Research Vita

I retired from The University of Texas at Austin in May of this year. Since then I have "cleaned up" and stopped maintaining my personal web page, which had information on publications. To compensate, I have created a PDF file called "Research Vita" that can be accessed through this link: Vita.

Another admin update: links to PDF files

Many links to my own external files were broken when a server was decommissioned last year. It has taken me a long time to find a suitable alternative. I have recently posted a set of PDF files to the Texas Scholar Works (University of Texas Libraries) and provide links below. Alternatively for a complete list under my name, go here. Several of these PDF essays are compilations of posts from this blog.

Analyses of Schubert, Waltz, D.779n13

Dance and Dancing in Schubert's Vienna

Cotillon after Schubert, with audio

Dance Designs in 18th and Early 19th Century Music

Proto-backgrounds in Traditional Tonal Music

Carl Schachter's Critique of the Rising Urlinie

Rising Lines in the Tonal Frameworks of Traditional Tonal Music

Table of Compositions with Rising Lines

Complex upper-voice cadential figures in traditional tonal music

Buelow Contredanses: Rising Lines

Kingsbury Hymns of Praise: Rising Lines

Tonal Frames in 18th and 19th Century Music

John Playford Dancing Master: Rising Lines

Martin Chusid on Schubert's Dances

The late Martin Chusid's monograph Schubert's Dances: For Family, Friends, and Posterity was published by Pendragon Press in 2013. An extended introduction by Walburga Litschauer, a familiar figure in these blog pages, was drawn largely from Litschauer and Deutsch (according to a comment by Chusid).

The chapter titles are:

The minuets (for winds, piano, and string quartet)
The ecossaises
The early German dances and ländler
Published waltzes, ländler, and German dances I: for the Carnival seasons of 1822 to 1825
Published waltzes, ländler, and German dances II: for the Carnival seasons of 1826 to 1828
The polonaises and dances for piano duet: Schubert and the Esterhazy family at Zseliz
The dances published after Schubert's death: Diabelli and op. 127 (D. 146); The dances edited by Brahms; The remaining dance publications.

Careful, thorough, traditionally oriented musicological work is welcome, though the volume has the character of a documentation, as it lacks a firmly committed argument to set a context for the work. Instead, one gets the definite impression that the volume is simply meant to fill a gap in Schubert scholarship, to which Chusid had already made distinguished, lifelong contributions. 

Assumptions about the priority of music for performance, rather than for dancing, come through clearly in chapter 1 (on the minuets), as do related preferences for possible cyclic designs and for distinctive harmonic or formal treatments. Thus, for example, D779n13, from the common observation that in "almost every musical aspect there are features . . . not commonly found in Schubert's other works in the genre," one jumps immediately to "the result is a remarkably complex and sophisticated composition," and of course to "perhaps the finest of all his dances" (135). It is also "the most ambitious" of the dances in D779, and one in which "Schubert avoids any sense of monotony."

Franz Schubert and His World

Franz Schubert and His World is the title of an essay anthology edited by Christopher H. Gibbs and Morten Solvik and recently published by Princeton University Press. Despite the title, most of the volume is devoted to what might be called Schubert sidelights, secondary topics, or even tangents. One chapter restates an already well-known position. A promising essay on Schubert and the Vienna Volkstheater descends into superficial melodic comparisons.

The great exception to the rule is John M. Gingerich's brilliant essay on the Schubert circle, "'Those of us who found our life in art': The Second-Generation Romanticism of the Schubert-Schober Circle, 1820-1825." Level-headed evaluations are greatly welcome about a number of issues--from assumptions about the Schubertkreis (which Gingerich narrows to a circle about Schubert and his friend Franz von Schober, a group with Romantic ideals about art and artists), about Schubert and money (a communitarian attitude prevailed among the group), about sexuality (Gingerich debunks the once fashionable notion of Schubert and homosexuality), and about religious non-conformity.