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Tonal strategies in the nineteenth-century symphony
Abstract
In addition to its vital importance for the social and aesthetic development of art music after the Enlightenment, the symphony is also pivotal for the evolution of tonality. As the most prestigious instrumental genre of the nineteenth century, it embodies on the largest scale changes in the way tonal relations underpin instrumental forms. To trace the development of symphonism from the late eighteenth century to the fragmentation of common practice at the start of the twentieth century is in a sense to observe in microcosm the history of tonality in its common-practice phases. Understanding this history requires engagement with a variety of theoretical, technological and historical issues. To the extent that the exploration of chromatic tonal relationships undertaken by composers in the first half of the nineteenth century shadowed an emerging consciousness of tonality as a musical system, it reflects a striking shift of theoretical attitude. Where eighteenth-century theory mingled notions of mode, key and harmonic schema with concepts of topic and melodic rhetoric, nineteenth-century theorists, from Alexandre Choron’s seminal coinage in 1810 onwards, were increasingly concerned with the system of tonality itself. In parallel, symphonists also responded to major advances in instrumental technology and temperament, which are intimately related to the expansion of tonal means gathering momentum by the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, the rise to dominance of equal temperament and the dissemination of instrumental modifications accommodating this change underlies the increasing confidence with which composers constructed forms around remote tonal relationships.
... In these lists, both Kirby and Grotjahn include works for which no scores survive. Julian Horton's (2013) overview of inter-movement key relationships in nineteenth-century symphonies is also quite large, comprising 163 symphonies by 34 composers. For works from before 1840, The Symphony 1720-1840, a collection of scores printed by Garland Publishing (Brook 1986), provides extensive works lists and thematic indexes. ...
This paper presents an analytical survey of 283 symphonies dating from 1800-1899. Features of full symphonies include the rate of compositional output over the course of the century, the number, order, and keys of movements, and the prevalence of sonata form. Individual movements that use sonata form receive greater attention, including analysis of the general proportions of internal sections (that is, relative lengths of slow introductions, expositions, developments, and recapitulations plus codas), as well as overall tonal plans.
This commentary compares observational corpus analysis and hypothesis-driven analytical methods, and discusses the methods used in Cannon's "Sonata Form in the Nineteenth-Century Symphony" article.
Sibelius's Fifth is one of the great late-Romantic symphonies. In this searching account, based on a wealth of new information, James Hepokoski takes a fresh look at the work and its composer. His findings have implications beyond Sibelius himself into the entire repertory of Post-Wagnerian symphonic composition. The early chapters place the Fifth Symphony squarely within the general culture of European musical 'modernism' and focus in particular on the problem of the clash of that culture with the more radical 'New-Music' experiments of an emerging younger generation of composers. Subsequent chapters include a probing consideration of Sibelius's style and meditative aesthetic; an account of how the symphony was composed; and a descriptive analysis of the final, familiar version. The book concludes with a discussion of the composer's own prescribed tempos for the Fifth Symphony, along with a comparison of several different recordings.
Despite significant advances in Bruckner scholarship, many problems persist. Although the relationship between Bruckner's music, post-Wagnerian ideology and, ultimately, Nazism has been carefully reconstructed, questions of how such matters should condition our responses to the music remain unaddressed. This important study isolates problematic issues of interpretation, analysis, reception, and historical location, and offers potential solutions through case studies of individual works.
Analysts of late nineteenth-century chromatic harmony must often reconcile both the conservative and progressive aspects of the music. On the one hand, the music has a venerable history to which it is indebted; on the other, musical works are subject to the creativity of individual musical voices, with resultant effect on tonal relations. This situation presents a problem that is perhaps more difficult than a first glance might suggest. In deference to its history, a sensitive analyst might opt to mimic the historical process by applying tried-and-true analytical techniques that have served so well for earlier musical styles. An equally sensitive analyst may be drawn to the opposite pole; in an effort to capture the music’s forward-looking, individual nature, an analyst may apply newer methodologies, adapting them to account for the music’s veiled tonality. Certainly, it is a truism that an analytical methodology will return results that betray its bias. For example, Edward Laufer accounts for many of Bruckner’s bold harmonic progressions by illustrating how a traditional classical model might be distorted to produce the end result. One of the techniques that Laufer insightfully asserts to be typically Brucknerian is ‘elision’, the process whereby a composer omits essential voices in a texture that provide the understood consonant support for a prolongation. The musical texture present is shown to take its meaning from a set of passing tones originating in a traditional, yet unstated harmonic model. Thus, Laufer’s analytical technique is used to normalize Bruckner’s composition to a classical model.
This book analyses the sonata. Both building on and departing from earlier methods of analysis, it provides an in-depth examination of the sonata genre. After establishing the normative features of the sonata, the authors examine how individual sonatas from Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart both adhere to and deviate from those standards to a variety of effects. Co-authored by a music theorist and a musicologist, the book provides a foundational theory and offers insights on individual works from the Western canon.
This study brings Hepokoski and Darcy's formal/dramatic categories of recapitulatory "success" and "failure" to bear on Mahler's canon of symphonic sonatas. Prior to the Seventh Symphony, Mahler linked expression and formal process with striking regularity: early- or middle-period sonatas ending affirmatively tended to feature properly functioning recapitulations, while sonatas ending tragically showed themselves incapable of such tonal resolution. Just as strikingly, the pattern changes in the composer's late maturity: after 1905, Mahler seems less inclined to dramatize the tonic/non-tonic tensions that motivated his earlier works.
Cambridge Core - Music: General Interest - The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory - edited by Thomas Christensen
Schenkerian analysis is a problematic tool for the analysis of early modernist music, not least because its deep-level theoretical and hermeneutic dependence on the Beethovenian heroic style is at risk of predefining the outline of a hermeneutics of other music. By bringing the Ursatz into contact with Martin Heidegger's concept of the Augenblick, it becomes possible to sever this restrictive hermeneutic link and also to open up a radically new possibility for background structures in late tonal music.
Elgar's First Symphony presents two considerable challenges to an orthodox Schenkerian reading. First, it is a prolongation of two strongly outlined tonalities - one immuring, the other immured - and second, its Kopfton remains static at the end of movements and does not descend structurally until the finale, thus prolonging a single Ursatz over an entire symphony. By aligning itself with Heidegger's analysis of the nature of human Being, a Heideggerian-Schenkerian analysis of the work illuminates Elgar's ‘play’ with the Beethovenian symphonic tradition, and demonstrates how he successfully manipulates his gigantic early modernist tonal structure.
Examples of directional tonality, associative tonality, associative theme and motivic parallelism all appear in the Act III Finale to Die Feen, Wagner's first complete opera. The inter-relationships evident among these compositional principles foreshadow a level of sophistication usually attributed to the more mature music dramas, suggesting that the keys to unlocking das Geheimnis der Form can, in some senses, be found in an understanding of the earlier works. The present study adopts a range of theoretical paradigms in order to address the variety of Wagner's musical and dramatic techniques. Used in conjunction, Schenkerian generative views of tonality, Robert Bailey's dramatic-tonal concepts, neo-Riemannian transformations and an understanding of thematic association enable a series of analytical observations unattainable through any single interpretative approach.
David Kopp's book develops a model of chromatic chord relations in nineteenth-century music by composers such as Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and Brahms. The emphasis is on explaining chromatic third relations and the pivotal role they play in theory and practice. The book traces conceptions of harmonic system and of chromatic third relations from Rameau through nineteenth-century theorists such as Marx, Hauptmann and Riemann, to the seminal twentieth-century theorists Schenker and Schoenberg and on to the present day. Drawing on tenets of nineteenth-century harmonic theory, contemporary transformation theory and the author's own approach, the book presents a clear and elegant means for characterizing commonly acknowledged but loosely defined elements of chromatic harmony, and integrates them as fully fledged entities into a chromatically based conception of harmonic system. The historical and theoretical argument is supplemented by plentiful analytic examples.
This book employs transformational theory to illuminate the experience of tonal music. In addition to providing an accessible primer on transformational theory, the book introduces new theoretical constructs to model familiar tonal effects. Two effects are central: the infusion of sounding pitches with tonal qualities (or qualia) and the orientation of pitches toward a tonic. Tonal qualities are modeled via a Generalized Interval System (or GIS), while tonic directedness is modeled by oriented transformational networks. The arrows in such networks animate a special class of transformational action called tonal intention-the directing of the listener's awareness toward a tonal center. The book divides into two parts. Part I addresses theoretical and methodological issues, while Part II comprises four extended analytical chapters. The analytical chapters explore the E-major Fugue from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier; the aria "Un'aura amorosa" from Mozart's Così fan tutte; Brahms's A-major Intermezzo, op. 118, no. 2; and the slow movement from Brahms's String Quintet, op. 111. Analytical vignettes are present throughout Part I as well, demonstrating the efficacy of the book's theoretical ideas in music from Bach to Mahler. The analyses place the book's novel technologies in dialogue with existing methods for tonal analysis, including Schenkerian theory and neo-Riemannian theory.