변형을 통한 브람스의 대조·대칭의 미학

Brahms's aesthetics of Contrast and Symmetry as witnessed through a transformational process

The paper is a narrative analysis, which shows how a semantic transfiguration from death to love is reflected upon Brahms's Lied, Vier ernste Gesänge through a genuine process of a musical transformation. We have adopted a Schenkerian theory and neo-Riemannian transformational theory as our primary methodology. The former explains the detailed voice-leading events between adjacent songs in a deep-level as well as a local-level structure, while the latter offers an invaluable insight, by which one could illuminate tonal relationships in a logical and systematic way. A close examination through such analytic methodologies reveals some systematic and logical analytical results not only in foreground events, such as a meter change and an anomaly in voice-leading and harmonic progression, but also in more structural events that cannot be detected exclusively by traditional harmonic and formal analyses. The narrative deploys by taking metaphors of “difference,” “contrast,” and “symmetry,” which integrate ultimately into a “transformation” as its main theme. The sense of transformation reflected on texts excerpted from the Bible suggests radical analytic interpretations, such as a unified Ursatz that juxtaposes the second and third songs, an unconformity between the superficial and structural keys, and a contrast and symmetry as witnessed in both adjacent and remote-level tonal relationships.