Carl Czerny's Preludes

Figures below are taken from the English edition of Czerny's The Art of Preluding, op. 300. Please note that the cadences shown on the first page (p. 2 of the original volume) are not examples of chord spelling from a harmony textbook -- Czerny calls them the "shortest Preludes." It was assumed that a pianist would improvise a passage before playing a complete composition, such as a sonata or rondo -- a practice that only gradually faded away after the mid-nineteenth century. (One of the longest hold-outs was Clara Schumann, generally one of the most conservative concert pianists of the era.)

The "shortest Preludes" all use a ^7-^8 figure in the uppermost voice. Notice also that Czerny doesn't bother to express the other half of the old clausula vera formula (^2-^1) in an inner part.

In the "rather longer Preludes" (the second page, or p. 3 of the original), only the two on the fourth system unequivocally expand the cadence stereotype that Kofi Agawu cites as universal, with ^3-^2-^1 above: see my post on the topic.

The English edition of Czerny's op. 300 may be found on IMSLP: here.

A menuet by Mozart, age 9

IMSLP has a facsimile of Mozart's London notebook, digitized by the library of the Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland. The volume contains sketches, many of them complete, from 1764 and 1765. Three menuets are among the last pieces in the book. They are followed by a fourth but incomplete menuet and an incomplete fugue for strings (it breaks off just after the exposition finishes).

The three menuets are in F, Bb, and Eb, respectively. A facsimile of the third one is given below, followed by a digital engraving.

The design is 8 + 8, and a repeat sign should undoubtedly be placed in the middle. This little piece is another case of the sentence design showing up much earlier than it ought to do in the classical narrative (that is, Schoenberg's story, in which Beethoven invents the sentence design as better suited to the 19th century organic unity ideal).

Mozart gives the first idea of the continuation phrase the same inverted-arch shape as those in the presentation. The second idea is a formula cadence where the tonic scale degree (here, Bb) is approached from both below (A-natural) and above (C). The B section recasts the basic idea in form of an ascending sequence based on parallel tenths. The transposition of the continuation phrase (to make a "balanced binary" form of the whole) brings the melodic line up to Eb (over G3), then repeats the ascent in the final perfect authentic cadence.