Waltzes from c1800

Matthew Cooke, 12 Spanish and Portuguese Waltzes and a Hornpipe. Cooke's dates are 1761-1829; the Waltzes aren't dated but from the notation and the style of the music I think they probably come from 1790–1800, at the very latest 1810. His music was published in London; whether he worked there, I don't know. The manuscript is in the British Library.

Three of the 12 waltzes have strains with upper-register cadences. In no. 1, it's the second strain of the main or A section. The design is a very common one as ABACA; it's ubiquitous around this time (see my post about this: link). 

Ignaz Pleyel, on the other hand, was a major figure in what we still call "Classical" music. Born in Austria, he was one of the principal students of Haydn; he spent most of his life in France, where he managed to survive the dangers of the early Republic and in later years flourished in business, particularly in music publishing and piano manufacture. The edition I have is for guitar and violin, and its connection to Pleyel is tenuous at best: it was published by Johann André in 1805. Here is a detail of the title page:

I would refer the reader to Rita Benton's Thematic Catalogue for further information.

Regardless, these waltzes are characteristic of the period. Notice the ABCA design of the first one, where C is in the relative minor, as would be expected of the more common ABACA, to which this could easily be adjusted. In no. 3 is one of those exceedingly simple and direct rising lines that one very occasionally finds--and that demonstrates once again how easily such figures arise even in the simplest kinds of harmonic and voice-leading situations. Number 7 is interesting for the same reason, but also in that it shows the classic 2-voice frame where ^5 ascends to ^8 while a counter-voice moves down by step to ^1. The ascending voice is obviously the primary one.

Ascending Lines in the 18th century

 This continues the series of posts about a short section in William Caplin's Cadence: A Study of Closure in Tonal Music (2024). Here as a reminder is the basic design of chapter 5, with §5.1.2.11.

Caplin begins the section with "Despite what is often taught in elementary harmony classes, a melodic line that ascends to its goal tonic occurs infrequently in the classical repertory" (265) and ends it with "In both cases, we sense the composer giving special emphasis to the ascending line in a manner that highlights all the more this nonconventional melody." I know of no textbook that does what Caplin claims; perhaps he is referring to the rule about the leading tone ^7 resolving upward to ^8, but two notes are not a line. And as we'll see below it is Haydn's treatment in op.77, no 2, that is "special," not the ascending line in general, even in the 18th century.

In his review of Cadence, Poundie Burstein is a bit more generous, beginning with "[the book] explores at length various standard top-voice paradigms for cadential progressions. One such paradigm that it briefly addresses is the melodic pattern ^5-^6-^7-^8,"--note "standard" and "paradigm"--but then he emphasizes what seems the opposite:

What is particularly striking about the ^5-^6-^7-^8 cadence is that its top voice surges entirely upwards, which tends to militate against the sense of closure expected at a cadence. As Caplin rightly notes, such a cadence is a “nonconventional" one that "occurs infrequently in the classical repertory” (265). In contrast, cadences whose top voice is framed by 5-6-7-8 in the upper voice are far more typical of nineteenth century practice.

This last is certainly true, but the generalizing that Burstein does is more of a problem. According to him, the ascending line in the Haydn quartet example (see below) has an "odd character," a "striking nature" that suggests it might better be called a "non-cadential 'tonic arrival'" rather than a "genuine cadence." Burstein also echoes Caplin's reading of "struggle" in this cadence.

I wrote in my earlier post (link): I hear it quite differently, as the most emphatic, in-your-face ascending ^5-^6-^7-^8 line in the Classical repertoire. It stands out in every respect, you can't miss it, and you know you're done when it's done. That's a cadence.

And to "odd character," "striking nature," and "non-cadential 'tonic arrival'": Consider that the simple descending line must cope with the disruptive ("striking"?) cadential 6/4 that was essential to the Italian style after its introduction into Neapolitan opera in the 1730s. Disruptive enough, in fact, that a few Schenkerians are still arguing about it three centuries later. By contrast, the harmony and voice leading for the rising line, with a pleasant set of parallel sixths or thirds even, are quite smooth.

Here is an example I found recently: Mozart, Divertimento [Trio] for Violin, Viola, and Cello, K. 563 (1788), Menuet 2, Trio 2. No mistaking this for anything other than a Ländler, or we should say the very recognizable Ländler topic within a typical ABA small form in a multi-movement instrumental piece meant for private or salon performance. 

The fact that Mozart includes the upper-register close, with the ascending line based on the focal note F5 as a bonus, shows not only what we would expect of him, a comprehensive, curious, and immediate knowledge of all the music around him, but also the definite possibility that musicians playing in public places like restaurants and taverns occasionally used these cadence figures in performance. The instrumentation, btw, invokes what became known in Vienna as the "Linzer Geiger," a popular type with two violins and bass.

Here is a reduction of the A-section:

Note that Mozart maintains the one-chord-per-bar convention of the Ländler.
-----

My series Ascending Cadence Gestures: New Historical Survey includes the time span 1650-1780 in Part 3 and 1780-1860 in Part 4. Link to a post directing to Part 3 files: link. Link to a post directing to a Part 4 summary: link.

Caplin, Chopin, and preluding

 I recently (link) wrote about William E. Caplin's Cadence: A Study of Closure in Tonal Music (2024), which is in two parts, each at over 300 pages: the first concerns the familiar Viennese trio of composers, about whose music Caplin without doubt has the most detailed and most comprehensive knowledge of anyone alive; but the second part looks at cadences in the earlier 18th and later 19th centuries.

The final section of chapter 8 (of the book's 9) is a survey of all the Chopin Preludes. Of course, the one of interest here is no. 9 in E major. I repeat a paragraph from an earlier post: link.

[Quote from notes in my 1987 JMT article]: "Pieces that appear to use a rising line from ^5 but in fact do not include Chopin, Prelude in E Major, op. 28, no. 9 (three-part Ursatz with line from ^3 above ^2 implied in the cadence)."  ---- I have already written about this at length: link to the first post; link to the follow-up post. The "short version": Until recently I was comfortable with the comment above, despite the work needed to imagine ^2; Carl Schachter repeated the analysis without giving me credit for precedent (and his editor Joseph Straus failed to catch it); but recently Emily Ahrens Yates revisited the piece and produced a thoroughly convincing analysis that shows the piece does have an ascending Urlinie.

Caplin doesn't dispute the ascending line in the cadence, but he interprets the cadence in a decidedly qualified way:

[Bars 9-12] see the melody again rise stepwise from ^5 in the context of a general ascending-step model-sequence technique. This time, however, the various modal inflections of the harmony yield chromatically flattened ^6 and ^7 degrees; only the final V-I leading into measure 12 resolves the leading tone to tonic in the melody. In itself, of course, this final progression qualifies as cadential, yet because it seems to emerge as the last link in a broader ascending-stepwise sequence, its cadential effect seems rather forced. Combined with the rhetorically powerful dynamic, it is as though Chopin were insisting hard that we take the final progression as cadential, even if it seems to be a part of the broader sequential process.

It is good to see Caplin venture beyond description to interpretation. What his comment suggests to me is indeed the "prelude" in its common 19th century role as introduction to performance of a featured composition. Over time there has been much talk of Romantic fragments, album leaves, and souvenirs, but not often enough about the everyday practice of preluding that was still firmly embedded through at least the first half of the 19th century.

So then, what might the E major Prelude be prelude to? It is clearly a slow and solemn march, and one would expect a serious follow-up, perhaps a sonata-like or large ABA movement at a moderately fast tempo, maybe even in a minor key. That's by no means guaranteed--like fantasies and potpourris, a prelude of any length was expected to offer a variety of textures, tempi, and figures. But preludes--at least as we see them in published collections--could also be short and uniform, and I will assume that here.

Preludes could also be tonally closed, despite our common experience of the very elaborate introductions in virtuoso pieces, where the most showy cadenza is either on or leads to a dominant. 

For some historical examples of the various possibilities as gathered in collections, see Czerny's opus 61 "Praeludien, Cadenzen, und kleine Fantasien im brillanten Style", his opus 696 "60 Prèludes pour Piano," and a book Die Kunst des Präludierens, op.300, about which there is literature and even a Schenker-influenced modern edition. Also see Paul Barbot, L'art de préluder au piano, op.94 (1868); and Clara Schumann, Praeludien (ms. c1895): link.

Here is a version with the E major Prelude as introduction to a polonaise by Józef Elsner, who was Chopin's composition teacher in Warsaw.

Here is a version with the E major Prelude as introduction to a polonaise by Chopin himself, from the Introduction and Polonaise for Cello and Piano, op. 3:

Both versions work appropriately in the manner of the 1830s and 1840s and demonstrate that the EM Prelude can be a prelude, but I admit that I favor the second version because of the continuation of triplet figures.

Alternate endings

Toward the end of his lecture on register in popular songs from c1900-1950, Michael Buchler summarizes his main points as a list of "Some Suggestions." For information on the lecture, see my post from 16 March: link. 

The fifth of his suggestions is: "Embrace a broader notion of obligatory register. The upper register is the most likely space for closure in certain types of music- especially vocal music."  An extended segment of the talk--starting at 27:00 and going to 35:00--is given over to this, the songs being "Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin'" from Oklahoma! (1943) and "It's Been A Long, Long Time" by Jule Styne (music) and Sammy Cahn (lyrics) 1945. 

Here are four more with written-out alternative high-register endings:

C. K. Harris, "Just Behind the Times" (1896).  Copy uploaded to IMSLP from the University of Wisconsin Libraries.

Richard Whiting, "Throw Me a Kiss (From Over the Sea)" (1917). Copy uploaded to IMSLP from the Ohio State University Libraries.

Egbert van Alstyne, "Because You're Irish" (1917). Digital copy from the Library of the University of Maine. 

H. M. Tennent, "Tomorrow Morning" (1926). 

Harris's "Just Behind the Times" comes from fairly early in his career, and that's obvious from the old-style (and low-quality) print. But the performance practice of ending high is clearly taken for granted (as it probably was on the musical stage much earlier in the 19th century).

Richard Whiting, "Throw Me a Kiss (From Over the Sea)" (1917). 

Egbert van Alstyne, "Because You're Irish" (1917) digital copy from the Library of the University of Maine. This and Tennent's "Tomorrow Morning" are remarkable for their fully written-out upper-register endings.

H. M. Tennent, "Tomorrow Morning" (1926).

William Caplin on rising lines

In what seems to be a movement toward monumentalism in music theory, three major books have appeared in the past few years with page totals running over 600 pages: Julian Hook’s Exploring Musical Spaces: A Synthesis of Mathematical Approaches (Oxford, 2023), at 864 pages; Dmitri Tymoczko’s Tonality: An Owner’s Guide (Oxford, 2023), at 672 pages; and William E. Caplin’s Cadence: A Study of Closure in Tonal Music (Oxford, 2024), which comes in at 648 pages with 715 musical examples. 

Cadence finishes a trilogy of exceedingly detailed and careful studies of formal functions in what is still usually called “Classical” music; that is, larger-scale compositions by musicians working mainly in Vienna from roughly 1780 to 1830 and, to be honest, among them really only Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. 

The earlier volumes are Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (Oxford, 1998) and Analyzing Classical Form: An Approach for the Classroom (Oxford, 2013), this latter monumental in its own right at 736 pages. 

The first of these books was largely responsible (along with one by Warren Darcy and James Hepokoski) for the revival of scholarly interest in the formalist analysis of formal functions in European music of the 18th and 19th centuries. The second was a pedagogical expansion of same, although for practical use in teaching one might reasonably have hoped (I certainly did) for more concision, not greater length. The new entry focuses on a single aspect, the cadence, and classifies and interprets formal functions on those terms.

Classical Form was certainly a great accomplishment, valuable for teaching (we used it for more than a decade as the primary text in graduate analysis courses; I was even able to teach its rudiments in a graduate harmony review course) and for research (though Hepokoski and Darcy’s focus on sectional processes seemed to capture graduate student interest more than Caplin’s priority to quadratic syntax, 8-bar themes, and a tight/loose binary). 

I used the book’s categories at the theme level for an extended, multi-part study of formal functions in Mozart menuets and to develop a model for the galant theme (Caplin’s antecedent–continuation hybrid), which was foundational to that musical style in the 1750s-1770s. 

Here are some links: Index to my essays, which has a complete list of the essays relating to formal functions: link. The first of the Mozart studies: Part 1: Orchestral Works and Independent Sets. Mozart, J. C. Bach, and the galant theme: Part 3: A Comparison with Johann Christian Bach.

    ————————

The point of interest here is a short section in chapter 5 of Cadence. For reference, the chapter titles and subheadings are on the book's webpage: link to OUP titles; click on the tab “Table of Contents.” Here are the chapter titles only:

CHAPTER 1 IDEAS OF CLOSURE

PART 1 THE CLASSICAL CADENCE

CHAPTER 2 GENERAL CONCEPTS OF THE 

CLASSICAL CADENCE

CHAPTER 3 BASIC CADENCE TYPES: 

MORPHOLOGY AND FUNCTION

CHAPTER 4 CADENTIAL DEVIATIONS

CHAPTER 5 CADENTIAL EXPANSION

PART 2 CADENCE IN OTHER TONAL STYLES

CHAPTER 6 CADENCE IN THE HIGH BAROQUE

CHAPTER 7 CADENCE IN THE GALANT ERA

CHAPTER 8 CADENCE IN THE ROMANTIC ERA

CHAPTER 9 CADENCE IN THE MID TO LATE 

NINETEENTH CENTURY  

As his reviewer, Poundie Burstein, describes Caplin’s method,

[it] is to seek precision in establishing strict formal categories matched by flexibility in analytic application. [He] tends to regard (at least ideally) the categories associated with cadential status as either-or propositions. An advantage of his absolutist attitude is that it allows for remarkable lucidity by establishing sharp definitions. This provides a solid vantage point to discuss specific analytic situations, avoiding the waffling that might result from vaguer definitions. [At the same time,] to help counter the [inevitable] problems that arise from categorical strictness, Caplin's analyses of cadences tend to be impressively flexible. [In some cases, he will provide] either hedged or alternative readings of the phrase endings. 

Here is the section in Chapter 5 on ascending lines: 5.1.2.11. Additional Patterns/Ascending Melodic Pattern (5̂/6̂/7̂/8̂) (p265)

Despite what is often taught in elementary harmony classes, a melodic line that ascends to its goal tonic occurs infrequently in the classical repertory. In the context of an ECP, a straightforward case arises at the end of the main theme group shown in Example 5.46, where the process of attaining the high F (8̂) represents the melodic, dynamic, and textural climax of the section. 

A similar, but more complex case, is seen in the earlier discussed Example 5.2. Like the previous example, this passage also produces the climactic moment of the main theme, though the sudden shift to piano in measure 19 slightly delays the ongoing progressive dynamic. In both cases, we sense the composer giving special emphasis to the ascending line in a manner that highlights all the more this nonconventional melody.

Both of these are indeed straightforward, but I should note that they are internal to the movement, whereas I decided several years ago to focus only on principal ending cadences. A small matter, perhaps, as either of these could have served as such, with a coda or codetta to follow and finish.

Burstein hedges more than a bit: "What is particularly striking about the ^5-^6-^7-^8 cadence is that its top voice surges entirely upwards, which tends to militate against the sense of closure expected at a cadence." About the Haydn passage above, he asks "Might its striking nature be better highlighted by labelling it as a non-cadential 'tonic arrival,' thereby helping to distinguish it from more normative authentic cadences?" It's very hard to hear such a thing as mere "tonic arrival" in the context of this strongly defined two-reprise form.

Because of the long notes, Burstein also refers to the ascending line as "struggling," but I hear it quite differently, as the most emphatic, in-your-face ascending ^5-^6-^7-^8 line in the Classical repertoire. It stands out in every respect, you can't miss it, and you know you're done when it's done.

Thomas Morley on ascent in the cadence

A surprising recommendation from Thomas Morley (1597):

Two earlier posts about the ascending cadence gesture in music by Thomas Morley: link 1; link 2.

Michael Buchler's lecture on songs

Michael Buchler is Professor of Music Theory in the College of Music, Florida State University. He has uploaded to Vimeo a version of his keynote address for the 2025 conference of Music Theory Southeast: link. The title of the file is Buchler MTSE Keynote 2025. 

Here is a list of songs he discusses, in order of appearance. Not all have rising lines, but all involve register in an important way and all are given analyses and interpretations that are appealing and illuminating.

• "Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue Has Anybody Seen My Girl" Ray Henderson (music) Sam Lewis and Joe Young (lyrics) 1925
• "Singin" in the Rain" Nacio Herb Brown (music) Arthur Freed (lyrics) 1929
• "In Florida Among the Palms" Irving Berlin 1916
• "Bewitched" Rodgers & Hart 1941
• "All er Nuthin'" from Oklahoma! (1943)
• "Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin'" from Oklahoma! (1943)
• "It's Been A Long, Long Time" Jule Styne (music) Sammy Cahn (lyrics) 1945
• "Keep Marching" from Suffs Shaina Taub (music and lyrics) 2024