The Tonic Chord and Lacans Object A in S

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The Tonic Chord and Lacan's Object ain

Selected Songs by Charles Ives
Kenneth M. Smith
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Songs by Charles Ives, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 136:2, 353-398
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Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 136, no. 2, 353398
The Tonic Chord and Lacan’s Object a

in Selected Songs by Charles Ives
KENNETH M. SMITH
Downloaded by [University of Liverpool], [Kenneth Smith] at 07:25 28 November 2011
Lacan, object a and the tonic in music theory

OF the many branches of new musicology, those that draw from the psychoanalytical
theories of Jacques Lacan have proved particularly fruitful. The range of outcomes is
surprisingly diverse, including the projection of Lacan’s registers of the real, the
imaginary and the symbolic onto the listening experience;1 the theorization of the
human voice as ‘object’;2 the mapping of the ‘gaze’ as regulator of power relations
onto musical and critical discourse;3 and the refined psychoanalytical explorations of
relationships between characters in operas and, by extension, their composers.4 Yet
for all this, Lacanian theory has yet to produce a sustained methodology for analysing
tonal/post-tonal composition. To be sure, there are countless instances in which
1
See David Schwarz, Listening Awry: Music and Alterity in German Culture (Minneapolis, MN, and
London, 2006); idem, Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham, NC, and London,
1997). Alastair Williams invokes Schwarz’s application of Lacan’s three registers in songs by the
Beatles in his own vision of the role of Lacanian psychoanalysis in musicology (Constructing
Musicology (Aldershot, 2001), 715).
2
Michel Poizat, The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera (Ithaca, NY, 1992); Kaja
Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, IN,
1988).
3
Schwarz finds an embodiment of the gaze relationship in Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger (Listening
Subjects, 6486); Lawrence Kramer explores the gaze and scopophilia in Liszt’s ‘Faust’ Symphony
(Music as Cultural Practice, 18001900 (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 10235); and Ian Biddle finds the
dialectics of the gaze at work within the art of music criticism itself (‘The Gendered Eye: Music
Analysis and the Scientific Outlook in German Early Romantic Music Theory’, Music Theory
and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Suzannah Clark and
Alexander Rehding (Cambridge, 2001), 18396).
4
Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar draw a Lacanian history of opera its plots, characters, composers,
trends which revolves around its ‘second death’ (Opera’s Second Death (New York and London,
2002)). Charles Dill offers a reading of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux, focusing on the role of ‘the Other’
not only within the opera itself, but also in Rameau’s professional relationships (‘Rameau avec Lacan’,
Acta musicologica, 80 (2008), pp. 3358). For a representative sample of attempts at locating the
‘gaze’ in opera (which extends to a dialectic between the stage action and the audience) see Carolyn
Abbate, ‘Opera or the Envoicing of Women’, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in
Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 22558, and Linda and Michael Hutcheon,
‘Staging the Female Body: Strauss’s Salome’, Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in
Opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 20421.
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354 KENNETH M. SMITH
Lacan’s ideas are employed on an ad hoc basis in order to explicate compositional

ideas (usually programmatically significant ones), but one must admit that these are
unsystematic in the main and indicate Lacanian possibilities without extending
beyond their immediate application, despite the rigour they enjoy there.5 Yet I am
persuaded that particular compositional strategies may share a fundamental
homology with Lacan’s comprehensive discourse on desire. If Lacan takes Spinoza’s
maxim ‘desire is the essence of man’ as his starting point, and further contends that
desire is inscribed in linguistic systems, then desire must surely pertain to our human
relationship to music.6 While music’s role as a language is debatable in general terms,
music is certainly linguistic according to Lacan’s own formulation of language as a

discontinuous system of signifiers; in fact, its lack of semantic content makes it the
Lacanian paradigm of language par excellence Wagner’s ‘transfiguring language’,
or what the composer Schoenberg, perhaps with a more psychoanalytical bent,
classified as ‘the language of the unconscious’.7
Desire, for Lacan, operates within the confines of a symbolic mandate in the guise
of the ‘law’ the rules of language and signification. Although the ‘law’ must operate
in music’s various dimensions, it certainly exerts power through the rules of tonal
grammar that govern any given composition. And although this article focuses on the
American composer Charles Ives, it is Wagner, with his radical expansion of tonal
language, who must set the stage. As is commonly acknowledged, the link between
music and desire is nowhere more explicit than in Tristan, the paradigm of musical
eroticism; indeed, Slavoj Žižek, the most prodigious contemporary Lacanian
5
See, for example, Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge, 1998).
Kramer’s analysis of numerous Schubert songs invokes Lacan at suitable junctures, though there is
understandably no proposal of a broader Lacanian theory.
6
Quoted in Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London,
1998), 275; the source of this quotation not given there, but see Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Treatise on
the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Seymour Feldman
(Indianapolis, IN, 1982), 188 (‘Desire, considered absolutely, is man’s very essence’). This linguistic
inscription of desire is adumbrated in Lacan’s ‘Graph of Desire’. Explanation of Lacan’s obscure and
enigmatic graph is beyond the scope of this article, and the reader is directed to Jacques Lacan, ‘The
Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London, 2004), 33125. On this general topic see also Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A
Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York, 1980).
7
Critiquing Ferdinand de Saussure, Lacan generally uses the term langage to refer to the system of
language in general rather than specific languages. For Lacan, langage pertains to all structures that are
composed of signifiers. Unlike Saussure’s definition of a signifier as something which signifies
something for someone, Lacan’s definition ‘a signifier is that which represents a subject for another
signifier’ allows musical signifiers (chords, pitches, harmonies) without any semantic meaning to
function as elements of a linguistic system. See Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and
Language in Psychoanalysis’. A discussion of Wagner’s ‘transfigured or transfiguring language’ is held
in Lydia Goehr, ‘Schopenhauer and the Musicians: An Inquiry into the Sounds of Silence and the
Limits of Philosophizing about Music’, Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Dale Jacquette
(Cambridge, 1996), 20028 (p. 219). Arnold Schoenberg’s words are found in his Style and Idea,
trans. Leo Black, ed. Leonard Stein (Berkeley, CA, 1984), 193.
THE TONIC CHORD AND LACAN’S OBJECT a 355
theorist, surveys many angles of Lacanian theory in this very opera.8 Although
fighting shy of music theory (or even musical substance), Žižek perhaps represents
the summit of a long tradition of psychoanalytical discourse on Wagnerian control of
desire, a tradition that stretches back to Schopenhauer (for Thomas Mann the ‘father
of modern psychology’),9 who wrote in the World as Will and Representation in 1819:
Music consists generally in a constant succession of chords more or less disquieting, i.e., of
chords exciting desire, with chords more or less quieting and satisfying; just as the life of
the heart (the will) is a constant succession of greater or lesser disquietude [. . .]. In fact, in
the whole of music there are only two fundamental chords, the dissonant chord of the
seventh and the harmonious triad, and all the chords that are met with can be referred to
these two.10
Wagner’s response was to employ ever-shifting unstable harmonies in a quest to find

a point of tonal repose that is ever-deferred across Tristan’s temporal frame. As Bryan
Magee notes,
Music, like life, consists of the perpetual creation and spinning out of longings on which
we are stretched as on a rack, unable ever to accept where we are as a resting place [. . .].
Only at one point is all discord resolved, and that is on the final chord of the work; and
that of course is the end of everything.11
The key player in this unsatisfiable ‘longing’ is the tonic chord, which, in Wagner,
exerts the full panoply of tonal law over the diatonic framework, and allows desire to
be organized around it. Even in the eighteenth century, Rameau recognized this
chord as ‘the centre of the mode, towards which is drawn all our desires’, Thomas
Street Christensen further proposing that, in Rameau’s theory, the hope of resolution
of dissonance ‘drives all tonal music’.12 The radical psychological extremes to which
Wagner stretched linear tensionrelease patterns were indicated by Ernst Kurth,
whose psychological groundwork indirectly paved the way for Lawrence Kramer’s
8
Most notably in Žižek and Dolar, Opera’s Second Death.
9
Thomas Mann, Thomas Mann Presents the Living Thought of Schopenhauer (London, 1939), 24.
10
Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2 ([n.p.], 1966), 456.
11
Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London, 2000), 2079.
12
Jean-Philippe Rameau, Génération harmonique, ou Traité de musique théorique et pratique (Paris,
1737), 109; Thomas Street Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment
(Cambridge, 1993), 189 and 120. Elaborations of this basic premiss arguably fuel Schenkerian
analysis, in which tension flows through a matrix of unstable pitches that are coordinated around a
single tonic. The Schenkerian Ursatz, however linear, is essentially structured by motion away from
and back to a tonic key: ‘the fundamental line signifies motion, striving towards a goal, and
ultimately the completion of the course. In this sense we perceive our own life-impulse in the motion
of the fundamental line, a full analogy to our inner life.’ Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition
(1935), trans. Ernst Oster (New York and London, 1979), 4; quoted in Candace Brower, ‘A
Cognitive Theory of Musical Meaning’, Journal of Music Theory, 44 (2000), 32379 (p. 333).
Freudian reading of the opera.13 Kramer’s eclectic vision of desire substitutes

Schopenhauer’s Will for the Freudian libido and posits a Lust-trope as a musical
device to embody/arouse desire for an alluring tonic chord, amid libidinal
fluctuations of key. Such hyper-romantic harmony is well served by Freud, but
twentieth-century compositional paradigm shifts questioned the ability of the tonic
chord to structure musical discourse, and perhaps more sophisticated psycho-
analytical apparatus is now required. Lacan’s true psychoanalytical value was his
interrogation of the relations between human subjects and the object(s) they desire.
Significantly recalibrating Freud’s vision of desire as being orientated around a
constitutive lack, Lacan reformulated ways in which an object structures the desire
system as absent centre. As I attempt to illustrate through Ives’s music, Lacanian
developments can offer ways of understanding the new role(s) of the tonic chord in
particular strains of post-Wagnerian composition. Before a detailed explication of
how this works in both music theory and in Ives, a brief excursus through Lacan’s
philosophy of desire and its objects is required.
In Lacanian algorithm the object of human desire is codified as objet petit a.14 This
elusive goal occupies the space that is irredeemably lost to the infant subject as it
passes into the law of language and is henceforth trapped in a network of signifiers
and condemned to symbolic communication. When signification is produced, object
a is the surplus, the remainder, the left-over piece of the real that resists
symbolization. Lacan describes ‘a privileged object, which has emerged from some
primal separation, from some self-mutilation induced by the very approach of the
real, whose name, in our algebra, is the objet a’.15 Originally conceived in the 1950s
as the imaginary object of desire, it was later defined by Lacan as the ‘object-cause’ to
further underscore its responsibility for setting the process of desire in motion. Thus
it incorporates both lack and surplus: lack because it represents what is forever lost
upon entry into the symbolic order, and surplus because it always lies outside
symbolization and initiates desire as we fantasize ever-new representations of it.
Although as ungraspable as the Kantian Ding an sich (with which, in a sense, it is
identical), this imaginary goal structures encounters with everyday reality. Lacan
claims that the whole field of reality is in fact ‘sustained only by the extraction of
the object [a], which, however, gives it its frame’.16 In Jacques-Alain Miller’s
13
See Ernst Kurth, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners ‘Tristan’ (Berne and Leipzig,
1920); Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 13575. Of course, psychoanalysis lies behind many
attempts at decoding Wagner’s ideological message, the most rigorous being Robert Donington’s
Jungian analysis (Wagner’s ‘Ring’ and its Symbols: The Music and the Myth (London, 1963)).
14
The lower-case a (autre), opposed to the capital A, refers to the ‘little other’ rather than the ‘Big
Other’.
15
Lacan, Seminar XI, 83.
16
Lacan, ‘On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’, Ecrits, trans. Sheridan,
198249 (p. 247).
rudimentary diagram (see Figure 1) the rectangle’s centre is replaced by a ‘lack’ the
object a that turns reality into a frame.17
Numerous situations allow the object to exert its desire-producing power. One
crucial requirement is fantasy, which is where object a takes root. Lacan’s matheme
for fantasy ( a) indicates the ‘split subject’ ( divided between the real and the
symbolic) in relation to ( ) the lost object a that he/she imagines will bridge the
gap.18 Through fantasy this missing object is interpreted and reconstructed as an
object of desire. And this can directly inform discussion of music. Even a modest
Lacanian extension to Kramer’s version of Tristan could be the realization that a
‘tonic chord’, which has been the object of our yearning, is reached only when Isolde
slips into a lethal fantasy that draws her desires towards a specific (however illusory)
key of B major. This chord is the musical object a par excellence in that it structures
the opera’s harmonic discourse but remains alienated from it, finding embodiment
only through Isolde’s fantasy in its closing bars.19 But the object a is non-existent
and, as such, is not an object that could ever be grasped, even through the fantasies
that are essentially attempts (albeit failed ones) to construct it. And this may be why
Wagner chooses to unveil the chord of B only within the confines of the principal
character’s ecstatic dream-state, and approaches it in the final bars from an oblique
‘plagal’ angle (iv0I) rather than via the established ‘libidinal’ path of V7 0I; it is
now projected ‘outside’ the work as a quasi-religious cadential gesture. The fatal
nature of this fantasy for Isolde (she dies before the chord is heard in its pure form,
without the elaborate appoggiaturas, etc.) also seems to symbolize the fundamental
impossibility of ever reaching the imaginary object a.
() a
Figure 1. The extraction of the objet petit a from reality.
17
Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Montré à Prémontré’, Analytica, 37 (1984), 2731 (pp. 289), quoted in
Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 94.
18
See Lacan, ‘Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’, Ecrits, trans. Sheridan, 32360
(pp. 3467).
19
Ironically enough, this objet petit a registered in musicology through Slavoj Žižek’s excavation of the
liminal space between Schumann’s piano accompaniments and his vocal melodies (The Plague of
Fantasies (London, 1997), 192212). But, as desire exerts its pressure on so many distinct planes of
musical enjoyment, we can find the object a showing its power in other parameters, not least
harmonic discourse. As Rameau indicated, our desires can be drawn towards a tonic chord, and
perhaps we may now see this in a Lacanian light as one form of ‘object a ’.
One could draw from any number of composers in the wake of Wagner (elsewhere I
follow Taruskin’s invitation to view the harmonic language of Alexander Skryabin in
this post-Wagnerian light),20 but Charles Ives offers some particularly cogent
Lacanian messages in his short songs that thoroughly interrogate the notion of the
tonic as object-cause of desire. Why Ives? For one thing, Ives was isolated early on for
his willingness to ‘play ball’ with gender theorists; his phallogocentric (and rather
misogynistic) language (examined by Judith Tick in Ruth Solie’s seminal volume)21
betrays tensions in his strained relationship with Wagner’s music that led Ives to
accuse Wagner of furthering the ‘emasculation of music’; such comments can be cast
in a Lacanian light, as we shall see.22 But more than this, Ives, through his playful and
wry approach to tonal composition, offered many criticisms of the tonic chord that
questioned its putative ability to engage our harmonic desires, to the extent that his
works are often read as critiques of the whole tonal edifice. As Burkholder so cogently
puts it in ‘The Critique of Tonality in the Early Experimental Music of Charles Ives’,
Ives strikes at the heart of the theoretical tradition, revealing as artificial and conventional
concepts others accept as natural and inviolable. Later compositional studies go on to
question that one needs to establish a tonal centre at all, by any means. Yet if Ives is
attacking traditional ideas, he does so from within the tradition rather than from outside,
for he accepts and preserves at least as much as he alters.23
Ives shared a place among a large roster of composers who indulged in fin de siècle
‘extended tonality’, infusing diatonic frameworks with multitudes of enriched
chromatic notes; Anthony Pople stands Ives alongside 33 other composers who
represent ‘a body of music, much of it written about 1900, to which the word ‘‘atonal’’
seems inapplicable, and which cannot easily be held up as exemplifying ‘‘tonality’’
20
Kenneth Smith, ‘‘‘A Science of Tonal Love’’? Drive and Desire in Twentieth-Century Harmony: The
Erotics of Alexander Skryabin’, Music Analysis, 30 (forthcoming, 2011); Richard Taruskin, ‘Scriabin
and the Superhuman: A Millennial Essay’, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 30859.
21
Judith Tick, ‘Charles Ives and Gender Ideology’, Musicology and Difference, ed. Solie, 83106.
22
On Ives’s views on Wagner, Jan Swafford quotes from an interview with Slonimsky (16 November
1988): ‘[The] boy of twenty-five was listening to Wagner with enthusiasm . . . But when he became
middle-aged . . . this music had become cloying, the melodies threadbare . . . These once
transcendent progressions . . . were becoming slimy’ (Charles Ives: A Life with Music (New York
and London, 1996), 51). By 1932, Ives’s soprano friend Mary Bell, who often performed his songs,
was to claim in an interview on 10 December 1970: ‘He couldn’t stand Wagner. He couldn’t even
talk about Wagner and you just didn’t’ (Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History
(New Haven, CT, and London, 1974), 1902 (p. 192)). Oddly, Ives clearly had a ‘soft spot’ for
Skryabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, which he heard in 1924, and which features this same Tristanesque long-
range deferral of the tonic chord. See Lincoln Ballard, ‘Scriabin and Ives: An Unanswered
Question?’, Journal of the Scriabin Society of America, 9 (2005), 3761. Ballard also discusses Ives’s
use of Skryabin’s ‘mystic’ chord (set 6-34), which shares many properties of the Ivesian harmony that
will soon be the topic of this article.
23
J. Peter Burkholder, ‘The Critique of Tonality in the Early Experimental Music of Charles Ives’,
Music Theory Spectrum, 12 (1990), 20323 (p. 222).
either’.24 One might then wonder what makes Ives so prime for Lacanian
investigation; after all, Pople’s Tonalities Project was designed to encompass the
whole gamut of composers universally. In at least three distinct ways Ives’s
idiosyncratic compositional methods eschew analytical theory as it pertains to
‘transitional’ music because of his quirky respect for the organizational properties of
the tonic triad. It is hoped that each of these three compositional tactics (outlined
below) will be elucidated through my own subsequent analyses, which, while
illustrating that existing post-tonal theory short-changes us with Ives, will bring his
potent critique of the tonic chord within the province of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
This, in turn, will suggest a new approach to Ivesian harmony.
(1) Ives not only structures stretches of music around a central tonal ‘lack’ à la
Wagner, but with a wry Ivesian smile often consciously exposes the
tonic as a smokescreen (and, as I will argue, a Lacanian fantasy). When
Schoenberg described the reluctance of his own op. 6 songs to yield their
tonal centres, he coined the term ‘suspended tonality’,25 which placed the
tonic on a remote pedestal. Yet the tonic condescends to show its face in a
converse compositional strategy, exemplified in Schoenberg’s Second
Quartet, where amid atonal chaos a lurking F> and its dominant, C >,
establish the tonal guarantor of the final movement. Jim Samson brings this
to light, but questions F>’s governing power, recalling Schoenberg’s words:
‘The overwhelming multitude of dissonances cannot be counterbalanced any
longer by occasional returns to such tonic triads as represent key.’26 Bryan
Simms proposes that the retention of a triad to close such works is merely a
‘symbolic choice’, resonating with composers such as Skryabin, the closing
F> triad of whose Prometheus, questioned by Daniel Harrison, we call ‘tonic’
by virtue only of its structural position.27 In Adorno’s words, such triads ‘are
false. They no longer fulfil their function.’28 As I will demonstrate, Ives’s
24
Anthony Pople, ‘Using Complex Set Theory for Tonal Analysis: An Introduction to the ‘‘Tonalities’’
Project’, Music Analysis, 23 (2004), 15394 (p. 153). Pople disliked the polarization of ‘atonal’
analytical techniques against ‘tonal’ ones: ‘many works from this repertoire can be, and have been,
addressed from both perspectives’ (p. 154).
25
Referring to Lockung, op. 6 no. 7, Schoenberg shows how the tonic E= remains absent: ‘I call this
‘‘schwebende Tonalität’’ (suspended tonality)’ (Arnold Schoenberg, Structural Functions of Harmony,
ed. Humphrey Searle (London, 1954), 111).
26
Jim Samson, Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 19001920 (London,
1977), 11012. Samson quotes from Schoenberg, Style and Idea, trans. Black, ed. Stein, 86, and
further suggests that tonal allusions are brought to the fore through classical phrasing, punctuation
and counterpoint (‘Schoenberg’s ‘‘Atonal’’ Music’, Tempo, 109 (1974), 1625 (p. 17)).
27
Bryan R. Simms, The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg, 19081923 (Oxford, 2000), 28; Daniel
Harrison, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music: A Renewed Dualist Theory and an Account of its
Precedents (Chicago, IL, 1994), 789.
28
Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN, and
London, 2006), 32.
Lacanian logic makes him oscillate between these two strategies, while
situating himself in the third critical position: a position of penetrating
Lacanian insight.
(2) Not content with Freudian-Wagnerian lack, Ives’s model of tonal desire
embodies Lacanian surplus. He colourfully mixes harmonic genera: atonal
clusters, whole-tone sonorities, symmetrically configured chords, modal
harmony, diatonic triads, extended-seventh chords, Tristan chords, ‘mystic’
chords, etc. While Fortean set theory can cope with such wonderful harmonic
arrays, it cannot represent the delicate balance of their tonal impulses.29
Because Ivesian harmony is so often diatonically organized (drawing on triads,

dominant-seventh configurations, etc., sometimes using both to create a vague
sense of key), a methodology is needed like that envisioned by Steve Larson: ‘a
way of experiencing atonality and ambiguity within a framework of tonal
function’.30 Similarly, John Williamson, recognizing the power of set theory to
situate ‘areas of suspended tonality’, calls for ‘a set theory comprised with [sic]
some directional principle [. . .] and that directional principle will presumably
be latently tonal’.31 In reserving such a lively (if somewhat deconstructive) level
of tonal functionality, Ives seems to slip the set-theory net. Attempts to use
post-tonal music theory in Ives’s music, such as those by Robert Morgan, Allen
Forte and Philip Lambert, enlightening though they may be, do not to my
mind fully represent Ives’s dynamic, diatonic life-force.32
29
Richard S. Parks discusses such interaction of genera in Debussy’s music (The Music of Claude
Debussy (New Haven, CT, 1989)). But Samson laments the inability of Fortean set theory adequately
to provide for ‘suppressed tonal structures’, citing op. 19 no. 2, which ends on a C triad that Allen
Forte, adding to Roy Travis’s reading of this piece, tonally reduces to a ‘non-set’ (Samson,
‘Schoenberg’s ‘‘Atonal’’ Music’, 18). Samson quotes from Allen Forte, ‘Sets and Nonsets in
Schoenberg’s Atonal Music’, Perspectives of New Music, 11/1 (autumnwinter 1972), 4364 (p. 52).
Roy Travis: ‘Directed Motion in Schoenberg and Webern’, ibid., 4/2 (springsummer 1966), 859
(p. 86). Samson suggestively remarks that ‘it is often more profitable to examine those features which
an ‘‘atonal’’ work shares with its tonal ancestry than to underline the differences’ (p. 16).
30
Steve Larson, ‘A Tonal Model of an ‘‘Atonal’’ Piece: Schoenberg’s Opus 15, Number 2’, Perspectives
of New Music, 25 (1987), 41433 (p. 418).
31
John Williamson, ‘Wolf ’s Dissonant Prolongations’, The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century
Tonality, ed. William Kinderman and Harald Krebs (Lincoln, NE, 1996), 21536 (p. 234).
Williamson follows implications from Kurth, Schoenberg and Schenker and admittedly takes
‘suspended tonality’ to its analytical limit in his analysis of Wolf ’s Seufzer. He comments on a ‘gap in
theory [that] can be defined as the absence of explanation for that species of directional tonality
whereby suspended tonality clarifies itself toward a final resolution’ (p. 219).
32
See Robert P. Morgan, ‘Spatial Form in Ives’, and Allen Forte, ‘Ives and Atonality’, An Ives
Celebration, ed. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis (Urbana, IL, 1977), 14558 and 15986, and
Philip Lambert, The Music of Charles Ives (New Haven, CT, and London, 1997). See also the recent
article by Scott Murphy which refers to studies that draw on the theoretical systems of David Lewin
and Henry Klumpenhouwer in an analysis of Ives’s ‘The Cage’ (‘A Composite Approach to Ives’s
‘‘Cage’’’, Twentieth-Century Music, 5 (2010), 17993).
(3) If the answer to the question of how ‘atonal’ music may be navigated ‘tonally’
was for Larson and Williamson the highly contentious issue of Schenkerian
prolongation, perhaps James Baker’s analysis of Skryabin arguably got the
best of both worlds in his Fortean/Schenkerian system.33 But even this
methodology reaches its limits with Charles Ives, who not only sets different
harmonic genera in free interaction, but also creates multiple directional tonal
centres. Again, I will show how this bears the Lacanian surplus value of desire.
Ives’s famous penchant for ‘bitonality’ opens analytical cans of worms (and I
attempt to keep these sealed), which, to date, neither prolongational theory
nor set theory seems adequately equipped to manage. While Harald Krebs
suggests strategies for Schoenberg’s ‘floating tonality’ (oscillation between
two tonal centres),34 Ives layers these centres vertically and sets them against
each other to form fluid and nuanced interrelationships.35 As Daniel Harrison
notes in his own survey of bitonality’s chequered analytical history, ‘One
source of [. . .] bitonal richness is the continually varying degrees of ‘‘bi’’,
while another results from ontological problems with the piece’s ‘‘tonality’’.’36
His diagnosis is doubly correct for Ives: as much as Ives’s critique of the tonal
system meant bombarding it with every conceivable harmonic type, his
messages, like his musical products, are extremely subtle and nuanced, and
require special analytical and, as I argue, psychoanalytical treatment. And
Lacan’s psychoanalytical discourse on the formation of desiring impulses
around a central linguistic lack is, in my view, crucial to understanding the
play of tensions in Ives’s surplus of tonal centres.
The combination of these three ‘eccentricities’ sets Ives apart from many of his
contemporary composers and from existing models that claim to process music that
alloys the tonal and the atonal. The methods sketched in this article are bespoke to
Ivesian composition, but even more specifically to certain of Ives’s ‘experimental’
songs, though they may well have implications elsewhere. The Ives songs I visit, some
of which are known best in orchestral form, are taken from the collection 114 Songs,
published in 1922 with piano accompaniment. Although Ives ironically claimed that
33
See James Baker, The Music of Alexander Scriabin (New Haven, CT, 1986). While Baker’s
methodology is applied to some degree by Lambert (The Music of Charles Ives), the Schenkerian-
tonal angle is downplayed in favour of largely post-tonal analyses of atonal sets and interval cycles.
The issue of post-tonal prolongation is perhaps most cogently formulated in Joseph Straus, ‘The
Problem of Prolongation in Post-Tonal Music’, Journal of Music Theory, 31 (1987), 121.
34
Harald Krebs, ‘Alternatives to Monotonality in Early Nineteenth-Century Music’, Journal of Music
Theory, 25 (1981), 116.
35
Pople’s Tonalities Project sought to correct such bias through his computer software’s ability to
process numerous expected harmonic types; but, as we shall see, Ives’s multilayered approach to
composition would preclude even the most refined ‘segmental’ analyses.
36
Daniel Harrison, ‘Bitonality, Pentatonicism, and Diatonicism in a Work by Milhaud’, Music Theory
in Concept and Practice, ed. James Baker (Rochester, NY, 1997), 393408.
he had ‘merely cleaned house’, and that these songs are ‘all that is left [. . .] out on the
clothes line’, his meticulous attention to drafting and editing places them among Ives’s
most intimate and carefully crafted musical poetics.37 Stuart Feder’s psychoanalytical
biography in fact sets the songs in an autobiographical context alongside his literary
Memos.38 The 114 songs are nonetheless a ‘mixed bag’, comprising a staggeringly
diverse range of topics and styles, and drawing from a number of poets. As Aaron
Copland commented: ‘Almost every kind of song imaginable can be found [. . .] songs
bristling with dissonances, tone clusters and ‘‘elbow chords’’ next to songs of the most
elementary harmonic simplicity.’39 Many of the songs are settings of texts that delve
deep into the nature of human desire its arousals, its objects, its fantasies, its shifting
coordinates and, responding to the nuances of the rich poetries at his disposal, Ives
cultivates a particular strain of harmony that combines Wagnerian Sehnsucht (based on
lack) with Skryabinesque/Debussyian sensuality (based on surplus). It is in songs such
as these that Ives’s tonal logic is most explicitly Lacanian. In some cases (particularly
the final song I analyse Premonitions), his music serves to support the already proto-
Lacanian text, while others give Lacanian twists musically to texts that are not, on the
surface at least, necessarily so psychoanalytically complex in nature.
Ives avec Lacan: desire and fantasy

To the latter category belongs no. 39, Afterglow (1919), a song that adumbrates Ives’s
use of the tonic chord as object a in the two facets of lack and surplus drawn by
Lacan. Ostensibly, James Fenimore Cooper Jr’s poetry is a simple reflection on the
lingering nature of beauty, and particularly on the ability of fantasy and memory to
recount beautiful moments.
At the quiet close of day,

Gently yet the willows sway;
When the sunset light is low,
Lingers still the afterglow.
Beauty tarries, loth to die,
Every lightest fantasy lovelier grows in memory,
Where the truer beauties lie.40
The text, on the surface at least, has little to do with Tristanesque desire, but the
sensuous excess of the Lacanian object a lies beneath this beguiling façade. After day
37
H. Wiley Hitchcock, ‘Ives’s ‘‘114 [ 15] Songs’’ and What He Thought of Them’, Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 52 (1999), 97144 (p. 97).
38
Stuart Feder, Charles Ives: My Father’s Song: A Psychoanalytic Biography (New Haven, CT, 1992).
39
Aaron Copland, ‘One Hundred and Fourteen Songs’, Modern Music, 11/2 (JanuaryFebruary
1934), 5964; quoted in Hitchcock, ‘Ives’s ‘‘114 [ 15] Songs’’’, 103.
40
The poem is found in James Fenimore Cooper Jr’s collection Afterglow (New Haven, CT, 1918), 4.
has changed into night, the lingering ‘afterglow’ is fully representative of the object a
as the remaining piece of the real that resists symbolization; the afterglow (qua object
a) draws our attention through its refusal to be integrated into the symbolic network
(a clear-cut day/night dichotomy). Particularly Lacanian is Cooper’s coaxing of this
mysterious excess into a fantasy space to produce his formula for memory and
beauty. And this is the aspect that Ives chose to paint most vividly in his song-setting,
though naturally he does not pass up the opportunity to affect certain twists of his
own. Before placing the intricate compositional aspects of the piece under a close
analytical microscope, a brief snapshot of the piece’s tonal operations will con-
textualize the methodologies I employ.

Although a rich harmonic vocabulary is exploited in Ives’s Afterglow (reproduced
as Example 1), and each sonority doubtless bears many interpretations, I read this
piece as a brimming ‘excess’ of tense pseudo-Wagnerian harmonies, often shaped like
dominant-seventh chords that indicate multiple potential tonic objects. To couch
this in semiotic terms: dominant-seventh implications become free-floating signifiers
of numerous tonic signifieds. However, Ives’s well-known penchant for bitonal
textures ensures that these sonorities are sometimes vertically combined to form
abstruse and mysterious chords that, in my view, contain highly ambiguous
dominant-seventh elements in multiple keys simultaneously. Interesting possibilities
for processing chords like these are afforded by branches of neo-Riemannian
Funktionstheorie, explored most recently by Daniel Harrison and Kevin Swinden,
which create leeway for certain extended chords to contain multiple tonal functions,
say a dominant (D) and a subdominant (S).41 Particularly pertinent is Stephen
Downes’s Freudian analysis of Szymanowski’s Narcissus, by which a certain chord
complex contains conflicting dominant-seventh ‘elements’.42
Ives’s experiments in this regard are well known, his sense of musical adventure
inculcated by his father, George: ‘If the mind can understand one key, why can’t
it learn to understand another key with it?’43 While my argument does not
necessarily hold that an ear can attend to two keys simultaneously (I thereby avoid
a rather sticky issue of bitonal composition, adumbrated by Harrison),44 I propose
that these libidinal, extended-Wagnerian chords hold the potential to drive (possibly
in a Lacanian sense, as I will explore) the ear in various alternative directions.
Examples of how such chords actually unfold will soon be provided, but suffice it
at this stage to say that these excessive ‘mystery’ chords (as I perhaps indulgently
41
See Harrison, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music, and particularly Kevin J. Swinden, ‘When
Functions Collide: Aspects of Plural Function in Chromatic Music’, Music Theory Spectrum, 27
(2005), 24982.
42
Stephen Downes, ‘Szymanowski and Narcissism’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 121
(1996), 5881 (p. 60). The chord Downes explores is actually a Skryabinesque ‘mystic’ chord,
comprising the pitches B, D>, F>, A (B7) and A, C>, G (A7).
43
Charles Edward Ives, Charles E. Ives: Memos (n.p., 1972), 140.
44
Harrison, ‘Bitonality, Pentatonicism, and Diatonicism’.
Example 1. Afterglow, Song no. 39 from 114 Songs. Afterglow by Charles Ives Copyright # 1933 by
Merion Music Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Slowly and very quietly
one chord
★ legato throughout
quietly, slowly and sustained throughout
At the qui et close of day. Gent ly yet the wil lows sway; When
l.h. l.h.
★ NOTE: The piano should be played as indistinctly as possible, and both pedals used
almost constantly.
Example 1 (continued)
less audibly, but no
più slower here
ten.
the sun set light is low, Lin gers
decresc.
non rall.
più rit.
still the af ter glow; Beau
l.h. l.h.
r.h.
ty tar ries loth to die. l.h.

l.h.
più moto r.h.
r.h. r.h.
animando
Ev ery light est fan ta sy love lier grows in

l.h. l.h.
r.h. r.h.
più ten. e rall.

3
me mo ry, Where the tru er beau ties lie.

slower
più ten. più rall.

rall.
term them) rely for any sense of tonal functionality they possess on local ‘tonic’ chords
that they posit and by which they are paradoxically sustained. At a certain crucial
moment in Afterglow, a C major triad is proposed as an object of possible relief from
these highly tensile and ‘libidinal’ harmonies. This triad, in my reading, emerges as a
pseudo-tonic even in this ostensibly atonal piece to supplement the word ‘beauty’ and
thereby mark a clear turning point at the work’s core. As will become apparent upon
closer inspection, this chord and the piece’s relationship to it illustrate both aspects of
the object a: (1) desire’s fantasmatic object of ‘lack’ and (2) the excessive remainder.
Both afford the rather superficial poetry a much richer Lacanian meaning.
Now that the framework of the piece has been established, we are in a position to
tease out these subtle Lacanian messages with sharper tools. First, in what ways can
this clear C triad be regarded as tonic? This is surely a counter-intuitive observation, as

it neither opens nor closes the piece as any decent tonic should. One consideration
would be that the triad occurs at the piece’s crux, when the poet transcends the
particular instance of the afterglow and extracts his universal formula of fantasy. The
second consideration is that, amid the tense flow of mysterious harmonies in the first
half of the song, loose dominant sevenths in C major can be found lurking beneath the
complex tonal surface to articulate the lack that sustains the uncoordinated mass of
mystery chords. Three particular instances bear additive weight in their approach to
this pseudo-tonic triad and, as I hear them, gently edge us through the atonal/bitonal
haze towards C major. These moments are highlighted on the score of the piece in
Example 1, though each is magnified in graphical form through the following analysis.
(1) Although primordially vague, the first allusions to C as an absent tonal centre
(object-cause of desire) are made in the introduction. After a highly ambiguous
symmetrical eight-note ‘atonal’ cluster with a tonally negating aggregate of
minor seconds,45 the second sonority may be marginally more diatonically
engaging; it encloses multiple tritone-based tensions that indicate various
incomplete seventh chords pulling in several directions, thereby constituting a
mystery chord. This could ‘resolve’ in alternative ways, yet in each resolution
something of its excess would be lost; there will always be a surplus. Example 2
illustrates on the lower staves the chord complexes we actually hear, while the
potentialities they hold for resolution are sketched on the upper staves, with the
most analytically significant pitches rendered in white note-heads.46
45
This opening chord comprises two tritone-related, chromatically aggregated tetrachordal cells that
comprise set class 89, a highly symmetrical class which is invariable upon T6 operation. To achieve
a vague, impressionistic atmosphere, Ives requested, at the foot of the printed score, that ‘the piano
should be played as indistinctly as possible, and both pedals used almost constantly’ (see Example 1).
46
Example 2, although Schenkerian in its reductive presentation, charts the ‘potential’ dominant-
seventh implications above the stave and in no way attempts to posit a Schenkerian ‘tonal’
background. Indeed, notwithstanding its similar graphical technology, my method diverges from
Schenkerian orthodoxy in several ways (even as it is generally applied to post-tonal repertory: see
James Baker, ‘Schenkerian Analysis and Post-Tonal Music’, Aspects of Schenkerian Theory, ed. David
Beach (New Haven, CT, 1983), 15386). First, the graphs show purely hypothetical local terrain,
mapping potential tonal impulses that are not, as yet, orientated around a global tonic. I draw out
‘bitonal’ implications where I believe these can be reasonably experienced. (Given that I am situating
this within a discourse on desire/subjectivity, these tonal impulses consolidate, and are suggested by,
the nature of the excessive surplus of the object a found in Ives’s text: an extension to desire theory
offered by Lacan.) Orthodox Schenkerian practice could not cope with such bitonal inclinations
(indeed, it radically problematizes even ‘directional tonality’). Secondly, my figures demonstrate the
process by which tonality (fragmented as it is) emerges (and later dissipates); this rather than the
Schenkerian paradigm, where it is established globally from the outset. Thirdly, I am concerned not
so much with voice-leading as with predominantly harmonic parameters in which voice-leading so
central to Schenker is reduced to a network of potentials, not all of which follow through on their
implications.
Example 2. ‘Mystery’ chords in Afterglow.
F7 E7 D7 G7
mystery chord
V 47 in C major
atonal cluster
While the pitches e = a c ? in the pianist’s left hand could reasonably

indicate some kind of primitive incarnation of F7 pulling towards B=,47 the
upper e ?g >?dƒ could equally indicate a potential E7 motion to A; the more
melodically unfolded f >ƒ and c pitches could find additional resonance with
the harmonic dƒ and a pitches to form a rather confused D7 chord that could
pull towards a G triad. While these conflicting elements may not be easily
distinguishable at first listening, perhaps this is what Žižek refers to as the
Kantian ‘mathematical sublime’ found in the drives of the Lacanian real:
compounded forces that are too much for us to process.48 These three
dominant-seventh elements are firmly welded together in a single complex that
certainly renders each impulse very faint indeed, and seemingly unable to be
satisfied by any single tonic.49 Yet the phrase markings nod in the direction of
classically directed tonal motion when they lead to a much clearer G7.
Notwithstanding the diminished fifth that sustains its bass (c >, a particularly
Skryabinesque type of dominant), this G7 chord (five notes, as opposed to the
piece’s opening eight-note cluster) indicates a C triad as a potential means of
(partially) releasing its tension. It also retroactively envoices the pre-dominant
47
To note: in some future instance of this configuration of E =, A and C, an F is added to the texture.
48
Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real: Selected Writings (New York and London, 2005), 308.
49
This form of harmonic tension is of a very different order from the kind of ‘wandering tonality’ that
Anthony Newcomb found in Wagner (see his ‘The Birth of Music Out of the Spirit of Drama: An
Essay in Wagnerian Formal Analysis’, 19th-Century Music, 5 (19812), 3866), where keys fluidly
slip from one to another, seemingly without any global orientation. Here, in my reading, various
tonalities are implied in Ives’s mystery chords, but one is ‘selected’ (see the later discussion on how
this reflects the process of ‘interpretation’ as a vital aspect of desire) and eventually comes to fruition.
function of the upper D7 element of the mystery chord, despite the somewhat
disjointed upper voice-leading by means of which it is registrally transferred in
the upper stave. Is this now II7 in C major? If so, it is very weakly articulated
and certainly needs further clarification.
Interestingly enough, a Fortean analysis of this opening proves telling, as it
illustrates the ‘mystery’ chord to be a manifestation of set class 7-28, whose pc
complement (5-28) occupies the following sonority. But while the true 5-28
complement (the set that would complete the ‘note-row’) would yield G, B, C>,
A> and F, this chord replaces the A> with the retained D and thus renders the
complement at T2 inversion. (The ‘missing’ A> from the 12-note aggregate is

unveiled in the subsequent melodic variation of this characteristic progression.)
This ingenious manipulation (by means of which the T2 inversion preserves the
invariant G, B, C>, F configuration of the true complement and thus preserves
also the proto-serial outlay of all 12 pitch classes; except that the A> is replaced by
D) ensures that a diatonic impulse is allowed to lurk beneath in the altered G7
triad by retaining its perfect fifth. Yet this is surely no pure G7 triad, and its
dissonant bass pitch, c >, may well invite alternative hearings. A complementary
interpretation would process this chord as the similarly diminished C>7 chord,
which is invariant at T6. Of course the manipulated ‘real’ fifth of G7 the D
that causes the false relation may well strengthen the former interpretation,
while not entirely closing off an ambiguous impulse towards an alternative tonic
chord of F>. The subjectivities at play in the analytical experience here mirror
the listening experience and, indeed, the subsequent business of the piece sets
both C and F> alternatives into a dialogue which, I will attempt to illustrate,
draws us towards diatonic clarification. Another factor which may affect our
diatonic engagement of this pseudo-atonal passage is the issue of harmonic
spacing. One of the cues for reading the first chord as an ‘atonal cluster’ is the
close semitonal harmony, while the second chord contains ‘dominant’-seventh-
type configurations and conventional spacing between the pianist’s hands that
seem to bring the tonal impulses of sevenths and tritones (some of which come to
fruition, some of which do not) into the realms of potential performer/listener
engagement. This spacing surely makes the distinct (bitonal) tensions more
audibly distinct a pianist’s analogue to the orchestration techniques employed
throughout Ives’s repertory that so successfully partition the orchestra into
bitonal groups, and allow an attentive ear to pick out the individual tonal lines.
(2) To echo the sentiment of the poem’s opening line, ‘At the quiet close of day’,
a similar complex of vertically compiled dominant-seventh elements in the
piano can be heard to ‘discharge’ its tensions (to use Daniel Harrison’s
analytical terminology, particularly germane to psychoanalytical discussion)
above an E and c pedal, and becomes whittled down to a single dominant
implication. Example 3 presents a microscopic view of these chords, heard in
quick succession.
Beneath the word ‘day’ the pianist’s right hand sketches an E7 element
(resonating with the bass pedal E ), while the pitches in the left imply both
F>7 and C7 chords (compressed into a single French sixth).50 Each of these
elements holds the potential to ‘discharge’ to its own local ‘tonic’. While the
Lacanian theory I propose does not require any of these chords actually to
do so it is simply enough that latent possibilities for discharge exist this
example is selected because the chord’s discharge retroactively consolidates
this potential in future contexts. The g >? pitch of the E7 element ‘resolves’ to
a single a ? pitch as the F>7 element follows its voice-leading implications
that drive towards a Bm7 element in a pseudo ‘V0I’ gesture. While this
Bm7 discharges in turn towards an E7 element (which now reconfirms its
original position), the new D7 element finds a place in the syntactical chain
by moving towards its own diminished chord, soon to be clarified as G7
when the piano’s clear G triad resonates with the seventh, f ?, in the vocal
line. The G7’s tension moves ultimately towards a diminished chord,
coinciding with the b ? 0cƒ melodic discharge on the words ‘When the
sunset’, and while this occurrence strengthens the first incarnation and
suggests that C major is a running concern, we still crave a true tonic triad
to confirm its function.
Example 3. A second series of ‘mystery’ chords in Afterglow.
E7 C 57 F 7
5 Bm7 D7 E7 dim.(G7) G7
mystery chord mystery chord mystery chord V 7 in C major
50
The French-sixth chord can behave as a dominant chord with a flattened fifth. In this way, its pc
content is identical to its own tritone transposition despite enharmonic differences. Thus C, E, G=,
B= under T6 procedures can be spelled F>, A>, C, E. The same chord, when used as dominant, could
discharge in two separate ways.
(3) The clinching moment for C major occurs for me at the equivalent moment of
the following phrase, leading towards the same melodic c ƒb ?a ? descent that
follows the crucial word ‘afterglow’. The G7 preceding it appears in a direct
reference to Tristan. The Tristan quotations in Ives’s Second Symphony are well
documented, and a similar allusion is seemingly cast here.51 Although certainly
no clichéd quotation of the Tristan chord, the rising chromatic line from the
bƒ to the upper d ƒ? leaves the distinct impression of a dominant seventh
lingering in the air like the afterglow. Additional implications are interwoven,
of course the C minor triad figures prominently, as does the GC > tritone,
but the salient pitches of the G7 chord that render this the most audible
expectation are sketched in Example 4.
And it is this intimation of G7 that ‘resolves’ to a pure C triad, articulated in full,

albeit via the Ivesian distorting tritone-related F > in the bass.52 Through its ‘lack’, a
tonic was intimated as an object a in the first two instances, but appears now to form
the piece’s crux. This chord, once enacted, functions as what Lacan calls a point de
capiton, a moment when meaning becomes retroactively fixed, and the signifier (in
this case the dominant chord) and the signified (the mysterious, alluring tonic)
Example 4. ‘Tristanesque’ version of G7 0C in Afterglow.

‘Tristanesque’
C major
V7 I
51
Colin Sterne, ‘The Quotations in Charles Ives’s Second Symphony’, Music and Letters, 52 (1971),
3945; J. Peter Burkholder, ‘‘‘Quotation’’ and Paraphrase in Ives’s Second Symphony’, 19th-Century
Music, 11 (19878), 325. Faint Tristan allusions like this are found in ‘Things our Fathers Loved’;
see Robert P. Morgan, ‘‘‘The Things our Fathers Loved’’: Charles Ives and the European Tradition’,
Ives Studies, ed. Philip Lambert (Cambridge, 1997), 326 (p. 14).
52
This F > triad, which I hear as an element strategically placed to undermine the otherwise powerful
effect of the C, may in fact hold a more structural function as an ‘alternative tonic’, as indicated by
the frequent play between C > and G7 sonorities. While seeming to run counter to my argument that
the dense harmonic profile of the piece leads towards an ineluctable C major, this new F > rather
serves as a reminder that the stronger C spread between both hands has stepped forward with
greater affirmation at the expense of other ‘repressed’ impulses. This quite forcibly embodies the
excessive nature of the desiring search for an object of satisfaction.
appear to be bonded.53 This fixity is, of course, entirely illusory a dimension

opened up in the harmonies that follow this crucial tonal event. From here onwards,
the whole harmonic structure changes, as we shall see. But the Lacanian logic also
appears in the second function of the object a : the excessive remainder. For Žižek
(and for Lacan), ‘The oscillation between lack and surplus meaning constitutes the
proper dimension of subjectivity.’54 The surplus value of the object a can be located
in at least two distinct places:
(1) If the colourful mystery chords that provide the main backdrop of the piece
embody the multivalent dominant-based driving factor, then the search for a
single tonic a selects one element at the expense of others. The ambiguous
chords always produce a surplus that is not caught up in the harmonic current.
Thus, in the beginning of Afterglow, we remember the E7 and F7 implications
of the earlier mystery chord, and the many other tonal implications that did
not bear such ripe fruit as the C major. Ives’s tonal message is that these are
the remainders; the pieces of the real that rejected symbolization, fully
analogous to the residual afterglow that embodies the surplus meaning of the
object a. These alternative ‘drives’ are not directly involved in the overarching
progression towards C major, but pulsate nonetheless and serve as the
excessive remainders that are not captured by this fantasy object.
(2) The pure C triad, once heard, should bring satisfaction according to Freudian
logic, but for Lacan the human drive will not be satisfied this way object a
(which is an imaginary object) always escapes us; it is, after all, ultimately only
a fantasy. As soon as the chord is struck, coinciding with the word ‘beauty’,
Ives offers a contrasting sequence of sparse, loose-knit chords which repeats
four times beneath a short melodic cell. Despite the C chord (qua tonic
object) which begins this sequence, each repetition now excludes the object
itself which has proved unsatisfying (see Example 5). In Lacanian theory the
human drive mechanism aims for the object a but always realizes that, in
actual fact, its real goal was to orbit it perpetually.55 Thus a repeated cycle of
excessive chords is now content to rotate around the C triad, which is elevated
to the status of absent object.
53
Point de capiton refers to the pins in mattresses which prevent the foam from slipping too far. For
Lacan, ‘slippage’ is concerned with the signifier and the signified, which share a loose relationship.
Such points of fixity, illusory though they are, provide our points of mental stability in the normative
human subject. Lacan, ‘Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’, Ecrits, trans. Sheridan,
32360 (p. 335).
54
Žižek, Looking Awry, 91.
55
Lacan, Seminar XI; see particularly the seminars on ‘The Deconstruction of the Drive’ and ‘The
Partial Drive and its Circuit’, pp. 16173 and 17486.
Example 5. The C major triad and subsequent cellular repetition in Afterglow.

(3) A crucial Lacanian aspect of object a’s nature is brought out in the poet’s
recognition that it exists in ‘fantasy’ and, in turn, ‘memory’. We learn from
Cooper that in fact ‘Every lightest fantasy lovelier grows in memory’. Fantasy
is always the location of the object a for Lacan: ‘The object of desire, in the
usual sense, is [. . .] a phantasy that is in reality the support of desire, or a
lure.’56 This fantasy section of the poem thus coordinates itself around the
earlier moment of ‘satisfaction’ in which the miasma of sensations and feelings
crystallized. Ives’s tonal correlate here is the fact that the tonic has been
reached but instantly committed to ‘memory’, where it now sits isolated; the
cycle of ambiguous chords spills out to remember the earlier moment of
satisfaction but creates an excessive vortex around it: the afterglow.
In summary then: a series of polytonally co-mingled harmonic impulses (fully

redolent of the Lacanian libidinal excess), which could have posited any particular
tonic, focused on the triad of C that was created as a fantasy object to fill the void
created by the Lacanian lack. This elusive fantasy object, once struck, does not bring
the hoped-for satisfaction (the object a is, after all, an illusion), but is reified as a
static object of memory where it remains as ‘truer beauties’ start to flower from this
fantasy once more. We are ready for the cycle to begin again.
And this cycle was not specific to Afterglow, enjoying long lineage among Ives’s
pieces. The second movement of Three Places in New England (191114), subtitled
The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common, is prefaced by a poem that compares the
‘afterglow’ to the souls of soldiers fallen in battle (the objects of loss for those left
behind). Three Wagnerian climactic waves lead towards a colossal C major triad that
erupts at the piece’s halfway mark, before slipping back into atonality. And C major
also appears at the central axes of several of Ives’s other songs not least Premonitions
and At Sea, to which we shall shortly turn. In Disclosure, the C major centre of
gravity poignantly escorts the line ‘Songs whose beauty now only lies in memory’,
making this song a sister to Afterglow. Burkholder asserts that C major is selected to
coordinate many of Ives’s tonal ‘experiments’:
56
Ibid., 1856. The Lacanian spelling generally favours ‘ph’ rather than the more general ‘f ’.
Ives seems to have regarded C as the ideal ‘key’ for his experiments with new means of
establishing tonal centers. Perhaps the simplicity of the key of C major and its primacy in
the teaching of theory made it easier for Ives to imagine non-traditional but analogous
methods for establishing a tonal center.57
It is to be hoped that looking at further song settings (some in C major, some in

other keys) will refine our model of how experiments with such tonal linchpins
linchpins which also hold together the Lacanian edifice in their guise as points de
capiton can coordinate tonal desire.
Love and the objet petit a

Ives’s Serenity (1919), Song 42, a setting of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Dear Lord and
Father of Mankind, contains a crucial moment that betrays something of the
Lacanian logic of desire as mechanism for interpreting the object a. The setting is
beautifully simplistic almost minimalistic as tonal momentum is compressed
into the mere oscillation of two ambiguous accompanying chords: essentially, an F
chord (underpinned with an alien b? ) and an E minor chord (with an equally foreign
c >? in the bass see Example 6).
The sole deviation from the alternation is the sequestered passing cadential
progression that coincides with the words ‘Interpreted by love’. The F chord’s
extraneous b ? recedes to yield a pure F triad, allowing us to ‘interpret’ the initial
mystery chord retroactively as F; this doubtless informs our tonal expectations for the
remainder of the song. The F moves chromatically towards a B= chord before
returning in a pseudo-cadential gesture, further setting our tonally interpretative
mechanisms working. The process of interpretation is our interpretation as listeners,
to be sure, but perhaps the process is equally embodied in the temporal harmonic
flow of the music itself. Interpretation, for Lacan, is identical to the process of desire.
Lacan claims that ‘interpretation is directed towards desire, with which, in a certain
sense, it is identical. Desire, in fact, is interpretation itself.’58 This reinforces the
Lacanian insight that this object a (indicated by the mystery chords) catches our
attention but cannot readily be admitted into a signifying network, and thus
launches a desire (interpretation) that draws towards a false vision of wholeness (a
tonal centre, for example) constructed through its tension discharges as points de
capiton (perhaps a local tonic confirmed through cadential progression). This point
de capiton supports the illusion by welding the signifier (‘dominant’ chord) to a
signified (‘tonic’ chord), and this ‘satisfying’ glimpse of tonal stability forces an
interpretation of the mystery chords. Naturally this gesture, although adopting the
interpretative mechanism of the text, ultimately raises more questions than it
answers. Is the F, then, a tonic with the B= as subdominant, or is B= the tonic with F
57
Burkholder, ‘The Critique of Tonality’, 221.
58
Example 6. Extract from Serenity, Song no. 42 from 114 Songs. Serenity Music by Charles Ives #
Copyright 1942 (Renewed) Associated Music Publishers, Inc. (BMI).
7 2
2 2
Je sus knelt to share with Thee, the si lence

10
of e ter ni ty In ter pre ted by love.
as its own dominant? Perhaps the ultimate message of Ives’s setting is the same as
Lacan’s that an interpretation is always a symbolic misinterpretation or
misrecognition (me´connaissance) of the object a that lies beyond us but puts our
interpretative apparatus to work nonetheless.
Of course, interpretation works on at least two distinct levels. On one level we as
listeners are offered a mystery chord that we may process and use to construct a
fantasy object (or objects) of desire; on another level the music supports the text
and therefore contains its own narrative structure: the music itself is constructed as
an interpreting subject. In Ives’s Song no. 4 from the 114 At Sea (1921,
reproduced as Example 7) both text and music explore the mechanics of the
interpretation process of the object a in a revealing way. While, as shown, Lacan on
the one hand equates interpretation with desire, Ives’s poet, Robert Underwood
Johnson, like Whittier, more optimistically calls this force ‘love’. This is surely not
such a stretch even for Lacan, who claims that any demand (the process of demand
being closely integrated into the desiring process) is always a demand for love,
Example 7. At Sea, Song no. 4 from 114 Songs. At Sea by Charles Ives Copyright # 1933 by Merion
Music Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Some things are un di vined ex
l.h.
Slowly
cept by love Vague to the mind, but

l.h. l.h.
l.h.
real to the heart, As is the point of yon ho ri zon line
l.h. l.h. l.h. l.h.
r.h.
11 più rit.
3
Near est the dear one on a for eign shore.

l.h.
l.h. l.h.
più rit.
r.h.
l.h.
referring back to the primal moment of a baby’s first cry that is interpreted by the
loving mother.59 In At Sea, we learn that the mysteries of life are once again
understood only by love (and ‘the heart’), the power that interprets:
Some things are undivined except by love,

Vague to the mind, but real to the heart,
As is the point of yon horizon line,
Nearest the dear one on a foreign shore.
While the harmonies that underpin the setting, particularly those of the opening
line, are much clearer than those of Afterglow, they still foster a degree of ambiguity
(see Example 7). The vertical composites of major chords and related minors create
tonal confusion from the outset. Is the opening chord a C6 or an Am7? Is the second
chord D6 or Bm7? An underlying tonal motion in the first line, carried through the
strong bass, is the I0II0V0I progression in C major, but this is distorted by the
conflicting tonal allusions above it (see Example 8).
For example, an E7 element arises in the second half of bar 2 (as discharge from
Bm7) and needs to resolve to an A triad. Melodically, this demand is satisfied to
some degree in the upper voice by the eƒdƒc >ƒ descent with its over-reaching aƒ.
But this occurs above a similarly fifth-based progression from D to Gm7 (II 0‘V’7 in
C major) in the bass.60 These overlapping discharges of dominant-seventh tensions
fully support the text ‘Some things are undivined’; everything here is tonally vague.
These harmonies continue in their confused state until the tonal linchpin (point de
capiton) is inserted an explicitly clear cadence on C, reinforced by the words ‘by
59
Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, Ecrits, trans. Sheridan, 31122 (p. 321).
60
This G7 is, of course, only intimated in the bass; the third is minor and the fifth is diminished
(spelled as C > to accompany the A element).
Example 8. At Sea : ‘Some things are undivined except by love’. All Rights Reserved. International
Copyright Secured. Used by Permission.
Am Bm E7 A
F7 E7
C D Gm7
I ‘II’ ‘V’ V I
love’. As much as this asserts C major, it equally interprets the energy of the previous
chords as C major, or at least asks us to interpret them in this way retroactively. But,
seemingly, this is the only pure cadence in the setting the best we achieve. As the
song takes its course, we can never recapture this fleeting moment of satisfaction in
which we constructed the illusory object a.
The insatiability of desire in At Sea, a song in which a lover yearns for the object of
his/her affections across the water, is highly Tristanesque. This is doubly the case when
considering Lawrence Kramer’s exposé of the connections between the sea, the flow of
the Freudian libido, and chromatic harmonies that are structured by the need for the
dominant-seventh chord to discharge its tension.61 What we achieve in At Sea is a
form of resigned stability, brought about by the search for the lost object a. As the
lover sings ‘Vague to the mind’, the piano settles on the upper pitch dƒ, accompanied
by the low bass G ? that grounds the piece in the tense realm of the dominant. The
difference between the earlier G0C cadence and this open-ended ground G is surely
the difference between the fantasy image of love as object a, and love in the painfully
miserable day-to-day sense of resigned dissatisfaction and separation from our object.
This twists the song into a rather cogently Lacanian anti-Tristan.
A similar tonal message weaves its way through the fabric of Song 57, another song
about detached lovers (as objects a), although the metaphor of water that symbolized
the lovers’ separation in At Sea is now vaporized in Mists. This poem, written in 1910
by Ives’s wife, Harmony Twitchell, was set to music at the same time but
recomposed ten years later.62 As in At Sea, a G pedal structures this piece, though
now as a ‘tonic’, first indicated in the introductory phrase. A G triad rises
sequentially through A, Bm and C to D. This D, employed as dominant, reconfirms
the G as tonic. However, the G is now clouded by the ‘misty’ whole-tone sonorities
that may prevent us from experiencing it as fully diatonic (see Example 9).
The narrative voice of Mists sets an atmosphere of melancholic confusion
represented by the mists that ‘weep with us who bid farewell’:
61
Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 13575.
62
H. Wiley Hitchcock, Critical Commentaries for Charles Ives, 129 Songs (Middleton, WI, 2004), 130.
Example 9. Mists, Song no. 57 from 114 Songs. Mists by Charles Ives Copyright # 1933 by Merion
Music Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Largo sostenuto
Low lie the

see footnote
mists; They hide each hill and
dell; The grey skies weep with
8 8
l.h.
★ The group of notes in the r.h. in measures 2, 3, 4, 5 and 16, 17, 18 may be omitted,
in which case the l.h. part, with the exception of the low G, may be doubled an octave
higher. If the r.h. notes are used they should be scarcely audible.
8
us who bid fare well.

8 8 8 8 8
l.h.
10
But hap pier

r.h. only
8
più animando
13
days through mem ’ry weaves

poco rall. e dim.
l.h.
r.h.
15 3
a spell, And
rit.
17
brings new hope to

★
a tempo
19
hearts who bid fare well.
rall.
Low lie the mists;

They hide each hill and dell;
The grey skies weep with us who bid farewell.
But happier days through memory weaves [sic] a spell,
And brings new hope to hearts who bid farewell.
The setting is semi-through-composed, following an ABCA design. The ‘misty’

outer A sections (bars 16 and 1720) are anchored by the pedal G, but bitonally
arranged augmented chords (that is, an A chord above a G chord) alternate in a
regular succession above. This alternation ensures that a single whole-tone sonority
weakens the G pedal at any given moment. This said, the lower chord of G is
certainly prominent, owing both to its consonance with the bass G ? and to its heavier
presentation in the middle register (reinforced by Ives’s own footnote indicating that
the upper notes could be omitted altogether if so desired but should certainly be
rendered ‘scarcely audible’). The balance is tipped further when the regulated chord-
level oscillation is destabilized by a meta-alternation at bar level that calls upon the
other whole-tone collection (that is, a B = chord above a G > chord). The fact that
the B section (bars 711) replaces the G pedal with its C > the unstable tritone
further confirms the inadequacy of the G to coordinate the tonality fully.
At the poem’s mid-point the C section (bars 1216) the protagonists begin to
court desire through memory. This memory, of course, corresponds to the Lacanian
fantasy screen that is the locus of the object a, and thereby offers new hope. Fantasy
grows out of the mists. Notice how, once the memory starts working, the composer
offers a loose reconstruction of the introductory rising triadic sequence that opened
the song before the mists had enveloped the lovers. When the singer declares ‘But
happier days through memory’, this rising sequence (A, B, C>, D, E=, F) is actually
underpinned by the bass pitches A? and subsequently D? to provide forward
momentum (see Example 10).
These again reaffirm the G as tonic through the II0V bass implication. But when
G arrives in the upper bass, it underpins an E= triad that heralds a dramatic (and
chromatic) descent to render the words ‘weaves a spell’ as the rising trajectory turns
downwards to deny the upward thrust. The logic here is surely that the hope found
in fantasy dissolves as the singer rationalizes the illusory quality of the image now
exposed as a ‘spell’. However much the fantasy of past wholeness provided hope and
inaugurated the search for tonal clarity, its failure and dissolution into a blurred D=
chord (a respelling of the B section’s C>) reaffirms the failure of the object a.
This enfolds back into the ‘misty’ G region of the A section in a ‘recapitulation’
that returns us to our originally unhappy position. The final pure G chord, while
ostensibly a return to the plenitude of the opening, is once again felt as a hollow
gesture. While the mists seemingly have cleared, there is no clarifying D7 0G
motion to make us feel either secure or satisfied. If anything, the G chord
compounds our misery; the happiest moment of the song was obviously the
approach to G through fantasmatic desire constructed from the II0V. It seems,
Example 10. Mists : ‘But happier days through memory weaves a spell’.
A B C D E F E Dm ‘D m’ C+ ‘B’+ B + A+ A + D
II V VI/I
then, that the message here is also Lacanian the object a is a fantasy and must
remain an imaginary object in order to coordinate desire; we must not approach it
too directly lest we risk losing it forever. In this piece, Ives leads us to the object a,
but the impossible object fails to evacuate the atmosphere of interminable longing so
expertly created; and this unmasking of the object as a non-existent illusion (a fully
Lacanian exposition, as I will soon argue) is staged most theatrically in the final song
I examine, Premonitions, Song 24.
A rite of passage: ‘symbolic castration’

As is well known, one privileged version of the object a for Lacan is the phallus.
Indeed, in his early work the phallic signifier was a precursor to the object a.63
However, he always maintained the significance of the phallus and in 1973 still
asserted its status as a master signifier (a ‘signifier without a signified’), because rather
than connoting any signified in particular its value lies in coordinating all
other signifiers in the chain.64 Lacan had earlier examined Hans Holbein’s
‘Ambassadors’ (see Figure 2) in Seminar XI; this celebrated painting encloses a
disturbing shape at its base that Lacan, ever fond of surrealist montage, likens to
Dali’s ‘soft watches’.65 When viewed from an angle, the curious misshapen image
now becomes a point of anamorphosis that resembles a giant skull. Working against
the foreground aura of grandeur, luxury and technology, this fearsome vision
provides a vital reference point of supplementary meaning: ‘Holbein makes visible
for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated.’66 Although Lacan’s
63
As Yannis Stavrakakis observes, ‘It could be argued that the concept of the objet petit a gradually
takes, in the work of Lacan, the place of the symbolic phallus. The object-cause of desire takes the
place of the signifier of desire. It could even be possible to view these two terms as identical’ (Lacan
and the Political (London, 1999), 50).
64
Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (New York and London,
1998), 80.
65
66
Ibid., 889.
Figure 2. Hans Holbein the Younger, ‘Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (‘‘The
Ambassadors’’)’. # The National Gallery, London.
argument is woven into his notion of the gaze, the formal function of this
anamorphotic spot is the phallic signifier. As Žižek elaborates, ‘Phallic is precisely the
detail that ‘‘does not fit’’, that ‘‘sticks out’’ from the idyllic surface scene and
denatures it, renders it uncanny.’67 Such a signifier opens up a hole in the imaginary
order and fills it with interpretation, activating desire. In this latter regard it
resembles our object a, but some psychoanalytical orientations indicated by Lacan’s
focus on this phallus in its capacity as master signifier can move us towards a more
nuanced view of musical organization of desire in Charles Ives.
Apropos of Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’, Ives’s Premonitions (1921) a setting of
Robert Underwood Johnson’s poem should thus suggest a certain Lacanian
reading:
There’s a shadow on the grass that was never there before; and the ripples as they pass of
an unseen oar; and the song we knew by rote, seems to falter in the throat, a footfall,
scarcely noted, lingers near the open door. Omens that were once but jest, Now are
messengers of Fate; and the blessing held the best cometh not or comes too late. Yet
67
Žižek, Looking Awry, 90.
whatever life may lack, not a blown leaf beckons back. Forward! Forward! is the summons.
Forward! Where new horizons wait.
Each image describes an intrusion of the real within the symbolic texture that
denatures the otherwise idyllic vista. Each also reflects the uncanny feelings of the
gaze by which the subject observing the disturbance is objectivized by some
menacing agent. The object a qua phallic signifier is indicated by the inexplicable
shadow on the grass, the ripples in the river, the footfall by the open door.68 These
‘signifiers without signifieds’ initiate our search for meaning. To accompany these
individual images, this song (see Example 11) comprises four distinct harmonic types
that figure in an intimate drama: (1) mystery chords, similar to those of Afterglow ;
(2) ‘impressionistic’ chords, such as pentatonic ‘black-note’ sonorities; (3) clear
diatonic triads; and (4) bitonal combinations of triads separated by the hands of the
pianist. But how do these harmonic types support the poet’s imagery? The first
consideration is a very basic one. My conviction is that this piece follows the poem in
its division into two discrete halves, the turning point (like that of Afterglow) being
the line ‘Omens that were once but jest, Now are messengers of Fate; and the
blessing held the best cometh not or comes too late.’ If the first half, with its
denatured pictures, is characterized by mystery chords and similarly excessive
‘impressionistic’ chords, the second part, with its pragmatic injunction ‘Forward!’,
employs purely triadic forms, often in clearly bitonal complexes.
Like those demonstrated in Afterglow, the mystery chords in the first half of
Premonitions comprise multiple dominant-seventh tendencies. The dramatic situ-
ation of this setting invites such chords that at once indicate both the lack and
the surplus of tonal centres. Immediately prior to the vocal entrance, the pitches
b?f >?a? in the right hand suggest a loose B7 chord.69 While this right hand
immediately leaps to a clear D7 chord in the upper register, the B7 element
‘resolves’ (albeit vaguely with registral transfers) to an E major chord in the left
hand, signalling a dislocated cadential motion in the bass register (see Example
12). This E major chord acquires the tension of a seventh from the upper dƒ
pitch, and a d ? an octave lower soon figures in a G chord that combines with the
upper register to produce a ‘resolution’ from the D7, reinforced by the rising
melodic f >?0b?. A fluid network of discharge patterns thus emerges (despite the
pseudo-bitonal organization), resulting in the upper resolution to elements of a C
triad with clearer voice-leading, though this tonal satisfaction is naturally
compromised by the chromatic harmonies beneath. As will become apparent
68
The image of the ‘footfall, scarcely noted’ near the door is particularly reminiscent of Lacan’s seminar
on the gaze, a concept inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of the sounds heard while peeping
through a keyhole. These sounds objectified the listener as the object of some Other’s gaze, providing
the feeling of being watched. Lacan, Seminar XI, 84.
69
An e = in the upper bass also reinforces the B7 element, acting as an enharmonic d > (as it is shown in
Example 12), and an upper f h? also chromatically slides to f >?.
Example 11. Premonitions, Song no. 24 from 114 Songs. Premonitions by Charles Ives
Copyright # 1933 by Merion Music Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Slowly
There’s a sha dow on the grass

r.h.
l.h.
that was nev er there be fore: and the

l.h.
rip ples as they pass whis per of an un seen oar;
l.h.
3
And the song we knew by rote, seems to fal ter

in the throat, a foot fall, scarce ly no ted, lin gers near the o pen door.
O mens that were once but jest, Now are mes sen gers of
heavily
Fate; and the bless ing held the best com eth not or
faster
comes too late. Yet what ev er life may lack, not a blown leaf
accel.
3 3 3
3
beck ons back, For ward! For ward! is the sum mons.
accel.
For ward! Where new hor i zons wait.

through this discussion, the path towards the chord of C once again acquires
particular significance in the Wagnerian libidinal current of the piece, not least in
the G7 upper element of the subsequent chord (marked in Example 11). But for
the present, each of these mysterious sonorities contains the same ‘effects without
causes’ as are found in the poetry: dominant-seventh chords, as free-floating
signifiers, now divorced from a syntactically prepared tonal centre, simultaneously
lacking and excessive, set the signification process in motion along the path of
‘desire’. These seventh chords then become Lacan’s anamorphotic spots (phallic
signifiers) that fuel our interpretative mechanisms (desires), just as they did in
Afterglow, Serenity, At Sea and Mists.
As mentioned, the piece turns around on its axis in the second part. Of course,
the energetic thrust of this poem lies in the final lines, where we move
unexpectedly from the mystical-psychoanalytical to a pragmatic affirmation of life.
After Underwood Johnson gives the object a a particular name ‘lack’ he
disavows it in favour of a command to move forward and live life to the full. A
more clichéd word-setting would allow a teleologically driven tonal centre to
propel the stirring call of ‘Forward!’ and celebrate such new horizons with a
Example 12. Mystery chords in Premonitions.
D7 C
B7 G
E7
strong diatonic orientation. But Ives is a Lacanian, and in fact goes as far as to
show us just how facile this fantasy of wholeness would have been. At the
structural point of denial in the poem (‘Yet whatever life may lack’) Ives presents
a pure C major triad. Given that the previous line had allowed a moderately
strong G7 implication to flourish, this could potentially be experienced as a V0I
cadential gesture, similar to that of Afterglow. But as the poem indicates that ‘the
blessing held the best cometh not or comes too late’, Ives, rather than settle on
this new C major triad, rather flippantly strings second-inversion triads together.
Neither do the links in his flimsy chain (CDE = F) support the melodic line
(pitches a ?b ?f ?d ?). This exposes the triad, so keenly awaited, as a joke that
mocks the pervading atmosphere of libidinal intensity.
In this final gesture, when the speaker disavows the authority and allure of the
object a, calling us to new horizons (‘Forward! Forward! is the summons. Forward!
Where new horizons wait’), Ives offers a fairly brutal form of bitonality as an
accompaniment. Again this follows a clear G7 (albeit with a C pedal in the bass) on
the words ‘beckons back’, but the ensuing C major triad is heard below an equally
strong B= triad. Dividing two whole-tone related triads between the pianist’s hands,
Ives progresses in contrary motion to differentiate each chord through registral
distance. Gone are the ambiguous mystery chords; this is bitonality at its purest. The
miasma of denaturalized and uncanny tonal implications, which were the mainstay of
the poem, has been channelled into a much clearer form of bitonality that relies to a
lesser degree on the highly subjective interpretation and engagement invited by the
mystery chords (see Figure 3, which tabulates these triads as presented in the score).
What the music achieves here with its overblown dynamics, tempo fluctuations and
polarization of bitonal elements is exactly what the speaker of the poem activates
disavowal. Just as the speaker rejects the truth of the mysterious ‘premonitions’ in
order to live and move forward unfettered, so do these assertive triadic harmonies
leave behind the ambiguous mystery chords with their dominant-seventh implica-
tions. However, even within this moment of bitonal separation, with its clear contrary
motion and vertiginous accelerando, the object a as surplus lurks regardless, though in
a much less obvious way. The two triads on C and B= combine to produce a dominant
thirteenth an impressionistic chord to be sure, but one that still contains the
‘dominant-seventh’ driving quality. Though each chord is successively turned upside
down, the whole-tone relationship between its bitonal elements always produces a
surplus value. Yet because of the oscillation between thirteenth chords and ‘upside-
down’ whole-tone relations, the repressive mechanism of the speaker works with
differing degrees of success. Nonetheless, the object a is never truly lost.
RH B B E Em G Am B F
LH C A Fm D Bm G F E
Figure 3. Table of bitonal triads in the closing gesture of Premonitions.

The Ivesian bitonal choice here is a very honest one; honest in a psychoanalytical
sense. Rather than allowing us to be duped into a diatonic vision of wholeness, he
shows us the faulty (neurotic) mechanism by which the Lacanian split subject
represses its mysterious (imaginary) past and lays claim to a more assertive (symbolic)
future. But how does one conceptualize the clear disjunction between the two halves
of the song in Lacanian terms? By viewing the object a as phallus it becomes possible
to locate a highly nuanced Lacanian passage between the two states, a progression
elaborated more recently by Žižek, who plays Lacan against his arch-critic Gilles
Deleuze.70 Žižek’s discussion of the passage between the registers of phallic
coordination and phallic castration is originally conceived in the domain of human

sexuality, but is designed to be transferred to other signifying networks (and
therefore to music).71 In the first register a subject’s desire is coordinated around the
phallus as agent of the law whose image regulates the dispersed bodily drives into a
heterogeneous whole (Žižek’s illustration is the schoolboy who is so sex-obsessed that
even his maths homework reminds him of what he would really like to be doing).72
Sexual meaning floods everything, and creates an untenable position whose very
impossibility sustains his desire. In the second register, the phallus is exposed as an
empty signifier and consequently desexualized; it is rendered impotent, in a word,
castrated (Žižek’s characteristically lowbrow illustration from the film Short Cuts sees
a housewife engaging in ‘phone-sex’ while she completes the housework).73 Full
enjoyment (Lacanian jouissance) cannot operate within the symbolic law, and Žižek’s
project is to theorize the passage between these two registers that rely on the Lacanian
notion of symbolic castration. Rather than the obvious meaning (a humiliating act
whereby a person is stripped of his/her power), Lacan refers to the moment when the
phallus which coordinated our overflowing desires as an imaginary signified is
unveiled as a hollow signifier it ‘falls into the signified’.74 Essentially this is our
entrance into the zone of the symbolic order, where there is no true signified, merely
a chain of signifiers in which the power of the symbol reigns supreme and in which
we lose connection to the real and its bodily drives.
70
This is doubtless an unusual alliance, as Lacan and Deleuze make ‘strange bedfellows’, Deleuze’s
Anti-Oedipus being a critique of the Lacanian model of desire based on lack. But Žižek’s wider
project, both in his article ‘Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze: Three Strange Bedfellows’ (Žižek,
Interrogating the Real, 16989) and as part of the more sustained comparison in his ‘Phallus’
(Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York and London, 2004), 8793), is to
unmask a ‘different’ Deleuze, the Deleuze of The Logic of Sense, certain of whose ideas,
notwithstanding his critical assault on Lacan, can be supplemented/supported by certain tenets of
Lacanian dogma. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze proposes these two registers (phallic coordination and
phallic castration), which, as Žižek is at pains to show, are of fundamentally Lacanian conception.
71
Žižek, ‘Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze’.
72
See ibid., 173.
73
Ibid., 174. Short Cuts (1994), directed by Robert Altman, distributed by Fine Line Features, USA.
74
Žižek, ‘Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze’, 178.
While this motion between the two states presents itself most forcibly in the
domain of sexuality, its true discourse is the discourse of language; its cross-domain
mapping with music is thus fully supported. Musically, then, the contrast between
these two registers is encoded in Ives’s Premonitions. In the first half of the song we
desperately try to solve the riddle of the shadow on the grass (etc.), and our desire is
coordinated by a missing tonic chord (qua phallus); in the second, we witness the
playful non-functionality of this chord in all its banality, first as a rising sequence,
then as almost juvenile bitonality. The tonic chord that we so desired and allowed to
coordinate the first half of the piece is now fully disempowered as we witness its
failure to lure us any more. It becomes a ‘desexualized’ signifier for tonality, fully
abstracted from the libidinal circuit that had earlier venerated it; it is no longer
singular; it shares a non-libidinal community with others, each as valueless as the
next. This is Lacanian symbolic castration at its purest; the tonic chord whose image
once coordinated the tonal motion now loses its allure and is reduced to just another
signifier in the chain just another triad in a network of others.
The question, of course, is how this inversion of the phallus of coordination into the
phallus of castration comes about. Žižek proposes that Lacan’s fundamental insight as
a psychoanalyst is his recognition that ‘coordination through the phallic central image
necessarily fails’.75 The phallus, as imaginary object that coordinates meaning, proves
unworkable (because it functions only as an image), and through symbolic castration
we leave the imaginary and enter the symbolic; the phallus thus becomes the
desexualized symbol that is ‘the operator of the evacuation of sexual meaning’.76 It is
thus subject to extreme failure. But how does this apply to Ivesian harmony? In musical
terms, the effects of the tonic chord’s failure are felt in the latter half of the piece when
these free-floating ‘desexualized’ tonics bring no satisfaction and are reduced to mere
symbols of fulfilment; no longer repositories for Wagnerian libidinal energy, they are
fundamentally disconnected from the piece’s libidinal current. But what marks the
moment of failure? For this we return to our exploration of the first half of the piece,
where the breakdown of the Wagnerian libido is rendered in its most audible form.
As has been shown, during the whole setting of the ‘premonitions’ section of the
poem, Ives employs mysterious harmonies that occasionally seem very loosely to
single out a potential tonic; this often (though not exclusively) takes the form of a
pursuit of C major. After the first seed has been sown (see Example 12), the
subsequent pure dominant seventh is our old friend G7, actually quite clearly
invoked between lines 1 and 2 (see ‘and the ripples as they pass’), although it had
previously enjoyed a miniature incarnation in the bass just prior to this, as is
indicated in Example 11, the tritone resolving in classical fashion to C major despite
the complex harmonies above. Although the pull of C major is most palpable as a
single chord at the end of this line, its satisfaction is thwarted in favour of its tritone-
75
Žižek, ‘Hegel, Lacan and Deleuze’, 175.
76
Ibid.
related F>, found amid the pentatonic chord on F> (‘unseen oar’), the piano’s black-
note chord (see Example 13). At first sight an impressionist gimmick, this pentatonic
constellation offers a concentrated F> major chord with the additional second (G>)
and sixth (D>) a ‘jazzy’ version of the chord, to be sure; nonetheless, a potential
local tonic is indicated following the C>7 element that is dimly intimated in the bass
register of the previous chord (C> E>(F)G> B).77 This ready switch between a
hypothetical tonic of C and one of F> perhaps shows that the piece is structured by
no global tonic, but rather a plurality of more localized tonics.78
C major, it seems, has failed to take hold, and is usurped by its tritone opposite,
F>, which becomes the new object of focus. The seeds of the F> discharge grow in the
subsequent line, which marks the true point of failure for the tonic as phallic signifier
(object a) to coordinate the subject even in speech; the speaker can no longer access
the words he/she knows ‘by rote’. A particularly cogent image is expressed musically
here through the characteristic failure to clinch the particular tonic. A C> chord
(highlighted in Example 14, which removes the pitches I regard as incidental)79
moves to a vague F>6 in a clear bid to trace a V0I progression. This latter chord is
replaced by its minor equivalent (D>), yet so trenchant is the melodic motion
Example 13. Premonitions : ‘And the ripples as they pass . . .’.
G7 C 7
F 6
77
The chord is enharmonically altered from the score in Example 13 to highlight the C>7 implications.
Notably, the diminished fifth of the dominant-seventh chord is identical to its own tritone
transposition. Thus C>7=5 is identical to G7=5 in terms of pc content. The switch between C and F>
implication is extremely smooth, and this highly ambiguous chord may well be heard as an altered
G7 function (if, indeed, it is experienced diatonically at all by this point) before its ‘discharge’ into F>.
78
These ‘tonics’ are hypothetical precisely because I find no global ‘tonic’; there is no Schenkerian tonal
‘background’, and any triad’s position must be highly questionable. What is vital here is the implied
motion around the cycle of fifths involved in the motion toward such triads. In this case, the F> that
follows the C>7 establishes that, in this local instance, the F> has been selected at least as a temporary
pathway, although C> 0F> could well be heard as V7 0I in F> or II7 0V in B, or even VI 0II in E.
However, the purely triadic nature of F> leads me to suggest tentatively that we may hear it as a
potential ‘local tonic’.
79
Pitches D>, F> and A>, pertaining to the vi7 chord, are co-mingled with the C>7 in different ways
through its various presentations. The second presentation of C>7 is slightly less obscured.
Example 14. Premonitions: ‘And the song we knew by rote . . .’.

3
And the song we knew by rote, seems to fal ter

F major V V I 6 /VI V V+VI
in the throat,
X compressed F major
through triadic C> pitches down to a stable F> that the harmony beneath is surely
heard as a distorted version of an F> triad. Discharge is immediately re-attempted,
but the revitalized C> now dissolves into a chord whose tensions, if they exist, are far
from apparent in the vertically compressed F major scale (on a bass of B =) at the
words ‘falter in the throat’. This is the classic illustration of the object a, which
cannot be symbolized or articulated in speech; similarly, Lacan himself conveniently
describes the object a as something ‘stuck in the gullet of the signifier’.80
This effect is compounded by a further failed attempt to ground the piece’s
tonality, which accompanies the words ‘Omens that were once but jest’. Resuming
80
the thread of C major after this brief foray into its tritone-related region, the simple
indication ‘heavily’ complements the arcane open fifths in the right hand with the
strong G chords (both major and minor) in the bass.81 This occurrence is doubly
significant owing to the disjunction between the poetic and musical messages. The
poetic implication is that the phallic signifier has anchored the speaker to some
degree at least old words have been invested with new meaning: ‘Omens that were
once but jest, Now are messengers of fate.’ But the tonality finally fails to ground
itself as the re-established G7 chord (again through a loosely repeated fragment on
‘cometh not or comes too late’ see Example 15) dissolves into the frivolous
‘desexualized’ triads of the following line. Thus the tonic chord as an image of
coordination is once again exposed, through its failure, as a thoroughly illusory, yet
essential, object a. The music thereby underscores the poem in its inversion of the
tonic of coordination into the tonic of castration.
In his Philosophy of New Music, Adorno complains of atonal composers who
composed with redundant tonic triads, which he regarded as ‘impotent’ or ‘powerless
clichés’.82 Yet, in Lacanian theory, this same impotence (castration) is woven into the
very texture of desire-satisfaction in object-orientated signifying systems. And Ives,
too, when he offers us a tonic chord, thoroughly unveils the (lack of ) mystery behind it;
Ives’s tonic is not only impotent (Adorno) but also symbolically castrated (Lacan). And
to conclude, let us turn to Ives’s own report of the tonal system, using his own new
third term: emasculated.
Richy Wagner did get away from doh-me-soh, which was more than some others did [. . .
but he liked] to dress up in purple and sing about heroism (a woman posing as a man)
[. . .] Music has been, to a large extent, an emasculated art and Wagner did his best to
keep it so. What masculation he has in it, is make believe.83
Although Ives’s critique of Wagner is perhaps most entertaining when he lampoons

Wagner’s dress code, it pointedly also revolves around subjugation to the tonal
system, notwithstanding Wagner’s move away from tonality’s most basic form the
‘doh-me-soh’. In retaining faith in the organizational powers of the tonal system,
81
While other interpretations of this ambiguous passage are doubtless plausible indeed my Lacanian
analysis relies on the multiple tonal impulses that operate beneath the surface I find the move
towards a G7 chord after the prevailing dominant pedal and the frequent array of C major triads in
the passage to be indications that C major at least holds some tonal governance here, even if this is
only retroactively asserted by the end of the passage.
82
‘Der fortgeschrittenste Stand der technischen Verfahrungsweise zeichnet Aufgaben vor, denen
gegenüber die traditionellen Klänge als ohnmächtige Clichés sich erweisen’ (Theodor W. Adorno,
Philosophie der Neuen Musik (Tübingen, 1949), 22). Mitchell and Bloomster’s translation uses
‘impotent’ (Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley
V. Bloomster (London, 1948), 34), whereas Robert Hullot-Kentor uses ‘powerless’ (Adorno,
Philosophy of New Music, trans. Hullot-Kentor, 32).
83
Charles E. Ives: Memos, 134.
Example 15. Premonitions : ‘Omens that were once but jest . . .’.
O mens that were once but jest, Now are mes sen gers of Fate; and the
C major: I/V v7 I/v 7 V/I v/I
bless ing held the best com eth not or comes too late.
V/II/I V7
despite his progressivity, Wagner was aiding the emasculation of music, which in
essence is Lacan’s symbolic castration. Ives’s words also adopt Lacanian meaning
when he exposes Wagner’s heroic ‘masculation’ as a fantasy; the Wagnerian tonal
system, which in Tristan is coordinated around a tonic triad, is revealed to be ‘make
believe’. Of course, one could argue, as does Žižek, that this is the very point of the
conclusion of Tristan (Isolde’s fantasy), but Ives, in his alternative way, transposes
this fundamentally Lacanian message into his own music. Premonitions, and certain
of the other songs I have discussed, contain this same castration of the tonic chord:
a critique of its lack of ability to coordinate human desires, except as a fantasy. As
Burkholder has already shown us, Ives has a penchant for ‘revealing as artificial and
conventional concepts others accept as natural and inviolable’.84 And this very
84
Burkholder, ‘The Critique of Tonality’, 222.
critique is engrained, not only in Ives’s words, but in the very harmonic fabric of his
music in the function of the tonic chord as the imaginary object a.
However, Burkholder refers not to any single tonally programmatic narrative of an
individual Ivesian composition, but to his oeuvre as a whole. This more globally
significant concern may perhaps extend to an understanding of various other types of
fin de siècle music that share similar practices. We must not forget that Adorno had
numerous composers in mind when he referred to the anachronistic ‘impotence’ of
the tonic chord, and was certainly not referring specifically to Ives; others may
therefore betray different messages about the failure (or otherwise) of a tonal centre
to coordinate our experience of their music. However, in my view, these short,

intimate, playful products of Ives’s ‘house-cleaning’, with their ritualistic passageways
between different registers of desire production, not only critique the tonal system
that had dominated music for centuries, but also interrogate, in a highly pertinent
Lacanian way, the very nature of human desire.
But apart from Ives’s philosophical outlook, which shares parallels with that of
Lacan in this particular sense, it is hoped that this brief insight into Ives’s aesthetic
of desire has demonstrated that Lacanian theory not only enriches our experience
of music in a broad sense (as outlined at the head of this study), but also pertains
to specific techniques of harmonic control. For one thing, Lacan has played a
crucial role in analysing the ways in which desire is inscribed in linguistic systems.
These systems are created through the interplay of signifiers, which, in music, can
be conceptualized (although alternative conceptions are naturally viable) as units
such as dominant sevenths that, as for Rameau, drive the whole desiring process of
harmonic syntax. The point of my analyses has not been simply to ‘analyse Ives’,
but to find a strategy for dealing with the portrayals of desire which I find
embodied in this very interplay of harmonic signifiers. Ives’s chosen texts
tantalizingly disclose the very Lacanian nature of desire’s basis in fantasy and
memory in terms of an illusory object, and his tonal strategies, although potentially
present in his ‘absolute music’, are rendered acutely Lacanian in their sympathetic
responses to these texts. Text and complex harmonic language are therefore
mediated well by Lacanian theory, which additionally suggests new ways of
tackling Ivesian harmony:
(1) Lacan’s emphasis on interpretation and its basis in desire are explored in the
ambiguous harmonies of Serenity and At Sea, which seem to drive the ear in
various directions, but syntactically converge upon a single point of entry
into a diatonic system, which is often asserted retroactively as a point de
capiton;
(2) the assumed ‘tonic’ behind this, posited as an object of lack, is shown by Ives
to be a Lacanian misrecognition (méconnaissance) of its earlier conflicting
impulses, as demonstrated by the failure of any given ‘tonic’ to satisfy us;
(3) as invited by Afterglow and Premonitions, my location of the object a in Ives’s

harmonies is dual, as it registers both lack and surplus when Ives weaves both
into his harmonic fabric, inviting an extension of Schenkerian practice that
registers the possibility of hearing complex chords not only as functional
agents in numerous keys, but also as possibilities that are inscribed within the
chords themselves in a pseudo-polytonal way;
(4) Wagnerian lack (as ‘suspended tonality’) is not ‘replaced’ by Ivesian/Lacanian
bitonal surplus, but the nature of both is incorporated into the Ivesian
narrative;
(5) in Premonitions and Afterglow Lacan’s theory of symbolic castration explains
curious moments in Ives’s tonal progressions, where two different registers of
tonal coordination (essentially the imaginary and symbolic) are outlaid, the
constructed tonic appearing at the meeting point of the two worlds.
It is to be hoped that a portrait of Ives emerges as a composer as rich in philosophical

insight about the human condition as he is pioneer of avant-garde composition, and
that both strands of his creative personality, while so often dissociated in critical
discourse on Ives, can be sutured effectively by strategic appeals to Lacanian theory.
Such theory, while clearly anachronistic, and in some ways contrary to the usual
portrayal of Ives as madcap, experimental ‘New England Transcendentalist’, may
perhaps stimulate new conceptualizations of how tonal desire can be recuperated and
its complex procedures still be embodied in the post-Wagnerian vortex of so-called
‘post-tonal’ harmony.
ABSTRACT
A musical response to Lacan’s concept of the objet petit a the imaginary ‘object-cause’ of
desire accounts for certain songs by Charles Ives in which ‘tonic’ chords are signified by
complex networks of dominant-seventh harmonies. These objects of tonal desire adopt the
structure of both lack (as absent centre) and surplus (as multiple tonal centres). In each song,
Ives employs individual harmonic techniques to question the ability of tonic chords to
coordinate a fractured tonality. Investigating Afterglow, Serenity, At Sea and Mists from the
1922 collection of 114 Songs, I explore the Lacanian dimensions of each text and setting,
bringing out the message that each song offers about the function of the tonic. An analysis of
Premonitions exemplifies a distinction Slavoj Žižek proposed between a functional system in
which the object a coordinates desire as absent centre, and a system in which the object is
stripped of its organizational power.

The Tonic Chord and Lacans Object A in S

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On: 28 November 2011, At: 07:25

Journal of the Royal Musical

The Tonic Chord and Lacan's Object ain

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The Tonic Chord and Lacan’s Object a

Lacan, object a and the tonic in music theory

ISSN 0269-0403 print/ISSN 1471-6933 online

Lacan’s ideas are employed on an ad hoc basis in order to explicate compositional

music is certainly linguistic according to Lacan’s own formulation of language as a

Wagner’s response was to employ ever-shifting unstable harmonies in a quest to find

Freudian reading of the opera.13 Kramer’s eclectic vision of desire substitutes

Figure 1. The extraction of the objet petit a from reality.

This, in turn, will suggest a new approach to Ivesian harmony.

Because Ivesian harmony is so often diatonically organized (drawing on triads,

Ives avec Lacan: desire and fantasy

At the quiet close of day,

textualize the methodologies I employ.

quietly, slowly and sustained throughout

the sun set light is low, Lin gers

still the af ter glow; Beau

ty tar ries loth to die. l.h.

Ev ery light est fan ta sy love lier grows in

più ten. e rall.

me mo ry, Where the tru er beau ties lie.

più ten. più rall.

this clear C triad be regarded as tonic? This is surely a counter-intuitive observation, as

Example 2. ‘Mystery’ chords in Afterglow.

While the pitches e = a c ? in the pianist’s left hand could reasonably

complement at T2 inversion. (The ‘missing’ A> from the 12-note aggregate is

Example 3. A second series of ‘mystery’ chords in Afterglow.

mystery chord mystery chord mystery chord V 7 in C major

And it is this intimation of G7 that ‘resolves’ to a pure C triad, articulated in full,

Example 4. ‘Tristanesque’ version of G7 0C in Afterglow.

appear to be bonded.53 This fixity is, of course, entirely illusory a dimension

Example 5. The C major triad and subsequent cellular repetition in Afterglow.

In summary then: a series of polytonally co-mingled harmonic impulses (fully

It is to be hoped that looking at further song settings (some in C major, some in

Love and the objet petit a

Je sus knelt to share with Thee, the si lence

of e ter ni ty In ter pre ted by love.

Some things are un di vined ex

cept by love Vague to the mind, but

real to the heart, As is the point of yon ho ri zon line

l.h. l.h. l.h. l.h.

Near est the dear one on a for eign shore.

Some things are undivined except by love,

Low lie the

mists; They hide each hill and

dell; The grey skies weep with

us who bid fare well.

But hap pier

days through mem ’ry weaves

brings new hope to

hearts who bid fare well.

Low lie the mists;

The setting is semi-through-composed, following an ABCA design. The ‘misty’

A rite of passage: ‘symbolic castration’

There’s a sha dow on the grass

that was nev er there be fore: and the