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of professional disapproval she reports having encountered "during 1985
in several Bach Year celebrations"?
For McClary, the concerto form "addresses the tensions between
the dynamic individual and the stable society," with the former repre–
sented by the soloist(s), and the latter by the larger group and its ritor–
nellos. How does this square with saying that "a ritomello represents
a
microcosm of the entire movement?" This can be the case only if the
ritomello compromises its "social" role by incorporating instability. But
she suppresses any mention of instability in
this
movement's ritornello
(whose phrasing is notably irregular) because that would interfere with
her argument: the ritomello must be stable, smug, and self-satisfied.
We can summarize McClary's account of the remainder of the
movement as follows: the normal dialectic of the ritomello and the
conventional soloists (the flute and violin) is first undermined and then
overthrown by the emergence of the harpsichord (from its obscurity as
a
continuo instrument) into a soloistic agent of violent revolution. The
harpsichord only relents, allowing the ritomello to prevail, when "the
alternative seems to be madness." This account forces McClary to suppress
the entrance of the harpsichord as one of the soloists
immediately
after the
first ritornello, where it presents material she associates only with the
'docile' flute and violin. Similarly, her account of the harpsichord
'cadenza' (Bach calls it a "cembalo solo senza stromenti") suppresses its
first forty-one measures (out of sixty-five); I therefore presume she finds
them as decorous as I do. Her claim that the solo "unleashes elements of
chaos, irrationality, and noise until finally it blurs almost entirely the sense
of key, meter, and form upon which eighteenth-century style depends" is
supposedly substantiated by a musical example. It begins with eight
measures of fairly straightforward elaboration of the dominant, followed
by elevent measures of dominant pedal: striking and adventurous, but no
threat to the tonic. With the arrival of the pedal, the meter (imperiled
for five measures - less than a tenth of the solo) is clear and
unambiguous. Instead of "finally relenting," the harpsichord relents
gradually, allowing itself ("ironically") "to be appropriated" by the so–
cial norm. Her "storming of the Bastille" is colorful, yet wildly inappro–
priate: but if the revolution is averted, it is not by force.
In short, McClary'S account of this movement is more sophisticated
than the average nineteenth-century programmatic reading of 'abstract'
music, but, inexcusably, not more accurate or responsive to what actually
happens in the piece. Her
"elements
of chaos ..." and "blurs almost en–
tirely" seem designed to let her wriggle out of any hole she might climb
into. She fails to deliver what her polemical stance would require.
It is not hard to discover either what McClary and other thinkers
of the left want of music in the late twentieth century or how their
