Schenkerian readings from ^8

Continuing the newly revived theme of linear analysis graphs closely hewing to the Schenkerian tradition, here are three potential readings from ^8, none of which is particularly convincing (all would fit Culler's ideas about extravagance and the implausible in (over)interpretation).

The first two are conventional readings. They require an initial arpeggiation across C#4 and E4 to reach ^8 at the end of the first strain; thereafter, each finds its own long path back to ^1. Both begin from G# (now acting as ^7) in the second strain.

The first reading finds a path through F#, as 7 in C#:V7, and so reaches the register of ^5 and descends as in the five-line readings. This requires the "mixture" voice leading to work.

The second eight-line reading preserves Schachter's G# passing between A and F#, but then the descent occurs very late--we are left to imagine a rush downward over two bars of V7; this ^4-^3-^2 is a Leerlauf, though this one sounds less like an "unsupported stretch" than like a free fall. Overall, both of these readings exaggerate the weaknesses of the reading from ^5. The only Schenkerian who might choose such lines would be a contrarian who hears a determined passage of lines through the waltz's net of cover tones.

Nevertheless, the third reading is obviously the most contrived. This Mixolydian reading rewrites the already weak octave-line to replace ^7 with ^7-natural, the motivation being that the G-natural constitutes the only truly dramatic, unexpected moment in this waltz. That a Mixolydian modal scale exists to accommodate the G-natural helps, even though such modal scales scarcely exist in the musics of this period (and certainly not in music for social dancing!).

For this reading we take an expressive, marked moment, rather as Edward T. Cone does with his promissory note in Schubert's Moment musical in Ab or Schachter with his F#/Gb in Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, but go beyond either of these authors by elevating the distinctive pitch to the status of a member of the urlinie; that is, the reading imposes a belief that such a note should not merely point to the background, it should be the background. In this case, however, the G-natural lacks any further consequences (unless you believe that the A Major Waltz was meant to act as a trio to the previous waltz in D major, in which case there certainly are consequences, for the earlier waltz foregrounds a juxtaposition of a G-natural neighbor note in the upper voice with a G# in an inner voice).

References:
Cone, Edward T. "Schubert's Promissory Note." Nineteenth Century Music 5/3 (1982): 233-241. Reprinted in Walter Frisch, ed., Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, pp. 13-30. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Schachter, Carl. "Triad as Place and Action." Music Theory Spectrum 17/2 (1995): 149-169. Reprinted in Schachter, Unfoldings, 161-183.

More on music-literal and schemata, after Guck, Saslaw

This entry provides more information about Marion Guck's "music-literal" analysis mode, along with Janna Saslaw's comments connecting Guck's arch shape with image schemata. The post is an extended postscript to the earlier one that matches notions of movement in dancing to shapes in listening: Low/high pairs.

Much has been written over the past two decades about metaphor, cognition, and language. As Marion Guck has shown, controlling metaphors and metaphorical language play a role even in apparently objective descriptive accounts of music ("Analytical Fictions"); in another place, she uses metaphor as a way to build such analytical accounts ("Two Types"). For Chopin's Prelude in B Minor, op. 28 no. 6, she compiled student reactions to hearing the piece, with and without score. These "eventually suggested to me a detailed analysis," summarized as follows: "I imagine the prelude as two-measure arching melodies nested within phrase-length arches in turn nested within a single prelude-long arch. The relatively literal spatial notion of melodic arch leads me on to the movements of arching gestures and then, beyond those, to the rise and fall of mood and to a narrative curve" (204).

Thus, the analysis assumes a loosely hierarchical model: the direct, aurally palpable two-measure arches of melody are "music-literal," the phrase-length arches are figurative (they "do not form a continuous line but rather generalize a directional emphasis" [206] and therefore "the conversion [from arch image to increase and decrease of tension] superimposes a metaphorical reinterpretation on the music-literal, and the resulting description is more deeply metaphoric" [207]), and the "single prelude-long arch" ties both "literal" and figurative to movement and mood, "incorporating all in a depiction of human (inter-)actions: the piece's arch is a narrative curve" (207; her emphasis).

How exactly we move from spatial metaphors to "human (inter-)actions"–and just what its "narrative" might be–is not clear, but that uncertainty is no obstacle to our application of a theme/thesis analysis in Guck's article: the theme may be stated as "direct aural experience [the "music-literal"] can be tied to abstract levels of apprehending music by means of layered (nested) metaphors"; the thesis is directly stated at the end of the article, as if in form of a moral: analysis by metaphor "facilitate[s] an endlessly closer, more profound hearing of each musical work" (212).

Guck begins her discussion by saying that spatial images are "so pervasively and deeply embedded in the language of musical discourse . . . [that] we must speak in spatial terms" (201). Commenting on this work, Janna Saslaw says that Guck "gets very close to the idea of embodiment when she discusses body sensations associated with [the] arch metaphor" in the Chopin Prelude ("Forces" 238n9), as when she compares an "arch's line" (it "ascends, focuses, and curves") to the movement of "the arm that threw the ball" (an image already familiar from Cone (26-28)):

To hear arching movement, one most likely recalls, subliminally, memories that incorporate the fine, continuous adjustments in muscle tensions needed to produce the smooth gesture: the initial impetus that increasingly opposes gravity as the arm rises, stretching to the point of fullest extension, then decreasing tension as the arm yields to gravity. In the [arch] gesture, rise and fall are also converted into increase and decrease of effort and tension. . . . The conversion superimposes a metaphorical reinterpretation on the music-literal, and the resulting description is more deeply metaphoric. ("Forces" 206-207)

Here the metaphoric seems to be equated with the abstract. For Saslaw, following Lakoff and Johnson, body metaphors underly the image schemas that permeate all language, including conceptual language: "image schemas are based on direct experience of a kinesthetic nature," and they "operate at a very basic level of cognitive organization, a level that Johnson has called 'preconceptual'" ("Forces" 218). Saslaw sorts a list of these

kinesthetic image schemas. . . . into two types. First are those that deal with our bodies themselves, including the container, center-periphery, front-back, and part-whole schemas. The container schema, for example, derives from our sense that one's body is a container with an inside and outside. The second group of image schemas . . . consists of those that deal with our orientation in, and relationship to, the world, including link, force, path, source-path-goal, and near-far (218).

These image schemas originate in our physical experience, but, "in order to structure domains that are not experienced directly, we map the kinesthetic image schemas . . . onto these more abstract domains. The mappings take the form of metaphors" (220). Guck's throwing arm–and the arch that might be said to derive from it–is a special case, then, of a general kinesthetic schema of trajectory that involves not only origination-to-goal but force or effort. For Saslaw, "if composers and listeners conceive of tones as objects that move in space, then these conceptual objects can have the attributes of real-world objects: weight, speed, force, direction of motion, etc." (235)

As I claimed in the early post, the persistent counterpoint of soprano and alto in this zärtliche Walzer is an astonishing evocation of the physicality of the standard waltz step. The music-literal allows us a way to think about the "blank" opening bars that permit hearing the waltz as counterpoint not between soprano and alto, but between right hand and left, between the complex of melodic upper voices and the bass. Whether or not these bars are actually danced, one can see/hear the male dancer in bar 1 followed in bar 2 by the musical mimicry of the woman's twirl in the eighth-note figure. The "foundational" (harmonic) leader–perhaps the Vortanzer–courteously makes no distinctive (musical) gesture before the "ornamental" (melodic) partner enters with an individual display of the essential motif of the waltz, the turn or twirl. After this, the couple together performs a larger-scale set of turns through the series of two-bar hypermeasures that make up the waltz. (Note that the harmony, too, is unwavering in its two-bar groups.)

[note (12-20-09): Michael Spitzer writes a critique of music/body-analogies, including Guck's, arguing that the "commitment to somatic immediacy" that she and others, including Robert Hatten, David Lidov, and Alexandra Pierce, stress cannot bridge a gap between the "concrete immediacy [of] performed gestures [and] the deeper principle that enables bodily thought, [or] schematism." (See his Music and Metaphor, 88-91).]

References:

Cone. Edward T. Musical form and musical performance. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968.

Guck, Marion. "Analytical Fictions." In Adam Krims, ed. Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic, 157-77. Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1998. Originally published in Music Theory Spectrum 16/2 (1994): 217-230.

Guck, Marion. 1992. "Two Types of Metaphoric Transference." In Katherine Bergeron and Phillip V. Bohlman, eds. Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons, 201-212. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Saslaw, Janna. "Forces, Containers, and Paths: The Role of Body-Derived Image Schemas in the Conceptualization of Music." Journal of Music Theory 40/2 (1996): 217-43.

Spitzer, Michael. Metaphor and Musical Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Spitzer criticizes Guck and several other writers for perpetuating a body/structure dualism. He says that they "identify the bodily experience of a performer with an immediacy that is distanced from musical structure. [The latter], with its abstract and articulated systems of internal relations, can still echo . . . or be echoed by . . . structures of bodily motion, [but] a commitment to somatic immediacy-the continuous, particular, and analog character of musical gesture-stands in the way of discriminating and categorizing the various types of bodily experience" (90).

A first narrative reading (after Edward T. Cone)

This is in part a new reading, in part a postscript to the previous entry (on the unison ^5).

Using Cone's device of the "promissory note,” I ask how the kind of musical plotting he describes for the Ab-major Moment musical can be applied to D779n13. As the "note," I choose the downbeat of measure 3: its distinctive dissonance is as close as we will come to a marked pitch event in the first strain. With the leap upward in measure 3, one might have expected a brighter sonority, such as a triadic subdominant, yet the C# unequivocally signals a B-minor 6/3–it is the leap upward, the "brightness" that is disappointed by the incessant string of suspensions. Without the suspension, the B-minor chord might have been neutral: as the first two items in the graphic below show, the voice leading from this ii6 might carry F# up or down equally well. Ironically, IV would be less successful, as rising from F# threatens parallel fifths in the lower voices (third item in the graphic).

The F#, then, is (relatively) stable at the outset as a chord member of ii6 and as upper member of a tenth with the bass (see the beginning of the next graphic, which charts the narrative across the time line of the piece); it is also in an isolated, higher register, yet its "brightness" is undermined by the inner-voice suspension figure. The F# maintains its position, but at the end of the first phrase it appears to give in by mimicking the suspensions with a soft, 6-5, accented neighbor figure.

In the second phrase, this pattern is repeated but now the neighbor figure sounds like a proper 9-8 suspension, paired as it is with a true 4-3 suspension in the alto. But suddenly--out of nowhere--our initial expectation is fulfilled, albeit with the rough voice leading of the waltz ninth, as an F# passing tone rises to G# in the cadence. (On the "waltz ninth," see Neumeyer 1987, 292-293.)

This might have been the end of it, but Schubert writes the second strain as an ingeniously intensified variation of the progress of the first. The relation of F# to E is sharpened (literally) by converting F# to the seventh of a dominant (C# major: V) and E to its resolution on E# (as ^3 of C# major). This again would appear to be the end of it–F# can only descend–except that the memory of rising is preserved in the repetitions of the cadence figure from the first strain (now a major third higher). The pitch C#6 reached in these cadences is the excuse for a remarkable twist prepared in the mysterious measures 29-30, whose G-natural will fall to F#5 as C#6 leaps abruptly up another fourth to F#6. Even more remarkably, two bars later the upper register is abandoned again, an event we might interpret either as a retreat or as a satisfied return to place (since the cadence's waltz ninth is retained). In either case, it is obviously a denouement.

A thematic statement (summary) for this "promissory note" account is most readily tied to character and progress of the narrative. (On theme and thesis and their connection to the proto-backgrounds, see the MTS article and the three web publications listed under “References.”)

Scale degree ^6 is unstable because it is not a member of the tonic triad, but it is ambivalent in directionality. Although at first pulled down by the weight of suspension figures in the alto voice, ^6 takes advantage of the cliché of the waltz ninth to rise in the cadence of the first strain. This sequence of events is repeated, in more intense form, in the second strain, but a drop in register at the end suggests a reconciliation or 'synthesis' of the scale degree's rising and falling tendencies.

This rather wordy version, however, is little more than a character-based summary of the story. We might distill it down to something like "The ambivalent directionality of scale degree ^6 is expressed at several levels." (On this ambivalence, see Day-O-Connell.) If the sense of narrative–and most of the sense of anthropomorphic character–is lost in this bland description, that is all to the good. For any reading that suggests or imposes narrative, the thesis might be the following: we are asked to believe that the parallel between the linear chronology required for reading a story and listening to a piece of music means that story-like narratives can be productively imposed on musical compositions (another way to phrase it: we are asked to believe that the story/music parallel is a strong one that permits the creative hermeneutics of narrative-building).

References:

Cone, Edward T. "Schubert's Promissory Note." Nineteenth Century Music 5/3 (1982): 233-241.
Neumeyer, David. "The Ascending Urlinie." Journal of Music Theory 31/2 (1987): 275-303.
Day-O'Connell, Jeremy. "The Rise of ^6 in the Nineteenth Century." Music Theory Spectrum 24/1 (2002): 35-67.
Neumeyer, David. Proto-backgrounds. On Proto-backgrounds: Material gathered from my UT website (uts.cc . . .) and from the blog “Hearing Schubert D779n13” (on Google’s blogspot): PDF essay on Texas Scholar Works [link updated 10 June 2016].

Neumeyer, David. Theme and thesis (Rebecca). See entry above.
Neumeyer, David. Theme and thesis (Hadas, The Genre Clerk). See entry above.