Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 7

I summarized Carl Schachter's article "Schoenberg's Hat . . ." yesterday. A number of issues will be considered here, from how good is his defense of some traditional notions, to how convincing are his examples, to how effective is his criticism of my "Ascending Urlinie" article. I will take these more or less in order -- insofar as they can be separated from one another -- following the article section by section.

As I wrote yesterday, in the introduction Schachter takes Schoenberg to task for his assertions about a unitary musical space, but Schoenberg was not referring to rising or falling lines -- he was talking about musical "objects" (motives) that maintain their identity despite "viewer position" (P, I, R, or RI). Schachter cites Milton Babbitt's comment on Schoenberg's application of the idea to Beethoven as well as to 12-tone music -- "The tonal motive assumes functional meaning in a context, and becomes, in turn, a vehicle of movement within this context; the twelve-tone set, however, is the instigator of movement and defines the functional context" (cited on 329). Schachter apparently wants his positioning of Babbitt's comment as "long ago" to mean that Schoenberg's error should have been obvious to everyone, but in fact the "long ago" inadvertently highlights an anachronism: Babbitt's firmly placed wall between tonality and atonality (understood in Schenkerian and 12-tone terms, respectively) is an attitude that belongs to a generation of the twentieth century's third quarter. That wall started showing cracks as early as the mid-1970s, when Allen Forte, James Baker, and others began to explore transition repertoires (Scriabin, early Schoenberg and Webern, etc., and going back to the late music of Liszt); and it was crumbling noticeably after David Lewin published GMIT in 1987 and collapsed quickly once neo-Riemannian theory and its attendant historical narrative began its rise in the 1990s.

Furthermore, work on schemata, metaphor, and related ideas points to the complexity of musical cognition. Janna Saslaw, drawing on Lakoff and Johnson, lists the following image schemes: container [which suits motives and hats very well], up-down, center-periphery, link, part-whole, force, front-back, path, and source-path-goal (219, Figure 1). All of these, as Saslaw points out, can be understood as relevant to expressive and interpretative models of music making. There is no more reason to privilege the up-down schema than Babbitt's wall.

Schachter finishes the introduction by listing three assumptions: he understands "motion", "space", "high", and "low" in purely musical terms; these have only a "a loose metaphorical relation to our non-musical experiences of space and movement"; but these metaphors are nevertheless fundamental to music's expressive and affective potential.

To the first of these: Schachter immediately constrains the potential outcomes by his definitions. Motion, for example, "refers to the kinetic impressions we derive from tonal and rhythmic patterns," a description that pushes us more than halfway down the road to Schenker. "Motion," however, involves schemata whenever it is anything more organized than events passing randomly by in linear time -- schemata like path, force, and source-path-goal. "'High' or 'low' [refers] to sounds produced by vibrations of greater or lesser frequency" -- but here again the variety of ways in which frequency differences are understood or experienced is ignored in favor of a particular one. Indeed, high and low frequency differences may be primarily based on gender differences familiar from everyday speech but particularly exposed during singing (children, in this account, being lumped in with women). The music of the celestial spheres had all manner of interval sizes, not just ones that produced "high" notes -- and the symbolism of intervals and numbers meant far more to composers before the 19th century than did the superficial text painting to which Schachter alludes. Pianists experience music as much left to right as lower to higher; violinists, too, with an added angle of distortion; organists left to right and large to small; trombonists far to near; guitarists top to bottom; horn players -- well, round and round, I suppose. Only a handful of instruments fit the low/high model: cello, bass, oboe, clarinet. Finally, of course, the proper way to conceive frequency differences would be slower and faster.

To the second and third assumptions: Schachter tries to have it both ways, acknowledging the weakness of the metaphorical ties but then wanting those metaphors to have deep cultural significance (and, because of their historical depth, permanence). Although I suspect that in music gender differences are at the root of it, the up/down schema itself is certainly ancient and is obviously a mental model related to everyday experience. It has generated a powerful collection of related metaphors, including earth/sky, climbing/descending, standing/sitting (or lying), waking/sleeping, even living/dead (as an extension of waking-standing/lying-sleeping). In the arts, it has often been mapped onto the pair tension/relaxation.

The schema and its metaphors are easily tied to gravity, as Steve Larson does in his three voice leading "forces": gravity, magnetism (or attraction), and inertia (cited in Lerdahl, 191). Lerdahl criticizes the first of these, however, saying that "gravity appears to be dispensable: in the major scale, except for the leading tone, the strongest virtual attractions of nonchordal diatonic pitches are by stepwise descent anyway." Lerdahl finds the source of Larson's promotion of gravity as a force not in cognition but in an ideological committment: "By gravity he means the tendency for melodic lines to descend by step (as a Schenkerian, Larson is especially committed to this notion)."

Gravity (as priority to downward motion) is an "earth-bound" metaphor, but it is as primitive as it is ancient: the scientific definition (since Newton) is attraction, and thus the appropriate way to think of gravity is in terms of tension and opposition but not a specific and fixed direction. In the neo-Riemannian historical narrative, the emergence of musical thinking expressing this change happens clearly in the first quarter of the 19th century -- see Cohn 1999, where Schubert's use of symmetrical harmonic and tonal patternings undermines the "down-to-tonic" model and prefigures more systematic understandings of symmetries later in the century.

It is certainly also worth noting that Alexandra Pierce, who of all persons should have the most authoritative notion of the embodiment of Schenkerian hearing, does not tie "ending" to "sitting" " or even to "relazing" instead, resting balance and centered core match harmonic completion and a closing tonic (in ch. 2 of her book).

References:

Lewin, David. Generalized Music Intervals and Transformations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

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.

Lerdahl, Fred. Tonal Pitch Space. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Cohn, Richard. "As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert." Nineteenth Century Music 22/3 (1999): 213-32.

Pierce, Alexandra. Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Practice of Embodied Interpretation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 2007.

Teleology

Yesterday's post introduced a series that may continue through the end of this month: additions or corrections to previous posts and analyses. In January, new readings will start again in earnest.

Here is another way to conceive the most sharply teleological readings so far: proto-backgrounds from ^1-^8 and ^3-^8. We might regard everything as a "prefix" to the final chord. This takes the teleological bias to its extreme; the effect is to devalue the "declaratory" quality of the piece's beginning (with its organicist or generative implications) and give the strongest possible emphasis to dramatic "delay," or Schenker's retardation.

Overt harmonic designs of this type are not unknown, especially in later nineteenth century music, and Schubert plays with them in some waltzes by extending V across seven bars of a strain, only arriving at I in bar 8. See the two examples below: first strains of D365n1 and D734n10.

In the case of D779n13, such a reading is encouraged by the strong metric accent given to the non-tonic sonority of bar 3. To create a graph, we could simply reconstruct the prolongations of a traditional background third-line as prefix to the final ^1. The result would be to make the entire waltz into an "initial descent" to the ^1 (Forte and Gilbert, Introduction 181-3). Most linear readings could be similarly reconstructed along extreme teleological lines, although some would certainly suffer considerable damage to their original intentions.

Reference:

Forte, Allen, and Steven Gilbert. Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982

Schenkerian hermeneutics and the proto-background

The rise of Schenkerian hermeneutics was a direct response to criticisms by, principally, Joseph Kerman and Lawrence Kramer in the 1980s and early 1990s. The cluster formalism/criticism, analysis/interpretation (aka hermeneutics), modernist/postmodern (or, less plausibly, structuralist/post-structuralist -- or, minimally plausible, aestheticist/ideological), has been well rehearsed in the literature since, and the employment of the mechanics of analysis to the end of illuminating meaning has become the preferred mode in publication. An impassioned defense of Schenkerian analysis on these terms may be found in Peter H. Smith's study of Brahms, Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op. 60.

Kerman obviously wasn't aware of the two strands of thinking about Schenkerian analysis at the time, as he not only bundles Babbitt and Forte together but in so doing grossly misrepresents the theoretical-analytical literature of the 1960s and 1970s. In any case, it is unlikely that either he or Kramer would have sympathized with the attitude of the composer-theorist characteristic of Princeton-based or trained authors, who were trying to make sense of (rationalize) Schenker and so grasp the essence of historical repertoires in light of contemporary compositional priorities (see Dembski). The clearest and most effective document in this line is Peter Westergaard's textbook-qua-treatise on tonal theory. By contrast, what we might call the New York/Yale axis was interested in embedding Schenkerian analysis in musicological accounts of historical musics (and of course in altering those narratives as well). One might point to any number of documents that sought to realize this goal, but to my mind still the most beautiful instantiation is Allen Forte's article on the early songs of Schoenberg.

In this blog post, I will construct a hermeneutical reading of D779n13 using the proto-background that I announced as my preference yesterday: ^3-^5. To make the work as clear as possible (and because the hermeneutic mode is not one I find instinctively congenial), I will use as a model an article by Frank Samarotto that is readily accessible online (see the link in References below).

The raised fourth scale degree can represent a powerful, even visceral impulse towards the dominant; once introduced, its course of harmonic resolution appears inevitable. Nonetheless, there are instances when a piece seems to rethink this impulse, and to restrain it by reverting sharp four to its natural state, resulting in what can be characterized as a kind of "sublimation." (abstract)

Samarotto draws on "energetics," in its historical description by Lee Rothfarb, to justify the hermeneutic mode, to speak of a "drama of musical forces," an "'empathetic aural experience' [that treats] music as metaphorically rich," and that "allows us to interpret the activities of those tones as meaningful, even intentional" [¶ 2]. As it turns out, however, energetics is little more than window dressing -- nothing in Samarotto's analyses or discussion could not also be found in Schachter or Schenker himself -- and in that sense the article does a disservice to the historical understanding that Rothfarb so carefully explicates.

That shortcoming, however, will not interfere with our modeling a reading on the analyses. Samarotto provides several examples in two groups: (preliminary examples) Mozart, Piano Sonata in B-flat major, K. 333, I; Beethoven, "Eroica theme" in the finale of the ballet music from the Creatures of Prometheus, Op. 43; [J. S. Bach], Aria, "Bist du bei mir," BWV 508, attributed to Gottfried Stölzel; Bach, St. Matthew Passion, "Mache dich, mein Herze rein"; (main examples) Debussy's first Arabesque; Brahms, String Quintet, Op. 111, III.

The first two examples confirm that ^#4, like all significant chromatic notes, is expressive in and of itself; it has "narrative" or "dramatic" implications and, since it is single -- a distinct individual, as it were -- it is easy to ascribe agency to it (a "will" to rise to ^5). The other readings are concerned with the unexpected undermining of that characteristic motion. The ^#4, by convention, is expected to continue to ^5 and, if a significant pitch, very probably to initiate a stable area of the dominant key as well. Samarotto uses the examples to show different ways in which a turn back to the tonic region can achieve what he calls a sublimation of ^#4 in the diatonic ^4, where the diatonic redirects the energy of the chromatic note (almost in the manner of a low-level "breakthrough") or else dissipates it.

The parallel to D779n13 should be unmistakable: we just replace ^#4 with ^#5 (that is, E#) and the same process of chromatic progression and "rethinking" or "sublimation" takes place in the second strain as E5 becomes E#5 but then is pulled back to E-natural5 for the reprise. I will explore the details of a reading based on this idea in tomorrow's post.

References:

Peter H. Smith. Expressive Forms in Brahms's Instrumental Music: Structure and Meaning in His Werther Quartet. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

Stephen Dembski. "The Structure of Construction." in theory only 13/5-8 (2007): 17-34.

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

Allen Forte. "Schoenberg's Creative Evolution: The Path to Atonality." Musical Quarterly 64/2 (1978): 133-176.

Frank Samarotto. "Sublimating Sharp ^4: An Exercise in Schenkerian Energetics." Music Theory Online 10/3 (September 2004): link.

Lee Rothfarb. "Energetics," in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen, 927-55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.