As wonderful as star clusters: Instruments for gazing at tonality in Schubert

Nineteenth Century Music

Volumn 22, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 213-232

  Cohn, Richard L ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949276698     PISSN: 01482076     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ncm.1999.22.3.02a00020     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. Donald Francis Tovey, "Tonality," Music & Letters 9 (1928), 362, rpt. as "Tonality in Schubert," in The Main Stream of Music and Other Essays (New York, 1949).
2. The earliest invocation of this metaphor of which I am aware is Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny, Cours complet d'harmonie, 3 vols. (Paris, 1806), I, 26.
3. The neutrality of this characterization is intentional: it equally accommodates approaches that emphasize Auskomponierung or basse fondamentale.
4. From an 1821 issue of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung as quoted in Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn, The Life of Franz Schubert
5. trans. Arthur Duke Coleridge (London, 1869), p. 210
6. and transmitted in Beth Shamgar, "Romantic Harmony through the Eyes of Contemporary Observers," Journal of Musicology 7 (1989), 531.
7. Similar passages are transmitted in Kristina Muxfeldt, "Schubert, Platen, and the Myth of Narcissus," Journal of the American Musicological Society 49 (1996), 480-527.
8. Ernst Kurth, Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagner's 'Tristan' (Berlin, 1920), pp. 239-56.
9. Partial translation (but with Schubert passages omitted) in Ernst Kurth: Selected Writings, ed.
10. and trans. Lee A. Rothfarb (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 119-29.
11. On the locally sensuous quality of Schubertian surfaces, see also Carl Dahlhaus, "Sonata Form in Schubert: The First Movement of the G-Major String Quartet, Op. 161 (D. 887)," in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Walter Frisch (Lincoln, Neb. , 1986), pp. 1-12
12. and Susan McClary, "Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music," in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, Gary C. Thomas (New York, 1994), pp. 205-33.
13. Theodor W. Adorno, "Schubert," Moments Musicaux (Frankfurt, 1964), pp. 18-36. First published in 1928.
14. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis, 1991), p. 184
15. Lawrence Kramer, "The Schubert Lied: Romantic Form and Romantic Consciousness," in Frisch, Schubert Studies, p. 216
16. McClary, "Constructions of Subjectivity," p. 223.
17. Kramer's reference comes in the context of an article that in some ways anticipates the approach developed here. While detecting moments of irrationality, disjunction, and randomness vis-à-vis Classical tonality, he holds out the hope that these moments might be reconciled to a sui generis "counter-coherence" (p. 216) and a "new tonal syntax . . . which depends for its effect on its dialectical relationship with the Classical harmony that it violates" (p. 231). Kramer's sketch of this syntax is informal, but involves "chromatic relationships that give a plausible meaning to the seemingly random sequences of primary tonalities. "
18. For recent accounts of the role of parsimonious voice-leading as a determinant of harmonic progression in nine-teenth-century harmonic theory, see David Kopp, A Comprehensive Theory of Chromatic Mediant Relations in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Music (Ph. D. diss. , Brandeis University, 1995)
19. and Richard Cohn, "Introduction to Neo-Riemannian Theory: A Survey and a Historical Perspective," Journal of Music Theory 42 (1998), 167-80.
20. Carl Dahlhaus also takes note of the determinative role of semitonal voice leading in Wagner's music. See "Richard Wagner," The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London, 1980), vol. 20, p. 123.
21. Figure 1 is from Richard Cohn, "Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late Romantic Triadic Progressions," Music Analysis 15 (1996), 9-40, which presents related material in a more systematic framework.
22. The motion from Emusical flat sign major to B minor is featured prominently in the exposition of the movement. Diether de la Motte's Harmonielehre ([Kassel, 1976], pp. 166-67) contains an account of this earlier passage that strongly resonates with the approach adopted here.
23. This taxonomy of harmonic relations is congruent with ones suggested by early-twentieth-century theorists. See Rudolf Louis and Ludwig Thuille, Harmonielehre, 4th edn. (1913)
24. trans. Richard Isidore Schwartz as An Annotated English Translation of Harmonielehre of Rudolf Louis and Ludwig Thuille (Ph. D. diss. , Washington University, 1982), p. 413
25. David W. Bernstein, The Harmonic Theory of Georg Capellen (Ph. D. diss. , Columbia University, 1986), pp. 142-44.
26. The term "modally matched" is appropriated from Daniel Harrison, Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music: A Renewed Dualist Theory and an Account of Its Precedents (Chicago, 1994).
27. For an exploration of this more complex geometry, see Jack Douthett and Peter Steinbach, "Parsimonious Graphs: A Study in Parsimony, Contextual Transformations, and Modes of Limited Transposition," Journal of Music Theory 42 (in press).
28. On the history of the table, see Michael Kevin Mooney, The 'Table of Relations' and Music Psychology in Hugo Riemann's Harmonic Theory (Ph. D. diss. , Columbia University, 1996).
29. On its continuing role in twentieth-century German harmonic theory, see Renate Imig, Systeme der Funktionsbezeichnung in den Harmonielehren seit Hugo Riemann (Dusseldorf, 1970).
30. See also Richard Cohn, "Neo-Riemannian Operations, Parsimonious Trichords, and Their Tonnetz Representations," Journal of Music Theory 41 (1997), 1-66. For many nineteenth-century theorists, the identity of the left and right edge would be a matter for contention. If the triads are justly tuned, those at the edges of the table are transpositionally related to each other by a syntonic comma.
31. James Webster, "Schubert's Sonata Forms and Brahms's First Maturity," this journal 2 (1978), 22.
32. The scare quotes are Webster's. Adorno, "Schubert" (Moments Musicaux, p. 32) also cites this moment as one of the many "sudden, unmediated modulations alien to development" in Schubert that, "like blinds, obstruct the skylight. " Adorno's metaphor provides an epistemological perspective on Momigny's ontology (cf. n. 2): for Momigny, the tonic, like the sun, is the orbital center; for Adorno, the tonic, like the sun, provides light, allows us to see.
33. Such paradoxes led Adolf Bernhard Marx to propose an analysis for this type of relationship. In the present context, Marx would read "Fmusical sharp sign minor" as A, Cmusical sharp sign, Gmusical flat sign, an incomplete dominant-ninth chord on F with fifth raised and root and seventh suppressed. See Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, 4 vols. , newly ed. Hugo Riemann (Leipzig, 1887), I, 525. Marx's treatise was first published in 1841; this particular passage was added for the sixth edition of 1863.
34. See also David W. Bernstein, "Georg Capellen's Theory of Reduction: Radical Harmonic Theory at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," Journal of Music Theory 37 (1993), 89-92.
35. For more on the paradoxical aspects of the progression, see Cohn, "Maximally Smooth Cycles," pp. 23-25.
36. Kurth, Romantische Harmonik, p. 241
37. Richard Kramer "Posthumous Schubert," this journal 14 (1990), 202.
38. Franz Schubert, Drei große Sonaten für das Pianoforte, D. 958, D. 959, und D. 960 (early versions), facs. from the autographs in the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek (Tutzing, 1987), III, 1.
39. See also Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms (New York, 1980), p. 291
40. and Alfred Brendel, Music Sounded Out: Essays, Lectures, Interviews, Afterthoughts (New York, 1990), p. 73.
41. See mm. 8-9, mm. 123-24 (first ending), 211-14, 222-23, and 352-53
42. on the generative force of the (F, Gmusical flat sign) dyad, see Felix Salzer, Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music (New York, 1952), I, 184
43. and Brendel, Music Sounded Out, p. 75.
44. The notion of "region" suggested here generalizes Riemann's harmonic functions in the spirit of Ernö Lendvai's "axis tonality," but along different lines. Lendvai focuses on the functional equivalence of pitch-classes related by minor third, whereas the regions of fig. 4 suggest functional equivalence between harmonies whose roots are related by major third. The most readily available and systematic introduction to axis tonality is Ernö Lendvai, Béla Bartók: An Analysis of His Music (London, 1971).
45. The figural/formal distinction is introduced in Jeanne Bamberger, The Mind behind the Musical Ear (Cambridge, Mass. , 1991), pp. 24-30.
46. See also David Lewin, Musical Form and Transformation: 4 Analytic Essays (New Haven, 1993), pp. 45-53.
47. For two more properly Schenkerian views of some of the music modeled here, see Salzer, Structural Hearing, I, 183-85, and II, 161-64
48. and Harald Krebs, Third Relations and Dominant in Late 18th- and Early 19th-century Music (Ph. D. diss. , Yale University, 1980), II, 48.
49. Tovey, "Tonality," p. 155.
50. We can demonstrate this paradox syllogistically. If Fmusical sharp sign (m. 48) is perceived to represent the same scale degree as Gmusical flat sign (mm. 20ff. ), then it is a diatonic sixth degree; it follows that A (mm. 59ff. ), a minor third above Fmusical sharp sign, notationally stands in for Bmusical flat signmusical flat sign. Therefore F (mm. 80ff. ), a major third below A, notationally stands in for Gmusical flat signmusical flat sign. So the exposition ends not on the dominant, but on the doubly flatted sixth degree. Consequently, the repetition of the exposition prolongs not the tonic major, but rather the major triad of the doubly flatted second degree, Cmusical flat signmusical flat sign major. A theoretical framework for approaching such diatonic paradoxes is provided in David Lewin, "Amfortas's Prayer to Titurel and the Role of D in Parsifal: The Tonal Spaces of the Drama and the Enharmonic Cmusical flat sign/B," this journal 7 (1984), 336-49.
51. For an account of their frequency in Schubert, see Elmar Seidel, Die Enharmonik in den harmonischen Großformen Franz Schuberts (Frankenstein, 1963).
52. Felix Salzer, "Die Sonatenform bei Franz Schubert," Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 15 (1928), 86-125
53. see also Webster, "Schubert's Sonata Form," pp. 21-22.
54. Schubert's approach to the counterstatement in the Bmusical flat sign-Major Sonata bears particularly strong affinities with the counterstatement of the second theme in Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto. See mm. 133-71 of the Beethoven Concerto, particularly m. 163. The shadow of the "Emperor" falls elsewhere across the movement at hand. Compare, for example, their incipits: Beethoven ornaments tonic with a double-neighbor figure, after which the melody rises stepwise to 3, then falls to 6-5; Schubert presents the same three event-classes but reverses the order of the first two. Compare also Schubert's m. 68 with Beethoven's m. 232, and Schubert's mm. 71-72 with Beethoven's mm. 245-47.
55. On such affinities in general, see Edward T. Cone, "Schubert's Beethoven," Musical Quarterly 56 (1970), 779-93.
56. Compare Krebs, Third Relations, II, 48. The bass sequence suggested by fig. 6a, 〈Bmusical flat sign, Fmusical sharp sign, A, F〉, has a precedent in the Adagio opening of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony in Bt major. Schubert apparently admired this music, since he copied a fragment of it into a sketchbook at an unknown date.
57. See Otto Erich Deutsch, Franz Schubert: Thematic Catalogue of All His Works in Chronological Order (London, 1951), pp. 488, 493.
58. This is an instance of the class of harmony that is the focus of Nicholas Temperley, "Schubert and Beethoven's Eight-Six Chord," this journal 5 (1981), 142-54. Regarding the use of {} in this article, the purpose of curly brackets is to indicate that the set is unordered, i. e. , the ordering of the dyads is not an issue, whereas in n. 26, the angle brackets, 〈 〉, are used because there the ordering does matter.
59. Such a hearing is consistent with Webster's observation that Schubert characteristically prolongs tonic straight through the second theme "purple patch," and "remain[s] in or around the tonic until the very last moment" ("Schubert's Sonata Forms," p. 30).
60. 6S triad at m. 70, despite its local instability, as prolonging the harmony that opens the counterstatement at m. 36.
61. This correspondence was first drawn to my attention in Carolyn R. Ellis, "Form, Process, and Coherence in the Sonata-Allegro from Schubert's Bmusical flat sign Sonata, Opus Posthumous" (unpublished B. A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1990). Ellis also notes that this relation is made patent when the pitch-classes of the opening theme are subject to a bass trill at mm. 197-98 of the retransition.
62. Hugo Riemann's theory of harmonic functions similarly assigns a mixed function to the mediant triad in major mode: depending on the context, it can represent either the tonic (by virtue of common dual third and fifth) or the dominant (by virtue of common dual root and third). For a recent account of dualism and harmonic functions in English, see Harrison, Harmonic Function.
63. Malcolm Boyd, "Schubert's Short Cuts," Music Review 29 (1968), 12-21.
64. Daniel Coren notes one late example of a subdominant recapitulation, the unpublished sonata movement in C major, D. 840 ("Reliquie"), in "Ambiguity in Schubert's Recapitulations," Musical Quarterly 60 (1974), 568-82.
65. This harmonic correspondence is pointed out, although in a different theoretical context, by Krebs, Third Relations, I, 103.
66. Compare Lawrence Siegel, Schubert's Harmonic Geometry: Structural Means in the First Movement of the Bmusical flat sign-Major Piano Sonata, D. 960 (Ph. D. diss. , Brandeis University, 1988), p. 49.
67. From this vantage point we can appreciate Schubert's decision to transpose immediately the music at mm. 69-70 down by a fourth, articulating the same music in the tonic (mm. 69-70), then the dominant (mm. 73-74): when the entire complex recurs transposed in the recapitulation, it articulates subdominant (mm. 288-89) and then tonic (mm. 292-93). Thus these measures epigrammatically do the work of articulating the [I → V] → [IV → I] paradigm so characteristic of Schubert's sonata-form movements in the large (e. g. , the exposition/recapitulation of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony) and in the small (e. g. , mm. 5-12 of the same movement).
68. This conceptual independence is a theme both of Cohn, "Hexatonic Systems," and idem, "Parsimonious Trichords. " Some readers might be tempted to respond that acoustic roots implicitly come into play in the naming of triads. But this entire article could have been written substituting "{Bmusical flat sign, D, F}" or "{10, 2, 5}" for "Bmusical flat sign major," and so forth, without loss of insight, and with considerable gain in parsimony and theoretical consistency. Or it could have been written using Oettingen's and Riemann's system of dual roots (so that [Fmusical sharp sign, A, Cmusical sharp sign] is a "Cmusical sharp sign-minor triad") with considerable gain in historical legitimacy. My assumption is that either of these choices would have annoyed most readers.
69. Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1993)
70. Gretchen A. Wheelock, "Schwarze Gredel and the Engendered Minor Mode in Mozart's Operas," in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), pp. 201-21
71. Brian Hyer, "Music as (Agriculture," paper read at the twentieth annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory, 1997
72. Momigny, Cours complet, II, 432-34.
73. Such correspondences are not exclusively European; they arise also in association with other tonally centric musical traditions. See, for example, Robert C. Provine, Essays on Sino-Korean Musicology: Early Sources for Korean Ritual Music (Seoul, 1988), p. 156.
74. I am indebted for this insight to a conversation with the anthropologist Mauro Almeida Barbosa.
75. Gottfried Weber, Theory of Musical Composition, 2 vols.
76. trans. James F. Warner (Boston, 1846), I, 215
77. These correspondences are explored in McClary, "Constructions of Subjectivity. " For a recent application to Wagner's Tristan, see David Lewin, "Cohn Functions," Journal of Music Theory 40 (1996), 181-216, n. 12.
78. Invitations to disengage from organicist ideology are by now legion; the locus classicus is Ruth A. Solie, "The Living Work: Organicism and Musical Analysis," this journal 4 (1980), 147-56.
79. On image schemata and musical analysis, see Janna Saslaw, "Forces, Containers, and Paths: The Role of Body-Derived Image Schemas in the Conceptualization of Music," Journal of Music Theory 40 (1996), 217-43
80. and Lawrence M. Zbikowski, "Conceptual Models and Cross-Domain Mapping: New Perspectives on Theories of Music and Hierarchy," Journal of Music Theory 41 (1997), 193-225.