Hackers, Harps, and Soundscapes: New Histories of the Musical Topic

After first emerging in Franz Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No. 1 (1860), the orchestral harp glissando had become a cliché by the early twentieth century--a view articulated by the English composer Cecil Forsyth, who noted that "this mechanical sweeping sound at every orchestral crisis becomes tiresome in the extreme." Yet it remains one of the most emblematic gestures in Western music, signifying transformation born of temporal and spatial ruptures and most typically linked to flashbacks, dreams, and fantasy sequences. Despite its longstanding semiotic durability, the harp glissando has received scant analytical attention, even from topic theorists, who might consider the gesture mimetic, insufficiently marked or, in derisive terms, a cliché.   

In this paper, I argue that the harp glissando has retained its currency precisely because of its capacity to function as cliché--and, moreover, that it acquires the characteristics of a musical topic over the course of the twentieth century. To distinguish signifiers from topics, Raymond Monelle has posed two questions: "Has this musical sign passed from literal imitation (iconism) or stylistic reference (indexicality) into signification by association?...Is there a level of conventionality in the sign?" (2000, 80). Using these questions as a guide, I examine the harp glissando's early appearances in Russian opera and ballet, where its function was iconic and mimetic. The gesture developed its now-familiar association with magical, transportive, and transformational states primarily in Rimsky-Korsakov's music, as examples from The Snow Maiden, Sadko, and Kashchey the Deathless will reveal. In some contexts Rimsky's harp glissandos were also indexical, functioning as if they themselves caused or had become synonymous with transformation, evoking Robert Hatten's interpretive links between indexicality, synecdoche, and causality.
By the twentieth century, composers expected listeners to know what the harp glissando signified, as examples from Ravel and Stravinsky attest. Evidence that the gesture ultimately fulfills Monelle's second condition--conventionality--appears in modern media, where harp glissandos signal transformative states in TV and film scores, cartoons, and video games. Indeed, the fact that the glissando can be the crux of a joke in comedic contexts demonstrates its topical legibility across musical styles and media types.

Ever since the notion of the musical topic was introduced into the vocabulary of musicology, the distinction between topics and pictorialism has been the object of controversy, arising from conflicting conceptual definitions and differing semiotic models. Raymond Monelle (2000), for one, subsumed some instances of musical icons under the category of topics, based on what he termed the 'indexicality of content', a property he ascribed to topics in general. However, the difference between such iconic topics and musical icons is far from clear-cut, and in any case indexicality cannot be determined a priori. By contrast, according to Danuta Mirka (2014), Monelle's 'iconic topics' should not be considered topics because they 'do not form cross-references between musical styles or genres.' Since musical imitation inevitably involves some degree of stylisation, the question arises as to what distinguishes an imitation of 'extra-musical sounds' from musical styles that typically incorporate those sounds – as, for instance, the imitation of natural sounds within the semantic field of the pastoral.


In this paper, I address some of the processes through which musical icons become part of standard typologies and eventually acquire the status of topics, by focusing on the representation of landscape in selected orchestral works from the 19th and 20th centuries, and in particular on the 'impressionistic soundscape' in the tradition of the 'Waldweben' music from Wagner's Siegfried, together with some parallel examples from Debussy, Ravel, Mahler and Rimsky-Korsakov. By examining the way melodic, rhythmic, harmonic and timbral features are woven together to form characteristic musical textures (Klangflächen), often blurring the distinction between background and foreground, my purpose is: (1) to show the intertextual character of such typologies and the way they convey temporal and spatial structures, particularly suited to the evocation of pristine nature, and (2) to show that the 'soundscape' topic is open to various degrees of semantic fluidity, to the extent of sharing some structural features with its apparent opposite, the representation of the mechanic – two extremes paradoxically linked by a common emphasis on 'immobile movement' (V. Jankélévitch) and the poetics of 'objectivity'.

Topic theory has evolved as a framework for studying communication and meaning in European classical music. Some scholarship has extended beyond this repertoire (ex. Echard 2017), but many conventional topics in popular music remain understudied. The music theorist Eron Smith has identified a b2-1 "hotness" topic in post-millenial pop and has traced the topic to long-standing orientalist stereotypes associating b2 with non-Western music. Some of Smith's examples clearly resonate with orientalism by combining the b2 with sitars or other timbral markers of foreignness.


But many examples of the b2 "hotness" topic do not contain orientalist timbral markers. I argue for another source: the ubiquitous use of b2 in extreme metal, gothic/industrial/EBM, and other pre-millennial underground music subcultures. Some post-millenial pop examples of the hotness topic, such as Justin Timberlake's "Sexyback" (2006), imitate the distorted timbres of EBM exactly, rather than the orientalist "foreign" timbres. I trace the transmission of b2 into mainstream pop through millennial films that romanticized these subcultures and brought them to mainstream attention, like _Queen of the Damned_ (2002) and _The Matrix_ (1999), as well as late-90s moments when these underground styles crossed over into the mainstream, like electro house (ex. Benny Benassi "Satisfaction," 2003) and nu metal (ex. Korn, whose singer Jonathan Davis composed songs for _Queen of the Damned_). What began as a pre-millennial performative icon of transgressive anti-mainstream aesthetics and ideology was sublimated into an indexical sign for edgy cool, then co-opted and commodified as post-millennial sexiness.


This trajectory certainly does not replace the b2's orientalist resonances, nor is it the only route of transmission to post-millennial pop (b2 is also common in trap music, for example). b2 "hotness," like all topics, is not a static analytical symbol, but carries contingent, plural meanings that evolve over time as the topic is used by different communities and for different purposes. This demonstrates a crucial role for historical research as topic theory expands to popular genres: to understand how pop topics change, what they have signified, and for whom.