Lectures in Musicology: Johanna Frymoyer, University of Notre Dame

Johanna Frymoyer, assistant professor of music theory, University of Notre Dame, presents “Topical Affordances in Modernist Performance Practice.” This lecture is co-sponsored by the School of Music and The Ohio State University Libraries. 
(Image credit: Arnold Schoenberg Center, Wien)

For many musicians, performances of late eighteenth-century music that emphasize topical gestures through tempo, dynamics, and articulation constitute a historically-informed practice. In modernist repertory too, analysts have demonstrated the prevalence of topics through score study, but topics often remain inaudible in performance.

This talk argues that topics provide affordances for expressive timing in modernist music, though they are underutilized in performance. Focusing on Schoenberg’s music in particular, Frymoyer's argument employs three angles: textual evidence from aesthetic writings, empirical evidence from the analysis of recordings, and critical engagement with broader disciplinary debates on performance practice. First, the speaker argues that “expressive characters” in writings on performance by Schoenberg and Rudolf Kolisch resemble musical topics. This connection is overlooked because scholars read these texts as philosophy rather than as performance treatises. Second, using Sonic Visualizer software, Frymoyer analyzes recordings of a topically-rich passage from Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet, Op. 26. The speaker demonstrates how some ensembles’ choices of tempo, rubato, and microtiming enhance topical audibility (and, by extension, technical precision), often in contradiction to beliefs about how and why performers employ expressive timing in modernist music. The premise that some performances are more “topical” than others suggests that topics present opportunities for musicians to synchronize and coordinate in time. This leads to Frymoyer's third, revisionist claim that topics are not limited to a historically-informed style of performance particular to late eighteenth-century repertory. Rather, topical awareness is a bottom-up approach to performance timing that can be applied in many repertories. This cross-stylistic practice undermines the historical periodization of performance into “rhetorical,” “vitalist,” and “geometric” styles.

Frymoyer concludes by proposing that topics provide an important way to approach performance decisions in many styles of notated music. Understood as affordances, topics underpin how performers shape musical time through learned ways of interpreting patterns in the score.

Johanna Frymoyer is assistant professor of music theory at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests explore musical meaning through the lenses of semiotics, cognitive linguistics, and embodiment with particular emphasis on the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Her book Modernist Movements: Listening for Topics in Schoenberg and Stravinsky is forthcoming (spring 2025) with Oxford University Press. She earned her PhD in musicology from Princeton University.