Schachter and the rising Urlinie, Part 12

The Conclusion -- "Lewis Carroll's Trousers" (337-38) -- is decidedly disappointing, despite its apparent promise to drive the sartorial point home, from hats to trousers. Schachter does nothing more than repeat his point with a couple new images -- an art historian writing in 1969 saying much what Schachter already did but in reference to shapes in a visual field (how exactly does the visual analogy prove the validity of the visual prop for a musical analogy?). Since asymmetrical figures look different upside down, therefore it is clear that, "in tonal music, with its gravitationally charged pitch space, linear shapes are also 'non-commutative.' In principle, ascent tends to mean beginnings and intensifications, whereas descent means endings and resolutions" (337). Let the unmarked term stand for all.

I take the charitable way out: Schachter tries an argument by accumulation: repeat your point often enough and it will seem to be proven. Since he had only an opposition to work with, the pendulum could have swung at any time to the marked term (the joyful playground of the post-structuralists). Since he was wholly committed to one term, there was no real way to address the issue directly. Just as I assume he refrained from making any jokes about "upside down" to his Australian audience -- it was, after all, the experience of sailing around the world that drove home the point for once and all that gravity-as-down was a schema that cultures needed to grow out of (in favor perhaps of center-periphery, one of the schemata in Saslaw's list), or else needed to make far more complex than a simple opposition.

C# major as marked term

Judy Lochhead makes this point in a critique of Susan McClary's (traditionalist) emphasis on tonal direction and structure:

"in listening recently to a [French claveçin suite], I was struck by how the ornamental filigree emerged as the structure of the pieces. I was not hearing the 'improvised surface' as the icing on the tonally coherent cake. Rather, the animated surface was the source of playful design that was anchored by cadential progressions serving as temporal markers" (152-3; her emphasis).

Lochhead has taken a familiar opposition, structure/surface, and “flipped” it, that is, given attention not to what we assume to be the initial term (surface) but rather to its opposing term (surface), the idea being to demonstrate and critique by example the power relations of convention and otherness.

A similar notion of "inversion" informs the first of two readings today: we flip the hierarchies of harmony (and form) in D779n13 to give pride of place to the C# major passage, whose "surprise" and "strangeness," after all, are the truly expressive, "Romantic" moment in this piece.

A less radical way to make the same point would be in terms of "tonal pairing," a concept that has proven fruitful for interpretation of music in the later nineteenth century. In our case, A and C# would be assigned equal status in a double-tonic complex (Krebs, 17), and a resulting graphic might look (in its background) like the one below.

In this instance, we are to understand the tonalities of A and C# as juxtaposed and as equally significant to our experience of the piece. At the outset, A major takes the conventional position of hegemonic tonic, but C# major abruptly undercuts that function, reducing A major to "frame" and A5 (^8) to neighbor note. When A major returns (or, perhaps better said, "gradually reintroduces itself"), the status of C# major is changed, but the "framing" quality of A major is not entirely erased, an impression that the repetition of the second strain only enhances.

Is it possible for B in an AABABA design, as here, to acquire an enhanced status? Not if it functions as a traditional contrasting middle, with unstable tonality, chromaticism, sequences, and fragmentation. But the stability of the C# major area, and the abruptness with which the key is reached and left, suggest an opposition rather than a functional assimilation of the kind we would understand from a conventional focus on the dominant.

References:

Lochhead, Judy. Review of Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom. Music Theory Spectrum 24/1 (2002): 150-53.

Krebs, Harald. "Some Early Examples of Tonal Pairing: Schubert's 'Meeres Stille' and 'Der Wanderer'." In William Kinderman and Harald Krebs, eds., The Second Practice Of Nineteenth-Century Tonality, 17-33. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.