Sunday, February 28, 2010

D924 and dancing

The last two blog entries, which contrasted traditional Urlinie readings with those based on an Ursatz manqué, made an assumption that is typical of these modes of analysis but is questionable, especially for waltzes (or other small-scale pieces, such as songs). Far from being the staid forms that tie the chaos of the foreground to the eternal, these backgrounds are highly contingent -- fragile and easily disrupted. We've met some of the devices before: the stability of its tonal "reference point" -- whether upper voice or bass -- is quickly undermined if it is played as trio to another dance, or enhanced if it is given a trio and a subsequent da capo.

In the double-tonic numbers of D924 there is even another possibility -- that the strains themselves were detached from their companions and played in differing combinations. This is of course speculative -- an extension "backwards" to Schubert's improvisation practice -- but one does find such "floating strains" in Schumann's Papillons, for example, and the topically uniform character of most of D924 makes its both easier and more plausible as well.

I have assembled below a dance-sequence that uses the first strain of n3 as the refrain. More repetition or extension would probably be necessary, but even in this form up to three minutes of dancing would be available. The sequence is n3, a, b, a -- n2, all -- n3, a -- n5, all -- n3, a -- n4, all. The key sequence is c#, E, c# - E - c# - A - c# - A.


Saturday, February 27, 2010

D924 and tonality in sets, part 2

This continues yesterday's post on certain numbers in the Gräzer Walzer, D924. Five dances (n3, 6, 7, 9, 11) have minor-key first strains that then modulate in the second strain to the relative major key, all but one ending there and thus creating double-tonic constructions. Here I will look at n6 & n9.

It's much harder to hear n6 in the same way (as n3--see yesterday's post) because C#6, which will become A:^3 in the second strain (circled), is too obviously a cover tone here and lines too obviously move from A5 (see the several circled notes and the added/implied G#5 in red). The second strain is less sharply profiled -- in a word, ambiguous -- but it would seem that A:^3 has priority -- follow circled and added notes -- while covering activity (boundary play) actually gets more attention (boxed notes). The background understood traditionally is not a problem: both A5 and F#3 are middleground prefixes to C#6 and A3, respectively. With more sensitivity to its expressive qualities, the waltz's Ursatz is again non-traditional, and its Urlinie, too: A5-C#6-B5-A5.


The last example is n9, which goes still further, as a reading with a traditional descending line requires a clumsy transgression of the voice leading in the first strain ("crossing" the soprano and alto voices in mm. 7-8 (boxed)). In the second strain, C:^5 is easily read as descending (F5 in m.10, E5 in m.11, D5-C5 in the final bars) but just as easily -- and more effectively -- as rising from ^5 steadily upward to ^8 (the line is boxed).

Friday, February 26, 2010

D924 and tonality in sets

The Gräzer Walzer, with the Valses nobles, represent the late style among Schubert's dances, as they were most likely composed/written down in 1826 or 1827. Of the two sets, the Valses nobles, with their often elongated and asymmetrical forms and leaning toward distinctly pianistic textures and gestures, show much more tension between playing for dancing and playing for listening. The Gräzer Walzer, with the possible exception of the last one (n12), which might have been conceived as the typically extended coda of the set, are all entirely danceable and may in fact easily be strung together to create extended sequences. Many, in fact, have very distinct Ländler characteristics, which seems a bit surprising for such a late period in Schubert's life.

A curiosity of D924 is the large number of minor-key first strains (5), all of which modulate in the second strain to the relative major key. These are n3: c#-E; n6: f#-A; n7: a-C (1st ending), a (second ending); n9: a-C; n11:e-G. All five end in the major key, except for n7, as shown.

In traditional Schenkerian analysis, priority goes to the end, and therefore all but n7 would be read in terms of the ending key, with the opening key situated in the middleground. I'll adopt that view here for sake of discussion, but in general it strikes me that this sort of bald hierarchization misses much of the expressive point of these pieces: their strains and their keys are balanced, two pictures in a locket -- and family pictures at that, as Schubert follows his earlier habit (exemplified in a skewed way in D779n13) of transposing the first strain to serve (with minor emendations) as the second. It seems to me that David Lewin's conception of key change (allied to the double-tonic complex but explicitly transformational) is a much better model.

In D924n3, Schubert plays a simple polyphonic game, flipping the priorities of uppermost and "alto" voice in the right hand. The G#5 (boxed) may sound like a cover tone to ^3 (E5) at first, but the dogged and direct cadence carries the voice leading down from its ^5, not from E. In the second strain the weight is reversed (though of course we have no way of knowing that till the cadence arrives -- but that's often the expressive trajectory of Schubert's waltz strains): B5 does retreat to the cover tone role and the cadence ultimately moves down the G#5 of m. 9 past an incomplete NN (not boxed) A5 through F#5 to E5. Thus the Urlinie design converts c#:^5 to E: ^3, and the c# region becomes a middleground prefix in the bass -- unless you decide that's a bad idea and give the C# bass note the background status it deserves in a double-tonic complex.
I will look at two additional dances, n6 and n9, in tomorrow's post. Both show more extended versions of the same patterns.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

more to ^6 and the ninth

Today's entry [update] was originally a link to another web essay of mine, first posted in 2005, edited and reposted in 2008. The material from that essay has since been incorporated into an essay pulbished on the Texas Scholars Works platform: Nineteenth-century polkas with rising melodic and cadence gestures:  ^6 and V9 in early polkas. The waltz hinted broadly at reshaping practice with respect to ^6 and the upper tetrachord; the polka realized and naturalized it.

"Common practice" is a chimera, a vast and convenient reduction that has seen its chronologically early third chopped off by partimento studies and its later half chopped off by the waltz, the polka, and the symmetries uncovered by neo-Riemannian studies. What's left? Music for the bourgeoisie (that's the educated middle class) in barely two generations covering roughly the period 1780-1830 (with possible extension to 1850, in the "mannerist bourgeois" of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and A. B. Marx). This is the period of the turn from patronage to entrepeneurship. . . . See how easy it is to fall back into comfortable narratives? It was the period of the turn from patronage to entrepeneurship in Vienna -- a shift that had been accomplished in the wealthy, trade-oriented commercial cultures of England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and a few other countries starting already in the 17th century.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

More to recomposition

This is a continuation of yesterday's post. I have constructed a second re-composition that goes a rather different direction: where my chain of dances from D365 + D779n13 yesterday emphasized the Ländler traits of the group, here I will be fitting D779n13 (as a trio) to two numbers from the D783 German dances. The most boisterous of the lot, n1, starts, with D779n13 in its 16-bar version as a first trio; after a reprise of n1, the mode change ties the second trio to D779n13 as "other"; again reprise to close. This version simultaneously brings out the deutscher traits and the Zärtlichkeit of D779n13.


Another way to go about it brings tonal relations, including mediants, into strong relief. The initial dance-trio-dance-trio group is the same, but the second reprise of n1 is replaced by n9, a piece of similar character and in a mediant relation to n10, which precedes n9 here; another mediant change brings back the D779n13 trio, and finally we hear a reprise of n1 to round things off. Or: n1-13-1-10-9-13-1, and IDENT-IDENT-P-L-RP-IDENT, where IDENT means neither tonic nor mode change.


Monday, February 22, 2010

More to recomposition

Today's post is a reaction to Matthew Bailey-Shea's article on recomposition in Music Theory Online. He takes several settings of a poem by Goethe and performs a "mash up," generating a self-styled "musical Frankenstein" (para. 22) that you can both see and hear (there is an audio file). His argument is quite similar to Agawu's in promoting (re)composition-as-analysis, but Bailey-Shea is bolder in speaking to the value (not just utility) of the results.
. . . although there are a variety of goals for music analysis, one of the most common is to suggest new ways to hear a given piece. Such analyses succeed, moreover, when the proposed ways of hearing challenge us in a creative, insightful, and thought-provoking manner. And though intertextual analyses often succeed through simple verbal description there are good reasons to literally compose the proposed connections. We actually hear how these songs resonate with one another, comment upon and affect one another, reach out and engage other settings of the poem. The spark of intertextual association becomes far brighter and, in a way, the music speaks for itself. The analysis informs the music; the music is an analysis. (para. 7)
The resonance with my own posts (locate them with the label "recomposition") is obvious. My task is much simpler than merging elements from several setting into a single performable song, since the individual pieces remain distinct in a dance chain or even a suite for performance. Still, as he puts it, "Every manipulation, every distortion [was] designed to enhance our experience of these songs, both as individual compositions and as a group" (para. 22), and the same is true of any gathering of dances in a sequence: they cast light on each other, as it were.

Here is an example. I have taken three A major waltzes from D365 and added D779n13 to them, in its 16-bar version. The six dances are to be played in order, the idea being that the alternate dances are placed in relation to one another by the dance & (multiple) trio principle. So, the similar first strains of n17 and n28 are shown together, but the topical underpinnings of their markedly different second strains ("foot-stamping" in the first, "yodeling" in the second) are brought into relief. Likewise the "trios": leading-tone basses and initial dissonances of n30, n16, and -- after a restatement of the "dance" (n28 again rather than the original n17) -- D779n13.


Tomorrow's post will show two other re-compositions of a similar kind, utilizing dances from D783.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Schubert's hand (holographs, that is)

On the Schubert-Autographe site mentioned in yesterday's post, you can find your way to dances for piano solo by the sequence: Notenmanuskripte / Alle Werke / Klaviermusik zu zwei Händen - Tänze. The two richest items are the [17] Deutsche mined for numbers in D 146, D 779, and D 783; and the [9 Tänze], with original versions of the opening numbers in D 779, along with the posthumously published D 973.

It's always fascinating to look at composer autographs, but here I am not interested in the stance of authenticity -- except to note that I was surprised to see how many expression marks, including accents, Schubert wrote into these pieces: I've always assumed they were mainly the work of later editors. The expression marks remind me of comments from Schubert-Kreis reminiscences about Josef von Gahy's "fiery" playing of the dances. Perhaps that style of playing was really in Schubert's mind, too (if not always in his fingers, given the tacit comparison in the description of Gahy's performances).

Not authenticity but rather the opposite, actually -- these autographs strike me as another part of the geography of Schubert's music making. First, he was ill: by early 1823 he was undergoing treatments for syphilis. Second, we note that in 1823 Ash Wednesday fell on 12 February. Imagine Schubert, before that date, rising in the morning to compose as usual. He decides (or follows up on friends' requests) to organize and write fair copies of several dances he played before he withdrew from social engagements, perhaps so that Gahy (or someone else) could play them during the final days of Carneval. Having finished the work, Schubert signs the first page, underestimating the space needed and his family name slants off on the corner. I'll be charitable and assume that the corrupted page edges came later. [this paragraph revised on 3-7-10]


Number 4 in the 17 Deutsche eventually became the last (n20) of the posthumous "Letzte Walzer" D146. What strikes me about this is the marked leftward slant of the handwriting at the left side of the page and how it gradually corrects itself by the right-hand side. This is as close as one can come to "embodying Schubert," to imagining oneself seeing with his eyes as he sits at the work-table, feeling the weight of the body's shift to the left as he fills the wide paper, and relaxing as he does while crossing the page to its right edge.


Here, as a postscript of sorts, is the beginning of n5 in the 17 Deutsche. As the black pencil marks show, this eventually became the trio to n4 above. Although that is plausible, nowhere is there is an indication that Schubert assumed the same.


Saturday, February 20, 2010

Some Schubert links

[NB 2 July 2016: It will surprise no one that the majority of the links below are broken.]

Here are some links to websites with information (or more links) related to Schubert.

1. Cynthia Cyrus's cleanly done, concise, and very helpful Schubert links. Cyrus is an associate dean and associate professor at Vanderbilt. She is a medievalist and apparently also a Schubert fan.

2. Schubert-Autographe. A remarkable "online databank" of Schubert autograph manuscripts in Viennese holdings. An ongoing project of the Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds (WWTF) in collaboration with the Institut für Angewandte Musikwissenschaft und Psychologie in Köln (IAMP) and the Musikwissenschaftliches Institut der Universität Wien. If you click on the button "Über Schubert," you'll reach a short biography and, at the bottom of the page, a set of links to the New Schubert Edition, Schubert societies in several countries, works-lists, and festivals. As is so often true of links-lists, some but not all are current.

3. The same, alas, is true of links provided on the Schubert-Edition site: links. Scroll down to "Schubert Im Internet" for sites specific to the composer. But that's the Net....

4. Continuing the theme, here's a link to the Schubert Society of the USA, a NYC-centered group whose activities and web-site are apparently undergoing change at present.

5.-6. The Wikipedia article on Schubert is quite decent, though it whitewashes a number of aspects of Schubert's life and personality (that is, it reads like something Schubert's agent would have written). The article has links not included on the sites named above. My personal favorite is the collection of digitized cylinder recordings from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Several performances of the Serenade are on offer, but also characteristic waltz "suites" recorded in 1913 by the České Trio z Prahy and in 1909 by the Indestructible Military Band (!). I haven't been able to verify yet that the pieces are actually by Schubert but will work on it. Unfortunately, the item listed as a "valse sentimentale" has not been digitized.

7. Tomoko Yamamoto's wonderful photo-biography is a treat: Schubert-Project. Like any good travelogue photo-set, it makes me want to repeat her journey.

8. Finally, a link to a performance of D779n31 (not 13) on alto viol, no less, and guitar: Ernst Stolze. There are, of course, many performances of Schubert waltzes on YouTube -- I'm afraid I just don't have the patience to wade through the morass of student performances, bad audio, and/or bad video to find the handful of adequate video files that are undoubtedly there somewhere.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Czerny's Op.12 Variations and ^5-^6

Carl Czerny's set of variations on D365n2 is in the bravura style but is obviously meant for domestic consumption, as he carefully and skillfully holds down the technical requirements to a level -- and with the kinds of figures -- that any reasonably well-trained pianist of the day could have managed. The piece consists of an introduction, theme, four variations, and lengthy coda.

The introduction seems to announce that the androgynous ^5 & ^6 will be its focus -- it's almost embarrassing in its profusion of figures:


As it turns out, although there are hints in the theme -- ^6-^5 over V and the expressive alteration of same to ^b6-^5 in the second strain -- Czerny steadfastly ignores the implications of his own introduction, downplaying or even eliminating the ^6-^5 in the variations. The final cadence of the fourth variation seems determined to erase all memory of the figure with an elongated scale, all that just before the sudden jump to bVI to announce the coda.


The score comes from IMSLP. It's a later edition marked as Wolfenbüttel: L. Holle, n.d., plate 178, but not dated. IMSLP also has a PDF scan of the original edition: Wien: S.A. Stemer und Comp, plate S. und C. 3377, but the scan quality is very poor.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

String Trio, D581, III, Trio to the Menuet

Schubert's Bb Major String Trio, D581, composed in fall 1817, has four movements, all of which meet the topical and design expectations of the time, as one might expect of a 20-year old composer still finding his way. The Menuet has a number of distinctive gestures that confirm its status as a late-style menuet. Its trio would be the ideal place to introduce the texture of the dance trio (two violins and bass) that would have been familiar from dance music played in taverns and restaurants at the time: see the second paragraph of this post for more on that.

Schubert, however, seems to be doing his best to refine the tavern-waltz topic, if we can call it that, although in some respects the result must have seemed komisch to his listeners. The solo role given to the viola is unusual, to say the least, and the sound of the instrument distorts the ensemble sound of the tavern-trio. Not played carefully, the first strain can sound metrically awkward (mainly because of the displaced beginning of the melody -- Schubert fixes it in the reprise (see the third system)). (Here's a link to an audio file with an excellent performance: D581, III & IV. The trio runs from 1:45-3:00.)

Still, with its prominent ^5-^6 play (boxed at the beginning), the first strain is recognizable as a Ländler, and in fact even with its displaced first note it can easily be rewritten to make a perfectly good dance piece (provided the violist can handle the tune): see below


The contrasting middle (first eight bars of the second section), on the other hand, is a stereotypical menuet pattern. Altogether a work that shows the same topical uncertainties (or perhaps topical blending) that lie at the back of D779n13.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Atzenbrugg transformations, part 3

This continues the account of mediant (and related transformational) moves in the six Atzenbrugg Tänze, which were divided between D145 and D365 in publication.

In n4, a pedal-point tonic finally yields to the leading tone, as the fifth of the mediant, which then receives the cadence -- one of the most direct possible auditory instantiations of the Leittonwechsel. The P move immediately following is masked a bit by the V7 voicing of the second chord.

The fifth dance (also in D365) is the only one of the group without any mediant or parallel play. I have noted below, however, the emphasis on ^6 in the motive and, in the second strain, the sudden lift upward to ^8 -- both moves strongly reminiscent of D779n13 (and, I would like to suppose, another companion in improvisation).

The final dance once again offers a direct R move between the first two phrases -- after that, it's all strictly fifth-roots.


Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Mardi gras

No, the screen grab from my browser bookmarks and tabs bars does not create juxtapositions that are so bizarre as they may seem. In honor of Mardi Gras, I link Schubert's dancing Vienna, about to become very quiet during Lent, with the Franco/Spanish/German Catholic historical cultures in Louisiana, not much influenced yet in Schubert's lifetime by their new membership in the United States.


Louisiana itself became a state in 1812, well before the territories to its east (including Florida); most of the remaining lands of the Louisiana Purchase had to wait quite a bit longer. For nearly a decade, Louisiana was the westernmost state in the Union.

The traditional couple and group dances brought to New Orleans by Europeans are now preserved mainly by their descendants as Cajun music and dance. The related style of dancing known as Zydeco apparently originated in black communities. Its "classic" form is a leisurely looking (but difficult to learn) 8-beat shuffle, but the many (!) YouTube videos show mainly variants of 6- or 8-beat swing (rooted in Lindy Hop).

Monday, February 15, 2010

Atzenbrugg transformations, part 2

The six Atzenbrugg dances may well have originated in improvisation during the vacationers' evening dancing at Atzenbrugg Castle in July 1821 -- or they may have been occasional pieces composed during one of Schubert's morning sessions and then played later on in the day. Their somewhat advanced expressive qualities even suggest that they may have been played as a set in performance, rather than for dancing.

Each of the dances exhibits direct (chord-to-chord) mediant shifts. Each on its own is not extraordinary -- even as early as 1820 or 1821 -- but, taken together, they seem to me a remarkable hint at mediant play in Schubert's improvisational-/compositional- thinking at the time.

In n1 (D145n1), a fanfare-processional first phrase is immediately answered by a shift to the relative minor (R). From first strain to second, also, a P transformation, a hint of a linkage between different modes of efficient voice-leading on the "Riemannian hand."


In n2, the R move is complicated a bit more by the octaves but is again associated with a significant design articulation. Ditto the LP move between strains, and P for the second strain's latter half, which transposes the first strain's second half from C to A (an RP move if it were done directly).

In n3 (which is D365n29), the design/transformation alignment continues between the strains (chord roots D-F#; move is LP).
The non-tonic opening is not related to this pattern, but is of course striking in itself. It does announce a round of after-beat parsimony, however, depicted below with the chords of the reprise (change F# in the first and fifth bars to F-natural and you have the sequence of the first strain).

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Atzenbrugg transformations, part 1

The first transformation is from: a castle to: a monastery to: a museum commemorating Franz Schubert and the Schubert-Kreis: Atzenbrugg-Schlosspark.

The second transformation is from: the six Atzenbrugger Tänze (also called Atzenbrugger Deutsche) that were composed (or at least written down as a group) in July 1821 and published in two groups of three in D365 and D145 (see list below) to: the visual records of Kupelwieser's watercolor and a remarkable postcard depicting outdoor activities at the castle (see below).
n1 = D145n1 in E
n2 = D145n3 in A minor, ending A major
n3 = D365n29 in D
n4 = D145n2 in B
n5 = D365n30 in A
n6 = D365n31 in C
I just happened across the postcard collection on the website of the UK Schubert Institute (a "fan site" level operation). The link for this specific card is: n218 Atzenbrugg. I know nothing more about its provenance, date of the drawing, etc. Certainly the activities depicted are those we would expect of the summer holidays enjoyed by Schubert and his friends in 1820 and 1821 (Gibbs, 70). I have added two arrows. The lower one points to Schubert lounging on the grass, the upper one to a small building identified in another postcard as the cottage in which he either stayed or, more likely, composed in the mornings (I daresay the cottage is neither so prominent nor so isolated as this drawing suggests).


[update 2-23-10: Dieckmann reproduces the picture as his Figure 4 (a black & white version is Plate XVIII in Deutsch). It was made in 1821 (or 1822) as a collective effort of three persons in the Schubert-Kreis. Deutsch says that Schubert is smoking a pipe. According to Dieckmann's caption, the singer Vogl is on Schubert's left and is playing a guitar, one of the artists is sitting at Schubert's right, and the violinist is Ludwig Kraissl, described by Deutsch as a "landscape painter and violinist" (185) and by one of the Schubert-Kreis as "a mediocre landscape painter who fiddles heavenly waltzes" (325). Kraissl is listed as attending a Schubertiade on 11-11-1823 (302) and a New Year's Eve party the following month (319); he settled in Carinthia (south-central Austria) in 1824 (653). ]

Reference:
Gibbs, Christopher H. The Life of Schubert. NewYork/London: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Dieckmann, Friedrich. Franz Schubert: eine Annäherung. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1996.
Deutsch, Otto Erich. Schubert, a Documentary Diography; tr. by Eric Blom; being an English version of Franz Schubert: die Dokumente seines Lebens. Rev. and augm. ed., with a commentary by the author. London, J. M. Dent [1946].

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 13c2

Schachter's second criticism is that I confused levels. Here is what I wrote:
it is not just the direction of the motion but the goal of that motion that is important. Schenker accepts this implicitly with respect to the bass arpeggiation, in that he allows it to rise, rather than fall, from the V to the final I, despite his own rule of the obligatory register in the bass. Yet if any voice should be sensitive to motion toward the fundamental, it is certainly the bass! (280)
To which Schachter responds:
the placement of V below I . . . results from prolongations at later levels, which transform the underlying shape of the bass arpeggio. Through ascending and descending register transfers in the upper voice, Schenker also allows for octave displacements of the Fundamental Line's final tone at later levels.
Here I have to say that neither of us apparently understood what Schenker said. I was wrong to tie the Bassbrechung-as-expression-of-nature to the obligatory register, and it was Schachter who confused levels. In section 268 of Free Composition, Schenker says that obligatory register applies to both upper and lower voices and means a return to a voice's "basic register" (107), which he defines as "the register of the first tone of the fundamental line." His upper-voice examples do refer to the fundamental line; the two lower-voice examples, however, are both foreground details. Still, given the care with which he matches the first and last tonic notes in the bass in the abstract figures, it is reasonable to assume that he meant for the same to be true of the background bass.

Whether or not Schenker intended a background return to the register of the first bass note at the end of a piece, Schachter is clearly incorrect in isolating displacements to later levels. Schenker says on p. 107: "Nevertheless, the final tone of the [Urlinie] sometimes appears an octave lower or . . . higher." And the basses in his figures showing readings of pieces vary quite a bit, though more often holding to the configuration of the abstract examples, as in Fig. 7a: C#3-G#3-C#3. But already in Fig. 7b the position of V is reversed: F3-C3-F3. The well-known Fig. 21b (Schumann, "Aus meinen Tränen Spriessen") is interesting in this respect: in the foreground, A4-E3-A3; this becomes A3-E4-A3 in the two middleground graphs. (He does something similar in Fig. 39,2.)

All my theoretical maneuvering in that section of the JMT article was irrelevant, I now think, to justification of the rising Urlinie. Although Schachter's criticisms are off the mark, the specific justifications from Free Composition that he attacks were not very strong, that's clear, especially insofar as they tried to conform to Schenker's own poorly defined notions of the relation of acoustics and art and his equivocation about register in the background. At the time of the JMT article, I didn't have the style statistics in hand that I have accumulated since: see this PDF file with a compositions list. From Schenker all I really needed was: "In the service of art, the arpeggiation throws off the restrictions of nature and claims the right to assert itself in either an upward or a downward direction." From this follows a principle of symmetry (the up/down schema is not fundamental but expressive) that is neatly realized in Zuckerkandl's graphic of the major-key scale.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 13c1

This continues Part 13b and is the final installment in the Schachter series -- though, because of length, I have broken it in two, as 13c1 and 13c2. The latter -- the final, final installment -- will be posted tomorrow.

In a lengthy footnote (341n22), it is understood that I misread Schenker's statements about the Bassbrechung (background I-V-I) in relation to the harmonic series.

Here -- in condensed form -- is what Schenker says in the first two sections of Chapter 2 (The Fundamental Structure)
In nature sound is a vertical phenomenon [but] art manifests the principle of the harmonic series in a special way, one which still lets the chord of nature shine through. . . . a horizontal arpeggiation.

This basic transformation of the chord of nature into an arpeggiation must not be confused with the voice-leading transformations of the fundamental structure which occur in the middleground.

[Section 2 is labeled] The fundamental structure as transmitter of the primary arpeggiation

In the service of art, the arpeggiation throws off the restrictions of nature and claims the right to assert itself in either an upward or a downward direction. The following two forms represent the briefest and most direct ways for the harmonic series to be realized by human vocal organs: [Fig. 3 shows two arpeggiations through an octave: C3-E3-G3-C4, then C5-G4-E4-C4]

The upper voice of a fundamental structure, which is the fundamental line, utilizes the descending direction [from Fig. 3]; the lower voice, which is the bass arpeggiation through the fifth, takes the ascending direction [here he refers again to Fig. 1, which shows an Urlinie E5-D5-C5 against a Bassbrechung C3-G3-C3]. As in the natural development of the arpeggiation, the ascending direction is the original one; indeed, in the fundamental structure it serves as a constant reminder of the presence of the chord of nature.
And here is the first of Schachter's two explanations of my "slightly inaccurate account of Schenker's view of bass structure."
When Schenker, in Free Composition, speaks of the bass motion as upward, he refers to the ascent from I to V, but not to a continued ascent up a fourth to the closing I. His Figure 1 and the accompanying discussion on p. 4 make this clear. Thus when Neumeyer (p. 281) says that "the descending fifth from V to I in I-V-I represents what should have been a rising fourth", he is not, I think, reporting what Schenker really means.
True, as far as it goes. Schenker quite deliberately "reverses" the direction of the move from V to I, from ascending as it should do, to descending. This dictum is pointless, however, because, as we shall see tomorrow, Schenker is quite lax about the obligations of obligatory register, so to speak. Yet he is determined to make the bass conform to the principle of obligatory register, and it would seem the reason is that he wants to set up a firm wall between the harmonic origins of the tonal system -- he was unequivocal about giving priority to the bass ascent in section 1 -- and the artistic priorities of the tonal system as he conceives it and as they are contained in the Ursatz. My MTS article was concerned in part with the suggestion that the wall is permeable (intervals as non-expressive themes generate lines, etc., as expressive themes) -- or, really, that the wall is a chimera.

Postscript: It is unfortunate that Allen Cadwallader and David Gagné simply parrot Schachter's assertions in their textbook. That sort of pedagogical hardening is not good for theoretical discourse.

Reference:
Cadwallader, Allen, and David Gagné. Analysis of Tonal Music: A Schenkerian Approach. 2d edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 13b

In Part 13a of this series, I responded to one point in the appendix to Carl Schachter's article "Schoenberg's Hat": what I regard as his misreading of a graphic from Victor Zuckerkandl's book Sound and Symbol. Here I will respond to a second point, and tomorrow to a third.

The last two paragraphs of the appendix acknowledge that two of my readings are convincing. The pieces are D779n2 and D969n7. In a footnote, Schachter says he still prefers a descending Urlinie from ^3 for D969n7, but that my version is "a plausible alternative" (341n23). The rising line ^5-^8, however, is lumped with other Urlinien manquées: "'incomplete' . . . (notably 5-^4-^3) or . . . ending on ^2 [over V]" (339), and these as a group are the exceptions that prove the rule: "their existence in no way diminishes the importance of the norms to which they form exceptions." Those norms:
(a) "tonal melodies come to rest on ^1" ---- or ^8, of course, since ^8 is equivalent (identical, really) in a modal pitch-class space system with octave equivalence. Up/down might be a schema, but octave equivalence has been an element of European pitch systems for a very long time.
(b) "complete harmonic structures end on the tonic chord" ---- but what can "complete" possibly mean apart from actual compositions, where we know that bifocal tonality (LaRue), double-tonics, and tonally meandering opera szenas or film cues can be found everywhere.
(c) "differences between rising and falling motion reflect fundamental properties of the tonal system" ---- I quite agree with this one, but with two large caveats: (1) I would change "fundamental properties" to "basic expressive properties"; and (2), as this series of posts will have shown, I don't share Schachter's particular notion of "tonal system."

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The Blue Danube

One of the most memorable treatments of ^5 and ^6 is in the first waltz of An der schönen, blauen Donau. Johann Strauss, jr's opus 314 was published in 1867, at the height of his success as a dance composer and conductor and not long before he turned to composing operettas. The design is standard: five waltzes, each of which consists of two strains with both repeated to create a double reprise (waltz-trio-waltz-trio) effect, plus a substantial introduction and a coda that quotes all but the last waltz. The tonal design of the set is also not unusual:

See the piano score for waltz 1, first strain, below. The circles show the expanded treatment of ^5 and ^6, including the "last second" retreat from a tonic with added sixth at the very beginning of the third system. The rectangles sketch my view of the design, which is based on the registral pattern established immediately, then shifted into the upper octave midway through the third system. I would read the strain as derived from a proto-background ^1-^5.

Schenker's desire for a unified, teleological tonal motion leads him to mis-read the first waltz in Free Composition: he maps onto the piece a waltz-trio-waltz design with the expected interruption covering the second strain (which is in A major). In fact, the waltz ends in A major because both strains, not just the first, have their reprise (the alternativo design already common in Mozart's generation [Note 19 June 2017: see my comment on this in the updated blog post for 3 March 2010]).

William Rothstein uses the first strain as a study object for his exploration of the meaning of the term "phrase." Along the way, Rothstein presents a foreground reduction with bar lines and four-bar "phrase" markings, two levels of durational reductions (after Schachter), and a "standard" Schenkerian graph. He describes the figures of this last as follows:
The first sixteen measures are ultimately static, ending where they began, with only minimal motion along the way. The gradual ascent that follows picks up from this same point, without which it would lack a firm beginning. The complete tonal motion therefore comprises the entire excerpt: all of it is to be performed "...figuratively, in a single breath."

The most striking feature of this larger motion -- and what elevates this unpretentious waltz to high artistic rank -- is the broad melodic arpeggiation from the initial ^5...up to the climactic ^3....One can see how this large arpeggiation mirrors and fulfills the smaller arpeggiations of the several upbeat measures. The ascending sixth [A4-F#5] in mm. 27-28 summarizes the entire ascent in a burst of melodic energy....The concluding melodic descent then gradually dissipates the accumulated tension.
Rothstein's reading does a good job of following the broad contours of registral (and dynamic) change through this first strain. It certainly improves on Schenker's reading, which ignores the melody of the inner voice to choose ^3 from the repeated quarter note figures in the upper voices; when these figures cease in m. 24, the voice-leading moves into the arpeggio-based melody. This in itself, although peculiar, is not damning because there is indeed a distinct change of texture (and orchestration) at mm. 24-25, but Schenker flattens out the large registral shape that Rothstein shows so clearly -- Schenker locates the first Urlinie note at the beginning (m. 3-4) and describes the broad figure reaching F#6 (and then dropping back to F#5 for the cadence) as unfolding, although the far more likely label would be coupling, or middleground registral doubling.

Note: establishing the "priority" text for this famous composition is something of a problem, believe it or not. An der schönen, blauen Donau was issued first in May 1867 in an arrangement for solo piano; from August to October of the same year, editions appeared for orchestra, men's chorus and piano, piano four-hands, and violin and piano. In all, between May 1867 and August 1869, fifteen versions were published. The preponderance of early public performances were the version for men's chorus, whose original text is a light inducement to enjoy the Carnival season: it begins "Wiener seid froh," to which the upper-voice ornaments (in the tenors) answer "Oho, wie so?" This banter continues till all the voices join forces for the final phrase and cadence, "Was nutzt des Bedauern, des Trauern? Drum froh und heiter seid!" (Very roughly: What good is sadness? Have fun!")

Reference:
Rothstein, William. Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music. New York: Schirmer Books, 1989.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Toward the androgynous ^5 and ^6

Here are several more examples of characteristic uses of ^6, this time adumbrations of Schubert's later, "androgynous" treatment of ^5 and ^6 in the Ländler repertoire. To give some sense of how characteristic an emphasis on ^6 was in Ländler, six of the first seven in D145 (all improvised/composed no later than 1821) feature it.

In n1, which shifts the typical Ländler key of D major up expressively to Eb, the subdominant embellishment in bar 1 is reinforced in the left hand, and in the second strain a very characteristic use of ^6 appears, as the harmony flirts with an outright V9. (Recall that you can click on the thumbnail to see the original size image.)

In n2, probably meant as the trio for n1, ^6 is offered very directly as a rising melodic embellishment in the first strain.

In n3, the play of ^5 and ^6 generates a simple motif -- the pairing of ^3 and ^5, the latter figured with ^6, should seem familiar from D779n13. In the second strain, the subdominant harmony suggested in n1 comes into full bloom, and we also hear the simple ^6 embellishment above I.


In n4, ^6 is an emphatic leap that announces the significance of the upper octave -- the strain closes on Db6, not Db5.

In n5, the alternate harmonization, with vi, is prominent, again followed by a characteristic embellishment, the V9. In the second strain, the V9 with its ^6 is given a very direct violinistic treatment, and the ending might well have gone differently -- see the alternate cadence below the score.

In n7, ^6 is buried in a trill on ^5, but in the second strain ^6 is again harmonized. The strong pairing of ^5 over ^3 with descending cadence motions (^4 over ^2, and finally (^3 over?) ^1) strongly implies ^3 as the alternate ending shows. I have written about this formation in the essay Complex upper-voice cadential figures in traditional tonal music published on the Texas Scholar Works platform: link to essay.


Monday, February 8, 2010

A proliferation of suspensions

The Strausses destroy the exclusivity of the old suspensions (an idea that lies behind both Zuckerkandl's scale scheme and Schachter's objections to it) by filling their dances with a profusion of accented incomplete neighbors (suspensions, appoggiaturas).

Perhaps one of the most famous examples is the first waltz in Tales of the Vienna Woods (Johann Strauss, jr., op. 325). Note that the direction of diatonic suspensions/appoggiaturas isn't changed (as here, they almost always go down) but they are answered by chromatic neighbor notes, which, as here, almost always rise. Thus, not only are all diatonic degree-pairs engaged at some point or another in Strauss waltzes, but the half-step "power" of the leading tone is represented in the chromatic figures, and this complex balances the diatonic figures.

Note the unusual harmonic link between first and second strain, which continues as below:


Sunday, February 7, 2010

The Strausses and the androgynous ^5 and ^6

Here are examples from the Strauss clan, not the Johanns, but Eduard and Josef.

The first is a version of Eduard's galop "Über Feld und Wiese" (Over Field and Meadow) published as a polka (schnell) by Herzberg & Greenburgh (New York, 1876). Link to this entry on the LOC site. The tempo of a polka schnell was probably not much less than that of a galop, and therefore one could dance a polka to it, but the musical figures are not at all like those of a polka. (A "slow polka," btw, was called polka française.) Link to this piece published as a galop.

In general, Eduard's music tends to be more conservative in its treatment of musical materials than the contemporaneous waltzes of the other Strausses. The first strain here uses quite conventional harmonic progressions, except to end the first phrase (boxed), where a characteristic figure draws ^7 over V down to ^6, and the resulting V9 resolves directly to ^5 over I.

The trio is similar. Here, a "throwaway" ^6 over I (first circle) becomes the ninth in a V9 that again resolves directly (second circle).


The second strain of the Trio is more adventurous in its cadence, finally taking up the implication of the stolid initial motive (first box) and sending the line up to ^8 in a PAC that is far more emphatic than the quick V-I that follows it.


The second example is "Mein Lebenslauf ist Lieb und Lust," a set of waltzes by Josef Strauss, as published in
Philadelphia by Louis Meyer (1870). Link to this entry on the LOC site.

In the second strain of the first waltz touches on both ^5 and ^6 over I and over V7.

The second waltz makes the play of ^5 and ^6 its main motif.


The third waltz, however, goes all out as ^5 and ^6 permeate the melody, disappearing only with approach of the final cadence (but note the reference to ^5 and ^6 over V7/V -- not marked in the score).


The second strain of waltz 3 uses ^6 and ^5 over I as the melodic answer to ^5 and ^4 over V7, quite common in legato strains. (More common though is ^5 and ^6 over I answering ^7 and ^6 over V7, a favorite gambit of Johann Strauss, jr.)

Saturday, February 6, 2010

The androgynous ^5 and ^6

This follows from the Schachter series, part 13a, in which I wrote the following:
[Victor] Zuckerkandl's model [of acoustical and dynamic space in the scalar octave] has firm style-statistical support in 19th century music, especially in the popular genres of dance music, where the play of ^6 and ^5 creates a kind of tonal androgyny that makes the identity of ^5 and ^6 interchangeable.
In the post, I analyzed D779n13 on those terms. Here are simply a few more score examples of the play of ^5 and ^6, with the telling moments boxed.

Schubert, D783n2: 1. a simple V9 chord; 2. a delightful (and historically prescient) muddling of scale degrees ^4, ^5, and ^6; 3.& 4. clear division of functions and registers. (Click on the thumbnail to see the original size graphic.)


Schubert, D779n17: the V9 again in the configuration that becomes a stylistic hallmark of the Viennese waltz through (and beyond) the Strausses: the 9 is sustained (repeated) over the resolution and eventually ^6 drops to ^5, leaving the status of ^6 in both sonorities less than crystal clear.

Schubert, D779n8: 1. ^6 as the upper third to the seventh of V7 (sounds like a variation of the V9 in D783n2 above); but 2. ^6 turns down to ^5 before the resolution (but note the ascending figure in the bass); 3. ^6 as an inner voice moves up to ^8 (^1) in the cadence.


Offenbach, La belle Hélène, n18b "Melodrame." This follows and repeats the ending from the rondo "Vénus fond du notre l'àme." We've heard the incessant play of ^5 and ^6 throughout the rondo; there and here, the game is resolved in favor of ^6 and the dynamic space of ^5 rising to ^8.