Saturday, February 15, 2014

more to Czerny, op. 300

Among the 121 preludes in Carl Czerny's op. 300 are several that play very directly to rising gestures and follow through into the design of the whole. No. 30 uses the same broad schema as no. 15 (discussed in the preceding post)--a line from ^3 to ^8--but clothes it in rapid scale and octave figures. The first half takes F# up to D but does not close the cadence; instead it starts over with broken octaves and then concludes with a stereotyped short cadenza that carries ^5, ^6, and ^7 up to close on ^8. This "freeing of the ^6" is one of the most characteristic and distinctive figures in 19th century music, especially in the first half of the century.



Friday, February 14, 2014

Czerny, op. 300

Carl Czerny's The Art of Preluding, op. 300, may be the ultimate compendium of this aspect of sophisticated concert practice in the first half of the 19th century. Unlike The Art of Improvisation, op. 200, which is a treatise with examples, The Art of Preluding is a collection of preludes of many types in all keys. All are "ossified" (that is, published) versions of the kinds of preludes that pianists would apply to any and all of the music they performed in concert, including chamber and ensemble concerts, not just solo recitals.

A surprisingly large number of the 121 preludes have prominent rising gestures, but only a few follow through into the cadence. The most obvious of them elaborates a simple V7-I cadence by expanding the V through an octave's worth of a harmonized chromatic scale: see no. 31 below.


 An earlier Prelude in Ab major takes a rising line very gradually upward from ^3 to ^8:


Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Ländler in Boehme's Geschichte

Today an interlude in the ongoing van Eyck series: a return to Schubert's time and to the Ländler. As I noted in earlier posts, such as this one, music for the Ländler was known in the early 18th century already, primarily for solo violin in the "native" violin keys of D, A, or G. Franz Boehme, in his Geschichte des Tanzes in Deutschland (1886) reproduces several of these early pieces. No. 230 is typical of the early dance that was transformed--in both dance and musical terms--in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.


Note the key of D major and the arpeggiated figures that are a "simplification"of underlying double stops. These are a line of parallel sixths in the first phrase but the basic interval of the piece is clearly F#4-D5. which receives repeated neighbor-note treatment.


Broken sixths and neighbor note figures prevail in this Ländler as well. Notice the way the pickup beat is transformed into a small flourish as it leads from bar 4 to bar 5. In the second strain, this element becomes the basis for more persistent boundary play that converges on the principal upper note G5 at bar 12 (and again at bar 16).

This Ländler is very close to no. 232: neighbor figures at the beginning, small flourishes near phrase ends that are increasingly expanded later (here in the final phrase of the first strain).