Canons and Contestable Cadences in Brahms's Op. 118 No. 4

Brahms's F minor Intermezzo, Op. 118 No. 4 prominently employs the fusty compositional technique of strict canon at the octave. Yet Brahms embeds this canon in music that is anything but fusty: as I demonstrate, unexpected features abound in the textures, dissonance treatment, modulatory schemes, and motives with which Brahms girds the canon. The movement's approach to cadences is also remarkable. The presence of a continuous canon automatically precludes all voices coming to rest simultaneously, but Brahms further attenuates the piece's cadences. Most notably, in this movement Brahms avoids traditional authentic-cadence closure entirely, writing not a single cadential progression from a root-position C major chord to a root-position F chord. Instead, I argue that Brahms effects tonal closure by using the augmented sixth chord, which supplants the dominant's usual function. He does this most obviously by repeating the augmented sixth sonority in prominent positions within the ternary form's final A section. I also show that Brahms artfully foreshadows this chord's importance in the initial A section, where he successively tonicizes each member of that harmony.

A Newly Discovered Annotated Partimento Manuscript : "Rudimenti di Musica per Accompagnare del Sig. r Maestro Vignali" (1789)

The partimento tradition of eighteenth-century Italy developed within a musical culture that prioritized oral pedagogy. While these teaching methods were successful in producing generations of great composers, they have left scholars with vexing questions concerning the precise manner in which partimenti should be realized. The recent appearance of a remarkable and previously unknown manuscript—"Rudimenti di Musica per Accompagnare del Sig. Maestro Vignali," dated 1789—promises to shed invaluable new light on the oral tradition of partimento instruction. The manuscript's likely author is Gabriele Vignali (c. 1736– 1799), a maestro di cappella active in Bologna; it is unique in the presently known canon owing to the detailed footnotes that accompany each of its twenty-four Bassi (one in each major and minor key). Vignali's annotations provide precisely the sort of commentary that was ordinarily restricted to real-time explanation, teaching the student to recognize keys, scale degrees, modulations, cadences, typical bass progressions, and significant motives. The present article and accompanying English-language edition examine this exceptional partimento collection in detail, offering modern partimentisti the opportunity for the first time to listen in, as it were, on a series of lessons between an eighteenth-century maestro and his student.

Grieg's Sonic Afterimages

As Neo-Riemannian transformations find their firm place in the analytical tool-kit, their function changes from a heuristic to describe harmonic progressions to a full-fledged analytical methodology. In this phase, the question of meaning looms large. Richard Cohn's (2004) associations between hexatonic poles and the uncanny have done much to pave the way toward a hermeneutics of Neo-Riemannian theory. This analytical vignette focuses on an intriguing SLIDE progression in Grieg's final Lyric Piece, "Efterklang," and offers a contextual analysis in which this harmonic transformation becomes meaningful. While the interpretation offered here remains specific to the piece at hand, the hermeneutic analysis may be used as a model for further such endeavours.

The Second Repeat in Beethoven's Sonata-Form Movements: Tonal, Formal and Motivic Strategies

Around the middle of the Classical period, there was a paradigm shift concerning sectional repeats in sonata-form movements. Whereas previously the repeat of both halves (exposition and development/recapitulation) was virtually pro forma, by the late 1700s composers typically only indicated the first repeat. When composers began to indicate the second repeat infrequently, this decision took on greater musical significance.<br/> Whereas Haydn and Mozart indicated the second repeat frequently, even in their late works, Beethoven indicated this repeat rarely (nineteen times in works with opus numbers). This infrequency is noteworthy and prompts the question: Are there issues of formal balance or tonal/motivic connections that would be lost if performers omitted this repeat? I will examine these works in depth, noting similarities in formal balance, motivic content, tonal procedures, and large-scale design. Although many of these movements date from Beethoven's early period, he also indicated the second repeat six times after 1800, including the finale of his last quartet, Op. 135. We can conclude that repeating a sonata-form movement's second half remained an option for Beethoven late in life, even after he had ostensibly broken definitively with the formal conventions of his Classical predecessors.

Robert O. Gjerdingen: Child Composers in the Old Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. ISBN 978–0–19–065359–0. 355 pp. €28.50.

Robert Gjerdingen scarcely needs any introduction. His 2007 book, Music in the Galant Style, has already become a classic, and his study of "schemas"—fixed, recognizable, and replicable musical patterns in the galant style—has had a profound influence on music-theoretical discourse. It has gained broad currency, and not just among music theorists and musicologists, for its holistic treatment of musical phrases attracts many non-specialists. The schemas discussed by Gjerdingen offer excellent tools for keyboard improvisation and are clearly recognizable from listening to eighteenth-century music in particular. […]

"Rudimenti di Musica per Accompagnare del Sig. r Maestro Vignali, A. 1789 D."

The recently discovered manuscript "Rudimenti di Musica per Accompagnare del Sig.r Maestro Vignali" (1789) merits a special place in the canon of eighteenth-century partimento sources, thanks to its illuminating music-theoretical perspectives and its remarkable collection of twenty-four annotated partimenti. This English edition marks the first appearance of this manuscript source in print, making it easily accessible to scholars and performers for the first time.

Tristan und Isolde at the Margins of Music-Analytical Discourse: A Dialogic Perspective

Whether or not the Prelude to Richard Wagner's 1859 music drama Tristan und Isolde is the most analyzed piece in the history of Western music, owing to its ongoing canonical status, it behooves us to consider how it has affected the field of music analysis over the past 150 years. More than any other piece, Wagner's Prelude is able to expose the many conflicts that arise between analytical approaches: while it can demonstrate the limits of one particular approach vis-à-vis another, it may also reveal new potentialities that divergent analyses offer when seen from an intertextual point of view.<br/> As a test case, this article will position three contemporaneous analyses of the opening measures of the Prelude against one another: Horst Scharschuch's post-Riemannian harmonic analysis and Jacques Chailley's style-historical analysis, both from 1963, and William Mitchell's Schenkerian analysis of 1967. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of "dialogism" and "heteroglossia," I will trace a broader historiographical and intertextual network surrounding the history of analyzing Tristan, with the goal of refocusing our analytical priorities around this work and penetrating the continuities and discontinuities between competing analyses. In this way, the article aims at opening up a further dialogic space in music analysis, both in our historical considerations and in the way we approach analysis as an intertext—that is, by traversing the fissures in the reified verities of a "unified" analysis and the multiple interpretative transpositions underlying our deciphering of analytical texts. It will conclude by offering yet another interpretation of Wagner's famous chord.

Metrical Ambiguity in the Scherzo of Brahms's String Sextet, Op. 18

This article explores the metrical and hypermetrical ambiguities present in the Scherzo of Brahms's String Sextet in B♭ major, Op. 18 (1859–60). Drawing upon Lerdahl and Jackendoff's metrical preference rules, Mirka's parallel multiple-analysis model, and Ito's fractional notation, I argue that each hearing of material from the opening phrase (at the beginning, during its first repeat, after the Trio, etc.) affords the possibility of a different hypermetrical experience. Furthermore, rather than the metrical structure becoming increasingly clear over time, there are a number of hypermetrical irregularities that can lead listeners to question their previous interpretations. The article concludes with suggestions on how chamber ensembles can utilize metrical analyses of this movement to inform their performances and create varied listening experiences.

Abwesenheit and Anwesenheit in Beethoven's Op. 81a

A sense of absence can be evoked in a piece of music through various means. For instance, the appearance of a musical event may be suggested through certain features while being noticeably obscured by others, or the arrival of an event that is strongly prepared ultimately may be conspicuously thwarted. Such strategies may be witnessed in the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata for Piano in E♭, Op. 81a. Significantly, Beethoven subtitled this movement "Abwesenheit"—that is, "Absence." This subtitle and also the layout of the movement arguably have programmatic implications possibly understandable as relating to landmark events that occurred in Vienna around the time of the sonata's composition.

A Multi-Layered Monolith : Beyond the Surface of Loudness in Galina Ustvolskaya's Sixth Piano Sonata

The forbidding harshness of Galina Ustvolskaya's Sixth Piano Sonata can easily be associated with the spiritual and reductively statuesque imagery associated with this composer. Adapting and expanding an initial classification by Andreas Holzer and Tatiana Marković, this article proposes an in-depth analysis of loudness in Ustvolskaya's final piano composition. A detailed overview shows how she uses expanding cluster types, accentuation, and rising intensity to create prolonged dynamic arcs where at first glance dynamic progression appears to be largely flat. I go on to identify three moments of musical climax, all of which seem to articulate the golden ratio for an important subsection of the sonata. Based on these observations, I formulate two contrasting interpretations, one teleologically orientated, the other symmetrical, which show that the Sonata is governed by the tension between two distinct types of formal logic. My analysis uncovers a surprisingly multi-faceted structure, one that belies the austere image of "the composer with the hammer."