Leonard B. Meyer, part 2

One may object to certain features in yesterday's graphics on the grounds that the prominent melodic F# cannot be prolonged, because to do so would contradict the underlying harmonic hierarchy -- but Meyer's priorities go to melodic processes, not to patterns (especially linear patterns) in a harmonic/voice-leading web.

Reading the analysis in the theme/thesis terms of my MTS article, the theme can easily be described as the richness of implication in the first five notes: gap-fill (at several levels), complementation, linearity, arpeggiation.

The thesis is harder to formulate. At one level, it might be negative; drawing on my epithet "shadow Schenker," we can say that Meyer was concerned about this time with producing an alternative to Schenkerian analysis, that he was convinced melody and rhythm had more salience than harmony, and that he was also convinced Schenker's hierarchies were too limiting because they are uniform. Thus we could say that we are asked to believe this piece continually puts before our ears questions (gaps, implications) and that our attention in listening, our "empathetic identification" with the music, is directed to the game of reading and solving these problems. This formulation, however, applies equally well to Schenker – we need only substitute "delay" for "implication." This substitutibility is suggestive in itself about the level of kinship of these methods; the only alteration we need is to specify melodic priority: "we are asked to believe this piece continually puts before our ears questions (gaps, implications, of melody and rhythm) and that our attention in listening, our "empathetic identification" with the music, is primarily directed to the game of reading and solving these melodic and rhythmic problems." Meyer sometimes presents these as individual choices (though they will be intersubjective rather than purely personal if one is a "conscientious critic"), but the environment is sufficiently rule-driven that "solving problems" is more appropriate than "making individual choices."

(The kinship of methods may be further suggested by the lack of influence of the formalizations or rationalizations of each: of Meyer by Eugene Narmour, of Schenker by several authors).

Leonard B. Meyer, part 1

Whether the influence was from Schenker or indirectly from Salzer's Structural Hearing, there is no question that analytical models from the 1970s and early 1980s engaged with the Schenkerian model for traditional European tonal music. In the two best-known systems from that era, Lerdahl and Jackendoff reinscribe prolongation in terms of what were then contemporary theories of cognition, and Leonard Meyer sets up his implication-realization model as a different kind of "shadow Schenker" on the basis of earlier Gestalt theories.

Meyer informally adopts notions of hierarchy and reduction, but like Lerdahl (and unlike Schenker) he is wary of assigning any spiritual significance (because of the generally recognized limitation on repertoire still in force at the time, he did not need to argue issues of canonization). Meyer does go much further than Lerdahl in ascribing cultural significance to music and its expressivity, though always in the context of a history of style. He develops these ideas extensively elsewhere, but in Explaining Music, his book on musical analysis he restricts himself to effects and relationships; these are four: hierarchic organization, and implicative, conformant, and ethetic relationships. Critical analysis (as he calls it) is primarily concerned with the first three, and expressivity is primarily a matter of the setting up of expectations and their subsequent dousing or realizing.

Meyer's "implicative" is identical to David Bordwell's term "gap," in the latter's similarly Gestaltist theory of film narrative. Meyer, however, uses "gap" for a specific class of melodic process. He gives most of his attention to melody, using both rhythm and harmony (but more the former than the latter) as contributors; he builds a catalogue of melodic processes, all of which are implicative, and among which the "gap-fill" melody is perhaps the most prominent. Under a Meyer-style scrutiny, the melodies of D779n13 become quite complex: an amalgam of overlapping types that just barely yield at last to a hierarchy of scale (the process that covers the distance of the whole piece sits at the top of the hierarchy).

The gap-fill model works in miniature in the opening eight-note motive (see graphic below), but the continuation gives the effect of a bilevel melody (Meyer's term for what is also called "polyphonic melody," a single melodic line that clearly contains two separate voice-leading parts – here, of course, the two parts are indeed separate voices). The symmetry of a complementary melody encompasses the first phrase (mm. 2-9), as the initial E-F# figure is answered by the F#-E 6-5 figure over the tonic at the end of the phrase (level b). The same initial figure can simultaneously imply continuation with a rising series of steps and so encompasses the first strain through its realization in the cadence figure (level c). Finally, the suspensions of the alto voice are strongly linear, but descending (level d). Taken together, levels c and d give the effect of a "diverging" melody – again, recognizing that these really are two separate parts. Meyer recognizes "convergence" as a type – two strands of (typically) linear melody that converge on a single tone. Here the effect is not of a wedge closing, but of one opening (to the octave).

The next graphic shows large-scale implicative processes (those that cover the whole piece). The C#-E interval of the opening suggests an arpeggio whose continuation is realized with the concluding A5 (level a), but this pattern continues through the C#-major section to E6 in the reprise (m. 33). Level b shows a complementary pattern in the second strain, while level c shows how level b's first component can be understood as completing a gap-fill process initiated in the first strain.

The final graphic gathers the larger-scale elements (labelled "x") in a summary of the processive hierarchy; the linear pattern ("a") is placed in the lower staff.

Tomorrow's post will comment on these analyses.

References.

Meyer, Leonard B. Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Postscript to Dance in Vienna

This is a postscript to Part 1 of the historical series completed yesterday. This was originally a very long footnote to the first sentence: “What Schubert found when he began composing waltzes about 1812 was not a simple, innocent country dance, as it is sometimes portrayed in an attempt to put as much distance between mass art and high art as possible.”

The literature has many examples of the damage done to style studies of nineteenth century and twentieth century music when mass art is ignored, but Leonard Meyer offers a particularly egregious instance that makes the point with unusual clarity. Meyer examines "the fortunes of the cadential 6/4 progression[,] tracing its rise and demise" (250). In the course of this, he points to the familiar notion of Romantic ideology as favoring the anti-conventional, and thus he says, quite plausibly, that Romantic values, which favored endings that are "gradual, continuous, and open," militate against such a clichéd and emphatic ending gesture as the cadential 6/4:

The very sonic salience that made the cadential 6/4 progression such a forceful signal made it seem routine and commonplace–a bit blatant. This is one reason why, as the years passed, the cadential 6/4 progression was less and less frequently chosen by composers (248).

Meyer's statistics come from pieces included in The Norton Scores anthology (a pedagogical collection), and his conclusions, although broadly correct for the repertoires involved (if one ignores Brahms and Bizet), are nevertheless useless as generalizations about all the musics of the period concerned. Meyer claims that, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, "[t]he cadential 6/4 progression . . . continued to be used in popular music and in the music of somewhat conventional composers" (250). It was employed "by composers of a more adventurous kind" only for special purposes.

It is true that Johann Strauss, jr., for one, was quite fond of the cadential 6/4 (and often displayed it prominently, stretched over several bars): my own quick survey shows that the ten strains in five waltzes use this chord 4, 8, and 6 times, respectively, in opuses 314, 325, and 340. Schubert, on the other hand, rarely used it in his dances: for example, in the waltzes of D. 779, nine times in 68 strains; in D. 681, only once in 16 strains; in the ecossaises of D. 421, 511, and 529 combined, ten times in 30 strains; in D. 781, three times in 22 strains. Johann Strauss, sr., was equally disdainful of the cadential 6/4: there are twelve appearances in the forty strains of opuses 201, 213, 218, and 230, combined. Josef Lanner was even more parsimonious: six appearances in sixty strains for the five opuses 19, 20, 40, 42, and 46.

Thus the dance repertoire completely upends Meyer's claim: in fact, the Romantic "extinction" of the 6/4 had already occurred in this popular music by the early 1820s. The chord had to be restored in the music of the mid-century, in the case of the younger Strauss, probably because of the space provided by longer sixteen and thirty-two bar strains, but equally also because of the greater volume and dramatic effect, useful in music for the larger orchestras and venues for which Strauss normally composed.

Reference:

Meyer, Leonard B. The Spheres of Music: A Gathering of Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.