Three from Ball's Musical Cabinet

Ball's Musical Cabinet, or Compleat Pocket Library for the Flute, Flaeolet, [sic] Violin &c. was published about 1820, according to its IMSLP page: link. I have no further information about it, but the date, if broadly taken, is plausible: many such inexpensive collections of well-known dances and songs were published in the first half of the nineteenth century. The evidently poor quality of the paper suggests earlier rather than later.

From this volume, I have extracted three dance-songs, all of which are very well-known. The "Exile of Erin" focuses on ^8, to which its figures continually return. The opening of B1 and B2 offer the "play in a register above" that one commonly finds in these subordinate form sections (not unrelated, in affective and functional terms, to the bridge in the American ballad standard). Here the repetitions of the rising cadence (boxed) carry particular weight, as their last appearance sets "Erin go Bragh."

The main theme phrase expresses a mirror figure, ^8 down to ^5, then up again:

"Kitty of Coleraine" would make an interesting study of the play of registers, but I will confine myself here to the main shapes of lines -- these are neighbor note figure about a constant ^8. In the main cadences—lines four and eight—a line returns to ^8 from below.

"Robin Adair" is a straightforward example of the case where a framing sixth, ^5 below, ^3 above, or A4-F#5 here, generates a wedge figure converging on the tonic note, here D5. I have sorted this out in the graphic below the score.

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.

Telemann, Concerto à sei in G major

This concerto is labelled "à sei" or "for six," meaning six-part strings plus continuo. It is written in the common sonata da chiesa design (slow-fast-slow-fast). Its opening adagio is of interest to us. Only parts were available through IMSLP; the score below is my effort at notation.

Despite a three-fold cadence to the upper register G5 (see bars 20-21, 24-26, 27-29), it seems to me that this is one of those pieces with a stable tonal frame from the outset. I take that frame to be the sixth ^3/^8, or B4-G5 -- see the box in bar 4. The subsequent boxes in the score trace pertinent sixths through the movement. Note that, in the most traditional fashion, the sixths become an octave to close -- see the two ** in bars 26 & 29.

New publication: a second supplement to British Dance & Song essay

English, Scotch, and Irish Dance and Song: Supplement 2 was just published on Texas Scholar Works. Here is the link: supplement 2. And here is the abstract:

Another supplement to the essay English, Scotch, and Irish Dance and Song, which is primarily a documentation of rising cadence figures in dances, fiddle tunes, and songs from late eighteenth and early nineteenth century published sources. Gathered here are an additional 70 examples taken from files downloaded in May and June 2017.