Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic

Canonic Threads and Large-Scale Structure in Canons

Alan Gosman — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:05:08 PDT

This article introduces the concept of canonic threads: patterns made of alternating dux and comes notes, in which the notes are separated by the time interval of the canon. Canonic threads are developed using as focus pieces Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Schumann, op. 9. Both sets present a compendium of canonic threads, and demonstrate how threads can integrate a theme’s harmonic and phrase-structural constraints into a variation with strict canonic form. The article also considers various techniques that allow an underlying template of canonic threads to function over a wide range of harmonic and metric possibilities.

Svetlana Kurbatskaya on Serial Music: Twelve Categories of "Twelve-Toneness"

Zachary Cairns — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:05:06 PDT

Published in Moscow in 1996, Svetlana Kurbatskaya’s book Serial Music: Questions of History, Theory, Aesthetics (Seriynaya muzïka: voprosï istorii, teorii, estetiki) carries the interesting distinction of being the first Russian-language monograph devoted entirely to the study of serial music. In the second chapter, Kurbatskaya defines twelve different categories of what she calls “twelve-toneness” (dvenadtsatitonovost’). Considering this source alongside the Russian Musical Encyclopedic Dictionary (Muzïkal’nïy entsiklopedicheskiy slovar’), which includes different definitions for a number of terms that Western readers would generally consider to be essentially synonymous (i.e., serial music, serial technique, dodecaphony, twelve-tone music), one can begin to accept the possibility that Russian theorists might be more restrictive in their definitions than their Western counterparts.

Despite its historical importance, Kurbatskaya’s book has remained virtually unexplored in English-language scholarship (owing both to the book’s language and relative inaccessibility in the United States). The present article aims first to summarize the state of Russian writings on serialism prior to the publication of Kurbatskaya’s book, and second to provide a thorough discussion of the second chapter of the book, which introduces twelve categories of “twelve-toneness.”

Disciplining Knowledge in Music Theory: Abstraction and the Recovery of Dialectics

Karl D. Braunschweig — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:05:05 PDT

A critical rethinking of disciplinary tendencies in music theory reveals several important historical moments when the process of abstraction has reshaped aspects of tonal theory in profound ways, notably in the areas of counterpoint, harmony, and form. These moments of abstraction prioritize one musical feature over others, and frequently involve a discursive process of dissociation to solidify the legitimacy of the abstraction and resolve lingering logical contradictions. This often leads to a theoretical and historical distancing from the contexts in which certain practices emerged, and risks severing aesthetic connections between technique and meaning. The resulting imbalance in one or more of three dialectical pairs has additional disciplinary consequences, and invites renewed interest in three theoretical perspectives that can recognize changing musical concepts and at the same time recover some of the latent meanings buried in tonal music. These perspectives have received some attention in recent music analysis; in this article I wish to call attention to their deeper disciplinary role in compensating theoretical abstraction and dialectically mapping our theoretical field.

Agency and the Adagio: Mimetic Engagement in Barber's Op. 11 Quartet

Matthew Baileyshea — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:05:03 PDT

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (1936) is undoubtedly the most famous elegiac work of the twentieth-century. We know it from movies, television, and highly publicized memorial services. Yet the music was originally written as the second movement of Barber’s string quartet, op. 11, with a number of interesting connections to the outer movements. This article highlights several recurring gestures throughout op. 11 that suggest the will of an individual “agent” struggling against gravity and weight. It proposes a broad, multi-movement narrative that draws together the three movements with a special focus on mimetic engagement, leading-tone resolution, and the quest for major-mode closure.

In Memoriam Carl Kristian Wiens (1964-2012)

David Carson Berry et al. — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:05:01 PDT

Gamut Editors — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 11:05:00 PDT

N/A

Review of Foundations of Diatonic Theory, by Timothy A. Johnson

Matthew Santa — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:53:17 PDT

Review of Understanding Post-Tonal Music and Anthology of Post-Tonal Music, by Miguel A. Roig-Francolí

Andrew Mead — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:50:32 PDT

Webern’s “Heavenly Journey” and Schoenberg’s Vagrant Chords

Matthew Shaftel — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:50:28 PDT

The five Dehmel Lieder (1906–08) act as a bridge in Anton Webern’s musical development. Along with the earliest of the fourteen George Lieder, they represent an initial exploration of a new musical style, while still maintaining substantive ties with the Romantic Lied of Webern’s predecessors. Because the five Dehmel settings are the only songs written by Webern under the direct tutelage of Arnold Schoenberg, they also provide unique insight into Schoenberg’s role as Webern’s teacher at this moment of stylistic shift. This article focuses particularly on the fair copy and sketches of the most extended of the Dehmel songs, “Himmelfahrt,” using linear analysis to show how Webern employed “vagrant” harmonies (in Schoenberg’s terms) and contrapuntal delays of tonal arrivals to arrive at a state of “suspended tonality.” In addition, it engages several markings in the sketches to speculate about Schoenberg’s influence on these songs.

This article is part of a special, serialized feature: A Music-Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte (Part III).

Fauré, through Boulanger, to Copland: The Nature of Influence

Edward R. Phillips — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:50:25 PDT

Using tonal and post-tonal analytical methods, this article examines two early songs of Aaron Copland and compares them with the music of Gabriel Fauré, in order to determine if the notion that the compositional techniques of the older composer had an influence on those of Copland is valid and worthy of further research.

This article is part of a special, serialized feature: A Music-Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte (Part III).

Redating Schoenberg’s Announcement of the Twelve-Tone Method: A Study of Recollections

Fusako Hamao — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:50:20 PDT

Arnold Schoenberg recalled that he gathered about twenty of his students in 1923, in order to announce his new compositional method based on twelve tones, which he had kept confidential for nearly two years. His reminiscences about this announcement appear several times in his writings, yet his reference to the date of the occasion varies from recollection to recollection. The reminiscences of his students are not consistent in this regard either, although “February 1923,” identified by Josef Polnauer, has been widely accepted as the date of the meeting. However, this date has become a point of debate in recent studies, along with the publications of newly uncovered documents related to Schoenberg’s announcement. In particular, a letter by Anton Webern, dated 7 January 1922, reveals that Schoenberg conducted a lecture series on his new method before 1923. In this essay, the author investigates recollections of the announcement meeting made by Schoenberg and his students to see if they contain any confusions or misunderstandings that might have caused an incorrect dating. After sorting out the details, the author discusses the unreliability of Polnauer’s dating, speculates on how the “myth” of a February 1923 meeting was created, and concludes that the first day of the lecture series (described by Webern) was actually the oft-cited announcement meeting, which most likely occurred between 23 December 1921 and 3 January 1922.

This article is part of a special, serialized feature: A Music-Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte (Part III).

Schenker’s First “Americanization”: George Wedge, the Institute of Musical Art, and the “Appreciation Racket”

David Carson Berry — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:47:44 PDT

A quarter of a century ago, William Rothstein first spoke of the “Americanization of Heinrich Schenker,” meaning the accommodation that had to be made to bring his ideas into the American academy. The focus of this process has largely been on activities following the Second World War. However, the earliest attempt at Americanizing Schenker seems to have come from an American-born pedagogue who had not studied with Schenker or his pupils: George A. Wedge, a theory instructor at New York’s Institute of Musical Art (a precursor to The Juilliard School). He started teaching something about Schenker in his classrooms as early as 1925, incorporated some of Schenker’s concepts into a popular harmony textbook in 1930–31, and subsequently distilled some of these ideas for the musical layperson, as part of a “middlebrow” or “appreciation” agenda that he and Olga Samaroff Stokowski advanced in books and at the Juilliard Summer School. Thus, Schenker’s route to Americanization took some previously unrecognized and “home-grown” turns along the way to the process outlined by Rothstein.

In this essay, I document and contextualize Wedge’s activities in five principal sections. First, I present details about his career, and investigate how he came to encounter Schenker’s ideas. Second, I explore his writings in order to discern their Schenkerian influences (which must be filtered from related elements of American pedagogy). Third, I consider Wedge’s (and Samaroff’s) pedagogical agenda of the 1930s, which involved bringing musical education to a mass audience. Fourth, I contemplate how Wedge’s work was a portent of the “Americanized” Schenker pedagogy that developed in later years. Fifth and finally, I demonstrate how -- even beyond Wedge -- the Institute of Musical Art became a conduit for learning about Schenker, especially between 1925 and 1936/37, and I argue that its name should be added to the list of early institutions in New York at which Schenkerian ideas were communicated.

This article is part of a special, serialized feature: A Music-Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte (Part III).

The Marriage of Note and Word in Two Songs by the Gershwins

Allen Forte — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:42:04 PDT

The author investigates various ways in which George Gershwin’s music and Ira Gershwin’s lyrics are ingeniously interconnected in two songs: “How Long Has This Been Going On?” (1927) and “Who Cares” (1931). The music’s melodies, motives, harmonies, and forms are tied to the lyrics’ rhymes, alliterations, and semantic meanings. The author demonstrates that the designs found in the songs are multi-directional: notes refer to other notes and words, and words refer to other words and notes; the relations are symmetrical.

This article is part of a special, serialized feature: A Music-Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte (Part III).

Multiply Directed Moments in a Brahms Song: “Schön war, das ich dir weihte” (Op. 95, No. 7)

Melissa Hoag — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:39:42 PDT

Brahms’s song “Schön war, das ich dir weihte,” op. 95/7, offers a melancholy setting of a brief text by Georg Friederich Daumer. Several melodic disjunctions figure prominently in Brahms’s setting of the poem; in treating these disjunctions, normative voice-leading expectations are thwarted in ways that never meet satisfactory resolutions. Around these violations are crystallized the central expressive issues of the song, involving ambiguities not only in the domain of melody, but also of harmony, phrase structure, and form; this web of ambiguity is termed a “multiply directed moment.” Other issues in the song include the discursive phrase structure in the B section, as well as Brahms’s musical treatment of the subjunctive mood.

Schenkerian analysis is used to explicate the unique melodic processes at work in Brahms’s setting, and the relationship of these melodic processes to Daumer’s text. The complex phrase structure of the middle section is also examined using a recompositional approach, which yields yet another level of interpretive insight. Nearly every parameter and time point in the song can be identified as multiply-directed; a spectrum of possible continuations or meanings is presented at every turn. Brahms’s setting thus focuses our attention on the multiply-directed moments in the song by meeting expectations with various levels of denial or surprise.

Classical Models, Sonata Theory, and the First Movement of Liszt’s Faust Symphony

Howard Cinnamon — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:39:38 PDT

Recent theories of sonata form compensate for a perceived overemphasis on harmonic structure during the latter half of the twentieth century by emphasizing thematic organization as the determining feature of formal function. The present study demonstrates how an analytical method based on earlier practice can be valuable in the analysis of one of Liszt’s most unconventional pieces, the first movement of the Faust Symphony. Initially, it considers “problematic” passages often thought to deviate from earlier conventions, and by offering alternative readings, it shows how they are actually consistent with those earlier practices. Once clarified, the movement’s large-scale tonal structure, and its relationship to thematic material, is compared with earlier, harmonically based models of sonata form (by Kollmann, Galeazzi, and Czerny), in order to demonstrate that the movement adheres to those models in remarkably consistent ways. The study then employs aspects of Hepokoski’s and Darcy’s Sonata Theory to show how its conclusions differ, and how the present methodology might be complementary.

A Study of Donald Grantham’s Fantasy Variations: Broad Musical Connections in Core Theory Classes

Amy Carr-Richardson — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:08:32 PDT

This article contains analytical comments on Donald Grantham’s Fantasy Variations, which is based on George Gershwin’s Prelude II (“Blue Lullaby”), focusing on its pedagogical use in a core undergraduate theory class. It proposes encouraging students to make broad musical connections regarding tonality, temporality, and developmental process, across a wide range of musical repertoire. The article discusses the analysis of Fantasy Variations in relation to these topics: pedagogical transitions between the study of tonal and post-tonal music, the process of development, non-linear aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first century music, and musical borrowing.

Progressive Trends in Variation Form: Robert Schumann’s Piano Sonata in F Minor, Op. 14, Quasi Variazioni

Hiu-Wah Au — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:06:26 PDT

Entitled Quasi Variazioni, the third movement of Schumann’s Piano Sonata in F Minor, op. 14 (1835–36), displays features that are not usually associated with variation form. In a typical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century variation set, the theme is usually a self-contained unit, whose form and voice leading are often preserved throughout the set. But in this Schumann movement, the theme presents an unusual, tripartite ABC form, its half-cadence ending evoking the tradition of continuous variation. Along with the theme’s peculiar formal plan, the variations also diverge markedly from the theme’s form and middleground structure. These differences are engendered by Schumann’s special handling of the theme. Instead of regarding the theme as an entity to be varied as a whole, Schumann treats its motivic, voice-leading, and harmonic elements as discrete components to be developed independently of one another. By reworking and combining these elements, Schumann progressively transforms the form and middleground of the theme. Significantly, these changes create motivic, harmonic, and voice-leading connections among the variations. These connections not only create a sense of development from one variation to another, but also articulate the large-scale organization of the entire set.

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:05:09 PDT

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:49:25 PST

Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata

Mark Richards — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:57:06 PST

Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic

Canonic Threads and Large-Scale Structure in Canons

Svetlana Kurbatskaya on Serial Music: Twelve Categories of "Twelve-Toneness"

Disciplining Knowledge in Music Theory: Abstraction and the Recovery of Dialectics

Agency and the Adagio: Mimetic Engagement in Barber's Op. 11 Quartet

In Memoriam Carl Kristian Wiens (1964-2012)

Table of Contents

Review of Foundations of Diatonic Theory, by Timothy A. Johnson

Review of Understanding Post-Tonal Music and Anthology of Post-Tonal Music, by Miguel A. Roig-Francolí

Webern’s “Heavenly Journey” and Schoenberg’s Vagrant Chords

Fauré, through Boulanger, to Copland: The Nature of Influence

Redating Schoenberg’s Announcement of the Twelve-Tone Method: A Study of Recollections

Schenker’s First “Americanization”: George Wedge, the Institute of Musical Art, and the “Appreciation Racket”

The Marriage of Note and Word in Two Songs by the Gershwins

Multiply Directed Moments in a Brahms Song: “Schön war, das ich dir weihte” (Op. 95, No. 7)

Classical Models, Sonata Theory, and the First Movement of Liszt’s Faust Symphony

A Study of Donald Grantham’s Fantasy Variations: Broad Musical Connections in Core Theory Classes

Progressive Trends in Variation Form: Robert Schumann’s Piano Sonata in F Minor, Op. 14, Quasi Variazioni

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata