Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age

Abstract

Early twentieth-century psychological theorists (Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund Freud) associated the uncanny with the occlusion of the boundary between real and imaginary, and with the defamiliarization of the familiar. Their music-theoretic contemporaries (Heinrich Schenker, Ernst Kurth, Alfred Lorenz) associated reality with consonance, imagination with dissonance. Late Romantic composers frequently depicted uncanny phenomena (in opera, song, and programmatic instrumental music) through hexatonic poles, a triadic juxtaposition that inherently undermines the consonant status of one or both constituents. Quintessentially familiar harmonies become defamiliarized liminal phenomena that hover between consonance and dissonance, thereby embodying the characteristics they are called upon by composers to depict. Examples of uncanny triadic juxtapositions are drawn from music of Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Haydn, Wagner, Mahler, Grieg, Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Puccini, Ravel, and Schoenberg.