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.
