Showing posts with label D969n7. Show all posts
Showing posts with label D969n7. Show all posts

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 13b

In Part 13a of this series, I responded to one point in the appendix to Carl Schachter's article "Schoenberg's Hat": what I regard as his misreading of a graphic from Victor Zuckerkandl's book Sound and Symbol. Here I will respond to a second point, and tomorrow to a third.

The last two paragraphs of the appendix acknowledge that two of my readings are convincing. The pieces are D779n2 and D969n7. In a footnote, Schachter says he still prefers a descending Urlinie from ^3 for D969n7, but that my version is "a plausible alternative" (341n23). The rising line ^5-^8, however, is lumped with other Urlinien manquées: "'incomplete' . . . (notably 5-^4-^3) or . . . ending on ^2 [over V]" (339), and these as a group are the exceptions that prove the rule: "their existence in no way diminishes the importance of the norms to which they form exceptions." Those norms:
(a) "tonal melodies come to rest on ^1" ---- or ^8, of course, since ^8 is equivalent (identical, really) in a modal pitch-class space system with octave equivalence. Up/down might be a schema, but octave equivalence has been an element of European pitch systems for a very long time.
(b) "complete harmonic structures end on the tonic chord" ---- but what can "complete" possibly mean apart from actual compositions, where we know that bifocal tonality (LaRue), double-tonics, and tonally meandering opera szenas or film cues can be found everywhere.
(c) "differences between rising and falling motion reflect fundamental properties of the tonal system" ---- I quite agree with this one, but with two large caveats: (1) I would change "fundamental properties" to "basic expressive properties"; and (2), as this series of posts will have shown, I don't share Schachter's particular notion of "tonal system."