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Motives for Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music.

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By Christopher Alan Reynolds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. [xii, 230 p. ISBN 0-674-01037-X. $45.] Music examples, index.

Motives for Allusion plumbs two difficult questions: what constitutes a musical allusion, and--the larger question--what purposes are served by such allusions? The music from which Christopher Reynolds has drawn his examples is chiefly that written by German and Austrian composers from Beethoven to Richard Strauss. But his methods, mutatis mutandis, could be applied to other repertories.

Page 6 provides the essential definition: "an allusion is an intentional reference to another work made by means of a resemblance that affects the meaning conveyed to those who recognize it." This formulation turns on the word "intentional"; for Reynolds, if a composer has used a musical motive to direct attention specifically to an already existing piece, then an allusion occurs. Testing a composer's deliberateness requires researches beyond the strictly musical. For instance, "the presence of textual associations [between vocal works] gives an added control in the attempt to relate two motives: there must he a correspondence not only between motives but also between texts" (p. 17). And, more broadly, a fact-laden historical and biographical perspective aims at determining the composer's intentions. Clearly, this stress on the maker's state of mind runs counter to tendencies arising in literary critical theory before the turn of the twenty-first century. Unlike the studies of intertexuality that proclaimed...

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