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.

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.

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.

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.