JMT series, re-orientation

I apologize that the chronology of the JMT series has become rather complicated. Here is an attempt to straighten things out, using dates of publication for the posts. All dates are in 2017.

15 May (link): The introduction to the series 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 pieces named in the notes.

16 May (link): The second post added to the list those compositions analyzed by others but 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.

Part 3: BWV 924 & 924a
19 May (link), 20 May (link): Continued discussion of .J. S. Bach, Prelude in C Major, BWV 924 and the variant BWV 924a.  Additional posts: 2 September (link), 3 September (link).

Part 4: simple rising lines
7 June (link): This post (finally) begins discussion of pieces from the notes. Note 28 concerns simple rising lines. Other posts in this series: 8 June (link), 27 June (link), 28 June (link), 29 June (link), 30 June (link).

Part 5: ascending Urlinie variants
10 July (link), 11 July (link): Notes 29 & 30.

2 September, 3 September: see Part 3 above. (BWV 924 & 924a)
4 September: this re-orientation post.

Part 6: the waltz ninth
Forthcoming: Note 31.

Part 7: the registral variant
Forthcoming: Note 32.

Part 8: the "primitive" rising line
Forthcoming: Note 22.

Part 9: the "mirror Urlinie"
Forthcoming: Note 34.

Part 10: from main text: Beethoven, Piano Sonata in Bb Major, op. 22, III
Forthcoming.

Part 10 will be the final entry in the JMT series.

Milestone; new publication

Yesterday the number of posts to this blog reached 175. By way of celebration, I have published a A Gallery of Simple Examples of Extended Rising Melodic Shapes on Texas Scholar Works. Here is the abstract.

Prevailing stereotypes of formal cadences and arch-shaped melodies were especially strong in the eighteenth century, but they did not prevent European musicians from occasionally introducing rising melodic figures into cadences and sometimes connecting those figures abstractly in lines with focal notes earlier in a composition. This essay presents a few of the most direct, cleanly formed rising lines in music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Here is the table of contents

Introduction
   1. Beethoven , 12 German Dances, WoO8n1
   2. Mozart, 12 Menuets, K176n1
   3. Johann Strauss, sr., Das Leben ein Tanz, oder Der Tanz ein Leben!, Op.49 (1831)
Music for Social Dance
   4. Schubert, Wiener-Damen-Ländler, D734n15
   5. Schubert, Valses sentimentales, D779n13
   6. Schubert, Ländler, D814n4
   7. Schubert, Deutscher Tanz, D769n1
   8. Johann Strauss, sr., Exotische Pflanzen, Op.109 (1839)
   9. Johann Strauss, jr., Künstlerleben, op. 316 (1867)
Minor Key
   10. Böhm, Suite in F minor, Courante
   11. Schubert, Grazer Walzer, D924n9
   12. Brahms, “Über die See”
Additional Examples
   13. Tchaikovsky, The Nutcracker, March
   14. Haydn, String Quartet in D Major, Op76n2, III
   15. Haydn, Symphony no. 86, III

Administrative post, part 1

Many links to my own external files were broken when a server was decommissioned last year. It has taken me a long time to find a suitable alternative. I have recently posted a set of PDF files to the Texas Digital Repository (TDR) and list all the links below.

Files most relevant to this blog are listed in this post. Several of these are compilations of posts from my Schubert blog and from a defunct website. Others will appear in a subsequent post.

Rising Lines in the Tonal Frameworks of Traditional Tonal Music

This article supplements, and provides a large amount of additional data for, an article I published nearly thirty years ago: "The Ascending Urlinie," Journal of Music Theory 31/2 (1987): 275-303. By Schenker's assertion, an abstract, top-level melody always descends by step to ^1. I demonstrated that at least one rising figure, ^5-^6-^7-^8, was not only possible but could be readily found in the repertory of traditional European tonal music.


Table of Compositions with Rising Lines

A table that gathers more than 900 examples of musical compositions with cadences that use ascending melodic gestures.

Complex upper-voice cadential figures in traditional tonal music

Harmony and voice-leading are integrated in the hierarchical networks of Schenkerian analyses: the top (most abstract) level of the hierarchy is a fundamental structure that combines a single upper voice and a bass voice  in counterpoint. A pattern that occurs with increasing frequency beginning in the later eighteenth century tends to confer equal status on two upper voices, one from ^5, the other from ^3. Analysis using such three-part voice leading in the background often provides richer, more complete, and more musically convincing analyses.

Buelow Contredanses: Rising Lines

Bülow, court musician in Copenhagen in the late 18th century. This file surveys all seven collections (more than the article “Rising Lines in Tonal Frameworks of Traditional Tonal Music”).


Kingsbury Hymns of Praise: Rising Lines

Pieces with rising cadence gestures in Hymns of Praise: For the Church and Sunday School. Compiled by F. G. Kingsbury. Chicago: Hope Publishing Co.,c1922. A hymn book from my father's collection. Because of their largely 19th c origins, it seemed reasonable to think that hymns in the evangelistic tradition would be more likely than older tunes to have rising cadence gestures.

Tonal Frames in 18th and 19th Century Music

Tonal frames are understood here as schemata comprising the "a" level elements of a time-span or prolongation reduction in the system of Lerdahl and Jackendoff, Generalized Theory of Tonal Music (1983), as amended and extended by Lerdahl (Tonal Pitch Space (2001). I use basic forms from these sources as a starting point but call them tonal frames in order to make a clear distinction, because I have a stricter view of the role of register.


John Playford Dancing Master: Rising Lines

Musical examples with rising cadence gestures from John Playford’s Dancing Master (1651). This set was extracted from the article “Rising Lines in Tonal Frameworks of Traditional Tonal Music.”

Carl Schachter's Critique of the Rising Urlinie

A detailed critique of two articles by Carl Schachter (1994; 1996), this study is concerned with some specific issues in traditional Schenkerian theory, those connected with the rising Urlinie—these can be roughly summarized  as the status of ^6 and the status of ^7. Sixteen of twenty three chapters in this file discuss Schachter’s two articles directly, and the other seven chapters (2, 4, 5, 17-20) speak to underlying theoretical problems.

Analyses of Schubert, Waltz, D.779n13

This article gathers a large number of analyses of a single waltz by Franz Schubert: the anomalous A-major waltz, no. 13 in the Valses sentimentales, D 779. The goal is to make more vivid through examples a critical position that came to the fore in music theory during the course of the 1980s: a contrast between a widely accepted “diversity” standard and the closed, ideologically bound habits of descriptive and interpretative practice associated with classical pc-set analysis and Schenkerian analysis.