Rounds and canons, part 1

The play of register in the compact designs of vocal rounds sets up a structure that is quite amenable to rising cadence figures—although of course we have to keep in mind that what constitutes the ending depends entirely on the circumstances of performance.

In "Row, row, row your boat," the registral units (intervals) are ^1-^3, ^3-^5, ^8-^5 (expanded to ^8-^1), and ^5-^1. In "Frère Jacques," the sequence is ^1-^3, ^3-^5, ^5-^1, and ^1-^-5-^1. Any of these units that include ^1 or ^8 can act as the close. Here are some examples.

From Novello's School Round-Book, published in two volumes (1852, 1854). "Thou, poor bird" is a registral sibling of "Row, row, row your boat," the only difference being that the third unit stays on ^8-^5. If the end is taken with the fermatas (as suggested by the volumes' editor), then one easily imagine a singer repeating D5 for the second syllable of "warble."

In "The rose's age is but a day" from volume 2, the first three units are the same, but the fourth is restricted to a functional but non-melodic bass. There are no fermatas this time, but one can easily imagine four voices ending together, with the simple rising line in the uppermost register.

In "Go learn of the ant," also from volume 2, the harmonic vocabulary is a bit richer, and we can discern in the first unit the shape of an ascending Urlinie variant: ^5-^6-^8-^7-^8.

Three-voice rounds can easily dispense with the upper fourth—in fact, many do in the 19th-century collections I have examined to date—but a few are like "The rose's age is but a day." In "Come let us all a maying go," for example, the division of soprano, alto, bass is quite clear, and the soprano—after its descending octave in the first phrase—remains in the upper fourth for the second phrase.

This round from the New York Glee Book (1844) is similar in its basic design but manages to spread melodic values over the three parts.

Canons, catches, and rounds were very popular entertainments in earlier centuries, as well. Here are two from Thomas Ravenscroft's Pammelia (1609), which is subtitled "Musicks Miscellanie, or, a Mixed Varietie of Pleasant Roundelayes, and delightfull Catches." Note in "Dame lend me a loafe" that the ending (final unit) is in the upper fourth.

The first example was about food; the second is about drink. I have marked the three units and boxed their closing figures.

Thanks to . . .

I have used GraphicConverter from Lemke Software (link) for longer than I can remember. Well, not quite. The first version appeared in 1992, and I know that I was using it not long after that. As is the case with many shareware users, I suspect, it took me 3-4 years before I decided that the program really was invaluable and finally purchased a license, which I have updated ever since. All graphics work in this blog and in my essays published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform has been done with the conversion and editing functions in GraphicConverter. My thanks to Thorsten Lemke for creating and maintaining an excellent, stable, and versatile product.

On the other hand, I am only a recent convert to MuseScore, currently in version 2.3.2 (link). My earliest attempts to use music notation programs were with Keith Hamel's NoteWriter, one of the first reasonably well-functioning (if quite limited) programs for the Mac. When NoteAbilityPro (for Intel-based Macs) replaced NoteWriter, I tried it but gave up not long after -- just as I later did with Sibelius -- because I needed only a very small subset of the program's capabilities and because it was too much work, given what I actually needed, to learn the necessary keyboard shortcuts. (Mouse-intensive work is hard on my hands.) MuseScore is specifically designed to be easy to use in its basic functions and it produces a very clean, good looking music score. For additional editing, I export to PDF, then to JPG using GraphicConverter. For those who need it, MuseScore Pro can be used to create complex scores and analysis graphs.

Finally, I was delighted when Apple released iWorks 8.0 and then 9.0. Pages was designed on a page layout basis but worked equally well and seamlessly as a word processor. It was easy to use and was perfect for the graphics intensive essays that I have been publishing on Texas ScholarWorks since 2010. Some of the earliest of those were conversions from web pages originally uploaded to university servers that were later decommissioned. Others, of course, were derived from posts to my blogs on blogspot. Unfortunately, newer releases of Pages (I am now using 7.1) seem to have separated out page layout and word processing, and I find it somewhat more difficult to use, but I will stick with it.

Post no. 301 and a (slight) change of focus

For most of the history of this blog, I have produced a series of posts on a single topic, then gathered those posts into an essay published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform (link).

I am currently working on a large-scale project that traces ascending melodic gestures in the stage works of Jacques Offenbach, as well as some of his predecessors (mainly Adolphe Adam, Donizetti,  and Hervé) and successors (Charles Lecocq, André Messager, possibly also Johann Strauss II). For this multi-part essay series, which is expected to run for a year or more, I will announce each part as it is published on Texas ScholarWorks. A few representative excerpts will probably be posted here as well.

The main goal for this blog going forward, however, is to return to my original conception of it: occasional posts on individual works as I find them and infrequent posts surveying mentions of the rising line in the music theory literature, in connection with or in response to my 1987 JMT article.

Some time ago now (in 2010, in fact) I wrote a series of posts (link to the first) and then gathered those as an essay (link) on Carl Schachter's two extended engagements with the ascending Urlinie. Nowhere else in the literature did my work on this topic merit so much attention, and I remain grateful to him for it, even if I completely disagree with his conclusions (or, really, with the grounds on which those conclusions were reached).

I have written previously about a few articles and books that mention the ascending Urlinie and/or analyses that utilize it (or specifically criticize it):

• Emily Ahrens Yates and Carl Schachter on Chopin, Op. 28n9 (link); (link)
• Michael Buchler, conference paper on Disney (link) and publications (link)
• Charles Burkhart, unpublished analysis of Couperin, Pieces de Clavecin, Ordre 5, "La Flore" (link)
• Suzannah Clark, critique of an analysis by Thomas Denny, from her Analyzing Schubert (link)
• Walter Everett, article on 19th-century songs (link); (link); (link)
• Henry Martin on Miles Davis's "Four" (link); comment by Mark McFarland and response by Martin (link)
• William Rothstein, in an article on implied notes, comment on the ascending Urlinie (link) and analysis of Beethoven, op. 119n7 (link)
• Heinrich Schenker, Bach Prelude in C Major, BWV 924 (and 924a) (link)
• Jeffrey Swinkin, analysis of Scriabin, Op. 11n13 (link)
• Naphtali Wagner on Sgt. Pepper (link)
• Channan Willner, essay on the polyphonic Ursatz (link)
• Jason Yust on Beethoven, Op. 22, III (link)
• Matthew Brown, Explaining Tonality (link)

Post no. 300

It is four years to the day that I started this blog (introductory post), and this post is the 300th in the series. The blog has provided material for over twenty essays published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform (link to my author page).

The focus has been quite narrow throughout: ascending cadence gestures in traditional European tonal music. Though my work on these figures has its roots in Schenkerian analysis—an article I published thirty-one years ago ("The Ascending Urlinie," in Journal of Music Theory)—I use those particular constructions only some of the time, because of problems with the figure of the focal tone (Kopfton), which I see as defined too narrowly to be generally useful. I opt more often (1) for the model of proto-backgrounds (link; see also Neumeyer 2009), (2) for style historical methods in connection with the dominant ninth chord and what I call the “waltz ninth,” (3) for similar methods and speculative modes for improvisatory practices, especially in the later 18th and early 19th centuries, and (4) for historical narratives of music for social dance, of music for the stage through the nineteenth century, and of composition in general in the later decades of that century, both narratives continuing to be relevant in the first half of the 20th century, as well.

The great majority of the traditional tonal music preserved in scores and manuscript makes use of form-defining cadences in which the principal melody line descends the scale to end on the tonic note. A significant minority, however, follow an upward path to end on scale degree eight (^8), a “circling” path around ^8, or a “mirror” path down from ^8 to ^5 and returning. An early surprise in my work was to find a considerably larger than average percentage of rising lines in the country dances preserved in John Playford's Dancing Master (first edition 1651; link to essay), which fact suggested to me that the figures were relatively common in dance-performance practice, including improvisation. It must be remembered that music for social dance was predominantly music for the violin (secondarily, flute) and that the instrument’s fifths mapping made it as easy to rise from the middle of the scale to ^8 as it did to descend to ^1. 

I later found considerable corroborating evidence in Scottish and Irish dances and dance-songs, these coming largely from the later 18th century (link; link; link), and in the Germanophone Laendler, one of the waltz ancestors and especially closely associated with the violin, later in the 18th century with an ensemble of two violins and bass.

In the example below, the four open strings are depicted at the left in (a) and (b). From the open A-string, one moves with the greatest ease down the D-major scale, as in (a), or up the D-major scale, as in (b). In counterpoint, supposing for example, one violin improvises a descant to the other, the work is almost as easy, one of the simplest versions shown in (c). Another version with a bit more melodic complexity is shown in (d). Register play, in other words, offered a simple device to "do something different," specifically to do something different for an ending/articulation that didn’t run afoul of the traditional cadenza, where ^2 goes down to ^1 while ^7 goes up to ^8, making intervals of the major sixth and the octave (or minor third and unison). Not coincidentally, the alternative higher-register cadence offered a sound that was "bright" or "brilliant."

Additional corroboration of early practices came from 17th-century Germany and Austria; these included repertoires across the entire spectrum of genres, excluding only sacred choral music: link to essay.

The history and practice of rising cadence gestures quickly became more complicated in the early 19th century. Broadly, though, cadences can be heard as prominent expressive gestures and a turn toward less common cadences fits nicely with our familiar nostrums about Romantic rebellion against eighteenth-century conventions—and it aligns well with music theorists' recent revelations about a kind of shadow tonality of hexatonic relations that arise from the exploitation of chromatic mediants, early on especially by Schubert, whose Laendler and Deutscher ("German dance," the other ancestor of the waltz) made significant use of rising figures. This is music, incidentally, we know passed back and forth between music for dance and music for performance, not only in Schubert’s case but in the pragmatic circumstances of music publishing and (especially) domestic use. 

Strangely, perhaps, I have found so far that straightforward expressive motivations for rising gestures—exhilaration, release, etc.—seem to have been far less prevalent than generic, topical, or formal-design considerations. The few coincidences of text and cadence, predictably, were found in the 19th century, after the clichéd cadence figures derived from earlier Italian practice had been largely abandoned (or, at least, their authority undermined). Examples: Grieg, Morgenstimmung (the analogy of musical ascent and the rising sun; link); Schubert, "Die Nonne" (the religious-utopian; link); Strauss, jr., Die Fledermaus n2 (increasing energy, demand, insistence: "Hinaus!”; link); Wolf, "Trunken müssen wir alle sein!” (as in Strauss; link).

As I have already noted, the rising cadence gesture was part of the toolkit of the waltz, and from there it went directly to the polka by no later than 1840. When an aria or other song used a waltz topic, the gesture went along with it. The floodgates were opened in French comic opera by no later than 1834 (see my essay on Adolphe Adam's Le Châlet: link), and rising cadences remained a factor in the opera bouffe and operettas of Offenbach, Lecocq, and others before finding a niche in the American operetta (Herbert) and the musical (notably those by Richard Rodgers).

The formal figure of the rising gesture in the coda of an aria or instrumental movement became firmly established in the last quarter of the 18th century. In some pieces, though, the boundary line between the "structural cadence" and coda figures became blurry—a process already underway earlier in the ensemble finales of Galuppi, with their many repetitions of cadential phrases, a dramatic device adopted by many composers, notably Mozart and Rossini. The process accelerated in the 19th century, more vigorously and consequentially in music for the stage than in instrumental concert music.

An important outlier in all this is Beethoven, for whom transcendence, as a philosophical-religious category, could mean striving to move not just to the top of the voice leading, but outside or beyond it. For my only comments on this to date, see my post on Op119n7: link. My plan is to do more with this eventually, engaging work by David Lewin, Robert Fink, and, more recently, Malcolm Miller.

Hugo Wolf songs, Part 4

"Cophtisches Lied II" (Goethe Lieder no. 15) is written in the style of accompanied recitative (by Wolf's day largely indistinguishable from the music of vocal melodramas intended for recital or salon performance: see References for more information). The poem is in ten lines, two units of five lines each. The overall expressive trajectory is from the shifting figures, fragments of phrases, and chromaticism of the traditional (18th century) accompanied recitative to a steady march (in the piano coda marcato, fortissimo).

Emphasized pitches in the voice part at the beginning trace a line from ^5 to ^#7 in D minor, though the underlying harmony wanders far afield:

For the remaining lines of the first verse, the line sinks back through C-nat5 to the piano's pianissimo B3 (bar 13). I have not marked it but also notice an ancillary line bringing G4 (bar 8) through F4 (bars 9-11 in the piano, bar 11 in the voice) to E4 in the voice (bar 12; then repeated by the piano in the following bars). This register persists as an inner voice during the second verse.

For the second verse, the voice puts D: ^6 in the fifth octave (bar 17), then on a somewhat tortured path eventually finds it way to the structural cadence and D5 (bar 27). Given the shifting movements of the harmony, even in this march section, I hesitate to ascribe any particular figure to the voice's background shape, other than it rises overall.

References: The most important source is Sarah Hibberd, ed., Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama (Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). The scholar who has written most extensively about melodrama is Jacqueline Waeber. See her Musique dans le texte: Le mélodrame, de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris,  2005). Some examples of melodramas of the type I mention written by contemporaries of Wolf include Franz Liszt, Lenore, S.346 (1857–58); Carl Haslinger, Der Bettler vom Rialto, Op.124 (1868?); and Siegfried Ochs, Der Handschuh (1883).

Hugo Wolf songs, Part 3

"Komm, Liebchen, komm!”   (Goethe Lieder no. 44). Design is ternary, where A is closed in the tonic key, B is extended and shifts keys several times, and A' is complete, where the voice line is often altered and the piano part is the same until the approach to the final cadence. A full page coda for the piano follows that cadence.

The A section is in two segments, the first closing with a PAC on V--see the cadence chord in bar 9 below. The set of circled notes in the piano, right hand, show steady step-wise progress upward from Eb5 to Ab5 in the cadence that closes the A section.

The voice part works quite differently. I have isolated it below. The Eb5 at (a) is the seventh in an F7 chord, dominant of Bb. It is touched on again and then resolves downward, first to D-nat5, then Db5, and we would expect the line to continue downward to C5, but instead the voice returns to Eb5 at (d) and the piano left hand takes over to resolve the Db (as seventh of Eb7)--see arrow. At (b) an inner voice moves up by step reaching A-nat4, which joins the upper Eb5 in an unfolded diminished fifth -- at (c1). This resolves as expected to a third at (c2); I have shown the upper note as Db5, but to match harmony in the strictest way it would have been D-nat5. In any case, as the upper voice Eb5 is recovered at (d), the lower voice moves on from Bb4 to the lower note of the unfolded fifth Ab4-Eb5 at (e), and cadential closure follows -- with that framing interval, Ab4-Eb5, intact (see final bar). (The two asterisks, btw, point to admittedly obvious register play.)

The detail in the discussion above is of interest because of the way Wolf rewrites the reprise of the A section. The first half, bars 59-67, is shown below. The piano carries its left-hand tenor melody again, and the voice winds its way within the interval frame Eb4-Ab4-Eb5. The cadence, however, is most easily approached from ^3, as shown beginning in bar 64.

The second half of the reprise suggests the possibility of the voice part moving onward from that ^3 (see bar 69) and steadily upward to the cadence on Ab5--see bars 77-79. The piano part goes even further, expanding its right-hand movement from earlier to move step-by-step to overtop the voice at ^3 (as C6).