Ł ðý Ł Ð ¼ Ł −ðý Ł ¦ð
L’af - flig - ge sı̀, l’af-flig - ge sı̀

ŠŁ ð ð ð ²Ð ¼
Ł − ðý Ł ð
L’af-flig - ge sı̀, l’af-flig - ge sı̀

ÿ ½
% Š+ ð Ð ð ²ð
L’af - flig - ge sı̀

Example 3 Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo, act 4, mm. 131–34 (from ex. 6 in Chua, Absolute Music
and the Construction of Meaning, 49)

Qui si volta Orfeo, & canta al suono

131 dell’Organo di legno.
$       −ð
Š− ½ ð Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł ¹ Ł ¼

O dol-cis - si-mi lu - mi io pur vi veg - gio, lo pur...

Ý ð ð ð
% − Ð Ð ð
−
²
Qui canta Orfeo al suono del clavic[embono]
Viola da braccio basso, e un chitar[one].
$133 ½ ¹ ² Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł ð Ł Ł ½
Š−  Ł Ł
ma qual E - clissi ohi - mè v’os - cu - ra?

Ý ½ ð ð ð
% − ²
Ð
²
[O sweetest eyes, I see you now, I see . . .
but what eclipse obscures your light?]

It is difficult to make the case that any of these instances are uncanny. In
Gesualdo’s madrigals, death is experienced rather than witnessed; its uncanny
potential is masked by anguish. And even with the Monteverdi, with its magi-
cal actions and animate dead, there yawn two vast chasms that must be negoti-
ated before we arrive at the properly unheimlich. One is epistemic: literary
historians have suggested that uncanniness was an eighteenth-century “inven-
tion” that responded to both the shedding of theological certitudes and the

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 293

social forces of industrialization.23 The other is musical: semantics varies with

syntax even when the lexicon of musical objects remains evidently constant.
We cannot assume a world of tonal expectations before such expectations were
consolidated. These settings are nonetheless of interest because of the poten-
tial model they provide, for composers of later generations, of how a vital
element of the uncanny can be effectively depicted.24
It is in this same spirit that we take note of Example 4, a portrait of the liv-
ing dead from a Haydn composition with a continuous history of circulation
and performance. The C-minor setting of “Affrighted fled hell’s spirits black
in throngs; down they sink in the deep of abyss to endless night” displaces a
prolonged E major, the tonicized dominant of the A major with which the
movement begins. So incomprehensible did the English composer George
Alexander Macfarren find this juxtaposition, almost sixty years later, that he
sought in vain to know of “some transposition of this piece, induced by cir-
cumstances such as the compass of the original singer’s voice, or other like ex-
traneous necessities, that might account for, if not vindicate, the peculiarity
under consideration.”25
With the next four examples we step properly into the age of the uncanny.
Here death is portrayed from a variety of perspectives: thanatos-compulsive,
portentous, grief-inducing, gruesome. Example 5 is the recurrent “Death-
devoted” theme from Tristan und Isolde. The phrase is scored for woodwinds
and is diatonic in C minor, except for the rhetorically marked triad preceding
its midpoint. Scored for brass and timpani, this A-major triad leads across a
caesura to its hexatonic pole, the F-minor subdominant. Example 6, from Die
Walküre, marks the moment when Wotan first foretells the death of the Gods.
The <E+, C-> hexatonic pole bridges a fermata. An identical example, bridg-
ing a long silence, occurs in Siegfried, when the Wanderer, in response to
Erda’s prodding, prepares to recall and realize his earlier prophecy.
The progression of Example 7, from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite (1874–75),
recurs throughout the second half of the movement that depicts the death of
Aase and her arrival at St. Peter’s Gate (as imagined by Peer). The progression
incorporates a motion from a B-minor triad to D major. The minor triad is
notated as {B, C , E} and is accompanied by a G under-seventh.26 Death, in
a particularly grisly form, is also the topic of Example 8: Puccini’s Tosca taunts

23. Castle, Female Thermometer, 8; and Royle, The Uncanny, 22.

24. Both passages from “Moro Lasso” were excerpted and discussed in Carl von Winterfeld’s
Johannes Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter (Berlin: Schlesinger’sche, 1834), 2:94–96. Monteverdi’s
Orfeo came back into circulation in the 1880s.
25. Macfarren’s essay, published in London in 1854 by the Sacred Harmonic Society, is ex-
cerpted in Nicholas Temperley, Haydn: The Creation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 98.
26. For a discussion of enharmonic renotations, see the next section below. Dissonant under-
sevenths are discussed below in connection with Example 11.

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294 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 4 Joseph Haydn, The Creation, “2. Arie (Uriel) mit Chor. Nun schwanden vor dem
heiligen Strahle,” mm. 48–56 ([Frankfurt: C. F. Peters, n.d.], 11)

$48 ²²² ý Ł ²Ł ð ½ ÿ ÿ
Š ð
keimt em - por.
Łl Łl l Łl ¦ Łl Łl Łl Łl l ¦ Łl Łl Łl
ݲ² Ł ¼ ¹ Ł Ł ¼ ¹ Łl Ł Łl
% ² Ł ¼ Ł ¼ [_ [_ [_ [[
$52 ²²² ÿ
Allegro moderato
½ ¼ ¦ Ł ¦ ðý −Ł ¦ Ł −Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł ý 
Š −Ł Ł ¦ ð
Er - starrt ent - flieht der Höl-len - gei - ster Schaar,

Ý ²²² ¦ Łl ¦ Łl Łl Łl ¦ Łl −Łl Ł ¦ Ł ÿ ÿ ÿ

% ¦ Łl l
[_

Example 5 Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Death motive, mm. 318–24 (vocal score [New
York: G. Schirmer, 1906, 1934], 16)

318

I.
− [ð Ł ý  \
¦ð Ł 
Š −− Ł ð Ł ¦ ðý Ł ¼ ¼
 Ł ¦ð Ł Ł ð
Tod - ge - weih-tes Haupt! Tod - ge - weih-tes Herz!

− −Ł ¹ ¦ ²¦ ððð ýýý ðð

ŁŁ ¹ ¦ ð Ł
Š − − − ðý ¼ ¼ ðý Ý Ł Š ð Łð
 ¦ð Ł Ł ¦ ð Ł ¦ Łð ý ð
! [[
− ð ýý ðð ýý \ \ \\
Ý −− ð ðý ² ðð ýý ¦ð ý
− ¦ ðý ¦ ð  ¹ −ð ý ðý ðý
¦ðý ¦ð Ł

the dying Scarpia over a G -major triad, then ushers him to the burning fires
with its hexatonic pole, D minor.
We now survey five examples that feature Jentsch’s prototypical uncanny
stimuli in full bloom. In all of these examples, agents pass from life to death, or
from death to life, or hover in between. The dead behave as living subjects or
are treated as living objects.
Example 9, from act 1 of Parsifal, marks the moment when Titurel,
“bowed down with age and stricken,” first sings “from a vaulted niche . . . , as
if from a tomb.” Thus perched between life and death, Titurel asks two ques-
tions, separated by a long silence. “Shall I still see the Grail once again and

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 295

Example 6 Richard Wagner, Die Walküre, act 2, scene 2, mm. 942–46 (vocal score [New York:
G. Schirmer, 1904], 127)

942 [ ¦Ð \ Ð
Ý −− ½ ¼ ¦ Ł
− ¦ ð ¼q ¹ Ł ð ½

das En - de das En - de!
¦ Łl
− ÿ ²¦ ¦ ŁŁŁ ½ ÿq Ý
Ð
−¦ ÐÐ
ÐÐ
Ð
Š −− ¼
! [[l \\
¦Ł
Ý −−
− ÿ ²¦ ¦ ŁŁŁ ½
¼ ÿq
Ð Ð
Ð Ð

Example 7 Edvard Grieg, Peer Gynt Suite: Åse’s death, mm. 25–28 (Samlede verker, vol. 18
[Frankfurt: C. F. Peters, 1988], 138)

A
$25 ²² Ł − Ł ð ¦ Ł −Ł ð ¦ Ł −Ł ð Ł Ł Łý
¹
Š
! \ \\
²² ² ð ð ²ð ð ²ð ð ²ð Łý ¹
Š
\ \\
Ł Ł ð Ł Ł ð Ł Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł ð ² Łý
š ²² ¹
\ \\
ð ð ð ð ð ð ð Łý
Ý ²² ¹
% \ \\

live? Must I die, unguided by the savior?” Wagner has arranged the syntax chi-
astically: life and death directly flank the caesura; light and darkness stand at
one degree removed from the center. The E-major triad is life and light, its
C -minor pole death and darkness.27
Example 10, the final chromatic event of Parsifal, marks the moment of
Kundry’s death, the opera’s final stage action. Wagner’s stage direction asks
something impossible from the actress portraying Kundry: that she gaze in-
tensely at Parsifal while simultaneously projecting to the audience that her soul

27. For a compelling discussion of the grotesque aspects of this scene, see Carolyn Abbate, In
Search of Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 131–34.

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296 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 8 Giacomo Puccini, Tosca, act 2, Scarpia’s death, mm. 1030–35 ([Frankfurt: Ricordi,
1966], 219)

1029 con ferocia

3 3 3

T. Š ¼ ¹ ²Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ¼ ½ ½
 Ł Ł Ł
Ti sof - fo - ca il san-gue? Muo-ri dan -

3 rantolando 3

S.
Ý ¼ ½ ½ ¼

a - iu - to! Muo-io!

−Ð
Ý −− ÐÐ
¦ Ððýý Ł − ð ðð ýý ð Ł
−Ð ¦ ÐÐ ðý ŁŁ ¹

! poco
\\
Ý
−Ð Ð Ð
−Ð ¦Ł
¦Ł

con forza crescente

1033 3 3 3
n n 3 n n n n
T. Š Ł Ł ¼ Ł Ł ¼ ½ ½
²Ł Ł ¼ Ł Ł ¼
-na - to! Muo-ri, muo-ri, muo-ri!
Br.
Ý −ÐÐ −Ð −−− ÐÐÐ ¦ ¦¦ ÐÐÐÐ
−Ð
! \\ poco
\\\
Ý
−Ð −Ð ¦Ð
−Ð −Ð ¦Ð
Pk.

has departed from her body. “Gazing up at Parsifal, Kundry sinks slowly to the
ground in front of him, de-souled.” (De-souled is a neologism; in Wagner’s ar-
chaic term, entseelt, the first syllable is a prefix that denotes an externalization,
a removal, perhaps a “leaching away.”) Wagner imagines her as a dead woman
with the hypnotic gaze of the hyper-living. Initially, Wagner envisioned this
event with a more explicitly uncanny component: in the 1877 poem, Titurel,
having just attended his own funeral, raises himself up from his coffin and
performs a blessing.28

28. Martin Geck and Egon Voss, eds., Dokumente zur Entstehung und ersten Aufführung des
Bühnenweihfestspiels Parsifal, vol. 30 of Richard Wagner Sämtliche Werke (Mainz: B. Schott,
1970), 134.

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 297

Example 9 Richard Wagner, Parsifal, act 1, mm. 1250–57 (vocal score [New York:
G. Schirmer, 1962], 76)

1250
Ý −− − ¼ Ł Ł Ł
− ð Ł Ł −Ł Ł ¹ Ł
Ł Ł ¹ ÿq
   (Langes Schweigen.)
Soll ich den Gral heut’ noch er - schau’n und le - ben?
[Timp.]
Ý −− −
− ÿ ÿ ÿ Ł ¹ ŁŁŁŁ ¼q
3

1254
Ý −− − ¼ −ð −−Ł −Ł ý Ł Ł ¦Ł
− −ð Ł ¹ Ł −Ł Ł  ½

Muss ich ster - ben, vom Ret - ter un - ge - lei - tet?

Ý −− − ÿ ÿ ÿ ½ Ł ¹ ŁŁŁ
−
3

Example 10 Richard Wagner, Parsifal, act 3, mm. 1123–27 (vocal score [New York:
G. Schirmer, 1962], 276–77)

1123 n
−− −− ÐÐÐÐ ýýýý ¦ ¦¦ ÐÐÐÐ ýýýý
77777

7777
ŁŁ ŁŁ
7777

ŁŁŁ 777 ŁŁ
7777

ŁŁ ŁŁ
7777

ŁŁ Ł
777

7777

Š ŁŁŁ ŁŁ Ł
7777

ŁŁ Ł
777

¦ ŁŁ Ł Ł
¼ Ł ¼ ¦Ł
! 3
Ł ŁŁ
cresc.
3
[ dim.

Ý −− − Ł Ł ŁŁŁŁŁ ŁŁ ¼
− ŁŁŁ ŁŁ ý ¦ Ðý
¦¦ ÐÐÐ ýý
Ł
7777777

1125 Ł Ł Ł Ł
− ÐÐÐ ýýý Ł ŁŁ
00 ŁŁŁ ŁŁ
7777

− ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł
Š − −−
7777

−Ð ý ŁŁ
777

Ł ŁŁ
7777

Ł ŁŁ
7777

¼ Ł Ł ŁŁ
Ł
! \ più
\
ŁŁ ŁŁŁ
777
7777

Ý −− − Ł Ł Š ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ Ý

7777

−Ð ý
7777

Łð ý
77777

ŁŠ
7777

− −−ÐÐÐ ýýý Ł
Ł Ł ðý

Although Wagner renounced his necroanimative impulse at the end of

Parsifal, he indulged a similar conception near the end of Götterdämmerung,
when the ring-bearing hand of the dead Siegfried raises itself in threat against
Hagen (Ex. 11). During the seven measures that accompany the sequence of
actions triggered by this event (Gutrune shrieks, the vassals react in terror,
and Brunnhilde advances from the rear of the stage), a B-minor triad, with G

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 298 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 11 Richard Wagner, Götterdämmerung, act 3, scene 3, mm. 1158–64 (vocal score
[New York : G. Schirmer, 1904], 314)

 Bedeutend langsamer.
− ŁŁ ¹ ¼
1158 
ð ²ð ² ððð ŁŁŁ Łl ² ð ý
Š ¼ ¹ Ł  Ł ²
Ł lŁ Łý
dim. marcato
! − ðð ²²² ðððð
\
Ł
[
Ý − ðð ² ŁŁŁ ð ýý Ð
 ðýý Ð
1161
BRÜNNH.
Š ÿ ÿ ÿ ÿ
8va
3
Ł 3
² ðð ýý ² ŁŁ ² ŁŁ ýý Ł Ł ² ŁŁ ² ŁŁ ² ŁŁ ýý ² ŁŁ ŁŁ ýý Ł Ł ý 
Š Ð Ł Ł  Ł ² Ł ý ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł
! \\  Ł ²Ł
Ý Ð Ð Ð Ð
² ÐÐÐ ² ÐÐÐ ² ÐÐ ² ÐÐ

under-seventh in the bass, initiates a sounding of the Tarnhelm motive. The

motive progresses through F  minor, but then is aborted by a D-major triad
that sounds for six measures, supporting a grafting of Sword and Götterdäm-
merung motives.
To hear Example 11 on the model of Figure 1, juxtaposing B  minor with
its D-major pole, one must be prepared to accept two distinct reductive
moves. The first asks us to suppress the F -minor triad on the basis of its inter-
mediate position, both in the event space of the segment and in the tonal
space that the segment traverses; F  minor shares common tones with both of
its flanking chords, which share none with each other. Perhaps more radical is
the interpretation of the {G, B , D , F} formation as a minor triad with sup-
plementary under-seventh, rather than as the half-diminished seventh chord
universally purveyed by harmony textbooks. To do so requires us to resist the
pseudo-naturalizing third-stacking dogma that has dominated harmony peda-
gogy in the last century, and to recover the view of an era of harmonic theory
that ran from Rameau through Riemann to Kurth, which recognized that the
putative “root” of such a chord is the sole agent of its dissonance. Such a re-
covery is empirically abetted by the Tarnhelm progression, whose first chord
appears typically as a minor triad. That Wagner supplied and retracted the
“root” at his pleasure suggests that he considered it, not the “seventh,” to be
the dissonant supplement.

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 299

Example 12 Richard Strauss, Salome, final scene, R349 through four measures after R350
(vocal score [London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1943], 197–98)

349
²² ² ¦Ł ¦Ł ý ¦Ł ¦Ł Ð
Š ² ²² ² ¼ ŁŁ Ł ¦ Ł ² Ł ¼ ¹ ¦Ł ¦Ł ð ðŁ ¼ ¦Ł
Ł 
! Und
Ł ¦ ¦ ŁŁ ¦ Ł
das Ge - heim-nis der Lie - be ist

Ý ²²²² ²² ðð Ł ¦ Ł ² ŁŁ ¦ ¦ ÐÐ ÐÐ ŁŁ ² Ł ¦ Ł ¦ ² ŁŁ
¦ ¦ ŁŁ ² ŁŁ ¦ ¦ ŁŁ
² ð ¦Ł Ł ¦Ð Ð Ł ²Ł
350
² ² ² ¦Ð
Š ² ²² ² ¦Ł ¦Ł Ł ¦Ł ²Ð Ł ¼ ¼ −Ł ¼ ½
−Ð −Ł
! grö - sser als das Ge - heim - nis des To - des

Ý ²²²² ²² ¦ ¦ ² ðððð ¦ ¦¦ ððð ¦ ¦ ðð ²Ð

−¦¦ ŁŁŁ ²¦ ÐÐ
ÐÐÐ −Ð
−− ÐÐ
¦Ð
¦ −¦ ² ÐÐÐÐ
² ¦ð −¦ ÐÐ
¦Ð Ð ²Ð Ð −Ð

In Example 12, Salome serenades the severed head of Jochanaan: “And

the secret of love is greater than the secret of death.” One polar progression,
F major to C minor, underlies “is greater than the secret”; a second, framing
progression, G major to E minor, sets the parallel texts “of love . . . of death.”
Over this progression, Salome sings all twelve pitch classes. The aggregate-
completing potential of the hexatonic collection is realized in a more explicitly
dodecaphonic environment in Example 13, the opening of Schoenberg’s
String Trio, which he composed in August 1946 as “a memorial to his own
momentary death” after a violent asthmatic attack stopped his heart.29
(Schoenberg’s piece is thus more literally “posthumous” than anything by
Schubert or Chopin.) The first hexachord juxtaposes “G minor” ({G, A , D})
with “B major” ({B, E , F }); the second pairs A minor with “D major” ({D ,
F, G }).
If composers call forth hexatonic poles to convey the uncanny, does the
conveyance reach its destination? We already have some evidence that this is so
from the passages cited in the opening paragraph. Youens, writing of
Schubert’s Die Winterreise, finds magic in the juxtaposition of Erstarrung’s
C minor and Der Lindenbaum’s E major; she attributes this, without further

29. Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg (New York: Viking, 1975; reprint, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996), 94. For more on this episode, see Walter Bailey, Programmatic Elements
in the Works of Schoenberg (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984), 151–57. The uncanny
qualities of the String Trio are treated by Michael Cherlin, from a slightly different perspective, in
“Memory and Rhetorical Trope in Schoenberg’s String Trio,” this Journal 51 (1998): 559–602.

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300 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 13 Arnold Schoenberg, String Trio, Op. 45, opening measures (Arnold Schönberg
Sämtliche Werke [Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhnes; Vienna: Universal Edition AG, 1982])

Teil 1
ä = 60
quasi Triller
$ simile
Geige Š 00 ¦ ð ²ð
\\ ¦ð ²ð
quasi Triller
^[\\
simile
Bratsche š 00
¦ð ¦ð −ð −ð
\\ ^[\\ }
} } ¦ žn ž} ž}
Violoncello
Ý0 ¾ ¾ ž (Š Ł) ¾ Ł ž Ł ¾ (Š ) l ¦ Ł
% 0 ²Ł l n l ¦Ł Ł
\\

qualification, to its mediant relation. Adorno perceives darkness when

Schubert modulates from B major to F  minor in his last piano sonata, and
from E  major to B minor in his Piano Trio; he attributes it to the displace-
ment of a major key by a minor one. Ernst Kurth hears supernatural strange-
ness when the Grail music of Parsifal is chromaticized, juxtaposing E  major
and B minor, G major and E  minor; he attributes it to the “unfamiliarity” of
the “disjunctive mediant shifts.” We conclude our inventory with four further
examples of what listeners say when they have their ears tuned to hexatonic
poles.
Example 14 is excerpted from the “Todtenfeier” movement of Mahler’s
Second Symphony, a composition whose programmatic subtitle refers to the
raising of the dead. Carolyn Abbate, in Unsung Voices, writes extensively about
the uncanny qualities of this symphony, taking as her cue the play by Adam
Mickiewicz on which the first movement is evidently based, together with
Mahler’s own informal characterization of the third movement Scherzo as
a “horrible chimera.”30 Both movements feature motions from C minor to
E major and back at global levels of modulatory structure. The Scherzo is
transformed into a grotesque dance (Mahler writes, in the letter Abbate
quotes: “always-stirring, never-resting, never-comprehensible pushing that is
life becomes horrible to you, like the motion of dancing figures in a brightly-
lit ballroom”) by a set of local gestures, perhaps the most eccentric of which
is quasi-klezmer music for E  clarinets, marked “mit Humor,” which layers an
A -minor triad (notated {A , B, E }) over a C-major prolongation (mm. 52–
53 and passim). In the music of Example 14, Abbate is particularly attuned to

30. Abbate, Unsung Voices, 125.

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 301

Example 14 Gustav Mahler, Second Symphony (“Resurrection”), first movement, mm. 43–49
(reduction prepared from Sämtliche Werke [Vienna: Internationalen Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft
and Universal Edition, 1970], 7–8)

43
− ðý Ł Ł Ł ¼ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ŁŁ ŁŁ
Š − − ÐÐ ÐÐ ÐÐ ŁŁ Ð
! Ð Ð Ð
3 3
Ý −− Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ¹ ¼  
Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ¹ ¼ Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ¹ ¼ −Ł −Ł Ł −Ł Ł Ł
−
(46) ²Ł ²Ł
− Ł ŁŁ Ł
¹ Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł ²Ł ²Ł ¦ Ł ¦ Ł
Š −− ¼ Ł Ð Ł Ł Ł Ł ²¦¦ ððð ýý ²¦ ŁŁ ¦ Ł ²¦ ŁŁ ² ŁŁ ŁŁ
! ²Ł
Ý −− −Ł ¹ ¼ −Ł −Ł Ł −Ł Ł Ł Ł ¹ ¼ ¦ Ł ²Ł Ł ²Ł Ł Ł Ł ¼ ¦ Ł ²Ł Ł ²Ł Ł Ł Ł ¼
−

Example 15 Franz Schubert, Piano Sonata D. 960, first movement, mm. 115–17b (Neue aus-
gabe Sämtlicher Werke [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1996])

115 rit. q
−   ŁŁ ¹ ¦ ŁŁ ¼
Š − ¦ Łðð Ł ý ² Ł ŁŁŁ ¹ ŁŁ ¹ ðð ýý
Ł ¼ ²¦² ŁŁŁl ¹ Łl Ł
! \\ð   ný l ŁŁl ŁŁq
Ý −− ð ŁŁ ¹ ŁŁ ¹ ðð ý ¼
²¦² ŁŁŁ ¹ Ł ¹ ²Ł ¼
   

the qualities of the emerging E-major Gesang, which consummates a rapid

modulation from the C-minor tonic. She hears a “deep sonic break,” a “hy-
perbolic musical disjunction” where “cracks fissure the music.”31 Of particular
relevance is her characterization of the last two entries of the Gesang: they are
“marked by musical blankness, by a sense of substance that is leached away.”32
It is easy to imagine Abbate’s Mahler sung by Kundry at the moment of her
Entseelung.
A similar sense of “leaching away” is captured by Richard Kramer’s account
of the music of Example 15, from a posthumous Schubert sonata that lacks
explicit semantic content: C minor, following immediately upon a tonicized
F major, is “audacious and unorthodox, . . . a single bar of breathtaking
31. Ibid., 150–51. Abbate’s account (which ascribes “Orphic force”) is uncannily echoed by
Chua, who, in the passage quoted in note 22 above, hears an “epistemic fissure” in the C minor
to E major of Orfeo.
32. Ibid., 152.

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302 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 16 Jean Sibelius, Seventh Symphony, opening measures (reduction prepared from
Copenhagen and Leipzig: Wilhelm Hansen, 1925)

Adagio
Š ./ ÿ ÿ ÿ
! Ł Ł −−− ÐÐÐ
Ý/ ¹ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł 
. ŁŁŁ  
\ \ [_

Example 17 Maurice Ravel, Le tombeau de Couperin, Forlane, opening measures (Paris:

Durand S. A. Editions Musicales, 1918)

Allegretto äý = 96
²2 ný
Š 4 Ł ý ²Ł Ł ²Ł Ł ý ²Ł ²Ł Ł ý ¦ Ł Łm
²Ł
! \ n
²¦ ŁŁŁ ýýý ²² ŁŁŁ ýýý ŁŁ ýý ²² ŁŁŁ ýýý ²² ŁŁŁm
ݲ2 Łð ýý
4 ðý
m

music.”33 Breath and soul are related constructs; in Greek, they are united in a
single word, pneuma. Kramer hears this moment perhaps as an Entatmung to
parallel Kundry’s Entseelung.
Example 16 is from the opening of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, which
also lacks a program. The conductor Colin Davis “described the opening
C-major scale. . . . ‘It’s what happens at the end of the scale that’s so horrible,’
he continued. ‘It hits a chord of A flat minor, which is really horrifying. . . . It’s
as though something has been born. It opens its eyes on that chord, and it
experiences a shock.’ ”34
Example 17 opens the Forlane from Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin. Abbate
writes that “tombeaux are uncanny . . . because they summon a more nebu-
lous object that is heard despite having been entombed. There is a dead
Forlane within Ravel’s Forlane; its hand moves the piece from within, but it is
not Couperin’s Forlane.”35 Abbate attributes the grotesquerie of the Forlane
to “the obliviousness with which a dance rhythm wears its harmonic distor-
tion,”36 citing the dissonances that besmirch the triads in the opening phrase.

33. Richard Kramer, “Posthumous Schubert,” 19th-Century Music 14 (1990): 202.

34. Jamie James, “He No Longer Has to Make Points. He Just Makes Them,” New York
Times, 19 March 1995, Arts and Leisure section, 31.
35. Abbate, In Search of Opera, 216. This formulation originally appeared with slight modifi-
cations in Abbate, “Outside Ravel’s Tomb,” this Journal 52 (1999): 498.
36. Abbate, In Search of Opera, 216.

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 303

We can supplement this observation by considering the identities of the har-

monies: an E-minor triad, with added D, is followed by its G-major hexa-
tonic pole, with added E.
These final examples make evident that hexatonic poles are an effective sig-
nifier of the uncanny: a composer transmits a message, and the knowledgeable
listener receives it on a clear channel. In the next part, we begin to explore the
properties of the progression that make it so.

Harmonic Theory and the Signifying Potential

of Hexatonic Poles

This section lays the groundwork for the claim that the association of hexa-
tonic poles with uncanny phenomena is not an arbitrary system of significa-
tion. Hexatonic poles in some sense embody the very features that they are
called upon by composers to depict, and that they spontaneously evoke in
knowledgeable listeners. The constituents of hexatonic poles both are and are
not triads; they both are and are not consonant. In terms of music-theoretic
writings of Freud’s contemporaries, their status as entities is both real and
imaginary, both alive and dead. Their secure status as perceptually fused uni-
ties, tonverschmelzt Zusammenhängen, is chimerical: these harmonic entities
are disquietingly susceptible to disintegration.
One might initially think that such equivocation could only be prompted
by an anxiety disorder. After all, both of the harmonies in Figure 1 manifestly
are consonant triads, one major, the other minor; gauged by the traditional
metric of root-distance, they exemplify a species of third (or mediant) rela-
tion.37 True; but this is how they practice their deceptive art. Their putative
consonance is compromised in their juxtaposition. To establish this claim,
we will explore it now in three distinct contexts, which together exhaust the
possibilities.
First, consider a situation where E major is established as a tonic. The most
popular approach in recent American harmony textbooks derives the C-minor
triad via double modal mixture.38 The interchangeability of modes sharing a
tonic, long an element of musical practice, was first theorized in terms of
modal mixture in Schenker’s Harmonielehre (1906). In the case at hand, the
C-minor triad is diatonic to neither mode that takes E as tonic, and so mixture

37. For a recent treatment in this vein, see Kopp, Chromatic Transformations.
38. The term originates with Felix Salzer’s Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music
([New York: Dover, 1962], 1:180), but the process was described much earlier in Arnold
Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre (1922). Schoenberg writes that, to derive A  minor from C major,
“the tones . . . e  and a  were introduced through the minor subdominant,” and then the C  is
derived via “minor-for-major substitution” (Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter [Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978], 386).

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304 Journal of the American Musicological Society

must be applied twice. Figure 2 summarizes the derivation. The E-major triad
(a) is initially integrated into a diatonic scale (b) for which that triad is
presumed to serve as tonic. A first stage of mixture converts that scale to its
parallel minor (c), from which a C-major triad is extracted (d) and labeled as
VI (although some symbol systems will use  VI in this particular case). That
triad is temporarily reinterpreted as a tonic (e) that sprouts its own diatonic
scale (f). A second stage of mixture converts that scale to its parallel minor (g),
from which the target C-minor triad (h) is extracted and labeled as  vi  (or
 vi ), with the two flanking accidentals representing the two stages of modal
mixture.39
The label is descriptively adequate, in the sense that it uniquely specifies the
target object. But as Figure 2 shows, the derivation freely interchanges triads
and scales as if they were unproblematically identical, and thus partly relies on
a sleight of hand. Accordingly, it should not be a surprise to discover that the
label implies problematic claims about the phenomenological status and dis-
positional behavior of the individual pitch classes. Flatward mixtures character-
istically resolve downward or, more weakly, neutralize the pressure on their
constituent pitches to discharge upward. The first stage of mixture accurately
captures the disposition of C as it presses downward toward B. But the second
stage of mixture falsely suggests that the E , rather than behaving as a D lead-
ing tone, is similarly disposed toward a flatward fate. Figure 3 captures these
dual dispositions by enharmonically renotating the “C-minor” chord. If we
hear both of the individual voices as diatonic semitones, then we are hearing
the notated major sixth {E , C} as a diminished seventh {D, C}. That is, we
are hearing it as a dissonance, not as a consonance.
If C minor is heard as tonic, as in Figure 4, the above analysis is replicated
inversely. The C-minor triad (a) is initially integrated into a diatonic scale (b)
for which that triad is presumed to serve as tonic. A first stage of mixture
converts that scale to its parallel major (c), from which an E-minor triad is
extracted (d) and labeled as  iii (or  iii). That triad is temporarily reinterpreted
as a tonic (e) that sprouts its own diatonic scale (f ). A second stage of mixture
converts that scale to its parallel major (g), from which the target E-major
triad (h) is extracted and labeled as  III (or  III ). The problematic pitch class
here is G . Its notation as a 5̂ degree implies a sharpward pressure, yet it is dis-
posed to discharge flatward, hence an A  representing the flattened sixth de-
gree. Again what is notated as a consonant major sixth, {B, G }, is perceived as
a dissonant diminished seventh, {B, A }, as in Figure 5.

39. Figure 2 resembles the composite neo-Riemannian operation <P,L,P> (Parallel,

Leittonwechsel, Parallel), which is one of the two shortest paths between hexatonic poles via basic
operations (i.e., those where two common tones are retained; the other such composite transfor-
mation is <L,P,L>). Those operations act on triads, however, whereas mixture acts on diatonic
collections. This comparison suggests that the theory of mixture fails the test of Occam’s razor: to

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 triadic reinterpre- scalar
(a) scalar integration (b) modal mixture, stage 1 (c) extraction (d) tation (e) reorientation
(f) modal mixture, stage 2
(g) triadic extraction
(h)
Ð Ð Ð Ð ÐÐÐ ÐÐÐ Ð Ð Ð − Ð − Ð Ð
Š ² ÐÐÐ Ð ² Ð ² Ð Ð Ð ² Ð ² Ð Ð ²Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð −Ð Ð Ð Ð
− ÐÐ
E: I E: −VI C: I − E: −vi
Figure 2 Derivation of C minor from E major via mixture

Š ² ÐÐÐ Ð
²× ÐÐ
Figure 3 Enharmonic renotation of C minor

triadic reinterpre- scalar

(a) scalar integration (b) modal mixture, stage 1 (c) extraction (d) tation (e) reorientation
(f) modal mixture, stage 2
(g) triadic extraction
(h)
Š − ÐÐÐ Ð Ð −Ð Ð Ð −Ð −Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð ÐÐÐ ÐÐÐ Ð ² Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð Ð ² Ð ² Ð Ð Ð ² Ð ² Ð Ð ² ÐÐÐ
c: i c: ²iii e: i C: ²III ²

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Figure 4 Derivation of E major from C minor via mixture

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Š − ÐÐÐ −−ÐÐÐ

Figure 5 Enharmonic renotation of E major

306 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 18 Richard Strauss, Salome, opening measures (vocal score [London: Boosey and
Hawkes, 1943])

²² ²Ł    ² Ł ¦ Łý ¦ Ł ¦ ð  ¦Ð
Š ² ² ² ¼ÐÐÐ ð Ł Ł ² Ł ² Ł Łý  
ð −Łý Ł
Wie schön

ist die Prin-zess - in Sa - lo - me heu - te Nacht

A single paradox underlies both cases. In general, tonal listeners process in-
tervals, where possible, by accommodating their components to a single dia-
tonic collection. The general principle dictates that, by default, a semitone is
heard as a change of degree (minor second), while at the same time dictating,
again by default, that a span of nine semitones expresses a major sixth rather
than a diminished seventh.40 The juxtaposition of a C-minor triad and an
E-major one, in either direction, causes these two defaults to conflict, and the
listener is forced to relinquish one of them.
Syllogistic reasoning in the face of music is often suspected of mere scholas-
ticism. A consideration of Example 18, the opening phrase of Strauss’s Salome,
is intended to counteract such suspicions. A C -major triad in the orchestra
supports Narraboth’s entry, and will orient him at both the beginning and the
ending of the phrase. But consider how the tenor might conceive the pitches
that set Salome’s name. He could fix on the E  of the first syllable and obliter-
ate the memory of the C-major environment. Imagining an unrelated tonal
universe, a minor one in which E serves as the fifth scale degree, he arpeggiates
down through its tonic triad. The singer who does so will hear the C  as the
third of the A-minor triad, but will have difficulty conceiving it as the leading
tone of the initial C tonic, which has been deliberately banished from mem-
ory. Employing a quite different strategy, the tenor could maintain an “auxil-
iary mental image” (Riemann) of C and G, slotting in the pitch of “-lo-” as
the leading tone (B), and the pitch of “-me” as the upper leading tone (A)
of 5̂.41 This singer will be singing dissonant intervals and will have difficulty
fusing the pitches of “Salome” into a single harmonic entity. The first singer,
like the character that he is portraying, will recognize the royal beauty of

the extent that mixture operations on seven-tone scales are translatable to neo-Riemannian opera-
tions on three-tone triads without loss of significant information, the four nontriadic tones of the
scales are dead cargo.
40. This principle is stated in Eytan Agmon, “Diatonicism, Chromaticism, and Enharmoni-
cism: A Study in Cognition and Perception” (Ph.D. diss, City University of New York, 1986),
185; and preliminary empirical confirmation is provided in David Temperley, The Cognition of
Basic Musical Structures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 128–36.
41. “A large number of intervals become easily singable (imaginable) through the auxiliary
mental image of a succeeding leading tone (even when it does not follow in reality).” Hugo
Riemann, “Riemann’s ‘Ideen zu einer “Lehre von den Tonvorstellungen’ ”: An Annotated
Translation,” trans. Robert W. Wason and Elizabeth West Marvin, Journal of Music Theory 36
(1992): 108; Riemann’s essay was originally published in 1915.

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 307

the named princess only by neglecting her context; the second, like the omni-
scient viewer of the opera, will recognize the power of the offstage incestuous
stepfather to split the consciousness of that adolescent persona into frag-
mented particles.42
Consider now the third and final case, where the two triads are juxtaposed
in a tonally indeterminate environment. How might we discern which one of
the two triads is more intrinsically stable? Our impulse is to seek out leading
tones, which channel the energy of one of the triads into the other. But here
we encounter a problem: each triad contains the other’s leading tone. B dis-
charges into C; E  (qua D ) discharges into E. The reciprocity of the two tri-
ads is magnified, moreover, if we adopt an expanded conception of leading
tone. German theorists around 1900 recognized that the downward pressure
of the flatted sixth degree toward 5̂ echoes and balances the upward pressure
of the leading tone toward the tonic.43 Both of the triads in Figure 1 bear each
other’s flatted sixth degree as well: C discharges onto B, G  (qua A ) onto G.
This double leading-tone reciprocity is unique to hexatonic poles.44
Figure 6 captures this double reciprocity as it applies to the components of
Figure 1, illustrating how each triad of the pair powerfully “summons” the
other. Their relationship constitutes an exceptionally potent instance of a
Wechselwirkung, a reciprocal exchange. Each triad destabilizes the other;
Lendvai writes that they tonally “neutralize” each other.45 Such relationships
are among “the weirdest cases that arise”: they are the musical equivalent of
Escher’s hands, which draw each other’s cuffs.46

42. On Salome as incest victim and hysteric, see Sander L. Gilman, “Strauss and the Pervert,”
in Reading Opera, ed. Arthur Groos and Roger Parker (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1988), 316. At the time of Salome’s composition, Freud held that hysteria was caused by sexual
trauma and resulted in split consciousness. The view of the result he held in common with Breuer
and with several French theorists. In the view of the cause he was quite alone, and indeed he re-
scinded it in 1905. See Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1893–95), trans.
and ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 12; and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The
Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1984).
43. This insight is central to dualists in the Oettingen/Riemann lineage, but also was main-
tained by harmonic thinkers with a more empirical grounding, among them Carl Friedrich
Weitzmann, Rudolf Louis and Ludwig Thuille, and Kurth. For a compelling case for the continu-
ing relevance of this viewpoint, see Daniel Harrison, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music: A
Renewed Dualist Theory and an Account of Its Precedents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994), 26–34 and passim. Harrison’s metaphor of a “double-barrel discharge” (p. 105) is partic-
ularly appropriate to the situation depicted in Figure 6 below; one imagines two warriors
(duelists?) simultaneously aiming double-barreled firearms at each other.
44. For more on the double reciprocity of hexatonic poles, see my “Maximally Smooth
Cycles,” 21; and Richard Kurth, “Suspended Tonalities in Schönberg’s Twelve-Tone Compo-
sitions,” Journal of the Arnold Schonberg Center 3 (2001): 239–65.
45. Lendvai, Workshop, 235–36, 378.
46. Riemann, in his rev. ed. of Marx, Die Lehre (1887), 1:525. More to the psychological
point, they reflect the Lacanian gaze, which “often bears an uncanny sense of looking and being
looked at; subject/object relations are confused” (Schwarz, Listening Subjects, 64; his italics).

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308 Journal of the American Musicological Society

−6–5 −6–5
Š ² ÐÐÐ Ð −Ð
²Ð Ð − ÐÐÐ
²7–1 ²7–1
Figure 6 Double leading-tone reciprocity between C minor and E major

Hexatonic Poles and Harmonic Theory in the Freudian Era

Music theorists of the second half of the nineteenth century were aware that
hexatonic poles were a problem. In the fourth edition of his Kompositionslehre
(1852), Adolf Bernhard Marx’s attention fell upon the juxtaposition of a
B-major triad and a G-minor one, reproduced here as Figure 7a. Marx enter-
tained, but ultimately rejected, the possibility that the G-minor triad might be
a notational stand-in for a dissonant formation.
If one wants to explain the progression by transforming the third B  into an A ,
as at [Fig. 7]b, then an entity comes into being which is not a chord at all, or is
a wrongly named chord. Thereby, one would have just made a bigger enigma
out of a smaller one. Or does one want to give weight to the fact that A  points
upward as a sharped tone? Then at [Fig. 7]c, the fifth D would have to become
a C  , and the incomprehensibility would be exacerbated.47

For Hugo Riemann, Marx’s attempt at a reductio ad absurdam was ineffec-

tive. In his 1887 revision of Marx’s treatise, he embraced the interpretation
that his predecessor had dismissed, substituting the following wording in place
of that quoted above:
The ear hears the three tight melodic junctions and discovers from the new har-
mony a reinterpretation of the old. The G-minor chord becomes, via the pro-
gression to B major, a ninth chord over F  with augmented fifth ([F  ] A  C 
[E] G).48

Figure 7d provides a hypothetical realization of Riemann’s interpretation. The

inferred F  root is a residue of post-Rameauian French theory, which inter-
preted chords on the seventh degree as dominants whose roots had been
omitted.49 Apart from this issue, Riemann’s claim is essentially that the chord

47. Adolf Bernhard Marx, Die Lehre von der Musikalischen Komposition, 7th ed. (Leipzig:
Breitkopf und Härtel, 1868), 1:519; my translation.
48. Marx, Die Lehre, 9th ed. (rev. and ed. Riemann [1887]), 1:525; my translation.
49. Initially advanced by Jean Laurent de Béthizy (Exposition de la théorie et de la pratique de
la musique: Suivant les nouvelles découvertes [Paris: M. Lambert, 1754], 88), this notion was trans-
mitted to German theory via Johann Philipp Kirnberger (The Art of Strict Musical Composition

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 309

(a) (b) (c) (d)

Š −ÐÐÐ ¦ ²² ÐÐÐ −ÐÐÐ ² ŁŁŁ ²² ÐÐÐ −ÐÐÐ ²× ŁŁŁ ²² ÐÐÐ ²× ŁŁŁ ²² ŁŁŁ
! Ł ²Ł
Ý ²Ł Ł
−9
B: V²7 I
5

Figure 7 (a–c) From Marx’s Kompositionslehre; (d) a realization suggested by Riemann’s

remarks

is a species of diminished-seventh leading-tone chord. In its complete and dia-

tonically unaltered form, this chord would appear in B major as {A , C, E,
G }. To transform this chord into the first chord of Figure 7c, the fifth is omit-
ted, the third sharpened by one chromatic degree, and the seventh flattened
by one chromatic degree, both chromatic alterations intensifying the resolu-
tion to the tonic by substituting a semitone for a whole step. Such alterations
were characteristic of the process of appellation identified in Fétis’s 1844
Traité de l’harmonie, of which Riemann was an enthusiastic champion.50
Example 19 suggests how Riemann’s reading might have been inspired by
contemporaneous compositional practice. The passage, from the Revenge
Trio of Götterdämmerung, opens with a strongly articulated authentic cadence
in C major, confirming for the first time the tonic that closes the opera’s sec-
ond act. A  minor follows immediately, with the bass C t C  reversing the ca-
dential resolution of the leading tone. One measure later, the notated C is
revealed as a B , and the consonant major sixth {C , A } as a dissonant dimin-
ished seventh {B, A }. A fully diminished seventh chord leads immediately to a
dominant and another cadence. Riemann’s reading of the abstract progression
as an altered diminished seventh chord missing its fifth, and ultimately as an al-
tered dominant ninth chord also missing its root, applies here without strain.
Riemann’s analysis was subsequently echoed by one of his most vigorous
detractors, Georg Capellen, who offered the following analysis of Example 20,

[1771–79], trans. David Beach and Jürgen Thym [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982],
146–47). For discussion, see Charles Jay Moomaw, “Augmented Mediant Chords in French
Baroque Music” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1985), 180.
50. Indeed, Fétis’s Traité includes a progression identical to the one that Riemann proposes,
transposed to C, with the fifth added in the bass, as one of several cadential intensifications of the 43
chord on the seventh degree (François-Joseph Fétis, Traité complet de la théorie et de la pratique
de l’harmonie, 4th ed. [Paris: Brandus, 1849], 99). For a passage that conforms closely to Fétis’s
synthetic example, see Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, Contrapunctus 4, measure 61, where the D
arises as part of a diminished-third turn figure in the countersubject.

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 Example 19 Richard Wagner, Götterdämmerung, act 2, scene 5, mm. 1643–47 (vocal score [New York : G. Schirmer, 1904], 227–28)

1643 BRÜNNH. Ð
− ÿ −ðý −Ł ð 
Š −− Łý Ł ð
All - rau - ner rä - chen - der Gott!

GUNTH. −ð −Ł ý Ł ð
Ý −−
− ÿ ÿ  ¼ Ł Ł ð
 
All - rau - ner rä - chen-der Gott!
HAG.
Ł Ł −Ł ý Ł Łý  Ł ý
Ý −− ðý
− Ł ½  −Ł ¼ ¹  Ł Ł ð

ent - ris - sen! Al - ben -va - ter ge - fall’ - ner Fürst!
p 3
p 3
p p
stacc.
− ¦ Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł ¦ ððð ŁŁŁ Łl Łl −− ðð ŁŁ Ł −Ł 
Š −− Ł Ł ð ðð Łý

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Ł Łl ¦ Łl Ł −ð Ł l Łl − Ł
l ¦ ðð

77777
¦ ŁŁŁŁ Ł Ł Ł ² Ł Łý
Ł ¦ ŁŁŁŁŁ
3 [

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! cresc. [ ][
l

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l ŁŁ Ł ¦ ðð −Ł ŁŁ
Ý −−
−  ¦ Łl Łl Łl Łl ¦ Ł  ¹ Ł Ł Ł ð ¼ −Łð −Ł −Ł ŁŁ ŁŁ ¹ 
Ł Ł  Ł
( Łl n Ł Ł −Ł −Ł ¦ Ð Ł
 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 311

Example 20 Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold, scene 4, mm. 3835–37 (vocal score [London
and Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, n.d.], 216)

3834
− Ł Łý Ł ¹ Ł −Ł Ł ý Ł ¹ Ł Ł ý Ł Łý ý
Š − −− ¼ ¦ Ł Ł    .. ¼

Um dich, du kla - res, wir nun kla - gen: gebt uns das Gold,

− 
Š − −− ¼ Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł ý Ł ¹ Ł ¦Ł Ł ý Ł ¹ Ł Łý  ý ¼ ý
   Ł Ł
Um dich, du kla - res, wir nun kla - gen: gebt uns das Gold,

−  
Š − −− ¼ Ł Ł Ł Ł ý Ł ¹ Ł Ł Ł ý Ł ¹ Ł Łý Ł ý ¼ ý
Ł
Um dich, du kla - res, wir nun kla - gen: gebt uns das Gold,

a passage from Das Rheingold: “G–B–F  is not an enharmonic E-minor triad

but an elliptical . . . E  Hochquinttiefnonklang [raised-fifth/lowered-ninth
chord].”51 Capellen’s analysis attracted a response from Heinrich Schenker,
in his 1910 Kontrapunkt: “One should avoid hearing . . . anything but
neighboring-note harmonies [Nebennotenharmonie]. . . . one grasps immedi-
ately the true character of mere neighboring-note harmonies.”52 After quot-
ing Capellen, Schenker turns vitriolic: “Whoever perceives a somewhat more
individual manifestation of the neighboring note . . . as nothing more nor less
than an ‘elliptical Hochquinttiefnonklang’ (sic!) is a barbarian. . . . How easy it
is to fabricate theory and history of music when one hears badly!”53
What Schenker is disputing is not Capellen’s dismissal of the “Marxist”
E-minor reading, but rather the notion that the dissonant formation repre-
sents any sort of classifiable, reified harmonic state. Schenker’s use of the term
Nebennotenharmonie, which he would have dismissed as self-contradictory a
decade later, indicates that he is not yet ready to deny dissonant structures har-
monic status altogether. But he is well on the way. The 1910 Kontrapunkt
contains another analysis that more closely anticipates the language that char-
acterized his later writings. An E -major tonic surrounds an aggregation that is
enharmonically equivalent to its C -minor hexatonic pole, against which an A 

51. Georg Capellen, Die “Musikalische” Akustik als Grundlage der Harmonik und Melodik
(Leipzig: Kahnt, 1903), 93; according to Rothfarb (Selected Writings, 107), Capellen initially dis-
cussed this progression in “Harmonik und Melodik bei Richard Wagner,” Bayreuther Blätter 25
(1902): 22.
52. Heinrich Schenker, Counterpoint (1910), trans. John Rothgeb and Jürgen Thym (New
York: Schirmer, 1987), 1:192–93. The juxtaposition of the prescriptive and empirical modes is of
interest—if one grasps the correct hearing immediately, why does one need to be warned off from
the incorrect one?—but not pursuable here.
53. Ibid., 193.

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312 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 21 Anton Bruckner, Symphony No. 1 (ex. 52 in Schenker, Counterpoint 1:61)

Łý
− ððð Łý Ł ð − Ł ²Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
Š −− ð 
! ÐÐ  ððÐð ý − ðð ² Ł ŁŁ
Ý −− ÐŁ ¹ ½ Ł ŁŁ
¼ ½
− ¼


under-third is sustained in the bass (Ex. 21). Schenker writes that the doubly
diminished fifth {F , C } “is in truth no interval at all” (“in Wahrheit also
überhaupt kein Intervall”), and is to be explained rather as an encounter
between the harmonic tone C (in D–F–A –C) and the chromatic passing
tone F .54
Just as significant as the substance of Schenker’s analysis are its ontological
claims, which turn out to be of central importance to our investigation of how
hexatonic poles signify the uncanny. When Schenker writes that the {F  , C } is
“in truth no interval at all,” he edges toward a preoccupation of his postwar
writings, where consonance and dissonance are explicitly entangled with the
metaphysics of reality and appearance. In his “mature” theory (now known as
“Schenkerian theory” tout court), simultaneously sounding pitches do not
qualify as real harmonies unless they attain the status of a scale-step (Stufe) at
some level. Once their components are understood as executing a linear func-
tion at a given structural level, these putative harmonic entities lose their uni-
tary status, fragmenting into components that bear no direct relation to one
another. Their reality becomes invested in the Zug rather than the local
Zusammenhang. The latter entities are not real; they are consigned to the bin
of “mere appearance” (Erscheinung), a category that Schenker assigns pejora-
tive value as a type of false cognition that weighs down the listener and pre-
vents the exercise of Fernhören. In Free Composition, Schenker writes of
“deceptive, inauthentic [scheinbare, uneigentliche] intervals which displace and
obscure the actual [eigentlichen] intervals which originate in the middle-
ground,” and devotes a subsection to distinguishing genuine (wirkliche) from
illusory (scheinbaren) (elsewhere: erroneous [ falsche]) entities (Einheit).55
It is not particularly surprising to find that the categorical dualism of reality
and appearance should preoccupy both Schenker and Freud: the enduring in-

54. Translation adapted from ibid., 61. Compare Schenker’s reading of the Till Eulenspiegel
chord, pp. 187–88. Schenker’s interpretation of both passages is surprisingly close to that of Fétis,
for whom he cultivated a profound distaste.
55. Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition, trans. Ernst Oster (New York: Longman, 1979),
55, 74, 133, at 55. In German, Der Freie Satz (1935), 2d ed., ed. Oswald Jonas (Vienna:
Universal, 1956), 95, 120, 205.

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 313

fluence of Kant is responsible for their prominence in all sectors of German

and Viennese thought, and indeed, as we shall see, Schenker is not alone in
viewing consonance and dissonance in terms of reality and appearance.56 What
is noteworthy is Schenker’s insistence that tonal events be submitted to ab-
solute categorical determination. Although a dissonance can be transformed
into a consonance at a “later” level, no ambiguity or undecidability is conceiv-
able at a given Schicht. For Schenker, consonant and dissonant, real and imagi-
nary, share no boundary, much less a permeable one. As categories, they are
separated by an ocean. Read through Jentsch’s eyes, Schenker had no taste for
the uncanny. Disorientation, paradox, and magic are distinctly not the aes-
thetic values that Schenker championed. 57
The writings of Schenker’s Swiss contemporary and rival, Ernst Kurth,
form a significant point of comparison. In his 1920 Romantische Harmonik,
Kurth takes up the topic of false consonance. The chapter entitled “Distortion
of Harmonies and Harmonic Progressions” begins with the following general
comments:
The chromatic modification of a chord tone and neighbor-note insertion . . .
cause the relationship between tension chord and resolution chord to simulate
[vortäuschen] entirely different harmonic formations than they actually repre-
sent [als sie wirklich darstellen], if traced back to their basic progression. This
[simulation] occurs mainly because tension chords often correspond to [har-
monic] forms that are elementary and, moreover, imprecisely simplified in their
notation, i.e., they are not notated according to the leading-tone function of
the individual notes.58

The progressions that are the topic of our study are among the formations
that Kurth has in mind, as becomes clear when he considers the analysis of the
Fate motive from Die Walküre (Ex. 22a). The famously apparent D-minor
chord sounds in a context that indicates, but rarely realizes, an F  tonic. When
that tonic sounds in its major form, the “D-minor triad” sounds as its hexa-
tonic pole, invoking the specific nexus of relations that has occupied us in
this paper. Example 22b is one such instance; here the complex is transposed
up by major third, an “F -minor triad” leading through an F dominant to a
B -major cadence.

56. On Schenker’s relations to Kant’s writings, see Kevin Korsyn, “Schenker and Kantian
Epistemology,” Theoria 3 (1988): 1–58.
57. It is tempting to go a step further and hypothesize that Schenker’s disposition symp-
tomizes a compulsion to repress any potential emanations of the uncanny, to stuff them under the
rug or heave them into the darkest corner. This hypothesis helps us to overcome revulsion and
cultivate sympathy for the Tourette-like reflux that erupts across Schenker’s palate at the slightest
provocation. Little is known of Schenker’s early life, but the basic facts are suggestive: it is easy to
imagine that, for a Jewish physician’s son in Galicia, the comforts of the bourgeois home may
have felt fragile and tenuous.
58. Ernst Kurth, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagner’s “Tristan,” 3d ed. (Berlin:
Max Hesse, 1923), 205; translation adapted from Rothfarb, Selected Writings, 116.

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 314 Journal of the American Musicological Society

Example 22 Richard Wagner, Die Walküre, mm. 1462–63 and 1506–9: (a) Fate motive;
(b) linked to Valhalla music in act 2, scene 4 (vocal score [New York: G. Schirmer, 1904], 152,
154)

(a)
Sehr feierlich und gemessen.
1462
Ý ²²²  ² ðÐý Ł ² ÐÐÐ ² ŁŁŁ
! \\ \\
Ý ²²²  Ð Ł ¹ Ł Ł Ł ¹ Ł Ł Ł
Ð Ð Ł

(b)

1506 BRÜNNH.
−  
Š − −−− ¼ ¦ Ł Łý Ł ¦ ð ¦ Ł Ł Ł Łý Ł ð
¼ Ł ½

wer mich er - schaut, der schei-det vom Le - bens Licht.
ðý
Ý −− − ¦ Ð Ł ¦ ÐÐÐ ¦ ŁŁŁ ½ ŁŁ ýý ¦ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ¦ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ
−− ¼ ¼
! \\ \\ \\
Ý −− − −Ð Ð Ł ¼ ¹  ¦ ŁŁ ýý ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł 

− − −Ð Ł ¹ ŁŁŁ ¹ ŁŁ Ł ¼
Łl Łl ŁŁŁ
l

In reference to the transposition at Example 22a, Kurth writes:

According to the external form, a D-minor chord precedes a dominant seventh
on C  . . . . As the notation indicates here, a completely different interpretation
is the basis. The first chord is a tension distortion of the second, with which it is
practically identical tonally. D is a neighbor-note insertion, from above, to C  ;
likewise A in the uppermost voice is a neighbor-note insertion to G  , so that
here too the first melody note of the motive appears as a dissonant, non-
chordal tension tone.59

Although Kurth selects physical metaphors where Schenker inclines to biolog-

ical ones, his analysis of Wagner’s putative D-minor triad’s status as a false en-
tity is fully consistent with Schenker’s analysis of the apparent C  minor from
Bruckner’s First Symphony. Kurth’s reference to simulated (vortäuschen)

59. Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, 210; translation adapted from Rothfarb, Selected
Writings, 117–18.

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 315

chords harmonizes closely with Schenker’s notion of deceptive (täuschend) in-

tervals, as does his appeal to musical reality.
Kurth’s subsequent remarks, however, are inconceivable from a Schenk-
erian standpoint:
It is remarkable that, in the very last measures of Walküre (from the tenth mea-
sure before the end onward), the motive undergoes a transformation and oc-
curs twice such that the first chord does in fact [in der Tat] appear as a D-minor
chord, followed by a second chord that is no longer C  7 but rather an E-major
triad. . . . The character of alteration, as it initially occurred in the first motivic
chord, D–E  –A, is neutralized [aufgehoben] here, and the harmonic shape itself
is consolidated. The original tension formation is converted into something
harmonic, and the transformation of this motive reflects nothing else than the
most general, basic genetic and historical process of all music.60

“Appearance” is not always “mere appearance”—under the appropriate cir-

cumstances, appearances can be revealed as reality. Moreover, the use of the
term aufgehoben suggests that this process of revelation not only is historically
central, but also accrues considerable aesthetic capital. The term is not easily
translatable, but in its richest Hegelian sense Aufhebung is the process by
which the terms of an antithesis are fused into a higher-level synthesis.
Assuming that Kurth has this range of meanings in mind, we might conjecture
that this synthesis consists of a cognitive state where we are alert to the dual
nature of the chord’s status: it is both a D-minor triad and a dissonant tension-
distortion of the dominant. This conjecture is consistent with Kurth’s claim
that such dualities were the essence of the Wagnerian style: “Everywhere,
Romanticism exploits the ability to hear one and the same phenonemon
[Erscheinung] in two and more ways; it is fond of this coexistence and its
indefiniteness.”61
A similar attitude is cultivated in greater specificity and detail by Alfred
Lorenz, whose analytical writings in the 1920s and 1930s on Wagner’s music
dramas bore the strong influence of Kurth.62 In the 1933 Parsifal mono-
graph, the music of Example 23 motivates Lorenz to interject a discursive
Sonderbetrachtung on the topic of apparent consonances into his chronologi-
cal analysis of act 1. He first takes up the general case:
If a triad proceeds to its chromatic exchange-tones or is prepared by “neighbor-
note insertion” (expression of Ernst Kurth), the ear hears in the first instance
the leading-tone energies that exist between the exchange-tones and the
chordal tones. In this manner, structures frequently arise that are intensely
dissonant but which incidentally are enharmonically akin to triads. By means of

60. Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, 210; Rothfarb, Selected Writings, 118.

61. Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, 226–27; Rothfarb, Selected Writings, 134.
62. Concerning Kurth’s influence on Lorenz (despite the former’s Jewish heritage and the
latter’s antisemitism), see Stephen McClatchie, Analyzing Wagner’s Operas: Alfred Lorenz and
German Nationalist Ideology (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1998).

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316 Journal of the American Musicological Society

longer duration, these actually dissonant structures eventually seem to the ear
to be consonant. The psychological effect of the procedure is magical; for dur-
ing the lingering on the tempered notes that are initially understood as disso-
nant, the Klang is purified [reinigt sich], without any motion, into the most
radiant beauty.63

Lorenz now turns to the music of Example 23, which presents two chromati-
cized versions of the Grail theme, the second of which is identical to the music
that accompanies Kundry’s Entseelung at the opera’s end (cf. Ex. 10):
When . . . an A-minor triad is placed between D -major triads, it is actually a
dissonance, for the A stands in for B  as a neighbor tone to A  , while the E/C
third is understood as lower leading tones to F/D  . . . . But no sooner are the
neighbor tones reached, when the Klang is covered over by the appearance of
a consonance, which acts like a beam of light. Although here the neighbor
tones again correctly return to the womb from which they were conceived,
three measures earlier, what is initially taken to be the same progression leads
away in a different manner: from G major follows the dissonance {F  , A , E },
sounding as E  minor, which then is established as scheinkonsonant and leads
to D  major as the ii-chord. . . . The reverse path can also occur: an originally
pure triad becomes transformed, through its progression to an actually unfa-
miliar chord, into a structure whose consonance is merely apparent, hence
dissonant.64

What this quote makes evident is that, for Lorenz as for Kurth, there is no
firm boundary between dissonance and consonance. One cannot point to a
moment when the dissonant becomes consonant. Or vice versa. The process

63. Alfred Lorenz, Der musikalische Aufbau von Richard Wagners “Parsifal” (1933), vol. 4 of
Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1966), 89; my transla-
tion. The idea of growing a consonant (alive) structure out a dissonant (dead) one seems particu-
larly apt for this opera, which has, as a central image, a lush garden blooming in a desert
wasteland.
64. Ibid., 89–90; my translation. There are some confusing aspects to this passage. The
penultimate sentence suggests that scheinkonsonant is an intermediate state between dissonance
and consonance; but the final sentence (“scheinkonsonantes also dissonantes”) suggests that
Scheinkonsonanzen are inherently dissonant. I believe that Lorenz is using scheinkonsonant in two
distinct ways. For nineteenth-century just-intonationists such as Simon Sechter and Moritz
Hauptmann, a minor chord on the second degree was mistuned by a syntonic comma, and hence
its consonance impure, only apparent. This sense of Scheinkonsonanz was then adapted by
Riemann to refer to all “secondary” diatonic triads. Throughout Lorenz’s Sonderbetrachtung,
Scheinkonsonanz refers to the misidentification of enharmonic distinctions, a much more acute
case of mistuning. When Lorenz refers to the E  -minor triad as a Scheinkonsonanz, he is employ-
ing a dead metaphor, whose identity with the topic of his excursus is occluded from his view. The
linguistic situation can be compared to an utterance (say, by a voice teacher) such as: “sing that
D natural with a less natural tone.” The first italicized term is a dead musical metaphor con-
verted to technical language through overuse, while the second corresponds to more general ap-
plication. Where an outsider would be struck by the paradoxical qualities of the utterance, a
member of the linguistic subculture of musicians would be unlikely to recognize, much less be
disturbed by, the homonymous status of these terms.

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 317

Example 23 Richard Wagner, Parsifal, act 1, mm. 1480–87 (vocal score [New York:
G. Schirmer, 1962], 90–91)

1484
− ð ð
Š − −− ¦ ðð ¦ð ð ð
¦ ðð
¦ð −ð ð
! n
\
Ý −− − ¦ Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł Ł ¹ −Ł Ł −Ł Ł Ł ¹ ¦ Ł Ł ¦Ł Ł Ł ¹
− Ł Ł −Ł Łý Ł ý
− Ł Ł Ł Ł
1486
− Ł Ł −ŁŁ Ł ððð ¦ ¦ ððð
Š − −− −Ł ŁŁ Ł ŁŁ ð ¦ð
! ð
\
 Ł Ł Ł Ł ¹  ¦ ŁŁ ¦ Ł ŁŁ Ł ¹
Ý −− − ð
−
−Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ¹ Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł
Ł Ł ¦Ł
Sehr allmählich das
Zeitmass etwas bewegter.
1488 Ł Ł Ł ÐÐÐ
− ðð Ł ŁŁ
Š − −− ð −ð ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ Ð
! più\Ł Ł \\
Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł poco marcato
 ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł Ł ¹ ŁŁ
777777

Ý −− − Ł −Ł Ł ¹ Ł ŁŁ
− Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł
Ł Łý Ł Ł Ł

of transformation is located everywhere and nowhere; it is distributed in some

sense across the time that it takes to reorient our interpretation of the disso-
nant neighboring formation as a consonant triad, or vice versa. The conso-
nance or dissonance of the triad is undecidable in a very deep sense.

How Hexatonic Poles Signify: A Freudian Reading

Recall Freud’s formulation of Jentsch’s view: “an uncanny effect is often and
easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is ef-
faced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears
before us in reality.” For Lorenz, as for Kurth and Schenker, musical reality is
consonance, musical appearance is dissonance. Accordingly, a simple substitu-
tion of terms will lead us to the musically uncanny: “an uncanny effect is often
and easily produced when the distinction between dissonance and consonance

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318 Journal of the American Musicological Society

is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as dissonant ap-

pears before us as a consonance.” Lorenz’s magic is, evidently, nothing more
nor less than a direct musical realization of Jentsch’s uncanny.
But Jentsch’s uncanny is not ultimately Freud’s. Neither the magical nor
the gruesome nor the undecidable is at the heart of the Freudian uncanny.
Rather, the uncanny is that class of the magical, gruesome, and so on “which
leads back to what is known of old and long familiar,” and which is indetermi-
nate on the basis of its simultaneously alien and hyper-proximate status. From
this standpoint, hexatonic poles are uncanny not only because the stability of
their constituents is undecidable; their uncanniness must have something to
do with the capacity of those constituents to associate with, but at the same
time resist or defamiliarize, the musically comfortable and heimlich.
We are led uncannily back, then, to a reconsideration of one of the most fa-
miliar metaphors in all of musical discourse. The musical home has been at-
tached to a range of entities associated with tonality. According to Brian Hyer,
“Marpurg (in his translation of d’Alembert) was the first writer to describe the
tonic as a musical ‘home’. . . , an image that has remained in circulation ever
since.”65 For Michael Cherlin, writing about the serial music of Schoenberg,
it is tonality itself that is musically heimlich.66 For Nicholas Marston, “The
metaphorical identification of the tonic key as ‘home’ is a commonplace in dis-
course about tonal music,” to the point that “it hardly engages our atten-
tion.”67 That is to say: we are quite at home with the notion of the tonic key as
a musical home. It is a dead metaphor that requires resurrection.68
Although Marpurg’s tonic pitch, Marston’s tonic key, and Cherlin’s tonal-
ity are ontologically distinct, musical discourse nonetheless slips easily between
and among them. The reason is that they are mutually implicative: a tonal sys-
tem implies a tonic key implies a tonic pitch-class implies a tonal system. We
can get on and off this wheel of implication wherever we like. We can also add
to it a fourth component: the tonic triad. The set of tonic triads is nothing
more nor less than the set of entities that are the constituents of hexatonic
poles.
The cognitive expectations of the fluent listener to tonal music—whether a
nineteenth-century one for whom tonal music is coextensive with music tout

65. Brian Hyer “Tonality,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2d ed.
(2001), 25:585; revised in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas
Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 732.
66. Cherlin, “Schoenberg and Das Unheimliche,” 362.
67. Marston, “Schubert’s Homecoming,” 248.
68. In both musical and psychoanalytic theory, the metaphor of home has an organic equiva-
lent in the form of the womb. On the musical side, see the Lorenz quote above (“the neighbor
tones again correctly return to the womb from which they were conceived”), and also Schenker,
The Masterwork in Music: A Year Book, vol. 2 (1926), ed. William Drabkin, trans. Ian Bent (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22. On the psychoanalytic side, see Freud, “Un-
canny,” 244–45; and Royle, The Uncanny, 143–44.

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 319

court, or a twenty-first-century one who comes to the concert hall expecting

to hear music of the tonal era—are such that, the sounding of, say, an E-major
triad at the beginning of a piece triggers an entire flood of associations and
inferences. The sound is a metonym for a heimlich world in a general sense, a
tonal world where the listener is shielded from certain sorts of cacophony.
From this E-major triad, the listener infers an entire tonal system. Wrote
Gottfried Weber: “It is natural that, in the beginning of a piece of music, when
the ear is as yet unpreoccupied with any key, it should be inclined to assume as
the tonic harmony any major or minor triad that first presents itself.”69
Nothing in music is better known to us, is more familiar and comforting, than
major and minor triads. For the musical metaphysician, from Lippius to
Schenker, they are the acoustic manifestation of the true, the perfect, the
divine. The world inevitably contains dissonance, falseness, and illusion; the
musical home provides the guarantee of resolution, restoration, reconstitu-
tion, recuperation.
The security of this idealized world is shattered when that E-major chord is
juxtaposed with its C-minor hexatonic pole. The new chord is evidently a dis-
sonance, for all the reasons outlined in the third part above. And its dissonance
might well be confirmed, as Example 19 (from Götterdämmerung) indicates.
Yet as Kurth and Lorenz show, it also has the potential to blossom into a con-
sonance. And if it has that consonant potential, then it must in some deep but
tangible sense be a consonance, just as its orthography indicates. To the extent
that C minor is dissonant, it is that class of the dissonant “which leads back to
what is known of old and long familiar.”
Moreover, there is a zero sum at work: as demonstrated in part 3, E major
and C minor cannot both be pure, secure consonances. The degree to which
C minor has consonant potential is exactly the degree to which the heimlich
E-major triad has an inclination toward dissonance. The initial guarantee of
the secure musical home turns out to be underwritten by flimsy collateral. As
the consonant potential of C minor erodes the consonant security of E major,
we become aware of Vidler’s “disquieting slippage between what seems
homely and what is definitively unhomely.”
Which way shall the listener turn? A commitment to either version of reality
—the consonant triad or its consonant pole—may at any moment leave listen-
ers vulnerable to reversal into an alternative reality for which they are unpre-
pared. The prudent listener may remain frozen at the boundary between
reality and illusion, or oscillate wildly back and forth across that boundary.
For all its shimmering consonant beauty, the triad, like Herod’s trauma-
tized stepdaughter, has a latent potential to fragment into a set of component
parts that stand in dissonant relation to each other. The listener is at any

69. Gottfried Weber, Theory of Musical Composition (1817), trans. James F. Warner (Boston:
Wilkins, Carter, 1846), 1:336; I have modernized the translation slightly. For a recent restatement
of this view, see Fred Lerdahl, Tonal Pitch Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 174.

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320 Journal of the American Musicological Society

moment at risk of being cast out on a vast sea of tonal indeterminacy, without
compass or anchor. Each triad seems to be a port, yet each rests on naught but
its own corrodible bottom. The lines between good and evil, life and death,
truth and appearance are cast into doubt. Severed heads are so beautiful one
cannot but kiss them. The energy of a dying woman is transferred into a fixate
gaze. A dissonant harmony bursts into a consonant but bleached-out Gesang.
Superannuated wraiths sing from their crypts, dead heroes animatedly guard
their treasure, and spirits scamper back down their infernal holes. A great com-
poser survives his own death to compose it in tones. What enables music to
portray effectively each of these uncanny events is the consonant triad’s im-
plicit potential to turn dissonant. This potential is realized, made explicit, the
moment the triad is mated with its hexatonic pole.

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Abstract

Early twentieth-century psychological theorists (Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund

Freud) associated the uncanny with the occlusion of the boundary between
real and imaginary, and with the defamiliarization of the familiar. Their music-
theoretic contemporaries (Heinrich Schenker, Ernst Kurth, Alfred Lorenz) as-

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 Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age 323

sociated reality with consonance, imagination with dissonance. Late Romantic

composers frequently depicted uncanny phenomena (in opera, song, and pro-
grammatic instrumental music) through hexatonic poles, a triadic juxtaposi-
tion that inherently undermines the consonant status of one or both
constituents. Quintessentially familiar harmonies become defamiliarized limi-
nal phenomena that hover between consonance and dissonance, thereby em-
bodying the characteristics they are called upon by composers to depict.
Examples of uncanny triadic juxtapositions are drawn from music of
Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Haydn, Wagner, Mahler, Grieg, Richard Strauss,
Sibelius, Puccini, Ravel, and Schoenberg.

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 This content downloaded from
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