Thursday, June 8, 2017

JMT series, part 4a-2 (simple rising lines)

In note 28 I wrote "Other pieces that use the simplest form of the rising Urlinie include the following (qualifying comments in parentheses)."

Among the pieces named was Haydn, Symphony no. 104, III. It's not quite as simple as I claimed, however—there is a drop from ^6 down to ^7, which also happens in the menuet of Symphony no. 86 (as discussed in my essay Ascending Cadence Gestures: A Historical Survey from the 16th to the Early 19th Century, published on Texas Scholar Works: link). About Symphony 86 I wrote:
This time [in the reprise] B5 drops to C#5-D5 for the cadence. The end result is a "circle" of sorts, from D5 back to itself, but by means of an octave's worth of a scale. This device of undercutting the rise from ^6 to ^7 is discussed in my JMT article and seems to be particularly characteristic of the later 18th century. To speculate: the conventions associated with the dominant Italian style (which we know better nowadays through research on the partimenti, evidence of methods of instruction) were so strong that Haydn felt an obligation to observe them in some situations, rather than take full advantage of the rising cadence gesture. In any case, the leap downward from a subdominant to the leading tone is very expressive in and of itself.
The key is the same in Symphony no. 104, ^5 is as firmly settled as the tonic pedal note underneath it, and a string of parallel sixths lead the melodic line down to the cadence. Only the sforzando on the last beat of bar 6 suggests anything different: B5 sticks out above, then leaps down to the dominant's C#5 (see the box).

What that sforzando hints at it is the possibility of a rising line from A5, but, as happened in Symphony no. 86, directionality is undermined by curling back to the lower octave instead of rising toward C#6 and D6.


As is well known, Haydn can't seem to leave things alone in a reprise, and the effects can easily be seen even in design features like linear patterns. In the A section, the eight-bar theme is repeated (in different instrumentation). In the reprise, the theme statement makes it through six bars before changes start, the overall result being an extension of the continuation phrase from four bars to eleven, including two bars of grand pause (!), and a clearly profiled stepwise ascent from B4 through C#5 to D5 (see the second system below). The codetta adds a little flourish that gives us C#5-D6 at last.

This condensed version shows just the ^5-^8 progress over the course of the reprise.