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Raymond Monelle. 2006. The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, and Pastoral. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Reviewed by Andrew Haringer
Raymond Monelle, who passed away earlier this year, was something of an anomaly in the academic community. As far as I am aware, he is the only musicologist to have a pop song written in his honor: "Keep in Sight of Raymond Monelle" by Canadian indie band Barcelona Pavilion. He was that rare breed of the true performer-scholar who remained active as a composer, jazz pianist, and conductor, nurturing the boyhood talents of now-prominent Scottish musicians Donald Runnicles and James MacMillan in the latter capacity. Following his retirement in 2002, he even wrote a novel about the adolescence of Alban Berg, which currently remains unpublished.1
However, it is for his groundbreaking work in musical semiotics, and topic theory in particular, for which Dr. Monelle is most likely to be remembered, and here too he deviated from the norm. Over the past two decades, he developed an approach to the study of music signification that was at once solidly grounded in the methodologies of the past, and yet refreshingly devoid of dogmatic prejudice and any pretense of quasi-scientific rigor. It was this judicious blend of a solid foundation and an adventurous spirit that ensured glowing reviews of Monelle's first two books by scholars of such different temperaments as Kofi Agawu (1994) and Susan McClary (2001). It is therefore surprising that his third and, in my estimation, greatest book-The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, and Pastoral-met with so little fanfare when it appeared four years ago.2
Modern topic theory owes its beginnings to Leonard Ratner's seminal work, Classic Music (1980). In a mere twenty pages, Ratner puts forth the revolutionary claim that eighteenth-century composers relied upon a lexicon of "characteristic figures"-dance rhythms, military and hunt styles, Turkish music, and so on-as "topics-subjects for musical discourse" (1980:9). Ratner's disciples, Kofi Agawu and Wye Allanbrook, continued his work, enlarging the topical world to address questions of form and syntax. Indeed, Nicholas McKay makes the keen observation that, while topic theory has avoided much of the backlash against formalist analysis by dint of its status as "hermeneutics," the first wave of topic theorists has still tended to focus on close readings...