Saturday, February 27, 2010

D924 and tonality in sets, part 2

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

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


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