At the very point where a conventional account of
organicism might begin -- with Sullivan and the early works of Wright, Horta, Guimard and Gaudi -- the author concludes with an epilogue describing 'the loss of the spell' -- the replacement of Vitruvian
organicism by a fundamentally different kind based on biological functionalism.
Any potential lack of
organicism is overcome by the principle of selection; there is a relatively small number of global themes that explain the inclusion of the essays reprinted.
His resistance to
organicism, however, is a much more central matter.
Yet although Kerman encourages a more analytical bent in musicology, he also notes that there are many musical traditions that are not fully illuminated by the traditional German analytic traditions of
organicism. He illustrates this point through an analysis of Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe, an analysis demonstrating that an attention to aspects neglected by
organicism - surface detail, text, and historical context - is essential to a comprehensive understanding of the piece.
Organicism is denied, and oppositions are not resolved.
His work is animated by the tensions created by its dichot-omies--between knowingness and innocence, grandeur and intimacy, constructivism and
organicism, immediacy and monumentality, neo-expressionism and neo-geo, a traditionalist's love of oil paint with an assemblagist's resort to vernacular materials (bread, foil, glitter).
On the one hand, this function demonstrates Mendelssohn's subscription to a central tenet of nineteenth-century theories of
organicism. On the other, it makes evident a fundamental concept common to the three otherwise remarkably disparate symphonies Mendelssohn chose to publish (the C minor, the 'Lobgesang' and the 'Scottish') and lacking in the two posthumously published ones (the 'Italian' and the 'Reformation').
Hoffmann (1810) to Walter Engelsmann (1940) in which the first movement is explained "as a congeries of intricately linked musical ideas" (i.e., the principle of
organicism) and a pithy yet incisive critique of Heinrich Schenker's reduction analysis of the movement (1912), which reveals "a deeper skeletal structure that gives shape and foundation to the myriad of details of the movement" (p.
Among the earliest works are four oils on canvas from 1953, which show Pape mixing the geometric with a vivid
organicism and relate broadly to the developing interests of the Concretismo movement.