JMT series, part 7-1c_Beethoven Op. 119n7

Yesterday I quoted William Rothstein on the three-part Ursatz and ascending Urlinie. He asserts (though in seemingly tentative tones) that the middle or "alto" voice in a three-part voiceleading web is "hierarchically superior to the ascending one, even when the ascending progression lies above. . . . I suspect that this is consistently true in Corelli's music, and that it remains true in most music by other composers. But there are surely exceptions. To consider an extreme example, if Beethoven's C major Bagatelle Op. 119, No. 7, is not based on an ascending Urlinie, what music is?"

I am, of course, always glad to have support for the rising line as background, although it's hardly needed any more, given the 1000+ examples of ascending cadence gestures I have found (so far) in the repertoire of musics of all kinds, but I am obliged to disagree with Rothstein here, if we are talking in Schenkerian terms. Beethoven is not "fitting a figure in" to an existing system here--he is using that distinctive figure to transcend the system altogether. (David Lewin discusses this idea of transcending the system in terms of patriarchy and women's voices -- see the reference at the bottom of this post. In Beethoven's case, it is almost certainly a philosophical-religious-pantheistic transcendence of the kind one finds elsewhere in his music.)

Here is the title page for the first edition, with the publisher's hopeful marketing note "faciles et agréables."

The bagatelle is an odd little bricolage of musical bits that resembles a cut-and-paste job more than a coherent composition. I have exaggerated the point by "cutting up" the score, separating it into its three components: first, a more or less normal opening phrase of six bars;

. . . then an eight-bar "continuation" whose only connections to the preceding are staccato notes (cf. bar 6) and simple presentations of invertible counterpoint and stretto;

. . . and finally what looks rhetorically like a structural cadence, but (a) offers only a second inversion ii chord; then (b) subverts the dominant by providing the proper bass (eighth note G2 in the second bar) but with Bb, not B-natural. The persistent subdominant -- it's been there since bar 11 -- and the very extended tonic pedal point are both familiar features of Baroque preludes and so are not strange here, given the display of old-fashioned devices that preceded. Nor, even, is the wandering into the instrument's highest register -- recall BWV 924 & 924a and Niedt's recommendation (link) -- but, still, the long ascent combined with an equally extended crescendo does seem a bit much in context. (Yet again, though, as many writers have noted, there is an obvious connection between this little bagatelle and the attention to registral extremes in the variation movement of Op. 111, which must have been written around the same time as this bagatelle.)

In Schenkerian terms, the turn to the subdominant subverts a cadence to the final C in the bass. We are therefore obliged to read an Ursatz that concludes in ten bars with a by no means hidden Urlinie from ^3:

This obligatory reading is clumsy, of course, but given that the music heads off to the subdominant immediately thereafter, it makes sense. Note, of course, that there is no ascending Urlinie -- much as it bludgeons our ears, the ascent over the pedal point in the second half of this bagatelle-prelude is a foreground feature at best.

I am not overly inclined to defend this bagatelle, as you may have guessed, but I am willing to suggest that it is at least possible to draw the final ascending figure into an effective reading based on register, tonal frames, and invertible counterpoint. In the example below, the upper voice pair ^3/^5 in bar 1 is flipped to the sixth ^5/^10 in bar 2 (invertible counterpoint, remember). By bar 5 the ^5/^10 has become ^5/^9 -- or ^5/^2. In the sequence of bars 8 and following, ^2 becomes ^1 and ^5 becomes ^4. In bars 15 and following, ^1 (or ^8) returns by step to ^5, and ^4 drops to ^3, thus recovering, in its original position, the third-pair from bar 1. It's that interval that is looped and threaded through overlappings until it finally makes a direct (if chromatic) ascent to ^8 (as C7).

References:
Lewin, David. [1992] 2006. "Women's Voices and the Fundamental Bass." In his Studies in Music with Text. New York: Oxford University Press, 267-81.
Rothstein, William. 2006. "Transformations of Cadential Formulae in the Music of Corelli and His Successors." In Essays from the Third International Schenker Symposium, edited by Allen Cadwallader, 245-278.

JMT series, part 7-1b

Willliam Rothstein, writing about Corelli -- but not the sonata whose prelude was the topic of the previous post -- does not consider registral shifts, but he does mention the related matter of the "descant" voice:

[David] Neumeyer has made an elegant case for the viability of a "three-part Ursatz with an "ascending Urlinie" but some questions remain. The minor mode, for example, is obviously less conducive to such a structure than the major. . . . Then there is the question of the relative hierarchical status of the two upper voices. I have assumed here, based largely on my own intuitions, that in a three-voice counterpoint of this sort the descending linear progression is hierarchically superior to the ascending one, even when the ascending progression lies above; that is why I have referred to the latter progression in such cases as a "descant." I suspect that this is consistently true in Corelli's music, and that it remains true in most music by other composers. But there are surely exceptions. To consider an extreme example, if Beethoven's C major Bagatelle Op. 119, No. 7, is not based on an ascending Urlinie, what music is? 

I'll answer his final question in a separate post (hint: Op. 119n7 isn't, but that just makes everything more complicated, and from a hermeneutical standpoint more interesting, doesn't it?)

To the problem of the rising line as "descant" voice, that's been an issue from the beginning in what I will call the positive style of critique of the ascending Urlinie (the negative style just rejects the rising line out of hand). In one of the essays published on Texas Scholar Works (link), I write about the "descant" voice and the process by which it overcame a subsidiary role to become a primary figure in some compositions and should be treated as such in analysis intended to be both musically and historically sensitive. Here is a link to a blog post that quotes from the essay and shows a few early examples.

Perhaps the most important point to make is that the process was largely finished by the end of the 16th century, in the last moments of the long-running change from priority to tenor to priority to bass (solidified--not invented--in the adoption of the basso continuo). Associated mainly -- though by no means exclusively (link) -- with dance-songs and music associated with improvisatory practices in the 17th and 18th centuries, ascending cadence gestures seem to have been suppressed somewhat in more formal musics by the clichéd figures of the partimento tradition. Once that tradition died out in the early 19th century, ascending cadence gestures gradually became more common.

Reference:
Rothstein, William. 2006. "Transformations of Cadential Formulae in the Music of Corelli and His Successors." In Essays from the Third International Schenker Symposium, edited by Allen Cadwallader, 245-278.