Is There a “Machine Music” Topic?

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 stylization, the question arises as to what distinguishes an imitation of “extra-musical sounds” from musical styles that typically incorporate those sounds. 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 machines in selected musical works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and by outlining a genealogy of the topic from the Rococo imitation of clocks to the current ubiquity of techno, by way of some musical exponents of a constructivist aesthetics (Mosolov and Deshevov, among others). By examining the way melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and timbral features are woven together to form characteristic musical textures, my purpose is to show the intertextual character of such typologies and the way they convey temporal and spatial structures particularly suited to the representation of the mechanic and the “objective,” against the wider frame of a poetics of “immobile movement” (Vladimir Jankélévitch) and the imagery of the non-human.