Grieg and the rising line

Why Grieg on a Schubert blog? Because the first movement of the Peer Gynt Suite no. 1, Morgenstimmung, is a textbook example of a simple but colorful harmonic plan combined with motivic gestures that match a Schenkerian background line (rising, in this case), all serving the obvious expressive purpose of depicting dawn (thus making for a very easily managed hermeneutic exercise).

I discuss the piece briefly in my JMT article on the ascending Urlinie (1987). Here are the musical examples:

Here is Example 9's material again in the context of the entire opening (piano reduction here, of course, done by Grieg himself):



And here is Example 10 again, in the score context:


The movement's design is three-part, each section marked by the appearance of the theme motive in E (in the last instance over E 6/4).

Here is the entire harmonic plan (thumbnail -- click on it to see the original size graphic). Timings are keyed to a version of Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic posted to YouTube.

Here are the parallel harmonic patterns aligned vertically (thumbnail -- click on it to see the original size graphic): upper system section A, lower system sections A and A'' (up to the structural cadence). The second pattern greatly expands on the I-III-V progression of section A.

A cut above YouTube

Steffan Fahl's website with (re)sampled performances of historical piano music has some remarkable material, most notably a complete set of Haydn piano sonatas whose sound is sampled from Malcolm Bilson playing a period fortepiano. There are just three short Schubert files and they are bizarre enough to be interesting: go to Klassik-resampled. The instrument is identified as an "Orphica," a portable keyboard from 1798 and quite possibly of a type that Schubert never played. The sound, as one would one expect, leaves quite a bit to be desired -- rather thin, especially in the upper register. One wonders why Fahl made this unlikely choice, but at least he did keep the tempo down, a rarity in Schubert dance performances (or almost any music of that period).

The pieces are not identified. They are from D. 783: no. 2, no. 10, and no. 15 (mislabelled as no. 12 on the website).

Rising lines in a Strauss waltz

Still more historical context for D779n13: Exotische Planzen, Op. 109, by Johann Strauss, sr. appeared in 1839. Like most published dance sets after about 1830, it consists of a short introduction, five waltzes, and a long coda. The set is remarkable for its focus on rising melodic gestures, beginning with the introduction, where a perfunctory bit of tonal definition (bars 1-3) promptly gives way to an extended dominant prolongation whose melodic elements keep going up:



The first waltz offers the classic play on ^5 and ^6 in its first strain, carrying the cadence up to ^7 (D#6) before "correcting" the register with an arpeggiated drop to E5. The second strain counters with a strong downward gesture from ^8. The bass in the final cadence is tailor-made for a compensating ascent (so, an overall ^8-^7-^6-^5 || ^5-^6-^7-^8) but Strauss the final notes down instead in an octaves-by-contrary-motion figure that is also a waltz cliché.


Number 2 couldn't make the ascent in the first strain any more obvious. The second strain, however, is clearly focused on G# and the expressive chromatic ascent at the end is a subordinate feature.

Number 3, on the other hand, has perhaps the most strongly emphasized final cadence gesture in the entire set.

The first strain of Number 4 balances ^3 and ^5 nicely, in the manner of many Strauss waltzes. The last phrase of the second strain involves a slightly elaborated rise from ^5.


The final waltz nearly completes the catalogue of Straussian cadence gestures -- here, ^8 is reached a bar early and ^7-^8 repeated over an emphatic V7-I.

The coda, as one would expect, is full of rising gestures because of the cliché coda cadences but also in this case because of the reprises of strains from the waltzes.

The piano edition used here is Belgian (1850?), available on IMSLP.

Updated web pages

I have reformatted some of the web pages in the rising cadence series, adding illustrations, marking content divisions more clearly, and doing a little editing of content. The "Ascending Lines" page has been separated into two, the first an introduction, the second a historical summary. The front page for the composition tables has some new illustrations.

Eric McKee's presentation in Indianapolis

Eric McKee (Pennsylvania State University) and I proposed a short session for last month's AMS/SMT joint meeting in Indianapolis. The SMT program committee accepted both papers but rejected the session: worse, from our point of view, we ended up cross-scheduled!

Eric has kindly allowed me to post his original proposal here; its title is "Lanner and Strauss and "The Future of Rhythm."

Wildly successful, Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss I are among the first generation of musicians who devoted themselves solely to the composition, performance, and publication of music aimed at a wide audience and designed for showmanship, pleasure, and dancing--music referred to today as "popular music." During the late 1820s and early 1830s Lanner and Strauss refined the characteristic features of the Viennese waltz, which is arguably the most important and certainly the longest living dance genre in the history of Western music. Composers such as Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Berlioz, among others, heaped praise on Lanner and Strauss both for the high level of their orchestral performances as well as their melodic ingenuity. Even the conservative critic Hanslick was not immune from the charms of their music. But despite the historical significance and far-reaching influence of their music, there has been only one published analytical study in English devoted to this vast repertoire of music (Yaraman 2002).

My presentation begins with a discussion of Berlioz's 1837 article "Strauss: His Orchestra, His Waltzes--The Future of Rhythm." In it Berlioz laments the primitive state of rhythmic understanding, especially in France, and advocates treating rhythm as an independent dimension just as important to musical interest as melody and harmony. He observes that "the combinations in the realm of rhythm must certainly be as numerous as melodic ones, and the links between them could be made as interesting as for melody. Nothing can be more obvious than that there are rhythmic dissonances, rhythmic consonances, and rhythmic modulations" (Quoted in Barzun 1969: Volume II, 338 [italics in original]). The true pioneers in this field, he continues, are Germans: Gluck, Beethoven, Weber--and Strauss. Speaking specifically of Strauss's waltzes, Berlioz locates one source of rhythmic dissonance in the cross rhythms found between the melody and accompaniment.

In the remainder of my presentation I continue Berlioz's line of thought by examining two techniques used by Lanner and Strauss that result in rhythmic dissonances: melodic hemiolas and extended anacruses. My methodology is based on the work of Rothstein (1989), Krebs (1999), and McKee (2004). The repertoire I examine are waltzes composed between 1826 and 1836, which constitute the first ten years of Lanner and Strauss's published output.

Melodies that form hemiolic patterns against the accompaniment are the most characteristically "Viennese" type of rhythmic dissonance (Krebs classifies this type of texture as a "G3/2 dissonance" [1999: 31-34]). In terms of our real time perception and the relationship of the music to the physical gestures of the dance, however, the primary level of the accompaniment is more easily heard and felt in 6/4 rather than in the notated 3/4. Playing against the accompaniment's 6/4, the melodies project their own 3/2 grouping patterns. Example 1 provides some examples. (This is a thumbnail; click on the image to see the original size.)


As seen in the first three melodies, a common maneuver employed by Lanner and Strauss is the progression from rhythmic dissonance to rhythmic consonance within an eight-bar phrase or within a four-bar subphrase. In other cases the hemiolic patterns are displaced so as not to begin on the downbeats of the accompaniment's 6/4 meter (Example 2).


Extended anacruses are another potential source of dissonance (or disruption). They typically arise from the noncongruence between the melodic grouping structure, and they typically are associated with a disruption in the hypermetric flow (Examples 3-4). My paper concludes with some general considerations on the expressive, formal, and choreographical implications of such rhythmic and metrical dissonances.



References:
Berlioz, Hector. 2001. Critique Musicale: 1823-1863. Ed. Yves Gerard. Paris: Buchet/Chastel.
Krebs, Harald. 1999. Fantasy Pieces: Metrical Dissonances in the Music of Robert Schumann. New York: Oxford University Press.
McKee, Eric. 2004. "Extended Anacruses in Mozart's Instrumental Music. Theory and Practice 29: 1-38.
Rothstein, William. 1989. Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music. New York: Schirmer Books.
Yaraman, Sevin. 2002. Revolving Embrace: The Waltz as Sex, Steps, and Sound. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press.

Estonia and Schenkerian pluralism

In mid-October, I gave a keynote address during the 6th Music Theory Conference organized by Mart Humal and his colleagues in the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. Here is the announcement from the MTO site earlier this year, and here is a PDF of the program.

My title was "Themes, Hierarchies, and Lines: Schenkerian Analysis as a Subspecies of Linear Analysis." As that suggests, the talk summarized the argument of my MTO article and provided illustrations, focusing on Chopin's Prelude in A Major, which I identified as a polka-mazurka, a mixed genre dance that was mildly popular in the 1830s. It's unlikely that Schubert knew anything like it, as it was probably invented by a Parisian dance instructor in the late 1820s or early 1830s, but it is highly likely that Chopin not only knew it but also danced it himself.

An article version of the keynote address will be submitted to Res musica, which is the peer-reviewed science magazine of the Estonian Musicology Association and the Musicology Department of the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. The journal is devoting an issue to papers from the conference.

The surprise for me was that my usual argument about methodological pluralism in linear analysis -- aimed of course at long-standing reactionary attitudes on the part of some analysts, mainly in my generation and the one before us-- is now out of date. Theorists gathered from Nordic Europe, the United States, and Canada took this pluralism for granted, indeed, actively nurtured it and protected it whenever it seemed threatened. It was quite refreshing to see a sense of community gathered about the utility and practice of music analysis; that's certainly a (generational) step ahead of the master-disciple model that prevailed before and that, for too long, inhibited the practice of Schenkerian analysis and development in Schenkerian theory.