The Flute Works of Erwin Schulhoff

While recent scholarship has begun to elucidate the life and compositions of Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff, whose life was cut short during the Holocaust, many of his works remain lesser known. The composer’s three works that feature flute (Concertino for Flute, Viola, and Double Bass; Sonata for Flute and Pianoforte; and Double Concerto for Flute and Piano) paint an intriguing picture of his late-1920s distinct and eclectic instrumental style. Recent in-depth theories of musical agency (which has long been a pervasive, albeit previously little-defined, perspective in music circles) by Hatten, Klorman, and Monahan supply an excellent lens through which to view chamber music. Coupled with stylistic, formal, and general analysis, the application of agential theories to this music yields fruitful snapshots of musical discourse and Schulhoff’s stylistic synthesis. Analyses of the three flute works reveal a distinct conversation between and “proto-narrativity” of the chamber music instrument personas of each piece as well as the interaction of folk music elements, modernist harmonic practices, jazz materials, Neoclassical tendencies, rhythmic vitality, metric ambiguity, and traditional formal structures within the composer’s style between 1925 and 1927. The numerous conversational and stylistic interactions uncovered using this kind of agential approach have profound implications for theorists, musicologists, and performers alike