JMT series, part 7-1 (note 32)

n32: The form ^5-^6-(reg.)^7-^8.  In the essay linked below (Ascending Cadence Gestures), I wrote about this form:

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 much better nowadays thanks to important 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. (Survey, p. 64)

In the note, five compositions are mentioned. I have already written about three of them in the essay Ascending Cadence Gestures: A Historical Survey from the 16th to the Early 19th Century: (link).

Haydn, Piano Sonata in E-flat, Hob. XVI/52, II.  Survey, pp. 76-78.
Haydn, Piano Sonata in A-flat, Hob. XVI/43, Menuet. Comment in the note: "the large-scale structure is obscured somewhat by strong emphasis on ^3 in the Trio."  Survey, pp. 74-76.
Haydn, String Quartet, op. 76, no. 2, II. Survey, pp. 78-83.

The other two are Beethoven, String Quartet, op. 74, IV, and Corelli, Trio Sonata, op. 2, no. 8, Preludio. I'll discuss the latter first, because it affords an easy opportunity to sort some of the issues related to register.

Register transfer in the rising line is worth some comment. Examples (a) - (e) apply octave or seventh registral changes to each successive tone of the rising line from ^5. In (a), the very common change of octave over a stable bass; in (b), the figure used by Bach in BWV 924; in (c), the registral variant I reference in note 32; in (d), the highly violinistic broken figures one frequently finds in Baroque music, where it is a 50-50 chance the final ^8 will be in the lower or upper octave; in (d'), a variant that applies the register change to a neighbor note -- this is a major-key version of the figure in the Corelli prelude to be discussed below; (e) is similar to (a), a simple octave embellishment of ^8.

My comment in note 32 is that "Very occasionally register transfer is applied to other tones [than ^6]: in Corelli, Trio Sonata, op. 2, no. 8, Preludio, the variant ^5-^6-^7-(^8-^7)-^8 has a dramatic octave-leap downward applied to the first ^8." As my parentheses suggest, the register change here is applied to a middleground neighbor note, not to an Urlinie tone.

The reading requires a line from ^5, which is certainly as plausible as one from ^3, even if we were to insist on a descending Urlinie form. In the closing cadence, the first violin takes the line steadily up but breaks at the dramatic #4 diminished chord to place its final notes an octave lower -- and below the persistent descent of the second violin. Here is another notation of the ending, emphasizing the parallel 10ths between bass and first violin and positioning the final notes in their "correct" octave. I just placed "correct" in scare quotes but it doesn't really need them -- the correct, simple, and proper voiceleading of all the parts above this harmony clearly demands that the first violin end in the fifth octave (its obligatory register, in other words).

In the next post I will examine the problem of the "descant" voice in Corelli, as presented in a book chapter by William Rothstein.
In the JMT article, note 32, I also mention Beethoven, String Quartet, op. 74, IV. A subsequent post will discuss that.

JMT series, part 3d (on BWV 924 and 924a)

Schenker published an analysis essay on BWV 924—he also comments on BWV 924a—in the fourth of the ten-volume series of pamphlets called Der Tonwille, the title translated authoritatively if infelicitously as The Will of the Tone (Schenker 2004). I have already discussed his reading in part 3b (link), where I said that, although I had rejected Schenker's reading (with its ascending Urlinie) in the JMT article of 1987, now I find it much more appealing and, indeed, preferable to other Schenkerian options.

I reproduced Schenker's graph from my personal copy of the volume, and commented that "[At the time,] I came up with quite a different reading myself—Urlinie from ^5—but on revisiting the matter over this past week [May 2017], I find [Schenker's] first reading of the piece the most convincing of them all. It charts the course of the upper voice beautifully and therefore also matches the bass and its implied (partimento) figures."

As the examples in that post show, "them all" means Schenker's original reading with a rising line; later readings with descent from ^3 by Schenker, Nicolas Meeùs, and Matthew Brown; my alternate reading from ^5; and William Drabkin's reading from ^8 (which actually conforms most closely to Schenker's notation of the background--though not his text commentary--in the Tonwille essay).

As he does in other analytical essays in the series, Schenker begins by showing the "ground-plan," in this case the composing out from a fourth (G5-C6) by gradual accretion of inner voices, then a short linear prefix (E5-F5-G5) elaborated with neighbors, and finally the insertion of bass tones to achieve consonances without parallels. He says that "these interpolated roots . . . are subsumed, along with the neighbor notes, under the concept of a dissonant passing motion, so that they lack the significance of harmonic design in spite of their unbroken progression by fifths" (141-42). This "lack of significance" happens to cover the bass progression as Bach borrowed it from Niedt. It is an irony—though not a lovely one—that Schenker ignores the basis in figured bass practice represented by Niedt and that by all accounts was consistently maintained in Bach's teaching, in favor of an abstract hermeneutics that could only be derived ultimately from Rameau's pseudo-Newtonian structure of tonic, upper dominant, and lower dominant, as that model grounded the harmonic theories (and also the experimental practices) of the nineteenth century.

Not surprisingly then, Schenker misses altogether the compositional assignment as I described it in part 2's post: He says "For the further decoration of the setting the master employs suspensions." That suspensions are built on top of the bass progressions is obvious enough, but the master is in fact doing something unexceptional: one may find in hundreds of partimenti a pedagogical progression that leads to the invention and performance of such devices. Schenker is undeterred: "It is an eternal, irrefutable law of creative nature to show life itself openly, but to keep hidden the germ from which it springs. The deep wisdom of the great German masters, to fulfill this law consistently •in their artistic creations, too, in the least of them as in the greatest, truly cannot be praised enough!" (142). I have already dealt with the absurdity of claims like this in part 3a (link), and since the rest of the analysis follows in a similar vein, we can safely ignore it. I would, however, like to provide a summary of Schenker's account of the remainder of the Prelude in terms of its elaboration of the Urlinie and also comment briefly on his radical (but not unexpected) misconstrual of BWV 924a.

Below is my rough notation of the Urlinie and its bass, as pulled from the graph.

See paragraph 4 above for the "Anstieg" of bars 1-3. The connection between ^5 and ^6 is described similarly in the essay, the descending seventh-line being progressively elaborated by the lower parts. Of the important motions of bar 6, he says almost nothing: "After the fourth-progression has come to an end in bar 6, the leading tone appears immediately in bar 7." Considerable attention is then given to the elaboration of the dominant and that leading tone. Because "the dominant [chord on the first beat of bar 7] still lacks the seventh," the eleven bars of the cadenza "spin a tale" that involves appearance and disappearance of this seventh and the leading tone. He then invites us to "acquaint ourselves with the miraculous fruits of this profound narrative art." Schenker finishes his account with the observation that "For the unfolding of his God-given powers, even eighteen bars were enough for Bach."

It is hardly surprising, then, that Schenker denigrates BWV 924a. "If one also observes the stasis of the third E5 in bars 1 and 2 (how misleading the descent to B4, when E5 is recovered again immediately after it!), if [--additional objections here--]. . . then one has every justification to declare this version with certainty to be an earlier one, perhaps even a draft." Schenker's conclusion, as we know, is wrong in almost every respect.

Fortunately for us, the translator, Joseph Dubiel, with experience as a professional composer, hits the mark in a footnote: "In many respects the alternative version looks like a rearrangement of figures that are used sequentially in the principal version into different sequences, especially ones moving in opposite directions to their originals. Thus the second bar of [Friedemann's] version is parallel to the first, but a third lower (instead of a second higher), the bass of the dominant reached in bar 8 alternates G2-G3 (instead of G3-G2, as in bar 7 of the principal version), and the figuration over this bass rises (instead of falls)."

The reader is referred to Schenker Documents Online for an excellent summary of the content and history of the Tonwille series, and of course also to the editor's introduction to Schenker 2004 & 2005. For further explanation, context, and critique, see Lubben 1993 & 1995, and Clark 2007.

References:
Clark, Suzannah. 2007. "The Politics of the Urlinie in Schenker's Der Tonwille and Der freie Satz," Journal of the Royal Musical Association, cxxxii/1: 141–64.
Lubben, Robert Joseph. 1995. "Analytic Practice and Ideology in Heinrich Schenker's Der Tonwille." PhD diss., Brandeis University.
Lubben, Robert Joseph. 1993. "Schenker the Progressive: Analytic Practice in Der Tonwille." Music Theory Spectrum 15/1: 59–75.
Pastille, William. 1995. "Schenker’s Value Judgments." Music Theory Online 1/6. Link.
Schenker, Heinrich. 2004. "Bach's Little Prelude No. 1 in C Major, BWV 924. 2004. Translated by Joseph Dubiel. In Der Tonwille: Pamphlets/Quarterly Publication in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music, Offered to a New Generation of Youth. . . ., edited by William Drabkin, issues 1-5, 141-44. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schenker, Heinrich. 2005. Der Tonwille: Pamphlets/Quarterly Publication in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music, Offered to a New Generation of Youth. . . ., edited by William Drabkin, issues 6-10. New York: Oxford University Press.
Der Tonwille. The Will of the Tone. [2017] Schenker Documents Online.  http://www.schenkerdocumentsonline.org/profiles/work/entity-001739.html

--------------------
Postscript:
Matthew Brown discusses two analyses of BWV 924, the first of which closely follows Schenker's from Free Composition (Brown 2005, 126-139). But since Brown's readings are used to demonstrate his theory, which if anything hardens still more some of Schenker's assumptions, they offer nothing that's useful to us here. In general, Brown's theory is a "philosophical" rationalization of Schenker's theory; the other (and precedent) rationalization of Schenker—by Lerdahl and Jackendoff—along the lines of cognitive science models (as they stood in the early 1980s) but tempered by Lerdahl's compositional intuitions, is both more creative and more practical.

(Brown, Matthew. Explaining Tonality: Schenkerian Theory and Beyond. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005.)

JMT series, part 3c (on BWV 924 and 924a)

The introduction to the JMT series (link) listed the compositions discussed, with musical examples, in the main text of my 1987 Journal of Music Theory article, The Ascending Urlinie, along with those named in the notes.

The introduction, part 2 (link), added to the list those compositions analyzed by others and only mentioned in the main text of the article. Among those was one composition that merited further discussion: J. S. Bach, Prelude in C Major, BWV 924. In the same post, I reproduced the score and collated it with its variant BWV 924a. Both versions appear in the Clavier-büchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and scholars seem to agree that the latter was probably written by Friedemann.

In two subsequent posts -- JMT Series, part 3a (link) and part 3b (link) -- I focused first (in part 3a) on a comparison of the two versions, assuming that BWV 924 was a pedagogical model that Friedemann was expected to use as the basis of a compositional exercise. In part 3b, I discussed several Schenkerian analyses of BWV 924: Schenker himself in Tonwille, William Drabkin, Nicolas Meeùs, and my own reading from ^5 (from sometime in the 1980s).

In this post (3c), I add another pedagogical note. In a subsequent post (3d), I will offer some additional notes on Schenker's reading.

After that the reader may wish to return to part 4a, which begins discussion of pieces from the notes (as promised in the introduction to this series!): link.

In part 3a, I noted that the ascending fifths series that begins BWV 924 (but Friedemann short circuits and turns into the Romanesca bass) appears only rarely in the documents of the partimento tradition. It can be found, however, in Johann Friedrich Niedt's Musical Guide, a work now generally considered to have been the basis of J. S. Bach's pedagogy (Hiemke). In Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema (190-94), I detailed Bach's adoption of one of Niedt's basses -- which he provides with multiple variations -- in the WTC, C Major Prelude. BWV 924 has an obvious source in another of Niedt's basses for variation:

From this it would seem clear enough that the bass is a foundation, a given, and the upper voice(s) are variable. It also becomes clearer that BWV 924 was indeed intended as a demonstration of "variation" -- or compositional development out of the incipit offered by Niedt's brief model.

If so, then the idea of BWV 924 as an "assignment" and BWV 924a as arising out of that assignment is rendered even more plausible.

And we should also mention that the play with register by both Bach father and son in the cadenza passages follows a recommendation by Niedt: "Such [arpeggio figuration] can be varied in many ways, and one can go through the entire keyboard up to the highest C with arpeggiated chords." Niedt then makes a comparison to the organ: "Those who find this strange in the thorough-bass (for arpeggiated chords are not forbidden in playing Preludes) should consider the function of a four-foot stop on the organ."

References:
Hiemke, Sven. 2005. "'Die beste Methode.' Zur Funktion des Generalbasses in Johann Sebastian Bachs Unterricht in Anlehnung an die Musicalische Handleitung von Friedrich Erhardt Niedt." In Musik zwischen Spätbarock und Wiener Klassik: Festschrift für Gisela Vogel-Beckmann zum 65. Geburtstag. Edited by Gisela Vogel-Beckmann, Hanns-Werner Heister, and Wolfgang Hochstein, 29-45. Berlin: Weidler.
Neumeyer, David. 2015. Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Niedt, Friedrich Erhardt. 1989. Translated by Pamela L. Poulin and Irmgard C. Taylor. The Musical Guide. [Musicalische Handleitung] New York: Oxford University Press.

JMT series, part 3b (more on BWV 924 & 924a)

The earlier of two published analyses by Schenker is in an issue of Der Tonwille—see references at the bottom of this post. It is the only reading with a rising line in his published work.

A facsimile of the detailed reading is below. This comes from my own copy, given to me by my former Indiana colleague Vernon Kliewer on the occasion of his retirement. You can find a cleaner version in Drabkin and Annibaldi, page 63 (again, see references at the end of this post). I wrote this in my JMT article: Schenker "gives an analysis of the first of J. S. Bach’s Twelve Little Preludes in which the essential motion is the 'composing-out of the space of the fourth from G to C.' He describes this motion as accomplished by ^5-^6-^7-^8 over I, followed by a repetition of ^7-^8 over V and I, respectively. . . . By the standards of the fully developed theory, this analysis is unconvincing, but it is more to the point that Schenker’s essay contains no comment suggesting that the rising Urlinie is in any way problematic. In fact one of his closing comments is, 'After this presentation, who can still doubt that this Prelude, through Urlinie, voice leading, and harmony, develops only the triad, the chord of C?'” (276-77; see note at bottom of this post] I then recount how he changed his mind about rising lines over the course of the next two years. As we will see below, I came up with quite a different reading myself—Urlinie from ^5—but on revisiting the matter over this past week, I find this first reading of the piece the most convincing of them all. It charts the course of the upper voice beautifully and therefore also matches the bass and its implied (partimento) figures.

William Drabkin has an equally interesting reading that retains Schenker's upper-voice shapes but expands on them using my three-part Ursatz device (from another 1987 article). His graph is the lower system below. In the upper system, I have pulled out a pair of unfoldings as a complementary way to relate the two upper voices.

Schenker's later analysis (here in a version from Meeùs, Figure 8) runs from the initial ^3 and shifts a great deal of the earlier-level motion to the pedal-point dominant. Allen Forte and the Forte & Gilbert textbook follow this.

Nicolas Meeùs tries to solve the problem of too much attention to the end by creating a different kind of rising inner voice (the one he labels "Cantizans").

I have an unpublished analysis, probably from the 1980s, in which I read the Prelude from ^5. My octave couplings -- at (a) -- imitate those of the WTC I C Major Prelude. At (b) sixths elaborate from above, starting from a unique C6 cover tone. At (c) I might have unfolded a third from B4 to the open note D5.

References:
Meeùs, Nicolas. "Fundamental Line(s)." Conference paper, 2004. Available from the author's website: link.
Drabkin, William, and Claudio Annibaldi. "'Bisogna leggere Schenker': Sull' analisi dell Preludio in  Do Maggiore BWV 924 di Bach." Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 24/1 (1989): 48-66.
Forte, Allen. "Prelude in C Major." Allen Forte Electronic Archive. University of North Texas. Link.
Forte, Allen, and Steven Gilbert. Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis. New York: Norton, 1982.
Schenker, Heinrich. Der Tonwille: Pamphlets in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music: Offered to a New Generation of Youth. Translated by William Drabkin. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
------------
Note: I am embarrassed to say, thirty years later, that I seem to have mischaracterized Schenker's Tonwille background by writing "the graph of the piece shows all six upper-voice tones as large notes (that is, as Urlinie tones) with a subordinate Anstieg leading to the ^5" (277). As you can see from both background and Urlinietafel (foreground) above, this is not the case. Nevertheless, the basic characterization of the Urlinie as consisting of all the labeled notes, except the opening ^3 & ^4, is correct, as it is consistent with Schenker's conception at the time. (He repeatedly refers to "the composing-out of the space of a fourth" in the Tonwille essay.)  If we do read the background strictly according to notation as in Free Composition, then the background is an ^8-^7-^8 neighbor figure: see below (adapted from Drabkin and Annibaldi's example 6). This is Drabkin's reading above without the structural alto.

JMT series, part 3a (more on BWV 924 & 924a)

The Clavier-Büchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1720 to 1725–6) has been described this way: "it is unlikely that this keyboard book reflects [the child's] very first systematic music lessons. . . . More plausibly it may be regarded as instruction in composition" (Christoph Wolff/Peter Wollny, "Wilhelm Friedemann Bach," Oxford Music Online). Wolff & Wollny place BWV 924a among "Friedemann’s own first attempts at composition."

Thus, we must once again be wary of the monumentalizing tendencies in analysis, radicalized in the notion of organic unity, of course, but also through an inevitable tendency in the rhetoric of analysis and its presentation or argument, intensified in the publication-oriented authenticist biases of the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries. (Not to mention the hardening of attitude about a particular reading that often results from classroom repetition.) Perhaps I am myself more than usually sensitive to this at the moment, having just recently finished an essay whose repertoire draws heavily on eighteenth-century Scottish fiddle tunes (link).

In any case, Urlinien and other abstract shapes for BWV 924 and 924a must be regarded cum grano salis. Not with respect to their basic legitimacy as readings—the piece, in either version, is so short that one really can hear some of these shapes—but with respect to subsequent claims that might be made. That is to say, the informal nature of the Clavier-Büchlein and the presence of BWV 924a undermine any conclusion that one's analysis demonstrates just how BWV 924 is another perfect, gleaming jewel in J. S. Bach's compositional crown, another example of German genius, or another instance of a musical genius manipulating the "tonal system." What we can say certainly is that the two versions are evidence of practice in performance, improvisation, and composition.

The collated block-chord reductions below are intended to show how young Friedemann might have developed his own composition out of his source. First, we assume that he learned to play BWV 924, probably as given in the score but also as its bass line, to which he supplied upper voices in the manner of the Neapolitan partimento pedagogy. From this point, he would be expected to use the musical materials to fashion original pieces, the best of which was written into the Clavier-Büchlein as BWV 924a.

It is worth asking if BWV 924 is an exercise in composition, what is the task? What is the student's assignment?

If it is the bass figure, as in the simpler partimento exercises, then this is a very odd one. The figure of the opening is the rising fifth, so C-G-D-A-E. Bach stops only when the next chord would be an undesirable diminished triad in root position (middle of bar 3 below). In the various documents available on Robert Gjerdingen's Monuments of Partimenti website (link), I found only one "rule" (sample progression) focused on a sequence of rising fifths (link), but no partimento compositions. The only composition that features rising fifths in its opening is the very last of 44 by Fedele Fenaroli (link) and that uses the Romanesca bass rather than a simple sequence of rising fifths. In this connection, it is interesting that Friedemann abandons his father's sequence almost immediately and converts the figure into the Romanesca bass--at (a)--but then breaks that after four notes to continue in A minor--at (b). Fenaroli has a rule for the Romanesca bass immediately preceding the one mentioned above: link.

It would seem, then, that the task is to take the given figures and combine them in a different way. Thus, the rising fifth of the opening becomes the Romanesca bass; the pair of 6/5s with stepwise bass has its upper voices rearranged at (b), continuing in sequence for 2.5 bars then merging with the version at bar 3 of BWV 924: see the arrows; at (c), Friedemann expands on bar 6 (literally present in his bar 7--see below) by preceding it with a transposition a fourth below, with the result that much greater attention goes to IV.

BWV 924 clearly also seems to be a lesson in suspensions, beginning with the "easy" ones -- 4-3 over root position triads -- then proceeding to the dissonant 6/5 pairs, then to 9-8. The positions for all these are shown with asterisks (*). (The only common type missing is the 2-3 bass suspension, which, of course, is prominent in the WTC I, C Major Prelude, a version of which also appears in the Clavier-Büchlein.) Note that Bach Vater continues the suspension work over the extended cadence dominant--see ** below; these are 7-6 figures between the upper voices. Friedemann, on the other hand, abandons suspensions altogether and has some fun with marching triads and dramatic arpeggios in the minor key.

BWV 924, ending:

BWV 924a, ending:

Here is another graphic to compare the two versions: the reduced upper line only, up to the first part of the dominant pedal. Note how the same materials are used in each section, until Friedemann turns to triads (section 3) and reverses the direction of the line (section 4).

JMT series, introduction, part 2

In yesterday's introductory post to this series, I did not include a list of compositions analyzed by others and only mentioned in my 1987 JMT article. That list is actually quite short:

J. S. Bach, Prelude in C Major, BWV 924  (Schenker)
J. S. Bach, Prelude in F Major, BWV 927  (Schenker)
Beethoven, Piano Sonata in A Major, Op. 101, first movement  (Schenker)
Beethoven, Symphony No. 5, second movement   (Schenker)
Chopin, Etude in Eb Minor, Op. 10n6   (Schenker)
Schubert, Valse sentimentale, D779n2   (Salzer)

My intention was to comment briefly on each of these before proceeding, as promised, to discuss at greater length the pieces named in the article's endnotes. Immediately, however, I am faced with a small but significant literature on BWV 924. The revised plan, then, is to look at this one piece and its literature in some depth and then move on to music named in the endnotes.

There are two versions of BWV 924, both of them in the Clavier-büchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. I have "disassembled" Pierre Gouin's excellent digital notation (link to Preludes page on IMSLP) and collated the two versions below.

In tomorrow's post I will reduce both versions to block chords and collate those.