Latent Modernism: Formula and Athematicism in Later Roussel

Larson Powell

I. Latency

Posterity has taken a dim view of Roussel's larger abstract forms: once cut free of the
plastic or pictorial, his imagination had difficulty transferring a Charakterstück aesthetic
to the monumental and discursive genres of sonata and symphony.1 Basil Deane
compares him to Schumann in precisely this respect. The difficulty was moreover only
intensified, not resolved, by the course of Roussel's development toward schematic form
in the 1920s. This gives the symphonies in particular an explosive ambiguity: their
highly characterized materials appear constantly to want to burst the classical forms
within which they are only awkwardly and forcibly confined. The resultant tension is
sometimes released in surprisingly violent conclusions, as that of the first movement of
the Petite Suite or that of the first and last movements of the Concert pour Orchestre.2
The individuality of these materials suggests a narrative or symphonic-poem
dimension to which the enforced architectonic symmetry of recapitulation does extreme
violence. This is most painfully evident at the precise moment of recapitulation, whether
at the astonishingly sudden reversion to Tempo Primo of the first movement of the Third
Symphony (following the motto theme, four measures before rehearsal number 17),3 or
the equally blithe binary return to the opening at rehearsal number 7 of the Suite en Fa
(after the massive climax at rehearsal number 7). It is hard to imagine a more glaring
instance of that "separation of outward form from inward principle"4 typical of much

1
See Basil Deane, Albert Roussel (London: Barrie and Rockliffe, 1961), pp. 153-5; Arnold Whittall
Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 69-70; David
Drew . "Modern French Music," in Hartog, Howard, ed. European Music in the Twentieth Century (New
York: Prager, 1957), pp. 258-9; Theo Hirsbrunner, Die Musik in Frankreich im 20. Jahrhundert. (Laaber:
Laaber Verlag, 1995), pp. 162-3.
2
On these, the comments of Edward Neill, "Albert Roussel." Musicalia, I: 1 (1970), p. 10, are revealing:
Roussel's music "introdusse per prima il gusto della dissonanza e sorpresa che viene a lacerare e a
dirompere la trama relativamente ordinate del testo" [introduces first of all the taste for dissonance, which
comes to lacerate and sisrupt the relatively ordered weave of the text]. In the conclusions of the Petite
Suite and the Concert, "l'energia motore dilaga e si spegne all'improvviso in un accordo a sorpresa,
disarmante e beffardo. Sono conclusioni che non concludono, apparenti chiusere di porte, chiavistelli che
non scattano; e dietro lo spiraglio che ne risulta, il barbaglio di un lieve ghigno" [The motoric energy
spreads out and spends itself improvisationally in a surprise chord which is disarming and mocking. These
are conclusions which do not conclude, apparent closings of doors, door latches which do not click shut,
and behind the glimmering that follows, the glare of a slight sneer].
3
Paris: Durand, 1931; ll of Roussel’s scores are published by Durand Editeurs. The score excerpts in this
paper are used by kind permission of Universal Music Publishing France.
4
Music in Transition (London: Dent, 1977), pp. 71-72.

1
twentieth century neoclassicism, and which has made it difficult to find any "aesthetic
criteria of judgment"5 for this music.
The ballets, vocal music, and overt character pieces such as Joueurs de flûte do
not have to confront this formal problem and are less internally contradictory, but at the
cost of remaining within the bounds of the descriptive or pictorial. Precisely in its
closure and well-rounded balance, Bacchus et Ariane feels more conventional than the
oblique complexities of the instrumental works. On the other extreme from ballet,
mélodie, and character piece are not only the symphonies, but also the sonata form works
in general, including the String Quartet and String Trio. Despite the attractiveness of
much of the music of these pieces, their forms are often nothing more than convenus.
The "finale problem" that troubled composers from the Beethoven 9th onward simply did
not exist for Roussel. After a few early experiments with more flexible form (in the
Sonatine for Piano and most importantly in the Second Symphony), his finales are
cheerful little galops or last dances, unconcerned with monumentality and thus more apt
for suites than sonatas. (The fugal finale of the String Quartet signally fails in its bid for a
more monumental close.) Even the finale of the Fourth Symphony, with its powerful
thematic transformation (at four measures before rehearsal number 63), which feels very
much like a "breakthrough," still feels confined by its form. In evaluating the Third
Symphony, it is difficult to distinguish how much of that work's apparent canonicity (or
at least popularity) is attributable to its undeniably vivid materials, and how much to a
formal "clarity" that is frequently rigidly schematic and formalistic.
These works thus appear at first as aesthetic ruins,6 and as such, suggest
philosophical interpretation. One should however beware of the temptation to make this
last allegorical. The obvious model, Benjamin's Trauerspielbuch, could be pursued in
detail: Roussel's tone of depersonalized mourning, his peculiarly unstable combination of
energy and rigidity recall the familiar Dialektik im Stillstand (arrested dialectics) or
erstarrte Unruhe (frozen unrest) of Benjamin's Baudelaire. Such a comparison might
sketch in another model of modern musical allegory than that of Adorno's Wagner. Yet it
would ultimately remain within a familiar hermeneutic circle, reiterating aesthetic-
historical topoi shared by a great many early modern turn-of-the-century artists
(especially those affected by Symbolism), rather than developing the specific "criteria of
judgment" for which Danuser's look at the 1920s called. (Kant's insight that aesthetic
judgment should be coordinating rather than subordinating is still helpful, even in a time
when attacks on “judgment” as such have become familiar.) Instead of allegory, what
follows will develop the less burdened term latency, which may be elaborated after a look
at some elements specific to Roussel's practice, especially the melodic formula. Latency
means here a parallel modernity, one distinct from, but related, to the latter's mainstream.
It is historically linked to French and modal traditions marginalized by Adorno's
influential model of musical modernity. As will become clear, this latency is central not
only to Roussel's larger (historical and individual) poetics––thus conditioning his limited
public reception to date––but also to his technique, specifically as it develops in his later,
more classicizing works from the 1920s onward.

5
Hermann Danuser,"Die ‘mittlere' Musik der zwanziger Jahre." La musique et le rite sacré et profane, ed.
M. Honegger and P. Prévost. Strasbourg: Université de Strasbourg, 1987, pp. 703-722, esp. p. 705.
6
So Charles Rosen saw Schubert's chamber music as a "degenerate style" (The Classical Style, New York:
Norton, 1972, p. 455).

2
II. Schematization

The most obvious aperçu or petit fait vrai one quickly encounters with Roussel––what
was once, in hermeneutics, called the dunkle Stelle––is the nonidentity of form and
material, a characteristic of much of his work. Giselher Schubert7 noted that already in
Résurrection, "Roussel emancipates the musical means of representation––the plan of the
movement, the instrumentation, the syntax, the type of movement––from the thematic
events." Similarly, Françoise Andrieux found in the First Symphony a tendency to a
paradoxically "athematic profile" of many melodic ideas. This athematicism can also be
acquired over the course of a movement. Thus the symphonies, as thematic, need themes
of "sufficiently pregnant profile."

But this is often only an illusion. There is more than one movement where, after
one had believed in the original character of the themes put forth (énoncées), one
8
watches their depersonalization.

An example is the finale of the Fourth Symphony, where it is no longer clear

whether the development is based on the first or the second theme. Andrieux goes on to
generalize further:

Traces of this tendency to thematic uniformization can be found on the level of

entire works or in the group of the symphonies. It may be explained by the
privileged place Roussel's themes give to disjunct intervals, intervals which are
rather large and––as it seems––stated (énoncés) in almost aleatory fashion. The
line does not answer to a strongly directed logic, but lives from an intense
9
movement that is not afraid of surrendering to disorder.

Carl Dahlhaus found a similar apparent intervallic randomness in Bruckner;10 in

both cases the looseness points to the primacy of rhythm. This is why many of Roussel's
developments11 tend less to unfold the dynamic potential of his opening statements than
condense them into hardened abbreviations, in a process less of expansion than of
petrification. The gradual schematization of his language12 after World War One is often

7
"'Classicisme' und 'neoclassicisme': Zu den Sinfonien von Albert Roussel." Studien zur Musikgeschichte:
Eine Festschrift fur Ludwig Finscher. Kassel: Barenreiter 1995, pp. 668-679.
8
"Les quatre symphonies de Roussel." In Albert Roussel. Musique et esthétique. Actes du Colloque
International Albert Roussel, ed. Manfred Kelkel (Paris: Vrin 1989), p. 187.
9
Andrieux, p. 190. The final phrase is ne craint pas de sacrifier au désordre, suggesting that the fearless
self-sacrifice of Padmâvati to the flames allegorizes something central to Roussel's compositional
technique.
10
Nineteenth Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 273.
11
Instances: the slow movements of the 2nd Violin Sonata, the 3rd and 4th Symphonies, perhaps that of the
Suite en Fa as well.
12
Schematic form is often seen as characteristic of academic (Reger) or neoclassical (Stravinsky)
composition, but in Roussel’s case melody was also affected. A contemporary cognate would be
Stravinsky’s treatment of folk-tunes in the Rite, “reducing them to simple essences which could then be
used as motives for rhythmic and ostinato treatment” (Stephen Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 46). “Schematic” can also mean deliberately didactic, demonstrative of a
method (as Ferneyhough uses it to describe Superscriptio: see Richard Toop, “On Superscriptio: an
interview with Brian Ferneyhough, and an analysis,” Contemporary Music Review, 13: 1 [1995], pp. 3-
17).

3
repeated in miniature form within the course of individual movements. The Sonatine op.
16 for piano is one of the first examples of this process: its inherently anti-classical nature
could not help but irritate the conservative tastes of Blanche Selva, who preferred the
fulsome Franckian rhetoric of the First Violin Sonata:

One may reproach this Sonatina for the loss of substance in its ideas throughout
the course of the work. Like people who dissipate their force in unworthy
occupations, or prostitute them to constant amusements, rather than growing
13
through the beneficent effort of action, they atrophy and disintegrate.

Although we need not share Selva's moralization of sonata rhetoric (as producer
of solid, hardworking bourgeois character), she has perceived something correctly here:
namely the odd split between motive and larger form also seen by Schubert and
Andrieux. (Her disparagement of "amusements" incidentally points up an inner link
between certain of Roussel's more popular, breezily café-concert finales, and Les Six.)
In fact, the process of schematization first found in overt form in the Sonatine can
be traced back already to aspects of the First Violin Sonata: note the hard, empty fifths in
the piano accompaniment at mm. 44f. (with a harsh chromatic leap of a major 7th in the
violin from C# to C natural and a deliberate rhythmic squareness driven forward by the
characteristic anapaestic snap or mordant, marked sforzato), or the threefold occurrence
of the opening introduction, which seems to be struggling up out of the waters of
Impressionist color and iridescent bell-sounds into a clearer light, with a gradual
intensification of movement. This process of engendering of a formula is taken to its
greatest lengths in the obscure paratactic form of the Second Symphony, culminating in
the last movement's heavy, clumping march.
With this last work's breakthrough to abstraction, Roussel's work enters its "hard"
neoclassic phase (as in Stravinsky): the opening of the Second Violin Sonata is stiff and
truculent in its phrasing as only one would find in Honegger. Although the key signature
is A major, the piano’s accompaniment includes D# and repeated Bbs. The declamatory,
rhetorical regularity of the violin’s striding quarter note opening suggests the definitude
of a traditional thematic statement, but its references to tonic harmony (C#-A, bar 3; A-
C#-E, bar 5) are jarringly contradicted by D#, Bb and F natural; nonetheless, the square
phrasing and invariant accompaniment force the music to continue on as if unperturbed
by its own jaggedness. Sonata form here is schematic in the pejorative sense: the other
materials in the movement have little relation to this opening, so that the movement
seems, despite the commanding tone of its opening, more potpourri or revue than
sonata.14 The Suite en Fa is less structurally disparate, beginning straightaway with a
formula that cannot possibly be developed, a moto perpetuo of unbroken eighth notes that
constantly shift key, but the movement's economy is achieved at the cost of rigid binary
form, remaining thus only a character-piece for orchestra. As the Third Symphony later,
the movement can only begin blithely again (at rehearsal number 9), as if nothing had
happened, once it reaches its impressive climax (at rehearsal number 7). The same is true
for the first movement of the Petite Suite, one of Roussel's most individual pieces of
characterization, ironically using cheerful dance-snippets as additive blocks within an

13
La Sonate (Paris: Rouart, Lerolle, 1913), pp. 237-238, emphasis author's.
14
See Deane's criticisms on p. 106f.

4
architectonic buildup of somber and frightening chromatic power. Yet the climactic
passage at rehearsal 7 is once more abruptly broken off, shearing away like a torn screen
or curtain to leave the cold polytonal noise of the flutes, as if in an unfazed distance (at
one measure before rehearsal number 9), identical to their first appearance at m. 18.
These faster outer movements are full of interesting material, yet as forms they
have little ambition; the material's eccentric extremity of character (to the point of
caricature) hardly permits any discursive development. Even though one can find
instances of formulae in these faster outer movements, they have little effect on form. All
of Roussel's faster movements rely heavily on the motoric energy of metrical repetition,
of Boulez' "striated time" (Bergson's temps espace), and have an implicit rondo-character.
It is in the central slower movements that extended, differentiated forms are found.

III. Mode and Model (1)

Here too there are a variety of formal types. Some are simple Liedformen, as the central
movement of the Flute Trio. The slow movements of the Suite en Fa and the Fourth
Symphony are both extended, developing forms, and accordingly both begin with––for
Roussel––unusually direct and classical thematic statements. In the Suite's Sarabande
(Examples 1a-1b), there is a 12-measure theme, beginning squarely on a root-position
tonic chord, and a bass so solid and conjunct one marvels at the accusations against
Roussel's basses. The bass line marches upwards in quarter and half notes to a V-I
cadence at mm. 3-4, rising again from III through hidden fifths (at mm.x 6-7) and only
becoming chromatic in the second half of the theme. The melody itself is symmetrical,
consisting of two pairs of two-measure phrases, each varying its antecedent; it concludes
with a final four measures' descent referring back to the fourth leap of the opening. The
Fourth Symphony's Lento molto (Examples 2a-2c) is 8 measures long, but slightly less
weighty, with greater use of inversions (the tonic C in root position is postponed until m.
5, and then only on a weak beat, appearing only on a strong beat in m. 7). Both rely
frequently on appoggiature and enrich their clearly defined outer lines with inner
chromatic voices (note for instance the violas and clarinets at 5-7 in the Sarabande). Both
use sequences and repeated motivic fragments15 (especially the Sarabande) to build up to
a powerful climax followed by recapitulation. If one wanted a defense of Roussel against
accusations that he could not write discursive, extended, sonata-type movements, these
examples would suffice.16

15
Motive is here used in Riemann's sense, as kernel for thematic formation (see references in Karl Wörner,
Das Zeitalter des thematischen Prozesses in der Geschichte der Musik. Regensburg: Bosse 1969, p. xi).
16
The case of the String Trio's Adagio is more complicated: despite the near-atonal chromaticism of its
development, Roussel here seems to revert to a Mozartian model of sequence rather than motivic argument.
It should nonetheless be noted that even in these two cited movements, the development of the motifs is
still determined by the bar-line, which is in fact increasingly stressed towards the climax.

5
Example 1a: Suite en Fa, op. 33, Sarabande

6
Example 1b: Suite en Fa, op. 33, Sarabande

7
Example 2a: Symphony No. 4, op. 53, Lento

8
Example 2b: Symphony No. 4, op. 53, Lento

9
Example 2c: Symphony No. 4, op. 53, Lento

10
 Such a defense would however be only another form of the sort of classicizing
aesthetic to be avoided here. Roussel is not Bartók, nor is he Prokofiev (for all he may
have learned from the latter). His most interesting work, unlike theirs, is not necessarily
best understood as a restoration of sonata-allegro in changed harmonic circumstances.17
There is another formal type in Roussel's slow movements that evades the opposition of
Germanic development versus static schema altogether.18 It may be described through
the twin poles of formula and athematicism.
The notion of formula must now be defined. A concrete historical example may
serve first to illustrate the idea. James Hepokoski19 has analyzed Debussy's formulaic
openings, such as the monophonic beginning of Printemps, with its "smooth elegant
shape: the Debussyan arabesque," which "is static, undular, and revolves around a central
pitch."20 Despite the ambiguities of such openings (which "generally impl[y] a rather
weak tonic, because of the use of pentatonicism, chromaticism, modality, gapped scales,
or other such devices"), "they are often richer than much of the interiors of the works they
begin" (pp. 48, 54). Hepokoski mentions the earlier use of formula in centonization, with
reference to Leo Treitler, but wants to keep his Debussyan formula distinct from this,

as a sequence of ordered procedures rather than as stereotypical sonic material

per se. Process and relationships are more decisive than the objective sound, and
any two members of the same formulaic category may sound quite dissimilar (p.
57).

Formula is thus a structural rather than a semantic category. It has its pendant in
literary modernity as well: as Baudelaire had it in Fusées, "Créer un poncif, c'est le
genie" (to create a stereotype is genius). Within Romantic music, it is an offshoot of the
characteristic invariance of thematic material from Schumann onward, but it is not
refunctionalized as the Wagnerian leitmotif. The famous beginning of the Rite of Spring
could be seen as formulaic, as many of Stravinsky's melodic shapes in general, with their
small steps and their permutability. Formulae may also be found in Enescu (2nd Violin
Sonata, opening) and Nielsen (Fifth Symphony, first movement).21 The characteristics of
formula are thus amorphousness; extendability (or paraphrasability), including internal
repetitions; invariance; and often restricted intervallic contour. The formula is thus

17
For such an "organicist" view of Bartók and Prokofiev, see the following papers by Elliott Antokoletz:
"Hybrid Modes and Interval Sets as Formal Determinants in Sonatas of Albrecht, Scriabin and Prokofiev,"
International Jouurnal of Musicology 3 (1994), pp. 309-338, and "Organic Expansion and Classical
Structure in Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion," in Antokoletz, Elliott, Victoria Fischer, and
Benjamin Suchow, eds., Bartók Perspectives: Man, Composer and Ethnomusicologist (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), pp. 77-94.
18
The opposition in question, with all its dialectical baggage, is familiar enough from Adorno; one idea
informing what follows is how to sidestep it (without however attempting a “refutation”).
19
"Formulaic Openings in Debussy," Nineteenth Century Music VIII/1 (Summer 1984), pp. 44-59, here p.
46.
20
Hepokoski refers to the work of Claudia Maurer-Zenck and Françoise Gervais on Debussy's arabesque;
see now also Jann Pasler, "Timbre, Voice Leading and the Musical Arabesque in Debussy's Piano Music."
Debussy in Performance, ed. James Briscoe (New Haven: Yale 1999), pp. 225-283.
21
Daniel Grimley, Review of John Fellow, ed., Carl Nielsen til sin samtid (Carl Nielsen to his
Contemporaries) (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1999), Journal of the Royal Musical Association 126(1) (2001),
pp. 106-117, esp. p. 110.

11
opposed to the subjective dynamism of the Einfall (in Adorno's sense). Unlike the
leitmotif, the formula does not state itself as a definite énoncé; it lacks the Prägnanz
required of a good Gestalt. Thus later Brahms would provide an ancestry for it as much
as Wagner: the plainchant-like murmuring lines of the Clarinet Trio, for instance, which
seem to be returning to the Gregorian. The semantics of formula are one of latency (a
term the definition of which must be deferred until this essay’s final section).
As noted, there are formulae in Roussel's faster outer movements as well as in the
central slow ones. A locus classicus would be the Third Symphony, which opens with a
rhythmic formula, an ostinato that however is too prominent to be merely a background
support, for it is both stated in nearly full tutti and also generates new foreground figures
(two bars after rehearsal 2 in high winds, or three bars after rehearsal 12 in the violins).
This ostinato is an attempt to bring Stravinsky (the Danse des adolescents from the
Augures printanières) back into the symphonic fold, and it anticipates the finale of
Honegger's Symphonie Liturgique. Similarly the great climax on the motto at rehearsal
number 15-16 is also formulaic, in that it is unvaryingly repeated; the problem being
however that Roussel cannot admit that this implosive concentration is irreconcilable
with sonata form architecture, for the piece continues blithely on after the climax,
recapitulating the second theme as if nothing had happened. The first movement of the
Piano Concerto is largely composed of formulaic motifs (the five-note repetition plus
semitone and fourth at measures 24-26, or the fanfare in fourths at rehearsal 6, neither of
which can be developed), although they too cannot disturb the binary form, propped open
as it is on the contrast between the more rhythmic opening materials and the waltz-like
Gesangsthema after rehearsal number 7. Similar examples may be found in the Flute
Trio (flute fanfare in perfect fourths at measure 28, mvt. 1) and String Trio (the viola's
fugato-like outburst in 16th notes at measure 34, mvt. 1). The motto-like oscillating
tritone that opens the Fourth Symphony, and returns in its slow movement (mm. 9 and 16
ff.) could also be seen as formulaic. In a sense, even the developments of the slow
movements in the Suite en fa and this Fourth Symphony have formulaic aspects about
them, since the Suite's Sarabande relies heavily on the opening ornamented single note,
which is never really changed, but only reshuffled with other motivic shapes in mosaic
fashion. The climaxes of the Fourth Symphony's Lento are in a sense athematic, arising
more from the oscillating formula than from the theme proper.
The opening of the slow movement of the Petit Concert, Op. 34 (Examples 3a-3b)
is formulaic in more striking fashion. Against a high G pedal doubled in the violins, the
flutes introduce a wavering ostinato accompaniment, chromatically oscillating between A
and E. A high bassoon (reminding one of the opening of the Rite) enters with the theme
proper, which is modal and composite, made of several different limbs pulling in
different tonal directions. The entire statement runs to 13 measures (4 + 4 + 5); partway
through the first phrase, the flutes abandon their static ostinato, and into the second
phrase, the violins begin to move as well. The tonality is A, but with both major and
minor third, lowered fifth and raised sixth. The mode is polycentric, combining fixed
notes with chromatically altered ones, as Hoérée has described Roussel's practice.22 Thus
22
See Arthur Hoérée, Albert Roussel (Paris: Rieder, 1938), p. 88, on Naissance de la Lyre's use of
Hypodorian or "ancien éolien;" see also Hoérée, "La Technique," La Revue musicale, April 1929, reprinted
in La Revue Musicale, 1987 (pp. 400-401) (Albert Roussel: Cinquantenaire), pp. 55-74, esp. p. 57, with
charts of various Hindu modes used by Roussel); and Robert Bernard, Albert Roussel (Paris: Colombe,
1948), p. 72.

12
different phrases of the formula can lead in drastically different tonal directions. The
broad expansiveness of the 6/4 meter also contributes to the blurry diffusion of the theme,
which only succeeds in reaching a conclusion through insistent repetition of a formulaic
phrase (a falling seventh that gradually shrinks chromatically toward A). As the upper
strings hesitate around a semi-tonal oscillation, the celli and basses pick up the end of this
opening bassoon theme, adding single note repetition and then inverting and diminishing
the leap of the seventh (m. 17); they are answered by horn and trumpet on Ab, with
tritonal D and a leading-tone-like G; by 22 the violins have a bi-tonal extension of the
basses' repeated-note shape that lands first on V of F# major (m. 23) and then goes to an
Ab chord in the first inversion (27), then the same inversion of Bb minor. This Db pedal
will be held for 8 very slow measures, practically senza tempo, with the solo flute
embellishing Roussel's "Hindu" scale on G above and several placidly ticking ostinati in
oboe, clarinet and violas in the middle register. The flute line is centered on repeated
pitches to which it continually and obsessively returns: Eb, G, then Db. The passage
might be compared to the heterophonic woodwind improvisations found in "Der
Abschied" from Das Lied von der Erde, in the first movement of the Nielsen 5th
Symphony and his Saga-Drøm, or even (more distantly) Boulez. The real stylistic model
however is the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, from which Roussel has taken not
only shapes but also keys: note the move to Db at m. 55 of Debussy's Faun and the
undulating flute triplets at 61. The last fourteen measures are a slightly expanded and re-
harmonized version of the opening (with its original modal ambivalences brought more
into the limits of A major and then F minor), so that the movement is in ternary ABA
form. The movement ends on a dissonant chord only resolved by the beginning of the
finale.
It is possible to find motivic links here: for instance, the bass motif at m. 17 (C-B-
E-Db) can be derived not only from the repetitive and cadential end of the bassoon's line
but also from the first clear shape in it, at measures 6-7 (Bb-A-C#-F). But the oblique
harmonic context makes this sort of recognition difficult: the shape is not a good Gestalt,
it is hard to pick out against the background interference and stands itself in harmonic
tension with the rest of the bassoon line. Roussel's modality here has consequences for
larger form and not simply harmony. This is the point where his peculiar form of
neoclassicism parts ways with the architectural classicizing of Bartók and Prokofiev
already mentioned (and has perhaps more structurally in common with another outsider,
Szymanowski).23
The formula stands in a different relation to the theme than does the motive.
Theorists of modality have noted that "modal entities…are more determined than musical
scales," including "selections of specific scale types";24 Jacques Viret specifies this with
reference to the opposition of fixed versus mobile notes we have already encountered in
Hoérée's description of Roussel's modes:

23
See Jim Samson, "The use of analytical models in the analysis of Szymanowski's harmonic language." In
Szymanowski in seiner Zeit, ed. Michael Bristiger (Munich: Fink, 1984), pp. 149-157.
24
Harold Harold. "Eastern and Western Concepts of Mode." In Report of the Twelfth Congress of the
International Musicological Society (Berkeley 1977), ed. Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade (Kassel:
Bärenreiter, 1981), pp. 501-549, here p. 502.

13
Example 3a: Petit Concert, Op. 34, Andante

14
Example 3b: Petit Concert, Op. 34, Andante

15
 L'idée de modèle appliqué à la mélodie n'englobe-t-elle pas également des
determinations moins précises, non codifies par une quelconque théorie…
notamment celles qui resultant des cadres créés par les intervalles consonants au
25
sein de telle gamme, diatonique ou particulier?
[Does not the idea of model applied to melody include as well less precise
determinations, not codified by any theory… notably those resulting from frames
created by consonant intervals at the heart of a scale, diatonic or particularized?]

This peculiar empiricism of method (another aspect shared with Szymanowski)

was in fact a response to a particular historical situation: as Theo Hirsbrunner put it, "die
französisische Musik um 1900 krankt an einem Theorie-Defizit"26 (“French music around
1900 suffers from a theory deficit”), despite the synthetic efforts of Roussel's teachers at
the Schola Cantorum. This theory deficit manifested itself also in compositional
practice: according to Giselher Schubert’s27 description of the piano sonata of Roussel's
contemporary Dukas, themes are rather conceived as related to each other ab ovo, not
dynamically unfolded, so that "den Gehalt des Satzes bilden weniger Themen als
vielmehr Darstellungsmöglichkeiten von Thematik."
Viret (17) uses himself the term "formule" to describe this practice of a "parcours
dynamique d'un espace sonore structuré, balisé." (the dynamic traversal of a structured,
marked-out sonorous space).28 What he means by this is that formula and a specific
"sonorous space––foreground and background––are less distinct than in the regular space
of tonal music. In Roussel's case, the rigidity of the peculiar 6/4 meter, the absence of
marked harmonic rhythm (e.g. the cadential drives of leading tone or dominant), mean
that the entire musical space seems itself to breathe and pulse within the formula. Thus
Roussel can, at the center of the piece, dissolve the motivic identity of the formula
entirely into an athematicism where the "sonorous space" is left to itself, in the form of
the long improvisatory flute solo. If the mode itself is made up of a "fan (éventail) of
formulas put to work by the improvised or composed melody, according to the procedure
of centonisation" (Viret, p. 22), then we can extend Hepokoski's reference to Treitler
even further. Centonisation is embedded in modal practice. Roussel's semblance of
improvisation contains within itself a ‘pragmatist' opting for usus as opposed to ars, as in
the medieval practice of sortisatio (Bandur 1996, p. 261). This is therefore a much
subtler, more esoteric form of Gebrauchsmusik: one aimed not at the use of the audience,
but that of the composer as “performer.”

25
"Quels modèles pour la modalité?" Analyse musicale, no. 16: 3 (2001), pp. 16-25, p. 17.
26
"'Gaspard de la nuit' von Maurice Ravel." Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft XLIV/4 (1987), 268-281, p. 275.
27
"'Vibrierende Gedanken' und das ‘Katasterverfahren' der Analyse. Zu den Klaviersonaten von Dukas und
d'Indy." In Das musikalische Kunstwerk, ed. Hermann Danuser (Laaber: Laaber Verlag 1988), 619-634, p
620.
28
Compare also Jacques Chailly, L'Imbroglio des Modes (Paris: Leduc, 1960), p. 5 ("mode formulaire").

16
IV. Mode and Model (2)

Even when Roussel's harmony is less obviously modal than in the slow movement of the
Petit Concert, his formal practice may be similar. The Adagio of the Piano Concerto is a
case in point (Examples 4a-4b, opening bars). Here too there is a clear ancestor in the
background, namely Ravel's use of repeated notes in Habanera, "Oiseaux tristes" (from
Miroirs) and "Le Gibet" from Gaspard de la Nuit. As with the dependency of the Petit
Concert on Debussy, the link here is not only of form but also of key. "Le Gibet" is built
on a repetitive Bb, dominant in Eb minor, and occasionally reinterpreted enharmonically
as A# (as in mm. 23-27), a procedure ultimately derived from Chopin's Prelude Op. 28
no. 15 (wherein Ab becomes G#). Here, in Roussel, the key signature is Eb major, but
with a raised fifth B natural, so that the Eb is heard as a mediant D#. These mediant
relations, a Romantic inheritance, are a favorite of Roussel's, and it is a practice he shares
with many contemporaries. Again, though, his use is peculiarly undynamic and
suspended, if one contrasts it with Stravinsky's energetic pushing and pulling between F
and A (in the Serenade in A) or C and E (in the Symphony in C). Roussel is interested
less in the dynamic possibilities of this tonal ambiguity than in its expressive sonority.
Before the “theme” enters, it is dimly prefigured by the piano's stepwise alternation of D
and C. The mediant combination is then built into the theme itself, which seems to begin
with 6-5 chord in Eb (with raised sixth)29 that is however reinterpreted as a German sixth
resolving to a B minor chord. As in the Third Symphony, the melody appears to tend
toward the dominant minor, a key in no classical relation to that of the tonic. These
polarities break up the theme into distinct limbs that cannot really be unified in any one
octatonic model. The scale used here could be described as a "hybrid mode," since the
upper tetrachord is major and the lower minor. Ravel used a similar planar division of
tonal space in Bolero,30 but here the absence of clear rhythmic shape makes the theme
even more tenuous and impalpable. .As in the Petit Concert, we are given an identifiable
Gestalt only at the end, with the eighth-note chromatic descent ending in triplets. It is
this formula that will dominate such "development" as the movement can offer.
The second theme (Example 4c) is clearly indebted to Chopin, particularly the
second Prelude with which it shares texture (fifths in the bass) and harmony (the French
sixth, spelled out by the opening of the melody, resolving to G). Although the key
signature is C (or none at all), G is strongly suggested. The harmony has in general a
diminished seventh feel due to the tritones and minor thirds. At the climax, the repeated
Bbs, this hardens into Bartók's "alpha chord" of superimposed diminished sevenths
(forming an octatonic bloc). By m. 72 this has resolved to a very Chopinesque Ab major,
with delicate grace-notes ornamenting the lines.

29
As it does at the opening of Mahler's Seventh Symphony, this raised sixth (C) "contaminates the sonority"
(John Williamson, "The Structural Premises of Mahler's Introductions: Prolegomena to an Analysis of the
First Movement of the Seventh Symphony," Music Analysis 5:1 [1986], 29-57, p. 52). Contrast here again
Mahler's much more dynamic and structural use of this altered degree.
30
Serge Gut, "Le Phénomène répétitif chez Maurice Ravel," International Review of the Aesthetics and
Sociology of Music, vol. 21, no. 1 (June 1990), 29-46, p. 40.

17
Example 4a: Piano Concerto, op. 36, Adagio

18
Example 4b: Piano Concerto, op. 36, Adagio

19
Example 4c: Piano Concerto, op. 36, Adagio, second theme

20
\

Example 4d: Piano Concerto, op. 36, Adagio, second theme

21
 If one wanted to link this second theme to the opening, one could point to the
centrality of the semitone (C-B natural in the opening, then B-Bb in the second theme), as
well as to the importance of repeated notes and triplets. The repeated notes appear to be
the only remaining semantic link backwards in the central athematic "development." The
texture is established first in six themeless measures (after rehearsal number 28) (see
Example 4d): over an F pedal and a rumbling piano left-hand figuration reminiscent of
the opening of the first movement, a motif of three repeated Eb's and a Gb is stated twice.
The second theme is now restated in the clarinet, with added grace note appoggiature in
cor anglais and oboe (Roussel's favorite flutes have been absent except for one passage
from rehearsal number 23 to 24). At the climax (Più mosso), there is nothing but an
ascending scale in the second violins, plus the repeated notes (now syncopated) and the
sighing semi-tonal descent in violas and first violins. As in the Petit Concert, the
invariant formula has alternated with athematicism, or with rhapsodic, improvisatory
extensions having little in common with Germanic discursive development.31
The central Pastorale of the Petite Suite (Example 5a) has one of the most subtle
formula-compositions of all. After the short modulating introduction from V of D to F,
the oboe's lament enters over a ticking bassoon with raised fourth and sixth degrees and is
heterophonically accompanied by a winding violin line in A. This is Bachian, but
without the obvious parody in Stravinsky's similar oboe arias (in Perséphone and
Orpheus). As many of Roussel's formulae, this one decorates and circumscribes a single
note and concludes with the same duple-triplet turn of phrase familiar from the end of the
Piano Concerto's main theme. The mask-like character of the formula is heightened by
its immobility and harmonic off-centeredness: although the sixth is flatted (Db), the
seventh is not (E natural), and the phrase ends with a bald tritone F-B, which could be
understood as the top of the dominant of A (in the violins); the oboe then meanders down
through more flats (Eb, Bb, Ab = G# with the violins) to a cadence on V-I (mm. 8-10).
The line is then stated again a third up (m. 11), with a new conclusion (16), then once
more in Db, swerving back at 23 to F again. By the third statement the violin
accompaniment has evolved into a freer counter-melody (see esp. mm. 23-25 with the
semitonal ornament).
At rehearsal number 5 (m. 26; Examples 5b-5d) there is a hush and the color
darkens, and the B natural is given additional weight by a terse clarinet motif of
diminished-seventh feeling (F-Ab-B, the B echoed in the flutes and horns); this is stated
four times, as the timpani shift from C to B natural and the basses drop from the tonic F
to E, the dominant of A, to which key the music now shifts for the Andantino.
Deane is not convinced by this passage, claiming it "bears no stylistic relationship
to the first and last sections," making the movement as a whole "disjointed."32 Although
the wide leaps in the violin melody here appear a release from the constricted small
intervals of the oboe's opening lament, they have been prepared for, since the B-F# has
been heard as B-F natural in the flutes immediately beforehand, and the minatory clarinet
motif plus timpani roll continue to lower underneath. The attempted breakout misfires,
however, for the violins can only repeat their three-note motif (E-G-F#, mm. 37-38),
managing at least to reach the major with it at m. 39, as if in despite of the heavy

31
Further instances could be added: as the slow movement of the String Quartet, mm. 30ff. (Poco andante).
32
Op. cit., p. 73.

22
chromatic bass. At m. 42 the texture breaks off suddenly on an A major triad and there
ensues a passage of magical release. This section is very comparable to mm. 46f. of the
Fourth Symphony's Lento and has something of the function once designated by
Wagner's Abgesang. It feels weightless due to the elision of the bass and the thinning of
texture, yet is still energized by the momentum built up during the Andantino and
deliberately not expended by the latter. It is in two 8-measure phrases, the second half
varying the first, and ending back at the tonic F. Whereas the passage in the Fourth
Symphony can be decrypted as a distant variant of that movement's opening theme,
matters are here less clear. In characteristic Rousselian fashion, the flute's line, which is
arguably atonal,33 re-shuffles a set of pitches around A major/minor, with both raised
fourth and fifth, and heterophonically shadowed by the second violins. (The second violin
line shares important pitches with the flutes—D#, D natural, C natural and C#—in the
first two bars; it also continues the chromatic line of the celli and contrabasses from mm.
35). One might hear a very distant relation to the oboe's opening shape in the serpentine
quality of the melody, its motionless circling around an alternation of scalar steps and
thirds, although here the line is also opened up by larger leaps of major sixths, sevenths
and even a minor ninth (E natural––F natural, mm. 48-49), as if under the influence of the
preceding Andantino.

33
On the frequency of atonality in Roussel’s linear writing, see Daniel Kawka, "Une auto-analyse inédite
d'Albert Roussel." Revue internationale de musique française, 19 (February 1986), pp. 83-91, here p. 90.

23
Example 5a, Petite Suite, op. 39, Pastorale

24
Example 5b, Petite Suite, op. 39, Pastorale

25
Example 5c, Petite Suite, op. 39, Pastorale

26
Example 5d, Petite Suite, op. 39, Pastorale

27
V. Formenlehre: The Unconstructible Question

Precisely in its irresolvability or irreducibility, the formula asks for some sort of
conceptual definition or analysis. Its eccentricity to the mainstream of musical
development suggests, per analogiam, a comparable eccentricity from mainstream
philosophy: Bloch's eschatological "Gestalt der unkonstruierbaren Frage" (“shape of the
unconstruable question,” Geist der Utopie). The merit of this idea is its escape from
musicological academicism, its marginality to any extant theory or method (neither of
which would be an adequate description of Bloch's corpus). Its dangers may however be
even greater than its merits. As Adorno noted, Bloch's formulation is "am Rand des
Misslingens: hart an der Sympathie fürs Okkulte" (on the edge of failure, close to a
sympathy for the occult).34 Beyond even the occasional vague spiritualism of Bloch's
concepts, they suffer from a lack of mediation (Vermittlung) and remain at the level of
grand rhetorical gestures. In consequence, Bloch's philosophy "muss Utopie auf den
Allgemeinbegriff abziehen, der jenes Konkrete subsumiert, das allein doch die Utopie
wäre."35 We need to specify more closely, more materially what Bloch's "question"
might be. It must be more than the old musical-rhetorical figure of the interrogatio (the
rising figure familiar from the Baroque),36 which means we must tease out its meanings
from various different passages in Bloch. Despite Adorno's warning that Bloch's writings
"cannot be read as texts,"37 we must read literally and carefully.

So bleibt uns als letztes Ziel: die Frage nach uns zu fassen, rein als Frage, nicht
als Hinweis auf die Lösung; die ausgesagte, aber unkonstruierte,
38
unkonstruierbare Frage selber als Antwort auf die Frage.
[There remains a last goal for us: to grasp the question of ourselves, purely as a
question, not as pointer to the solution; the stated, but unconstrued, unconstruable
question itself as answer.]

As often in the early work of Kracauer and Benjamin, there are here ontological
formulations that would later acquire a political dimension in Sein und Zeit––and then be
excluded from Adorno's version of Modernist aesthetics. Here, in this early work of
Bloch, the ontological is not so tainted. The idea of the reflexive question is, so far, not
difficult (one could point to its later incarnations in Heidegger and Deleuze). But in what
does it consist; how can it be defined?
If one parses "die Gestalt der unkonstruierbaren Frage" word for word, one must
note that Gestalt cannot mean anything like what it came to mean in the psychology of
that name pioneered by Wertheimer and Köhler, since it cannot have a "good form." It

34
Theodor Adorno, "Henkel, Krug und frühe Erfahrung," Noten zur Literatur, Gesammelte Schriften 11
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), pp. 556-566, here p. 564.
35
“It must distill Utopia to its general concept, which subsumes that concretion that were alone Utopian,”
"Blochs Spuren," Noten zur Literatur, pp. 231-250, p. 247; on the lack of Vermittlung, see p. 241.
36
In line with Symbolism's turn away from rhetoric (programmatically stated in Verlaine's line from "L'Art
Poétique," "Prends la rhétorique et tords-lui son cou"), the rhetoric of the unconstructible question could
only be a paradoxical one.
37
"Blochs Spuren," p. 236.
38
Geist der Utopie, Erste Fassung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1971), p. 367.

28
actually means, paradoxically, its opposite, "das Gestaltlose" (a concept in Schelling).39
How does one understand Konstruieren? Adorno thinks it is used in Schelling's sense,40
extending Kant's mathematical Konstruktion to the domain of Nature (an undertaking
Hegel thought impossible).41 But it makes more sense (!) to grasp the term as referring to
the hermeneutical construction of meaning.42
The hermeneutical sense remains close to Kant's formulation: "Einen Begriff aber
konstruieren heisst: die ihm korrespondierende Anschauung a priori darstellen. Zur
Konstruktion eines Begriffs wird also eine nicht empirische Anschauung erfordert..."43 If
a musical Einfall (idea), or in English “theme,” is kin to the concept, in that its sense is
unfolded (constructed) retrospectively (nachträglich) by its subsequent development,
then the formula may be defined as that which, like Bloch's “question,” cannot be
developed or “constructed.” It can only be either repeated or contrasted either with
dissipatory structures (such as athematic passages) or with “breakthroughs.”44 It is,
moreover, structural and historical kin to the twelve tone row: its latent cousin. Like the
row, it participates in the loss of harmonic depth-dimension characteristic of the early
20th century, and which was also a loss of meaning (Sinn). "Gewiss jedoch ist das
harmonische Tiefenbewusstsein für die Konstruktion unserer Musik nicht mehr
entscheidend,"45 and this means not only the architectural construction of its form, but
also the hermeneutical one of its sense. The formula, as it has been sketched in here, thus
constitutes an element of musico-historical evolution quite distinct from Adorno's
"tendencies of the material."
Although Bloch does not give an exact musical equivalent for his "unconstructible
question," it may be correlated with other, more materially specific aspects of his
philosophy of music. One of these is his relativization of the Einfall, important not only
to Adorno but to music theory circa 1900 in general. Bloch explicitly rejects the idea that
the Einfall should be "the seed, from which on its own... the forest of the symphony
grows," and suggests that for Beethoven, Bruckner and Wagner, the theme "does not
even stand at the beginning, but only stands above it like a distantly effective
hypothesis." Instead of the Einfall,

39
Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988), p. 49; Erster
Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, Samtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart: Cotta,
1858), vol.1 (Erste Abt. Bd. I3), p. 31.
40
"Blochs Spuren," p. 246.
41
Enzyklopädie, §250 (Werke, ed. Moldenhauer/Michel, vol. 9 [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970], p. 35).
42
Joachim Jacob: "Verstehen konstruieren," Einführung in die Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Miltos
Pechlivanos et al. Stuttgart - Weimar: Metzler 1995, pp. 324-336. The term is also relevant to logic, as in
Leon Chwistek's discussion of unconstructible propositional functions ("Die nominalistische Grundlegung
der Mathematik," Erkenntnis 3, pp. 367-388). Bloch might here be seen to anticipate Heidegger's later
critique of such hermeneutical "construction" in Sein und Zeit.
43
“To construe a concept is to represent a priori the intuition corresponding to it. Thus for the construal of a
concept, a non-empirical intuition is demanded,” Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 713 B 741 (Werke ed.
Weischedel [Suhrkamp, 1974], vol. 4, p. 613).
44
The concept of Durchbruch was developed by Adorno in the Mahler book, but has potentially wider
application: it is relevant to the larger forms of Nielsen and Enescu (and late Brahms) as well, and thus
constitutes an esoteric (or even occult) formal tradition within modernity.
45
“Certainly, however, harmonic depth-consciousness is no longer decisive for the construction of our
music,” Adorno, aphorism 10 from Musikalische Schriften V, Gesammelte Schriften 18 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 17.

29
 the productive life of the chords does better service. And not only because
certain inessential tributary rivers spring from the accompanying voices, which
then flow into the ensuing continuation. Rather there is here a particular form-
shaping force, which retunes (umstimmt) and reshapes the tone series, and can
46
even make this latter unrecognizable for the lay person.

It is significant that Bloch uses here the term "tone series" (Tonreihe) and not
scale (Tonleiter). The retuning (Umstimmen) of this series would be, in our context,
Roussel's modal reshaping of the scale. Roussel's modal and improvisatory loosening of
the distinction between figure and background, noted earlier, would also be cognate to
Bloch's stress on the "productive life of the chords" that cannot be reduced to the
individual shape of the Einfall. Note also Bloch's idea of the theme as a "distantly
effective hypothesis" (eine fernher wirkende Hypothese), which well describes the
tentative quality of the formula and its evasion of the quality of definite, intentional or
logical positing so typical of the Einfall. It is the suspension of normal harmonic function
that gives the formula its hesitant, anticipatory quality so typical of Jugendstil aesthetics.
This absence of clear function, the retuning of the scale, the blurring of fore- and
background, all give the formula its quality of latency, of irrealization as well. That same
quality is what requires the risk of philosophical interpretation:

Thus one enters––certainly not without being multiply supported and instructed
by formal analysis, but without having one's way pointed out by the latter––the
47
dangerous (schädlich) space between musical and philosophical form.

This latency is indeed a signature of Roussel's period (specifically of Symbolism),

and it is familiar from Debussy's poetics of suggestion and indirectness.48 In Bloch––as
later in Adorno and Benjamin––it is inseparable from a Messianic theology of
anticipation, a metaphysical matter which need not be continued here. Yet in Roussel's
later work from the 1920s onward, latency takes a more abstract form, one which evades
thematic statement and logical, discursive development in favor of the paraphrasable
formula, one which resists the construction of an unambiguous tonal meaning. It is this
abstraction and ambiguity which define what was earlier termed latency, namely the
difficulty of understanding Roussel. Andreas Moraitis has suggested that Riemann's
Tonvorstellung might be a form of musical latency.49 Tonvorstellung has been variously
translated as "imagination" or "representation."50 In Roussel's case, the Tonvorstellung
required by his formula is tied up to a character-like latency of form, a form which is at a

46
Geist der Utopie, pp. 205-206. See also p. 217 on this "tone series." On page 200, the relativization of
the Einfall is set in relation to its "spreading out... into many voices, which does not at all have to be
'already' fugal." Such a non-fugal dispersion could be interpreted as the heterophony characteristic of
French music of the period and common to Debussy and Roussel.
47
Ibid., pp. 224-5.
48
Louis Marvick, Waking the Face that Noone is: A Study in the Musical Context of Symbolist Poetics
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).
49
"Musikalische Latenzen." Klang-Struktur-Metapher: Musikalische Analyse zwischen Phänomen und
Begriff, ed. Michael Polth, Oliver Schwab-Felisch, Christian Thorau (Stuttgart: Metzler 2000), pp. 137-159,
p. 139.
50
On this, see Brian Hyer, "Reimag(in)ing Riemann," Journal of Music Theory, vol. 39 (Spring 1995), pp.
101-138, esp. pp. 102-104.

30
"boundary station between absolute and program music."51 Historically, we may see this
as tied to residues of French musical pictorialism in his work. One might also surmise
that the marginalizing of French music and of Stravinsky in Adorno's version of musical
modernity is tied up with a peculiar notion of Tonvorstellung. The difficulty of
understanding this aspect of Roussel is at once immanently technical, hermeneutical and
philosophical. Yet the aesthetic of the formula, as programmatically suggested here, may
offer a key to other modern composers who have been marginalized by the modernist
canon as has been Roussel. The speculative nature of this essay's conclusion might
eventually be justified as prolegomena to such a larger undertaking.

51
Erwin Bodky, Das Charakterstück (Wölfenbüttel: Moeseler, 1960; reprint of 1932 edition), p. 3.

31