Cardiff University Music Analysis Conference (CarMAC) 2008 PROGRAMME Thursday 4 September

Accounts of Elliott Carter’s music since the mid-1990s have emphasized a new-found clarity in his style, characterized by more transparent textures and a simplified approach to harmony, rhythm and form. Yet little attention has been given to either the technical details or the aesthetic intentions of this important new phase of Carter’s development. In particular, Carter’s recent harmonic practice – in which a small family of related set classes replaces the exhaustive partitions that characterize his middle-period style – has significantly altered the expressive implications of his music. Using examples from his recent works, this paper addresses a fundamental shift in Carter’s compositional approach since the mid-1990s, and suggests ways in which the music of his remarkable late period changes our perspective on his career as a whole.

Joshua B. Mailman (Eastman School of Music)
An imagined drama of competitive opposition in Carter’s Scrivo in vento

Carter’s music often poses some struggle of oppositions, for instance in timbre (Double Concerto), space (Third Quartet) or pulse (Fifth Quartet). His preference for the all-interval tetrachords, 4-Z15[0146] and 4-Z29[0137], is also well known. From these two facets of Carter’s music, I develop a narrative interpretation of his Petrarch sonnet inspired solo flute piece: Scrivo in vento (1991). Specifically, I forge narrative paths by imagining the two tetrachords as active agents opposed in competition.
Previous Scrivo analyses (Capuzzo 2002, Childs 2006) stress continuity by revealing Q-transforms and voice-leading between the tetrachords. My analysis, however, emphasizes oppositional struggle by tracing the tetrachords on separate tracks, comparing these to each other as the piece unfolds in sections of alternating agreeable and combative moods. Their struggle involves conflict and cooperation. The two tetrachords (called Incumbent and Challenger) manoeuvre to outdo each other: in dexterous displays of unity and variety involving intersection, invariance, imbrication, embedding, reordering, re-spacing and contextually defined pc operations; by joining or excluding each other when appealing to mutual superset hexachord 6-9[012357] (called Arbiter); and by transposing, inverting and repeating to create nested patterns emulating the ABBA and ABA rhyming of the sonnet.
The analysis advances three agendas. (1) It guides listening to and reading Scrivo in a way that resonates with Carter’s concern for the aesthetics of oppositional struggle, his choice of a sonnet as inspiration, and his affinity for the all-interval tetrachords. (2) It shows how music analytic detail can be organized into dramatic narratives by (a) projecting dramatic roles onto categories asserted by a formal theory and (b) treating the formal theory’s relations metaphorically as actions performed by each role as the musical work unfolds. (3) It shows that detailed pcset analysis can support a Heraclitean view of music: a flux of opposing forces seeking and resisting unity.

Brenda Ravenscroft (Queen’s U., Ontario)
Keeping his finger on the pulse: clarity of design in Carter’s later music

Reflecting on Carter’s musical style over the past seventy years confirms that, although Carter has long been associated with the modernist aesthetic, his compositional style has slowly developed over this time. Broadly speaking, the complexity and density of his earlier works has evolved into a musical language characterized by directness and lucidity.
In my paper, I analyse music from Carter’s later period to identify the compositional techniques that have resulted in this greater clarity. Using music examples from the piano piece 90+ and the song cycle Of Challenge and Of Love (both 1994), I examine aspects of both pitch and rhythm. Carter’s pitch vocabulary is seen to be greatly reduced in terms of harmonic resources, with a focus on the all-trichord hexachord [012478] and exploration of the unique properties of its subset set-classes [048] and [0167]. Although the fluctuating pulses and complex simultaneities of works from the 70s and 80s are no longer present in these later works, Carter’s lifelong fascination with pulse crystallizes into rhythmically simplified constant pulses that provide stable frameworks for the characteristically varied surface of his music.

2B: Repetition and closure in early 19th-century instrumental form

Chair: William Drabkin (U. of Southampton)

Timothy Clarke Best (Indiana U.)
Schubert’s expansive sonata forms: the Trio in E flat op. 100 as case study

Schubert’s three-key expositions are enormous regions of tonal and thematic tension. In Elements of Sonata Theory, Hepokoski and Darcy propose the Trimodular Block (TMB), a type of S area complication and ‘strategy for enriching and extending mid-expositional space’, as a precedent for such expositions (2006: 170–77). In this paper I will examine the first movement of Schubert’s Trio in E flat major, op. 100, a work of Eroica-like proportions with a secondary zone of 141 bars. Using the general principles of the TMB to examine the harmonic and cadential structure of the movement, my analysis will problematize central issues of the model, and propose some extensions to its principles which can account for repeated and pronounced points of non-tonic articulation involving both deferment and arrival. At the crux of the TMB concept is the occurrence of two medial caesuras (MC), implying two separate launches of pre-EEC themes. In op. 100, this results in an enormous expansion of the S area. The story of this expansion is one of attempting to find a sense of balance and closure on the dominant after the harmonic digression after MC1. This multi-modular analysis will attempt to explain the organization of the exposition’s subsequent closural efforts, and interpret their effect on the movement as a whole. This will illuminate strategies of continuity and closure common to the expansive sonata-form works of Schubert and other nineteenth-century composers, offering new possibilities for interpreting the various trajectories which contribute to the dramatic tension of these works.

Julian Horton (University College, Dublin)
John Field’s piano concerti and the evolution of concerto first-movement form in the early nineteenth century

Two conceptions have predominated in the literature on the development of first-movement form in the early nineteenth-century piano concerto. First, the repertoire is considered to owe a fundamental debt to the Mozartian model, especially as received and transmitted by Beethoven (see, for example, Botstein 2001). Secondly, as Stephan Lindeman has observed (Lindeman 1999; see also Hepokoski and Darcy 2006), the ritornello-sonata hybrid perfected by Mozart is gradually reduced to a unitary sonata form, a process evinced in Mendelssohn’s mature concerti and completed with Schumann’s Piano Concerto of 1845. These two perspectives are mutually dependent: perception of the collapse of the hybrid model relies on a particular assessment of its normative presence at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Whilst the debt to Mozart is in general terms hard to contest, scrutiny of non-canonical repertoire from the period 1785–1845 discloses practices operating within the hybrid design that become standardized by 1820, but which have scant precedent in Mozart’s essays, and which expose Beethoven’s concerti as markedly eccentric in key respects. As an evidential case study, this paper offers an analytical survey of the first movements of John Field’s seven piano concerti, composed between 1799 and 1832, which derives from a much broader ongoing study of concerti by Field, Dussek, Moscheles, Hummel, Kalkbrenner, Cramer, Steibelt, Weber, Chopin, Moscheles and others. It reveals numerous consistent practices, which are strikingly at variance with the Mozartian model, but which become widespread in the contemporaneous repertoire. Field habitually employs tonally mobile first ritornelli, solo-expositional first groups having no material connection with their ritornello counterparts, episodic insertions within the development section, substantial recapitulatory truncations, and the regular omission of a cadenza punctuating the closing ritornello. On the strength of the study, and mindful of Schumann’s critical engagement with much of this repertoire, I suggest a reorientation of the historical progression noted by Lindeman, away from Beethoven and towards a practice established by Dussek and standardized by Field and others, which provided the platform for the formal experiments undertaken by Mendelssohn and Schumann.

Adriana Ponce (Illinois Wesleyan U.)
Chopin’s thematic restatements: returns and culminations

My paper will identify two distinct types of thematic restatement in Chopin and will characterize them in terms of antithetical formal/dramatic functions. The first type, recapitulatory in the normative sense of the term, is a process where the moment of return constitutes a formal/dramatic point of arrival. Consistent with this characterization is the treatment of all, or most, musical parameters in the section leading to the return of the material. Such is the kind of elaboration that the said material is typically subject to. The second type – more innovative and characteristic of Chopin’s, if in tune with procedures associated with the ‘early Romantics’ – does exactly the opposite; it is a type of restatement where a high concentration of musical parameters (rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, register and texture-related, etc.) work to conspicuously undermine an understanding of the thematic recurrence as a point of arrival. One could even go as far as claiming that the handling of the musical parameters brings an element of surreptitiousness to the process, as it were, which shifts the formal significance of the restatement from a ‘point of culmination’ to a ‘referential point in the past’. Reinforcing the distinction between both procedures is the nature of the thematic material associated with them. While the material reintroduced through the first procedure is ‘tight-knit’ (in William Caplin’s words) and subject to a specific type of transformations, the one reintroduced through the latter is ‘loose-knit’ and never subject to transformations. Both procedures are equally form-defining. I will propose, however, that whereas the first one is allegorical of a normative forward-looking unfolding of musical time, the second one suggests – insofar as one is willing to accept the allegorical recreation of time as a function of music – the recreation of a point of departure in relationship to the past.

3A: ‘Im Schatten Wagners’: aspects of a legacy

Chair: Robert Samuels (Open U.)

Xavier Hascher (Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg)
Beyond the famous chord: a comparative analysis of Wagner’s Tristan Prelude and the beginning of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen

The two pieces mentioned in the title seem to offer little resemblance beyond the high dose of chromaticism with which they are infused and the perplexing complexity of their harmony. It may be said that they stand respectively at the beginning and end of the post-Romantic era and share the same musical language, that of so-called ‘extended tonality’, where the the traditional pillars of tonality appear sporadically and at wide intervals, and where there is little guidance to help us understand what happens in between.
In the case of the ‘Tristan’ Prelude, interpretations vary between extremes, ranging from a prefiguration of atonality to conventional Roman-numeral analysis with a wealth of modulations and appoggiaturas, via purely contrapuntal readings that ignore chordal successions altogether. Yet, more often than not, these readings stop after the opening chords, either as if the rest of the Prelude posed too many problems, or as if those problems were solved once the opening bars had been elucidated. In past decades, Schenkerian linear reductions have also been undertaken, though it may justifiably be argued that the Prelude represents the ideal terrain for the application of a neo-Riemannian-style analysis given the apparent weakness of root progressions and the ubiquitous projection of minimal melodic displacements such as occur between members of a PLR-family of chords.
The analysis proposed here diverges from those models and rests upon a theory of generalized tonal function mainly inspired by Riemann, Lewin, and Cohnian hexachordal theory. It reintroduces notions of functionality, but in a way that seeks to avoid the traditional maze of modulations and unrelated, ‘vagrant’ chords, and to offer a more economical view of the treatment of certain non-harmonic notes. The same approach is applied to the Strauss excerpt, as a means of testing the validity of the theoretical stand which is taken.

Frederick Stocken (U. of Manchester)
Anton Bruckner and Simon Sechter’s fundamental bass theory

Anton Bruckner studied Simon Sechter’s fundamental bass theory for six years, and he later became Sechter’s successor at the Conservatorium in Vienna, making fundamental bass theory the basis of his harmonic teaching for the rest of his life. Given these biographical facts, one might presume that fundamental bass theory would have played an important part in subsequent analysis of Bruckner’s music. Yet, because the theory became defunct, it was not until the end of the twentieth century that interest in the role the theory played in Bruckner’s compositional process began to be explored.
In a short passage from the Adagio of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony it will be shown how previously unnoticed harmonic structures in this music do seem likely to have been influenced by Sechter's approach to harmony. The value of a Sechterian approach to this particular piece is of especial interest because it sheds new light on fraught analytical terrain; in 1997 Edward Laufer published a controversial Schenkerian analysis of the same movement, provoking a full-scale analytical response by Derrick Puffett in Music Analysis in 1999. Kevin Swinden has revisited the movement since then, giving yet another solution to the passage in question.
This topic stands as a particularly interesting case of how a controversial theory appears to lie behind music of rarely disputed greatness.

Silvio J. dos Santos (U. of Florida)
Between Wagner and Schoenberg: Berg’s crisis of identity in the composition of Lulu

The opera Lulu embodies conflicting aspects of Berg’s identity as a composer, one in which he confronted modernistic ideals in art and culture. On the one hand, he assimilated ideals from a group of intellectuals, including Weininger, Kraus, Loos and Schoenberg, who adopted a critical attitude towards the purely ornamental, if not narcissistic aspects of modern Viennese culture. On the other hand, Berg did not let go of the ‘dream world of subjective states’ that had characterized post-Wagnerian aesthetics. In fact, as he fashioned his own identity as a twelve-tone composer over the course of composing Lulu, he sought to reconcile his new musical language with techniques of the past, especially the music and aesthetics of Richard Wagner. But his engagement with Wagnerian ideals was bound to cause an inner conflict regarding the question of how to achieve a balance between his creative identity and Schoenberg’s compositional principles.
This apparent conflict between the modern and the historical is particularly evident in the radical transformation of the character Alwa in Lulu, whom Berg equates with Wagner’s Tristan in the autograph manuscripts. In effect, Berg refashioned the relationship between Alwa and Lulu as a mirror of the one between Tristan and Isolde by following a theory of romantic love exposed by the contemporaneous Viennese writer Emil Lucka, whose Die drei Stufen der Erotik (1913) became a bestseller in early twentieth-century Europe. In accord with Lucka’s work, Alwa experiences different stages of love, evolving from the sensual and the spiritual to a synthesis of the two. The ultimate goal is to reach a form of transcendence similar to the one experienced by Tristan. This Wagnerian dimension is embedded in the formal organization of the rondo in Act 2, particularly the end of the love scene. Significantly, in the short score of the work Berg included a verbatim quotation from the Prelude of Tristan, bearing close resemblance to the same quotation used in the Lyric Suite. Evidence from previously unexamined autograph sources, personal accounts, letters and musical structures suggests that Berg attempted to achieve with Lulu the same metaphysical ideal Wagner had accomplished with Tristan. At a deeper level, however, it demonstrates Berg’s concern with the antithesis between tonality and twelve-tone serialism and his attempt at a synthesis. In many respects, Berg’s appropriation of Wagner becomes an allegory for the construction of his distinctive musical aesthetics.

3B: Contemporary British composers

Chair: David Beard (Cardiff U.)

Kenneth Gloag (Cardiff U.)
Fundamental polarities and stylistic identities in Nicholas Maw’s Scenes and Arias

Nicholas Maw’s Scenes and Arias (1962, rev. 1966) was, after its first performance, compared by Anthony Payne to Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Strauss’s Elektra. This comparison suggests that the stylistic identity for this work involves reflections of late romanticism and early modernism, a suggestion that can be extended further to identify a relationship to those past musical languages in the shape of intensely expressive gestures and dramatic contrasts. The work is also imbued with tonal references in the form of embedded triadic shapes and specific pitch centres. For Payne, such formations are ‘seen as points of reference within an atonal world’. While this proposal might connect with the reference to Schoenberg, it is difficult to hear Scenes and Arias as ‘atonal’, in that specific pitch centres often emerge from dense textures and give focus and direction to the harmonic and thematic materials, a process that suggests an underlying tension between the possibilities of tonality and atonality – what Arnold Whittall calls a ‘polarity of single-note centricity and chromatic saturation’. This proposed polarity and the resulting unresolved balance provides a useful starting point for a consideration of the harmonic languages of this work.
However, this polarity is not only active within the harmonic dimension but also relates to the work’s stylistic identity in that it presents a realization of the tensions both within and between late Romantic and early modernist soundworlds, tensions that can be extended to include those formed between a twentieth-century postmodern music and these now historically distanced moments. For some commentators Maw’s Scenes and Arias reflects a neo-Romantic stylistic orientation, a label casually attached to Maw and other British composers during the 1980s, that overtly acknowledges the presence of the past. Maw himself has identified the period ‘somewhere between 1860 and 1914’ as the historical moment from which he has chosen to ‘nourish’ his ‘own music’. However, this paper will argue that this orientation, in the context of this work, rather than resulting in an easy accommodation with the past is defined through a remarkable series of tensions formed between different stylistic sources in dialogue with different harmonic formations.

Benjamin K. Davies (U. of Southampton)
‘Grasping the nettle’: Birtwistle’s pitch-language

Harrison Birtwistle reportedly stated early in his career that he could rewrite his music using different pitches ‘without doing any damage to it’ (reported in Nyman, Tempo, no. 88, 1969). While his subsequent declarations have not necessarily substantiated this assessment, aspects of Birtwistle’s documented procedures do indeed suggest that chance and accident in the determination of pitch formations in his works are not only tolerated but actively courted, with the implication that such formations might have been otherwise. Starting from provisional acceptance of Birtwistle’s appraisal of his pitch-language, this paper will interpret the composer’s evolving compositional practice – in particular the development of the archetypes of ‘multiple’ and ‘notional’ musical objects – as the rigorous consequence of his insight that pitch specificity is not, in the context of his aesthetic and formal practice, in itself either necessary or sufficient to determine a work’s expressive and formal identity. Discussion of the idea of ‘damage to the music’ will broach the issue of which ‘different pitches’ might appropriately be substituted, which in turn will entail an appreciation of local determinants within a timescale where the operative mechanisms concern the functional range of a posteriori pitch relationships. Following certain of Birtwistle’s ad hoc comments on those elements of form and narrative that he deems proper to diatonicism, the eclipse of the nexus scale-degree/enharmonic relation by the concept of pitch-class will be understood as having profound methodological implications for our generalized understanding of pitch-relations. I will suggest that the issues involved are by no means unique to Birtwistle, and that we need to be more cognizant of a radical discontinuity concerning what theory might be expected to account for if we are not – almost one hundred years after the publication of Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre – to continue to plead that, while laws prevail, demands for theory should be deferred.

Edward Venn (Lancaster U.)
Smoke and mirrors: Thomas Adès’s Brahms

‘If a man who knows that he will die soon makes his account with earth and with heaven, prepares his soul for the departure, and balances what he leaves with what he will receive, he might desire to incorporate a word – a part of the wisdom he has acquired – into the knowledge of mankind, if he is one of the Great. […] Or is one entitled to assume that a message from a man who is already half on the other side progresses to the uttermost limit of the still-expressible?’ (Schoenberg, ‘Brahms the Progressive’).
In his poem ‘Brahms II’, Alfred Brendel describes the nocturnal visits of the cigar-smoking ghost of Brahms to the music room of a house; his piano playing sends the unfortunate instrument out of tune. When setting this for baritone and orchestra (Brahms, op. 21), Thomas Adès ‘wondered what would happen if [he] wrote a piece just about the logic of Brahms’ music and not about the beauty and warmth’, thereby exploring, in Tom Service’s words, ‘the limits of Brahms’ musical material’.
This paper will explore the gulf between the poetic visions of Schoenberg and Brendel/Adès through a hermeneutic reading of the latter in the terms of the former, in order to investigate the nature and conditions of the limits both visions describe. In doing so, it will say something about the apparatus by which Adès alludes to Brahms (the smoke and mirrors by which he makes us hear the ghost), but will also enable us to understand better the expressive affect of the work.

3C: Polyphony and disjunction

Chair: Jonathan Cross (U. of Oxford)

Marc Rigaudière (Université Paul Verlaine, Metz, and CRULH)
Reading between the lines: the analysis of melodic disjunction in tonal music

Since the progressive dissemination of the concept of ‘compound melody’ from the 1960s on, a deeper knowledge of the implications of melodic disjunction for harmonic and polyphonic perception has been gained. Moreover, Schenkerian studies, by placing the question of the relationship between melodic lines and underlying contrapuntal structures at the heart of the analytical process, have made analysts more sensitive to compound melody and kindred phenomena.
It is therefore tempting to introduce an approach to this matter in music analysis curricula. But, as one quickly notices, the many resultant complications mean that such an approach exceeds the scope of school training. For instance, exercises that would seem straightforward, like rewriting a horizontalized polyphony in terms of strict counterpoint, often appear unsolvable in a simple and univocal manner. Likewise, the harmonic analysis of certain pieces in two voices may appear much more difficult than expected. The reason for this is that those composers who have been fully conscious of the potentialities of the set of techniques based upon auditory persistence, which I will gather under the term ‘oblique polyphony’, have made good use of the ambiguity that it allows. To try to recognize all the subtleties of this ‘oblique polyphony’ offers a rewarding insight into numerous passages of tonal music from all periods, but also leads us to accept recourse to ambiguity and indeterminacy as a powerful compositional device.
I would like, through the study of a few instances from various composers including Bach, Mozart and Schumann, to list the different kinds of issues to which the analysis of oblique polyphony may give rise, and to explore the wide range of ways in which polyphonic equivocality was cultivated by composers, from the most pragmatic ones (who avoid voice-leading defects) to the most artistic ones (who introduce the ear to the delights of mild and transient uncertainty).

George Papageorgiou (Royal Holloway, U. of London)
‘Defying gravity’: structural conflict as dynamic experience

A frequent topic in the analysis of the complexity of musical structure is the identification of structural conflict. This is generally conceptualized in terms of two or more non-aligned or incompatible grouping structures or layers of motion (whether we are talking, for example, about two juxtaposed metres or keys, metre against rhythm or harmony/voice-leading against phrase structure). While such models do succeed in locating all kinds of structural incongruities or dichotomies, they give little insight into the nature of the way they are experienced by the listener as a whole. In this paper, I will propose an alternative theoretical framework for understanding structural conflict as dynamic experience by showing how it is manifested in the listening process.
The current theoretical model differs from traditional ones in at least one important way: the conflict is not located in the structural patterns themselves (rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, etc.) but in the experienced gestural patterns they shape. This does not only allow for the consideration of the interaction of different structural aspects under one integrated model but also gives more room for the consideration of the role of the performer and listener, in addition to the composer, in shaping structural conflict.
‘Structural conflict’ from the point of view of dynamic experience is understood here as ‘gestural distortion’: the various structural patterns that contribute towards the overall music-gestural experience encourage experienced gestural patterns that deviate from (as opposed to conflict with) some prototypical ‘well-formed’ pattern. These experienced gestural patterns are nothing but our bodily reactions to the perceived structure of musical sounds and, as such, they derive their meaning from our daily experience of physical movement in space-time. The nature of this experience will be demonstrated by analogy with computer-generated animations of a bouncing ball that moves expressively to the musical examples to be analysed.

Anthony Gritten (U. of Middlesex)
Dialogue, Stravinsky, distraction

This paper juxtaposes a Bakhtinian concept of polyphony, the third movement of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, and a Benjaminian notion of distraction.
Part 1 describes the conditions of polyphony and situates it historically and philosophically. This section moves inwards towards the musical origins of polyphony (Benson 2006) and outwards towards a generalized interpretive mechanism for accomplishing hermeneutic work. Noting the recent growth of broadly Bakhtinian musicology, I turn from this generalized context for agon to a modernist case study.
Part 2 describes a sequence of musical gestures in Aria II in terms of three clear but hitherto unremarked allusions to specific moments in Bach, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky concerti, relating the shared languages of these gestures and describing the polyphonic palimpsest of the music. This section demonstrates that polyphony is the archetypal form of structural listening (Subotnik 1996), biased towards the musical text and assuming that listeners listen fully, attentively and uninterruptedly.
Part 3 plays off Bakhtin and Stravinsky against each other, using them as a springboard into questions of polyphonic interpretation and its nemesis: distraction. On the basis of historical changes in the cultural dynamics of listening (e.g. Benjamin 1936, Rutsky 2002), work in pop music studies (e.g. Goodwin 1992, Waters 2003), organization studies (e.g. Furnham & Allass 1999, Furnham & Bradley 1997, Furnham & Strbac 2002) and perception (e.g. Gaver 1993a-b, Clarke 2005, Brodsky 2007), I will argue that distraction not only prevents Aria II’s polyphony from full self-realization, but is what allows it to happen in the first place, by providing a mechanism by which the listener can (or is forced to) shift attention from one voice to another within the polyphonic musical fabric. Indeed, I shall argue that, although distraction is usually considered as stealing the listener’s attention away from music towards the nominally non-musical, the cognition of polyphony suggests that the listener can also be distracted by the very sound of music itself (thus, the postmodern return of aura). Structurally coeval with the interpretive enterprise, distraction works over the polyphony in Aria II and opens it up for hearing, gently reminding us that attention and concentration are not given but created – they are tasks for the listener requiring what Bakhtin calls aesthetic love.

5A: Late Schubert: songs, cycles, repetitions

Chair: Robert Hatten (Indiana U.)

Anne Hyland (King’s College, Cambridge)
The burden of Schubert’s instrumental music reconsidered: variation form in the second movement of D810, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’

The issue of repetition in Schubert’s instrumental music has continued to stimulate analytical discourse since the publication of Adorno’s 1928 essay on Schubert. In particular, the ‘burden of repetition’, a term coined by Scott Burnham in reference to Schubert’s treatment of sonata themes in his late instrumental works(19th-Century Music, 2005), foregrounds the ostensibly static construction of Schubert’s sonatas and invites criticism of their non-teleological structures.
This paper takes as its starting point the notion of a ‘burden’ of repetition, but inverts the perspective of the questions being asked by looking instead at a variation movement by Schubert. Despite the overlapping narrative of distance and return common to both the sonata and variation, the purpose and effect of repetition within each is fundamentally dissimilar. Since repetition, whether contiguous or remote, is a sine qua non of variation form, the obligation to repeat is implicit in the formal outline and not, as in the sonata, imposed upon it by the composer. This paper therefore aims to problematize the prevailing view of Schubert’s use of repetition by drawing attention to the developmental techniques employed by him, even within a form which dictates the use of repetition and arbitrary additive processes.
To this end, I will present an analysis of the second movement of the D minor Quartet, D810 in order to illustrate its formal organization. Its position as the slow movement of this quartet is also an important consideration, since it therefore has no formal responsibility to mimic the dynamic form of the first-movement sonata. Nonetheless, it shall be demonstrated that here, as elsewhere in Schubert’s variations, the music expresses a clear structure, uninhibited by the repetitive dictates of the form.
Ultimately, I hope to suggest a means by which repetition can be perceived as a structuring device and thereby question the unanimity of the judgment that relegates it to the position of ‘burden’.

David Bretherton (U. of Southampton)
Evocation through structure in Schubert’s ‘Gondelfahrer’

Schubert’s songs ‘Gondelfahrer’ (D808) and ‘Der Gondelfahrer’ (D809) both set Johann Mayrhofer’s poem ‘Es tanzen Mond und Sterne’, but, although composed in the same month (March 1824), they are substantively different. Most obviously the medium changes from solo voice and piano in D808 to accompanied male-voice quartet in D809, and the settings are also melodically dissimilar. Furthermore, the harmonic language of D808 is dark and brooding, whilst that of D809 is optimistic and comparatively straightforward. Thus, although many of Schubert’s songs exist in multiple (often closely related) versions, D808 and D809 appear to be completely different settings. Yet D808 and D809 share one very important feature: both represent the tolling of midnight from St Mark’s Tower – the central event in Mayrhofer’s poem – with a mimetic, trance-like passage which is cast in that most Schubertian of key areas, bVI. This evocative arrival on bVI is fundamental to the articulation of the modally mixed, large-scale interrupted-cadence progression (I – V – bVI – I) that forms the basis of the songs’ common harmonic structure.
Susan Youens has recently suggested that Mayrhofer’s apparently innocent poem really concerns the Austrian government’s suppression of the Carbonari (Italian nationalists). Following her lead, I argue that Schubert carefully constructed the thematic and surface-harmonic elements of his two ‘Es tanzen Mond und Sterne’ settings so as to project different readings of the text, with D808 being best interpreted as politically dissident and D809 as ostensibly innocent. This would seem to chime with aspects of the songs’ performance and publication history. Schubert’s treatment of bVI is crucial to my interpretations of D808 and D809, and so, during my conclusion, I question Liszt’s claim that Schubert would have approved of the modifications made to the bVI ‘tolling bell’ passage in his 1838 piano transcription of D809.

Blake Howe (City U. of New York)
On annihilation and transcendence: Schubert’s final Mayrhofer settings

Though Schubert’s final four settings of the poetry of Johann Mayrhofer (‘Der Sieg’, ‘Abendstern’, ‘Auflösung’, and ‘Gondelfahrer’, D805–8) have previously been considered in isolation (Youens 1996), they have not yet been analysed collectively. Mayrhofer’s belief in the annihilation of physicality for spiritual transcendence – a philosophy that closely resembles the narrative of ‘overcoming disability’ (Straus 2006) – is complemented in Schubert’s songs through shared intertextual musical gestures. Consider, for instance, the pitches C#/C, which Schubert uses at pivotal junctures to contrast heightened strength with disabling resignation. In ‘Abendstern’, these notes toggle the song between the ephemeral hope of A major and the weakness of A minor, and at the crucial moment of suicide in ‘Der Sieg’, a startling Db yields to C. But, in the dramatic climax of ‘Auflösung’, the sequence is reversed: C rises to C# – a fitting musical representation of the ‘overcoming disability’ narrative. Consider, also, how the peculiar appearance of Ab major in ‘Gondelfahrer’ accompanies the ‘decree of midnight’, which sentences the gondolier to a life of exception and abnormality. In ‘Auflösung’, Ab major is prolonged at an equally provocative moment, when the singer cries ‘lass mich allein!’ – renouncing physicality in favour of spiritual transcendence, ‘overcoming’ the initial marking of difference in ‘Gondelfahrer’ by modulating to the same key (via an enharmonic progression similar to the one at the moment of suicide in ‘Der Sieg’). These internal intertexts (and others, particularly those involving chromatic mediants and the gesture 5-^b6-5) all contribute to a network of motives that reveal Schubert’s cyclical propensity (Kramer 1994). Additionally, a reordering of the songs is proposed, based on a letter apparently unconsidered by Otto E. Deutsch in his creation of the Schubert chronological catalogue; the musical–structural consequences of such a reordering (a multi-song progression from I to V) argue strongly in favour of cyclical/collective analysis.

Cameron Gardner (Cardiff U.)
Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A minor, D845: constructing analysis and interpretation from ‘Todtengräbers Heimwehe’, D842

With little Schubert analytical tradition to draw upon, one way in which scholars have recently interpreted the composer’s instrumental music is to make a comparison with his songs. For those like William Kinderman who offer relatively brief analysis, a subjective reading of an earlier song can be applied to a piano sonata or chamber work when the same musical devices are used. For others like Charles Fisk who analyse more extensively, an alternative reading can be given to an instrumental work when a link to a song (whether a theme, key or harmonic progression) is shown in a different musical context.
A similar comparative approach and interpretative goal informs this paper’s discussion of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A minor (D845). Noting the melodic link with ‘Todtengräbers Heimwehe’ (‘Gravedigger’s homesickness’, D842), the main interpretation of the sonata is derived from revealing contrast between the coda of the first movement and the final verse of the song. Particular significance is drawn from comparing where and how frequently the melody appears. In ‘Todtengräbers Heimwehe’ it is used twice in the penultimate verse where the gravedigger expresses his yearning to die, but does not return in the final verse where he ascends to heaven. Taking the melody’s associations with death (as revealed in the song), its pervasiveness in the coda (compared to its absence in the final verse) and its relationship to other motifs in the movement, a non-transcendent outcome is claimed for the sonata.
Contextualized within the alternative ‘Todtengräbers Heimwehe’ reading of the sonata are semiotic ideas: Robert Hatten’s correlation of ascending motion with ‘yearning’ and descending with ‘resigning’, and Michael Klein’s identification of repetition, chromaticism, enharmonicism and the strange note as signifiers for the uncanny. These ideas also help the discussion to move fluidly between analysis and hermeneutics.
To conclude, I claim that my interpretation may be considered as the governing one for the entire work, since there are close musical parallels between the codas of the first and last movements. Reinforcing that the sonata conveys a lack of spiritual salvation compared to ‘Todtengräbers Heimwehe’, I emphasize the unresolved outcome of my narrative. This contrasts with Fisk’s reading of the final three piano sonatas, which suggests reintegration of a divided self from difference with Winterreise.

5B: Covert modernism in the ‘conservative’ mainstream

Chair: Nick Reyland (U. of Keele)

Michael Byde (U. of Leeds)
William Walton’s ‘tonality’: prolongation vs. association

In 1939, William Walton prophesied his future critical demise, writing ‘I’ve gone through the first halcyon periods, and am just about ripe for my critical damnation.’ These words proved to be remarkably accurate in terms of the critical pressures that developed following the Second World War. Given the rising prestige of continental modernism amongst British composers and critics, Walton’s tonal symphonic music was increasingly branded as ‘regressive’.
However, beyond the unsubstantiated claims made in press reviews, there has been little in-depth analysis of these scores, Frank Howes’s colourful but superficial descriptions aside. This paper aims to address this lack of analytical and critical attention, focusing particularly on tonality, taking the opening movements of the Cello Concerto (1956) and Second Symphony (1960) as case studies.
A close study of these scores reveals that contrast between different types of harmonic organization – including conventionally tonal, extended, octatonic and freely dissonant structures – is more pertinent than hierarchical relationships that relate different keys to each other. Following Joseph N. Straus (Journal of Music Theory, 1987), I argue that that motivic patterns (specifically, structures identified in set-class terms) may have referential significance; although these may be linked structurally with similar sonorities in other parts of the score, they are not prolonged in the Schenkerian sense. Such associations may be structurally significant and lend coherence to the music, but they do not control the passages that separate them.
These analyses bring into focus criticism of Walton’s post-war music as ‘conservative’ or ‘regressive’. Although some parts of these scores have a triadic surface, the underlying structural relationships are not conventionally tonal. In fact, Walton’s tonality was influenced, although not overtaken, by ‘modernist’ ways of thinking.

Raphael D. Thöne (Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Hanover)
An Arnoldian ‘enigma’: the application of musical ciphers in Malcolm Arnold’s Seventh Symphony and the Fantasy on a Theme of John Field

The tendency to hide or incorporate extra-musical meanings into musical works through the use of either onomatopoeic or other algorithm-based generated tone rows is not a particular feature of the new British contemporary compositions of the twentieth century in general. Composers from all centuries and all nationalities have always had a sense, initially, for these compositional ‘mind games’ (the BACH motif or the Shostakovich motif); secondly, for creating intertextuality (as Elgar did with his Enigma Variations and its monogram titles) and thirdly for the opportunity to express secrets (as Alban Berg accomplished with his ‘secret love’ dedication to Hanna Fuchs-Robettin in his opera Lulu, hidden among his twelve-tone rows).
Paul Jackson – and later Paul Harris and Anthony Meredith – previously revealed Malcolm Arnold’s (1921–2006) application of a musical letter-name alphabet in his Seventh Symphony and his Fantasy on a Theme of John Field for piano and orchestra. Except for casually mentioning that Arnold was using such methods – literally transcribing words into music and this generating his musical material from a ‘non-musical’ source (such as the names of his children Katherine and Robert or his former wife Sheila) – both analysts refrained from analysing the outcome and impact of such a compositional method in detail.
In my paper, I will demonstrate the overall structural effect of Arnold’s initial decision to generate his subjects from the simple letter-name alphabet, quoting a few well-chosen examples from the above-mentioned works. Furthermore, I hope to encourage a discussion on whether or not it is correct to label this as a serialist approach, as Jackson and Harris/Meredith have suggested, or the means by which we need to extend our musicological terminology in order to capture Arnold’s true, though hidden, compositional Enigma.

Erica Argyropoulos (U. of Kansas):
Expressionism and antagonism: Leonard Bernstein’s complex relationship with serialism

Throughout his musical career, Leonard Bernstein was often flippant in his attitude towards serialism, neglecting its repertory as both a conductor and educator; in fact, Bernstein often implied that composers whose tonal works he readily embraced – including Copland and Stravinsky – had needlessly ‘sold out’ to the academic fashionability of atonalism. In scholarly musical discourse, Bernstein is largely regarded as an antagonist of the Second Viennese School; however, such an assertion wrongfully ignores key instances of his favourable relationship with serialism. Most noteworthy is his Symphony no. 3 ‘Kaddish’ for orchestra, singers and narrator: a work so deeply personal that the composer reportedly began to weep uncontrollably while leading a particularly rousing performance.
Music and cultural scholars alike have long been attracted to Kaddish as a sort of cathartic enigma. The self-authored text appears to embody Bernstein’s deep resentment towards his own otherness: a musical narrative of a conductor forced to hide his homosexuality for the sake of his career, a radical liberal who had barely escaped the McCarthyist blacklist, and most significantly, an American Jew questioning the atrocities of a genocide which claimed many of his own relatives. Bernstein relied on the language of Schoenbergian expressionism for his monumental final symphony, conceding that it was otherwise impossible to communicate himself effectively. Furthermore, I assert that Bernstein used Schoenberg’s own unsettling response to the Holocaust, A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46, as an artistic precedent for Kaddish: a thesis clearly at odds with the widely accepted view that Bernstein’s tone as a serialist was one of sarcasm. While dodecaphony ultimately surrenders to tonality as anger gives way to acceptance, Bernstein’s employment of serialism in Kaddish is painfully sincere and communicates his growing respect towards a system he felt capable of articulating emotions inconceivable solely by means of diatonicism.

Norton Dudeque (Federal U. of Parana, Brazil)
‘Rolling off like a film’: analysing Villa-Lobos’s ‘Cantilena’ (Bachianas Brasileiras no. 5) through Schoenberg’s ‘unravelling’ concept

Schoenberg argues that music of the homophonic-melodic style is characterized by the use of a main theme, accompanied by harmony, and that its thematic development is based on the variation of the features of a basic unit, which characterizes ‘developing variation’. On the other hand, the music of the contrapuntal-polyphonic style is characterized by the unfolding, the ‘unravelling’ of a basic configuration, which is reassembled in a different order, and contains everything to produce a different sound, or in Schoenberg’s words, ‘rolls off like a film’. Schoenberg’s ‘unravelling’ concept will provide the analytic tools for an investigation of the first movement of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras no. 5, a work which the Brazilian composer allied with the Bachian tradition (of unravelling the musical work). This work is famous for its melodic fluency, charming instrumental setting (soprano and cello ensemble), and the mixture of elements from Bach’s music and the choros, a genre of Brazilian popular music.

5C: Hexachords plus or minus: from the combinatorial to the transformational

Chair: Christian Kennett (U. of Westminster)

Bernard Gates (Rugby, UK)
Z-related hexachords: their properties and their role in pitch-class set analysis

Of the fifty distinct six-note set classes, as defined by Allen Forte, only twenty are self-complementary within the twelve-note aggregate, either through transpositional or inversional equivalence. The other thirty are given a Z-prefix, to show that they are related in pairs, although only through complementation or total interval content. Some theorists have attempted to explore the possibility of further links between Z-paired hexachords, while others have been merely dismissive: George Perlehas gone so far as to assert that no special value can be given to the Z-relation, since it has played no role in twelve-note serial composition.
This paper suggests that the Z-relation’s special value for analysis lies in its property of complementation. Since Z-related sets are complementary, it follows that any reduction in the size of one set by the transference of those pitch elements to the other set would still maintain a complementation within the aggregate. So by definition, all subsets of all Z-sets are complemented exactly by the supersets of their Z-partners; this reciprocal property applies to the fifteen hexachord pairs within the twelve-note aggregate, to the three pentad pairs within ten-note aggregates, and to the single tetrachord pair within the octatonic scale. It can be shown that structural associations may be made or strengthened through the use of these new relational models; as an example, the piano textures which open the two halves of Berg’s Warm die Lüfte, op. 2 no. 4 (bar 1 and bars 11–12 at Zeit lassen) can be associated through the Z-relational chains

4-Z29 – 5-20 – 6-Z43 – 7-19 – 8-Z15
4-Z15 – 5-19 – 6-Z17 – 7-20 – 8-Z29

Inessa Bazayev (CUNY Graduate Center/Oberlin Conservatory of Music)
Orthography in the music of Nicolai Roslavets

The music of Nicolai Roslavets (1881–1944), long repressed in the Soviet Union, has recently begun to attract musicologists’ attention. Perle 1991, Ferenc 1993 and Sitsky 1994 are useful accounts of Roslavets’s music, but none explains his idiosyncratic orthography. I will show, however, that Roslavets’s orthography, which often features triple sharps, operates on a deeper structure of fifth relations and helps us understand his unique compositional system.
Roslavets uses synthetic chords – groups of scale-like notes that recur at different transpositional levels. The transpositions of these chords – for instance, those of the set class (0134578) at the start of ‘Pianissimo’ – can be represented by means of quint or perfect-fifth distances (Qn), illustrated by means of a line of fifths on which octave equivalence, but not enharmonic equivalence, is assumed. From the resultant transformations emerges a path that not only outlines inversional symmetry but also accounts for the unique spellings of chords. Roslavets’s extreme orthography results from this underlying structure in fifths: moving to the right on the line produces sharp-dominated spellings, while moving to the left produces flat-dominated spellings.
In my paper I use Trois Compositions (1914), ‘Pianissimo’ (1914), and Cinq Preludes (1922) to show that Qn relations shape the deeper structure of Roslavets’s music in a way that ultimately explains his unique orthography.

Rachel E. Mitchell (U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Roberto Gerhard’s idiosyncratic approach to twelve-tone sonata form

The classical sonata form, according to the tradition set by the first Viennese school, is generally described as a harmonically driven, thematically based structure. The form is based on the conflict and resolution of thematic groups in contrasting keys within a tonal idiom. But when tonality is abandoned, must we also abandon the sonata form structure? The first movement of Roberto Gerhard’s String Quartet no. 1 is composed in sonata form, yet it is also governed by a twelve-tone row. While this was not a completely foreign idea during the 1950s when the work was composed, Gerhard took a unique approach in the reconciling of traditional and contemporary features.
Gerhard’s implementation of the sonata-form principle, like those of other twelve-tone composers, is at odds with the views of many theorists. Many of these analysts adhere to a definition of sonata form that emphasizes key relations and thus argue against the use of the form in twelve-tone or other non-tonal music. On the other hand, there are some theorists who view the sonata form from a thematic perspective, finding that it can provide the framework needed to accommodate themes of both a tonal and a non-tonal variety.
According to Joseph Straus, the most refined twentieth-century examples of sonata form are those that address the harmonic and thematic struggle presented by the nature of the form, something that I suggest Gerhard accomplishes in his First String Quartet. Harmonic contrast is noted in his unique treatment of related and unrelated hexachords. Thematic contrast is achieved through his use of clearly delineated primary and subordinate themes. In this paper, I will explore these issues as they pertain to the opening movement of Gerhard’s First String Quartet and suggest reasons for the idiosyncratic nature of this work among its kind.

6A:Cognitive and empirical models

Chair: Michael Spitzer (U. of Durham)

Daniel Shanahan (Trinity College Dublin)
Melodic probability in Debussy’s String Quartet: the use of hidden Markov models in music analysis

Debussy’s music comprises fluctuating states of closure and continuation. The composer’s use of stasis in one parameter while creating expectation in another allows the listener to simultaneously perceive both closure and continuation. The String Quartet in G minor is an example of the composer’s early attempts to elude tonal constraints in favour of purely sonorous music. The harmonic ambiguity, albeit conservative when compared to Debussy’s later works, undermines the implicative nature of the melodic segments and creates a number of closural possibilities. The varying degrees of expectation can be measured by the probability of closure which has been generated.
Much of the work which has applied probability to music has used as a priori a corpus or set of stylistic precepts, which are referred to as likely events. Debussy, however, eludes many of the stylistic features which have thus far been applied. In attempting to use intra-opus methods to determine the nature of expectations, my research has examined probability as a continually generative aspect of the composition. This paper attempts to quantify the degrees of closure which occur within the melodic parameter by defining the probability of melodic closure. The analytical model, which is influenced by Huron’s recent work on Bayesian probability and music, attempts to further explore the nature of hidden Markov models as a method for defining probabilities within a composition. By using a perceived tonal centre as the unobserved constant in a Markov process, the melodic parameter is defined as a series of low-order probabilities in a Markov process. These probabilities are then used to quantify the varying degrees of closure within the melodic process, which are often at odds with the harmonic and rhythmic parameters.

Fernando Gualda (Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s U. Belfast)
Parametric comparison of motif Gestalt

Current research in the computational analysis of music has led to the development of several new methods for music analysis. Those methods, however, do not necessarily take into consideration intuitive notions of motivic analysis, partly because the very definition of motif lacks clarity (Mazzola 2006). Since it can be argued that strict definitions of musical motif may not be desirable (Réti 1951), there is a need for methods that can either adapt to style (in terms of the particular characteristics of a given work) or to the user’s own musical definitions.
This research has developed a new approach that can list motivic patterns by similarity, based on parameters retrieved from the motivic distribution within a piece of music. Parameters can also be given by the user. Results can be browsed and compared.

Vanessa Hawes (U. of East Anglia)
Kraehenbuehl’s general theory of musical communication

In the late 1950s the composer David Kraehenbuehl began to develop a general theory of music based on a model of music as communication. His early editorials in the Journal of Music Theory proposed a definition of musical theory in which the development of compositional systems with which a composer might communicate with his audience was paramount. As music theory as a discipline in America developed in the direction of increasing separation between composers and those working in musical academia, the idea of a compositional theory was sidelined in favour of analytical theories such as pitch-class set theory and variations on Schenkerian theory.
This paper explores the development of an American music theory in terms of Kraehenbuehl’s vision in which not only is a musical composition modelled as a communication system, but the system of music study itself was also modelled thus. Kraehenbuehl’s general theory can be constructed out of threads from the proto-cognitive system developed by Coons and Kraehenbuehl at the end of the 1950s; Kraehenbuehl’s editorials; his unpublished writings; and his wide influence in piano pedagogy. Taken together, these four facets of Kraehenbuehl’s career can be assembled to form a comprehensive, coherent theory of musical communication, for use by the composer, music theorist and listener. Although Kraehenbuehl’s influence, like Schillinger’s theory before it, now exists almost solely in the realm of musical pedagogy, his conception of music and the study of music as communication provides a model with which to explore the roots and reasons of the nature of American music theory and how it developed.

6B: Temporality and metre in the 20th century

Chair: Charles Wilson (Cardiff U.)

Roxane Prévost (U. of Ottawa)
Hypermetric structures in post-tonal music

Most recent analytical studies on rhythm and metre have focused on select excerpts from both tonal and post-tonal repertoire. Some scholars have adopted an architectonic approach in analysing metre and rhythm in tonal music (London 2004, Temperley 2001, Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1985), while others have focused on hypermetric structures (McClelland 2006, Cohn 2001) and metric dissonances (Krebs 1999). These approaches well describe metre and rhythm in tonal music, but become problematic with post-tonal repertoire because some of the criteria for the perception of metre disappear with this latter type of music. Although some scholars have developed models to analyse rhythm in post-tonal music (Roeder 2003, Horlacher 2001, Hasty 1997, Roeder 1994), these studies focus on select excerpts, rather than full movements.
In this paper, I will show that a hypermetrical structure, similar to that of tonal music, may also exist in a particular class of post-tonal repertoire. Drawing from Christopher Hasty’s Meter as Rhythm, I extend the notion of flexible metrical structures from short excerpts to an entire movement. I have selected the fourth movement of Canadian composer Anne Eggleston’s Piano Quartet (1955) as representative of a class of post-tonal works that project a sense of metricality over long time spans, either an entire movement or a large section of a movement. I show how some of the different groupings of the half note (or duple metrical division) and the dotted-quarter note (or triple metrical division) create an underlying metrical structure for the entire fourth movement. The duple usurps the primary role, while the triple offsets the dominant metre. I then interpret these duple and triple units as hypermeasures and further group the hypermeasures to show that this movement can indeed be perceived as a large-scale hypermetric entity.

Nelson Wu (Chinese U. of Hong Kong)
Messiaen’s dynamic Mozart

Like Arnold Schoenberg, Olivier Messiaen was not only a prominent composer, but also an influential pedagogue. Eminent post-war figures such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Alexander Goehr all attended his class at the Paris Conservatoire. We tend to forget, however, that Messiaen was an analysis teacher before being appointed as a professor in composition in 1966. According to Boulez, Messiaen viewed teaching as an important creative outlet, and most of his students seemed to have benefited more from the French master’s pedagogy than his music. More specifically, Jean Boivin observes that ‘[m]any of the students … were deeply struck by [Messiaen’s] insightful comments on Mozart’s late symphonies and great piano concertos.’ It is, therefore, ironic that the majority of scholarly works on Messiaen focus closely on his compositional techniques. His teachings on the Austro-German masters are seldom mentioned. It is only with the publication of Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie that we now get an opportunity to witness the detailed analyses of Mozart’s music in Chapter 4, Volume IV.
In order to investigate why the theory of accentuation is indispensable in Messiaen’s pedagogy and significant to today’s analytical climate, the treatises of Vincent d’Indy, André Mocquereau and Hugo Riemann will be discussed in connection with the categorization of masculine and feminine groups. Messiaen’s analysis of the slow movement of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony will be examined in relation to the discussion of writers such as Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard Meyer, Wallace Berry, Joel Lester and Christopher Hasty. Without a doubt, Messiaen’s dynamic reading of the notated score offers a refreshing perspective to analysts, and enables performers to see how musical phrases should be projected. Thus, this will be the first attempt to confirm his status as a theorist and analyst of the musical canon.

8A: Narrativity in late Romantic symphonism

Chair: Stephen Downes (U. of Surrey)

Robert Samuels (Open U.):
When must one speak of narrativity in music?

Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s article of 1990, ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?’ (Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 115) has become a much-quoted source, and a staple of undergraduate reading lists. The question that Nattiez proposes in his title, one might think, has been answered affirmatively in the intervening years. It is no longer contentious to claim that at least some music, at least some of the time, is best understood as a narrative construct.
Other questions which have arisen in the course of the ongoing academic debate to which Nattiez’s article belongs are, however, current issues for music analysis. Is narrativity the best descriptive model for all music, or for a small and genre-specific minority of pieces? Is it audible at every moment of a piece, or only at specific points when produced by specific techniques? Is narrativity a mode of analysis, or an alternative to analysis?
This paper enters this debate in order to propose some analytical consequences of interpreting musical texts as narratives. The paper contends that narrativity in music is a historically bound phenomenon, and is particularly a feature of nineteenth-century aesthetic thinking. To that extent, it seeks to recuperate recurrent metaphors of nineteenth-century criticism. However, the basis for using narrativity or narratological models in music analytical contexts lies in the semiotics of formal, tonal, motivic and thematic processes, in the repertoires in which this approach is productive. To speak, analytically, of narrativity in music requires an analytical model which addresses the similarities between music and literature at a structural level.
Having outlined the circumstances in which narrativity is required, rather than merely legitimate as an approach, the paper concludes with some examples drawn from the nineteenth-century symphonic repertoire. The paper, and the article that will derive from it, forms the methodological basis for the author’s intended book-length study of the nineteenth-century novel and symphony.

David Larkin (University College, Dublin)
Curvaceous composition: tracing trajectories in Strauss’s tone poems

In his celebrated 1964 polemic on the centenary of Strauss’s birth, Theodor W. Adorno noted that ‘[the] curve dominates him and his work’. Adorno saw in Don Juan (1889) the paradigmatic instance of this ‘meteroric arc’: the élan of the opening music and its precipitous decline at the end were for him inextricably linked together. Strauss’s penchant for quiet endings was noted even before the set of tone poems had been completed: the composer’s friend Friedrich Rösch encouraged him to rework the first version of Ein Heldenleben to counteract the perception that he was unable to conclude forte.
In this paper, I will evaluate the significance of the ‘curve’ and related metaphors in Strauss’s tone poems. While mainly focusing on large-scale dynamic plots, I will also take cognizance of Walter Werbeck’s investigations of Steigerung technique as a local form-shaping device in these works. It will be shown that the rise-and-fall shape represents merely one of a number of possible trajectories. For instance, Tod und Verklärung (1889) follows a different route: the musical collapse at the death of the protagonist is merely a prologue to the celebration of ultimate transcendence, so that the work as a whole follows the familiar ‘per-ardua-ad-astra’ path. The links between the trajectory of a work and its programmatic elements will be considered. It will be suggested that the dominance of the Adornian parabolic curve is one way in which Strauss deliberately differentiated himself from the dominant ‘ending-as-apotheosis’ paradigm in the works of Liszt and Wagner, his most significant precursors. Ending with a whimper rather than a bang is a symptom of Strauss’s rejection of transcendental metaphysics.

Joseph C. Kraus (Florida State U.)
Levels of nostalgia and narrative collapse in the ‘Pastorale’ from Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony

In his book Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, Fred Davis defines three ‘orders of cognition and emotion’ for the nostalgic experience: (1) first order or simple nostalgia, where a superior past is uncritically sentimentalized; (2) second order or reflexive nostalgia, where the authenticity of the nostalgic claim is critically examined; and (3) third order or interpretive nostalgia, where the nostalgic experience is analysed for its ‘significance and psychological purpose’. Davis claims that the artist can elevate the artwork from the naïve first level by a process called bracketing – placing the first-order modality ‘in quotation marks’ and ‘critically altering its meaning’.
My paper will explore Davis’s theory in relation to the narrative structure of the ‘Pastorale’ from the Manfred Symphony of Peter Tchaikovsky. Raymond Monelle describes its principal theme as a ‘new-siciliana’, a pastoral topic more intimate and subjective than its courtly Baroque predecessor. Although the movement begins to establish a conventional pastoral narrative, Tchaikovsky problematizes restatements of the siciliana by introducing greater textural and harmonic complexity, thus bracketing the theme upon its later appearances. The reflexive nostalgia invoked by the second statement is intensified by the subsequent introduction of a problematized ‘rustic’ pastoral (recalling Roman pifferari music). The intrusion of hyper-expressive ballet music in the movement’s central section threatens to derail the pastoral narrative altogether; the third and final statement of the siciliana attempts to reinstate the narrative, but is overwhelmed by a return of the hyper-expressive dance music. This narrative collapse (followed by a final reference to the pifferari) signals a third-order interpretive nostalgia: the initial experience of the pastoral allows the listener to escape from a complicated, unpleasant present into a simpler, idealized past, but it is a past that never really existed. Details of harmony, voice leading, and hypermeter will support my narrative reading.

8B: Compositional fictions in the later 20th century: sound, surface, abstraction

Chair: Alastair Williams (U. of Keele)

Bruce Durazzi (Washington U. in St Louis)
A dialectic of politics and love: Luigi Nono’s Incontri and the aesthetics of the impossible

In light of Luigi Nono’s persistent claims about the influence of Leftist politics on his work, it is difficult to know how to approach a piece like Incontri (1955). The score and the sketches reveal an abstract work, an experiment in the serial techniques typical of the European avant-garde in the mid-1950s. However, the composer’s program note invites us to hear the work as an encounter between two mutually autonomous entities, an expression of radical disunity framed in terms of Marxist dialectics. And, on the basis of biographical evidence that has come to light more recently, the work reads as a souvenir of Nono’s courtship with Nuria Schoenberg, the two ‘entities’ being no more abstract than the composer and his sweetheart.
The present study undertakes a close reading of Incontri, beginning with the technical process of its composition and working through the implications of the work’s public and private programmes. While this mode of analysis exposes some ways in which these competing impulses – musical, personal and political – may be independently valid and yet mutually contradictory, the problem must not be attributed to confusion on Nono’s part. The composition of the piece, its conception, its working method, and the composer’s commentary about it, represent Nono’s self-conscious working out of the tensions between different aspects of his life and career. And in fact, much of Nono’s career may be understood as an attempt to reconcile the composer’s musical modernism, his Communism and his personal affinities. The value of such a project lies not in its dubious success, but in its willingness to look frankly at the problem again and again. The work offers a window into the method of a composer who acknowledged the world as it was while working towards a world as he thought it should be.

Ian Dickson
Scelsi’s musical grammar

Giacinto Scelsi (1905–88) is a problematic figure for musical analysis, on account of his extreme anti-formalism and subversion of the authority of the musical text. By the 1950s, he was creating his music by improvisation, and delegating the transcription to assistants. The idiom he evolved was novel not only in its extreme economy of means (usually consisting of subtle inflections of continuous sounds), but also in its apparent rejection of any trace of conscious thought.
Analysts of Scelsi have tended to concentrate on large-scale musical architecture, neglecting the apparently redundant, non-developmental gestures from which, nonetheless, this architecture must be built up. Many of Scelsi’s advocates have encouraged this by denying that any formal processes might transcend ‘sound’, or even that any individual figures might be identified. This argument stems from Scelsi’s own mysticism: he attributed the automaticity of his improvisations to the cosmic power of sound, rather than to the long hours that he spent creating them.
I have recently argued that Scelsi’s late style can be understood in terms of a ‘musical grammar’ – that he adhered (however unconsciously or automatically) to a system of identifiable idiomatic ‘rules’. In this paper I shall develop this approach not just to show the complex results he achieved with this grammar, but also to suggest residual hierarchical tendencies in his use of overlapping and nesting. I argue that this grammatical analysis accounts for the persuasiveness of the improvisations more plausibly than metaphysical formulations involving ‘sound itself’.

Kivilcim Yildiz Senurkmez and Ahmet Altinel (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University State Conservatory, Istanbul)
Temporal character of harmony in spectral music

In his ‘Creative Evolution’ (1907), Henri Bergson (1859–1941) attempts to find the answers to certain problems on time-related issues and suggests various descriptions. According to him, there is a distinction between time in physical reality and time in consciousness. Bergson opposed mathematical time, which belongs to physical reality, to internal time, which is guided by intuitions. Internal time cannot be expressed in rational terms. It is only sensed by intuition. Bergson refers to this type of time as ‘duration’. Duration has a continuous, multi-layered structure and is not linear. The creative and innovative roles of the Bergsonian time concept overlap in many respects with the space-time concepts of spectral music, which bring sound as a temporal object into the focus of the compositional/creative process. The spectral approach in music has many similarities with Bergson’s theory of duration, as well as relating to Husserlian phenomenology, specifically to his theories of internal time-consciousness, which at the same time display fundamental differences with Bergsonian concepts. The phenomenological approach, based on time consciousness, draws our attention to the temporal characteristics of music. The phenomenological approach introduces a different approach to the temporal nature of spectral music.
This paper will discuss and analyse the relation between the concepts of intentionality and predictability and temporal issues. Thus, the following points will be discussed in relation to spectral compositions, especially those of Gérard Grisey, in the context of an analytical and aesthetic approach:

the relation between musical situations
analysis of spatio-harmonic relations
the relation between temporality and compositional continuity
the notion of process
discussion of aesthetic issues, such as musical time and space

8C: Harmony and mode in the 16th and 17th centuries

Chair: Geoffrey Chew (Royal Holloway, U. of London/Masaryk U., Brno)

Antonio Cascelli (National U. of Ireland, Maynooth)
Seconda prattica revisited

Cadences are at the centre of discussions about seconda prattica and the development of modern tonality. However, they have not been considered in terms of a combination of oratione, harmonia and numero, that is the platonic definition of melodia, so important in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music debates. The fundamental problem is: what do we consider as cadence? According to Zarlino, the cadence is an act that denotes that the harmony has been brought to rest and the meaning of the word fully achieved. Yet, in modern accounts this aspect is sometimes overlooked. In his analysis of ‘O Mirtillo’, for example, Carl Dahlhaus underlines the equality of cadences and verse endings, which do not necessarily correspond to the grammatical and syntactical closures required by Zarlino (la perfettione del senso delle parole). In treating all those chords as cadences on the same level, and selecting the primary chord on the basis of how many times it is played, Dahlhaus underlines the tonal aspect but does not grasp the unfolding of the events. This indeed is revealed by the different strength levels of the cadences, as result of the interaction between oratione, harmonia and numero, and leads to a new montage of musical events.
Considering the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century revitalization of the platonic definition of melodia, one may extract from the musica process in which words, cadences, pitches and accents are assembled together to create a new temporal and performative model, a rhetorical scheme of unexpectedness, as I will explain with examples from Monteverdi’s ‘Cruda Amarilli’, ‘O Mirtillo’ and Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. By means of this scheme of unexpectedness the music and the text define different tonal spaces and emotions, and the audience is invited, almost through a camera, to focus the attention on different objects.

Luca Bruno (Southern Methodist U., Dallas)
Adrian Willaert’s Madonn’io non lo so: a model for Renaissance harmony

This paper proposes a new methodology for the analysis of harmonic procedures in particular genres of secular Renaissance polyphony. Willaert’s Canzone villanesche (1542–5) represent an ideal model for studying the interactions between chordal composition and other dimensions of the polyphonic fabric, in particular text setting. My analytical method provides answers to the following questions: ‘Does Renaissance harmony only organize local events or can it also connect larger spans of music?’ These questions are not secondary, since theorists up to Zarlino did not contextualize in technical terms the large-scale harmonic perspective, focusing instead on local connections between simultaneities through dissonance (Dahlhaus 1968, Rivera 1979, Blackburn 1987, Roig-Francolí 1990, Wilde 1994). The generation of theorists active in Italy during the 1550s displays a new coherence in the treatment of harmony, both from a conceptual and a terminological point of view. My hypothesis is that theorists such as Zarlino and Vicentino were influenced by the ‘new’ harmonic practice devised by Willaert and applied in nuce in his ‘lighter’ production. Composers such as Lasso, Cipriano, Nasco and Azzaiolo welcomed the new way of composing, which featured local as well as large-scale implications of harmony.
The analytical method is exemplified through the analysis of Madonn’io non lo so, the third villanesca in the collection published by Angelo Gardano in Venice in 1545. I propose seven stages of analysis to determine how harmony – intended here in its modern sense as the study of chord construction and linkage – interacts with other dimensions of the polyphonic fabric to enhance text setting. Matters of text setting, particularly prosodic qualities of the ‘Neapolitan’ language, become determinant factors in detecting at deeper levels of structure the harmonic functionality of chords – functionality that exists not only at cadence points, but throughout the entire musical phrase.

Jeremy Grall (U. of Memphis)
Harmonic functionality through idiomatic ornamentation in Kapsberger’s Partite sulla Folia (Venice, 1604)

This paper’s primary focus is the harmonic functionality as a result of idiomatic ornamentation in Kapsberger’s Partite sulla Folia. The paper explores the link between modality and tonality from the practical perspective of the instrumentalist. Kapsberger’s tablature fingerings are studied in context with a graphic analysis of the harmony and harmonic rhythm. The findings present a clear instance where the functional harmony is a direct consequence of idiomatic chordal insertion.
In this paper the use of functional versus nonfunctional chordal insertion will be both quantified and categorized by type and common usage within the Folia framework. Furthermore, the chordal insertion will be analysed with graphic analyses in relation to idiomatic ease and contrapuntal conventions. These findings culminate in a schema that illustrates how Kapsberger’s chordal substitution unfolds within the overall organization of the piece.

10A: Schema, style and the listening subject in Classical music

Chair: Julian Horton (University College, Dublin)

Laurence Woof (Lancaster U.)
Towards an epistemology of the Classical style: Mozart and realism

In European literature, the most significant development of the eighteenth century was the novel. Recent scholarship suggests that the creation of ‘realism’ as a literary mode came about through the dialectical interaction of two distinct literary perspectives, that of the highly subjective first-person disclosures of the epistolary novel and that of the ‘omniscient’, invisible narrator who was apparently able to comprehend society as a totality. Michael McKeon’s influential study of this subject places the innovative literary creations of Samuel Richardson in a creative dialectical tension with the more theatrical, third-person narratives exemplified by writers such as Henry Fielding. As a mode of writing, realism developed out of this interaction, taking much of the eighteenth century to stabilize before going on to dominate the literature of the following century. If we were to look for a roughly equivalent and contemporaneous development in European music, it would be that of the emergence – and subsequent dominance – of the Classical style. This paper seeks to investigate the possibilities of this interdisciplinary connection: initially through music’s most literary mode – opera – but then at the level of the elements that make up the ‘texture’ of the Classical style, such as dance and fantasy. Opera seria, essentially a sequence of reflective, subjective, first-person soliloquies, corresponds to the perspective of the epistolary novel; opera buffa, with its Goldoni-inspired finales, instead presents an overview of society in the round. The development of an adequate musical language capable of combining these two elements was arguably the great achievement of Mozart’s last decade. Through applying McKeon’s reworking of Bakhtin’s formalism to the language of the classical style, this paper attempts to suggest some additional ways in which cultural contexts of the eighteenth century could be integrated into music analysis.

Danuta Mirka (U. of Southampton)
Techniques of phrase expansion: the case of overridden caesuras

A technique of phrase expansion occasionally used by eighteenth-century composers but so far not recognized by music theorists either of their days (Riepel 1752, Koch 1787, 1793) or ours (Rothstein 1989) consists in faking the end of a given phrase by means of a caesura which is then overridden by the following musical material leading to another caesura a few measures later. Perception of the former caesura is usually provoked by ‘top-down’ cognitive processes. Such processes are guided by schemata of cadence or half-cadence made up of cadential harmonic progressions, typical bass lines and melodic formulas, and working in concert with hypermetre. Overriding the caesura usually involves ‘bottom-up’ processes, especially the mechanism of implication–realization in the melody and the bass (Meyer 1973, Narmour 1977, 1990, 1992, Caplin 2008). Examples of overridden caesuras can be found in several pieces by Haydn and Mozart. I will argue that they represent complex games played by the composers with their listeners on two levels of listening experience. One dimension of this play belongs to the ‘modular’ level of processing represented by unconsciously working mechanism of music perception; the other to the ‘central’ level of processing related to consciousness (Fodor 1983). If the former was presumably accessible to all attentive listeners of the eighteenth century, including less cultivated ones (Liebhaber), the other dimension refers to the theoretical knowledge of the listener and hence could be appreciated only by Kenner.

Vasili Byros (Yale U.)
Towards an ‘archaeology’ of hearing: schemata and eighteenth-century consciousness

‘Aestheticising the historical and historicising the aesthetic are opposite sides of the same coin.’ The argument, from Dahlhaus’s Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (Eng. trans. 1984, p. 71), suggests that history is somehow fundamentally integral to the faculty of hearing. My paper addresses the implications of Dahlhaus’s ‘twisted aesthetic paradox’ (p. 70) – that historical consciousness is immediately available to present-day listeners – by way of a cognitive-philosophical framework that collapses oppositions between past and present, culture and psychology, and Geistwissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft: the schema.
As knowledge structures (Rumelhart 1986) that mediate perception (Spitzer 2004) or determine behaviour, schemata provide a means for investigating not so much a ‘historical’ but an ‘archaeological’ mode of hearing in a Foucauldian (1969) sense. The difference turns on understanding history less as the pastness of music than a ‘principle of knowledge’ (Treitler 1982: 154), ‘normative system’ (Vodi?ka, 1975: 90) or ‘mode of behaviour’ (Dahlhaus trans. 1984: 61) that schemata embody and thereby aestheticize.
But by virtue of its cultural determinacy, a schema is inescapably historicized nonetheless: both Robert Gjerdingen’s (1988) statistical study of the ‘1–7 … 4–3’ archetype, and my own historical survey of another schema for thesis research on tonality – the le–sol–fi–sol archetype (some of it presented at the ‘Tonality in Perspective’ and TAGS conferences earlier this year) – show population distributions that approximate a Gaussian distribution at c1760–1810, with population peaks in the 1770s and 1790s, respectively.
The evidence implies that schema-driven listening would by nature be ‘historical through and through’ (Adorno, 1984: 214): I examine occasions of ‘historicized’ modes of listening in contemporary as well as twentieth-century responses to Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ Quartet, k465, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and Piano Sonata in E minor, op. 90, whose ‘historicism’ becomes marked, all the more pronounced when contrasted with modern modes of listening prompted by ‘structural hearing’ (Salzer, 1952); hence the Foucauldian conception.

10B: Performing Jazz

Chair: Sarah Hill (Cardiff U.)

James Stager (York U., Toronto)
‘With a Song in My Heart’: voice leading and structure in song, arrangement and improvisation

The music of jazz often involves interactions occurring across many levels and time periods; not only are the musicians collaborating in the moment on any particular performance, they are often building on pre-existing musical strata. An old song from a previous generation receives new life in an arrangement, which is in turn elaborated upon by improvising jazz soloists.
Such treatments of pre-existing material – both arrangement and improvised solo – can show quite a range in faithfulness to the original source. Some song arrangements and their performances stay close to the spirit and the intent of the original, while others venture further afield. Jazz musicians have long enjoyed pushing the boundaries in an effort to see how ‘far out’ they can take an arrangement while still retaining the essence of the original source material.
The question of what constitutes this ‘essence’, and to what extent it resists the creative energies of arranger and soloist, poses an interesting problem. The work of such theorists as Steve Larson (1987) and Henry Martin (1996) has established Schenkerian analysis as a viable avenue for studying jazz compositions and improvisations, while acknowledging the necessity of allowing for some flexibility in method.
Using reductive analytic strategies, this paper begins with an examination of the standard ‘With a Song in My Heart’, followed by a study of Hal Crook’s arrangement of this composition for the Phil Woods Quintet. The fundamental structure of the original song and subsequent arrangement is then read against an analysis of Crook’s improvised trombone solo. The comparative analyses will show that these levels of abstraction – song, arrangement and solo – are in fact more deeply related than they might appear to be on first listening.

Adrian Goodman (York U., Toronto)
Who is really in charge here? Rethinking the relationship between Miles Davis and Tony Williams

Alliances, enmities and their reflection in musical interaction are at the heart of jazz performance. The roles and interaction of instruments within small acoustic jazz ensembles underwent major change in the early to mid 1960s, and can be evidenced in recordings by the Miles Davis Quintet. This author posits that the musical alliance (and the musical interaction) between trumpeter Miles Davis and drummer Tony Williams in recordings by the Miles Davis Quintet during the period May 1963 and December 1965 not only represents a revision to the way jazz scholars have traditionally perceived the relationship between these two musicians but also formed the basis of a revolution in the way rhythm sections functioned in relation to soloists. While the author acknowledges that many factors can and do influence jazz improvisation, various interviews with Davis and Williams confirm that their relationship was of the utmost importance during improvised solos, and as such the following analyses constitute the primary focus of this paper. The performances of Miles Davis and Tony Williams during Miles Davis’s solos on the tune Walkin’, as performed by the Miles Davis Quintet on live recordings made between February 1964 and December 1965, are analysed in context of five criteria: rhythm, use and application of motifs, dynamics, timbre and texture. However, analyses of Davis’s musical relationship with other drummers during the performance of this piece prior to 1964 (as heard on the 1954 recording with Kenny Clarke, the 1958 recording with Philly Joe Jones and the 1961 recording with Jimmy Cobb) are also presented as evidence to support the author’s contention. As result of these analyses the author proposes that a reversal of the normal roles of soloist and accompanist occurred, and that this represented a radical resetting of the parameters of small group interaction in jazz.

Peter Elsdon (U. of Hull)
Constructing improvisation: Keith Jarrett’s ‘Prism’

Jazz is deeply associated with the idea of improvisation, a linkage which sometimes leads to it being defined by the presence of improvisation. But it has long been recognised that improvisation is a problematic concept. As Laudan Nooshin (2003) has suggested, improvisation functions as a binary opposite to composition, constructed as its other through a series of dualisms. This way of viewing improvisation reveals it as a cultural construction which became necessary at a certain historical moment, mainly because jazz represented an alternative to notions of composition associated with Western Art music.

This paper suggests that a productive approach to considering improvisation might be to explore how it continues to be constructed as a set of concepts about music, not least through discourses on jazz. Specifically, I will explore the idea of improvisation as a quality which can be perceived through listening, or in other words, what is it which makes jazz sound 'improvised'? By close examination of a 1985 Keith Jarrett trio performance of his composition 'Prism', I will explore the ways in which the musicians' gestures work to construct ideas about improvisation and creativity in jazz.

10C: Perspectives on centricity and salience

Chair: Joshua Mailman (Eastman School of Music)

Stan Kleppinger (U. of Nebraska, Lincoln)
Salience as a structural determinant in post-tonal pitch-centric music

Developing a theory to account for the structure of post-tonal pitch-centric music in the Western art tradition has proven a difficult enterprise. For instance, the application of quasi-Schenkerian prolongational theory to this repertoire, demonstrated in analyses by Roy Travis, Felix Salzer, Allen Forte and others, has fallen into disfavour. (Joseph Straus has provided perhaps the most compelling arguments against prolongational analysis in post-tonal repertoire.) Yet we are left with the intuition that at least some of this music has a sense of large-scale tonal coherence.
Fred Lerdahl has argued that ‘atonal music collapses the distinction between salience and structural importance’ – that is, those pitch events that are loudest, highest, lowest, longest, metrically stressed, emphasized timbrally or motivically, and so on might be considered the most structural pitch events. This paper explores the results of applying this principle to post-tonal pitch-centric music. In this way, the analytic approach echoes Arthur Berger’s call for ‘starting from what this music itself is, rather than dwelling upon its deviation from what music was previously’. All things being equal, the more salient a pitch event is, the more analytic value it should carry.
Sample analyses consider music by Ligeti, Copland and Bartók. In some passages, the music invokes several salience conditions simultaneously in regard to a single pitch class, thus creating great emphasis on that pitch class and requiring our analysis to similarly regard it as structurally important. At other times, a pitch class might be more weakly asserted via only one or two of these conditions, or multiple pitch classes might vie for centricity by simultaneously invoking different conditions. In each case, the relative salience of pitch events interacts with ‘tonal residue’ – vestiges of tonal practice such as triads or emphasis of interval class 5 – to create a perspective of the work’s structure or of its structural ambiguities.

Rachel Bergman (George Mason U.)
Viktor Ullmann’s String Quartet no. 3 in the context of the Second Viennese School

Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944), like many composers of his time, was forced to contend with the dissolution of functional tonality, a system that had already ceased to hold universal value when he began his studies with Schoenberg in 1918. Along with other members of the Schoenberg circle, Ullmann became interested in generating a coherent musical structure through the manipulation of a limited amount of referential material. Despite the fact that Ullmann’s String Quartet no. 3 (January 1943) was written at the end of his life, more than twenty years after his initial exposure to the Schoenberg circle, it nonetheless bears resemblance to particular early works of the Second Viennese School in two important ways. The first has to do with issues of expanded tonality and atonality, and the second with form.
This paper explores Ullmann’s string quartet with these specific issues in mind, while also looking at the ways in which Schoenberg and Berg, in their early string quartets, were grappling with similar challenges. As Berg does in the Lyric Suite (1926) for string quartet, Ullmann successfully combines 12-tone and atonal movements in String Quartet no. 3. Moreover, even within the 12-tone movement he maintains an emphasis on G and D, the two focal pitches of the quartet at large. Juxtaposed with the G/D centricity are many non-diatonic, symmetrical structures such as whole-tone and octatonic segments, which are also structurally significant. Despite, or perhaps because of, these apparently disparate elements, the quartet is highly integrated thematically and, like a number of early works by Schoenberg and Berg, is written as one continuous movement. The intricate balance between tonal and atonal elements and the thematic unity of the quartet link Ullmann to specific ideas and works of the Second Viennese School, demonstrating the profound and lasting impact of Schoenberg and his circle.

Atte Tenkanen (U. of Turku, Finland) and Fernando Gualda (Queen’s U. Belfast)
A tonal-centre computational model for real-time music analysis

Geometrical models of tone systems offer a mode of representation in which musical pitches are dependent on their relationships to other pitches (e.g. Krumhansl 1990, Tymoczko 2006). This paper presents a new mathematical model for computing tonal-centre distances based on the circle of fifths. This model is an extension of the comparison set analysis (CSA) of Huovinen and Tenkanen (Music Analysis, 26/1–2). The system is not restricted to triads familiar from tonal music: it can be applied to any kind of pitch-class collection.
A new software application has been developed. It offers graphic representations of tonal-centre trend curves for a given musical piece. It accepts MIDI files as input, which allows access to a great variety of music files. The software also offers real-time analysis of performance (MIDI input).
Points for discussion include problems with multiple tonal centres, caused by tonally neutral chords such as the German sixth or the diminished seventh, as well as whole-tone and octatonic scales.