Friday, October 17, 2014

Administrative

I am in process of moving posts about rising gestures and cadence figures in music other than Schubert's generation or 19th century Vienna to a new blog: Ascending Cadence Gestures in Traditional Tonal Music. These are two multi-part sets: the van Eyck series and the "Kidson" series.

A few posts relating primarily to design in small compositions, and especially those concerned with William Caplin's form theory, will be moved to my blog Dance and Dance Music, 1650-1850.

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Ge Ho, Dobbin

This and four other "Kidson" posts have moved to my Ascending Cadence Gestures blog.

Friday, March 14, 2014

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Additions to the literature on Caplin's form theory

This post expands on the previous one about William Caplin's form theory and the scholarly literature on it. 

For the present, this is simply a list of recently published articles. I hope to comment on individual items in future posts. I have not included work jointly published by or in response to Hepokoski and Darcy, Schmalfelt, and Caplin.

A special issue titled "Contemplating Caplin": Intersections: Canadian journal of music/Revue canadienne de musique XXXI/n1 (2010).

Peter Franck, "Canon and Its Effect on Tight-Knit Organization within Classical Themes." Intégral (Eastman School of Music) vol. 26 (2012).

Nathan Martin, "Formenlehre goes to the opera: Examples from Armida and elsewhere." Studia musicologica: An international journal of musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 51/ns3-4 (2010): 387-404. 

Michael Oravitz, "The use of Caplin/Schoenberg thematic prototypes in melodic dictations." Journal of music theory pedagogy 26 (2012): 101-139.

Mark Richards, "Teaching sonata expositions through their order of cadences." Journal of music theory pedagogy 26 (2012): 215-252.

Mark Richards, "Viennese classicism and the sentential idea: Broadening the sentence paradigm." Theory and practice 36 (2011): 179-224.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

William Caplin's form theory and 18th century dance

The scholarly literature making use of William Caplin's form theory is growing, if slowly. Some recent examples include Nathan Martin's "Schumann's Fragment," in Indiana Theory Review 28 (2010); Steven Vande Moortele's "Sentences, Sentence Chains, and Sentence Replication: Intra- and Interthematic Formal Functions in Liszt's Weimar Symphonic Poems," in Intégral 25 (2011); and Matthew Riley's "Haydn's Missing Middles," in Music Analysis 30 (2011).

Almost all of the work, so far as I can tell, has focused on extending the reach of the method deeper into the nineteenth century--even into the early twentieth. This tendency includes a rumored forthcoming book by Caplin himself. My interest, on the other hand, was originally in expanding the available style knowledge for the Vienna School composers by looking at their social dance repertoires. Obviously, their published work on its own is inadequate to describe the actual practice of music played for social dancing, but it is what we have. Therefore, in addition to a [website] with a summary of Caplin's terminology for themes and small forms, I worked out pages with analyses of menuets, German dances, and Laendler by Beethoven: WoO7, WoO8, WoO11, WoO14, and WoO15; and contredanses by Mozart and Beethoven (all of these are accessible from the website). This work was extended to a few contemporaries, notably Czerny, Hummel, Marschner, and Weber: [tables].

The principal results to date are that the historical narrative charting a turn from the period theme to the sentence over the course of the Vienna School heyday, or roughly 1770-1830, is incorrect. The period does become much more prevalent at one historical moment -- about 1770, when the French style of contredanse became popular in Vienna. (This was due to the fact that French contredanse music was heavily oriented to the gavotte, whose dance figures effectively required an antecedent-consequent design in the music.) But even after 1770, the period co-existed with other theme types, including the sentence and the hybrid antecedent-continuation. The latter, in fact, was far more congenial to the menuet than was the period, for the reason that the dance emphasized variety of detail, and a theme with antecedent-continuation offers more variety than any other theme type. Indeed, if the composer chooses, every 2-bar unit of this theme can be different: basic idea followed by a contrasting idea, followed by another idea (or fragmentation of a new model), followed by the generic cadence. (Its antipode is the hybrid presentation-consequent, a type so rare in the Vienna School repertoire that Caplin deletes it. It does, however, have a role to play in the Laendler repertoire, which tends to emphasize sameness within strains but contrast between strains.)

As the preceding suggests, once the influence of the French contredanse was established, I wanted to look into earlier dance repertoires. To date, this work has extended as far back as the English country dances in the Playford collections, which confirm the variety of theme types (sentences are surprisingly common, for example) but also highlight the extent to which French court dance practices tended to reduce the number of available theme types.

In the course of all this work, I have also realized that Caplin's catalogue of theme types does not work as well as one would like for some of the subtler idea and phrase length figures common in the social dance repertoire, and my goal over the next few months is to revise (or expand) his taxonomy to account for these, the goal continuing to be to acquire useful style information.

This post may also be found on my blog Dance and Dance Music, 1650-1850.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Franz Hünten (aka François Hünten) published a Premier Quadrille de contredanses variées, suivi d'un galop as his Opus 63. The date is about 1834; a facsimile is available on IMSLP, as a digital copy of the facsimile published in an anthology by Garland about twenty years ago.

The work contains the usual five numbers of the quadrille as they were standardized in the early 19th century, plus a specific genre dance appended, as was the custom in published quadrilles at least through mid-century. In this case it's a galop; it might also have been a waltz or, after 1840, a polka.

The interesting feature of Hünten's quadrille is that the alternate strains in all five numbers are varied when repeated but the refrain (first strain) is not. The design of each number is ABACABACA. This provides 72 bars of music for the dance, or 8 for the promenade and 64 for the figures. See the graphic below for incipits of the refrain, B, C, and the variants of B & C.

I suspect that the composer is duplicating a common practice of performers (most often pianists) in house balls and similar dancing occasions (as with the post-Schubertiade dancing of Schubert's friends, for example). The unembellished refrain provides a stable guidepost for the design -- and therefore for the dancing -- while the variations on the alternate strains not only provide additional contrast with the refrain but also reflect what a creative (or bored) pianist very probably did in the course of dancing that could go on for a half hour to an hour at a time.

Themes in Mozart K. 604 and 605

Even in his last menuets, Mozart bows to the formal tradition of the antecedent-continuation design. Perhaps the fact that these were written specifically for formal balls had something to do with it (in the last years of his life, Mozart held an official post writing dance music for the Imperial court).
Here are the melody and bass for the first part in K. 604, nos. 1 & 2: (click on the graphic to see a larger image)



In contrast, the German dances of K. 605 use simple period forms in nos. 1 & 2, and a sentence (or perhaps antecedent-continuation, depending on how you read bars 3-4) in no. 3:




Saturday, February 15, 2014

more to Czerny, op. 300

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



Friday, February 14, 2014

Czerny, op. 300

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

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


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


Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Ländler in Boehme's Geschichte

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


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


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

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

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Carl Czerny's Preludes

Figures below are taken from the English edition of Czerny's The Art of Preluding, op. 300. Please note that the cadences shown on the first page (p. 2 of the original volume) are not examples of chord spelling from a harmony textbook -- Czerny calls them the "shortest Preludes." It was assumed that a pianist would improvise a passage before playing a complete composition, such as a sonata or rondo -- a practice that only gradually faded away after the mid-nineteenth century. (One of the longest hold-outs was Clara Schumann, generally one of the most conservative concert pianists of the era.)

The "shortest Preludes" all use a ^7-^8 figure in the uppermost voice. Notice also that Czerny doesn't bother to express the other half of the old clausula vera formula (^2-^1) in an inner part.

In the "rather longer Preludes" (the second page, or p. 3 of the original), only the two on the fourth system unequivocally expand the cadence stereotype that Kofi Agawu cites as universal, with ^3-^2-^1 above: see my post on the topic.

The English edition of Czerny's op. 300 may be found on IMSLP: here.



Monday, January 20, 2014

A menuet by Mozart, age 9

IMSLP has a facsimile of Mozart's London notebook, digitized by the library of the Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland. The volume contains sketches, many of them complete, from 1764 and 1765. Three menuets are among the last pieces in the book. They are followed by a fourth but incomplete menuet and an incomplete fugue for strings (it breaks off just after the exposition finishes).

The three menuets are in F, Bb, and Eb, respectively. A facsimile of the third one is given below, followed by a digital engraving.



The design is 8 + 8, and a repeat sign should undoubtedly be placed in the middle. This little piece is another case of the sentence design showing up much earlier than it ought to do in the classical narrative (that is, Schoenberg's story, in which Beethoven invents the sentence design as better suited to the 19th century organic unity ideal).

Mozart gives the first idea of the continuation phrase the same inverted-arch shape as those in the presentation. The second idea is a formula cadence where the tonic scale degree (here, Bb) is approached from both below (A-natural) and above (C). The B section recasts the basic idea in form of an ascending sequence based on parallel tenths. The transposition of the continuation phrase (to make a "balanced binary" form of the whole) brings the melodic line up to Eb (over G3), then repeats the ascent in the final perfect authentic cadence.