Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 9

The third section, "Structure and Contour" (331-33), provides two readings that illustrate an assertion from the end of the second section:

Downward motion will characterise structural endings, and, as a corollary, upward motion will occur before the descents-~either at the beginning or in the middle of melodic lines. The tonal system, however, through the phenomenon of octave equivalency, provides an escape clause from these constraints of the structural background. Prolongations, in widening the field for tonal activity, will also free the upper voice from the need for uniformly descending resolutions of linear tension. (331)

The examples from Verdi and Schubert show registral repositioning upward of individual tones in a descending urlinie: the ^3 in the middle of a five-line, and the final ^1, respectively. In both cases, the repositioning is associated with figures in the text.

With respect to the structural cadence of Schubert's "Die junge Nonne" -- and therefore the Urlinie shape -- Schachter has simply gotten it wrong. His graph shows bars 52-61; these include a "cadence [that] achieves its rise to the tonic through a brief stepwise line that culminates in the notes C-D-E-F; F of course is the tonic note and E, the leading tone, can be understood as an inner-voice note of V that substitutes for ^2" (333). This is not the structural cadence -- "a variant of this same cadence" has that role: mm. 74-83. These latter measures are shown in the graphic below, with Schachter's reading mapped onto them: ^5 with inner voices ^3 and ^1 below, the structural bass elements IV-V-I and ^4-^3 (moving from voice to piano)-^2-^1 with accompanying sixths below, two lines moving up in the voice: ^3-^5, then ^5-^8.

Against that I offer my reading below. The ^5 over ^1 is clear at the outset. Note the string of unstable harmonies with parallel octaves between voice and bass at the same time the voice repeatedly outlines the octave register (C4-C5, D4-D5, F4-F5). The octave, and the space of the octave, are obviously crucial here. The clue, I think, is in the "bell sounds" -- the piano left hand crossover pitches, F5 in m. 74, C5 in m. 75, etc., The voice duplicates the piano's notes each time she reaches the word "Getön" (meaning the bell sound): the link between "Getön" on F5 and "Höh[e]n" on F5 is obvious. The piano may have to work the mundane task of the cliché cadence, but the voice has been transported -- and that, I would assert, is what this song is all about.

In the MTS article, I wrote about the Pietist concept of Jesussehnsucht (longing for Jesus) in connection with the funerary chorale "Christus, der ist mein Leben." Here it is not an expression derived from the Protestant notion of personal salvation, but from the Catholic tradition of specifically female figures (usually nuns) yearning for the "heavenly marriage" with Christ. That has been merged with simple Romantic nature imagery -- in the first verse, she speaks of her fear at a stormy night; in the second verse, the emotion is the turbulence of her yearning for Christ (at the end of this, she calls out for the himmlischer Bräutigam); in the final verse, the bell sound seems to clear and calm the air, and she can speak of peace, desire, and heaven.

Schubert obliges with a ballad style and textures and affects that remind one of Erlkönig. The first two verses are in F minor, with obsessive emphasis on C5 and Db5 in the voice (see below); the final verse is in F major.

I am hardly finished with the striking features of this song. Contrary to the suggestion in the lines that Schachter quotes, with their "sweet sound" and "eternal heights," the harmonic progressions of the F major verse remain surprisingly tense (at least, unstable) right up to the structural cadence -- it is the release in that final rising gesture, going one last time to F5, that enables the harmony to come to peace itself. Some sections of the song look very amenable to transformational readings, and the incessant right hand tremolos reveal a different version of the Riemannian hand. Perhaps I'll follow up those leads some other day.

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.

Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 6

Carl Schachter's article "Schoenberg's Hat" has the following sections:

Introduction: Schoenberg's Hat (327)

Ascending and Descending Motion Contrasted (328)

Structure and Contour (331)

The Rising Fourth (333)

Conclusion: Lewis Carroll's Trousers (337)

Appendix: The Rising Urlinie (338)

Schachter begins by criticizing Schoenberg's extension of his idea of a unitary musical space (essential to derive and justify the several forms of a 12-tone row, including inversions) to tonal music, where Schachter points to "a functional context in which the tonal motive assumes…meaning…characterised by fixed points of orientation (the tonic note, triadic roots), [and] by important functional differences between rising and falling movement (for instance in the resolution of dissonances)" (328). Schachter is careful to say that notions of high, low, and others relating to space and motion are metaphorical or analogical, but then he goes on to claim that "I do not regard the analogies between musical space and motion on the one hand and physical space and motion on the other as unimportant, inexact though they may be. A significant part of music's ability to reflect our physical and emotional lives comes from just these analogies."

He then spends considerable time exploring text painting in relation to prolongational figures in songs by Schumann ("Die Lotosblume") and Brahms ("Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht"). Under Structure and Contour, the examples are Verdi, from "0 Terra, Addio" from the final duet of Aida; Schubert's "Die junge Nonne"; under the Rising Fourth, Bizet, Carmen's soliloquy in the "Card Trio" of the opera's third act. In the latter section, he also looks at two instrumental compositions: Bach's C-minor Fugue from WTC 1; Chopin's Prelude in E-major. The appendix comments on what Schachter regards as problems in my rising line article and renders his own judgments about analyses that are convincing with rising line Urlinien.

I will make some comments on the analyses and offer responses to the arguments in posts over the next several days.

References:

Schachter, Carl. "Schoenberg's Hat and Lewis Carroll's Trousers: Upward and Downward Motion in Musical Space." In Brenton Broadstock, Naomi Cumming, Denise Erdonmez Grocke, Catherine Falk, Ros McMillan, Kerry Murphy, Suzanne Robinson, and John Stinson, eds. Aflame with Music: 100 Years of Music at the University of Melbourne. Parkville, Victoria: Centre for Studies in Australian Music, 327-41.

Neumeyer, David. "The Ascending Urlinie." Journal of Music Theory 31/2 (1987): 275-303.

Caplin's form functions

The form-function terminology of William Caplin, derived in part from Schoenberg and so useful for sonata movements (among others), is less well suited to dance repertoires of the early nineteenth century. Late menuets still work well, and German dances generally pose fewer problems than do Ländler-based waltzes, in which tightly unified (that is to say, highly repetitious) themes and small forms can sometimes offer little in return for the effort involved in applying the terms.

Certainly, Caplin's terminology offers no unusual insights into formal design in D779n13. The first strain is only a bit more insistent than most waltzes in its repetitions of the basic idea of mm. 2-3, and other unusual features are self-evident without additional analysis: the displacement of the basic idea through the extended pick-up; the unexpectedly stable, if tonally distant, opening to the second strain; and the ending that is convincing as a reprise even though its appearance is somewhat muddled by a transition that puts the basic idea in a tonally uncertain position. The 16-measure theme in the first strain is a true 16-measure theme in Caplin's sense (not an artefact of the awkward beginning that would make the use of repeat signs clumsy). The 16-measure theme becomes the norm in Strauss, sr., and Lanner; that is stretched to 32 bars in the next generation. The contrasting middle (opening of the second strain) as a second theme is by no means unusual in the early waltz repertoire, especially in Schubert.

Sketch of the design: first strain: 16-measure period consisting of an 8-bar antecedent (sentence in which the continuation phrase is biv + biv with an imperfect authentic cadence) and an 8-bar consequent with the same elements but a perfect authentic cadence. (biv = "basic idea varied.") Second strain: rudimentary period with a 6-bar antecedent that appears to end with a perfect authentic cadence, followed by a 2-bar transition and a reprise of the consequent from the first strain.

Reference:

William Caplin. Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

See also my summary of the terminology in Chapter 1 of my PDF essay Dance Designs in 18th and Early 19th Century Music: Beethoven examples in Chapter 1.   Link updated 10 June 2016.