Of Serpentina and Stenography: Shapes of Handwriting in Romantic Melody

Like nineteenth-century handwriting, Romantic melody consisted of a single unbroken, shaped curviline and was invested with the ability to evoke the ideal, maternal feminine, to evoke deeper images and specific meanings, and to function simultaneously as language and as signifier of infinite meaning. It can be fruitfully compared with stenography, a handwriting-based information technology flourishing in the middle nineteenth century. This article documents the perceived handwriting-like nature of music and the perceived musicality of stenography through writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Robert Schumann, Wagner, and the stenographer F. X. Gabelsberger. The perceptual phenomenon of auditory streaming, along with analytical approaches developed by Robert O. Gjerdingen and Eugene Narmour, makes it possible to demonstrate structural similarities between stenography and melody (in examples by Berlioz, Mendelssohn, and Wagner) and to show commonalities between the notion of the "music of the future" and the futuristic aspirations of stenography. In turn, it becomes possible to perform the shapes of handwriting in Romantic melody and hear voices and fantastic visions in those shapes.

Music and meaning in the commercials

What does music mean, if anything? The question is one of the hardy perennials of musical aesthetics, and there is no shortage of answers to it. Indeed, there is a plethora of seemingly unrelated answers. We can talk about music's internal structure, about its symmetries and directional motions, about patterns of implication and their realisation or lack of realisation; moving from ‘the music itself’ to listeners' reponses, approaches like this offer a psychological approach to meaning (and the work of Leonard Meyer and Eugene Narmour provide the best known examples). Or we can approach the music from the opposite direction, talking about the context of its creation, the context of its performance, and the context of its reception; here the assumption is that music acquires meaning through its mediation of society. Or again, we can oscillate between these two viewpoints, on the assumption that meaning arises from the mutual mediation of music and society. That is the central assumption of musical hermeneutics, whether we are applying this term to the work of Hermann Kretzschmar in the 1880s or that of Lawrence Kramer in the 1980s.