Perceiving Irony in Music

Abstract

Hatten (".fn_cite_year($hatten_1994).") writes that if musical passages are “inappropriate to the context of the movement . . . an ironic interpretation would be one way to reconcile that inappropriateness as a compositional effect rather than a flaw” (185). Is there something systematic that prompts listeners to interpret musical “inappropriateness” as ironic? Building upon Hatten’s work, this article explores how a listener might infer irony in Beethoven’s music by drawing on cognitive principles and analogies shared by music and language. I create an analytical framework that draws conditions from language psychologists’ empirical studies of verbal and situational irony (".fn_cite($colston_2001).", ".fn_cite($lucariello_1994)."). The first condition is a violation of expectations established through a norm or schema. I use Caplin’s (".fn_cite_year($caplin_1998).") theory of formal function, Gjerdingen’s (".fn_cite_year($gjerdingen_2007).") schema theory, and Hepokoski and Darcy’s (".fn_cite_year($hepokoskidarcy_2006).") Sonata Theory to measure violation of expectation as defined by Beethoven and his audience’s shared stylistic knowledge. Since listeners develop expectations in music simply by listening (".fn_cite($meyer_1956)."), this paper incorporates “common ground,” Clark’s (".fn_cite_year($clark_1996).") term for the information, knowledge, and cultural norms that the composer and listener share. The second condition is blatantly failing to fulfill one or more of the “maxims” defined by the linguist H.P. Grice (".fn_cite_year($grice_1975)."), who argues that a person implicitly follows the maxims in any “cooperative” conversation. I apply this framework to analyze three Beethoven string quartet movements that Hatten and others have described as “ironic”: op. 95/iv, op. 131/v, and op. 130/i. I close by discussing implications for musical communication as a whole.