D924 and tonality in sets

The Gräzer Walzer, with the Valses nobles, represent the late style among Schubert's dances, as they were most likely composed/written down in 1826 or 1827. Of the two sets, the Valses nobles, with their often elongated and asymmetrical forms and leaning toward distinctly pianistic textures and gestures, show much more tension between playing for dancing and playing for listening. The Gräzer Walzer, with the possible exception of the last one (n12), which might have been conceived as the typically extended coda of the set, are all entirely danceable and may in fact easily be strung together to create extended sequences. Many, in fact, have very distinct Ländler characteristics, which seems a bit surprising for such a late period in Schubert's life.

A curiosity of D924 is the large number of minor-key first strains (5), all of which modulate in the second strain to the relative major key. These are n3: c#-E; n6: f#-A; n7: a-C (1st ending), a (second ending); n9: a-C; n11:e-G. All five end in the major key, except for n7, as shown.

In traditional Schenkerian analysis, priority goes to the end, and therefore all but n7 would be read in terms of the ending key, with the opening key situated in the middleground. I'll adopt that view here for sake of discussion, but in general it strikes me that this sort of bald hierarchization misses much of the expressive point of these pieces: their strains and their keys are balanced, two pictures in a locket -- and family pictures at that, as Schubert follows his earlier habit (exemplified in a skewed way in D779n13) of transposing the first strain to serve (with minor emendations) as the second. It seems to me that David Lewin's conception of key change (allied to the double-tonic complex but explicitly transformational) is a much better model.

In D924n3, Schubert plays a simple polyphonic game, flipping the priorities of uppermost and "alto" voice in the right hand. The G#5 (boxed) may sound like a cover tone to ^3 (E5) at first, but the dogged and direct cadence carries the voice leading down from its ^5, not from E. In the second strain the weight is reversed (though of course we have no way of knowing that till the cadence arrives -- but that's often the expressive trajectory of Schubert's waltz strains): B5 does retreat to the cover tone role and the cadence ultimately moves down the G#5 of m. 9 past an incomplete NN (not boxed) A5 through F#5 to E5. Thus the Urlinie design converts c#:^5 to E: ^3, and the c# region becomes a middleground prefix in the bass -- unless you decide that's a bad idea and give the C# bass note the background status it deserves in a double-tonic complex.

I will look at two additional dances, n6 and n9, in tomorrow's post. Both show more extended versions of the same patterns.

more to Schenkerian analysis and the New Criticism

When, Jeffrey Williams, interviewing Stanley Fish, offered the now commonplace view that, in the 1970s and 1980s especially, "[literary or critical] theory provided a kind of bridge or lingua franca for literary studies, so that somebody in Renaissance could talk to somebody in twentieth-century American literature," Fish responded with comments on the preceding generation:

New Criticism provided a vocabulary, with its notions of tension and paradox and verbal artifacts, that could be as much a part of Chaucerian criticism . . . as of criticism, let's say, of Joseph Conrad's novels. So there was always a way, I think, that the techniques in one field could be generalized. What surprises me, though, and heartens me, is the survival through all of these changes of some commitment to close reading. I know that there are many, many complaints and laments that close reading is a lost art, but I see many people who still perform it. It still remains, at least in my experience, the most powerful pedagogical tool which can really awaken students' interest when they begin to realize that they can perform analyses of texts that remove the texts from the category of the alien and the strange, and then begin to actually understand the mechanics of how prose and verse work. (22)

In music studies, Schenkerian analysis and classical pitch-class set theory did much the same during roughly the same period (allowing for an offset of a decade or so). The difference was that the "tools" and "mechanics" of particular ways of reading/auditing became naturalized: in literary studies, every device, notion, or rhetorical gambit was closely scrutinized and often contested. Something like this happened with classical pc-set theory through Robert Morris's more thorough and more sophisticated reformulation of it and, more radically of course, through Lewin's GMIT, which opened the door to a wide field of theoretical and interpretative possibilities. Despite some good critical and historical work beginning in the 1980s, Schenkerian studies advanced only so far as meeting New Musicologists in a conservative practice of hermeneutics. Thus, as he does in "Schoenberg's Hat," Schachter can say in 1999 that "Schenker's description in Part I of Free Composition reveals some of the fundamental characteristics of the tonal system" (10). And the mechanics of that "system" are the naturalized "three Ursatz forms, [which are] the simplest pieces of tonal music, so simple that they have no artistic value at all, but still fulfill some of the basic needs of a tonal piece."

Between Neo-Riemannian rewriting of the history of harmony, the Schenkerian hermeneutics that must, if carried out sensitively and thoroughly, eventually break down the notion of a common practice, and the powerful new view of musical rhetoric in the 18th century that is coming out of partimento studies, a view like Schachter's is no longer sustainable.

References:

Williams, Jeffery L. Critics at Work: Interviews, 1993-2003. New York: New York University Press, 2004.

Morris, Robert D. Composition with Pitch Classes: A Theory of Compositional Design. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

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

Schachter, Carl. Joseph Straus, ed. Unfoldings: Essays in Schenkerian Theory and Analysis. New York/London: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 8

In the second section, "Ascending and Descending Motion Contrasted" (328-31), Carl Schachter offers two readings of ascent and descent in connection with text painting in 19th century songs. In the first case (Schumann), the inversion of a motive and a sequence made up of this rising form expresses "erotic excitement" (329). In the second case (Brahms), the motivic directions are reversed (death/night/rise; life/day/fall) but at the climax the expectations are righted by a change of shape in the motive (330).

From the first, because Schumann denies the erotic with a falling cadence at the end, comes the general statement that "the descending melodic impulse at a cadence is typical and is a central component of the tonal system" (329). "Typical" not "universal" -- Schachter never goes so far as explicitly to claim the latter for descending lines in cadences -- but nevertheless essential to "the tonal system," the latter, as we find out during the discussion of Brahms, being defined as Schenker construed it. Thus,

That descending melodic movement tends to create repose might be understood as reflecting our physical lives as creatures subject to the force of gravity. It takes effort to throw a ball into the air; it falls back to the ground by itself. Accordingly we might well imagine that musical descent suggests repose by analogy with physical motion…. (330)

. . . the ensemble of pitches conforms in part to the inner structure of a normal musical tone. . . . Musical motion toward the first partial -- " descending" motion -- leads to a fixed point of reference and thus tends to evoke a feeling of repose comparable to a move down through space. In the music of triadic tonality, this general attribute of downward motion is intensified by the fact that the triad is built from the bottom up. . . . In tonal music, the most stable positions of the triad are of course those where the root is grounded in the" earth" of the bass part. And in the melodic lines of tonal music, a descent from ^3, ^5, or ^8 to ^1 replicates in the horizontalized triad of the upper voice a move from an overtone . . . to the fundamental sound. (331)

Out of this recital of familiar notions comes the foregone conclusion that "for tonal music, the distinction between up and down is far from superficial, since moving down provides a more definitive closure."

David Lewin argues differently. Reacting to Susan McClary's charges about patriarchal containment of women's voices, he rejects an analogy between the spoken sentence and the sung phrase (and therefore a naturalized linkage between "coming to rest" and descending melodic movement): "Our musics are not 'natural phenomena,' like everyday speaking. All singing styles, in particular, are highly stylized in comparison to everyday speech" (275).

I would add that the notion of cadence-as-repose within a tension-relaxation model has no place in the singer's physical experience of performance -- tension in the body (diaphragm, lungs) rises to its top point before a phrase starts and is maintained till after the phrase is finished. One doesn't need to be a professional singer to experience that, either -- or a singer at all, since playing a wind instrument works essentially the same way.

Instead, Lewin associates patriarchy with priority to the bass (or fundamental), and from this it follows that "the transcendent musical voice must be a woman's voice" (271): "The female voice is typically acoustically free of what we conceive as a functional bass line—whether continuo or fundamental bass—and that is less typically true of the male voice" (274).

For Schachter, a certain set of historical practices in European tonal music may as well be universals ("fixed points of orientation [the tonic note, triadic roots]. . . important functional differences. . .the system itself"), but for Lewin they still have strong traces of cultural practices that can be interrogated. For Schachter, the difference between rising and falling melodic gestures offers wonderful expressive tensions in a balanced system; for Lewin, that balanced system may also be understood as a constraining cultural construct that can be "escaped" not just by the mad women of nineteenth-century opera but also by the transcendent female voice (pace McClary, Lewin counts Isolde and the soloist in Schoenberg's second string quartet and Erwartung among these).

However one reacts to Lewin's specific argument here, it is certainly well-established through historical narratives connected to neo-Riemannian theory that in the nineteenth century a harmonic model emerged that opposed symmetrical models to traditional "Earth-bound" metaphors. I also claim that whether through a Newtonian concept of gravity, the Romantic's exploitation of oppositions, or simply through a desire to escape from century-old, clichéd cadence figures, the opposition of rising and falling gestures was altered to contest (or to vitiate) the structural priority of descending cadence gestures.

References:

Lewin, David. 2006. Studies in Music with Text. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rings, Steven. 2006. Review of three books by David Lewin in new editions. Journal of Music Theory 50/1: 111-27.

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.

Schenkerian hermeneutics, part 2

Yesterday I wrote the introduction for a reading in the mode of Schenkerian hermeneutics, using as a model an article by Frank Samarotto. Here is the final paragraph again:

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.

I will use the proto-background ^3-^5 as the framework. Any of the four readings with ^5 would be workable, but, among all the proto-backgrounds, ^3-^5 is the one I prefer here, in part because (as I wrote in the comparison post) the strongly teleological readings seem out of sync with a waltz whose sections move unpredictably, and the analyses that isolate either ^3 or ^5 (or ignore them, as in the unison ^1 and octave) are much harder to hear than the one that combines ^3 and ^5 (soprano and alto, male and female dancers).

The inflection of ^5 is deeply embedded in the design, as if, in thematic terms, the rising motion is what this waltz is about, an increasing exhilaration in the dancing couple as the waltzing turns continue. Even if he wasn't a dancer, Schubert would have known from the experience and comments of his friends that, because of a basic difference in center of gravity, women in general find it much more pleasurable to turn and spin than do men -- in this portrait of dancing, then, the upper voice expresses the exhilaration, not the lower. The action is shown in the small, as well, in the later-level N

and in the immediate, as, at the beginning, E5 barely sounds before it pushes upward to F#5 and then to A5:

After all these hints (or preliminary attempts), it is hardly a surprise when the soprano pushes (completes the middleground turn?) up to A5 in the cadence.

There is thus a definite kinship -- a shared impulse -- between the E# of the background, the rising cadential gesture of the middleground, and the neighbor note of the foreground.

It is a curiosity that ^#4 or D# never appears in D779n13 as an inflection of ^4 -- instead, D# is ^2 in C# minor/major. The role of distinctive chromatic note is thus all the more clearly thrown onto ^#5 in the second strain -- but that note has a decided inner conflict: in the immediate, it is stable and F#5 is the neighbor, the dominant seventh that must resolve to it, but in the background, E# would move further upward, to that same F# as tonic to E#'s leading tone. The moment of sublimation comes in the transition, where the E#-G# pair that are the C#-major equivalents of C#-E begin to move, not up, but down in a chain of parallel tenths (see graphic below), thus imitating the determined descent of the suspension chain in the first strain. This motion would seem quickly to cancel out E#, but the E-natural belongs to a very unstable chord. Eventually the tenths arrive at C#-E as the reprise comes into focus. But in the meantime the soprano has gone out of the voice leading altogether as the ascending fourths pile up and F#6 is reached; the soprano even reaches again for a high A -- see the text at the top of the graphic. Here is that same transcendent voice, reaching up and out of the harmony, that Lewin describes.

The sublimation, then, is a complicated process here. In the background, exhilaration/ecstasy gives way in the end to the form of the dance. In the immediate, however, the soprano holds to that feeling (or its memory) and floats free of the voice leading for a moment. And in the middleground, Schubert has accomplished something that would take a whole generation of French opera composers after him to manage by force of sheer repetition: make the rising gesture in the waltz's final cadence seem quite conventional, the most natural thing in the world.

References:

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

Lewin, David. "Women's Voices and the Fundamental Bass." In Studies in Music with Text, 267-281. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Proto-backgrounds (comparison and evaluation)

Over the past month, and one at a time, I have presented readings based on the nine proto-backgrounds. (Refer again to the introductory post; clicking on the label "proto-background" in the sidebar will bring up all the entries in a single window.) In many of the individual entries, comments offer preliminary assessments. This post compares all the readings, which seem to form two (non-exclusive) groups: (1) teleological (or end-oriented), (2) focused on one or both of the principal right-hand melody notes and yielding N or LINE-derived backgrounds.

^1-^1, ^1-^8. Of the first version, the unison ^1, I wrote that "Given the alto's strong focus on ^3 and the soprano's equally dogged emphasis on ^5, a reading generated from ^1 might seem counter-intuitive, but it [effectively conveys] the teleology in the 8-bar antecedent." The unison and octave (^1-^8) readings are very closely related, the main difference being the level to which the octave A4-A5 in bar 9 is assigned (whether proto-background or "background"). My assessment was that I "prefer [the octave] version, if only because it takes the teleological bias (which will be a factor in any analysis of this waltz involving ^1) and pushes it to the max, making for a more consistent interpretation overall." Both readings do a good job of aligning formal design and pitch elements at comparable levels.

^3-^8, ^1-^5. The reading from ^3-^8 takes this further, as "the prominent sixth of the closing cadence [that it represents] is unavoidable; . . . the most sharply teleological of the nine, [this hearing of the waltz requires that] everything must be read 'backwards' from the voicing of the final right-hand chord." By contrast, the end-orientation of the ^1-^5 hearing is limited to phrase level, where ^5 shows up immediately but ^1 only arrives at the end.

^3-^3, ^1-^3, and ^5-^5. Like the unison and octave readings, the unison ^3 and ^1-^3 are closely related: "unison ^3 focuses attention on the alto voice but differs from ^1-^3 in delegating its repeated linear path to later levels." Thus the third level ("first middleground") of the unison reading highlights INV transformations, but the same level in the ^1-^3 analysis features layered lines. At the same time, ^3-^3 and ^5-^5 are related in that each forces intense focus on one of the two right-hand melodic notes throughout. Both align very cleanly with the large units of the formal design, but the ^5-^5 hearing is more dramatic in the chromatic shift of its primary tone (rather than a secondary voice) for the C# major section and therefore offers a very direct expression of the most distinctive feature of this waltz.

^3-^5, ^5-^8. This is the odd couple, in that I characterized the former as the most obvious, one might say "natural," hearing, but the latter as a misreading.

As to which of the nine readings is the "correct" one -- or even which of them I favor -- I will first refer the reader to the MTS article's discussion of Lewin's assessment of four Schenkerian readings of a Schumann song and his ultimate choice among them. Like Lewin, I will say that all of the nine analyses of D779n13 are possible in the sense that they are coherent on their own terms and I can -- sometimes with a little effort -- hear the waltz as each interprets it. Finally, though, I would choose ^3-^5: the strongly teleological readings seem out of sync with a waltz whose sections move unpredictably. The immediacy of the suspension chain does drive forward at phrase-level, but the C# major section even breaks that up (note that there is only one suspension in each unit, not a chain). Similarly, the analyses that isolate either ^3 or ^5 (or ignore them, as in the unison ^1 and octave) are much harder to hear than the one that combines ^3 and ^5 (soprano and alto, male and female dancers).

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"Any background analysis does crucial work in specifying just what some metastable hearing of the piece is" (Lewin, 167). Analysis using the proto-backgrounds as initial structures for generative hierarchies is highly dependent on the choice of the initial or highest-level figure. Such figures are what Lewin calls "metastable": not universals but acting pragmatically as if they were for the sake of the work of analysis or interpretation (see discussion in my MTS article). As I have noted in earlier posts and in web essays, they are, in fact, identical in function to the themes that a reader engenders to gather and guide reading and interpretation of a poem, story, play, or other text. For examples of themes in the analysis of literary works, see the sections Rebecca, Genre Clerk, and Blac Danse in my PDF essay Proto-backgrounds in Traditional Tonal Music: link.

Reference:

Neumeyer, David. 2009. "Thematic Reading, Proto-backgrounds, and Transformations." Music Theory Spectrum 31/2: 284-324.

Lewin, David. Studies in Music with Text. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Proto-background 5: the fifth ^1-^5

Also see the proto-background introduction.

The fifth space ^1-^5 re-introduces a teleological element into the reading, but by no means so radically as when we hear the background as ^1-^1. Here, the upper part of the interval receives attention at the beginning, but the interval as a whole is only defined at the end of the first phrase (see the third staff below). The contrast between upper and lower voices in the right hand, thus, is more striking even than in the reading ^3-^5 (entry to be posted later this week), in that the definition or the concrete presentation of each background tone is situated at opposite ends of the phrase. And the teleological hearing of the alto voice is a good mirror of the listening experience for a string of suspensions, which constantly push forward, ahead, towards a goal, the resolution of the last suspension in the series (here, the 4-3 suspension that brings the secure arrival of ^1).

The fifth space also coordinates nicely with the C# major section (in fact, more simply and directly than any other reading): a WEDGE transformation pulls the notes apart by a half step, to G#-E#, then its inverse pushes them back together again for the reprise/ending. (WEDGE here can be understood as inversion about C/C#; it is a variant of Lewin's transformation W -- see 1987, 124 ff.; see also 2006, 332 ff.)

In a performance of the waltz, of course, the WEDGE is distorted as the G# is G#5, not G#4. We would include the registral shift in a fourth staff/level (not shown here).

References:

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

Lewin, David. Studies in Music with Text. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Recomposition as analysis

Kofi Agawu rebuts Joseph Kerman's critique of "formalist" analysis and call to replace it with a model based on (literary) criticism and belles lettres by pointing to the affinities of music analysis not only with criticism but, as importantly, with music performance and composition. Of the latter, Agawu says: "composition as the art of making, of putting together, shares with analysis the speaking of music as a language" (280). That is to say, "when analysis is realigned with composition, we restore to it a measure of improvisation, liberate it from the requirement of making propositional statements, and reconfigure its epistemological requirements to privilege play. In short, the link with composition encourages more thinking in music about music" (279).

Agawu describes recompositions (perhaps the simplest and most obvious way in which analysis can be carried out as composition) as "fictions" and reminds us that such "imaginary constructions [are] designed to persuade, titillate, amuse, entertain, lead in a certain musical direction or mislead" (279). When he says that "we need an ethical attitude towards constructing these fictions," his argument can be said to apply more broadly to any kind of analytical construction, any interpretation, any "fiction," and it aligns well with a self-conscious practice of (musical) interpretation but also with David Lewin's warning about rewriting theoretical models indiscriminately (when he says that we should "think long and hard before subjecting a received theoretical discourse to fundamental modification" (91)).

Along these lines, I rethink the waltz by adding a new trio (below). This addition suggests a process by which the hierarchy of design is upended -- or at least unexpectedly influenced -- and a background can be shaped or "colored" by the middleground, in this case the principal melodic tone as "engineered" by a newly-composed Trio.

Considering only Schenkerian readings, I hear the waltz by itself very readily and convincingly as a three-part ursatz with a rising upper line from ^5 (post forthcoming), but Carl Schachter’s reading from ^3 (see this entry) becomes stronger in combination with this new trio, as it very unambiguously highlights ^3 in the upper voice with the cover tone ^5 appearing only in subordinate formal positions: that is to say, the trio follows convincingly the path into which Schachter cannot very easily force the waltz itself, and it influences us to hear the waltz in the same way (during the reprise at least, if not during the initial presentation).

All of this is straightforward enough: it merely reflects the fact that, whatever we may think about the priorities of hierarchies, the local can influence the general -- a decision may be made about large-scale features based on an influential nuance (at the abstract level of the background, a newly added trio is a nuance). This is always the danger of the "promissory note" -- that it may not merely act as an expressive marker but insist on its own influence over design, and the hierarchy may be flattened out (to something like a network) or even inverted.

I have added another element to make this point even more blatantly: an intertextual reference that draws the waltz out of Vienna, indeed out of Europe altogether: my bogus trio is a version of one of the most famous nineteenth-century American songs, written by a man who opened a music publishing company in one of the most prosperous cities of the old Northwest Territories, Chicago: the composer was George Root, the song is “The Battle Cry of Freedom," and my reason for including it is the resonance it still has thanks to a plaintive rendering heard several times in Ken Burns's video documentary of the American Civil War. We could explore the binaries generated for quite a long time -- Schubert and Root, Vienna and Chicago, old Europe and young America, the urban and the wilderness, Metternich and the democratic authors of the Northwest Ordinance, the revolutions of 1848 and the secessions of 1861, etc.

My point, however, is simply to show how powerful an intertextual reference can be -- made all the more obvious here because an association was deliberately manufactured. And -- perhaps my greater point -- the "creative analysis" of arrangement or recomposition can manage these kinds of shifts with ease.

References:
Agawu, Kofi. "How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back in Again." Music Analysis 23/ii-iii (2004): 267-86.

Lewin, David. "Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception." In Lewin, Studies in Music with Text, 53-108. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.