More to the trio texture

In an early blog post, I wrote this:

While thinking about improvisation, about Schubert sitting at the piano playing while his friends danced, I realized that the piano permitted the sound of the waltz that would have been most familiar to people in Vienna about 1800 -- two violins and bass -- to be transferred from tavern or restaurant to the home.

-- and added this more recently (5-19-10): Litschauer and Deutsch give an example of this texture (44); so does Rainer Gstrein (82) .

And now I add this: Alexander Weinmann's Verzeichniss for Johann Strauss, sr. & jr., shows that the elder's early compositions were published in one or more of the following formats: piano solo, piano four-hands, violin and piano, 2 violins and bass, guitar, flute solo, csakan [Hungarian flute] solo, and orchestra. Beginning with Op. 56 (1832), "2 violins and bass" was replaced by 3 violins and bass, but as 2 violins, violin 3 ad libitum, and bass. Only with a handful of Strauss's last works was the "standard" string quartet specified instead: Opp. 225 (1848), 232, 237, and 241 (1849).

References:

Litschauer, Walburga, and Walter Deutsch. Schubert und das Tanzvergnügen. Vienna: Holzhausen, 1997.

Gstrein, Rainer, "Ländliche und urbane Tanzmusik im Biedermeier in Österreich." In Boisits, Barbara, and Klaus Hubmann. Tanz im Biedermeier: Ausdruck des Lebensgefühls einer Epoche, 73-87. Proceedings from the Symposium Musizierpraxis im Biedermeier: Tanzmusik im ländlichen und städtischen Bereich, Graz, Austria, 26.-27. März 2004. Series: Neue Beiträge zur Aufführungspraxis, vol. 6. Vienna : Mille Tre Verlag Robert Schächter, 2006.

Weinmann, Alexander. Verzeichnis sämtlicher Werke von Johann Strauss, Vater und Sohn. Series: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alt-Wiener Musikverlages. Reihe l: Komponisten, Folge 2.

Wien: Musikverlag L. Krenn [1956].

Schubert's soprano-alto pairs

Dances with consistent soprano/alto pairings comprise a distinct subcategory in Schubert's dances. D779n13, of course, represents it well. Here are some others.

D969n10 is a simple case where the source of the soprano/alto pair in the 2v/bass trio texture is especially obvious (see my rewritten version below the score).

Rewritten in trio texture:

D924n11 is more elaborate (I wonder if it's an imitation of improvised variation by violinists) but at the same time holds more closely to the thirds/sixths pairings typical of the violin pair.

Two examples from the early dances:

Among the Laendler of D145, no. 9 is another simple case. Obviously, the key of Db major is another expressive alteration of a typical violin key (D), like the Ab (from A) that dominates D365.

The same for D365n15:

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.

D779n13 in Ab major

From my Music Analysis review-article, 215:

It is even possible that the A major Waltz was originally in Ab major, as are the first thirteen numbers in D. 365; the waltz that immediately follows in D. 365 (No. 14 in Db major) displays a similarly abrupt chromatic shift (I– bVI) that is "corrected" by means of an augmented-sixth chord (the same pattern also appears on a smaller scale in No. 2, the famous Trauerwalzer).

The version here is in 16 bars, not 38; it's the "preliminary" version for improvisation cited in this post: sixteen bars and embedded in the "suite" put together for yesterday's blog entry.

The embedding of this version of D779n13 in D. 365 is easily justified, as the total time elapsed is no more than 5-6 years and there is substantial overlap -- that is, the earliest versions of a number of waltzes in D. 779 are contemporary with (and chronologically prior to the publication of) D. 365. I think one can assert with confidence that these waltzes--or versions of them, at any rate--were played alongside one another in late evening sessions where Schubert played for dancing.

As promised in at least one earlier entry, I will write about Kofi Agawu's views on recomposition as analysis in a subsequent post. For now, the citation is "How We Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back in Again." Music Analysis 23/ii-iii (2004): 267-86.

The A major Waltz as Trio to D779n12

D. 779 is a collection, not a cycle. The designs for functional dance music varied according to the length of the dance: the music might be arranged in a simple chain (ABCDE . . . ), in the five-part design familiar from the contredanse tradition (ABACA), as a dance with multiple trios (ABACADAEA . . . ), in the alternativo manner (ABAB or ABABCDCD), or in some ad hoc design that suited the occasion. We should also note in this connection that dances are sometimes labelled "Trio" in Schubert's manuscripts but not in print (and vice versa) (Litschauer, "Tänze," 3.)

In published works, however, the "standard" Viennese waltz design was already apparent in the 1820s: sets of five to six waltzes, usually without introductions but many with codas of varying length. The key schemes are closed, meaning that the final waltz and the coda are in the key of the first waltz. Key relations are close--the majority of waltzes are in the home key, with diversions restricted to dominant or subdominant.

The manuscript evidence and internal evidence of key sequences suggest that the A major Waltz was intended as a trio to No. 12 (in D major) ((Litschauer, 113-114); this is MS. 45 in Brown's list (Essays 237)). In the holographs, Nos. 12 and 14 appear as Nos. 6 and 8, respectively, of a collection of seventeen German dances. The first eight pieces in that set are clearly arranged in functional dance/trio groups, with the key succession: D, D, A, D, G, D, G, D. In this sequence, our A major Waltz would have taken the place of No. 7 in G major. (216-217). In the graphic at the end of this file, I have combined these three pieces in a dance-with-two-trios design: n12-n13-n12-n14-n12.

If we want to think of this design in Schenkerian terms, the waltz in A Major expresses a prolongation of an interruption on E5, or ^2 of D major (see the graphic below), a reading that resonates with--though it flips the structural priorities of--a statement by Carl Schachter as he seeks to explain the prominence of scale degree ^5 in the A Major Waltz: "A curious feature of the upper line is its beginning on [F#5] . . . A glance at the Waltz that precedes this one helps to explain: . . . No. 12 is in D major with [F#5] as its most prominent melodic tone. The [F#5] forms a link between the two Waltzes; such links occur fairly often in a chain of short pieces" (71).

References:

Litschauer, Walburga. "Franz Schuberts Tänze: Zwischen Improvisation und Werk." Musiktheorie 10/1 (1995): 3-9.
Brown, Maurice. "The Dance-Music Manuscripts." In Maurice Brown. Essays on Schubert, 217-43. London: Macmillan, 1966.
Litschauer, Walburga, ed. Franz Schubert. Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, Series 7, part 2: Werke für Klavier zu zwei Händen, Band 6: Tänze I. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1989.
Neumeyer, David. "Synthesis and Association, Structure and Design, in Multi-Movement Compositions." In James M.Baker, David W. Beach, and Jonathan W. Bernard, eds. Music Theory in Concept and Practice, 197-216. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997.
Schachter, Carl. "Rhythm and Linear Analysis: Durational Reduction." Music Forum 5 (1980): 197-232. Reprinted as "Durational Reduction" in Schachter 1999, 54-78.

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The graphics below are thumbnails; click on them to see the original files.