Postscript 3 to Berry

This entry re-examines the results of a look at harmonic options for the second section of D779n13 as reported in an earlier post. The graphic below combines the first staff from that older graphic with the analysis after Berry from the post three days ago; additional annotations are at the bottom.

If A major is certainly stable throughout the first strain, especially as the entire long phrase (after the two-bar introduction) is an expanded cadential progression (Caplin's ECP), there is also -- thanks to style statistics that tell us non-tonic openings are common in early 19th-century waltzes -- at least a momentary possibility of D major, which dissipates once the cadential 6/4 appears.

The second strain is the mirror inverse of the first, as it is highly unstable and multiply suggestive almost throughout -- again, it is only the appearance of the cadential 6/4 that "nails down" an A major ending. If C# major is overly insistent ("Hey, look at me! I'm a stable key! Really!"), it is perhaps because the "proper" key is all too obviously f#, as A: vi. Lurking at the back of C# major's momentary success is the potential for a hexatonic continuation, which would have given us eventually not a B minor triad but its polar opposite: a major triad a tritone away.

The moment of the metric-expressive climax is also the moment at which the five (!)-layer harmonic complexity evaporates. It's not just an accent but a moment of revelation, of coming around a corner, or of walking into the light.

As I noted in yesterday's post, the notion of multiple functional layers (realized or potential) follows not only Berry but also suggests the method outlined in two early articles by Charles J. Smith. This is the place, then, to acknowledge that I have always been an opportunistic (rather than comprehensive) reader, and, although I read several of the articles in Richmond Browne's collection after it was published in 1981, I did not read Smith's. Had I done so, its influence would certainly have been felt in the series of articles I published in 1987 (on the rising Urlinie, the 8-line, and the three-part Ursatz).

References.

Smith, Charles J. "Prolongations and Progressions as Musical Syntax," in Music Theory: Special Topics, ed. Richmond Browne (New York: Academic Press, 1981), 139-174.

Smith, Charles J. "The Functional Extravagance of Chromatic Chords." Music Theory Spectrum 8 (1986): 94-139.

Postscript 2 to Berry

If only he had relaxed his insistence on recursive hierarchies, Wallace Berry might have been an early darling of musical post-structuralists. As I noted in yesterday's post, his "metric middleground/backgrounds" usually have the effect of flipping the binary in which harmonic hierarchies (and the hierarchies of formal design implied in labels like "A", "B", etc.) constitute the unmarked term. His final graph for Chopin, C-Major Prelude, Op. 28n1, for instance (Berry, "Metric," Ex. 17b), looks very much like my graphic for D779n13 in the post two days ago.

And Berry is quite willing to talk about harmony in overlapping spheres of influence rather than as exclusive, as in his characterization of the harmony in the C-Major Prelude, WTC I:

Primary tonal elements in the Bach Prelude are, in my view, best deemed a complex of overreaching foreground occurrences, anticipating and reflecting. Two occurrences of V, conceivable as one basic manifestation, enclosed by three encompassing occurrences of I, comprise a fundamental unity of linked, overlapping events which span the Prelude ("Metric," 24).

. . . the Prelude's first nineteen measures [suggest] segments marked by overreaching occurrences, prolongations, and processes, inarticulative of precise temporal spans. Particular occurrences and recurrences seeming in the graph [his Ex. 20] to mark explicit spans should be read as veiled, blinking, fading and reemerging, signals (25).

This complex treatment of harmony is, in fact, remarkably similar in its basic strategies to work by Charles J. Smith cited in an earlier post.

Berry, unfortunately, went further in his final book to assert the composer's priority, after the by-then dated manner of the 1960s and the "CMPs" (Contemporary Music Project; Comprehensive Musicianship). As Nicholas Cook puts it, "the dominant approach [to the relation of analysis and performance is] typified by Walter Berry's Musical Structure and Performance. [Its problem is] that it is prescriptive, that it proceeds from analysis to performance, [and] that it tells performers what they have to do rather than listening to what they have to play" (217). What Cook calls for is analysis that is not "monotextual," and thus Berry becomes the emblem of a (heretofore) hegemonic unmarked term.

References.

Berry, Wallace. "Metric and Rhythmic Articulation in Music." Music Theory Spectrum 7 (1985): 7-33.

Smith, Charles J. "The Functional Extravagance of Chromatic Chords." Music Theory Spectrum 8 (1986): 94-139.

Cook, Nicholas. "At the Borders of Musical Identity: Schenker, Corelli and the Graces." Music Analysis 18/2 (1999): 179-233.

Berry, Wallace. Musical Structure and Performance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Options to follow C# major

At (a) in the graphic below is a chordal reduction of the basic progression in D779n13. At (b) through (d) are three alternatives that in fact would have been statistically more likely results for a waltz that is firmly in A major in its first strain, then shifts abruptly to a C# major triad at the beginning of the second strain. Version (b) does not tonicize C# major, as does D779n13, but instead converts the triad into a seventh chord and moves smoothly through a cycle of fifths progression, devoting roughly equal time to each step. Version (c) tonicizes not C# major, but the F# minor that would have been a more likely goal of a C# chord in this context. Version (d) plays out the other implication of version (b) -- here a cycle of fifths progression leads to a close on E major. It is assumed that the close comes as the end of a contrasting middle section, because the articulation is necessary to explain an otherwise awkward retrogression to B minor for the reprise.

Version (d) follows through the implications of the hexatonic cycle and supposes a direct movement from C# major to F major (with an intermediate respelling of the C# triad as Db), and again from F major to A major.

I have worked all of these out in improvisation sessions. Not surprisingly, versions (b) and (c) are the easiest to manage, particularly in the close quarters of an 8-bar strain, but also as an 8-bar contrasting middle leading to a full reprise. Version (d) is not so successful; to make it sound plausible, I had to, as it were, override the close on E by following it with an A major triad -- that additional step on the cycle of fifths made for an uncomplicated move into the D7/b6 dissonance of the reprise. Version (e) sounded quite strange if I attempted to make it compact (fit it in 8 bars), but at least plausible if I stretched it out as a series of tonicizations.

The idea of a close look at chromatic harmonies as an addition to or corrective to linear analyses in the Schenkerian tradition was explored in a convincing way more than twenty years ago by Charles J. Smith (who was reacting to a tendency toward somewhat radically linearized -- and therefore sometimes harmonically obtuse -- readings among the first generation of American post-Schenkerists). More recently, Marianne Kielian Gilbert has given sustained attention to the issue in several articles -- see this post.

References:

Smith, Charles J. "The Functional Extravagance of Chromatic Chords." Music Theory Spectrum 8 (1986): 94-139. See also David Beach, "On Analysis, Beethoven, and Extravagance: A Response to Charles J. Smith," Music Theory Spectrum, 9 (1987): 173-185; and Charles J. Smith, "A Rejoinder to David Beach," Music Theory Spectrum 9 (1987): 186-194.

Kielian Gilbert, Marianne. "Interpreting Schenkerian Prolongation." Music Analysis 22/1-2 (2003): 51-104.

Kielian Gilbert, Marianne. "Inventing a Melody with Harmony: Tonal Potential and Bach’s "Das alte Jahr vergangen ist." Journal of Music Theory 50/1 (2006): 77-101.