The Formal Structure of Viennese Classic Instrumental Themes
This monograph treats in detail the formal structure of instrumental melody in the Viennese High-Classic style, as exemplified in 1450 themes drawn from the mature works of F.J. Haydn and W.A. Mozart.
Writers on music from H.C. Koch forward have attempted to explicate the audible sense of orderliness, even of grammaticalness, in the construction of this music. The idea here is to try to sharpen and enlarge the definitions and concepts of these theorists, and to test the principles so developed against a substantial homogeneous corpus of music, in such a way that we can give a rational answer to the question, “How many types of Classic instrumental theme are there?” One of the critical claims is that we can achieve some taxonomic clarity by dividing a theme’s construction into two aspects, the cadential and the motivic.
Part One discusses Classic instrumental melody in general, Part Two deals with two-part themes in more detail, and Part Three treats three-part themes in more detail. Chapter 21 presents some final conclusions and conjectures.
This study was written in the later 1980’s, which will account for the out-of-date references; I have not updated it, except for a few minor changes in wording. NOTE: The internal hyperlinks to the musical examples will not function in a web browser; they are accessible only if the .pdf is downloaded.
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under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License.
Modality and the Melodic Foreground
One of the under-explored features of Western classical music is modality: the use of specific scale-degrees in ways idiosyncratic to a particular style or period. And yet modal considerations are particularly important for any theory of melody attempting to deal with the “coherence of the incipit”, the fact that in the opening measure or two of a successful melody or theme, the pitches and the rhythms are simply not to be changed without great damage to its integrity.
A repertory of ca. 6300
themes, in the major mode only, drawn from the work of four Viennese
classic composers (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert) is surveyed for
its treatment of the nontonic pitches – 2°, 4°, #4°, 6°, and 7° – in
melodic situations analogous to traditional dissonance-treatment: the
nominal appoggiatura (including the grace-note), the neighbor-tone, and
the passing tone, in various rhythmic configurations; and an attempt is
made to draw out a few well-founded general principles for the treatment,
in this style, of individual degrees of the major scale.
Classic Melody: What Are the Little Notes For?
As part of an investigation into the exceptional coherence to be found in the opening few notes, the incipit, of a theme or melody in the Viennese Classical style, the study attempts to understand the function of the “little notes” – that is, those that arise from dotted rhythms, as compared to similar incipits with undotted incipits. Examining about 4000 major-mode incipits from the total repertory of themes and thematic passages in Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, a method is developed to evaluate various metric/contour combinations in terms of the readiness with which they group, and to relate this evaluation to the likelihood that a theme which opens with a given contour will be dotted or not. NOTE: The internal hyperlinks to the musical examples will not function in a web browser; they are accessible only if the .pdf is downloaded.
This work is licensed under a
Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Viennese High-Classic thematic incipit database:
This is a collection of the incipits of the major-mode thematic material in virtually all of the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, excluding juvenilia: in Haydn’s case, that is, works from 1759 onwards; for Mozart, works from 1770; for Beethoven from 1790, and Schubert from late 1813.
The entire repertory, without the incipits, is specified here, as the “Viennese Classic major-mode incipit corpus”: a sortable MS Excel spreadsheet (which also explains the theme “addresses” and contains a list of abbreviations). The incipits themselves are to be found in a number of individual Excel spreadsheets, and also in multiple MS Access databases, according to their “rhythmic genus”.
These incipits have all been transposed to C major, and can be sorted, or located, by their contour: in ascending “contour order”, first come incipits beginning (after transposition) on C – that is, on the tonic - then on C#, then D, etc, up to those beginning on B. Within the incipits beginning on C, first come those in which the second note is lowest, then next lowest, up through incipits beginning with repeated Cs, and on up to those incipits in which the note following the initial C is the highest. The same goes for the third note, etc, in this quasi-alphabetical order.
This kind of ordering is feasible only if all the incipits in a given collection have virtually the same opening rhythm – that is, if they all belong to the same “rhythmic genus”. The various rhythmic genera are listed here, in a .pdf document, which is also the means by which to access the assorted individual spreadsheets and databases. In music as rhythmically-differentiated as the Viennese High-Classic, the sorting of the repertory into these rhythmic genera is often beset with difficulties and ambiguities, for example in the treatment of grace-notes or gavotte-rhythms. Fairly often a given incipit is listed in two separate genera, to allow for differing rhythmic interpretations. Upbeats are disregarded in this rhythmic classification: the defining rhythm is that beginning on “downbeat zero”: the first strong beat, generally the note after the first notated barline, of the incipit.
This catalog of themes was assembled over a number of years, for several different purposes, and no guarantees are proffered as to accuracy; in particular articulations have usually been ignored in the transcriptions. Anyone using this material for a public purpose should be careful to check the notation and transposition against the scholarly editions of this music.
MS Excel does not handle images especially well: some care must be taken when manipulating one of these spreadsheets that the images travel with their descriptive cells, particularly if one wishes to delete a particular record. The images in the MS Access versions are more stable (they appear in the “form” views of a particular rhythmic type), and can be viewed either in a quasi-cardfile form (convenient for printing, for example, to 4x6 index cards), or in a tabular form, simulating a spreadsheet view (but without the zooming capabilies of Excel). And of course, anyone downloading these files is free to modify them as they see fit for their own purposes, with appropriate acknowledgement.
This work is licensed under a Creative
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The Traditional Theory of Harmony
Like so many teachers of music theory, I too have committed a harmony text. In response to requests from several former students, here it is, for whomever might find it useful:
Introduction
Chapter
1
Scales and Intervals
Chapter
2
Triads and Tonality
Chapter
3
Connecting (Root-position) Triads
Chapter
4
Sixth-chords; Cadences
Chapter
5
6-4 Chords; Harmonizing a Melody; Harmonic Rhythm
Chapter
6
Modulation (via Pivot-Chords)
Chapter
7
Review Chapter
Chapter
8
Dominant and Supertonic Sevenths
Chapter
9
Nonharmonic Tones
Chapter
10
Full-Diminished and Half-Diminished Sevenths; Secondary
Dominants
Chapter
11
Nondominant Sevenths; Sequences
Chapter
12
The Neapolitan Sixth; Augmented Sixth-Chords
Chapter
13
Pedals
Chapter
14
Modal Interchange
Chapter
15
Dominant Ninths; Nondominant Ninths, Elevenths, and
Thirteenths
Chapter
16
Embellishing Diminished Sevenths
Chapter
17
Extensions of the Augmented-Sixth Principle
Chapter
18
Augmented Dominants
NOTE: The embedded audio examples will not
function in a web browser; they are accessible only if the .pdfs are
downloaded.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.