William Coble’s ‘Autumn Elegy’: Parentheticals and Implicature

I recently had occasion to hear a recording of William Coble’s beautiful 1983 chamber composition, ‘Autumn Elegy for solo guitar’. Coble is a two-time winner of the Davenport Orchestral Composition competition (1990, 2002) at SUNY New Paltz and has received commissions from eighth blackbird and Pacifica Quartet, among others. His chamber music works have been performed at Merkin Hall, Weill Hall, CAMI Hall, Harvard Musical Association, Northwestern University’s Music Marathon, Society for New Music, Cincinnati’s Music-2004 Festival, and the BSO at Tanglewood.

Coble trained initially at Boston University School of Music, with graduate work at Harvard University and Curtis Institute of Music. His teachers have included Ned Rorem, David DelTredici, Mario Davidovsky, Gunther Schuller, Steve Albert, John Eaton, Kotoka Suzuki, and Howard Sandroff.

W hile a fellow at the Macdowell Colony, he recently completed a setting of sacred music for baritone, violin, cello, and piano. He also worked on vocal chamber music for an upcoming festival in Austria and on Variations for the Richmond Symphony. Coble is currently a graduate student in composition at the University of Chicago.

Coble’s music is honest and free of pretension. It is intent on creating coloristic effects from a wide palette. Its performance does call for ‘repose’, reserve, and great subtlety of phrasing. ‘Autumn Elegy’ is characteristic in that regard...

In fact, in view of Coble’s output to date, including his ‘Parenthetical Phrases for Flute, Oboe, and Bassoon’, he seems especially interested in inter-part adverbial constructions and parentheticals. Various of his compositions have to do with encapsulating one passage within a constrasting ‘wrapper’ structure. The enclosed passage is generally a sort of ‘aside’ or reminder——not so much subordinate to the surrounding material as expressing a rebuttal or rejoinder to it.

Musical parenthetical expressions correspond to a sense of suspending and resuming——a change of gesture, confiding or revealing some intimate detail. Parentheticals are not ‘incidental’ or ‘accessory’; instead they are often where the most important dramatic things are said.

W hat I notice in Coble’s ‘Autumn Elegy’ is these variations’ demand for spontaneity. Too often, at chamber music master classes and lessons, when the teacher addresses interpretation and the timing of transitions (‘No, wait a little longer here. Try to end this up in the air,’ etc.) it seems to focus too much on the superficial ‘syntactic’ features of the piece and too little on how to make each performance fresh.

Now, I don’t find ‘Autumn Elegy’ sad as such–—its overall emotional mien is wonderfully abstract—–but the phrase to which the low B in measure 5 leads is desolate. You feel a kind of inner call towards contemplation rather than playing and engagement. A few bars of minor are absorbed within the larger arc; a bubble of minor floating in the major.


The low notes have their distinctive ‘litoral’ colors: they are dark, forsaking and forsaken; uncertain what they will do now——now that they, and we, have fallen to the ground.

Coble controls his materials well, including his clauses that Diane Blakemore and others might call ‘adverbial parentheticals’. But he does so with a deliberate aim to allow/demand improvisatory interpretive ‘implicature’ by the performer(s). Implicature does not succeed if it’s an over-rehearsed ‘talking-point’, ‘too smooth’. Implicature only works if it’s spontaneous and real. Coble clearly has the mechanics of implicature ‘nailed’.

The term ‘parenthetical’ covers a disparate range of phenomena only some of which have been regarded as falling within the domain of syntax—which is possibly why master classes and lessons seldom to justice to parenthetical idioms. It’s been argued by Haegeman that adverbial parenthetical clauses, which have been treated by other writers as syntactic phenomena, must be analyzed as syntactic ‘orphan’ that are integrated into the utterance at the level of utterance interpretation. If this approach is right, then it would raise the question of how we could justify a distinction between grammatical parentheticals and pragmatic or discourse parentheticals.

But recently research linguist Christopher Potts at UMass Amherst has argued against this approach in favor of an integrated syntactical analysis. In Potts’s analysis, the ‘otherness’ of parentheticals is best characterized semantically by treating them as inserting ‘implicatures’. The difference between these approaches to adverbial parenthetical clauses basically concerns what relationship the parentheticals have with the material that encloses them.

Have a look at the linguistics references below to see how compositions like William Coble’s (and, say, Beethoven’s Opp. 109 and 111) are supported by these two very different conceptions of the distinction between grammar (syntax) and pragmatics (performance practice; rhetoric). I myself favor the Potts-Blakemore view, which emphasizes pragmatics, spontaneity, and implicature. Their linguistics analytical methods have much to offer, I think, to music theory and to composers who find analysis helpful during the process of composing/orchestrating…

• William Coble website
  
• Coble W. Autumn Elegy for Solo Guitar. Assoc Music Publ, 1983.
  
• Diane Blakemore, University of Salford, U.K.
  
• Why Leaves Change Color
  
• Fall Foliage at Wikipedia
  
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• Asher N. Truth and discourse semantics for parentheticals, Journal of Semantics 2000; 17:31–51.
  
• Blakemore D. Performatives and parentheticals, Proc Aristotelian Society 1990; 91:197–213.
  
• Blakemore D. Understanding Utterances: Intro to Pragmatics. Blackwell, 1992.
  
• Blakemore D. Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge Univ, 2004.
  
• Blakemore D. And-parentheticals, Journal of Pragmatics 2005; 37:1165–81.
  
• Blass R. Relevance Relations in Discourse. Cambridge Univ, 2006.
  
• Bolinger D. Intonation and Its Uses. Stanford Univ, 1989.
  
• Burton-Roberts N. Language, linear precedence and parentheticals. In: P. Collins and D. Lee, eds, The Clause in English. John Benjamins, 1998, pp. 33–52.
  
• Haegeman L. Parenthetical adverbials. In: S. Chiba, ed, Aspects of Modern English Linguistics. Kaitakushi, 1988, pp. 232–54.
  
• Hand M. Parataxis and parentheticals. Linguistics and Philosophy 1993; 16:495–507.
• Kinderman W. ‘Thematic contrast and parenthetical closure in the piano sonatas opp. 109 and 111.’ in Zu Beethoven: Aufsatze und Dokumente, Bd 3. Goldschmidt H, ed. Neue Musik, 1988, pp. 43-59.
  
• Kirby F. Music for Piano. Amadeus, 2003. [several mentions of ‘parenthetical’ expressions and performance practice]
  
• Levinson S. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. MIT, 2000.
  
• Potts C. The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Oxford Univ, 2005.
  
• Ross J. Inner islands. In: C. Brugman and M. MacCaulay, eds, Proceedings of the 10th Annual Meeting of the Berkley Linguistics Society. Univ California, 1984, pp. 258–65.
  
• Sperber D, Wilson D. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2e. Oxford Univ, 1996.
  
• Taglicht J. Constraints on intonational phrasing in English, Journal of Linguistics 1998; 34:181–211.
  
• Todd R. 19th-Century Piano Music. Routledge, 2004. (see esp. pp. 75-77)
  
• Wichmann A. Spoken parentheticals. In: K. Aijmer, ed, A Wealth of English. Gothenburg Univ, 2001, pp. 171–93.
  
• Wilson D, Sperber D. Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua 1993; 90:1–25.
  
• DSM. Once & future underground. CMT blog, 22-OCT-2006.