Chaminade, Mazurka, Op. 1n2

Cécile Chaminade, Mazurka, Op. 1n2 (1869). In the multi-strain with reprise design typical of 19th century dances, here as ABACDCAEA, where C, D, and E are in the subdominant. The A strain is shown below. Using Schenker terms and following one of my 1987 articles, I would call this a three-part Ursatz, with soprano descant (^3-^4-^4-^3) and alto Urlinie ^5-^6-^7-^8. Bars 5-8 repeat 1-4.

Reference: Neumeyer, David. "The Three-Part Ursatz." In Theory Only 10/1-2: 3-29.

Emile Waldteufel, Les Patineurs (Skaters), Op. 183

The famous "Skaters Waltz" is  Les Patineurs by Emile Waldteufel (published in 1882). Given its main melody—the first strain of waltz n1—the notion of ascending cadences would seem far afield, but look at this simplified piano edition:

In a version for salon orchestra, the piano/conductor score (a two-stave score with abbreviated instrumental indications) also shows the rising scale figure from F#4 to A4. In the full orchestral score, this figure is taken by the second clarinet and second trumpet. The piano/conductor score, btw, shows the complete texture: there are no subsidiary parts or notes in different octaves.

Les Patineurs has an introduction, four waltzes, and a coda. The 16-bar main theme is anticipated in the introduction, appears twice in the first waltz (a small ternary design), and three times in the coda. The cadential counter-motive appears in all of these but the first (the introduction) and the last, grandioso statement.

Looking at it in Schenkerian terms, three possible hearings are readily imagined. The first is a rising line from ^5, where an Urlinie parallelism traces across the middleground in bars 2-10. The E4 (circled) in bar 11 is particularly interesting in that it clearly initiates a lower, descending line through the 4-3 figure over B2, but E4 is also an aural trace of the initial ^5 that prepares for the ascent that begins a bar later.

Alternatively, if we give full sway to hypermetric accent, that allows a hearing from ^3, with a neighbor in bar 5, a possible return to C# in bar 7, a consonant C# touched on at the end of bar 10 and a twice-dissonant C# at the end of bar 12 and in bar 13.

Combining the figures of both lines in a three-part Ursatz design produces the following, quite satisfactory reading:

The problem is that the counter-motive is barely audible—to my aging ears, effectively inaudible—in all the recorded performances I listened to. The second clarinet and trumpet are simply overwhelmed by the unison melody in the first violins, cellos, and first clarinet and trumpet. In the end, then, if one is using Schenkerian tools, I think the best reading is this:

Note: I've left out one intermediate step, where the "quarter note" G#5 would have a C#4 below it and a bass C#3 (to account in some fashion for bars 7-8).

All in all, it must be said that this famous theme has a remarkable collection of diatonic dissonances.

An upper-voice wedge in a contredanse gigue (1781)

One of the clearest examples of a wedge figure in a three-voice texture can be seen below. The handwritten title is "Les Caprices de Galatée," which may or may not refer to a Parisian dance-pantomime of that title. This is the 17th page in volume 3 of the collection The celebrated Dances performed by Messrs. Vestris &c. at the King's Theatre in the Hay Market, 1781, composed by G. B. Noferi. Link. Giovanni Battista Noferi was an Italian violinist (he also played guitar) who apparently came to England early and stayed, working mostly in London. He died in 1782, the year after this collection was published. The Vestris were a large French family of professional dancers.

Very plainly a contredanse gigue, this piece is cast in the very common design of three strains (ABC) and five sections en rondeau (ABACA). All three strains are simple period themes. Indeed, the design is so familiar that amateur dancers would have no trouble dancing to it, either in the four-couple quadrille formation or as a long dance.

The principal strain has a stationary voice on E5, which the surrounding voices approach in a wedge, the "alto" voice reaching the tonic note, the upper voice making it part-way to G#5 (^3) but losing even that in the consequent. As readers of this blog will know, this strong implication of a pitch not actually sounded in the cadence is a common device, especially in violin music, and one can readily imagine it as an inducement to particular figures in ornamented repetitions (see below the score for one obvious such figure here).  For more on complex upper voices, see this essay of mine: link.

A likely (actually, almost inevitable) cadence figure improvised in performance:

JMT series, part 6c (note 31, the waltz ninth)

By the mid 1850s, when Jacques Offenbach began his prolific career as a composer of operetta and opera bouffe, rising cadence gestures were already well embedded in musical practice. (See my essay on Adolphe Adam's Le Châlet [1834]: link. The essay was based on posts to this blog; follow the labels for "Adam" or go to the first post in the series: link.)

The composition and production history of Offenbach's final work, Les contes de Hoffmann [The Tales of Hoffmann] is complicated, but there is no ambiguity about its most famous number, the Barcarolle "Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour," number 13 in the four-act version of published French editions from the two decades after the composer's death. A duet for two sopranos, Giuletta, female lead of Act 3, and Nicklausse, Hoffmann's muse (a pants role), the soloists are joined by a chorus in the second half of the piece.

My comment in note 31: "^5 is prominent in the upper octave as a cover tone, also." Alas, here I was a bit optimistic about the status of the rising line. It is a distinctive figure to be sure--in fact, it is Giuletta's cadence line, and therefore ought to be given priority over the orchestra's plodding descent at that same place in the music. The orchestra's role in the gestures and topical expression of this particular number, however, is so strong that nowadays I have to regard the voice and orchestra as equals. That being the case, Giuletta's rising line is an inner voice, a "structural alto" to the orchestra's descending line from ^5. Details below.

I have shown just two systems from the vocal score. In the first, see the prominent A5 (^5), which of course has sounded many times before.

At (a) is the orchestra's descending line in the fifth octave (the keyboard reduction is corroborated by the full orchestral score, btw). At (b): Giuletta's ascending line, with ^6 (*) as the waltz ninth. At (c) Niklausse copies part of the orchestra's descent in the fourth octave. At (d) the curious detail of the second chorus alto repeated ^4-^3.

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.

Music in 17th century Vienna, part 6; 200th post

"Margarita" is from Schmelzer's Balletti francesi, written in 1669 for a production of Cesti's opera Nettuno e Flora festeggianti. The numbers are Allemanda, Aria, Courente, Margarita, Sarabanda, Retirada.

I admit that I placed this piece here to allow a small joke on the occasion of the 200th post to this blog. But, surprise, "Margarita" does not refer to the cocktail—it is Margaret, far better known as the Spanish Infanta painted multiple times by Velasquez than as the wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.

This is a bright and stately march that was most likely meant for the ingress of the Empress on stage (family members frequently participated in ballets and other staged events in the court). It is especially interesting for the sharp timbral distinction in tonal space between the trumpets and the first violin and for the three-part Ursatz design that results (note especially the ending).

This, incidentally, is the last in the 17th-century Vienna series.

More from Martin; response from McFarland

In yesterday's post I summarized analytical work by Henry Martin including three non-traditional Schenkerian backgrounds for jazz compositions. One of those was a rising line, as a reading of Miles Davis's "Four."

One response to that article touches on the rising line and so I continue comment here, with the caveats that (1) I am not at all knowledgeable about jazz repertoire and practices; but (2) I am wary of the ideological work being done by any applications of Schenkerian or Neo-Schenkerian models to this music.

That said, the other scholar who was engaged with Schenkerian analysis of jazz over a long period of time is the late Steve Larson. Martin and Larson seem to me to have carried over the 1970s' era differences with respect to tonal analysis between Princeton and the New York/Yale axis, the one more methodologically liberal and composition-oriented, the other more methodologically conservative and musicology-oriented. As that survives into the present here, it is mostly about different attitudes towards the Schenkerian background constructs and the rules or heuristics for their derivation.

In Music Theory Online (18n3, September 2012--link to the issue), a memorial issue for Larson, Mark McFarland describes the basic differences well: Larson, he says, "strove as much as possible to approach jazz using as orthodox a form of Schenkerian theory as possible" (¶1), where Martin was willing to entertain a "list of modifications to Schenkerian theory" based on the view that conventional readings may be unconvincing and thus alternatives should be developed that could "provide superior readings” (¶2). The core of the difference in practice is that Larson insisted on reducing dissonances, including the most characteristic dissonances of jazz, to traditional consonances, where Martin insisted on the inviolability of the tune, which not only preserved dissonances but provoked readings with non-traditional backgrounds.

McFarland's critique of Martin's analysis of "Four" is in ¶¶5-10 of his article, and I refer the reader to those paragraphs for details. McFarland starts by noting that the analysis "is, in some ways, the least controversial graph in Martin’s study as it ultimately reduces to the ascending Urlinie." Further, "While I have no problem with the ascending Urlinie, . . . I question the scale degrees at which [this] Urlinie is interrupted, the number of appearances of interruption within this opening chorus, and the radically different reading of the two halves of this antecedent-consequent period" [¶5].

Here are the basic elements of McFarland's reading, pulled out of his Example 2. Unlike Martin, McFarland commendably reads the entirety of the 32-bar chorus.

Note that, although McFarland uses the term "ascending Urlinie," he has notated the alto voice with the background's open notes and the "4-zug" with beamed closed notes. Thus, in fact the ascending cadence gesture, according to him, belongs to the middleground, not the background. This is pretty much what William Rothstein, whom McFarland cites, said in 1991. Note also that the alto is given priority at bar 9 -- this reminds me of Channon Willner's privileging of the alto in Baroque music (see an earlier post on this blog), but where I found that plausible, I have trouble seeing the justification here.

Below, I have reproduced only the final eight bars of McFarland's graph aligned with the middleground level of Martin's analysis. This is for reference. I don't have anything to add.

Finally, I have isolated the same elements from McFarland's transcription (it is Example 1 in the article examples file on MTO). The boxes indicate the specific elements included in my "short" version of McFarland's graph (the first example in this post). The asterisks mark the only two chords that are the same. That alone suggests to me that the "underlying consonances" approach threatens to distort not only the surface of the music but its foundations. All this connects, not surprisingly, to the theoretical problem of variations: does the structure of the theme underlie all the variations, or is it the musical task of the variations to "rewrite" the theme? That can't be answered with any simple pronouncement.

Further citations:
William Rothstein 1991. “On Implied Tones.” Music Analysis 10, no. 3: 289–328.
Steve Larson 1998. "Schenkerian Analysis of Modern Jazz: Questions About Method," Music Theory Spectrum 20/2, 209-241.
Steve Larson 2009. Analyzing Jazz: A Schenkerian Approach. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press.
Henry Martin. 2011. “More Than Just Guide Tones: Steve Larson’s Analyzing Jazz—A Schenkerian Approach.” Journal of Jazz Studies 7, no. 1: 121–44.

Channan Willner on the polyphonic Ursatz

This post is not about rising lines (mostly -- see the postscript), but it does belong to the "internet search" series that started on 15 March. In 2007, Channan Willner published an essay on his website titled "The polyphonic Ursatz": link to his publication page. The essay is well-known and thus shows up relatively early on a search for "ascending urlinie" because of a reference to my JMT article on p. 13n4, but except for one highly speculative example it has nothing to do with ascending cadence gestures. Rather, it is a very detailed study of Handel, Suite in D Minor (1720), Allemande, that invokes—but then further develops—my three-part Ursatz construct.

As the title suggests, Willner accepts the three-part Ursatz (enthusiastically, even—I am said to have "blazed an 'obbligato trail' with [the] three-part Ursatz, which allows for the structural descent of both soprano and alto" (2)); but he then expands the options to include the tenor and bass, though not in a consistently maintained voice leading grid (as if a kind of background chorale setting), so "not [an Ursatz] in which all four voices are equal, nor one in which the tenor part embodies a genuine structural voice" (2). The argument becomes a bit tortuous as he then asserts that "the background structure does indeed remain two-voiced at the very deepest level. The obbligato voices realized by the alto and by the tenor unfold a little closer to the surface than the fundamental two voices do. But in practice, as an aural and as an analytical experience, this is a distinction without much of a difference, at least in what concerns the alto" (2-3). I might complain that a distinction without a difference may not warrant a distinction at all.

Still, Willner grounds his adjustments in a compositional device that was especially important to 17th and 18th century practice: "Letting the Ursatz remain in a state of polyphony points to the dependence of all voice leading—from the foreground to the background—on invertible counterpoint" (13). He also makes a revealing comment about style features: "Despite the soprano’s prominence, it’s actually the alto’s descent that usually provides the scaffolding over which the thematicism of the piece rests, at least in the Baroque repertoire" (3). The analysis of the Allemande is guided by this idea throughout.

I will reproduce here only the background graphs from early in the essay, as these reflect the point just made above. The first graph shows a three-part Ursatz with a diversion by the alto into the tenor (arrow). I have added the red circles to bring out the alto, which—following from the comment above—Willner takes to be the primary upper voice.

The second graph demonstrates the source of this unequal pairing: the "obbligato soprano" would be a line of lower thirds under the primary voice, the "structural alto." (It is now also easy to see why invertible counterpoint is a factor.) My circled notes attempt to bring out these underlying thirds: F4-A4, E4-G4, F4-D"4", E4-C#"4",  and D4 unison to close.

Postscript: "Examples [of minor-key ascending Urlinien, despite the odds against them] can be found throughout Bach’s suites, sonatas, and partitas for various instruments. Most movements of the D minor Suite for Violoncello Solo, for instance, close with a motivically charged ascending Urlinie" (14n20). Here I will respond with the same quibbling distinction Willner made about the three-part Ursatz and the background—I'm not at all sure those ascending cadence gestures belong to the largest-scale melodic features in the Bach cello suites, despite their position in the final cadence. I have written so far only about two major-key cello preludes, Eb and G: link; link.

Isaac Strauss, Figaro-Revue

Isaac Strauss was born in Strasbourg, the principal city on the French side of the Rhine river, and was active in Paris. A skilled Conservatoire-trained violinist, he took up conducting and became very successful (and also wealthy). He wrote original music but also many arrangements for dance and concert, including the Figaro-Revue for piano four-hands based on tunes by the younger composer Marius Boullard. Isaac Strauss was no relation to the Vienna Strausses.

The design is that of a quadrille, five parts with the traditional names (Pantalon, etc.), to which Strauss has added another whimsical title. The two of interest to us are n2 (Éte; Le Cigare) and n4 (Pastourelle; Le Mur de la Vie privée).

As in a few earlier instances on this blog, I have collated the prima and secunda parts. At the beginning, ^3 has the better of the cover tone ^5. Note the lower neighbor (interruption) at phrase end and the doubling of ^3 in the secunda part -- at (a). In the second phrase, however, the cover tone suddenly comes alive and takes over -- at (b) -- while ^3 descends in the secunda part, right hand.

In n4, a pattern of thirds puts the focus on ^5 and thus the ascent in the cadence is not much of a surprise. Note that the voice splits as F6 moves down in inner voices.