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reactionary attitudes on the part of some analysts, mainly in my generation and the one before us-- is now out of date.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.

Schubert in Indianapolis

A good crowd attended our SMT short session this past Friday afternoon. Odd little hitches took away a bit (no access to the room till the official start time, a laptop display connection that didn't work today though it had done so without trouble yesterday) but the paper was designed to be efficient, and I think I got my points across in any case -- and the cotillon performance was everything I had hoped it would be.

On the other hand, I realized not long ago that my paper was really three (mediant relations as transformations, Schubert in the space and time of social dancing, and the historical contexts of social dancing in Vienna in the early 19th century), and that I probably couldn't do justice to any of them. Of the three, I think it was the transformations that suffered most; I plan to remedy that in the version I am now preparing for publication.

Handout for SMT presentation

I presented "Schubert's 'Riemannian Hand': An Archaeology of Improvisation for Social Dancing" during last week's joint meeting of AMS/SMT in Indianapolis. I have posted a pdf file with the handout here. [NB: This link was updated on 3 July 2016]

Here is the PROPOSAL as it was sent to the program committee last spring:

Proposal for the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Indianapolis, 2010

Title: Schubert's "Riemannian Hand": An Archaeology of Improvisation for Social Dancing

Research on improvisation practices in the nineteenth century has looked primarily at the fantasia. The reminiscences of Schubert's friends provide a window into another, equally important, practice: playing music at the piano for dancing. The celebrated Schubertiades varied greatly in their formats but often consisted in musical performances followed by dancing (Litschauer 245). For the latter, Schubert was obliged to string his waltzes into "endless cotillons" (Deutsch 230; also, Litschauer and Deutsch 101). A close relative of the contredanse, the cotillon required frequent repetition of strains, particularly the principal one, which acted as a kind of rondo theme. The number of repetitions depended on the dance caller (some published instructions stretch 24 bars of music across 80 or more bars of dancing).

Using the three-layer texture of the waltz (as played on a piano) and "endless cotillons" as the design, I will demonstrate with examples and through performance (1) how strict small forms, repetition, and variation can reveal pairings and groupings among Schubert's surviving waltzes, suggesting relationships that may have arisen through varied repetition in performance; and (2) how the chordal offbeats can effect transformations with parsimonious voice leading by simply moving thumb, middle finger, or little finger, thus anchoring the more distant modulations that Schubert attempted in improvisation.

During the presentation, I will provide a handout charting and comparing the dances that make use of third relations, and I will perform a "music-stretching" cotillon that will gradually transform one Schubert waltz (as the first iteration of the principal strain) into another (as the final iteration).

An instance of the pairings that emerge from this study is given in Example 1, which shows that the A Major Waltz D. 779 no. 13 (familiar to music theorists from analyses by Schachter and by Lerdahl and Jackendoff) might easily have arisen as an improvised variation on D. 365 no. 6. [ Example 1: At the top, Schubert, D. 365 no. 6, opening; at the bottom, D. 779 no. 13; in the middle, underlying voice leading pattern -- see the presentation handout for this.]

The three-layer texture is associated with the most common ensemble in tavern or small restaurant settings in Vienna about 1800: two violins and bass. The layers are clearly differentiated in Example 2 -- the second violin's double stops would simply become the offbeats in waltzes by Lanner and Strauss. [Example 2: Beethoven, Sechs ländlerische Tänze, WoO15, no. 1, first strain. -- see the presentation handout for this.] The texture of this ensemble could be appropriated for domestic settings when the piano became popular as a replacement for the traditional violin as accompaniment for dancing. For those pieces that used the Ländler-derived "oom-pah" rhythms, the result was three functionally differentiated layers, two in the left hand, one in the right.

I focus attention on patterns of the middle layer (left hand chords) in relation to upper voice figures, particularly on those that generate third-related key areas in the second strain. See Example 3, where the left hand executes an LP transformation. [Example 3: Schubert, D. 779 no. 13, move from the first to second strain, and from A major to C# major, as an LP transformation in the left hand -- see the presentation handout for this.]

By doing multiple comparisons among dances, I try to reconstruct some sense of how Schubert, during improvised performance, may have been—in Kofi Agawu's terms—"thinking in music about music."

Works cited

Agawu, Kofi. "How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back in Again." Music Analysis 23/ii-iii (2004): 267-86.

Deutsch, Otto. Rosamond Ley and John Nowell, trans. Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends. London: A. & C. Black, 1958.

Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray Jackendoff. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983.

Litschauer, Walburga. "Unbekannte Dokumente zum Tanz in Schuberts Freundeskreis." Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 42 (1993): 243-249.

Litschauer, Walburga, and Walter Deutsch. Schubert und das Tanzvergnügen. Vienna: Holzhausen, 1997.

Notley, Margaret. "Schubert's Social Music: The 'Forgotten Genres'." In Christopher H. Gibbs, The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, 138-54. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Schachter, Carl. "Rhythm and Linear Analysis: Durational Reduction." Music Forum 5 (1980): 197-232.