JMT series, part 8 (note 33)

In note 33 for the 1987 JMT article, I mention the incomplete line ^5-^7-^8. A "textbook" example of this "primitive Urlinie" in tandem with a proto-background ^3/^5 may be found in the ninth number of Schubert's Ecossaisen, D781. See the circled notes in bar 1 -- the pairing is obvious through the first strain; I have traced the voices in the score as they trade positions in the second strain.

The “verlorener Bruder” Trio, D610 (a trio without a menuet), neatly frames ^5 in its basic idea and transposed repetition (bars 1-4), then focuses on movement upward to ^8 in the continuation. In the shortened reprise (the final four bars), there is a bit of a "lost soul" sort of posthorn touch, and the voices are firmly set against one another at the last -- see the boxed notes.

In note 33, I mentioned Schubert, Ländler, D. 681, nos. 1 & 2 (perhaps as ^5-(^8)-^7-^8). Unfortunately, I don't have easy access to these at present. It is perhaps worth noting that these pieces would be nos. 5 & 6 in the complete 12 Ländler, D. 681 (from 1815), but the first four have been lost.

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.

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.

JMT series, parts 6b2 and 6c

The two final posts for note 31 (the waltz ninth) are on Beethoven Symphony no. 1, III, and the barcarolle from Offenbach's Hoffmann. These posts are lengthy and I am still preparing them. In the meantime, I will continue with later entries in the JMT series. When the longer pieces are ready and published, I will edit this post to provide links.

JMT series, part 4a-1 postscript

Work for yesterday's post about the Scherzo in Beethoven's Second Symphony involved examining the orchestral parts. I found that the upper winds "overshot" ^8 in the final cadence, complicating my reading of a simple rising line (those "extra" notes had been deleted from the piano reduction I relied on during research for the 1987 JMT article).

Having found that, I decided to re-examine some of my analyses of Haydn symphony third movements. Symphony 100 produced some interesting results. Here is the original post: link.

In the original post I noted that the inverted arch shape of the opening melody worked against a rising line, but the orchestration in fact plays on a low-then-high registral pairing throughout that supports the rising line at a higher level.

In the A-section, the flute and the first violins begin in the same octave -- circled below -- but in the re-orchestrated repeat (bars 9-16), the flute plays an octave higher -- circled notes in bars 9-10; see also bars 14-16 in the second system below.

The upper winds rejoin the first violins in the B-section -- boxed notes in bars 17 ff above. This holds till the stop on V in bar 28 -- see boxed notes below.  After that an interesting wedge figure brings out the registral differences as the flute moves chromatically down from D6, then returns to it -- circled notes and line --  while the first violins (and first oboe) rise from D5 before likewise returning to where they started.

The reprise is 8 bars rather than 16 and it combines the orchestrations of the two versions from the A-section: brass and timpani play as in bars 1-8 while the strings and winds play as in bars 9-16, except for the addition of the persistent rising figure (boxed) that motivically connects the ends of the first and second phrases and brings particular clarity to the flute's upper-register scale in the structural cadence.

JMT series, part 6b-1 (note 31, the waltz ninth)

In the 1987 JMT article, I introduced the term "waltz ninth," which refers to ^6 treated either as a passing tone between ^5 and ^7 over V7 or as an element of a V9 chord that, despite older rules, moves upward to ^7 rather than resolving down to ^5. Here are two additional examples from Schubert: Valses nobles, D969n1, and Valses sentimentales, D779n13 (first strain only; second strain ends the same way).

In note 31, I mention the scherzos for the first two Beethoven symphonies. Until recently I thought the scherzo in Symphony no. 2 was the simpler of the two cases, and therefore decided to talk about it first here. The problem -- which nevertheless provokes some interesting opportunities for interpretation -- arises from orchestration, register, and arrangements.

Symphony no. 2, Scherzo. Comment in the note: "a very clear case." Here it is (below) as I analyzed it in the 1980s. I didn't specify a focal tone (aka first note of the fundamental line), though obviously I was assuming ^5; the shape of the cadence, however, is unmistakable. Note that ^6 rises to ^7 over the dominant.

My source was the piano reduction made by Otto Singer and published by Peters in 1906. Below is another version published a few years earlier by Ernst Pauer (London: Augener). [These are dates given on IMSLP; whether they represent time of the original publication, I don't know.]

The full orchestral version, however, has the following at the critical moment:

Curiously enough,  Franz Liszt follows the original in his pianistically enhanced reduction:

And, more tellingly, so does Beethoven himself in the trio arrangement published in 1805 (the orchestral original appeared in 1804).

Two other contemporary sources, however, treat the ending in the same way as Singer and Pauer. Hummel made some of the first published piano solo versions of symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Joel Sachs and Mark Kroll say of them that "[Hummel's] extraordinary ability to respond to the needs of the musical market place without sacrificing high musical standards is illustrated by his numerous arrangements. . . . For England [in the 1820s] he arranged symphonies by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, seven piano concertos by Mozart and 24 opera overtures. . . . All proved to be successful and profitable for both publisher and composer" (Oxford Music Online). Hummel's trio version is accurately described on the title page as for piano solo with accompaniment of violin and violoncello. Here is the piano's ending of the scherzo aligned with the violin part.

I've also aligned the two parts in an unattributed manuscript arrangement for piano four-hands from 1820.

What do we glean from all this? That any one of three backgrounds is plausible. Version (a) reads from ^3, with the upper octave as expressive doubling. Version (b) goes further, regarding the upper octave as consequential enough to warrant coupling [the Urlinie descends simultaneously in both octaves]. Version (c) shows my original reading, with ^5 as the focal tone and the simple ascent we have already seen above in several arrangements of the score.

Since (a) & (b) are marginally different in notation, I show only the details of (a) below.

Version (c) is below. I admit that I still prefer this one, despite its weaker claim on a firmly established focal tone at the beginning. In the graph below, note the expression of a neighbor note figure A5-B5 -- at (a) and subsequent places marked.

The weakness of ^5 at the beginning is that it's much easier to hear it as a one-too-far gesture. I've variously called it "one leap too far," "one note too far,"or just "one too far." Note how A5, as one-note-too-far, helps confirm ^3 (F#5), before the latter is undercut by another one-leap-too-far in the fortissimo D6. It's not hard to write off D6 as the emphatic expression of a cover tone, but it's now "two leaps," not one, which suggests a potentially different role for A5.

In the modulating consequent of this 16-bar period, the role of A5 as just described is confirmed: the figure of bar 2 continues upward in bar 4 and that register is maintained in the final phrase. The possibility of E6 as the interrupting ^2 for a focal tone ^3 is undercut by the fact that E6 is now where the undoubted cover tone was in the antecedent. The observation that things can get turned upside down in scherzos is not much of a defense.

The reprise is one of those -- common enough in Beethoven but found in others of his generation also -- that muddles the ending by introducing figures from the "development" (the B-section here). Unlike the scherzo in the first symphony, there is no possibility of hearing a structural cadence before the very end. Thus, the rising figure of the final bars attains considerable significance: not the falling resolutions in the seventh bars of antecedent and consequent above but the emphatically affirming fortissimo that follows.