More from Martin; response from McFarland

In yesterday's post I summarized analytical work by Henry Martin including three non-traditional Schenkerian backgrounds for jazz compositions. One of those was a rising line, as a reading of Miles Davis's "Four."

One response to that article touches on the rising line and so I continue comment here, with the caveats that (1) I am not at all knowledgeable about jazz repertoire and practices; but (2) I am wary of the ideological work being done by any applications of Schenkerian or Neo-Schenkerian models to this music.

That said, the other scholar who was engaged with Schenkerian analysis of jazz over a long period of time is the late Steve Larson. Martin and Larson seem to me to have carried over the 1970s' era differences with respect to tonal analysis between Princeton and the New York/Yale axis, the one more methodologically liberal and composition-oriented, the other more methodologically conservative and musicology-oriented. As that survives into the present here, it is mostly about different attitudes towards the Schenkerian background constructs and the rules or heuristics for their derivation.

In Music Theory Online (18n3, September 2012--link to the issue), a memorial issue for Larson, Mark McFarland describes the basic differences well: Larson, he says, "strove as much as possible to approach jazz using as orthodox a form of Schenkerian theory as possible" (¶1), where Martin was willing to entertain a "list of modifications to Schenkerian theory" based on the view that conventional readings may be unconvincing and thus alternatives should be developed that could "provide superior readings” (¶2). The core of the difference in practice is that Larson insisted on reducing dissonances, including the most characteristic dissonances of jazz, to traditional consonances, where Martin insisted on the inviolability of the tune, which not only preserved dissonances but provoked readings with non-traditional backgrounds.

McFarland's critique of Martin's analysis of "Four" is in ¶¶5-10 of his article, and I refer the reader to those paragraphs for details. McFarland starts by noting that the analysis "is, in some ways, the least controversial graph in Martin’s study as it ultimately reduces to the ascending Urlinie." Further, "While I have no problem with the ascending Urlinie, . . . I question the scale degrees at which [this] Urlinie is interrupted, the number of appearances of interruption within this opening chorus, and the radically different reading of the two halves of this antecedent-consequent period" [¶5].

Here are the basic elements of McFarland's reading, pulled out of his Example 2. Unlike Martin, McFarland commendably reads the entirety of the 32-bar chorus.

Note that, although McFarland uses the term "ascending Urlinie," he has notated the alto voice with the background's open notes and the "4-zug" with beamed closed notes. Thus, in fact the ascending cadence gesture, according to him, belongs to the middleground, not the background. This is pretty much what William Rothstein, whom McFarland cites, said in 1991. Note also that the alto is given priority at bar 9 -- this reminds me of Channon Willner's privileging of the alto in Baroque music (see an earlier post on this blog), but where I found that plausible, I have trouble seeing the justification here.

Below, I have reproduced only the final eight bars of McFarland's graph aligned with the middleground level of Martin's analysis. This is for reference. I don't have anything to add.

Finally, I have isolated the same elements from McFarland's transcription (it is Example 1 in the article examples file on MTO). The boxes indicate the specific elements included in my "short" version of McFarland's graph (the first example in this post). The asterisks mark the only two chords that are the same. That alone suggests to me that the "underlying consonances" approach threatens to distort not only the surface of the music but its foundations. All this connects, not surprisingly, to the theoretical problem of variations: does the structure of the theme underlie all the variations, or is it the musical task of the variations to "rewrite" the theme? That can't be answered with any simple pronouncement.

Further citations:
William Rothstein 1991. “On Implied Tones.” Music Analysis 10, no. 3: 289–328.
Steve Larson 1998. "Schenkerian Analysis of Modern Jazz: Questions About Method," Music Theory Spectrum 20/2, 209-241.
Steve Larson 2009. Analyzing Jazz: A Schenkerian Approach. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press.
Henry Martin. 2011. “More Than Just Guide Tones: Steve Larson’s Analyzing Jazz—A Schenkerian Approach.” Journal of Jazz Studies 7, no. 1: 121–44.

Henry Martin on Miles Davis's "Four"

Continuing the series of posts based on entries from my internet search on "Ascending Urlinie," I look at an article by Henry Martin and a response by Mark McFarland.

The citation is Henry Martin. 2011b. “Schenker and the Tonal Jazz Repertory.” Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie [Dutch Journal of Music Theory] 16, no. 1: 1–20. I found this through the journal's archive: link. Martin has been a long-time advocate of Schenkerian analysis applied to the jazz repertoire. His publications can be accessed through his personal website: link.

"This paper proposes ways of expanding the three Schenkerian paradigms (Ursätze) to enable more convincing readings of problematic pieces found in the traditional jazz repertory of standards written generally before 1950. . . . I hope to show that background paradigms differing from Schenker’s provide superior readings of these pieces. I also hope that these additional paradigms will suggest yet even further extensions applicable to jazz literature that is less conventionally tonal" (1). Martin takes up this last issue in a detailed list at the end of the article (pp. 16-18). Here I am concerned with the three analyses that provide the case studies: (1) Buster & Bennie Moten, "Moten Swing," A section only; (2) Sy Oliver, "Opus One," cadencing A section; (3) Miles Davis, "Four" (he shows the final eight bars).

(1) Buster & Bennie Moten, "Moten Swing," A section only;

(2) Sy Oliver, "Opus One," cadencing A section;

(3) Miles Davis, "Four" (he shows the final eight bars, that is, all of the continuation). Here is a condensed version of his level c, a middleground 2, showing the elements of the rising line with its pre-figuring in ^6 as neighbor to ^5. Note the interruption symbol in bar 4 -- we have seen this interruption of the rising line at ^6 before, in the recent post on Naphtali Wagner's chapter about "She's Leaving Home."

Here is a lead sheet I downloaded from an online source (there are multiple copies of this out there and so I am assuming that it is acceptable to use). In any case, I have annotated -- in red -- to show at (a) and (b) the strong motivic directionality at the two-bar level of idea [note that "Four" is structured as a sentence], at (c) a hint of movement still further up beyond ^5, then at (d) the turn back down, and at (e) the crucial and decisive move up to ^8. Note there are two chord differences in the continuation: where Martin has EbM7 in the first bar, the lead sheet has G-7, and where Martin has Dm7(b5) and G7 in bar 4, the lead sheet has simply Bb7. Neither of these materially affect the reading.

In the next example, for reference I have fashioned an "obbligato grid" based on the chord symbols in the lead sheet.

Finally, here is my own simplified graph (without interruption and encompassing both statements, with first and second endings):