Abstract
Rudolph Reti is a “foot-notorious” figure among musicologists and theorists today. Given the author’s relative obscurity, The Thematic Process in Music continues to be cited with uncommon regularity sixty-five years after its initial publication. The vast majority of these references find his theory of thematic process completely untenable, even ridiculous, making Reti a favorite straw man, ready to be knocked down repeatedly in service to a variety of diverse, at times conflicting, hypotheses. Still, one gets the sense that many of those doing the knocking have a certain amount of sympathy for Reti, that they tacitly acknowledge his position as a cheap foil to their theoretical propositions, and that they were initially drawn to consider Reti’s work by something more genuine that lies within.\r \r The chief aim of the present study is not to demonstrate the rectitude of Reti’s theory of thematic process or to champion his analytical findings. Rather, its purpose is to begin the process of uncovering the source of Reti’s firm conviction in the thematic process and to \r demonstrate how he perceived it operating in music. In other words, this essay will lay the foundation for understanding what it is that keeps drawing scholars to consider Reti’s work despite the fact that it has been so successfully challenged by numerous commentators since The Thematic Process in Music first appeared.\r \r Using certain holes in our knowledge of Reti’s biography as a base, some common threads in the reception of his work will be briefly surveyed and challenged. This is followed by an examination of the results of Reti’s analyses and how he graphically represents them, raising further questions about his analytical method and its relation to these veins of criticism. Finally, a new understanding of Reti’s actual method will be suggested through the application of elementary principles of Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative cosmology, his work clearly having held a demonstrable position of importance for Reti. This new understanding will be applied to an analysis begun by Reti of Brahms’ Second Symphony.