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Analysis and Value Judgement:: Schumann, Bruckner and Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis
The timeworn view that Bruckner's sonata form is a motionless architecture devoid of dynamic processes has long contributed his isolation from the mainstream post‐Beethovenian tradition. Taking inspiration from August Halm's (1914) and Ernst Kurth's (1925) approaches, which were aimed at overcoming this view, this article seeks to elucidate the processual aspects of Bruckner's symphonic form in light of recent theoretical developments in musical form. Specifically, it combines William Caplin's form‐functional theory (1998), especially its beginning–middle–end paradigm, with Matthew Arndt's (2018) reconception of formal functionality to construct a new framework for the analysis of Bruckner's symphonic forms.
By way of an analytical case study of the first movement of Bruckner's Sixth Symphony, the article reveals that the expression of continuous motion occurring across discrete formal entities, often further dramatised by ‘wave dynamics’ (Kurth 1925), is fundamental to Bruckner's reinvigoration of sonata form's inherent temporal process in a post‐Romantic context. In the exposition, the inter‐thematic beginning, middle and end paradigms are redistributed to the three thematic groups, which express their unique temporal domain while delineating a continuous tonal journey from the home key to the subordinate key. The remainder of the movement articulates a gradual journey of homecoming, with each subsequent large‐scale part addressing previously suggested tonal implications. Ultimately, the modified form‐functional approach adopted in this study sheds light on Bruckner's exceptional care for formal syntax on various levels of structure, and its close association with an overarching, though unconventional, tonal plot.
This article revisits the long‐standing issue of form in the Adagio of Mahler's Tenth Symphony (1910) in light of recent developments in Formenlehre and neo‐Riemannian theory. I consider the movement's sonata properties, as discerned by Kofi Agawu (1986) and Richard Kaplan (2005), by exploring the applicability of William E. Caplin's form‐functional theory (1998) and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's Sonata Theory (2006) in a post‐Wagnerian tonal environment, construed in terms of Richard Cohn's hexatonic systems (1999) and Julian Horton's model of orbital tonality (2018b). While the argument posits a hexatonically orientated conception of form based on what I theorise as hexatonic tension, special attention is given to the idea of breakthrough as an analytical and hermeneutic point of reorientation: conceived after Janet Schmalfeldt's concept of becoming (2011), the breakthrough initiates a retrospective reinterpretation of the Adagio's tonal universe and consequently turns its form into a diatonically orientated sonata form. The article thus explicates the formal function of breakthrough based on Adorno's aesthetic formulation, propounding a chromatically inflected model of sonata form in response to Seth Monahan's call for a novel framework for Mahler's late works (2011). Together they constitute a foundation of a theory of fin‐de‐siècle modernist symphonic sonata form.
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