[2] Today I will set out the "bare bones" of my thoughts on the matter, beginning with defining synecdoche and its epistemological prerequisites; the status of synecdoche as an element of communication; the time-reliant foundations of music, communication, and knowledge; and finally to three examples of synecdoche in music: Wagner's leitmotiv technique; the quotation of the funeral march from Beethoven's Third Symphony at the end of Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen; and the quotation of Johann Strauss by Schoenberg at the end of Pierrot Lunaire. I was attracted by their chronological proximity, as well as their profound import; the issues of meaning for the listener that they raise are literally a matter of life and death. There are a number of facets to this topic that I must leave to one side due to time constraints: this paper has ramifications for studies of music as narrative; organicism and unity in music; deconstructive strategies; absolute music; the distinction between synecdoche and metonymy; Bloomian poetics; and other topics. I hope that some of them might be raised in the discussion following.

[3] First let me clarify what I mean by "synecdoche," a term that has proved contentious in the literature of rhetoric and linguistics over the past forty years. Despite sometimes violent disagreement of detail, it is generally agreed that synecdoche is part of a central figural space of language which also includes metaphor and metonymy (Levin 1977). Samuel Levin has identified two types of synecdoche, the genus-species relation (or "member-class ensemble") and the part-whole relation (or "logical sum"); for example, the set [apple::macintosh, Rome, delicious, etc.] suggests the genus-species, while the set [apple::seeds, stem, core, skin, etc.] suggests the part-whole relation. Levin regarded the former as semantic, the latter as encyclopedic (Levin 1977:103). I prefer to view this opposition as a continuum between semantic and encyclopedic, for the element of the semantic can never be "distilled" from the encyclopedic. Thus I focus on the latter in this paper. The three famous chords we first heard demonstrate the encyclopedic signification of reference [bonus points given for reference to Tippett, 3rd Symphony, or Shostakovich, 15th Symphony!]; member-class synecdochic signification in music may be seen in examples of references to a general style. To take a recent study of music and meaning particularly pertinent here, Nicholas Cook has considered how the first 38 measures of the overture to Mozart's Marriage of Figaro function meaningfully as background music to a TV commercial, a Volvo ad (Cook 1994); that is, he showed that the associative nature of the music was held by the ad makers to be strongly conducive to producing the effect "I want to own a Volvo." Although Cook does not break down the interpretation according to varieties of listeners, it is clear that the meaning of the quotation is still effective, even if the listener had never heard Figaro before. Features of the music such as its style and mood, features admittedly apprehended through experience of music in society, enable the listener to place it as a member of a class (e.g. "classical," "cheerful," etc.); precisely the intent of the ad writers.

[4] Since both types of synecdoche--genus-species and part-whole-- rely on the encyclopedic, we must have prior knowledge, and agree as listeners on what that prior knowledge is. This typical feature of language, which Saussure identified as sign agreement, I take to be uncontroversial but fundamental to the process of reference; quite simply, we use sign agreement (or paradigmatic association) to appreciate references of any type, and particularly musical quotations and allusions. It is not rigid or precisely quantifiable but probably best viewed as a continuum whereby the member-class synecdoche is "simpler," that is apprehensible with less prior knowledge; and the part-whole synecdoche consequently "more complex" since it relies on more knowledge. [5] We have seen two ways music functions synecdochically (the chords and the commercial), both with roots in knowledge. The more knowledge one acquires, presumably, the more complex and subtle the nuances of understanding become. This suggests a general observation, a fundamental paradox of life: how to live with the knowledge of mortality in a world filled with a numberless variety of "universes," each one in some sense filled with an infinite quantity of data, which itself could be reflected upon ad infinitum. We all know that a lifetime's work could be invested in any one of numerous fields, and we feel a certain frustration at our inability to "keep up with it all." Truth be told, we are compelled to use small representations for wholes daily. It is axiomatic that we refer to past experience synecdochically; history relies on synecdoche; simplification, abstraction, and summary are typical everyday manifestations. [One is reminded of Borges's "The Immortals," cursed with too much memory.] Thus synecdoche in music is a specific manifestation of our fundamentally paradoxical relation to the past.

[6] But I would like to move away from these more metaphysical considerations to specifics of quotation or allusion in music and explore the synecdochic reference, where composers allude to prior material with meaning-based intentions. I hasten to say that not all allusions to prior material are synecdochically significant: it is useful to recall what Kenneth Burke has identified as the "synecdochic fallacy," mistaking a part for a whole. In other words, the part/whole dialectic is ambiguous: it is not always easy to determine which "whole" a given part belongs to, for of course they belong to many (as the Marriage of Figaro example shows). Thus I am suggesting a useful frame of reference for understanding quotation and allusion in music, rather than claiming that all allusion should be read synecdochically. In Peter Burkholder's typology, for example, arrangements, variations, and paraphrases quote "wholes" (the entire tune) and are thus not synecdochic in the most superficial sense (Burkholder 1994). One could force the issue and claim that a given tune, superficially a "whole," is also a part of some other whole, and thus synecdochic; but I leave this infinite-regression-style argument to one side for the present. Two elements are necessary to music: an actor and that which is enacted. The synecdochic quotation or allusion, however, requires a third element, the listener; its fundamental premise is thus communication from composer to listener. Communication, memory, and knowledge all share reliance on time; before I take up the specific instances of synecdochic quotation I would like to consider these temporal foundations.

[7] It is well-known that Wagner and Schoenberg were acutely aware of their place in a tradition, that is, they saw a lineage from which they emerged. They both spoke about the future in the context of their works: Kunstwerk der Zukunft was one of Wagner's preferred terms for his music dramas; and Schoenberg spoke about his impact on the future of German music. The relation of past to present to future is certainly a fundamental in our lives and the lives of composers, and so it is important to recognize that there are many types of time (Adam 1990), clock-time, the passing of seconds and minutes, being only one. But it is with clock-time that music has striking control over time, so to speak. There is an inevitability that inheres to music: Eliot's verse "In my beginning is my end" ("Little Gidding," Four Quartets; an accidental allusion to Machaut?), suggests the principle I mean: once a performance of a work is begun, there is a forward propulsion through time to its conclusion. This propulsion is governed by small and large scale temporal coherence. Rhythm is obviously a major factor here, but even pitch is axiomatically defined temporally as "cycles per second." The temporal propulsion of music allows us to, as it were, "predict the future," at least for the remainder of the piece. Control over virtually infinite detail of sound spectrum is complete. In Susanne Langer's terminology, we enter "virtual time" when we listen. The composer is essentially a craftsman of time, and the work as performed is a whole that occupies and manipulates time according to the crafter. I suggest that this intimate connection with time leads composers to a "special relation" with time in the larger sense I first commented on: the past-present- future continuum. They can and do refer to time at the macro level as they manipulate time at the micro-level. Synecdochic quotation is the quintessential combination of macro and micro time scale in the most temporally oriented of the arts.

[8] Wagner's leitmotiv technique is a good example of synecdochic self-quotation for meaningful purposes. Much has been written about the technique, one he himself was at pains both to stress and downplay. It is no accident that for Wagner Beethoven's Ninth was a key ancestor; and Wagner's inspired solution to the problem of how to re-introduce the classical principle of chorus-type commentary into drama may ultimately have arisen from an awareness of Beethoven's synecdochic self-quotations at the head of the fourth movement of the Ninth. Be that as it may, Wagner's solution was to accord the role of the Greek chorus to the orchestra via leitmotiv; and further, to establish formal coherence by the same means (granted that additional aspects combine to constitute the totality of the art form). It is noteworthy that there is a critical ambivalence to leitmotiv; Debussy scorned them as "calling cards," implying that the leitmotiv lacks a legitimate purpose. Wagner did emphasize that leitmotivs had dramatic function, using the term "web" to suggest a network of cross-references.

[9] The cross-referential operation of leitmotiv in time is vital for meaning (Brown 1991, etc.). It requires action on the part of the listener, perhaps to a degree never before experienced. This involvement of the listener in the drama itself is surely part of the background to such hyperbole as Gustav Kobbe''s (1904), who described the Siegfried death-music in Goetterdaemmerung as "the supreme musical-dramatic effect in all that Wagner wrought, and hence the supreme effect in all music."

[10] I suggest that leitmotiv is reference that functions in a simple synecdochic way. The associative meaning that a musical line accrues becomes enlarged and refined as the drama proceeds: each "repetition" of the motive adds to its contextual significance, and thus add layers of meanings to the musical "carrier of meaning." The burden carried by the motives thus becomes "weightier" or more complex as the drama progresses. This has the temporal effect of drawing all the past statements together in a single, richly nuanced mental package. The result is a kind of "stacking up" so that the entire drama's force comes into play with the sounding of leitmotivs. The appearance of the motives at the Death Music thus draw a large whole (the Ring drama) into the reflective space of a few moments. While I do not mean to suggest that this is the only reason audiences have found the Ring and Wagner's other leitmotiv works so mesmerizing (cf. Kinderman 1980; Newcomb 1981), I believe it is an important, if little-recognized, factor in the phenomenon. We as participating witnesses to the drama can palpably feel the powerful weight of meaning increase as the leitmotivs proceed to accumulate significance in the course of the drama.

[11] Richard Strauss's quotation of the funeral march from Beethoven's Third Symphony in Metamorphosen is also centered on issues of part-whole, but without the internal reticulae of Wagner. Strauss's quotation is the culmination of apparently unconscious musical allusion to the Beethoven as he conceived the piece. I leave to one side the general implications of the "metamorphoses" of motives from Strauss's past life as the work unfolds, and turn to the final page of the score, where the Beethoven reference appears with the annotation "IN MEMORIAM!" The reference is synecdochic, not so much for the movement as whole, nor for the symphony, nor even the oeuvre of Beethoven; rather, for the entire culture that was at that moment crashing down around Strauss (the work was composed in early 1945). The reference is similar to leitmotiv in that it forms part of a web of meaning; only the repetitions of the motive occurred through Strauss's life (and by extension to every performance of the symphony from Beethoven forward, whether or not Strauss heard it). Thus the entire weight of Strauss's culture is bound up in the climax to this work. And there is tragic irony in the quotation too: for the state into which Germany had fallen may be viewed as an inevitable outgrowth of historical processes that also gave birth to Beethoven and the "high culture" of Strauss. Suffice to say, the profound despair of the Funeral March quotation is effective at least in part because of the synecdochic burden it bears: the burden of high culture, Strauss's reason for living.

[12] Finally, the Schoenberg. This example may be debatable, but that is no bad thing, for we may thus consider allusion and its perception as a subjective phenomenon. Pierrot Lunaire's last group of seven songs lean towards themes of nostalgia, the literal title of no. 15. Numbers. 19 to 21 particularly suggest longing for a simpler past: Serenade, Journey Homeward, and O Ancient Scent from fabled times. A form of the primary motive of O Ancient Scent is heard in the interlude immediately before the song, which then begins surprisingly with tonally oriented sonorities, which, as has been noted by others, is appropriate to the "fabled" sense of the text that Schoenberg was striving to reflect. A compelling case can be made for identifying the motive as a reference: to Johann Strauss, Tales from the Vienna Woods. [PLAY TAPE] Reference to the Strauss would certainly be appropriate to the text at this point; and the tonal parallel thirds are starkly foreign to the prevailing style of Pierrot. Schoenberg respected Strauss's popularity and found profundity in the simplicity of the master's work: in "Brahms the Progressive," Schoenberg said "Real popularity, lasting popularity, is only attained in those rare cases where power of expression is granted to men who dwell intensely in the sphere of basic human sentiments. There are a few cases in Schubert and Verdi, but many in Johann Strauss." (Style and Idea, 415)

[13] The reference's synecdochic operation is ambiguous. It in some sense represents all that J. Strauss himself represents of a glittery if somewhat decadent Viennese culture; a culture on the surface far removed from Pierrot, yet perhaps not so distant as one might like to think: witness the dramas of Georg Buechner, written in early nineteenth-century Vienna. Again, the weight of a culture is forcefully felt in the space of a few notes, leading me to suggest a powerful meaningful reference. The situation is occluded by the fact that the theme which Schoenberg borrowed is itself easily characterized as "nostalgic" or "wistful." A topos analysis of the Strauss, a la Leonard Ratner, is appropriate: the tempo change, rubato, and mandolin instrumentation evoke an additional layer of significance. Yet to put it more simply: the associations the listener has made, which increase with each instance of hearing Vienna Woods, are forcefully wrenched from memory to the present when the reference in Pierrot is picked up. [For us, the reference has become more complex thanks to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.]

[14] Conclusion. I have tried to show how synecdoche operates when employed in musical allusion and quotation as a conveyor of meaning. This argument relies on the specifically time-based orientation of music as an art. Nostalgia (literally "homesickness") at its most potent is a reminder of mortality; and nostalgia operates strongly in all three examples I have given. Leaving maudlin cliches aside, we still must confront issues of time such as the unrepeatability of the past and the inevitability of our death. We are fundamentally entwined in the human issues of life and death, and reminders of such (though now taboo topics for general discussion) carry a particularly forceful message for us. Musical synecdoche, by focusing associatively the "weight of the past" in sharply delimited compositional moments, carefully planned by their designers, can reduce even the most dulled sense to a heightened awareness of one's situatedness in the world, one's all- too-brief moment of life in comparison with all that has gone before, all that may continue.

Agawu, V. Kofi. Playing with signs: a semiotic interpretation of classic music. Princeton: PUP.

Ayrey, Craig. 1994. Debussy's significant connections: metaphor and metonymy in analytical method. In Theory, analysis, and meaning in music, ed. Anthony Pople. Cambridge: CUP. 127-51.

Ballantine, Christopher. 1979. Charles Ives and the Meaning of Quotation in Music. Musical Quarterly 65:167-84.

Barry, Barbara R. 1990. Musical Time: The Sense of Order. Stuyvesant: Pendragon.

Bonds, Mark Evan. 1991. Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration. Cambridge: HUP.

Brown, Hilda Meldrum. 1991. Leitmotiv and Drama: Wagner, Brecht, and the Limits of 'epic' Theatre. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Burke, Kenneth. 1974 The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd edn. Berkeley: UC Press.

---------. 1954. Four master tropes. In A Grammar of Motives. NY: Prentice-Hall. 503-17.

Burkholder, J. Peter. 1985. "Quotation" and Emulation: Charles Ives's Uses of His Models. Musical Quarterly 71:1-26.

---------. 1991. Musical Time and Continuity as a Reflection of the Historical Situation of Modern Composers. Journal of Musicology 9:412-29.

---------. 1994. The uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field. MLA Notes 50:851-70.

Cicora, Mary A. 1988. From Metonymy to Metaphor: Wagner and Nietzsche on Language. German Life and Letters 42:16-31.

Clifton, Thomas. 1983. Music as Heard: a Study in Applied Phenomenology. New Haven: Yale UP.

Cook, Nicholas. 1994. Music and meaning in the commercials. Popular Music 13/1:27-40. Davis, Fred. 1979. Yearning for Yesterday: a Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press.

Dubois, J., et al. 1970. Rhe'torique ge'ne'rale. Paris: Larousse.

Dunsby, Jonathan. 1992. Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ginzburg, Carlo. 1989. Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm. In Clues, myths, and the historical method, transl. John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 96-215.

Joseph, John Earl. 1982. Dialect, language, and 'synecdoche'. Linguistics 20:473-91.

Kassler, Jamie C., ed. 1991. Metaphor: a Musical Dimension. Sydney: Currency Press.

Katz, Richard C. 1980. The Synecdochic Prospect: a Rhetorical View of the Emergence of a Modern Poetice from the Romantic Symbol to Hart Crane's The Bridge. Ph.D. diss., University of Washington.

Kinderman, William. 1980. Dramatic Recapitulation in Wagner's Goetterdaemmerung. Nineteenth Century Music 4, 101-12.

Kobbe', Gustav. 1904. Wagner's musical dramas. NY: Schirmer.

Korsyn, Kevin, 1991. Towards a new poetics of musical influence. Music Analysis 10/1-2, 3-72.

Kramer, Jonathan D. 1988. The Time of Music. New York: Schirmer.

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: UCP.

Levin, Samuel. 1977. The Semantics of Metaphor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

Monelle, Raymond. 1992. Linguistics and Semiotics in Music. Chur: Harwood.

Morgan, Robert P. 1978. Ives and Mahler: Mutual Responses at the End of an Era. Nineteenth Century Music 2, 72-81.

Newcomb, Anthony. 1981. The Birth of Music out of the Spirit of Drama. Nineteenth Century Music 5/1, 38-66.

Ratner, Leonard, 1980. Classic music: expression, form, and style. NY: Schirmer.

Richards, I. A. 1936. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: Oxford UP.

Ruwet, Nicolas. 1975. Synecdoques et Metonymies. Poetique 23, 371-88.

Saussure, F. de. 1983. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, transl. and annotated Roy Harris. London: Duckworth.

Schoenberg, Arnold. 1975. Style and Idea. London: Faber.

Straus, Joseph. 1990. Remaking the past: musical modernism and the influence of the tonal tradition. Cambridge: HUP.

Sturrock, John, et al. 1979. Structuralism and since. Oxford: OUP.

Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. 1976. Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition. In Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (U of M Press, 1991), 15-41. First published JAMS.