Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The Sound of Dancing

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.

Monday, March 29, 2010

mediant blocking in 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. 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."

Thursday, March 18, 2010

16-bar sentences; more to D810

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.)








Wednesday, March 17, 2010

A Deutscher in D810

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.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Mailer's Strauss

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.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Schubert's personal soundscape

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.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Milestone

Today is the 150th post in this blog. The total number of analyses of D779n13 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.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Postscript 3 to Berry

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.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Postscript 2 to Berry

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.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Postscript 1 to Berry

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.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Wallace Berry

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

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Leonard B. Meyer, part 2

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).

Monday, March 8, 2010

Leonard B. Meyer, part 1

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.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Let the hommages begin

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.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Explaining Tonality

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 Explaining Tonality is 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.

Friday, March 5, 2010

D779n13 replaces D946n2 in Glory

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.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Some updates

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.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

performance designs for dances

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." [note 19 June 2017: I adopted Mozart's meaning of alternativo, but have recently discovered that the term was generally used throughout the 18th century to refer to what we call trios nowadays. I like Mozart's use, though, and will continue applying the term specifically to the ABAB performance strategy.]

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.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

More to recomposition

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.



Monday, March 1, 2010

More to Papillons and the single-strain dance

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.