New essay published

I have published a new essay titled Rising Gestures, Text Expression, and the Background as Theme on Texas Scholar Works: link. Here is the abstract:

Walter Everett's categories for tonal design features in nineteenth-century songs fit the framework of the Classic/Romantic dichotomy: eighteenth-century practice is the benchmark for progressive but conflicted alternatives. These categories are analogous to themes in literary interpretation; so understood, they suggest a broader range of options for the content of the background than the three Schenkerian Urlinien regarded as essentialized universals. The analysis of a Brahms song, "Über die See," Op. 69/7, provides a case study in one type, the rising line, and also the entry point for a critique of Everett's reliance on a self- contradictory attitude toward the Schenkerian historical narrative.

Beethoven Werke score for WoO85

An addendum to a previous post. Here is the engraved score for the waltz singleton from 1825: WoO85.

Beethoven, Waltz, WoO 85 autograph

The Beethoven-Haus Bonn has an exceptional digital archive, from which I drew the graphic below. It is the composer's manuscript fair copy of one of his last compositions, a waltz in D major that is an isolated piece. I am particularly fond of the iconography that reinforces the notion of rising cadence gestures as out of the ordinary (in this case, beyond the staff). Click on the thumbnail to see the full-size graphic.

Beethoven gave the piece the generic name of "Walzer" (see the beginning, at the left of the treble staff), but the violin-key of D major and the broken interval figures mark it clearly as a Laendler. So do the abrupt dynamic changes (imitations of rural dance practice) that undercut the atmosphere of what otherwise sounds like a keyboard transcription of a delicate Laendler for two violins.

new data for themes in dance music

I have added two pages to a set that focuses on theme types as they can be described using William Caplin's terminology. [NB 2 July 2016: The two links below are broken. The material mentioned has been gathered in my essay Dance Designs in 18th and Early 19th Century Music, published on the Texas Scholar Works platform: link to that file]  The first gathers information from the other pages according to theme type: Examples of theme types. The second supplies data for 8 collections by Beethoven, 1 by Czerny, 9 by Hummel, and 1 each by Marschner and Weber: Themes Tables.

Proto-background 8: the sixth ^3-^8

Also see the proto-background introduction.

The sixth ^3-^8 often seems more comfortably regarded as a transformation of ^1-^3 through INVersion or ADDINV (in the first case, the sixth replaces the third; in the second case, the sixth is added onto the third).

In D779n13, however, the prominent sixth ^3-^8 of the closing cadence is unavoidable; it generates a foil to the previous reading's static ^3-^5: the new reading is the most sharply teleological of the nine, as everything must be read "backwards" from the voicing of the final right-hand chord.

In the graphic below, the proto-background is at the top. The second level shows the distribution of the pitches over the form (A5 appears at the end of the first strain), along with the first elaboration by means of neighbor notes (as N-1 in both voices). The third level shows the origins of the C# major section in a temporally displaced (and registrally elaborated) INV transformation. The material below the third level shows later iterations of the same kind of registral play with the basic pitch classes.

For other examples of the ^3-^8 proto-background, see my web essays [NOTE 10 June 2016: both essays named here have been integrated into my PDF essay Proto-backgrounds in Traditional Tonal Music: link] on Beethoven WoO10n2, where ^3-^8, curiously, plays the anti-teleological role among the several readings; and Beethoven WoO10n1, in which registral shifts upward elaborate a neighbor-note pair (no commentary).

D779n13 embedded in D. 365

Instead of imagining performance conditions in which D779n13 might have acted as a trio to n12 (see trio), we can take the opposite tack and construct a new "suite" of waltzes by inserting the simplified 16-bar version into D. 365, to take the place of the waltz of which it may well be a variant.

In the graphic at the end of this post, I have assembled an excerpt from a "false" Opus 9: the actual waltzes, nos. 4 & 5, then the 16-bar recomposition of the A Major Waltz (transposed down to Ab major), then number 6, and the beginning of number 7. The recomposition fits comfortably in the set I am constructing, as all of the Ab major waltzes in D. 365 are in the most basic 8+8 design, with brief (or no) pickups.

The earliest extant manuscript for D365n4 (from 1817) is an incipit in A major, not Ab. The Trauerwalzer (D365n2), also in A, is included in that set of incipits, and it is only in several Albumblatt-style copies from the following year that this waltz is transposed down to Ab (to make it more "traurig," perhaps?); then, a manuscript from later the same year or early in 1819 has D. 365 nos. 1-4, all in Ab, as they were finally published in 1821 (Brown, 228, 230-31, 291-2).

Postscript: After Schott reissued the Trauerwalzer under Beethoven's name and with the title "Sehnsuchtswalzer" (Kinsky, 727), the little piece's fate was sealed, and it was republished any number of times throughout the nineteenth century. As we saw in another post, Schumann knew it in 1835 as Le Désir (it was also called Mon Désir in some editions). Already by 1831, it had acquired English words (under the title "The Maid of Elsmere"). By 1870, American publishers had attributed as many as seventy waltzes to Beethoven; a very small number were actually his, including WoO11n7, a Ländler that was Americanized as the "Cactus Waltz" (Kinkeldey, 245-46).

In the musical example below, n1=D365n4; n2 = D365n5; n3 = D779n13 (16-bar version in Ab); n4 = D365n6; and n5 = D365n7.

References:

Brown, Maurice. Essays on Schubert. London: Macmillan, 1966.

Kinkeldey, Otto. "The Beginnings of Beethoven in America." Musical Quarterly 13/2 (1927): 217-48.

Kinsky, Georg. Hans Halm, ed. Das Werk Beethovens: Thematisch-Bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner Sämtlichen Vollendeten Kompositionen. Munich-Duisburg: Henle, 1955.

Caplin's form functions

The form-function terminology of William Caplin, derived in part from Schoenberg and so useful for sonata movements (among others), is less well suited to dance repertoires of the early nineteenth century. Late menuets still work well, and German dances generally pose fewer problems than do Ländler-based waltzes, in which tightly unified (that is to say, highly repetitious) themes and small forms can sometimes offer little in return for the effort involved in applying the terms.

Certainly, Caplin's terminology offers no unusual insights into formal design in D779n13. The first strain is only a bit more insistent than most waltzes in its repetitions of the basic idea of mm. 2-3, and other unusual features are self-evident without additional analysis: the displacement of the basic idea through the extended pick-up; the unexpectedly stable, if tonally distant, opening to the second strain; and the ending that is convincing as a reprise even though its appearance is somewhat muddled by a transition that puts the basic idea in a tonally uncertain position. The 16-measure theme in the first strain is a true 16-measure theme in Caplin's sense (not an artefact of the awkward beginning that would make the use of repeat signs clumsy). The 16-measure theme becomes the norm in Strauss, sr., and Lanner; that is stretched to 32 bars in the next generation. The contrasting middle (opening of the second strain) as a second theme is by no means unusual in the early waltz repertoire, especially in Schubert.

Sketch of the design: first strain: 16-measure period consisting of an 8-bar antecedent (sentence in which the continuation phrase is biv + biv with an imperfect authentic cadence) and an 8-bar consequent with the same elements but a perfect authentic cadence. (biv = "basic idea varied.") Second strain: rudimentary period with a 6-bar antecedent that appears to end with a perfect authentic cadence, followed by a 2-bar transition and a reprise of the consequent from the first strain.

Reference:

William Caplin. Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

See also my summary of the terminology in Chapter 1 of my PDF essay Dance Designs in 18th and Early 19th Century Music: Beethoven examples in Chapter 1.   Link updated 10 June 2016.