Minor key series, part 7 (progression g and partimento)

Francesco Durante, "an eighteenth-century composer from the J. S. Bach generation, was perhaps the central figure in the partimento tradition" (Robert Gjerdingen in Monuments of Partimenti, entry: Francesco Durante). Link to the Monuments home page: link. For definition, description, and illustration of partimento pedagogy, see this page on the site: link.

Simple cadences include a 4-3 suspension over the dominant. Double cadences add a prior 6/4: see the example below (link to it on the Durante pages).

The force of the three downward resolving suspensions (9-8, 7-6, and 4-#) makes a rising motion in the cadence very difficult indeed, especially in the minor key, as here. A simple realization in four parts might look like this:

Rearranging the parts (alto becomes soprano, soprano becomes tenor) is no better from the standpoint of a rising line:

Still another version, this time in three voices, highlights the problem of the natural-^6: see the bracketed notes.

It must be said that the double cadence seems quite old-fashioned for the 18th century: it was a staple of sacred music in the 16th century (the progression above sounds far more like Palestrina than it does Corelli) and probably survived mostly because of the needs of that genre in the 18th century (which, oddly, was more conservative than it had been through much of the 17th century).

Among Durante's simple cadences is one that looks much more typical of 18th century practice: (link)

A realization of this progression makes a rising line more manageable. In three voices, it's difficult to realize the iiø6/5 -- I've left it as a simple subdominant triad in this version.

Here is another attempt, in which the correct subdominant type does appear. Putting a 6/4 on the first beat of the second bar might make for a bit smoother inner voice.

This last progression above does fit Durante's bass correctly, but neither of my two realizations quite matches figure g (reproduced below). 

Here are two further versions trying to reconcile Durante's bass and figure g, again in three voices. At (a), the awkward tritone (C3 in the bass, then F#4 in the treble) is prominent, but in fact it's not an anomaly in minor-key pieces. I am more concerned about the similar motion in all parts from the D major to E major triad. At (b), that problem is solved, and the "structural alto" for many rising lines "magically" appears: ^3-^-2^1, as C4-B3-A3.

Minor key series, part 5 (progressions d-j)

Figures d-j offer some other possibilities for ascending lines with ^#6, including variants of figures b and c and two that introduce natural-^7. In the examples that will follow in later posts, figures e, f, and i are represented but the larger number (5 items) use figure g.

The progression in figure d elaborates a bit on the TSDT pattern, but the result seems to exaggerate a tendency for the minor  to "collapse into the major." I have found no examples in the repertoire so far.

The progression in figure e introduces the natural-^7 into the ascending line, providing room for a substantial amount of attention to the Dorian octave. That being the case, the first of two courantes by Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, from 1687, will be a plausible example in part 6a's entry. The second courante was discussed here: link.

Figure f underpins the Dorian-octave elements with a very tonal third divider and the ubiquitous move i to III, minor tonic to relative major. The example is a very striking, counter-intuitive one, where the surface appearance of the structural cadence is down, not up. I am grateful to Charles Burkhart for sharing his reading with me and for permission to reproduce it. This will be in part 6b of the series.

Figure g is a variant of figure b (link), where ^3 in the bass could support i6 or III. Partimenti by Francesco Durante, the Couperin passacaille that I analyze in my 1987 JMT article, music by three other composers from the later 17th and early to mid-18th century, and a song by Hugo Wolf all make interesting use of this relatively simple design. The posts will be parts 6b through 9.

Figure h is a variant of figure c, where, again, ^3 in the bass might support i6 or III. No examples.

Figure i varies figure g slightly: B substitutes for D in the bass. I will have something to say about the Tristan Prelude in connection with this. (In part 10.)

Figure j is figure h where ^#6 now is given harmonic support. No examples--I suspect that ii rather than the more likely iiø in the minor key is an impediment.

Minor key series, part 2b (Schubert)

In yesterday's post, I looked at two pieces in which Schubert avoids the problem of a minor-key ascent by shifting to the major mode for the closing cadence. Today I will discuss the opposite case--a change from major to minor--and Schubert's poignantly expressive treatment of the natural-^6 in "Frühlingstraum," n11 in Winterreise.

In the introductory post, I remarked on the problem of the natural-^6 as an Urlinie element. Here is the figure I used:

The opening of "Frühlingstraum" finds the poet, in winter, dreaming of spring flowers and bird calls, these latter imitated in the mordents of the cadence (see the box -- these mordents were already heard in the piano introduction). The melodic frame clearly starts from ^3 (m.1) and a descent can be heard in the piano (B4-A4 in the right hand--not marked in the score), but the voice marks out an interior voice that ascends F#-G#-A.

 In the B-section, the assumed, pleasant small birds promptly turn to roosters and crows, and the symbolic play involving minor versus major is in full swing. A closing passage brings a sudden moment of direct address: "You probably laugh at a dreamer who sees flowers in the winter." Much is made of natural-^6 and ^5 -- see the circled notes, ending with a rising line as in figures "x" or "z" above. This ascent is, however, clearly subordinate to the voice's determined descent, as A minor: ^3-^2-^1.

 The full expressive effect of the ascent through natural-^6 is achieved with the repetition of the passage, also the ending of the song. See the box in the graphic below, where the excruciating dissonance sets "Liebchen."

Minor key series, part 1--introduction

The minor key poses obstacles to rising cadence gestures. Not surprisingly, then, I have found only a few compositions with convincing linear ascents in the structural close, and even fewer still with an overarching line of the traditional Schenkerian sort.

A series of posts beginning with this one will examine the problem of the minor key from a mostly traditional Schenkerian point of view and in that small repertoire of compositions that includes 17th and early 18th century music relying on the Dorian octave, two remarkable pieces by François Couperin, and two anomalous 19th century compositions by Beethoven and Hugo Wolf.

The ascending Urlinie is most likely from ^5, and what I should perhaps call the "mirror Urlinie" takes the form ^8 down to ^5 then up again to ^8. Here are versions in both major and minor keys:

The simplest ascending form in the minor key uses the raised ^6 and ^7. With I-V-I only, ^#6 is either part of a ^5-^6 figure over I (as in "a" below) or a passing tone over V (as in "c" below). Example "b" shows how S chords can be introduced by elaboration of the version in "a".

An ascending line with the natural-^6 poses obvious problems:

At "x" the augmented second is prominent; although one can find such scale figures in compositions, positioning in a structural cadence is unlikely. At "y" the augmented second is mitigated by one of the variant forms I discuss in my JMT article (1987), but as "z" shows it is very hard to get rid of the sense of the natural ^6 as a neighbor note rather than a scale step rising to ^#7.

A graphic with fourteen ascending figures may be found here: link.  The series will follow the sequence of these figures, with examples from compositions, though I admit that only a few of them are consequential [the majority are hypothetical--I haven't found them in pieces] and in fact the first set will be counter-examples from Schubert. At the end of the series, I will add posts with a couple additional counter-examples (from Beethoven and Offenbach) and other posts with historical context about the Dorian octave, the examples coming mainly from Praetorius and Eyck.

New essay published

My essay Rising Gestures, Text Expression, and the Background as Theme has been published on the Texas Scholar Works platform: link. Here is the abstract:

Walter Everett's categories for tonal design features in nineteenth-century songs fit the framework of the Classic/Romantic dichotomy: eighteenth-century practice is the benchmark for progressive but conflicted alternatives. These categories are analogous to themes in literary interpretation; so understood, they suggest a broader range of options for the content of the background than the three Schenkerian Urlinien regarded as essentialized universals. The analysis of a Brahms song, "Über die See," Op. 69/7, provides a case study in one type, the rising line, and also the entry point for a critique of Everett's reliance on a self- contradictory attitude toward the Schenkerian historical narrative.

On the "March" Prelude in Chopin's Opus 28, part 2

In part 1, I cited Carl Schachter's recent analysis of this Prelude, with its Urlinie from ^3, where ^2 had to be "supplied by the imagination of the listener" (61). I also indicated my priority in this reading of the background, having written about it twice in 1987.

In February, Emily Ahrens Yates presented a paper titled "Surface Motives in Tonal Music and Their Influence on Our Readings of Background Structures" at the TSMT conference in Belton, TX. In the well-established tradition of motive-driven Schenkerian readings, she "show[s] how ascending surface motives of 5̂ to 8̂ are composed out, are evident in the middleground and foreground levels, and are replications of an ascending Urlinie background structure resolving the conflict in readings between motivic parallelisms of rising motives and 'Ursatz parallelisms'" (from the abstract).

Emily shared her analysis with me beforehand. It was entirely convincing, and I now wonder why anyone (including me, you understand) would ever have proposed a background descent from ^3 at all: each of the march's three phrases is wholly occupied with rising stepwise gestures (and the subsequent relaxation from them), the "one-leap-too-far" quality of the Ab 6/4 chord in bar 8 is certainly accentuated/confirmed by its unstable status as a harmony, and the one truly remarkable thing in this musical context is the ending, which is the only one of the three phrases that refuses to drop away from its rising line from ^5 to ^8 (awkwardly chromatic though it is).

Additional comment: "each of the march's three phrases is wholly occupied with rising stepwise gestures (and the subsequent relaxation from them)": note that each rising phase is longer and each relaxation phase is shorter than the last. In the first phrase, ten rising beats are followed by six falling ones (numbers depend on where you place the three beats of E4). In the second phrase, twelve rising beats are countered by four falling beats. And of course in the third phrase, sixteen rising beats are not countered at all. What surely emerges as thematic in this march, then, is the withering away of descent, regardless of the dramatic surge into bar 8.

More than that is the Sisyphian struggle against a chromatic weight that bears down the already heavy diatonic chords in the second and third phrases. I have boxed those passages in the score below:

It is not difficult to "reconstruct" the diatonic version of all this, the state of the march "before" its chromatic deformation, its suppression by a half-step. (The notion of lowering to flat keys as expressive is something we've seen in Schubert, who dropped the "violin keys" of D and A to Db and Ab in his waltzes.) Here is the diatonic bass for the two chromatic passages.

What is truly remarkable -- and dramatic -- then is not the "one-leap-too-far" Ab6/4 chord, but the sudden emergence of the diatonic from the chromatic depths. The staircase down to those depths is also the way back up:

An entire slow movement of a heroic sonata is sketched in this miniature—an invitation perhaps to a skilful improvising pianist to fill it out.

On the "March" Prelude in Chopin's Opus 28

The steadily rising scale figures in each of the three phrases of Chopin's E-major Prelude are emphatic and obvious (so is the sudden drop at the end of the second phrase). In a recently published book The Art of Tonal Analysis: Twelve Lessons in Schenkerian Theory (Oxford University Press, 2016; edited as a labor of love, I suspect, by Joseph Straus), Carl Schachter says that "some people analyze this piece with an Urlinie that rises a fourth: B-C#-D#-E. I think, however, that it is quite possible to hear instead a very subtle and wonderful descending Urlinie, but to do so one has to be quite un-literal in one's use of the theory" (56). [You can read the chapter on two preludes in the Google Books preview window.]

Here is his Example 3.10, which shows the middleground and background shapes of the upper voice:

For the record, I was the first to assert the abstract pitch design by which a primary line descends from ^3 (while a secondary line rises from the lower ^5). I did this in a footnote to a well-known article, "The Ascending Urlinie" (Journal of Music Theory 31/2 (1987); in fn28: "Pieces which appear to use a rising line from ^5 but in fact do not include Chopin, Prelude in E Major, op. 28, no. 9; [instead it is] a three-part Ursatz with line from ^3 above; ^2 implied in the cadence."

In another article published the same year, I provided a graph: from "The Three-Part Ursatz," In Theory Only 10/1-2: 28.

This gives less emphasis to the arpeggios, but my point was to place attention on the inversion of the third G#-B to the sixth B-G#, in line with middleground transformations that I identify in the article. Here is a schematic version of the example below showing this:

Finally, here is a link to a facsimile of my sketch from 1982: holograph sketch of Op28n9.