Nonconformist notions of nineteenth-century enharmonicism

Music Analysis

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 115-160

  Harrison, Daniel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949191272     PISSN: 02625245     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2249.00154     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. The act of tuning is perhaps the clearest situation in music where this kind of listening is called for. A violinist tuning to the oboe's note produces many different (and defective) versions of it until a particular one that best matches the oboe's is chosen
2. Many examples of analytically-driven notational corrections can be found in John L. Snyder, 'Entropy as a Measure of Musical Style: the Influence of A Priori Assumptions', Music Theory Spectrum, 12 (1990), pp. 121-60
3. See Gregory Proctor, 'Technical Bases of Nineteenth-Century Tonality: a Study in Chromaticism' (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1978), pp. 131-2, for an introductory study of this issue
4. See, for example, Timothy L. Jackson, 'The Enharmonicism of Faith: Enharmonic Symbolism in Bruckner's Christus factus est (1884)', BrucknerJahrbuch, (1987-8), pp. 7-20
5. Proctor, 'Technical Bases', p. 132. Robert P. Morgan makes a nuanced case for this position in 'Symmetrical Forms and Common-PracticeTonality', Music Theory Spectrum, 20 (1998), p. 3: 'Since symmetrical pitch relationships play a much more prominent role in twentieth-century music than in nineteenth-century music, one is inclined to view such earlier manifestations, which involve superimposing symmetrical features over an asymmetrical tonal framework, as part of a gradually emerging prehistory of post-tonal music.'
6. See Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 247 and 258, for an unabashed negative political appraisal of vagrancy
7. Edward Aldwell and Carl Schachter, Harmony and Voice Leading, 2nd edn. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1989), p. 543
8. Music Analysis, 15/i (1996), pp. 9-40
9. See Howard Cinnamon, 'Tonic Arpeggiation and Successive Equal Third Relations as Elements of Tonal Evolution in the Music of Franz Liszt', Music Theory Spectrum, 8 (1986), pp. 1-3 for a penetrating discussion of this problem
10. Daniel Harrison, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music: a Renewed Dualist Theory and an Account of Its Precedents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 134-53. Much of the following discussion is based on ideas advanced in that book. I hope to have fashioned the discussion so that familiarity with the book is not a prerequisite
11. Leonard B. Meyer, Style and Music: Theory, History, and Ideology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 14-16
12. Snyder makes a similar point in 'Entropy as a Measure of Musical Style', pp. 126-7
13. Hermann Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, trans. Alexander Ellis (1862; repr. with foreword by Henry Margenau, New York: Dover Publications, 1954), pp. 470-83
14. Nicola Vicentino advocated a split-keyboard instrument in Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice (1555), trans., intro. and notes by Maria Rika Maniates; ed. Claude V. Palisca (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966)
15. For comments on Schoenberg's notational practice when composing tonal music, see Snyder, 'Entropy as a Measure of Musical Style', pp. 134-40
16. 'The Diachronic Recognition of Enharmonic Equivalence: a Theory and its Application to Five Instrumental Movements by W. A. Mozart' (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1983), p. 23
17. See Jonathan Bernard's 'Chord, Collection, and Set in Twentieth-Century Theory', in James M. Baker, David W. Beach and Jonathan W. Bernard (eds.), Music Theory in Concept and Practice (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, pp. 11-51) for an Entwicklungsgeschichte of twentieth-century atonal theory
18. The history he relates is coextensive with much progressive tonal theory until Paul Hindemith's Unterweisung im Tonsatz, Vol. 1 (1937), which models the traditional practices of many twentieth-century composers - not just Hindemith, as has long been supposed - and develops an updated theory of chord structure and harmony that leaves out the possibility of atonality, thus marking a breach in 'progressive' music theory. Bernard notes that 'every chord has a root in Hindemith's estimation; thus the whole system has a builtin bias' (pp. 38-9); what is more, Hindemith assumes an unequally tempered scale as the primitive chromatic entity. Those who assumed an equallytempered scale from the outset (and Bernard discusses them) went directly for the kind of static-structural analysis that ends up in pc-set theory and its derivatives. Those who showed interest in unequal scales generally had negative views towards the techniques of composers who clearly enjoyed the benefits of equal temperament - enharmonic modulation or atonality, for example
19. See, for example, Robert W. Wason, 'Josef Schalk and the Theory of Harmony at the End of the Nineteenth Century', in Timothy Jackson and Paul Hawkshaw (eds.), Bruckner Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 122-39. The history of theories for twentieth-century tonal music has yet to be written
20. The cognitive - and theoretical - issues involved in hearing large- v. small-scale tonal events are discussed in Nicholas Cook, 'Perception: a Perspective from Music Theory', in Rita Aiello and John A. Sloboda (eds.), Musical Perceptions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 70-76
21. Cook concludes that 'in perceptual terms, an extended composition cannot have the tonal unity that a single phrase has.' The study on which Cook bases this conclusion is his 'The Perception of Large-Scale Tonal Closure', Music Perception, 5 (1987), pp. 197-205
22. This point can also be illustrated well from a Schenkerian perspective. The initiating tonic of a fundamental structure has prolongational opportunities completely different from those of the concluding tonic. Indeed, Schenker's own analyses often peter out after the concluding tonic is graphed. The exceptions are interesting, and indeed show quite different prolongational devices. See, for example, Fig. 3 of his 'Eroica' analysis, 'Beethoven's Third Symphony: its True Content Described for the First Time' (1930), trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton, in The Masterwork in Music, Vol. 3, ed. William Drabkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 12
23. Riemann recognised this dichotomy between harmonic structure and phrase process, and once metaphorically read the I-IV-V-I progression as 'opening assertion, conflict, resolution of the conflict, and conclusion.' See Harrison, Harmonic Function, p. 278
24. William E. Benjamin, 'Tonal Dualism in Bruckner's Eighth Symphony', in William Kinderman and Harald Krebs (eds.), The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 278
25. Meyer, Style and Music, p. 209
26. James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 5
27. In 'Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero? Strauss's Don Juan Reinvestigated', in Bryan Gilliam (ed.), Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), Hepokoski acknowledges Adorno as the source of some deformational categories, but he also offers additional background. See pp. 149, 172
28. See also, Warren Darcy, 'Bruckner's Sonata Deformations' in Jackson and Hawkshaw (eds.), Bruckner Studies, pp. 256-77
29. See, for example, Robert Bailey, 'An Analytical Study of the Sketches and Drafts', in Robert Bailey (ed.), Wagner: Prelude and Transfiguration from 'Tristan und Isolde' (New York: Norton: 1985), pp. 113-46
30. William Kinderman, Introduction to Second Practice, pp. 7-8
31. Benjamin, 'Tonal Dualism', p. 238
32. Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980), pp. 48-51. Brian Hyer offers an excellent critique of Joseph Riepel's (1755) own solar-style conception, which is actually modelled on the social organisation of a farm, with the tonic in the role of 'master,' and other harmonies/keys being the 'overseer', 'head maid', 'errand girl', etc. Hyer's work exposes the (social) rigidity inherent in this model and, by extension, in the theoretical conception of key itself. 'Music as (Agri)culture', paper presented at the joint annual meetings of the Society for Music Theory and the American Musicological Society, Phoenix, October 1997
33. This perspective is what Hepokoski, echoing Adorno, refers to when he advocates perceiving a musical artwork as 'a coherent "thing in motion"' ('Fiery-Pulsed Libertine', p. 136). Anthony Newcomb also advances similar ideas in 'The Birth of Music out of the Spirit of Drama: an Essay in Wagnerian Formal Analysis', 19th-century Music, 5 (1981), pp. 38-66
34. For an interesting comparison of musical formal functions in Beethoven with formal garden making, see Tilden A. Russell, 'On "looking over a ha-ha'", The Musical Quarterly, 71 (1985), pp. 27-37
35. 'Geometries of Sounds in Time', Music Theory Spectrum, 18 (1996), p. 16. In fairness, Westergaard recognises some problems with this model: 'Its paths are clean of diatonic bias, but how consistent is that with the paths we hear?'
36. See, for example, Cohn, 'Maximally Smooth Cycles', p. 11. Cohn echoes David Lewin's argument in 'Amfortas's Prayer to Titurel and the Role of D in Parsifal: the Tonal Spaces of the Drama and the Enharmonic Cb/B', 19th-century Music, 7 (1984), pp. 336-49
37. See also Raphael Atlas, 'Enharmonic Trompe-L'Oreille, Reprise, and the Disguised Seam in 19th-century Music', In Theory Only, 10 (1988), pp. 15-36
38. See Richard Cohn, 'Neo-Riemannian Operations, Parsimonious Trichords, and their Tonnetz Representations', Journal of Music Theory, 41 (1997), pp. 7-8
39. Brian Hyer, 'Reimag(in)ing Riemann', Journal of Music Theory, 39 (1995), pp. 101-38, esp. n. 1 on p. 136
40. and Robert W. Wason and Elizabeth West Marvin, 'Riemann's "Ideen zu Einer 'Lehre von den Tonvorstellungen'": an Annotated Translation', Journal of Music Theory, 39 (1992), pp. 69-116
41. See also David Lewin, Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 20-22
42. For topologically equivalent forms, see Fred Lerdahl, 'Tonal Pitch Space,' Music Perception, 5 (1988), p. 319
43. The domestic image is Riemann's. See Wason and Marvin, 'Lehre von den Tonvorstellungen', p. 101. The visual impression of the Tonnetz is irrelevant to its group properties, and various reshaping of the pitch residences exist, including reducing them to intersectional nodes on the grid instead of being within the area described by grid nodes
44. Lewin, 'Amfortas's Prayer', pp. 344-5
45. Hyer, 'Reimag(in)ing Riemann', p. 127
46. See Lewin, Generalized Musical Intervals, pp. 20-22
47. Janna Saslaw, pursuing a line independent from Hyer's, also recognises the extent to which Riemann's theories are shot through with visual and other metaphors. 'Forces, Containers, and Paths: the Role of Body-Derived Image Schemas in the Conceptualization of Music', Journal of Music Theory, 40 (1996), pp. 217-43
48. see also Cohn, 'Neo-Riemannian Operations, Parsimonious Trichords, and their Tonnetz Representations', Journal of Music Theory, 41 (1997), pp. 1-66
49. In this way it functions like Gottfried Weber's key map and like Arnold Schoenberg's related 'Chart of the Regions'. See Gottfried Weber, Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst, 3rd edn., Vol. 2 (Mainz: Schott, 1830-32), p. 86
50. Arnold Schoenberg, Structural Functions of Harmony (New York: Norton, 1954), p. 20
51. David Lewin also uses the Riemannian Tonnetz to map some key relations of Schubert's G-major quartet in 'Some Problems and Resources of Music Theory', Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, 5 (1991), pp. 123-5
52. This figure is a consolidated adaptation from three separate figures found in Harrison, Harmonic Function, pp. 206-9
53. 'Ernst Kurth and the Analysis of the Chromatic Music of the Late Nineteenth Century', Music Theory Spectrum, 5 (1983), p. 60
54. It is illuminating to compare conforming pressures on notation with those on register. A descending-fifth sequence, for instance, is generally composed to avoid a strict series of descending bass motions. Interestingly, both registral and notational pressures come to bear - albeit at different stages - on perpetual modulating canons. Jean Philippe Rameau, for example, presents two canons that modulate upwards by major and minor third respectively in the Treatise on Harmony (1722), trans. Philip Gossett (New York: Dover, 1971), pp. 371-2
55. In Strauss's later instrumental style, exemplified by the Oboe Concerto, the two wind band Sonatinas, and, to a lesser extent, Metamorphosen, formal keys become less identifiable and merge with surface keys, creating sometimes a sense of restless note-spinning reminiscent of Max Reger, who emphasised surface and passing keys at the expense of formal and asserted ones. For a discussion of key establishing techniques similar in spirit to mine, see Newcomb, 'The Birth of Music', pp. 52-3
56. For commentary on key symbolism in Strauss's tone poems, see Eva-Maria Axt, 'Das Ineinaderwirken von Bewusstem und Unbewusstem: Zum Stimmungs- und Symbolcharakter der Tonarten bei Richard Strauss', Richard Strauss Blätter, 29 (1993), 7-19
57. Max Nordau, Degneration, trans. unknown. Introduction by George L. Mosse (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). See esp. pp. 171-213 and 244ff
58. The conclusions reached here reinforce those of Walter Werbeck in his authoritative study of the tone poems, Die Tondichtung von Richard Strauss [Dokumente und Studien zu Richard Strauss, Vol. 2], series ed. Stephan Kohler (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1996), pp. 450-52
59. Werbeck's findings are summarised (all too briefly, yet with critical skill) in James Hepokoski's review, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 51 (1998), p. 623
60. See Michael D. Palmer, Names, Reference, and Correctness in Plato's 'Cratylus' (New York: Peter Lang, 1988)
61. 'Amfortas's Prayer', p. 344
62. Cohn names this a 'path/goal duality', and frames it as an 'open question' in the study of parsimonious trichords ('Neo-Riemannian Operations', pp. 58-9)