JMT series, part 7-2 (note 32)

This is the final post on music mentioned in the notes to my article "The Ascending Urlinie" (Journal of Music Theory, 1987). One additional post will return to the main text of the article, in response to a published analysis of the menuet in Beethoven's Piano Sonata, Opus 22.

Note 32 is about the registral variant ^5-^6-(reg.)^7-^8. Here is a link to the first post about this form: link.

In the note I mention Beethoven, String Quartet, op. 74, IV. Comment in the note: "where ^6 is somewhat extended."

In looking at the score of this quartet again, I see that my placement of this movement under the registral variant doesn't make sense. Since it is equally reasonable to hear movements I & III in terms of backgrounds with rising lines, I now suspect "IV" was an error, a typo for either "I" or "III." I intend to examine both earlier movements in the essay I am preparing based on the JMT-series blog posts. Here, however, I will keep attention on IV, whose rising line is prominent indeed.

The fourth movement is not an Allegro molto or Vivace finale, but instead a set of variations on an Allegretto theme. Here is the theme, and as the score and annotations show, there really is no doubt about the status of a focal tone ^5 and an ascending Urlinie at the end.

Five variations follow, plus a extended coda that starts out sounding like another variation. Variations 1-3 & 5 maintain the clarity of the rising line -- variation 2 (below) even gives to the first violin a simple reduction of the line! Variation 4 (not shown here) has a new melody in the first violin; it is centered on and closes on ^3 (G4).

A distinctive feature of the theme that is repeated in the first three variations is the old cadenza perfetta 6-8 figure appearing in both the half-cadence to G that ends the first strain and in the final cadence to the tonic.

The coda-qua-variation-6 (or variation 6 with coda character) can be read with the shapes of the theme in the first violin part, but the bass is strange indeed, so that it's hard to know quite what to make of the upper voice(s). The durations of the theme are maintained: bars 3-10 = theme, bars 1-8;
bars 11-14 = theme, bars 9-12, continuation phrase 1; bars 15-22 = theme, bars 13-20, expanded continuation phrase 2. The coda to this variation (or coda to this coda) runs an additional 53 bars. Within that the gesture of a "structural cadence" does appear in bars 39-42 -- see the bottom of the example below. At this moment, at least, the rising line is gone, but after the theme and five (six?) variations, the gesture seems rather hollow, a formula there because it's expected.

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.

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.