Guide to the blog

I have put together a guide to the 200+ entries in this blog: link.

Here is the abstract:

My blog on Google’s blogspot platform has 209 posts as of 03 July 2016. Tags (Google’s “Labels”) are even greater in number. This document offers a “research guide” to the blog, including live links. Four sections discuss topical emphases, ranging from a catalogue of musical analyses to dance culture in Vienna during Schubert’s lifetime. Seven appendices provide lists of the blog posts with links, tags, a list of analyses by category, and a bibliography.

And here is the table of contents:

Introduction

Topics 1: Analyses of Schubert, Valses sentimentales, n13, Waltz in A Major
Topics 2: Schubert, Playing for Dance, Dance in Vienna 1815-1830
Topics 3: Formal Design and Functions in Music for Social Dance
Topics 4: Responses to Criticism of the Ascending Urlinie

Appendix 1: Complete list of blog posts, with links
Appendix 2: Complete list of tags (“Labels”)
Appendix 3: Tally of the analyses of D779n13
Appendix 4: Bibliography (that is, an alphabetical list of all literature citations)
Appendix 5: Blog Ascending Cadence Gestures in Tonal Music, complete list of posts, with links
Appendix 6: Blog Dance and Dance Music, 1650-1850, complete list of posts, with links
Appendix 7: Blogs Ascending Cadence Gestures in Tonal Music and Dance and Dance Music, 1650-1850, complete list of tags (“Labels”)

administrative post

I have gone through all posts on this blog—from the beginning (the first is dated 7 October 2009)—checked all links, and where necessary updated them. Some links to external websites were broken (not surprising after six or seven years), and I should make it clear that, although I tried, I may not have caught all of them. Most of the updates, however, were from old pages on now defunct servers to my essays published on the Texas Scholar Works platform. My author page there.

Essay on menuet designs, including Schubert D41 and D89

I have published Form Functions in Menuets by Beethoven and Others, 1770-1813:
A Contribution to the History of Design for Dance Musics on the Texas Scholar Works platform: link.

Here is the abstract:

This article adds further documentation for the claim that dance musics in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century were not dominated by the classical symmetrical period but were in fact written in a variety of thematic types and frequently emphasized contrast between ideas (that is, two-bar units). In order to fine-tune descriptions, the terminology for the second phrase in a theme is expanded beyond consequent and continuation (after William Caplin) to include two new categories: contrast and complement.

In addition to two sets of menuets by Beethoven—WoO7 and WoO10—I look at the late menuets of Mozart (K. 461, K. 463, K. 568, K. 585, K. 599, K. 601, K. 604), early menuets by Schubert (D. 41, D. 89), menuets by Friedrich Schwindl (1778), Settree (an English publisher; 1770s?), and Hummel (1807).

Research Vita

I retired from The University of Texas at Austin in May of this year. Since then I have "cleaned up" and stopped maintaining my personal web page, which had information on publications. To compensate, I have created a PDF file called "Research Vita" that can be accessed through this link: Vita.

Another admin update: links to PDF files

Many links to my own external files were broken when a server was decommissioned last year. It has taken me a long time to find a suitable alternative. I have recently posted a set of PDF files to the Texas Scholar Works (University of Texas Libraries) and provide links below. Alternatively for a complete list under my name, go here. Several of these PDF essays are compilations of posts from this blog.

Analyses of Schubert, Waltz, D.779n13

Dance and Dancing in Schubert's Vienna

Cotillon after Schubert, with audio

Dance Designs in 18th and Early 19th Century Music

Proto-backgrounds in Traditional Tonal Music

Carl Schachter's Critique of the Rising Urlinie

Rising Lines in the Tonal Frameworks of Traditional Tonal Music

Table of Compositions with Rising Lines

Complex upper-voice cadential figures in traditional tonal music

Buelow Contredanses: Rising Lines

Kingsbury Hymns of Praise: Rising Lines

Tonal Frames in 18th and 19th Century Music

John Playford Dancing Master: Rising Lines

Martin Chusid on Schubert's Dances

The late Martin Chusid's monograph Schubert's Dances: For Family, Friends, and Posterity was published by Pendragon Press in 2013. An extended introduction by Walburga Litschauer, a familiar figure in these blog pages, was drawn largely from Litschauer and Deutsch (according to a comment by Chusid).

The chapter titles are:

The minuets (for winds, piano, and string quartet)
The ecossaises
The early German dances and ländler
Published waltzes, ländler, and German dances I: for the Carnival seasons of 1822 to 1825
Published waltzes, ländler, and German dances II: for the Carnival seasons of 1826 to 1828
The polonaises and dances for piano duet: Schubert and the Esterhazy family at Zseliz
The dances published after Schubert's death: Diabelli and op. 127 (D. 146); The dances edited by Brahms; The remaining dance publications.

Careful, thorough, traditionally oriented musicological work is welcome, though the volume has the character of a documentation, as it lacks a firmly committed argument to set a context for the work. Instead, one gets the definite impression that the volume is simply meant to fill a gap in Schubert scholarship, to which Chusid had already made distinguished, lifelong contributions. 

Assumptions about the priority of music for performance, rather than for dancing, come through clearly in chapter 1 (on the minuets), as do related preferences for possible cyclic designs and for distinctive harmonic or formal treatments. Thus, for example, D779n13, from the common observation that in "almost every musical aspect there are features . . . not commonly found in Schubert's other works in the genre," one jumps immediately to "the result is a remarkably complex and sophisticated composition," and of course to "perhaps the finest of all his dances" (135). It is also "the most ambitious" of the dances in D779, and one in which "Schubert avoids any sense of monotony."