Dance collections (2)

This continues yesterday's post, which provided links to several dance collections available from IMSLP and described those collections in terms of design and key sequence.

It is perhaps a little embarrassing that one conclusion to be drawn from comparing Schubert with Czerny and Marschner manages no more than to repeat some old clichés: If Czerny's dances are a bit dull in their routines, despite some technical "glitz,"

and Marschner seems already to be striving toward opera,

then Schubert distinguishes himself as an inexhaustible fountain of charming and memorable melodies. (first strains of D365ns7-9)

On the other hand, with respect to design and style, Schubert's dances are completely within the limits of typical practice for the period 1815-1830. Arguments made for Schubert's uniqueness on those terms are indefensible.

More to recomposition

Today's post is a reaction to Matthew Bailey-Shea's article on recomposition in Music Theory Online. He takes several settings of a poem by Goethe and performs a "mash up," generating a self-styled "musical Frankenstein" (para. 22) that you can both see and hear (there is an audio file). His argument is quite similar to Agawu's in promoting (re)composition-as-analysis, but Bailey-Shea is bolder in speaking to the value (not just utility) of the results.

. . . although there are a variety of goals for music analysis, one of the most common is to suggest new ways to hear a given piece. Such analyses succeed, moreover, when the proposed ways of hearing challenge us in a creative, insightful, and thought-provoking manner. And though intertextual analyses often succeed through simple verbal description there are good reasons to literally compose the proposed connections. We actually hear how these songs resonate with one another, comment upon and affect one another, reach out and engage other settings of the poem. The spark of intertextual association becomes far brighter and, in a way, the music speaks for itself. The analysis informs the music; the music is an analysis. (para. 7)

The resonance with my own posts (locate them with the label "recomposition") is obvious. My task is much simpler than merging elements from several setting into a single performable song, since the individual pieces remain distinct in a dance chain or even a suite for performance. Still, as he puts it, "Every manipulation, every distortion [was] designed to enhance our experience of these songs, both as individual compositions and as a group" (para. 22), and the same is true of any gathering of dances in a sequence: they cast light on each other, as it were.

Here is an example. I have taken three A major waltzes from D365 and added D779n13 to them, in its 16-bar version. The six dances are to be played in order, the idea being that the alternate dances are placed in relation to one another by the dance & (multiple) trio principle. So, the similar first strains of n17 and n28 are shown together, but the topical underpinnings of their markedly different second strains ("foot-stamping" in the first, "yodeling" in the second) are brought into relief. Likewise the "trios": leading-tone basses and initial dissonances of n30, n16, and -- after a restatement of the "dance" (n28 again rather than the original n17) -- D779n13.

Tomorrow's post will show two other re-compositions of a similar kind, utilizing dances from D783.

Atzenbrugg transformations, part 3

This continues the account of mediant (and related transformational) moves in the six Atzenbrugg Tänze, which were divided between D145 and D365 in publication.

In n4, a pedal-point tonic finally yields to the leading tone, as the fifth of the mediant, which then receives the cadence -- one of the most direct possible auditory instantiations of the Leittonwechsel. The P move immediately following is masked a bit by the V7 voicing of the second chord.

The fifth dance (also in D365) is the only one of the group without any mediant or parallel play. I have noted below, however, the emphasis on ^6 in the motive and, in the second strain, the sudden lift upward to ^8 -- both moves strongly reminiscent of D779n13 (and, I would like to suppose, another companion in improvisation).

The final dance once again offers a direct R move between the first two phrases -- after that, it's all strictly fifth-roots.

Atzenbrugg transformations, part 2

The six Atzenbrugg dances may well have originated in improvisation during the vacationers' evening dancing at Atzenbrugg Castle in July 1821 -- or they may have been occasional pieces composed during one of Schubert's morning sessions and then played later on in the day. Their somewhat advanced expressive qualities even suggest that they may have been played as a set in performance, rather than for dancing.

Each of the dances exhibits direct (chord-to-chord) mediant shifts. Each on its own is not extraordinary -- even as early as 1820 or 1821 -- but, taken together, they seem to me a remarkable hint at mediant play in Schubert's improvisational-/compositional- thinking at the time.

In n1 (D145n1), a fanfare-processional first phrase is immediately answered by a shift to the relative minor (R). From first strain to second, also, a P transformation, a hint of a linkage between different modes of efficient voice-leading on the "Riemannian hand."

In n2, the R move is complicated a bit more by the octaves but is again associated with a significant design articulation. Ditto the LP move between strains, and P for the second strain's latter half, which transposes the first strain's second half from C to A (an RP move if it were done directly).

In n3 (which is D365n29), the design/transformation alignment continues between the strains (chord roots D-F#; move is LP).

The non-tonic opening is not related to this pattern, but is of course striking in itself. It does announce a round of after-beat parsimony, however, depicted below with the chords of the reprise (change F# in the first and fifth bars to F-natural and you have the sequence of the first strain).

Atzenbrugg transformations, part 1

The first transformation is from: a castle to: a monastery to: a museum commemorating Franz Schubert and the Schubert-Kreis: Atzenbrugg-Schlosspark.

The second transformation is from: the six Atzenbrugger Tänze (also called Atzenbrugger Deutsche) that were composed (or at least written down as a group) in July 1821 and published in two groups of three in D365 and D145 (see list below) to: the visual records of Kupelwieser's watercolor and a remarkable postcard depicting outdoor activities at the castle (see below).

n1 = D145n1 in E

n2 = D145n3 in A minor, ending A major

n3 = D365n29 in D

n4 = D145n2 in B

n5 = D365n30 in A

n6 = D365n31 in C

I just happened across the postcard collection on the website of the UK Schubert Institute (a "fan site" level operation). The link for this specific card is: n218 Atzenbrugg. I know nothing more about its provenance, date of the drawing, etc. Certainly the activities depicted are those we would expect of the summer holidays enjoyed by Schubert and his friends in 1820 and 1821 (Gibbs, 70). I have added two arrows. The lower one points to Schubert lounging on the grass, the upper one to a small building identified in another postcard as the cottage in which he either stayed or, more likely, composed in the mornings (I daresay the cottage is neither so prominent nor so isolated as this drawing suggests).

[update 2-23-10: Dieckmann reproduces the picture as his Figure 4 (a black & white version is Plate XVIII in Deutsch). It was made in 1821 (or 1822) as a collective effort of three persons in the Schubert-Kreis. Deutsch says that Schubert is smoking a pipe. According to Dieckmann's caption, the singer Vogl is on Schubert's left and is playing a guitar, one of the artists is sitting at Schubert's right, and the violinist is Ludwig Kraissl, described by Deutsch as a "landscape painter and violinist" (185) and by one of the Schubert-Kreis as "a mediocre landscape painter who fiddles heavenly waltzes" (325). Kraissl is listed as attending a Schubertiade on 11-11-1823 (302) and a New Year's Eve party the following month (319); he settled in Carinthia (south-central Austria) in 1824 (653). ]

Reference:

Gibbs, Christopher H. The Life of Schubert. NewYork/London: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Dieckmann, Friedrich. Franz Schubert: eine Annäherung. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1996.

Deutsch, Otto Erich. Schubert, a Documentary Diography; tr. by Eric Blom; being an English version of Franz Schubert: die Dokumente seines Lebens. Rev. and augm. ed., with a commentary by the author. London, J. M. Dent [1946].

On Departure and the Tonal Archetype

I am returning one last time to the progression that Kofi Agawu describes as "a closed harmonic progression [that] constitutes the norm of coherent and meaningful tonal order" (109).

In a previous post I observed that this progression is not in fact "syntactically correct" because it shows the compromises necessary when melodic parsimony conflicts with a strictly maintained four-voice texture.

There is another problem with the progression, specifically with its status as a departure-return model. The first chord conflates a stable harmonic beginning point (I) with an already-departed melody (^3, not ^1). Now, this is presumably out of deference to Schenker, but that deference also means too much is taken for granted here. As Westergaard puts it near the beginning of Introduction to Tonal Theory, "pitch and time relationships are the primary stuff of the structure of any piece of tonal music" (11). If stable beginning is also to be point of departure, then only ^1 over I can be adequate to the task.

The properties are separable: in the examples below, all constitute points of departure (bar 1 of a waltz in D365) but only one of them constitutes a stable beginning (and even there, the tonally stable beginning is pre-empted metrically by the pickup note E5, which gains in salience from its mordent).

Although Westergaard, too, sets his rules out of deference to Schenker ("The first note of the basic step motion must be a tonic-triad member a third, fifth, or octave above the final note" (as cited in Peles 78)), he seems to recognize the problem at some level. Looking back at Introduction to Tonal Theory more than thirty years later, he says (59) that he would replace arpeggiation with borrowing as a basic operation (arpeggiation is melodic movement between triad members; borrowing accounts for these movements as drawing notes from other voices in the voice-leading web -- the same as Rothstein's imaginary continuo). Westergaard's example (60) begins (this is the crucial bit) with a closed position tonic triad, whose label reads "Four voices define a span by stating a C-major triad in closed position with the C doubled in the outer voices." Only after this, rearticulation confirms duration and borrowing lets the soprano claim ^3 from the tenor. Thus, the closed position triad, with ^1 at the top, is conceptually prior to the first chord of Agawu's "norm."

References:

Agawu, Kofi. Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Westergaard, Peter. Introduction to Tonal Theory. New York: Norton, 1975.

Peles, Stephen. "An Introduction to Westergaard's Tonal Theory." In Theory Only 13/1-4 (1997): 73-94.

Closed-position textures

Although the "trio" texture associated with the oom-pah left hand figures is by far the most common in Schubert's dances, occasionally (and beginning quite early in his career), he uses a closed voicing in the left hand. In these cases, the stabilizing role comes very much to the fore. Here are a few examples, to be discussed in more detail at another time. The first two appear in a manuscript from 1815, D146n15 in a manuscript from 1823.

D146n3, trio, contrasting middle (the reprise begins in the final two bars of the example):

D146n4, trio. A similar example, D820n2, could not be reproduced here for copyright reasons.

D146n15. This and the next example combine closed position and oom-pah texture:

D365n16:

Schubert holograph

Here is a link to a page with a facsimile of the waltz that follows the Trauerwalzer (and sounds like a variation of it) plus one other dance from D365, both in Schubert's hand (this is a Reinschrift or fair copy, not a sketch). This is the second page of a two-page manuscript -- there are two schottisches and Schubert's signature on p. 1. Alternatively, you can go to the front page of Schubert-Autographe and navigate your way to the dance autographs.

Schubert's F-major experiments

Quoted from Schumann's review of D 365:

. . . lovely little genii, floating above the earth at about the height of a flower--though I do not much like . . . the last three aesthetic errors [nos. 34-36] which on the whole I cannot forgive their creator.

What did Schumann mean? What was it about these waltzes that was so troublesome? I would suggest that it was exactly the same spontaneous (and thereafter practiced) creativity that expressed itself in the abrupt shift to III in D779n13 but that in other cases found itself confined within the tiny frame of (what "should" have been) a 16-bar binary dance. (Or a simple ternary design with a transposed A-strain as its contrasting middle -- see examples in yesterday's post).

After a long series of waltzes in sharp keys (everything from G major to B major) in ns16-30, a single C-major waltz intervenes before the final five waltzes in F major. No wonder many commentators regard this last group as "tacked on" -- which may very well be true and may have been an element in Schumann's displeasure with ns34-36. The effect is all the greater because the five waltzes do hang together as a set and could easily be played independently of D365 in dance-trio groups, most likely as 32-33-32-34-35-34-36-34. This design would support a dance or a performance of nearly 5 minutes. (The grouping of 32 with 33 is supported by the appearance of this pair in two manuscripts in Schubert's hand from 1821. The grouping of ns34-36, similarly, is found in another manuscript from the same year. See Litschauer.)

The "theme" of this last group is announced immediately in n32: the exploitation of chromaticism. The non-tonic opening does refer back to n31 but retrospectively, after the phrase-aligned cadential progression plays itself out, the G7 is understood as chromatic. Nevertheless, the focus of the chromatic play is, as we would expect, in the contrasting middle of the binary form (beginning of the second strain) or of the small ternary form (the "B" section). As in D779n13, Schubert turns the affects around by making the transposed variant of the theme in the contrasting middle more stable harmonically than the original.

Schubert plays out the idea of diatonic/chromatic contrast in another way in n33. Here what would have been a 16-bar waltz with repeat signs is still 32 bars total but each "repeat" is written out: bars 9-16 = bars 1-8 but the cadence is to bIII, not I; bars 25-32 are a variant of bars 17-24 where the Ab major of the earlier bars shifts directly to the F major of the later ones. The design overall is closely related, in its blocking out of chromatically related key areas, to the ternary forms I discussed in yesterday's post. This is also a waltz that could very easily have arisen in improvisation and repetition, and seems little removed from that state as it stands.

Now, on to the three "errors." In n34, it is easy to imagine a motivic motivation in improvisation for the striking augmented sixth chord that opens the second strain: the chromatic passing tone B-natural5 and its run up to D6 is compressed into a diminished third B-natural4 to Db5 in the second strain. As the eight-bar cadential function unfolds, the bass charts the inverse: Db3-C3-B-natural2.

The extended cadential function with chromaticism and prominent cadential 6/4s sounds a bit old-fashioned and dramatic, as if it belonged to a menuet or a purely instrumental piece -- not much like "little genii" floating just above ground. Given that the first strain abuts four bars of Ländler to four bars of horn calls, perhaps Schumann disliked the topical chaos.

It is more difficult to guess what Schumann objected to in n35--the design is certainly as straightforward as it could be, and the direct chromatic shift to begin the second strain and the "falling fourths" progression that opens it are hardly uncommon in Schubert's dances. Here again, I will guess that the issue was topical dissonance: the lilting violinistic figures of the Ländler style are placed in a rather low register. Where D365n2 (the Trauerwalzer) lifts its figures out of this register to end with clear Ländler figures in the next octave, and so neatly contrasts the chromatic (lower) with the diatonic (higher), here the register is maintained throughout.

In the manuscript that includes the F major waltzes, all are in F# major. These have the earliest date (March 1821; D365 was published in November that year) and are undoubtedly the "originals" -- that is, the keys Schubert would most often have played these dances in. The F# major versions without question lie better under the hands -- some places in the published versions are so awkward as to be nearly unplayable. It's unlikely Schubert himself would have made these kinds of clumsy literal transpositions -- and so perhaps what Schumann was objecting to, unbeknownst to him, was publisher's errors and not Schubert's.

The last waltz uses a texture that is very rare in Schubert's dances: melody with block-chord accompaniment that virtually erases the dance and moves the music toward song instead. These block chord textures, often with the half+quarter rhythms found here, are used occasionally for strains or whole dances that emphasize tonic pedal points (and especially in the minor key).

Note added 12-24-09, cited from Notley, 140: "Schubert entered these five dances as F sharp major "Deutsche Tänze" in his autograph, but they came out as F major waltzes in [D365]. The dances, which bear the date March 8, 1821, play with the possibilities of modal mixture. . . . In each the chromatic inflections underpin his interpretation of the genre's even phrases and divided form."

Reference:

Litschauer, Walburga. Ed. Franz Schubert. Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, Series 7, part 2: Werke für Klavier zu zwei Händen, Band 6: Tänze I. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1989.

Notley, Margaret. "Schubert's Social Music: The 'Forgotten Genres'." In Christopher H. Gibbs, The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, 138-54. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Schumann's Schubert story

Robert Schumann's review of Opus 9 and 33 (D. 365 and D. 783), published in 1835, gives us another way to think about associations between D779n13 and dances in other collections. Schumann, by his own admission a Schubert "fanatic," imagines a meeting of the Davidsbund, a domestic musical evening that resembles an informal, small-scale Schubertiade.

Florestan is in rare form throughout. He first invokes an image of dancing, with the heavily ironic joke that "dance music makes one sad and languid while church music, on the other hand, makes one gay and active--at least myself." Then Zilia [Clara] pricks her finger on a rose and offers, mysteriously, that "Like these waltzes it has nothing to do with pain, but only with drops of blood, drawn forth by roses" (124). Burgeoning excitement caused by Zilia's playing produces a silly moment at the level of a parlor game, as they try to decide between Schubert and Chopin: "Florestan went into a corner remote from the piano, saying, 'Now if running toward the keyboard I manage to hit correctly the first chord of the last movement of the D Minor Symphony [Beethoven's Ninth], it shall be Schubert.' Of course he succeeded."

After this, "Zilia played the waltzes by heart." These waltzes were, first, Schubert's Opus 9, then the deutsche Tänze of Opus 33 (D. 783). Florestan insists that the latter is a tableau of characters and that a painter present that evening ought to sketch them quickly and project the results as magic lantern slides. Florestan leaves suddenly, and our author offers the apology that "Florestan, as I may explain, is in the habit of breaking off at the moment of highest enjoyment, perhaps to preserve its entire freshness and fulness in his memory" (126).

Here the story has an intrinsic interest for its narrative progress, its characters, their social interactions, and its description of a domestic evening among creative artists in the early 1830s. The music is certainly important as a plot element (motivation for the event and characters' behavior) and as a motif, but Schumann allows his review of the music to be nearly lost in the story. Of D. 365, he does say that they are

lovely little genii, floating above the earth at about the height of a flower--though I do not much like Le Désir [No. 2], in which hundreds of girls have drowned their sentiment, nor the last three aesthetic errors [nos. 34-36] which on the whole I cannot forgive their creator. There is much beauty in the way in which the rest circle round the Désir, entangling it more or less in their delicate threads, also in the dreamy thoughtlessness which pervades them all, so that we, too, when playing the last, believe that we are still in the first. (124)

(About Le Désir—Schumann is being disingenuous, as he himself valued it highly enough to write an (unfinished) set of variations on it.)

D. 783 is described in terms that clearly evoke Schumann's own character-piece cycles, as Florestan declares that No. 1 announces a masked ball and then calls out characters from the ball as each dance goes by: "No.2. A comic figure, scratching its ear, and whispering "Pst! pst!" Disappears. No.3. Harlequin with his hand on his hips; exit with a somersault. No.4. Two stiff, polite masks, dancing and conversing little with each other" (125). Etc.

These descriptions might provoke us to consider how the A Major Waltz might replace one of the dances in D. 783. Florestan describes only the first ten dances, not all sixteen, but from those he does describe, No. 7 would seem to fit well: "Two reapers waltzing together in a happy trance. He says softly, 'Are you she?' They recognize each other." (Schumann's original for "Are you she?" is "Bist du es?" which is easily mapped onto the dotted rhythms that open phrases or–more likely perhaps–onto the half-quarter pairs at the ends (as "Bist du's?") (Gesammelte Schriften 1:200).)

The Bb-major Deutscher in this position bears a number of similarities to the A Major Waltz: its first strain is the only one in D. 783 that does not end with a hypermetrically weak tonic, its overt chromaticisms are restricted to the opening of the second strain, and it relies on expressive suspension figures.

The first strain is the "happy trance" of the two dancers, the chromaticism a question, and the descent to the final cadence the mutual recognition. Each of these traits is easily transferred to the A Major Waltz: the soprano/alto pairs of the first strain and the more exuberant C#-major section; the question in the mysterious chromatic measures measures 29-30; and the moment of recognition in the sixth-octave registral climax.

As a final comment, I should add that David Gramit is only half-right when he claims that "Schumann's one extended discussion of Schubert's dances . . . effectively neutralizes the physical and potentially popular not by dismissing it, à la Hanslick, but by transferring it to the realm of the imaginary" (232). The physical--that is, the functional quality of dance--is certainly gone, as Zilia is seated at the piano throughout the evening; through her, the dances become domestic salon music: as Gramit puts it, they are "no longer functional music but rather evocative character pieces." The physical is transferred to Florestan, who is a vital, even hyperactive, presence throughout the story, but it by no means follows that "Schumann creates high art out of dance" (232).

The domestic musical evening, the salon, itself is a principal emblem of middle-class entertainment in the 1820s and 1830s, and often included dancing and parlor games. There is, furthermore, nothing "high-art" about the magic lantern (indeed, quite the reverse, if one recalls that magic lanterns and similar machines were later associated with photography, not painting). Gramit anachronistically imposes socially exclusionary high/popular art distinctions onto an era when such distinctions were far from fully formed, and thus he falsely turns Schumann the creative critic into Schumann the snob, the progressive Romantic into the reactionary Romantic that Schumann did indeed become after the democratic revolutions in 1848-49.

References:

Schumann, Robert. "The Literature of Dancing: First Waltzes, Opus 9, Book 1, German Dances, Opus 33." In Robert Schumann, ed. Konrad Wolff, tr. Paul Rosenfeld, On Music and Musicians, 123-6. New York: Pantheon, 1946.

Schumann, Robert. Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker. 3d ed. 2 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1883.

Gramit, David. "Between Täuschung and Seligkeit: Situating Schubert's Dances." Musical Quarterly 84/2 (2000): 221-37.

D779n13 in Ab major

From my Music Analysis review-article, 215:

It is even possible that the A major Waltz was originally in Ab major, as are the first thirteen numbers in D. 365; the waltz that immediately follows in D. 365 (No. 14 in Db major) displays a similarly abrupt chromatic shift (I– bVI) that is "corrected" by means of an augmented-sixth chord (the same pattern also appears on a smaller scale in No. 2, the famous Trauerwalzer).

The version here is in 16 bars, not 38; it's the "preliminary" version for improvisation cited in this post: sixteen bars and embedded in the "suite" put together for yesterday's blog entry.

The embedding of this version of D779n13 in D. 365 is easily justified, as the total time elapsed is no more than 5-6 years and there is substantial overlap -- that is, the earliest versions of a number of waltzes in D. 779 are contemporary with (and chronologically prior to the publication of) D. 365. I think one can assert with confidence that these waltzes--or versions of them, at any rate--were played alongside one another in late evening sessions where Schubert played for dancing.

As promised in at least one earlier entry, I will write about Kofi Agawu's views on recomposition as analysis in a subsequent post. For now, the citation is "How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back in Again." Music Analysis 23/ii-iii (2004): 267-86.