Hearing Schubert D779n13

Grieg and the rising line

2011-01-13T15:53:00.001-06:00

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

2011-01-12T12:24:00.004-06:00

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

2011-01-08T06:44:00.000-06:00

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

2011-01-07T08:45:00.004-06:00

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

2010-12-12T13:13:00.007-06:00

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

2010-11-10T03:46:00.005-06:00

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

2010-11-08T03:29:00.000-06:00

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

2010-11-07T13:02:00.001-06:00

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.

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.

new data for themes in dance music

2010-10-02T19:32:00.004-05:00

I have added two pages to a set that focuses on theme types as they can be described using William Caplin's terminology. The first gathers information from the other pages according to theme type: Examples of theme types. The second supplies data for 8 collections by Beethoven, 1 by Czerny, 9 by Hummel, and 1 each by Marschner and Weber: Themes Tables.

D779n13 as genre mash-up

2010-06-23T08:59:00.001-05:00

Many posts in the past two months or so have focused on style or genre questions, especially as they relate to dancing practices. From all this, another way of thinking about D779n13 emerges: as a catalogue of common dance-music gestures piled on top of one another.

1. The simple progression using I and V7 (characteristic of the traditional Ländler) is used in the C#-major section.

2. A common way to vary the I,V7 patterns is to introduce a third chord, IV, typically generating a progression either I-IV-V7-I or IV-I-V7-I. A variant of the second of these substitutes ii (especially as ii6) for IV, as in D779n13.

3. Another common way to "enhance" the I,V7 patterns is to introduce suspensions or appoggiaturas (see the Ländler by Hummel in this post for examples). Schubert, of course, makes leisurely two-bar suspension figures the hallmark of D779n13. (If the slow pace seems to hint at the sacred style, then it would be only in jest, given the parallel fifths that underly the progression.)

4. Improbably, the Ländler style is "enforced" by the rare expression mark, "zart," and verified by the Schnadahüpfl episode in the C#-major section.

Although Schubert's friends might very well have enjoyed the piquant sweetness of this waltz's first strain, they might equally have shaken their heads over its stylistic oddities.

More on Forms with Refrains (3)

2010-06-22T08:43:00.005-05:00

This is a follow-up to the post on the contredanse La Griel. I wrote there: "Contredanse folios published by the dancing master La Cuisse and reproduced on the Library of Congress American Memory site contain two remarkable fold-out graphics that collate music, text and graphic descriptions of figures, and drawings of the dancers."

La Griel, of course, is one: La Bionni is the other. Virtually everything said in the earlier post about La Griel applies equally to La Bionni, including the varying lengths of the figures and the grand rond or rond ordinaire danced to the first strain and its repetition. The music as performed (five strains with repeats, in an ABACA design) is reproduced below. (Click on the thumbnail for a larger image.)

From all this, three points may be made. First, it is hard to overemphasize the importance of the more or less formal (or ritualized) frame for the dance (in the rond ordinaire at the beginning and courtesies at the end). Second, it is equally hard to overemphasize the importance of the refrain. Third, although the musician is tempted to say that the refrain "structures" the music, that is only half the story, because a refrain in the music by no means signals a repetition of a figure in the dance.

Note: because it is often quite difficult to find the music pages in the 18th century dance manuals on the Library of Congress site, I have put together a web page with links: dance-manual music pages.

Ländler moments in the coda of Hummel's dance sets

2010-06-05T09:42:00.010-05:00

Facsimiles of eleven sets of dances by Hummel, arranged for piano by him or by the publisher's staff, may be found on IMSLP. Two of those are particularly interesting, in that they embed sections identified as "Ländler" into extended instrumental codas.

Both sets were written for balls during Carneval 1811: op. 39 for the Apollo-Saal, op. 44 for the "Ste. Catharinen Redoute." The Apollo-Tänze consist of 6 menuets (each with trio) and 4 Deutsche, each with multiple trios (n4 includes a vocal trio and its own short coda section), plus a long coda labeled "The Eruption of Vesuvius" and totaling some 450 measures. The Laendler is the penultimate section; a narrative logic for its placement is obscure, at best -- given that exactly the same placement occurs in the coda of the Catharinen-Tänze, it may simply have been a convention that Viennese audiences expected. (Click on the thumbnail for a larger image.) The characteristic violinistic key (D-major) and figuration, the design in a series of strains played en rondeau, and the Schnadahüpfl episode (section B), here generalized to a soft-loud alternation, are all present. Note, however, that the oom-pah bass shows up only in the third strain (C).

The Catharinen-Tänze consist of 12 Deutsche (each with trio) plus a coda of well over 200 measures. Here again, the Ländler is the penultimate section; plainly, it would be played more slowly than the rest -- see the "Tempo primo" that marks the beginning of the final section of the coda. The design is simpler than in op. 39: characteristic violinistic figuration and ABA form with A played softly and B loudly (Schnadahüpfl episode). In this case, the oom-pah bass is present throughout, simplified as a Leier (hurdy-gurdy) ostinato.

Another milestone: today's entry is the 175th post to this blog.

More to the trio texture

2010-06-03T08:31:00.001-05:00

In an early blog post, I wrote this:

While thinking about improvisation, about Schubert sitting at the piano playing while his friends danced, I realized that the piano permitted the sound of the waltz that would have been most familiar to people in Vienna about 1800 -- two violins and bass -- to be transferred from tavern or restaurant to the home.

-- and added this more recently (5-19-10): Litschauer and Deutsch give an example of this texture (44); so does Rainer Gstrein (82) .

And now I add this: Alexander Weinmann's Verzeichniss for Johann Strauss, sr. & jr., shows that the elder's early compositions were published in one or more of the following formats: piano solo, piano four-hands, violin and piano, 2 violins and bass, guitar, flute solo, csakan [Hungarian flute] solo, and orchestra. Beginning with Op. 56 (1832), "2 violins and bass" was replaced by 3 violins and bass, but as 2 violins, violin 3 ad libitum, and bass. Only with a handful of Strauss's last works was the "standard" string quartet specified instead: Opp. 225 (1848), 232, 237, and 241 (1849).

References:

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

Gstrein, Rainer, "Ländliche und urbane Tanzmusik im Biedermeier in Österreich." In Boisits, Barbara, and Klaus Hubmann. Tanz im Biedermeier: Ausdruck des Lebensgefühls einer Epoche, 73-87. Proceedings from the Symposium Musizierpraxis im Biedermeier: Tanzmusik im ländlichen und städtischen Bereich, Graz, Austria, 26.-27. März 2004. Series: Neue Beiträge zur Aufführungspraxis, vol. 6. Vienna : Mille Tre Verlag Robert Schächter, 2006.

Weinmann, Alexander. Verzeichnis sämtlicher Werke von Johann Strauss, Vater und Sohn. Series: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alt-Wiener Musikverlages. Reihe l: Komponisten, Folge 2.

Wien: Musikverlag L. Krenn [1956].

More on Forms with Refrains (2)

2010-05-31T10:40:00.006-05:00

Contredanse folios published by the dancing master La Cuisse and reproduced on the Library of Congress American Memory site contain two remarkable fold-out graphics that collate music, text and graphic descriptions of figures, and drawings of the dancers. For La Griel, I have reproduced the music below, labeled the strains and phrases, and then pulled out and labeled the music as it is shown in the large graphic. Note that the music is played as marked in the score, en rondeau, and dance figures vary in length from 2 bars to 8 (a gap in the music notation corresponds to a new figure in the dance). The greater complexity (compared to the long-dance style) is possible with a smaller group of dancers in the more formal quadrille square-dance structure, which was broadly speaking a compromise between the skilled, formal couple dancing of the menuet and the informal, highly social English long dance.

Music as distributed over the 8 figures of the dance:

La Cuisse published his contredanse folios in the mid-1760s, the French style became popular in Vienna in the early 1770s at the latest, and Bülow's manuscript compilation was made in the early 1780s -- therefore it is reasonable to assume that we are speaking about closely related practices. By Schubert's time, things had changed -- the menuet was often reduced to a comical Grossvater dance, and the formal quadrille had by and large been superseded by the decidedly less formal cotillon, or else adopted the latter's tendency to mix dancing with party games. More than ever, the design of a dance was in the hands of the caller or lead dancer (Vortanzer), and the music was shaped accordingly (and sometimes on the spot). As Schubert was playing for cotillons, then, he would take his cues from the Vortanzer (from the reminiscences, this was usually Josef von Spaun).

In this environment, the reprise was the principal device available for an aural structuring of the dance to complement the sequence of dance figures; the refrain, on the other hand, was a way of extending and enriching a particular sequence. The refrain and musical coda are obviously closely related -- the only real difference being that the coda usually consists of stereotypical cadence gestures mixed with material from the preceding sections , where the refrain is substantially new material. It's entirely possible that the refrain was not danced -- along the lines of the published waltzes of the 1830s and later, an instrumental introduction was likely (whether a prelude in the old manner, a vamp to establish rhythm, or a more elaborate piece) and -- if the Vortanzer directed it -- a final strain not danced was possible. One can, for example, easily imagine the dancers standing and clapping in rhythm to the yodeling refrain of D734n11.

The comments above can be regarded as an addendum to the post on performance designs.

More on Forms with Refrains

2010-05-28T09:51:00.005-05:00

This is an addendum to last week's post on forms with refrains. Here are two contredanses from a manuscript collection preserved in the Royal Library, Copenhagen: the volume is simply labeled "Dances 1782-84" with the name Johan Bülow: a PDF file can be accessed through IMSLP.

Note that the first piece has two strains and four dance figures are described (that's one per strain with repetitions).

The second contredanse has three strains and six corresponding figures in the dance.

From the instructions (especially the mention of three couples), it seems clear that the music is intended for dancing in the English long-dance manner, not the square or round forms of the French quadrille. That means the music as given is probably only the barest outline of what actually happened when the music was played for dancing. (At the least, one would expect the strains to be played en rondeau, that is, with repetitions of the first strain following each successive strain.) On the other hand, the arrangements are clearly for keyboard (others in this and related collections are for violin; a few are marked "Flauto"): these could not be used in a hall but instead for private dancing occasions, including dance lessons for members of the Royal family or others in the Court. The simplicity of the given design would suit the needs of pedagogy.

Schubert's soprano-alto pairs

2010-05-27T08:33:00.002-05:00

Dances with consistent soprano/alto pairings comprise a distinct subcategory in Schubert's dances. D779n13, of course, represents it well. Here are some others.

D969n10 is a simple case where the source of the soprano/alto pair in the 2v/bass trio texture is especially obvious (see my rewritten version below the score).

Rewritten in trio texture:

D924n11 is more elaborate (I wonder if it's an imitation of improvised variation by violinists) but at the same time holds more closely to the thirds/sixths pairings typical of the violin pair.

Two examples from the early dances:

Among the Laendler of D145, no. 9 is another simple case. Obviously, the key of Db major is another expressive alteration of a typical violin key (D), like the Ab (from A) that dominates D365.

The same for D365n15:

Forms with refrains

2010-05-21T05:15:00.001-05:00

D734n11 is a 16 bar dance with an additional eight-bar segment added onto the second strain. These violinistic "Ländler codas" were a trademark of the genre and of course are very closely related to the yodeling figures placed at the ends of songs (even into the 20th century, these were common -- in the United States, they are probably most familiar from Western songs as performed by Roy Rogers). (Click on the thumbnail to see the file at original size.)

A version of this design is used by Hummel as well for the theme of his Tyroler-Lied mit Variationen, op. 118. The example below shows only the primo part. The repeat of section A (which modulates to the mediant, btw) is written out; the second strain begins with a contrasting middle, but a reprise is replaced by an 8-bar Ländler coda that is repeated rather forcefully.

The "extra" segment is a separate strain specifically identified as "refrain" in the theme for Henri Herz's variation set Nouvelle Tyrolienne, Op. 154. Note also the pedal point bass, which invokes a folk style.

Finally, the somewhat free concatenation of strains suggested by the Ländler coda is still evident in this waltz-style exercise from Friedrich Wieck's Piano Studies. The first two strains give a simple A-BA design. The third strain as it is given sounds like a coda, but performance practice for dancing or listening might also make of it another secondary strain, to be followed by A (even if that's not indicated in the score). The fourth strain is obviously a (short) trio.

Some updates (2)

2010-05-20T06:17:00.003-05:00

I have undertaken another round of additions and corrections to older posts.

1. Margit Legler and Reinhold Kubik offer a concise list of the major public dance venues in 19th-century Vienna: see yesterday's post. Also in that post: Andrea Harrandt discusses the professional activities of Johann Strauss, sr., during the Carneval season. She reproduces two page-long lists of his engagements, for 1840 and 1846, respectively (139, 142).

2. Walter Deutsch comments on the "Strassburger": post.

3. Examples of the trio texture for waltzes (from Walburga Litschauer and Walter Deutsch; also, Rainer Gstrein): [edited 6-3-10] meant for this post but since moved into a new post.

4. David Brodbeck has some commentary and an explanatory example for the Scherzo movement from the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet: post.

5. Legler and Kubik reproduce instructions from a dance manual by one Edward David Helmke (1830): post.

6. Barbara Boisits reproduces the sequence of dances (Tanzordnung) for the first ball of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (1830): post.

7. I corrected "Schuhplattl" to "Schnadahüpfl" in a couple recent posts. I also corrected several early posts, where I reversed the designation of marked and unmarked terms in an opposition.

8. I added a link to an ad for Franz Mailer's 10-volume biography of Johann Strauss, jr., in the post reviewing his Strauss-Verzeichniss.

Dance venues in Vienna

2010-05-19T14:38:00.002-05:00

This updates the four summary posts on dancing in Vienna during Schubert's lifetime: post #1.

Margit Legler and Reinhold Kubik offer a concise list of the major public dance venues in 19th-century Vienna (91-92).

Der Sperl: correctly, "Zum Sperlbauer," after the name of the first owner of the inn (opened 1701). A public dancehall and gardens with a performing pavilion were added in 1807, and the venue quickly became a favorite local destination. It was drastically remodelled in 1839 and retained its popularity for another 30 years; it was torn down in 1873.

Zur goldenen Birne, started in 1702, was remodelled in 1801, including the addition of a large dancehall, which became known as the "Wiener Annentempel."

Apollosaal, built in 1807 and opened in time for Carneval 1808. In addition to a great dancehall, the site had smaller halls and rooms, grottos, etc., along with an orchestral performance area in the shape of a small hill. As many as 8000 visitors could be accommodated. Perhaps in part because of its size, which had the disadvantage of an unwieldly complexity, the venue suffered an unstable, shifting history, finally burning down in 1876 after being turned into a textile factory.

Dianabad opened in 1804 and was extensively remodelled in 1829-30, its special trait being a swimming area that could be converted into a dancehall for the winter (!). The leading dance orchestras played here. The building was rebuilt in 1893, and suffered severe damage in 1945.

The other venues in Legler and Kubik's list were all opened after Schubert's death: Dommayers Kasino (1833-1907), Sophienbad (1838-2002), Kettenbrückensaal (1840-1904), and Odeonsaal (1844-1848).

In the same volume, Andrea Harrandt discusses the professional activities of Johann Strauss, sr., during the Carneval season. She reproduces two page-long lists of his engagements, for 1840 and 1846, respectively (139, 142). Between 11 January and 3 March, 1840, Strauss's band had well over 40 appearances, on weekends often more than one in a day. The venues: Sperl, 36 times; Dommayer, 11 times. In 1846, between 11 January and 24 February: Sperl 35 times; Sophienbad, 7; Odeon, 6; Redoutensäle, 4. The tables, unfortunately, don't quite agree with Harrandt's text: for 1846, Strauss is said to have played for 31 balls at the Sperl, and three days a week for the afternoon "Konversation" [see more on this below] in the Volksgarten (143) -- that would make a total of 49 engagements at the Sperl alone. In any case, the number is remarkable, and certainly corroborates statements about the intense dance-oriented social activity of the Carneval season in Vienna.

[added 5-26-10: A more extensive list can be found in the work catalogue edited by Schönherr and Reinöhl (343-53). The list covers the years 1827-1849. The book is structured as an annotated chronological list, somewhat in the manner of Franz Mailer's Strauss [jr], but the annotations are generally more contextual or anecdotal than focused on the individual work at hand. Early on, they identify the "Konversation" (alternate names: soirée, Reunion, among others) as a fashionable entertainment in Viennese venues, distinguished by the performance of quite varied types of music and sometimes including magic and similar acts. The sessions finished with some dancing (15-16). Except for the dancing, these sound remarkably similar to vaudevilles at the end of the century.]

Reference.

Legler, Margit, and Reinhold Kubik. "Anmutige Verschlingungen. Tänze des Vormärz: Quellen – Notation – Ausführung." In Boisits, Barbara, and Klaus Hubmann. Tanz im Biedermeier: Ausdruck des Lebensgefühls einer Epoche, 89-131. Proceedings from the Symposium Musizierpraxis im Biedermeier: Tanzmusik im ländlichen und städtischen Bereich, Graz, Austria, 26.-27. März 2004. Series: Neue Beiträge zur Aufführungspraxis, vol. 6. Vienna : Mille Tre Verlag Robert Schächter, 2006.

Harrandt, Andrea. "'Das Leben ein Tanz.' Zu den Tanzkompositionen von Johann Strauß Vater für den Wiener Fasching." In Boisits and Hubmann, 133-149.

Schönherr, Max, and Karl Reinöhl. Johann Strauss Vater: ein Werkverzeichnis. London, Universal Edition [1954].

Archaeology of Improvisation

2010-05-03T01:31:00.002-05:00

In November, I will be giving a paper-presentation during a conference session on improvisation. The place is Indianapolis; the occasion is the joint national meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory.

The title is "Schubert's 'Riemannian Hand': An Archaeology of Improvisation." Here's the abstract:

Schubert was said to string his waltzes into "endless cotillons" for dancing. A close relative of the contredanse, the cotillon required frequent repetition of strains, particularly the principal one. Using the three-layer texture of the waltz (as played on a piano) and "endless cotillons" as the design, I will demonstrate (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. 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."

[note added 5-19-10: Legler and Kubik reproduce instructions from a dance manual by Edward David Helmke (1830), one of which is "A waltz may last no more than 15 minutes and a cotillon no more than 45 minutes" (95).]

Reference.

Legler, Margit, und Reinhold Kubik. "Anmutige Verschlingungen. Tänze des Vormärz: Quellen – Notation – Ausführung." In Boisits, Barbara, and Klaus Hubmann. Tanz im Biedermeier: Ausdruck des Lebensgefühls einer Epoche, 89-131. Proceedings from the Symposium Musizierpraxis im Biedermeier: Tanzmusik im ländlichen und städtischen Bereich, Graz, Austria, 26.-27. März 2004. Series: Neue Beiträge zur Aufführungspraxis, vol. 6. Vienna : Mille Tre Verlag Robert Schächter, 2006.

Dance collections (2)

2010-05-02T01:35:00.002-05:00

This continues yesterday's post, which provided links to several dance collections available from IMSLP and described those collections in terms of design and key sequence.

It is perhaps a little embarrassing that one conclusion to be drawn from comparing Schubert with Czerny and Marschner manages no more than to repeat some old clichés: If Czerny's dances are a bit dull in their routines, despite some technical "glitz,"

and Marschner seems already to be striving toward opera,

then Schubert distinguishes himself as an inexhaustible fountain of charming and memorable melodies. (first strains of D365ns7-9)

On the other hand, with respect to design and style, Schubert's dances are completely within the limits of typical practice for the period 1815-1830. Arguments made for Schubert's uniqueness on those terms are indefensible.

Dance collections

2010-05-01T11:38:00.001-05:00

Here are a few links to dances or dance collections from IMSLP:

Carl Czerny, Les Etrennes, Op. 32. 24 waltzes published by Tobias Haslinger, Vienna, reissue after 1826.
Stephen Heller, Ländler und Walzer, Op. 97. 12 waltzes published by Friedrich Kistner, Leipzig, [date?]
Johannes Brahms, arr. Theodor Kirchner. Liebeslieder-Walzer, Opp. 52 & 65. Piano solo arrangement of both sets, complete. Simrock, Berlin, 1881.
Carl Maria von Weber, Allemandes, Op. 4. 10 dances with trios. From collected edition of music for piano (c. 1890).
Heinrich Marschner, 12 Dances, Op. 53. 6 waltzes and 6 ecossaises. Halberstadt: C.Brüggemann (1820s?)

Czerny's set, details: All 24 dances are in 8+8 design, except n22, which is 16+16, including a truncated reprise. Numbers 7, 12, and 22 make demands on technique in isolated passages; otherwise, any pianist who could play the published waltzes of Schubert could easily play these, as well. The sequence of keys: ns1-6: A major; ns 7-9: C major; ns 10-12: F major; ns 13-14: F minor; ns 15-16: Db major; ns 17-18: F major; ns 19-20: A major; ns 21-22: E major; ns 23-24: C major. Or, overall: A-C-F-Fm-Db-F-A-E-C.

Heller's set, details: The designs vary quite a bit; they are listed below along with keys.

n1 8+8; first strain repeat written out F major
n2 16+16 with reprise D major
n3 8+8+8 as ABA Bb major
n4 8+16, partial reprise D major
n5 8+8 A major
n6 16+8 A minor
n7 8+8+8+8+18 as ABABA with last A extended in coda fashion. No repeat signs. F major
n8 8+16+10, where 16 includes a full reprise and 10 is a separate coda. Ab Major
n9 8+16+16, where 16 includes a full reprise and the second 16 is a slightly varied version of the first 16. Both 16s are repeated as a group (error?) Db major
n10 8+8 with the second strain repeat written out. C major
n11 16+(10+16)+32. First strain no repeat sign; full reprise in the second strain; 32-bar coda is marked "ad libitum." F minor
n12 16+16+8+16+8+16+40. F major
Overall key sequence: F-D-Bb-D-A-Am-F-Ab-Db-C-Fm-F.

The set was probably published around 1860 and shows the hybrid character of Schumann's early sets, especially Papillons. The early pieces could be grouped for dancing, but progressively the set becomes more and more pianistic, more in the nature of character pieces and not social dances.

Weber's set, details: all dances and their trios 8+8. Keys: C-F; G-C; Cm-CM; Eb-Bb; D-D; Dm-F; C-F; Db-Ab; C-F; Bb-Eb. Thus, tonic-subdominant pairings predominate (6 out of 10). It's hard to imagine these dances being played in succession as a complete set. A division into two groups (1-4 or 1-5; 5-10 or 6-10) is plausible, but even then one would probably want to employ some alternativo designs (repeating the trio, then going on to the next dance without a reprise).

Marschner's set, details: The waltzes are clearly meant to be grouped, as in a "single" Strauss or Lanner set. An 8 bar introduction; 8+16 in A (with reprise); 8+12 in E (with reprise); 8+8+8, each section repeated in A; 8+16 with reprise in D; 16+44 in Bb, with second strain as 28+16 (reprise); 8+8 in F. At the end of n4 is a notation "I da capo al Fine" -- somewhat mysterious, as it could mean that n4 should be played as an independent trio to n1 OR that n1 should be reprised at this point perhaps to close the sequence 1-4: so, 1-2-3-4-1 OR it might suggest that n4 is the last in a series of trios, so: 1-2-1-3-1-4-1. Of course, in performance, any of these was possible. A similar notation at the end of n6 is easier to decipher: "V da capo al Fine," making n6 a trio to n5.

Schenkerian hermeneutics; Schenkerian

2010-04-20T06:46:00.002-05:00

I did an internet search (as well as literature search) on "Schenkerian hermeneutics" a few days ago, for the sake of class notes. The result: although I had assumed the term is commonly used, it clearly is not. I have placed a PDF file of the notes sent to my class here.

In the course of the internet search, I was surprised to see how often and how early in the results this blog appears. I strongly suspect -- but certainly can't prove -- that it has something to do with the fact that the blog sits in Google's own blog space.

However that may be, a switch in the results list from links to "Images" turned out to be truly amusing:

William Drabkin on Schenker and Strauss

2010-04-19T01:03:00.001-05:00

In the final paragraph of his survey article on Schenker, William Drabkin notes the following:

Schenker's admiration of the music of Johann Strauss and his efforts to promote it by providing voice-leading graphs of his more famous waltzes in Der freie Satz suggests that, his outright dismissal of jazz and other forms of popular music notwithstanding, he saw the difference between good and bad as greater than that between serious and popular. (838)

For this most capable historian and editor, whose guidance of the Cambridge editions of translations of Der Tonwille and two of the three volumes of Das Meisterwerk in der Musik was masterful, work for which we should all be grateful, a statement like this is, alas, a come-down. Drabkin sets Schenker up above the fray, as impartial arbiter of quality regardless of source. That's nonsense, as Drabkin certainly knows. Strauss squeaked into the pantheon because of his close friendship with Brahms, the Lion of Vienna and Schenker's idol -- and only for that reason.

How else, when Strauss represents better than anyone the post-Rossini generations that marry dance music with Italianate melody, a realm of foreground music (chains of waltzes) and larger works of spectacle (operettas) rather than Beethovenian "substance"? Schenker wrote several negative descriptions of Italian music: in brief, he thought that contemporary Italians could write melodies but couldn't build coherent compositions; that people's contribution had been historical, to find and explore counterpoint, which was then properly understood and developed only by Germans.

PS: "--and only for that reason": there is, of course, another, namely Schenker's loyalty to Vienna, his adopted home, great musical city, and seat of the monarchy.

Reference.

Drabkin, William. "Heinrich Schenker." In Thomas Christensen, ed. The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, 812-843. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

On the Laendler in D734

2010-04-18T01:51:00.003-05:00

Here is another passage from Litschauer and Deutsch (39; trans.):

Among Schubert's dances in triple meter are about 130 Ländler, composed between 1815 and 1826 and by and large preserved in manuscript sources. In contrast to the schottisches, german dances, and waltzes, however, the Ländler do not appear among Schubert's albumleaves or dedication compositions, and thus it is not suprising that these dances are rarely mentioned by the composer's friends and acquaintances. Furthermore, as two journal entries by Franz von Hartmann indicate, Ländler were commonly confused with German dances. (In both instances, the reference is to Schubert's "16 Ländler, opus 67" D734, which were published by Diabelli in December 1826 under the title "Hommage aux belles Viennoises: Wiener-Damen-Ländler.")

17 December 1826 (Sunday): By Spauns, where Gahy played brand-new Schubert German dances (with the title "homage to the belles of Vienna," which made Schubert quite angry).

6 January 1827: We went to Spauns, where we were invited, along with Gahy, to breakfast. . . . then Gahy played two superb sonatas by Schubert and the German dances that had enchanted us so at M on the 17th.

Hartmann probably should have known better, as few collections outside the first dozen or so numbers in D365 and D779 represent the Ländler style more consistently, but in his defense we should remember that Deutscher was not only the genre title for a particular group of dances and their musics, but also the family name for all "waltzing" dances.

Several points can be made about D734, many of them reminders of earlier posts:

(1) the boundary between Ländler and Deutscher was always fuzzy with respect to musical style in the urban dance cultures, being reduced by the 1820s to sweeter/quieter/slower (Ländler) versus formal/louder/faster (Deutscher).

(2) in dancing, the types were often intermingled to fit alternations between couple and group dancing. In D734, for instance, n2 comes as close as any Schubert dance to realizing the type of the rural Ländler in the late 18th century: D major, I and V only, violinistic melody with many third doublings. But n16 is clearly a Deutscher that would accompany the obligatory processional that ended an extended dance/cotillion.

(3) the "sweeter/quieter/slower" criterion is muddied by imitations of the Schnadahüpfl episodes in rural dancing. This alternation is clearly at work in D734n1: the first eight bars of Ländler are interrupted by the same music abruptly transformed into a loud, drone-accompanied Schnadahüpfl, then the Ländler returns. Remember that this is also what happens -- down to the direct mediant key shifts -- in D779n13 and D145n7.

Reference.

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

Litschauer and Deutsch on the Ländler

2010-04-17T07:08:00.004-05:00

Here is a free and partial translation from the section on choreography of the Ländler (48-51):

About the dance performance of the Ländler during the Biedermeier period there remains considerable ambiguity. [Like the Deutscher,] the genre title Ländler represents a category encompassing both the so-called "almeric" (alpine) couple dances ("Steirische," "Wickler" "Schuhplattler") and the "ländlerisch" (rural) group dances. We can say with certainty only that the Ländler is a figure-dance for whose performance a moderate tempo is assumed.

Ernst Hamza has noted that the Ländler originally was a couple dance in which "the individual dance couples...had a large individual space at their disposal." The rich choreography of the almeric dances was (and still is) characterized by a number of figures with embracing movements, so that this Ländler type often appears as a lovers' dance. One can infer from dance illustrations in the Biedermeier period that similar arm figures were also typical of social dance, where in fact they were integrated into not the Ländler but [the urban dance most directly derived from it,] the "Straßburger." [the figures in this blog's logo are illustrations of this dance]

[The Ländler was apparently already being danced in Viennese society as early as 1790.] Around 1818 one can trace several variants of this dance in the repertoire of middle class house balls, where it was often danced in rural costumes. Because of the decorative character of the arm figures, the "Steierische" enjoyed great popularity at these festivities.

In the dance instruction manuals of the early 19th century the Ländler is usually called a "Länderer" and its figures are labeled "Ländern."

Reference.

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

William Drabkin on Schenker

2010-04-15T18:45:00.000-05:00

It's always nice to see one's work mentioned in places where it's relevant. Surveying the field of post-Schenkerian studies in North America and the UK, William Drabkin notes the following (836):

Not surprisingly, the attempt to render Schenker's work accessible has also led to new developments in his theories. Although Schenker himself stressed that his work was artistic, not scientific, succeeding generations of theorists felt the need for it to be more internally consistent. One sees not only a more scientific approach, as early as Forte's seminal essay of 1959, but also numerous attempts to come to terms with ambiguities and inconsistencies in the theory. Both the sanctity of the two-voice Ursatz and the primacy of the descending 3-2-1 Urlinie have been challenged,51 and theorists now generally accept the possibility that a piece may admit more than one valid Schenkerian reading.52

Footnote 51 cites my three 1987 articles, one of David Beach's responses to them, and Geoffrey Chew's "The Spice of Music," which appeared in one of the first issues of Music Analysis (1983). Chew, blending Schenker and Kurth, argues in favor of the primacy of the leading-tone progression, something with which I can certainly sympathize, although I do not think he works it all out in the clearest possible way.

I am pleased to hear the tone of voice in the word "sanctity" -- it shows that Drabkin can retain a critical attitude and has not merely fallen into the old "Schenker's right and you're not" trap that held back serious critical work for quite a long time in the 1970s and 1980s (even later in some retrograde instances). On the other hand, he keeps his place among the (most) traditionalist Schenkerians with "although Schenker himself stressed that his work was artistic, not scientific" [the clear implication being that we should avoid criticizing that position] followed by "theorists felt the need for it to be more internally consistent" ["felt the need" suggests desires rather than objectively necessary action; that is, Schenker seems reasonable while later theorists seem to be reacting on emotion. This is the academized Schenker of the 1978 Free Composition translation, the pale shadow who would have been at home in a Friday afternoon sherry party -- more likely the real Schenker would have despised all the pale academicians at said party]. Alas, (a) Schenker apart from his ideology is an emasculated and pointless Schenker; (b) Schenker said it was a theory and no amount of dodging about art vs. science or culture vs. politics will avoid the responsibilities that come with that claim [which is why I agree with Matthew Brown's agenda -- just not his method or his results]; (c) the theory as offered was (and I think still is) shot through with "ambiguities and inconsistencies."

Footnote 52 cites four items, including Carl Schachter's "Either/Or" and Drabkin's own "Consonant Passing Note." Drabkin misrepresents Schachter in that the article is concerned with locating the correct choice among alternatives, not assuming that both are intrinsically acceptable. Drabkin's essay, which is grounded in a case study -- Schenker's exchange with his student Felix-Eberhard von Cube about an analytic exercise -- does not so much acknowledge alternate readings as say the "verdict" should be left open on the problem of the subdominant that is separated from the dominant by a consonant triad.

References.

Drabkin, William. "Heinrich Schenker." In Thomas Christensen, ed. The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, 812-843. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

more from Wilmot on dancing

2010-04-11T05:00:00.005-05:00

Here are three more excerpts from Martha Wilmot's Letters concerning dancing. The first and second come from early in their time in Vienna.

The Spanish Ambassador's ball: The Empress did not arrive till late, that is, till half past nine. After sitting a few moments [she] rose, and followed by her Grande Maitresse and Grand Maitre, she went thro' the assembly room, talking to everybody. How those high people contrive to find something appropriate to say to so many is my astonishment, and She seems to be quite gifted in this way. When she had talked to almost everyone she proceeded to the ball room. Then begun the waltzes. There were not many dancers, except the Court, but if they were not glittering Waltzes never did I see any. . . . The Imperial party retired at eleven, and then begun the fun of the natives, who danced more freely with their equals. (46)

To her sister-in-law, January 1820:

I dare say you imagine us very frisky people, eternally gadding abroad, but you are mistaken if you do, for on an average I think we are 4 or five Evenings out of the seven quietly at home, but when we do go, tis something to make a figure in a letter, for example, the English and French Ambassadors balls, which we have attended, both of which were uncommonly brilliant, gay, and agreeable. One country dance is always danced, and then Waltzes and quadrilles only.

And, finally her account of Carneval season 1825:

All the balls that are given in the course of the year are given during the Carnival, which begins the 1st January and ends Ash Wednesday. This year the Archbishop would not allow it to begin so soon, and it lasted not quite 5 weeks. While it lasts the young people almost dance themselves to death, and then the last thing is a Ridout [Redoute], where the cram and mob is suffocating, the dancing and music maddening. Twelve O'Clock strikes! It announces the arrival of Ash Wednesday! The music makes a sudden stop, the sudden pause and quiet which follows is awful-it lasts a moment, when the buzz which succeeds is worse than the honest ball music and noise. . . .
I do not enter much into the gaietys of the Carnival. You must know that nothing would be easier than for us to go to a ball or two every night, but as our dancing days are over and our childrens dancing days are not come, the stupidity from want of interest is very great, and the expence of dressing very great likewise, added to which [my husband] William dislikes it, and in a wicked town like this I ought to be too happy that his home is his favorite ball room. . . . But my grand delight was the Opera. . . . I have been at 7 or 8 Operas this year and they are allowed to be the very best filled up opera's in Europe, as all the performers are excellent and 2 or three quite first rate. [Our daughter] Catharine begins to enjoy an Opera and a concert, so I take her to form her taste.

Reference.

Wilmot, Martha. Ed. by the Marchioness of Londonderry and H. M. Hyde. More letters from Martha Wilmot; impressions of Vienna, 1819-1829, relating her experiences in the brilliant cosmopolitan society of Vienna as the wife of the Rev. William Bradford, chaplain to the British embassy, during a period when Austria was the political and social centre of Europe, and including a journal of a tour in Italy and the Tyrol, and extracts from the diary of her elder daughter Catherine for 1829. London, Macmillan and co., limited, 1935.

Style topics in D145n7

2010-04-10T01:23:00.001-05:00

In this entry, I wrote about the topical contrast in the first strain and contrasting middle of D145n7:

A simple diatonic mediant move (effecting the transformation R twice) is aligned with formal design in an early ternary waltz that also happens to contrast Ländler and deutscher traits (the former in the main theme, the latter in the contrasting middle) using sharp dynamic contrast to make the point unmistakably.

"Deutscher" here was a bit too confident -- I was relying on expressive and functional distinctions that often appear in and between Schubert's dances. First, recall that "deutscher" was a relatively broad category referring -- especially very early in the nineteenth century -- to all the waltzing dances. It was, in effect, the German "back-translation" of the French appellation from the 1760s, allemande (in contredanse allemande).

Second, "deutscher" was used more narrowly for music that had the processional (that is, somewhat formal) character of the menuet; by 1810, it was often impossible to tell the two apart -- to a composer, the deutscher was often just a menuet with few of that genre's long-since-clichéd gestures. It was the contrast between the processional "waltz" (deutscher) and the romantic couple dance of the Ländler that was clearly meaningful to Schubert and that I was relying on.

But, third, the foot-stamping segments of a folk dance could also be represented along with the drone instrument (bagpipe, Dudelsack, etc.) that accompanied folk (rural) dancing well into the nineteenth century (Petermayr, 83-84).

In other words, here Schubert is offering us two very different sides of his tune: as sweet Ländler in the first strain, but probably as accompaniment to rural stampfen thereafter, not to a more refined urban processional dance.

In the course of this, he might even have been duplicating the contrasting segments of rural or lower-class group dancing. Petermayr quotes a description of such dancing from later in the century (NB: the segments are marked by numbers in square brackets):

The string players have tuned their instruments and begun to play dance music in three-quarter time with their characteristically piercing tones, while they stamp their feet in duple time. [1] The dancers don't hold back: pair on pair they step into the line of dance and go some steps forward, following the beat, man and woman side by side (specifically, with the woman on the outside). [2] Then they grasp hands and make several turns [or figures [the word is Schwenkungen]], so that the woman appears briefly on the inside then again on the outside of the line. Then both raise their arms high above their heads and the woman turns herself once under the man's arm. [3] Then both settle back [to side-by-side position] and execute several figures, as before. [4] Again the arms go up and the woman turns quickly twice, so that her skirts swirl upward and out. [5] Each couple then embraces [that is, takes a clasping hold] and turns waltzing in a circle. [6] Again the couples settle back, but now the dancers move forward stomping on the floor so vigorously that the windows shake and the dust rises. While doing this they clap hands in time, call out, and sing in chorus the powerful, not easily forgotten "Schnadahüpfl" [also known as "Vierzeiler" -- commonly known bits of verse, sometimes nonsense]. [When all this is done,] the couples change, as each woman moves forward up the line to the next man, and the whole sequence begins again. This is repeated as often as there are dancing couples, so that at the end each man has his original partner. (94-95; trans.)

Reference.

Petermayr, Claus. "Nieder- und oberösterreiche Quellen zum Volkstanz im Biedermeier." In Harrandt, Andrea, and Erich Wolfgang Partsch. Tanzkultur im Biedermeier: wissenschaftliche Tagung 1. bis 2. Oktober 2004, Ruprechtshofen, N. Ö, 75-96. Series: Publikationen des Instituts für Österreichische Musikdokumentation, vol. 31. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2006.

The Sound of Dancing: update

2010-04-09T01:47:00.003-05:00

The answer to the question posed in the previous post (Did Schubert's friends change shoes for dancing?) appears to be: No. Lightweight shoes, often without heels, were the fashion. (Whether they were always of cloth, or could be of leather, is unclear.) Sturdy covering boots and shoes were worn when going outdoors. Buxman: "fashion [in shoes] changed -- throughout the first half of the nineteenth century one used flat footwear, shoes with cross straps, cloth shoes or boots" (185; translated).

Here are two details from Viennese drawings, the first from 1816, and other from 1827.

We can assume a consistent style of dress in Vienna through the period of Schubert's adulthood, as Parisian fashions were dropped in 1815 (Congress of Vienna; end of the Napoleonic Wars) and then almost as quickly adopted again in 1830 (July Revolution).

Writing about Carneval 1826, Martha Wilmot (Mrs. William Bradford) describes in great detail a rather unusual costume ball that consisted of 12 very elaborate walking tableaux (she does not mention dancing but as she labels some of the tableaux "quadrilles" it is likely they danced as well as marched). In the paragraph about her own dress, she mentions "white satin shoes and broad flat pink saddle bows" (239). After the final tableau, however, general dancing started, and all characters, classes, and ages intermingled, in the most informal manner of the contredanse. At 2:00am a supper was served. The party was given by the British ambassador; Wilmot was the spouse of the embassy chaplain. (She reports that by request of the Emperor the entire series of tableaux was repeated in the palace the following evening and "the quadrilles for want of dancing Masters as Heralds to guide them, got into . . . glorious confusion" (240); also that "after the Imperial family had seen the quadrilles there was a little dancing in the Crown Prince's Apartment" (241).

Wilmot also mentions dancing in the context of a typical day for the children and their governess. (Wilmot, Blanche, and Catharine are the Bradfords' three children. ) Note particularly the promenade (the polonaise) that offers the characteristic formal close to a session of dancing (equivalent to the procession of couples waltzing about the room to a deutscher Tanz).

The governess "makes both Wilmot and Blanche say lessons twice a day, in french, then she can practice them in dancing, teach work, and superintend . . . their [dancing and] other Masters. She dresses them for dessert, and comes in with them. After sitting about half an hour, I get up and announce a ball; [the governess] then waltzes with Catharine while I play some excellent waltzes that I have got. Then she waltzes with Blanche, (in fun) who will be an exquisite dancer, the little manner of her in setting about it is so admirable. The Squire has his turn [and] when this is ended [he] leads out one in a polonaise, the others follow, and so they proceed to the nursery--after which they sup, tell stories, and the two youngest go to bed. (83)

Alas, this report is from September 1820, before Schubert's D365 was published, but as the Bradfords remained in Vienna till 1829, it is entirely possible that she "got" music of his and played it at some later time -- she reports that the family always had a (rented) pianoforte in the house.

[note added 5-19-10: the longevity of the polonaise as a formal or processional dance is attested by Barbara Boisit's reproduction of the sequence of dances (Tanzordnung) for the first ball of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (1830): the evening was divided into two halves with an hour's rest inbetween -- the first was polonaise, waltz, waltz, cotillon and galop, waltz; the second shuffled the dances but kept the formal dance at the head: polonaise, waltz, cotillon and galop, waltz, cotillon and galop (158, illustration). The same organization's ball for 1847 was considerably more complex, but still placed the polonaise at the beginning of the first part: polonaise, waltz, waltz, quadrille, waltz, quadrille, waltz, quadrille, mazurka, quadrille, waltz. The second part consisted of waltz and polka, quadrille, waltz, quadrille, waltz, menuet (!), quadrille, waltz and polka (Legler and Kubik, 94 illustration).]

References.

Buxbaum, Gerda. Mode aus Wien, 1815-1938. Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, for the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Wien, c1986.

Boisits, Barbara. "Der erste Ball der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien im Jahre 1830." In Boisits, Barbara, and Klaus Hubmann. Tanz im Biedermeier: Ausdruck des Lebensgefühls einer Epoche, 151-166. Proceedings from the Symposium Musizierpraxis im Biedermeier: Tanzmusik im ländlichen und städtischen Bereich, Graz, Austria, 26.-27. März 2004. Series: Neue Beiträge zur Aufführungspraxis, vol. 6. Vienna : Mille Tre Verlag Robert Schächter, 2006.

Legler, Margit, and Reinhold Kubik, "Anmutige Verschlingungen. Tänze des Vormärz: Quellen – Notation – Ausführung." In Boisits, Barbara, and Klaus Hubmann, 89-131.

The Sound of Dancing

2010-03-30T08:41:00.004-05:00

In an earlier post on the geography of dancing (that is, the physical spaces in which Schubert improvised/played dance music) I wrote the following:

The distinct timbres of the three main registers on contemporary pianofortes would be audible nearby, less so on the dance floor, where the swishing of clothes and muffled swish-slide of light cloth dancing shoes would mingle with the music.

Since writing that sentence, I have been wondering about those shoes. I wrote "light cloth dancing shoes" (that is to say, shoes of a fabric, shape, and weight similar to modern ballet slippers) because those are recognized as the standard from historical sources (dance instruction manuals and iconography). Here is a close-up from the rightmost couple in my logo graphic. This comes from 1808 and so can reasonably be regarded as typical at least into the early 1820s, and the dancers are dressed in a way that corresponds to the social class of Schubert and his friends.

A dance party (house ball) was not like a Clara Schumann recital -- strictly ordered, staid, and quiet. And since one of the few predictable elements would have been the alternation between dancing and eating/drinking, one has to ask whether the participants changed their shoes from one to the other. Given the protocols for dress, it would seem uncouth (or else youthfully rebellious) to wear dancing slippers while eating and talking. If Schubert's friends took the time to change their shoes, that action would would have affected the timing and process of the dancing and therefore also of Schubert's playing: it would necessarily articulate or "formalize" the dancing -- setting a particular dance segment off, as when a modern dance band takes a break. For Schubert, the inclination to group his waltzes by some (any) sort of connecting logic would have increased at least as much as with the "endless cotillions." In fact, perhaps more so, as he would have had more opportunity to organize distinct, small sets in the dance-trio(s) mould.

mediant blocking in D145n7

2010-03-29T08:15:00.005-05:00

A simple diatonic mediant move (effecting the transformation R twice) is aligned with formal design in an early ternary waltz that also happens to contrast Ländler and deutscher traits (the former in the main theme, the latter in the contrasting middle) using sharp dynamic contrast to make the point unmistakably. In the example below, the mediant moves are outlined. (Another reminder that the graphics are thumbnails -- click on them to see the original-size file.)

Perhaps because of the change of figuration assisting the topic change, the left hand does not execute the transformations directly (in the manner of the Riemannian Hand). Instead, the right hand works out a pattern that combines transformation with registral shifts.

In mm. 3-4, the Hand would seem to be as at "a?": Bb4-Eb5-G5, but the direct move is from the shape at "a". The "b?" to which "a" moves is not literal, however (there is no Eb5); instead, the Eb is shifted upward to Eb6 (as at "b"). In the reprise this shape settles down as C5 goes to Bb4 (at "c?"), but the final move again takes the lowest note up an octave: G5 to G6 at "c."

16-bar sentences; more to D810

2010-03-18T06:49:00.007-05:00

Yesterday's post dealt with the expansion of D790n6 into the scherzo of the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet. For the trio, I'll do the reverse: pull out of the existing piece a plausible dance source. Actually, it's quite easy to do because the trio is set up as strain + varied repetition, and the contrasting middle is cleanly segregated out.

The 16-bar strain is by no means common in the waltzes, and most of those are periods (which, it must be said, are just as easily understood as written-out repetition with a varied cadence). Of 16-bar sentences, there are only seven, and all but one is early. The list is D128n10; D145ns 1, 3 12; D146ns 5, 6; and D969n5; they appear in a gallery below, with the articulation at eight bars marked in red. (D145n3 is an exception: the red line marks the "proper" end of the 16 strain, before the second 8 are repeated.)

A Deutscher in D810

2010-03-17T06:40:00.002-05:00

In his review of Christopher Gibbs' biography, Brian Newbould mentions Schubert's use of a Deutscher, D790n6, as the basis for the scherzo in D810 (the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet). Here they are, the latter in Salomon Jadassohn's piano reduction. The opening motive is boxed in red, the more extended citation of the melody in purple, then a two-bar block quoted directly but without the eighth notes (again in purple), and finally the eight-bar direct quote that opens the contrasting middle (in green).

The blocking out of the material is convincing -- the dance's opening figure obviously makes a distinctive germ motive, but the harmonic instability of the first phrase is much better suited to the continuation in a 16-bar sentence; the second phrase with its vii°7-i pair lends itself very well to sequences; and of course contrasting middles are easily movable. Schubert also duplicates and expands on the affective contrast: waltzes often make a point of contrast in figuration, dynamics, and dance-style between individual phrases, not just between strains. As one particularly clear example that uses all three elements of contrast, see the opening of D779n16 below.

[added 5-19-10: David Brodbeck goes through the scherzo of D810, noting that the connection to D790n6 was originally raised by Maurice Brown (Brodbeck, 32-34).]

References.

Newbould, Brian. Review of Christopher Gibbs, The Life of Schubert. Notes 58/1(2001): 82-83.

Brodbeck, David. "Dance Music as High Art: Schubert's Twelve Ländler, op. 171 (D. 790)." In Walter Frisch, ed. Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, 31-47. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

Mailer's Strauss

2010-03-16T02:25:00.004-05:00

I interrupt the hommage series for a book review. Franz Mailer's annotated works-catalogue for Johann Strauss, jr., is a delightful find. It reminds me very much of the dedicated, knowledgeable fan literature that is at least as important to film studies as anything written by academic scholars. There's very little room left for such writing in concert music studies. Granted, as in most fan literature, Strauss can do no wrong, but one knows the attitude going in and, as in the best of the fan literature, Mailer's catalogue wraps a great deal of interesting information around his advocacy.

The foreword is a short pair of paragraphs, then follows a 360-page alphabetized list of Strauss's compositions, each of which receives at least a third to a half page of commentary (and, commendably, without bias toward the well-known pieces: The Blue Danube is given no more space than the Künstler-Quadrille, op. 201). The last 15 pages is another works list, this time by opus number and with place and date of the premiere. The usual stragglers (pieces without opus numbers, etc.) are given a separate spot at the end.

Mailer's writing is very clear, without the Viennese colloquialisms he might have been tempted to bring in, and he consistently offers context (historical, geographical, political, and biographical -- though by no means always in that order). There is little here that cannot be found in other books on Strauss and the Strauss family, but it is particularly appealing to find the focus squarely on the compositions. I can imagine writers of CD liner notes mining this book for many years to come.

Performance of the music is, understandably, given priority over the immediate social contexts of that performance, though one does learn a number of details of venues. And occasionally one gets a hint of dancing, as in the account of Die jungen Wiener, op. 7, a waltz set featured in a Carneval-ball on 22 January 1845. According to Mailer, Strauss used the contrast between a dramatic introduction and the first waltz's "rocking, caressing melody" as a device "to entice [his audience of] young Viennese onto the dance floor of the elegant Dommayer Casino" (170-71). A review of another ball two weeks later notes approvingly the 19-year-old's "playful, piquant, and dance-inviting [tanzauffordernden] melodies" (99) -- this in the commentary on Faschings-Lieder-Walzer, op. 11.

Schubert was 19 barely thirty years earlier. He would have been 48 when Strauss's op. 11 was first performed; his children might have attended the ball in the Sträußelsälen (Theater in der Josefstadt).

Link to a Johann Strauss website, which includes here a charmingly indignant retort to the many writers who have assumed that the composer began with 12-15 players; his first orchestra was 24 players. Because of their contracts, they would also have played at the two balls mentioned above.

Update 6-3-10: Apparently, Mailer is more than a fan: in the traditional philologically oriented manner of the Germanophone musicologist, he has spent 25 years writing a biography of Johann Strauss, jr., a work that has expanded into ten volumes: Grösste Strauss-Biographie aller Zeiten.

Reference.

Mailer, Franz. Johann Strauss: Kommentiertes Werkverzeichnis. Wien: Pichler, 1999.

Schubert's personal soundscape

2010-03-15T01:19:00.001-05:00

By "personal soundscape" I mean the ambient sound and resonance of his room(s). In this post, however, I am actually focusing on musical instruments again, as I am still vexed over Robert Winter's statement about pianos, repeated below from this post.

. . . the truly remarkable fact that Schubert did not have regular access to a piano as he composed. Robert Winter, in the New Grove biographical sketch of Schubert, writes that in late 1824,"Schubert moved briefly . . . for one last time into the Schubert family home. . . . It was the only place he ever lived in that contained a piano; Schubert never bought, leased or borrowed a piano of his own."

Schubert writes his siblings in October 1818: "Do take my fortepiano; I shall be delighted" (Deutsch 109). The instrument is presumably the Graf said to have been given Schubert by his father in 1814 (44). Schwind's drawing of Schubert's room with a piano was made in 1821 (163; 204; also my earlier post). In notes on Schubert's estate expenses, Deutsch says that "Schubert no longer owned a pianoforte, but had used that in Schober's lodgings" (849). Johann Mayrhofer's recollections of sharing a room with Schubert in 1819 include the remark that, ten years later (that is in 1829), the room still held "a played-out pianoforte" (860); in the notes a further quote to this: "Schubert had a miserable pianoforte standing in a narrow room" (864).

Dieckmann's comments on Wilhelm Rieder's formal portrait of Schubert, an oil painting done decades after the composer's death, suggest that Winter took too literally another late-life recollection: Schubert's lively but problematic friend Joseph von Spaun claimed that the composer never owned and didn't use a piano to compose (Dieckmann, 102). Dieckmann thinks that the piano drawn by Schwind in 1821 is the same instrument given Franz several years earlier by his father; it would have gone along when Schubert moved back into the family home in fall 1822 and was probably left there the following year as he went back and forth between the house and the city. From early 1825, he may not have had an instrument but played those in friends' houses nearby (Dieckmann 106-7).

The end result: Winter is apparently wrong; Schubert did own a piano and had it with him in his rooms at least part of the time up to 1825; he may very well have composed without an instrument; no one mentions a violin.

References.

Dieckmann, Friedrich. Franz Schubert: eine Annäherung. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1996.

Deutsch, Otto. Eric Blom, trans. Schubert: A Documentary Biography. London: J. M. Dent, 1946.

Milestone

2010-03-14T11:34:00.007-05:00

Today is the 150th post in this blog. The total number of analyses of D779n13, as listed on the tally page, is 90.

This may be the right moment to gather some bits of information about publication dates:

(1822). Ash Wednesday in 1822 fell on 20 February. D365 was announced by Cappi and Diabelli on 29 November 1821 and again on 11 February 1822, where it was advertised under the sales heading Neueste Tanzmusik zum Carneval 1822 (Schubert: Dokumente, item 143).

(1823) Ash Wednesday in 1823 fell on 12 February. D145 was announced by Diabelli on 31 January 1823 and again on 5 February (Schubert: Dokumente, items 191-192). The three dances in D971 were published by Sauer and Leidesdorf in the collection Neue Tanzmusik: Carneval 1823, advertised on 10 January 1823 (S:D, item 188).

(1824) Ash Wednesday in 1824 was unusually late; it fell on 3 March. D779 was announced by Diabelli on 21 November 1823 (S:D, item 357). Some dances eventually included in D146 were first published by Sauer and Leidesdorf in the anthology Halt's enk z'samm in 1824. The volume was advertised on 12 January, 29 January, and 21 February (S:D, items 236, 244, 250).The ads note that the collection is available in four versions: piano solo, piano 4-hands, piano and violin, and two violins and bass -- in other words, in all the arrangements necessary for domestic and small venue performance for listening and dancing.

(1825) Ash Wednesday in 1825 fell on 16 February. Another collection of the same name was advertised on 27 January 1825 (S:D, item 308). D783 was announced by Cappi on 8 January 1825, as Deutsche Tänze und Ecossaisen under the sales category Tanz-Musikalien für den Carneval 1825 (S:D, item 301). These pieces were apparently arranged by J. B. Scheidemayr in Linz as cotillions, in which form they received a favorable review on 11 March (S:D, item 319). The score is lost, but Deutsch (410) takes it for granted that they are ensemble arrangements. The same review complains that Scheidemayr's own Deutsche, although lively and solidly written, are "rather too pompous," and some will find his "light and uplifting Ländler" more to their taste [my translation].

(1826) Ash Wednesday in 1826 fell on 8 February. In December 1825, Sauer and Leidesdorf advertised three collections: Krähwinkler Tänze für das Pianoforte (18 December), Seyd uns zum zweyten Mahl willkommen! and Ernst und Tändeley: Eine Sammlung verschiedener Gesellschaftstänze für den Carneval (29 December; again on 20 January 1826) (S:D, items 363, 364, 370). The first of these was issued in two volumes, waltzes in the first and galops and ecossaises in the second. Seyd uns was a collection of 50 waltzes, one each by 50 composers, plus a coda and an introduction based on the title song (from Mozart's Magic Flute) (a set of 40 waltzes had been published a year earlier: S:D, item 298). Ernst und Tändeley was equally ambitious: it contains 6 each of menuets, quadrilles, ecossaises, and galops, as well as 8 cotillons (Schubert's only dance of this name was included here). The publisher's description notes that the collection is good for dancing parties "where one simply wishes the music to be played by amateurs at a piano"; thus the virtue of a "collection in which all those dances appear that serve to delight those at a social party" [my translation]. Remarkably, within two weeks, Seyd and Ernst were the subjects of a favorable review in the Wiener allgemeine Theaterzeitung (S:D, item 371).

(1827) Ash Wednesday in 1827 fell on 28 February. On 23 December 1826, Sauer and Leidesdorf advertised the Neue Krähwinkler Tänze für das Pianoforte as well as the Moderne Liebes-Walzer, both sets for piano solo (S:D, item 430). D734 was announced by Diabelli on 15 December 1826 and again on 14 February 1827 (S:D, items 425, 453). D969 was announced by Tobias Haslinger on 22 January 1827 (S:D, item 444).

D969 was advertised by Haslinger again on 11 April 1827 and a month later a review appeared in a Frankfurt newspaper (S:D, items 472, 493). The review appears in Deutsch, p. 638. The final comment is "The reviewer feels that a dance should never consist of two parts only, as is the case here; for its repetition, often for hours on end, must result in unendurable weariness." To this the biographer retorts that "Schubert's dances, written for domestic balls, are to be played in series. [D969] comprises a dozen waltzes." The reviewer's comment is obscure, and the biographer probably misreads it -- but what is interesting is that it's taken for granted by both that D969, that most concert-friendly of Schubert's sets, was meant for dancing.

(1828) Ash Wednesday in 1828 fell on 20 February. D924 was announced by Haslinger on 5 January 1828 (Schubert: Dokumente, item 555) and received a review in the Wiener allgemeine Theaterzeitung, in which it was noted that "with respect to composition, the works of Schubert, Lanner, and Strauss stand out" [my translation] (S:D, item 590; also see Deutsch, 734).

Reference.

S:D = Franz Schubert: Dokumente, 1817-1830. Ed. Till Gerrit Waidelich, with Renate Hilmar-Voit and Andreas Mayer. Vol. 1: Texte: Programme, Rezensionen, Anzeigen, Nekrologe, Musikbeilagen und andere gedruckte Quellen. Veröffentlichungen des Internationalen Franz Schubert Instituts, vol. 10. Tutzing: Hans Schneider.

Deutsch, Otto. Eric Blom, trans. Schubert: A Documentary Biography. London: J. M. Dent, 1946.

Postscript 3 to Berry

2010-03-13T11:30:00.002-06:00

This entry re-examines the results of a look at harmonic options for the second section of D779n13 as reported in an earlier post. The graphic below combines the first staff from that older graphic with the analysis after Berry from the post three days ago; additional annotations are at the bottom.

If A major is certainly stable throughout the first strain, especially as the entire long phrase (after the two-bar introduction) is an expanded cadential progression (Caplin's ECP), there is also -- thanks to style statistics that tell us non-tonic openings are common in early 19th-century waltzes -- at least a momentary possibility of D major, which dissipates once the cadential 6/4 appears.

The second strain is the mirror inverse of the first, as it is highly unstable and multiply suggestive almost throughout -- again, it is only the appearance of the cadential 6/4 that "nails down" an A major ending. If C# major is overly insistent ("Hey, look at me! I'm a stable key! Really!"), it is perhaps because the "proper" key is all too obviously f#, as A: vi. Lurking at the back of C# major's momentary success is the potential for a hexatonic continuation, which would have given us eventually not a B minor triad but its polar opposite: a major triad a tritone away.

The moment of the metric-expressive climax is also the moment at which the five (!)-layer harmonic complexity evaporates. It's not just an accent but a moment of revelation, of coming around a corner, or of walking into the light.

As I noted in yesterday's post, the notion of multiple functional layers (realized or potential) follows not only Berry but also suggests the method outlined in two early articles by Charles J. Smith. This is the place, then, to acknowledge that I have always been an opportunistic (rather than comprehensive) reader, and, although I read several of the articles in Richmond Browne's collection after it was published in 1981, I did not read Smith's. Had I done so, its influence would certainly have been felt in the series of articles I published in 1987 (on the rising Urlinie, the 8-line, and the three-part Ursatz).

References.

Smith, Charles J. "Prolongations and Progressions as Musical Syntax," in Music Theory: Special Topics, ed. Richmond Browne (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 139-174.

Smith, Charles J. "The Functional Extravagance of Chromatic Chords." Music Theory Spectrum 8 (1986): 94-139.

Postscript 2 to Berry

2010-03-12T08:34:00.002-06:00

If only he had relaxed his insistence on recursive hierarchies, Wallace Berry might have been an early darling of musical post-structuralists. As I noted in yesterday's post, his "metric middleground/backgrounds" usually have the effect of flipping the binary in which harmonic hierarchies (and the hierarchies of formal design implied in labels like "A", "B", etc.) constitute the unmarked term. His final graph for Chopin, C-Major Prelude, Op. 28n1, for instance (Berry, "Metric," Ex. 17b), looks very much like my graphic for D779n13 in the post two days ago.

And Berry is quite willing to talk about harmony in overlapping spheres of influence rather than as exclusive, as in his characterization of the harmony in the C-Major Prelude, WTC I:

Primary tonal elements in the Bach Prelude are, in my view, best deemed a complex of overreaching foreground occurrences, anticipating and reflecting. Two occurrences of V, conceivable as one basic manifestation, enclosed by three encompassing occurrences of I, comprise a fundamental unity of linked, overlapping events which span the Prelude ("Metric," 24).

. . . the Prelude's first nineteen measures [suggest] segments marked by overreaching occurrences, prolongations, and processes, inarticulative of precise temporal spans. Particular occurrences and recurrences seeming in the graph [his Ex. 20] to mark explicit spans should be read as veiled, blinking, fading and reemerging, signals (25).

This complex treatment of harmony is, in fact, remarkably similar in its basic strategies to work by Charles J. Smith cited in an earlier post.

Berry, unfortunately, went further in his final book to assert the composer's priority, after the by-then dated manner of the 1960s and the "CMPs" (Contemporary Music Project; Comprehensive Musicianship). As Nicholas Cook puts it, "the dominant approach [to the relation of analysis and performance is] typified by Walter Berry's Musical Structure and Performance. [Its problem is] that it is prescriptive, that it proceeds from analysis to performance, [and] that it tells performers what they have to do rather than listening to what they have to play" (217). What Cook calls for is analysis that is not "monotextual," and thus Berry becomes the emblem of a (heretofore) hegemonic unmarked term.

References.

Berry, Wallace. "Metric and Rhythmic Articulation in Music." Music Theory Spectrum 7 (1985): 7-33.

Smith, Charles J. "The Functional Extravagance of Chromatic Chords." Music Theory Spectrum 8 (1986): 94-139.

Cook, Nicholas. "At the Borders of Musical Identity: Schenker, Corelli and the Graces." Music Analysis 18/2 (1999): 179-233.

Berry, Wallace. Musical Structure and Performance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Postscript 1 to Berry

2010-03-11T01:04:00.003-06:00

This is a postscript to yesterday's post on Wallace Berry, where Robert Fink's notation was adopted for part of the analysis graphic. Fink demonstrated the extent to which ascending linear gestures are present in Beethoven's Missa solemnis and the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies (1994, 88-216; 1999, 108-13). Although many of these are long-range patterns (in the sense that their elements are distributed over large segments of the music), they differ from Urlinie forms, as Fink carefully and deliberately avoids tying the gestures to harmony and voice leading hierarchies, his goal being to show how what he calls "energies," or the irrational movement of desire, can play out independently of the "logic" of harmonic functional hierarchies. Hearing an "arbitrary" rising chromatic gesture in the close of the Credo of the Missa solemnis, for example, Fink generalizes to say that "Even in a tonal work ultimately ruled by a voice leading hierarchy, this way of hearing drives a transgressive wedge between the surface and the depths" (1999, 113).

Rising gestures are appropriate (perhaps even the simplest and most direct) figures for Fink's theory, which avoids universal forms. Setting the image of a ball on a hillside against the experience of goal-directed motion in listening to a piece of music, Fink says that "In the case of the ball, the surroundings are the earth and its gravitational pull; in the case of a musical piece, the surroundings are the listener's musical consciousness and the pull of expectations and desire" (1994, 30). The "crucial difference" between the two is that: "the pull of desire is for each musical experience essentially self-created, unlike gravity." This is basically another example of flipping binaries: depths/surface in linear analysis necessarily favors the first term; the "transgressive wedge" shifts attention to the unmarked term, and one ends up with a cluster: surface/desire//depths/[design].

Fink's "flat hierarchy" is not an attempt to reconcile "surfaces" with Schenkerian practice but to displace (do away with?) the latter. His mode is essentially polemical and as a result he can offer no defense against long-standing scientific demonstrations that hierarchy plays a fundamental role in cognition, even though in hardly so monolithic a manner, perhaps, as Lerdahl continues to insist in Tonal Pitch Space.

References.

Fink, Robert. "Arrows of Desire: Long-range Linear Structure and the Transformation of Musical Energy." PhD diss. University of California, Berkeley, 1994.

Fink, Robert. "Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface." In Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, eds. Rethinking Music, 102-137. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Lerdahl, Fred. Tonal Pitch Space. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Wallace Berry

2010-03-10T01:41:00.002-06:00

Detaching rhythm and meter from harmony rather in the way that Meyer prioritizes melody (but, like Meyer, preserving a loose sense of hierarchy), Wallace Berry proposes that rhythm merges into meter at larger spans and thus multiple accent streams can be read hierarchically, with a layering of accents analogous to the layering of structural levels in a Schenkerian analysis – the difference being that the accents at the upper end of the hierarchy acquire their position by cumulation, rather than syntactical differentation.

Such expressive accent groups have the advantage that they can model the dramatic or emotional curve(s) of a composition's unfolding far better than analyses that rely on metric regularities or the hierarchies of harmony. As a matter of method, however, Berry demands too much of the analyst – every level requires considerable, intuitive gathering and sorting of accents, and the resulting analysis graph can never reflect the complexity of those decisions. In the case of D779n13, reasons for the choice of the "primary" accent are not likely to be obvious, because one element of the decision is a denial of expectations: our structural highpoint or highest-level accent, m. 31 (see the graphic below), should have been as loud as the forte of the C#-major phrase, and it should have received a strong hypermetric accent (which we can confer on it but only with the help of explanations such as those engendered by Lerdahl and Jackendoff's various preference rules). The measure is marked partly by these notable absences, and in both cases, the preceding bars of A7 chords rob m. 31 of those features. Thus, even at the end there remains residual doubt about whether the primary accent belongs to the C#-major chord of m. 23, the A7 chord of m.29, or the B-minor 6/3 chord with its suspension in m. 31. The deciding factor, I think, is register, as depicted in the lower part of the example, where a steady progress of the initial F# across the piece obtains, and the moment of arrival coincides with an inversion of the initial soprano-alto interval. After this moment, the reprise and final cadential ascent sound "anticlimactic" – in Berry's terms "reactive" and recessive. (Berry's priorities resemble Robert Fink's, a fact which has motivated my notation using the angled arrow/beam.)

Berry's conception of musical hearing is the endpoint in a line that began with Schenker and moves through Meyer. All believe in hierarchy: Schenker's is the strictest, with its single generating structure determining priorities throughout the levels; Meyer loosens this to permit multiple simultaneous patterns but he clearly believes in relative significance based especially on a shorter-scale/larger-scale distinction; Berry believes in multiple, autonomous streams which establish hierarchies by statistics, the accumulation of coincident accents (one might say that this concept of meter is at the top of the hierarchy). Its combination of multiple streams of activity and dramatic accent makes Berry's method the most cinematic of any mode we have considered so far – indeed, his notion of levels of metric accent as applied to music is indistinguishable from Michel Chion's "audiovisual phrasing" as applied to a film soundtrack.

References.

Berry, Wallace. "Metric and Rhythmic Articulation in Music." Music Theory Spectrum 7 (1985): 7-33.

Berry, Wallace. Structural Functions of Music. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975; reprint ed. New York: Dover Books, 1987.

Chion, Michel. Claudia Gorbman, tr. Audio-Vision: Sound in Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Leonard B. Meyer, part 2

2010-03-09T01:26:00.002-06:00

One may object to certain features in yesterday's graphics on the grounds that the prominent melodic F# cannot be prolonged, because to do so would contradict the underlying harmonic hierarchy -- but Meyer's priorities go to melodic processes, not to patterns (especially linear patterns) in a harmonic/voice-leading web.

Reading the analysis in the theme/thesis terms of my MTS article, the theme can easily be described as the richness of implication in the first five notes: gap-fill (at several levels), complementation, linearity, arpeggiation.

The thesis is harder to formulate. At one level, it might be negative; drawing on my epithet "shadow Schenker," we can say that Meyer was concerned about this time with producing an alternative to Schenkerian analysis, that he was convinced melody and rhythm had more salience than harmony, and that he was also convinced Schenker's hierarchies were too limiting because they are uniform. Thus we could say that we are asked to believe this piece continually puts before our ears questions (gaps, implications) and that our attention in listening, our "empathetic identification" with the music, is directed to the game of reading and solving these problems. This formulation, however, applies equally well to Schenker – we need only substitute "delay" for "implication." This substitutibility is suggestive in itself about the level of kinship of these methods; the only alteration we need is to specify melodic priority: "we are asked to believe this piece continually puts before our ears questions (gaps, implications, of melody and rhythm) and that our attention in listening, our "empathetic identification" with the music, is primarily directed to the game of reading and solving these melodic and rhythmic problems." Meyer sometimes presents these as individual choices (though they will be intersubjective rather than purely personal if one is a "conscientious critic"), but the environment is sufficiently rule-driven that "solving problems" is more appropriate than "making individual choices."

(The kinship of methods may be further suggested by the lack of influence of the formalizations or rationalizations of each: of Meyer by Eugene Narmour, of Schenker by several authors).

Leonard B. Meyer, part 1

2010-03-08T01:08:00.004-06:00

Whether the influence was from Schenker or indirectly from Salzer's Structural Hearing, there is no question that analytical models from the 1970s and early 1980s engaged with the Schenkerian model for traditional European tonal music. In the two best-known systems from that era, Lerdahl and Jackendoff reinscribe prolongation in terms of what were then contemporary theories of cognition, and Leonard Meyer sets up his implication-realization model as a different kind of "shadow Schenker" on the basis of earlier Gestalt theories.

Meyer informally adopts notions of hierarchy and reduction, but like Lerdahl (and unlike Schenker) he is wary of assigning any spiritual significance (because of the generally recognized limitation on repertoire still in force at the time, he did not need to argue issues of canonization). Meyer does go much further than Lerdahl in ascribing cultural significance to music and its expressivity, though always in the context of a history of style. He develops these ideas extensively elsewhere, but in Explaining Music, his book on musical analysis he restricts himself to effects and relationships; these are four: hierarchic organization, and implicative, conformant, and ethetic relationships. Critical analysis (as he calls it) is primarily concerned with the first three, and expressivity is primarily a matter of the setting up of expectations and their subsequent dousing or realizing.

Meyer's "implicative" is identical to David Bordwell's term "gap," in the latter's similarly Gestaltist theory of film narrative. Meyer, however, uses "gap" for a specific class of melodic process. He gives most of his attention to melody, using both rhythm and harmony (but more the former than the latter) as contributors; he builds a catalogue of melodic processes, all of which are implicative, and among which the "gap-fill" melody is perhaps the most prominent. Under a Meyer-style scrutiny, the melodies of D779n13 become quite complex: an amalgam of overlapping types that just barely yield at last to a hierarchy of scale (the process that covers the distance of the whole piece sits at the top of the hierarchy).

The gap-fill model works in miniature in the opening eight-note motive (see graphic below), but the continuation gives the effect of a bilevel melody (Meyer's term for what is also called "polyphonic melody," a single melodic line that clearly contains two separate voice-leading parts – here, of course, the two parts are indeed separate voices). The symmetry of a complementary melody encompasses the first phrase (mm. 2-9), as the initial E-F# figure is answered by the F#-E 6-5 figure over the tonic at the end of the phrase (level b). The same initial figure can simultaneously imply continuation with a rising series of steps and so encompasses the first strain through its realization in the cadence figure (level c). Finally, the suspensions of the alto voice are strongly linear, but descending (level d). Taken together, levels c and d give the effect of a "diverging" melody – again, recognizing that these really are two separate parts. Meyer recognizes "convergence" as a type – two strands of (typically) linear melody that converge on a single tone. Here the effect is not of a wedge closing, but of one opening (to the octave).

The next graphic shows large-scale implicative processes (those that cover the whole piece). The C#-E interval of the opening suggests an arpeggio whose continuation is realized with the concluding A5 (level a), but this pattern continues through the C#-major section to E6 in the reprise (m. 33). Level b shows a complementary pattern in the second strain, while level c shows how level b's first component can be understood as completing a gap-fill process initiated in the first strain.

The final graphic gathers the larger-scale elements (labelled "x") in a summary of the processive hierarchy; the linear pattern ("a") is placed in the lower staff.

Tomorrow's post will comment on these analyses.

References.

Meyer, Leonard B. Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Let the hommages begin

2010-03-07T01:16:00.001-06:00

Quite a long time back, I listed a series of readings of D779n13 TBP (to be posted). Here is that list again:

A pitch-space reading, several recomposition exercises (including one modeled after Matthew Bailey-Shea's article in Music Theory Online), a dense motivic reading after Daniel Chua, the substitution of D779n13 for another piano piece of Schubert's in a movie scene, a reconsideration of cycles and tonality as Arthur Komar construed them for Dichterliebe, homages to Leonard Meyer and Wallace Berry, and closer consideration of harmonic transformations (after Kopp and Hook).

A couple of these, as marked with links, have been carried out already, others not. Starting tomorrow, I begin what might be called a "retro" series of posts that collectively form a hommage to music theorists/analysts of a previous generation (one perilously close to my own). Komar, Meyer, and Berry will all be included, and the pitch-space reading will invoke Jonathan Bernard's work on Varése along with Lewin's GMIT. (To be fair, Jonathan is actually younger than I am.) A classical pc-set analysis will recall not only Allen Forte but early work of John Clough.

Explaining Tonality

2010-03-06T01:35:00.003-06:00

Today I'll comment briefly on why I did not make use of Matthew Brown's Explaining Tonality in the MTS article, or at least raise a critique of the book, since it is also concerned with basic features of linear analysis, including prototypes. Simply put, Explaining Tonality hangs entirely on one idea, and if you do not accept that idea, or for some reason do not find it fruitful, then there is nothing to be gained. Brown believes that there is implicit in Schenker's work a fully adequate, rationally demonstrable theory of monotonal functional tonality that models what the expert composer/listener knows. All this precedes the book, which resembles nothing so much as a triumphal run to victory, leaping over all obstacles on the way.

And I would say that "leaping" is precisely the word needed here. As one example among many, here is Brown's treatment of the rising Urlinie notion. These "contradict the law that melodies reach maximum closure when they descend ^3-^2-^1. Since ^8 lines satisfy this and our other laws, it is hard to see how they can be rejected as Neumeyer suggests" (75). Since Brown derives his "laws of tonal motion" in such a way that they conform to Schenker's theory, then of course only melodic shapes descending through ^3-^2-^1 can be accepted. I'm not sure this even rises to the level of circular reasoning, though that is what Catherine Pellegrino calls it:

[Brown] dismisses David Neumeyer’s extensions of Schenkerian theory through a curious bit of circular reasoning. Brown introduces some of Neumeyer’s alternative prototypes, including one in which the Urlinie rises from the fifth scale degree to the tonic, but then dismisses them on the basis that they do not conform to Schenker’s prototypes, which descend to the tonic. If they conformed to Schenker’s prototypes, it would hardly be necessary to propose them as extensions of Schenker’s theory, would it? Oddly enough, Brown accomplishes this logical feat just before dismissing another critic’s charges that Schenker’s own theories involve circular reasoning. (92)

At one point, Brown says that "Schenkerian [harmonic] derivations are simply more accurate than functional explanations" (61). For this, one of his reviewers, Matthew McDonald, takes Brown to task:

Two problems arise here. First, ‘accurate’ is once again an inappropriate description of Brown’s interpretation. His ideas about chord generation rely on what is clearly a heuristic model for harmonic analysis: the notion that harmonies other than the tonic ‘derive’ from melodic motions. Such derivations might well be understood as useful explanatory tools, but they can be considered accurate only if one maintains a mystical belief in Schenker’s theory as a representation of musical reality; and such accuracy could never be demonstrated scientifically (or, to use Brown’s terminology, it is not ‘falsifiable’). Chords are not derived from melodic notes, they are composed by human beings. One can conceptualise such derivations, but this is an interpretative act, not a scientific judgement. (234)

Although I, too, have an interest in what can be called theoretical foundations of linear analysis, the MTS article should make it clear that my goal is to inform interpretation, and, implicitly, that I regard Schenkerian analysis as a mode of interpretation, not a scientific model. "Theory," in my sense, is Bordwell's "semantic field" (post) -- another way of saying an organized mode of discourse -- and my interest is in reconfiguring constructs within that field for the sake of enriching interpretative practice.

With respect at least to the idea of Schenkerian analysis as fruitful interpretative practice, I am firmly in Carl Schachter's camp.

Reviews of Explaining Tonality:

Anson-Cartwright, Mark. Journal of Schenkerian Studies, 2 p141-148. 2007.

Clark, Suzannah. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 132(1) p141-164. 2007.

Drabkin, William M. Music & Letters, 89(2) p252. May, 2008.

McDonald, Matthew. Music Analysis, 26(1-2) p217. Mar-July, 2007. McDonald's review of is Explaining Tonality on the mark, but I think he is rather too harsh on the other book reviewed, by David Beach.

Pellegrino, Catherine. Notes (Music Library Association) 63/1 (2006): 90-93.

References:

Brown, Matthew. Explaining Tonality: Schenkerian Theory and Beyond. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005.

Neumeyer, David. "Thematic Reading, Proto-backgrounds, and Transformations." Music Theory Spectrum 31/2 (2009): 284-324.

D779n13 replaces D946n2 in Glory

2010-03-05T04:15:00.000-06:00

Picking up the Civil War motif from an earlier post, I will substitute D779n13 for a posthumously published keyboard piece by Schubert (D946n2) in the soundtrack for a scene from Glory (1989). The film, starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, and Morgan Freeman, recounts the early history of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first regularly formed black regiment in the United States Army.

One of very few non-military scenes in the film, a formal party of upper-class Bostonians begins at about 9 1/2', lasts just over 5 minutes, and is heavily scored -- only about 30 seconds are without music. The scene breaks down readily into three parts, the first a decidedly self-conscious entry into the party by Robert Gould Shaw (Broderick), the second a series of conversations, and the third a final conversation carried on outdoors. The piano music occurs only in the first two segments.

First segment: Shaw’s entry. Action: Shaw descends the central stairs in his parents' upper-class Boston house to join a large party in progress. He and two other soldiers pass singly through a doorway. Duration: 0:56 (from the beginning of the dissolve). Shot pacing is fairly consistent throughout, though not surprisingly the close-ups of Shaw tend to be a bit longer. Music: in during dissolve -- piano music (Schubert) assumed to be diegetic; continues to shot 5. Total time: 0:24. (Complicating factor: Music's diegetic status is somewhat compromised because the music’s volume level is unrealistically high for Shaw’s opening position on the stairs outside the room at whose opposite end the piano stands (as we learn later when we see it onscreen). The piano’s volume level is much higher than the snatches of conversation.) The piano music fades out slowly under a wordless boys chorus; music mixed with bits of conversation; music continues, with slow crescendo. Chorus total time: 0:32.

Second segment: Conversations. Action: Shaw and Thomas Searles (Andre Braugher) converse as Shaw serves himself punch from a bowl. A servant closes a window noisily in the background, causing Shaw to spill the punch. Shaw’s mother enters, taking him to see a group of men assembled about a desk; he talks with his father, Governor Andrew, and Frederick Douglass. Then he excuses himself and turns to leave. Duration: 2:08. Music: background music abruptly out as we hear Thomas say “Robert.” Piano music as abruptly returns; continues to shot 15. Piano total time: c. 0:42. (Complicating factor: The piano music’s volume is now lower than before, but Shaw is standing within ten feet of the instrument, which we see for the first time -- the pianist's hands and sheet music remain visible throughout. Indeed, the volume level now suggests that the piano is in the next room.) As Shaw and Thomas converse, the piano is just visible behind. As Shaw and his mother walk toward the other room, the piano is briefly visible, along with the pianist’s head. The status of the harp -- we also see the harpist's hands -- is never clarified.) Music: Piano music fades out slowly once they are in the other room and conversation begins. (Complicating factor: Fade out without finishing the composition is unrealistic.)

The piano music suggests (roughly) the historical period; it indicates time (disjunct, presumably much later than the previous scene), place (a domestic situation; an educated, perhaps wealthy household), and situation (party, or at least domestic gathering of some kind and evening entertainment). The style of the composition is its most important element here, assisted by the moderate tempo and low technical demands (appropriate to Hausmusik rather than a concert performance).

Music is called on to stress the equivalence of plot and screen duration in the scene’s opening segment: the piano music re-enters at Thomas’s greeting at exactly the point it should be for the number of seconds that have elapsed from its fade-out under the boys chorus. This helps to counteract the effect of the point-of-view music, which is increasingly subjective and emotional, a condition supported by camera framing (the MS-CU-ECU series) and the three unrealistically exaggerated closeups of guests (shots 3, 6, 8). The reappearance of the piano confirms that we have been following in clock time Shaw’s stream of consciousness.

The pianist in this scene is playing the second of the Drei Klavierstücke, D946, composed in May 1828, shortly before Schubert's death. This piece, in Eb major but played a half-step lower in the film, is laid out in a simple 5-part rondo design. The pianist plays all of the first section, though its middle is suppressed under the wordless chorus. How appropriate is this music for the situation? Quite -- Schubert reception was in a positive mode at the time in both national sources likely for a Bostonian -- Germany and England -- even if, according to John Reed, "Until the 1860s Schubert and Schumann were both regarded as 'modern'" (255). There is an historical error, but it is very minor: The Drei Klavierstücke were first published in 1868, more than five years after the date of the film’s Boston party.

If we now substitute D7779n13 for the Eb-major Klavierstück, especially if the tempo is kept relaxed and the dynamic-level of the C# major section is kept down, the difference seems minimal. We are given many visual cues that prevent us from mistaking the party for a dance -- the only possible miscue from replacing the pastoral Klavierstück with a waltz. Because of the existing background music, we would have to transpose the waltz up a half-step to Bb major. The chorus sings in D minor, making for a sharp clash with the C# major of the waltz's second strain. As it is, there will be some clash between D major of the waltz and D minor in the chorus, but the tonality of the latter only gradually comes clear (by about 0:40), and the piano is gone by that point (see the summary version below).

Reference:

Reed, John. "Schubert's Reception History in Nineteenth-century England." In Christopher H.Gibbs, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, 254-62. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Some updates

2010-03-04T01:49:00.009-06:00

I have updated information and references in several earlier posts. Today's entry consists of pointers to those changes.

1. Added a link to an audio file (Prokofiev, Schubert-Suite) in the post for 12-08-09.

2. Added a link to an audio file of D581, III, in the post about that work (2-18-10).

3. Updated the post on Gesellschaftspiel with an added graphic and citations to information in Friedrich Dieckmann's book: 12-14-09.

4. Corrected a graphic listing the different "left-hand" transformations; corrected accompanying text. In this post.

5. Added information about the graphic and some of the persons represented to the first of the Atzenbrugg posts.

6. Added a comment about Alexandra Pierce's conception of the embodiment of Schenkerian hearing to this post.

7. Added a note on the Cadwallader and Gagné textbook to this post.

performance designs for dances

2010-03-03T01:08:00.007-06:00

It is important to understand that there is no such thing as a single, fixed form for the performance of a series of dances -- indeed, not even a fixed context or environment. This fluidity or variability is reflected in the following (repeated from an earlier post):

A reminiscence by Ludwig August Frankl describes an occasion where Schubert "had a great triumph. A large company was there, including the Duke of Reichstadt. [Schubert] sang and played his things. They got ready for dancing, whereupon he played and improvised waltzes; they listened, asked him to go on playing, completely forgot the dancing and so it went on till long after midnight. They departed enraptured, he likewise, the triumph had delighted him" (Deutsch, 265)

All that having been said, here are typical designs for dance performances, all but the first being appropriate either to dancing or listening.

1. the "jewel" -- a single dance performed on its own for listening.

2. dance-trio (ABA). Very common, of course, in sonatas and symphonies. In J. N. Hummel, Tänze, op. 39, Menuets 1, 3-6. Scanned first editions are available through IMSLP. In Schubert: each of the numbers in 20 Menuets, D41; D139; D146nn1, 4-11, 20; D334; D336; D769?

3. alternativo (ABAB). Of his Deutsche Tänze, K. 509, Mozart said: "Each German dance has its trio or rather 'alternativo' - after the 'alternativo' the dance is repeated, then comes the 'alternativo' again; it then goes via the introduction into the next dance."

4. double trio (ABABA or ABACA). In Hummel, Tänze, op. 39, Menuet 2. In Schubert: each of the numbers in D91; D146n3; D335; D380nn1, 2.

5. extended trio design (ABACADA...). In Hummel, Tänze, op. 39, Deutscher 1 (4 trios), 2 (5 trios), 3 (4 trios), 4 (3 trios, the last being a vocal number). In Schubert: any number of these groupings may be embedded in the larger collections (Neumeyer 1997, 2006, and citations there).

6. extended trio design with reprises and also recurrent trios (ABACABA or ABACADABA, etc.). See the note to item 5 above.

7. extended trio design with multiple dance- trio segments (ABACDC . . . or ABACADCEC . . ., etc.). See the note to item 5 above.

8. fixed chain designs, such as the quadrille (ABCDE-[coda] or ABCDEF-[coda]).

9. extended but informal chain designs, such as the Ländler sequence or Lanner/Strauss waltz set (often as introduction-ABCDE-coda or introduction-ABCDEF-coda). In Schubert: possibly the 12 Wiener Deutsche, D128 (because of its introduction and plausible key sequence); also see the note to item 5 above.

10. "free" chains of dances, wholly informal or organized by the dancers as a cotillon. In this case the design of the dance would be under the control of the lead dancer or caller (Vortanzer), but Schubert would still have considerable -- if not complete -- control over the music. See this subsequent post on the topic. Also see the note to item 5 above.

References.

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

Neumeyer, David. "Synthesis and Association, Structure and Design, in Multi-Movement Compositions." In Music Theory in Concept and Practice. Edited by David Beach, James Baker, and Jonathan Bernard. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press: 1997), 197-216.

Neumeyer, David. "Description and Interpretation: Fred Lerdahl's Tonal Pitch Space and Linear Analysis." Review-article. Music Analysis 25/1-2 (2006): 201-30.

More to recomposition

2010-03-02T01:47:00.005-06:00

Today's entry picks up from this post on recomposition. Another version of the dance set creates connections to other existing compositions, namely, D790 and Schumann's Papillons.

As in the earlier sets, the strongly marked promenade piece that opens D783 begins. This number is also D790n2, where it is followed by a trio in D major (D790n3). I have inserted that here as the second dance, but instead of returning to D783n1/D790n2 as the reprise, I insert the first two strains of n3 from Papillons, a piece with a very similar character for which D783n1 may very well have served as the model (since Schumann knew D783 well: see this post). The ending in A major with rising cadence gesture is an invitation to the second trio, the 16-bar version of D779n13. Then D783n1 returns as the final reprise in the AB(A)CA design.

More to Papillons and the single-strain dance

2010-03-01T01:13:00.001-06:00

Yesterday I referred to "floating strains" in Schumann's Papillons, by which I meant individual dance strains (usually 8 bars) that "take the place" of a complete dance in reprise sections of dance sets. Papillons does indeed contain such a floating strain, but it acts more like an interrupting reminiscence than a reprise within a dance set: it's the second strain of n6, which reappears in the middle of n10.

As it happens, however, n6 itself is built as a miniaturized dance set in ABACA design (or dance with two trios), where all five sections are single strains.

D924 and dancing

2010-02-28T01:50:00.000-06:00

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.

D924 and the Urlinie manquée, part 2

2010-02-27T01:44:00.002-06:00

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 manqué, 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).

D924 and the Urlinie manquée

2010-02-26T01:38:00.002-06:00

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 (because I want to consider the Urlinie manquée), 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 is deserves in a double-tonic complex. The result is not an Urlinie manquée, but, because of the bass, an Ursatz manqué.

I will look at two additional dances, n6 and n9, in tomorrow's post. Both show more extended versions of the same patterns.

more to Urlinien manquées

2010-02-25T09:28:00.001-06:00

This entry follows on an earlier one: post. The term Urlinie manquée would gather those forms that, according to Carl Schachter, may rarely be called upon in analysis (if one feels one has no other choice) but that are exceptions in the culture of the tonal system. Holding to my language mash-up method, then, the opposed term (that is, Schenker's three types as a group) is Urlinie ordonnée (alternatives: the Urlinie normale or perhaps even Urlinie parfaite).

German versions haven't anything like the barely-clever in-joke sarcasm (French = musically corrupted) of the mash-ups: so, verfehlte Urlinie vs ordentliche Urlinie (alt: regelrechte Urlinie), or Fehlurlinie vs Normalurlinie (alt: Regelurlinie).

For a long while I assumed that the prefix "Ur-" was, ironically, a neologism derived from 18th and 19th century archaeological digs ("Ur" being in this scenario Ur of the Chaldees, an historically significant city that is also important to Biblical traditions as the birthplace of Abraham). Instead, it comes from Middle High German, is the accented version of "er-" and means "out of" or "from." In Old High German it was a preposition. (See Kluge, 374).

But the case for contingency is not entirely lost: in the present day "ur" overwhelmingly means something very different: see graphic below.

more to ^6 and the ninth

2010-02-24T06:30:00.000-06:00

Today's entry is a link to another web essay of mine, originally posted in 2005 and updated in 2008: on ^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.

More to recomposition

2010-02-23T03:26:00.000-06:00

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.

More to recomposition

2010-02-22T02:33:00.001-06:00

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.

Schubert's hand (holographs, that is)

2010-02-21T01:03:00.002-06:00

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.

Some Schubert links

2010-02-20T08:19:00.002-06:00

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.

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

2010-02-19T01:45:00.000-06:00

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.

String Trio, D581, III, Trio to the Menuet

2010-02-18T01:06:00.003-06:00

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.

Atzenbrugg transformations, part 3

2010-02-17T02:05:00.001-06:00

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.

Mardi gras

2010-02-16T01:15:00.006-06:00

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).

Atzenbrugg transformations, part 2

2010-02-15T01:14:00.001-06:00

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).

Atzenbrugg transformations, part 1

2010-02-14T01:46:00.002-06:00

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].

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 13c2

2010-02-13T02:05:00.005-06:00

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 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.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 13c1

2010-02-12T02:59:00.004-06:00

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.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 13b

2010-02-11T01:05:00.002-06:00

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."

The Blue Danube

2010-02-10T01:55:00.002-06:00

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).

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.

Toward the androgynous ^5 and ^6

2010-02-09T01:21:00.001-06:00

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 elsewhere; more examples from Schubert here.

A proliferation of suspensions

2010-02-08T03:46:00.001-06:00

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:

The Strausses and the androgynous ^5 and ^6

2010-02-07T02:49:00.004-06:00

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.)

The androgynous ^5 and ^6

2010-02-06T02:28:00.004-06:00

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.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 13a

2010-02-05T01:54:00.008-06:00

Part 13 is the last in this series of posts on Carl Schachter's article "Schoenberg's Hat." In case you've lost track of them all by now, the first post was on 11 January: Part 1.

The appendix is a set of comments on my JMT article "The Ascending Urlinie" (338-39). Schachter spends most of the roughly 1000 words disagreeing with my interpretation of a graphic from Victor Zuckerkandl's Sound and Symbol, even suggesting that Zuckerkandl himself didn't take quite the right view of his own graphic. The last two paragraphs acknowledge that two of my readings are convincing, but only in the context of repeating his point about the exception proving the rule. In a lengthy footnote, it is understood that I misread Schenker's statements about the Bassbrechung (background I-V-I) in relation to the harmonic series.

I'll discuss the first of these three points here, the others in Parts 13b & c.

Here is Zuckerkandl's graphic, which Schachter reproduces:

I use Zuckerkandl's distinction between "acoustical space" [movement in pitch space] and "dynamic space" [rise or fall on a tension-relaxation scale] as a way of breaking through the conceptual fourth-species logjam, the style-statistics-driven assertion that descending melodic motions have priority because suspensions resolve downward. Why lines have to obey the same rules as suspensions is never explained, nor why the musics of the 19th century have to obey the rules of the 16th (we can't say it's to preserve a continuity narrative: harmonic practices and ideas about rhetoric and expression, after all, changed radically during the same time period).

Zuckerkandl points to the ^5-^8 "upper half" as potentially rising in acoustical space but falling in dynamic space, and of course I use that in the JMT article as one of the justifications for rising lines in a generative mode of linear analysis. Here is Zuckerkandl, cited by Schachter: "the tone ^6 still plays a double role, since it can be heard both as a state in the succession ^5-^6-^7-^8 and as bound to a pointing toward its comparatively stable adjacent tone ^5; the particular circumstances determine whether the meaning 'away from ^5' or the meaning 'toward ^8' preponderates in the step ^5-^6."

Schachter says that the graphic shows "implicitly a far greater bias toward downward resolution in the dynamics of scalar structure than his explicit formulation acknowledges" and "the pull of ^1 is much greater than that of ^8" (339). But Zuckerkandl doesn't imply what Schachter claims: instead, Zuckerkandl says quite directly that "particular circumstances determine whether the meaning' away from ^5' or the meaning 'toward ^8' preponderates." Schachter misreads Zuckerkandl in order to push a couple "greaters": "a far greater bias" and a "much greater" pull.

In any case, Zuckerkandl's model 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 "particular circumstances," exactly as Zuckerkandl says. Eventually (that is, by around 1860 or so, but firmly and unmistakably by 1910), the two even fuse in the triad with an added sixth.

And it all starts early, in places like D779n13: see the graphic below, where I have written a narrative of the interplay of ^6 and ^5 in the first strain. The two identities of the scale degrees are plainly evident. (Recall that you can click on this thumbnail to see the graphic at its original resolution.)

References:

Neumeyer, David. "The Ascending Urlinie." Journal of Music Theory 31/2 (1987): 275-303.

Zuckerkandl, Victor. Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956).

More to hexatonic cycles and D779n13

2010-02-04T01:47:00.004-06:00

I referred to Richard Cohn's article on Schubert in an earlier post. This post is mainly text citations with a comment or two.

Cohn uses the astronomical metaphors more expansively than I do (earlier post). I replace the primitive earth-bound up/down metaphor with the earth's spherical center-periphery model of gravity, a common image by the early 19th century, as Cohn reports:

By Schubert's time, the spherical earth had long been acknowledged. . . . Gottfried Weber compared the components of a tritone to "antipodes, literally with the feet directly opposite to one another, as those of persons standing on the opposite sides of the globe," anticipating Tovey's comment a century later: "Harmonic space is curved like the surface of the earth, and [the] tritone is its date-line." (231)

Cohn, on the other hand, pushes the metaphors out to galactic levels:

The traditional metaphorical source for tonal relations is the solar system, where positions are determined relative to a central unifying element. A star cluster evokes a network of elements and relations, none of which hold prior privileged status. These two contrasting images of cosmic organization provide a lens through which to compare two conceptions of tonal organization in Schubert's music. (213)

The essential claims, then, are "that efficient voice leading, emphasizing semitonal displacement, furnishes a context in which to understand nineteenth-century triadic progressions that are not adequately reconcilable to diatonic tonality" (231); and that, in at least some of Schubert's late music, one finds "the intersection of plural incommensurate systems: amid tonally indeterminate triadic progressions exhibiting efficient voice leading, Schubert's [Bb major piano] sonata establishes diatonic collections, articulates cadences, and prolongs tonics by conventional means."

This "intersection" is represented in the figure below, a reworking of Cohn's Figure 3, which collapses the hexatonic cycles into a "table of tonal relations" (217). Here I have reordered the triads to fit not Bb major but the A major of D779n13.

I do think that Cohn, in his advocacy for a Riemannian historical thread, pushes the "equality" of diatonic (fifth-based) and symmetrical (third-based) systems a bit too far, suggesting a level of organized thinking that seems foreign to practical musicians in the first half (at least) of the nineteenth century. In particular, he doesn't explain why a looser narrative -- of accidental or serendipitous results from the exploration of chromatic mediant progressions common since the late 1790s -- wouldn't work just as well or better in explaining Schubert's bolder harmonic and tonal moves.

Reference:

Cohn, Richard. "As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert." Nineteenth Century Music 22/3 (1999): 213-32.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 12

2010-02-03T01:53:00.001-06:00

The Conclusion -- "Lewis Carroll's Trousers" (337-38) -- is decidedly disappointing, despite its apparent promise to drive the sartorial point home, from hats to trousers. Schachter does nothing more than repeat his point with a couple new images -- an art historian writing in 1969 saying much what Schachter already did but in reference to shapes in a visual field (how exactly does the visual analogy prove the validity of the visual prop for a musical analogy?). Since asymmetrical figures look different upside down, therefore it is clear that, "in tonal music, with its gravitationally charged pitch space, linear shapes are also 'non-commutative.' In principle, ascent tends to mean beginnings and intensifications, whereas descent means endings and resolutions" (337). Let the unmarked term stand for all.

I take the charitable way out: Schachter tries an argument by accumulation: repeat your point often enough and it will seem to be proven. Since he had only an opposition to work with, the pendulum could have swung at any time to the marked term (the joyful playground of the post-structuralists). Since he was wholly committed to one term, there was no real way to address the issue directly. Just as I assume he refrained from making any jokes about "upside down" to his Australian audience -- it was, after all, the experience of sailing around the world that drove home the point for once and all that gravity-as-down was a schema that cultures needed to grow out of (in favor perhaps of center-periphery, one of the schemata in Saslaw's list), or else needed to make far more complex than a simple opposition.

more to Schenkerian analysis and the New Criticism

2010-02-02T01:20:00.003-06:00

When, Jeffrey Williams, interviewing Stanley Fish, offered the now commonplace view that, in the 1970s and 1980s especially, "[literary or critical] theory provided a kind of bridge or lingua franca for literary studies, so that somebody in Renaissance could talk to somebody in twentieth-century American literature," Fish responded with comments on the preceding generation:

New Criticism provided a vocabulary, with its notions of tension and paradox and verbal artifacts, that could be as much a part of Chaucerian criticism . . . as of criticism, let's say, of Joseph Conrad's novels. So there was always a way, I think, that the techniques in one field could be generalized. What surprises me, though, and heartens me, is the survival through all of these changes of some commitment to close reading. I know that there are many, many complaints and laments that close reading is a lost art, but I see many people who still perform it. It still remains, at least in my experience, the most powerful pedagogical tool which can really awaken students' interest when they begin to realize that they can perform analyses of texts that remove the texts from the category of the alien and the strange, and then begin to actually understand the mechanics of how prose and verse work. (22)

In music studies, Schenkerian analysis and classical pitch-class set theory did much the same during roughly the same period (allowing for an offset of a decade or so). The difference was that the "tools" and "mechanics" of particular ways of reading/auditing became naturalized: in literary studies, every device, notion, or rhetorical gambit was closely scrutinized and often contested. Something like this happened with classical pc-set theory through Robert Morris's more thorough and more sophisticated reformulation of it and, more radically of course, through Lewin's GMIT, which opened the door to a wide field of theoretical and interpretative possibilities. Despite some good critical and historical work beginning in the 1980s, Schenkerian studies advanced only so far as meeting New Musicologists in a conservative practice of hermeneutics. Thus, as he does in "Schoenberg's Hat," Schachter can say in 1999 that "Schenker's description in Part I of Free Composition reveals some of the fundamental characteristics of the tonal system" (10). And the mechanics of that "system" are the naturalized "three Ursatz forms, [which are] the simplest pieces of tonal music, so simple that they have no artistic value at all, but still fulfill some of the basic needs of a tonal piece."

Between Neo-Riemannian rewriting of the history of harmony, the Schenkerian hermeneutics that must, if carried out sensitively and thoroughly, eventually break down the notion of a common practice, and the powerful new view of musical rhetoric in the 18th century that is coming out of partimento studies, a view like Schachter's is no longer sustainable.

References:

Williams, Jeffery L. Critics at Work: Interviews, 1993-2003. New York: New York University Press, 2004.

Morris, Robert D. Composition with Pitch Classes: A Theory of Compositional Design. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Lewin, David. Generalized Music Intervals and Transformations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Schachter, Carl. Joseph Straus, ed. Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis. New York/London: Oxford University Press, 1999.

More to hexatonic cycles and the Riemannian Hand

2010-02-01T07:45:00.004-06:00

I've written in an earlier post about Richard Cohn's hexatonic cycles in relation to the C# move in D779n13. I probably should have labeled today's entry another "regret post." As with Eco and Westergaard, Cohn's article on Schubert's treatment of tonality has many points of resonance with posts on this blog, probably because it has been in my mind several times already when I make reference to Neo-Riemannian historical narratives.

I will write more about the article at another time. In thinking about it this morning, however, I went back to the post with the waltz that has a close parallel to D779n13 in a direct A-C# move from first to second strain (then back again): D971n2: see the score in this post. The move is interesting in itself, of course, since D971n2 might well be another trace of a Schubertian improvisational formula, but the piece as recorded is curious in the absolute regularity of its left-hand chord shifts: in every case, as shown below, two pitches change by a half step while the third remains stationary. A rotation is required between each key area, as the register shifts of E3 up to E#4 and back reveal.

All this seems the more remarkable in light of Cohn's observation that

Theorists recognized voice-leading efficiency as an alternative basis for harmonic relations already during Schubert's lifetime and throughout the nineteenth century, but were reluctant to explore its systematic implications, primarily because to do so would have required them to relinquish their deep prior commitment to acoustic theory and tonal centricity, in favor of a less hierarchic, more networked conception of harmonic relations. (214)

I would extend that early knowledge of voice-leading efficiency to the afterbeats played by Schubert's left hand. Pragmatically, as any pianist who has played waltzes, ragtime, or stride piano knows well, anchoring the after-beats on the keyboard serves as a way of making the (frequently blind) leap down to the downbeat bass note more secure. Paradoxically then, for the improvising pianist it is the afterbeats -- and not the accented bass -- that provide a stable voice leading thread and can influence the direction of improvisation as well as harmonic formulae do.

[2-23-10: corrected text and graphic] In that light, consider the figure below. At (a) are the three Riemannian transformations R, L, and P. These are all the 1-note step-changes that will produce major or minor triads. At (b) are the diatonic 2-note changes; at (c), the chromatic -note changes. At (d) are the diatonic and chromatic triads generated through 3-note changes. In all cases except familiar inversions of V7 and ii7 or forms of viiø7, no non-triadic results are shown, and those moves that generated parallel fifths were also excluded.

It should probably not be remarkable that Schubert usually maintains close voice-leading patterns in the after-beats of his dances, given the habits of his training and the practical uses mentioned above. That such patterns are sometimes maintained even in the face of unusual or awkward chord progressions, however, is notable, an indication perhaps of how the "middle" -- always literally close to the player's eye, after all -- can guide the "edges" of the texture. In D779n7 (below), we would expect the stationary F3 in the second strain, given the T-D Ländler figures, but look at how tight are the after-beats through the odd (and not altogether elegant) harmonic meanderings of the first strain. (As usual, click on the thumbnail to see the graphic at original size.)

Reference:

Cohn, Richard. "As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert." Nineteenth Century Music 22/3 (1999): 213-32.

Debussy, the pentatonic, and the upper tetrachord

2010-01-31T01:47:00.001-06:00

Jeremy Day-O'Connell has published an article in the same issue of MTS as my proto-backgrounds piece. He makes a comment that resonates with an earlier post here:

For Schenker,the tonic-dominant polarity held an almost mystical primacy: "May the musician always carry in his heart the image of the bass arpeggiation! Let this triangle be sacred to him! Creating, interpreting—may he bear it always in ear and eye!" ([Free Composition] 1979,15). That being said,the leading tone per se was of relatively little importance in Schenker’s mature theory, according to which tonal melody achieves coherence and completion only in a descent through ^2 to the tonic. (245)

His article is a sensitive, historically rich exploration of Debussy's treatment of pentatonic materials and design, with the Prelude La fille aux cheveux de lin as the principal example. Using (of all things) Schenkerian analysis, Day-O'Connell shows the layering and development of ^5-^6 figures and ^5-^6-^8 cadence gestures.

After reading the article through, I thought: over the years, we seem to have done a creditable job of the notes up to ^5, but we are just beginning to get a proper sense of the rest.

Reference:

Day-O'Connell, Jeremy. "Debussy, Pentatonicism, and the Tonal Tradition." Music Theory Spectrum 31/2 (2009): 225–261.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 11

2010-01-30T03:09:00.001-06:00

Carl Schachter devotes the fourth section of his article "Schoenberg's Hat" to an assessment of one rising fourth line, ^5-^8 (333-37).

Allowing that "the fourth from ^5 to ^8 is among the most important structures that produce rising contours, sometimes spanning whole formal sections and, especially in short pieces, often forming the high point of an entire melodic line," Schachter says that its close on the tonic note accounts for its status, in part at least. Equally important, however, is the play of registers within the Urlinie and the balance of registers that complements upper with lower. It is these – and not Schoenberg's notion of unitary space -- that bring formal and expressive treatment of "inversion" into tonal music. Thus, for Schachter, "the interest and beauty [of such treatments] result as much from the structural and expressive differences between rising and falling lines as from the similarities of shape."

His examples are Bizet, Carmen, Act III, "Card Trio"; Bach, WTC 1, Fugue in C-minor; and Chopin, Prelude in E-major. In the first, contrast of direction is linked to an expressive life/death reversal. In the second, the gap opened in the subject is filled by the rising fourth line that leads to the fugue's highest pitch in the third episode; the line reappears in the structural cadence. The "^5-^8 fourth . . . serves as a foil both to the essentially descending subject and to the structural descent of the upper voice as a whole" (335). Finally, the E-major Prelude's obvious closing cadence figure is set into context as follows:

Although each phrase contains a primarily rising melodic line, the Prelude as a whole maintains a remarkable balance between upward and downward motion. This effect results from the second phrase's powerful climax on Ab (G#), which provides a focal point for the right-hand part. Thus the first phrase and most of the second seem to rise up to this tone, which then falls to the E at the end of the Prelude. The large-scale motion from climax to final note, then, is a descent, even though the immediate path to the final note is an ascent. (337)

I read the last of these the same way in my "Three-Part Ursatz" article (27-28), which Schachter does not cite.

Schachter, it seems to me, mixes together the notion of up/down with registral contrast, which can often be linked with timbral differences and functions of textural layers. In other words, rather as I have argued earlier, Schachter wants to maintain a simple opposition down/up so that he can the more easily choose the first, unmarked term and set it against an expressive marked term. As a device for interpretation, that tends to oversimplify (constrain) the treatment of register. In the MTS article, I discuss how the emphasis on balance of tension (along with a tendency to "naturalize" interpretive goals) links Schachter's practice to that of the literary New Critics.

Reference:

Neumeyer, David. "The Three-Part Ursatz." In Theory Only 10/1-2 (1987): 3-29.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 10

2010-01-29T01:52:00.004-06:00

This post continues the discussion of Schubert's ballad "Die junge Nonne" from Part 9. First, a simple, nicely done description of the song through the poem's narrative may be found here, along with a link to a performance: Die junge Nonne.

From the standpoint of thematic reading, an Urlinie running down from ^5 misses too much of what is essential about the dramatic progress of the song in terms of motive and the play of register. "Misses" is not quite right -- what I mean is that an analysis grounded on such an Urlinie necessarily misconstrues the song and its elements.

The introduction announces three registers with distinct materials: I've labeled them Bass, Tremolos, and Bell. The voice (system 3) occupies the space between Tremolos and Bell (assuming the singer is meant to be female, a reasonable assumption given the identity of the poem's narrator). The Surprise moment comes in the second system, when to Bell is suddenly appended a motive that is a loose inversion of Bass, drawing attention to the relation of Db and C, which I regard as the crucial design element in the upper most voice, whether that line is in the keyboard or the singer's part. (L in the third system is a Leittonwechsel transformation, made directly as it could be in Tremolos.)

The static register of the voice -- as I wrote in the earlier post, if I were reading this with proto-backgrounds, ^1-^5 would be the overwhelming choice -- is pushed against by the same C-Db pair (above), and even more when Db = C# moves again, to D-natural (below). The harmony "breaks," however against "finster," where an R transformation in Tremolos is subverted by the G# in the bass. From that point the harmony moves toward a cadence; D-natural moves down again, finally reaching C; and the pinkie finger in Tremolos retraces its movements down from F# to F-natural.

When all this done, Surprise reappears, now in the voice, immediately after the keyboard's P-transformation (third system below). "Immerhin" here means "always" (or perhaps "constantly"), as the young nun introduces the comparison between the turbulence of the storm and her equally unsettled emotions. This moment of Surprise is remarkable, stands out as an island of calm, and promptly disappears as verse 2 gets underway in earnest.

A motivic detail of interest is Bell, which sounds as D5 but then is gone for several bars until it reappears at the moment of Surprise (below).

The second verse ends like the first, and the third verse, then, expands greatly on the P-transformation and the Surprise moment -- see below. The voice keeps pushing upward: C5-then D5-then E5-and-finally-F5 (circled notes), but as it turns out only the initial C5 is stable. E5 is reached at "Friede" but the harmony is C: I 6/4 that remains unresolved -- instead, an RP transformation takes it directly to A major (as V of D minor), then to Bb: V7 with the F5. This latter move is a PR transformation *if* you read only the underlying triads.

In all this, there is no suggestion of C5 (or any ^5) taking a significant role, though C4 in the middle of Tremolos does move to C# (enharmonically the Db of the beginning), which in turns drops back to C -- a nicely managed motivic statement.

The latter half of verse 3 was discussed in some detail in the previous post. Here I will note that Bell gives us a gesture C5-D5-F5 (connected boxes below), as pinkie Tremolos run from A4 up to D5 (connected circled notes). In Bell, E5 is skipped, not reached; and in Tremolos a reach toward E5 in the voice after the D5 is roundly subverted by Bass, which (finally) drops to Bb to define a functional triad plainly and then fosters the predictable patterns of voice leading to which Schachter draws attention.

Both Bell and Tremolos mark F5 as a goal, as, of course, did Surprise from the outset: C5-Db5 as Sturm, F5 as escaping, surmounting Sturm. In the partial score below, I have marked out the twin unfoldings in the voice part that bring ^6 back to ^5 before the final ascent. Note that *only* here are E5 and F5 stable tones. (Earlier in the song, F5 is in Bell at the Surprise moment, and of course the parallel cadence in 52-61 is set up the same way.)

The geography of dance music

2010-01-28T01:42:00.006-06:00

I am using "geography" here to denote the immediate physical environment of Schubert's playing -- the piano, Schubert on a chair, anyone not dancing standing near him, the dancers coming by relatively close, the sound of the room, the shifting groupings and activities of the participants.

Given that Schubertiades took place with audiences anywhere from a few to a hundred, we have to assume that the physical spaces for dancing varied greatly, too. In a small space -- a drawing room of one of his friends' apartments -- the piano would probably be small, too, square. Chair with a back, not a modern-style piano bench. The piano positioned either along a side wall or, if there is space, angled out into the room (as in Kupelwieser's watercolor). The amount of resonance in the room would vary greatly, depending on wall coverings and the number of people, but would probably be fairly high since the floors would not be carpeted (or any carpets would be drawn back for the dancing).

Schubert playing, looking occasionally to the side at the dancers, especially the Vortänzer (the lead couple), and listening in case the Vortänzer call for a different figure, dance, or a pause (common in longer dance sessions), during which Schubert might continue to play or might stop, too. Persons not dancing, male or female, sitting or standing close by, occasionally talking to one another or even making brief comments to Schubert on his improvisations or requests to hear familiar dances. The distinct timbres of the three main registers on contemporary pianofortes would be audible nearby, less so on the dance floor, where the swishing of clothes and muffled swish-slide of light cloth dancing shoes would mingle with the music. The shapes of the dancing would have varied, from couples dancing freely within the dance space, couples moving in a "round dance" format (around the room along a line of dance) to chain dances or even something like the "parlor game" formats of the quadrille. Windows closed, perhaps shuttered against the night.

In breaks, food and perhaps the light, young Austrian white wines of which Schubert was said to be particularly fond. He was a "lively" drunk, and it would probably have been difficult to get him to return to the piano late in the evening if he had had too much. These, among others, were the occasions when his duet-partner, Josef von Gahy, would take over to play for any dancing done in the late night hours.

In larger spaces, Schubert would probably have had a correspondingly louder wing-shaped pianoforte to play, and the temptation to move back and forth between music for dancing and dance-music performances would have been that much greater, as well.

Note: In Kupelwieser's watercolor, the pianoforte appears to be a small spinet -- thus, neither the square piano one might expect in that space nor the larger instrument one sees in the Schubertiade drawings and other graphics.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 9

2010-01-27T01:49:00.006-06:00

The third section, "Structure and Contour" (331-33), provides two readings that illustrate an assertion from the end of the second section:

Downward motion will characterise structural endings, and, as a corollary, upward motion will occur before the descents-~either at the beginning or in the middle of melodic lines. The tonal system, however, through the phenomenon of octave equivalency, provides an escape clause from these constraints of the structural background. Prolongations, in widening the field for tonal activity, will also free the upper voice from the need for uniformly descending resolutions of linear tension. (331)

The examples from Verdi and Schubert show registral repositioning upward of individual tones in a descending urlinie: the ^3 in the middle of a five-line, and the final ^1, respectively. In both cases, the repositioning is associated with figures in the text.

With respect to the structural cadence of Schubert's "Die junge Nonne" -- and therefore the Urlinie shape -- Schachter has simply gotten it wrong. His graph shows bars 52-61; these include a "cadence [that] achieves its rise to the tonic through a brief stepwise line that culminates in the notes C-D-E-F; F of course is the tonic note and E, the leading tone, can be understood as an inner-voice note of V that substitutes for ^2" (333). This is not the structural cadence -- "a variant of this same cadence" has that role: mm. 74-83. These latter measures are shown in the graphic below, with Schachter's reading mapped onto them: ^5 with inner voices ^3 and ^1 below, the structural bass elements IV-V-I and ^4-^3 (moving from voice to piano)-^2-^1 with accompanying sixths below, two lines moving up in the voice: ^3-^5, then ^5-^8.

Against that I offer my reading below. The ^5 over ^1 is clear at the outset. Note the string of unstable harmonies with parallel octaves between voice and bass at the same time the voice repeatedly outlines the octave register (C4-C5, D4-D5, F4-F5). The octave, and the space of the octave, are obviously crucial here. The clue, I think, is in the "bell sounds" -- the piano left hand crossover pitches, F5 in m. 74, C5 in m. 75, etc., The voice duplicates the piano's notes each time she reaches the word "Getön" (meaning the bell sound): the link between "Getön" on F5 and "Höh[e]n" on F5 is obvious. The piano may have to work the mundane task of the cliché cadence, but the voice has been transported -- and that, I would assert, is what this song is all about.

In the MTS article, I wrote about the Pietist concept of Jesussehnsucht (longing for Jesus) in connection with the funerary chorale "Christus, der ist mein Leben." Here it is not an expression derived from the Protestant notion of personal salvation, but from the Catholic tradition of specifically female figures (usually nuns) yearning for the "heavenly marriage" with Christ. That has been merged with simple Romantic nature imagery -- in the first verse, she speaks of her fear at a stormy night; in the second verse, the emotion is the turbulence of her yearning for Christ (at the end of this, she calls out for the himmlischer Bräutigam); in the final verse, the bell sound seems to clear and calm the air, and she can speak of peace, desire, and heaven.

Schubert obliges with a ballad style and textures and affects that remind one of Erlkönig. The first two verses are in F minor, with obsessive emphasis on C5 and Db5 in the voice (see below); the final verse is in F major.

I am hardly finished with the striking features of this song. Contrary to the suggestion in the lines that Schachter quotes, with their "sweet sound" and "eternal heights," the harmonic progressions of the F major verse remain surprisingly tense (at least, unstable) right up to the structural cadence -- it is the release in that final rising gesture, going one last time to F5, that enables the harmony to come to peace itself. Some sections of the song look very amenable to transformational readings, and the incessant right hand tremolos reveal a different version of the Riemannian hand. Perhaps I'll follow up those leads some other day.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 8

2010-01-26T01:49:00.006-06:00

In the second section, "Ascending and Descending Motion Contrasted" (328-31), Carl Schachter offers two readings of ascent and descent in connection with text painting in 19th century songs. In the first case (Schumann), the inversion of a motive and a sequence made up of this rising form expresses "erotic excitement" (329). In the second case (Brahms), the motivic directions are reversed (death/night/rise; life/day/fall) but at the climax the expectations are righted by a change of shape in the motive (330).

From the first, because Schumann denies the erotic with a falling cadence at the end, comes the general statement that "the descending melodic impulse at a cadence is typical and is a central component of the tonal system" (329). "Typical" not "universal" -- Schachter never goes so far as explicitly to claim the latter for descending lines in cadences -- but nevertheless essential to "the tonal system," the latter, as we find out during the discussion of Brahms, being defined as Schenker construed it. Thus,

That descending melodic movement tends to create repose might be understood as reflecting our physical lives as creatures subject to the force of gravity. It takes effort to throw a ball into the air; it falls back to the ground by itself. Accordingly we might well imagine that musical descent suggests repose by analogy with physical motion…. (330)

. . . the ensemble of pitches conforms in part to the inner structure of a normal musical tone. . . . Musical motion toward the first partial -- " descending" motion -- leads to a fixed point of reference and thus tends to evoke a feeling of repose comparable to a move down through space. In the music of triadic tonality, this general attribute of downward motion is intensified by the fact that the triad is built from the bottom up. . . . In tonal music, the most stable positions of the triad are of course those where the root is grounded in the" earth" of the bass part. And in the melodic lines of tonal music, a descent from ^3, ^5, or ^8 to ^1 replicates in the horizontalized triad of the upper voice a move from an overtone . . . to the fundamental sound. (331)

Out of this recital of familiar notions comes the foregone conclusion that "for tonal music, the distinction between up and down is far from superficial, since moving down provides a more definitive closure."

David Lewin argues differently. Reacting to Susan McClary's charges about patriarchal containment of women's voices, he rejects an analogy between the spoken sentence and the sung phrase (and therefore a naturalized linkage between "coming to rest" and descending melodic movement): "Our musics are not 'natural phenomena,' like everyday speaking. All singing styles, in particular, are highly stylized in comparison to everyday speech" (275).

I would add that the notion of cadence-as-repose within a tension-relaxation model has no place in the singer's physical experience of performance -- tension in the body (diaphragm, lungs) rises to its top point before a phrase starts and is maintained till after the phrase is finished. One doesn't need to be a professional singer to experience that, either -- or a singer at all, since playing a wind instrument works essentially the same way.

Instead, Lewin associates patriarchy with priority to the bass (or fundamental), and from this it follows that "the transcendent musical voice must be a woman's voice" (271): "The female voice is typically acoustically free of what we conceive as a functional bass line—whether continuo or fundamental bass—and that is less typically true of the male voice" (274).

For Schachter, a certain set of historical practices in European tonal music may as well be universals ("fixed points of orientation [the tonic note, triadic roots]. . . important functional differences. . .the system itself"), but for Lewin they still have strong traces of cultural practices that can be interrogated. For Schachter, the difference between rising and falling melodic gestures offers wonderful expressive tensions in a balanced system; for Lewin, that balanced system may also be understood as a constraining cultural construct that can be "escaped" not just by the mad women of nineteenth-century opera but also by the transcendent female voice (pace McClary, Lewin counts Isolde and the soloist in Schoenberg's second string quartet and Erwartung among these).

However one reacts to Lewin's specific argument here, it is certainly well-established through historical narratives connected to neo-Riemannian theory that in the nineteenth century a harmonic model emerged that opposed symmetrical models to traditional "Earth-bound" metaphors. I also claim that whether through a Newtonian concept of gravity, the Romantic's exploitation of oppositions, or simply through a desire to escape from century-old, clichéd cadence figures, the opposition of rising and falling gestures was altered to contest (or to vitiate) the structural priority of descending cadence gestures.

References:

Lewin, David. 2006. Studies in Music with Text. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rings, Steven. 2006. Review of three books by David Lewin in new editions. Journal of Music Theory 50/1: 111-27.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 7

2010-01-25T01:51:00.005-06:00

I summarized Carl Schachter's article "Schoenberg's Hat . . ." yesterday. A number of issues will be considered here, from how good is his defense of some traditional notions, to how convincing are his examples, to how effective is his criticism of my "Ascending Urlinie" article. I will take these more or less in order -- insofar as they can be separated from one another -- following the article section by section.

As I wrote yesterday, in the introduction Schachter takes Schoenberg to task for his assertions about a unitary musical space, but Schoenberg was not referring to rising or falling lines -- he was talking about musical "objects" (motives) that maintain their identity despite "viewer position" (P, I, R, or RI). Schachter cites Milton Babbitt's comment on Schoenberg's application of the idea to Beethoven as well as to 12-tone music -- "The tonal motive assumes functional meaning in a context, and becomes, in turn, a vehicle of movement within this context; the twelve-tone set, however, is the instigator of movement and defines the functional context" (cited on 329). Schachter apparently wants his positioning of Babbitt's comment as "long ago" to mean that Schoenberg's error should have been obvious to everyone, but in fact the "long ago" inadvertently highlights an anachronism: Babbitt's firmly placed wall between tonality and atonality (understood in Schenkerian and 12-tone terms, respectively) is an attitude that belongs to a generation of the twentieth century's third quarter. That wall started showing cracks as early as the mid-1970s, when Allen Forte, James Baker, and others began to explore transition repertoires (Scriabin, early Schoenberg and Webern, etc., and going back to the late music of Liszt); and it was crumbling noticeably after David Lewin published GMIT in 1987 and collapsed quickly once neo-Riemannian theory and its attendant historical narrative began its rise in the 1990s.

Furthermore, work on schemata, metaphor, and related ideas points to the complexity of musical cognition. Janna Saslaw, drawing on Lakoff and Johnson, lists the following image schemes: container [which suits motives and hats very well], up-down, center-periphery, link, part-whole, force, front-back, path, and source-path-goal (219, Figure 1). All of these, as Saslaw points out, can be understood as relevant to expressive and interpretative models of music making. There is no more reason to privilege the up-down schema than Babbitt's wall.

Schachter finishes the introduction by listing three assumptions: he understands "motion", "space", "high", and "low" in purely musical terms; these have only a "a loose metaphorical relation to our non-musical experiences of space and movement"; but these metaphors are nevertheless fundamental to music's expressive and affective potential.

To the first of these: Schachter immediately constrains the potential outcomes by his definitions. Motion, for example, "refers to the kinetic impressions we derive from tonal and rhythmic patterns," a description that pushes us more than halfway down the road to Schenker. "Motion," however, involves schemata whenever it is anything more organized than events passing randomly by in linear time -- schemata like path, force, and source-path-goal. "'High' or 'low' [refers] to sounds produced by vibrations of greater or lesser frequency" -- but here again the variety of ways in which frequency differences are understood or experienced is ignored in favor of a particular one. Indeed, high and low frequency differences may be primarily based on gender differences familiar from everyday speech but particularly exposed during singing (children, in this account, being lumped in with women). The music of the celestial spheres had all manner of interval sizes, not just ones that produced "high" notes -- and the symbolism of intervals and numbers meant far more to composers before the 19th century than did the superficial text painting to which Schachter alludes. Pianists experience music as much left to right as lower to higher; violinists, too, with an added angle of distortion; organists left to right and large to small; trombonists far to near; guitarists top to bottom; horn players -- well, round and round, I suppose. Only a handful of instruments fit the low/high model: cello, bass, oboe, clarinet. Finally, of course, the proper way to conceive frequency differences would be slower and faster.

To the second and third assumptions: Schachter tries to have it both ways, acknowledging the weakness of the metaphorical ties but then wanting those metaphors to have deep cultural significance (and, because of their historical depth, permanence). Although I suspect that in music gender differences are at the root of it, the up/down schema itself is certainly ancient and is obviously a mental model related to everyday experience. It has generated a powerful collection of related metaphors, including earth/sky, climbing/descending, standing/sitting (or lying), waking/sleeping, even living/dead (as an extension of waking-standing/lying-sleeping). In the arts, it has often been mapped onto the pair tension/relaxation.

The schema and its metaphors are easily tied to gravity, as Steve Larson does in his three voice leading "forces": gravity, magnetism (or attraction), and inertia (cited in Lerdahl, 191). Lerdahl criticizes the first of these, however, saying that "gravity appears to be dispensable: in the major scale, except for the leading tone, the strongest virtual attractions of nonchordal diatonic pitches are by stepwise descent anyway." Lerdahl finds the source of Larson's promotion of gravity as a force not in cognition but in an ideological committment: "By gravity he means the tendency for melodic lines to descend by step (as a Schenkerian, Larson is especially committed to this notion)."

Gravity (as priority to downward motion) is an "earth-bound" metaphor, but it is as primitive as it is ancient: the scientific definition (since Newton) is attraction, and thus the appropriate way to think of gravity is in terms of tension and opposition but not a specific and fixed direction. In the neo-Riemannian historical narrative, the emergence of musical thinking expressing this change happens clearly in the first quarter of the 19th century -- see Cohn 1999, where Schubert's use of symmetrical harmonic and tonal patternings undermines the "down-to-tonic" model and prefigures more systematic understandings of symmetries later in the century.

It is certainly also worth noting that Alexandra Pierce, who of all persons should have the most authoritative notion of the embodiment of Schenkerian hearing, does not tie "ending" to "sitting" " or even to "relazing" instead, resting balance and centered core match harmonic completion and a closing tonic (in ch. 2 of her book).

References:

Lewin, David. Generalized Music Intervals and Transformations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Saslaw, Janna. "Forces, Containers, and Paths: The Role of Body-Derived Image Schemas in the Conceptualization of Music." Journal of Music Theory 40/2 (1996): 217-43.

Lerdahl, Fred. Tonal Pitch Space. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Cohn, Richard. "As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert." Nineteenth Century Music 22/3 (1999): 213-32.

Pierce, Alexandra. Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Practice of Embodied Interpretation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 2007.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 6

2010-01-24T05:50:00.000-06:00

Carl Schachter's article "Schoenberg's Hat" has the following sections:

Introduction: Schoenberg's Hat (327)
Ascending and Descending Motion Contrasted (328)
Structure and Contour (331)
The Rising Fourth (333)
Conclusion: Lewis Carroll's Trousers (337)
Appendix: The Rising Urlinie (338)

Schachter begins by criticizing Schoenberg's extension of his idea of a unitary musical space (essential to derive and justify the several forms of a 12-tone row, including inversions) to tonal music, where Schachter points to "a functional context in which the tonal motive assumes…meaning…characterised by fixed points of orientation (the tonic note, triadic roots), [and] by important functional differences between rising and falling movement (for instance in the resolution of dissonances)" (328). Schachter is careful to say that notions of high, low, and others relating to space and motion are metaphorical or analogical, but then he goes on to claim that "I do not regard the analogies between musical space and motion on the one hand and physical space and motion on the other as unimportant, inexact though they may be. A significant part of music's ability to reflect our physical and emotional lives comes from just these analogies."

He then spends considerable time exploring text painting in relation to prolongational figures in songs by Schumann ("Die Lotosblume") and Brahms ("Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht"). Under Structure and Contour, the examples are Verdi, from "0 Terra, Addio" from the final duet of Aida; Schubert's "Die junge Nonne"; under the Rising Fourth, Bizet, Carmen's soliloquy in the "Card Trio" of the opera's third act. In the latter section, he also looks at two instrumental compositions: Bach's C-minor Fugue from WTC 1; Chopin's Prelude in E-major. The appendix comments on what Schachter regards as problems in my rising line article and renders his own judgments about analyses that are convincing with rising line Urlinien.

I will make some comments on the analyses and offer responses to the arguments in posts over the next several days.

References:

Schachter, Carl. "Schoenberg's Hat and Lewis Carroll's Trousers: Upward and Downward Motion in Musical Space." In Brenton Broadstock, Naomi Cumming, Denise Erdonmez Grocke, Catherine Falk, Ros McMillan, Kerry Murphy, Suzanne Robinson, and John Stinson, eds. Aflame with Music: 100 Years of Music at the University of Melbourne. Parkville, Victoria: Centre for Studies in Australian Music, 327-41.

Neumeyer, David. "The Ascending Urlinie." Journal of Music Theory 31/2 (1987): 275-303.

Eco's Limits and the conclusion of the MTS article

2010-01-23T01:03:00.007-06:00

In an earlier post, I wrote that I regretted being unable to call on a couple constructs from Peter Westergaard's Introduction to Tonal Theory. Today I will say the same about Umberto Eco's Limits of Interpretation -- the point that I attribute to Jonathan Culler in the conclusion of the MTS article was made earlier, more forcefully, and we probably should say more famously, by Eco.

Where I seek to link the uncontrolled proliferation of themes, and therefore thematic reading, by citing Culler on the heuristic value of interpretive frameworks (319-320), Eco says that his goal in Limits is to

make clear that the notion of unlimited semiosis does not lead to the conclusion that interpretation has no criteria. To say that interpretation (as the basic feature of semiosis) is potentially unlimited does not mean that interpretation has no object and that it "riverruns" for the mere sake of itself. To say that a text potentially has no end does not mean that every act of interpretation can have a happy ending. (6)

Undoubtedly, the question has less significance now than it did fifteen years ago, when Eco felt obliged to note that "Even the most radical deconstructionists accept the idea that there are interpretations which are blatantly unacceptable" (6). If one is willing to make this acknowledgment, then one must allow that "the interpreted text imposes some constraints upon its interpreters." He identifies "the limits of interpretation [as coinciding] with the rights of the text (which does not mean with the rights of its author)" (7).

Eco's claim itself has heuristic value (a point on which he is by no means always clear). Note that he uses "unacceptable" -- the constraint on interpretation is partly the material dimension of the work, but partly also the moral dimension always implied in interpretation -- for comments to these points, see these posts: (1), (2), (3). The problem, of course, is that the moral dimension tends to be rooted in the prescriptive, which would seem to leave interpretation with no other option.

Final note: Today is the 100th entry in this blog. I have gotten a bit off the path of directly constructed close readings of D779n13 in recent weeks. After finishing up discussion of Schachter's "Hat" over the next several days and commenting on Richard Cohn's article on Schubert's Bb Major Sonata, I plan to post some of the following (in no particular order): a pitch-space reading, several recomposition exercises (including one modeled after Matthew Bailey-Shea's article in Music Theory Online), a dense motivic reading after Daniel Chua, the substitution of D779n13 for another piano piece of Schubert's in a movie scene, a reconsideration of cycles and tonality as Arthur Komar construed them for Dichterliebe, hommages to Leonard Meyer and Wallace Berry, and closer consideration of harmonic transformations (after Kopp and Hook).

Fauxbourdon

2010-01-22T01:38:00.004-06:00

Was the C# major section a creative (and perhaps spontaneous?) response to the problem of parallel fifths in the first strain of D779n13 and the realization of an underlying fauxbourdon figure?

Readings from ^3 -- including Carl Schachter's -- inevitably include a string of parallel sixths underneath the principal line (see this post). In a recent session that included both improvising on right- and left-hand 6/3 passages and playing through a number of Schubert waltzes, especially those I know least well (that is, those written down before 1819), I realized (a) that following a tight fauxbourdon figure in the right hand frequently led to rather dull results; and (b) that, given their obvious utility in structuring the physical path of a dance improvisation, Schubert frequently uses strings of parallels in the right hand but is surprisingly reticent about the line of sixths down from ^3. When he does use the latter, he will find ways to vary it -- as with the truncation in the first strain of D365n9 (below) or the upward extension in D365n5.

I should have made an obvious stylistic point much earlier in this blog: ii6 -- or for that matter any S-type or predominant chord -- is a marker of the German dance, not the Ländler. The latter, as Litschauer documents, is characterized by alternations of tonic and dominant or prolongations of one or the other (see my Music Analysis article, 214-15). The German dance makes use of a range of progressions, including many taken from menuets. On these terms, D779n13 is a perfect marriage of the two dance types: it announces itself as a German dance immediately but is zärtlich like a Ländler -- indeed, one might speculate that the rare expression indication was meant to alert a contemporary player that, although this looks like a deutscher, it should be played more slowly and sweetly. (Virtually the same, btw, can be said of D365n2, the Trauerwalzer.)

In posts sometime next month, I will write about another right-hand figure that is quite common in Schubert's waltzes: the diatonic wedge, or ^7 to ^1 below with ^6 to ^5 above.

Postscript: One of the most direct treatments of parallel sixths in the ^1-^3 space is in the first of the two schottisches that follow the German dances of D783:

Schottisches in the first decades of the nineteenth century are often surprisingly direct, even crude (Beethoven's are good examples). With this one, the minor-key topos and pedal point announce zingarese exoticism but the second strain suddenly turns the motive into a loud march, and the dance ends with horn calls. All this in the space of 16 2/4 bars. The result is a comic portrait of Hungarian soldiers, perhaps an invitation to a parlor game rather than dancing.

Options to follow C# major

2010-01-21T02:50:00.005-06:00

At (a) in the graphic below is a chordal reduction of the basic progression in D779n13. At (b) through (d) are three alternatives that in fact would have been statistically more likely results for a waltz that is firmly in A major in its first strain, then shifts abruptly to a C# major triad at the beginning of the second strain. Version (b) does not tonicize C# major, as does D779n13, but instead converts the triad into a seventh chord and moves smoothly through a cycle of fifths progression, devoting roughly equal time to each step. Version (c) tonicizes not C# major, but the F# minor that would have been a more likely goal of a C# chord in this context. Version (d) plays out the other implication of version (b) -- here a cycle of fifths progression leads to a close on E major. It is assumed that the close comes as the end of a contrasting middle section, because the articulation is necessary to explain an otherwise awkward retrogression to B minor for the reprise.

Version (d) follows through the implications of the hexatonic cycle and supposes a direct movement from C# major to F major (with an intermediate respelling of the C# triad as Db), and again from F major to A major.

I have worked all of these out in improvisation sessions. Not surprisingly, versions (b) and (c) are the easiest to manage, particularly in the close quarters of an 8-bar strain, but also as an 8-bar contrasting middle leading to a full reprise. Version (d) is not so successful; to make it sound plausible, I had to, as it were, override the close on E by following it with an A major triad -- that additional step on the cycle of fifths made for an uncomplicated move into the D7/b6 dissonance of the reprise. Version (e) sounded quite strange if I attempted to make it compact (fit it in 8 bars), but at least plausible if I stretched it out as a series of tonicizations.

The idea of a close look at chromatic harmonies as an addition to or corrective to linear analyses in the Schenkerian tradition was explored in a convincing way more than twenty years ago by Charles J. Smith (who was reacting to a tendency toward somewhat radically linearized -- and therefore sometimes harmonically obtuse -- readings among the first generation of American post-Schenkerists). More recently, Marianne Kielian Gilbert has given sustained attention to the issue in several articles -- see this post.

References:

Smith, Charles J. "The Functional Extravagance of Chromatic Chords." Music Theory Spectrum 8 (1986): 94-139. See also David Beach, "On Analysis, Beethoven, and Extravagance: A Response to Charles J. Smith," Music Theory Spectrum, 9 (1987): 173-185; and Charles J. Smith, "A Rejoinder to David Beach," Music Theory Spectrum 9 (1987): 186-194.

Kielian Gilbert, Marianne. "Interpreting Schenkerian Prolongation." Music Analysis 22/1-2 (2003): 51-104.

Kielian Gilbert, Marianne. "Inventing a Melody with Harmony: Tonal Potential and Bach’s "Das alte Jahr vergangen ist." Journal of Music Theory 50/1 (2006): 77-101.

Notational styles

2010-01-20T08:34:00.001-06:00

The "chordal middleground reduction" below will show up again in tomorrow's post on options for progressions from the C# major area in D779n13. The style of notation here is quite similar to chordal reductions used by Douglass Green for his textbook Form in Tonal Music.

This notational style apparently derives in part at least from Felix Salzer's Structural Hearing. See the facsimile of Green's class notes for the opening of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 below. The middle system uses chordal reduction with the broken beams that are characteristic of Salzer, though he did not use one-stave reductions. All in all, Green's notes run a range of styles -- perhaps that was part of his pedagogical goal for the class.

References:

Salzer, Felix. Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1962. Original edition 1952.

Green, Douglass. Form in Tonal Music: An Introduction to Analysis. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965; 2d ed 1979.

Green, Douglass. Class notes, unpublished, in my possession.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 5

2010-01-19T01:55:00.007-06:00

If the rising line is not a good candidate in the Eb Major Prelude (see previous posts), it is inescapable in the G Major Prelude. The same kind of dramatic emphasis that Carl Schachter notes and uses in part to situate his reading of the several voice leading strands in the Eb Major Prelude occurs also in the G Major Prelude, and specifically in connection with a cadence that rises to and through the leading tone: here are the final bars. And here is a link to a score of the entire Prelude: G Major Prelude.

The opening bars (shown below) establish a three-part texture with great clarity; the topmost voice charts a neighbor-note figure across mm. 1-4 and even embellishes itself with little neighbor note figures along the way. The bass is a pedal point G2, and the middle voice walks sturdily on a path from ^5 to ^1 (^8): D3-E3-F#3-G3. As we shall see, the relationship of the upper two voices is simply reversed in the final cadence, the pedal point bass there being V or D3. That the topmost voice is the principal one is confirmed a few measures later, when a stereotypical (^2)-^2 brings ^3 over I down to ^2 over V (see the rectangle frame in the example). Along with this, the role of D4 is plainly identified as a cover tone, or focus of an auxiliary (secondary) voice above the principal voice.

Disruptive cadenzas like those in the Eb Major Prelude are lacking in the G Major Prelude, but there some dramatic moments before the final flourish. In the first system below, a registrally expansive gesture runs quickly across the strings from the open C2 to our cover tone D4. The latter is pushed one half tone higher to Eb4 two measures later -- that's the highest note before the run up to G4 at the end. The effect is immediately vitiated, however, by a move downward and resolution to B3 as ^3 (end of the rectangular frame), and D4 is heard again it's obviously a cover tone once more (circled in the last system).

At the end, the formation of A3 (^2) above V could hardly be clearer, and the sudden chromatic rush up to G4 is a surprise -- although the chromaticism itself is a marker of the cadenza, and that is apparently how the figure is meant to function here. The diagonal line marked in the score suggests that the figure outlines (unfolds) a sixth from A3 to F#4.

In the final bars, the circled note pairs mark the parallels to the beginning of the Prelude, but now with the voices inverted: what was the uppermost voice is in the middle, and the middle voice, having attained its tonic goal-tone, is shifted an octave higher, above the original "soprano." Thus, the opening gesture at the left of the example below turns into the closing gesture at the right.

I suppose one could argue that the stretched-out chromatic scale changes the relations of the voice leading strands to the point that the middle voice replaces the upper voice as primary, and therefore one gets a rising Urlinie from the cover tone D -- picked up in the middle of the chromatic scale -- up to G4. I am wary of these sudden reversals, however, just as I am of Urlinie ^3s that show up just a few bars away from the end of a piece. The cover tone D4 never has the kind of significance earlier that would predict such a change of role -- the rising line, then, seems an arbitrary choice. Thus, I would go with Schachter's "equals" here, the inner voice being "first among" them, and would probably notate using Channan Willner's "polyphonic Ursatz" (see yesterday's post). But there is a caveat: a descent to ^1 is plainly as forced and arbritary as a rising Urlinie would have been. The Prelude, then, ends as it began: with ^3 in the principal voice (and probably then a background shape involving neighbor notes -- see my comment on Arthur Komar's reading of the WTC, C Major Prelude in the MTS article, 291).

Postscript: Should D779n13 not be read in a similar way? Have I not said that the rising cadence gesture is a surprise? And does not the set of parallel sixths force B4 (^2) back up to C#5 (^3) rather than down to A4 (^1)? I could settle for the latter reading, but as to the rising gesture, it is only a surprise in terms of the clichéd formulas of the cadence (and, in the waltz repertoire, therefore, rather less of a surprise than it would be in most other genres). Unlike the cover tone D4 in the G Major Prelude, in D779n13 the F#5 (^6) that appears almost immediately and is touched on repeatedly thereafter forces constant attention to the "space above ^5" and sets all the conditions needed for a move further up at the end.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 4

2010-01-18T01:48:00.003-06:00

In his article on the Prelude from J. S. Bach's Eb-Major Cello Suite, Carl Schachter makes a serious attempt to weigh the merits of a rising Urlinie, but the direction of his argument is nevertheless obvious from the outset, as he weighs the three possibilities for a reading of the upper voices in the first section (mm. 1-10). He addresses the question of the rising Urlinie head on only in the closing pages, and then only briefly. Still, the answer he comes to -- the Urlinie as one among equals rather than an obvious and controlling line -- responds in a sensitive way to the circumstances of the Prelude even as it preserves the theoretical priorities dictated by Schenkerian theory. His "first among equals" construct here is in fact almost indistinguishable from Channan Willner's four-part Ursatz model: see the item "Polyphonic Ursatz" under the year 2007 on his publications page.

I don't hear the Prelude quite the same way, but mainly with respect to the middle strand on ^5 (Schachter labels this "y" -- "x" is the upper Eb, and "z" the Urlinie G3). The idea of continuing voice leading strands certainly makes sense, given the static quality of the registers (so static they have to be broken up radically by the cadenza-figures), though I might want to experiment with the five or even six voices implied by the arpeggio figures, rather than the four Schachter follows (bass plus x, y, and z).

In the graphic below, at (a) I have pulled out early-middleground/background features for Schachter's reading in terms of score fragments and at (b) have produced an analogous graphic for my own view of it. Remember that the graphic is a thumbnail -- click on it to see the original size.

I would essentially flip the priorities of Schachter's textural model, with an ^8-^7-^8 figure as the background and Schachter's "y" and "z" as the other "equals." Probably because of the lack of typical emphasis on V, a relatively common figure that combines descent and ascent (from ^8 down to ^5, then back up) really doesn't work at all here. And in any case, I can't hear the ascent in Schachter's strand "y", especially in phrases 3 and 4 (mm. 27-62), where a rise from C4 through C#4 to D seems forced, too much at cross purposes with the underlying harmonic progression.

Posts in a series starting next week will look in detail at the article in which Schachter addresses the theoretical questions of the rising Urlinie directly: "Schoenberg's Hat and Lewis Carroll's Trousers: Upward and Downward Motion in Musical Space."

References:

Schachter, Carl. "The Prelude from Bach's Suite No. 4 for Violoncello Solo: The Submerged Urlinie." Current Musicology 56 (1994): 54-71.

Neumeyer, David. "The Ascending Urlinie." Journal of Music Theory 31/2 (1987): 275-303.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 3

2010-01-17T01:05:00.002-06:00

Today's post is a summary of Carl Schachter's article on the Prelude to J. S. Bach's Eb-major Cello Suite. I will provide critical commentary in tomorrow's post.

Here is a link to a copy of the score (from the old Bach complete works edition): page (1); page (2). And here is a much condensed and (necessarily) heavily edited version of Schachter's 250-word abstract (71):

The Prelude has a quick-moving and active bass line above which ^3, ^5, and ^8 initiate linear strands: ^8 is a cover tone that begins and ends the Prelude; ^5 begins a fourth-progression ending in the final ^8; ^3 descends to ^1 at the structural cadence. Among the complex interactions is a contradiction between Db and D-natural whose resolution helps to direct the large-scale harmonic structure.

In the opening, ^3 lies below ^8 and ^5: this disposition characterizes the Prelude as a whole. The descent from ^3 to ^1 occurs in the middle of the texture: the uniformity of this texture suggests that the Urlinie is first among equals rather than the governing upper voice (that is, a two-part outer~voice counterpoint has less explanatory power here).

The essay has the following sections (headings taken from the text):

The Musical Idea. Responding to a criticism that technical analysis (the analytic graphics) may not provide real insight into a work's musical idea (here, not only a motivic germ but also a sense of movement and balance), Schachter summarizes his argument by noting the striking Db in m. 3 and its resolution through D-natural
several bars later, but in the "wrong octave" and middle of the texture. This is corrected at the end of piece but is worked through dramatically in conjunction with changes in figuration after the low C# (enharmonically Db) in m. 49.

The Opening Tonic Pedal and Underlying Shape: mm. 1-10. Three upper-voice motions are possible: the one described in the previous section, an ascent from an inner voice ^5 up to ^8, or a descent from ^8 down to ^5. The first of these, which is considered boundary play by Schenker, is preferable, and because its registral shift "exposes an inner strand of the texture--Ab-G--and transforms it into the upper voice," that G3 is ^3 of an Urlinie that remains essentially "submerged" throughout the Prelude as an array of events moves above it.

The Large Structure: An Overview. Details of the preceding (multiple strands with the Urlinie in one of the middle ones) are shown.

The C-Minor Prolongation and Parallelisms: mm. 11-28. Highlights motivic parallelisms between the topmost voice at the beginning and the bass in the following section.

The Chromatic Move C-C#-D: mm. 27-52. The more important and dramatic music follows after the C-minor cadence (in the preceding) through this section that leads to a cadence in G minor. Disturbances in the figuration gradually increase, up to the point of the full stop on C#2 in m. 49.

The G-minor Cadence: mm. 49-62. Connections are made between voice leading movements here and those of the three strands and their registral positions.

From G Minor to the End: mm. 62-91. The G-minor cadence is framed by a pattern of gradually introduced sharped notes before (shaped by the circle of fifths) and a corresponding series of flatted notes after (likewise following the circle of fifths). The several strands remain; the large-scale fourth in the upper strands resolves itself in the final two measures.

The Submerged Urlinie. The lower strand, with ^3-^2-^1, rather than the large-scale fourth, is the fundamental line because (1) it "is the primary melodic constituent of the big harmonic cadences, and these cadences clearly shape the tonal movement of the piece . . .; (2) G is a far more prominent constituent of the opening tonic prolongation than the Bb; (3) in this piece, the 3-2-1 line is representative of the melodic structure that characterizes the tonal repertory at large" (68-69). Here, at least, "the contrapuntal interplay between several upper voices is important enough to reduce the explanatory power of inferring a two-voice framework."

Oppositions. "The opposition of ascending and descending motion [,] an inescapable constituent of any music with organized pitches [,] plays an inordinately great role in the design and structure of the Prelude. Indeed if the musical idea of the Prelude involves the restoration of equilibrium after an initial disturbance, it is largely in terms of the opposition of descending and ascending that the idea seems to be conceived" (69)

Symbolism? Tentatively suggests Christian symbolism: "the change of Db into C# may symbolize the redemption of fallen humanity through the crucifixion" (70). Although the focus on flatted notes in the second half "might suggest mortality and physical death, they are mitigated by the final rise to the high Eb, the saved soul's ascent to heaven" (71)

Reference:

Schachter, Carl. "The Prelude from Bach's Suite No. 4 for Violoncello Solo: The Submerged Urlinie." Current Musicology 56 (1994): 54-71.