Deborah Rifken
Eastman School of Music
The aim of this paper is to show how Prokofiev's "wrong note passages" participate in tonal structures and motivic parallelisms. "Wrong notes" is a term used by many scholars to describe the chromatic surprises of Prokofiev's music. His middleground structures create conventional tonal expectations because of their traditional cadential goals and phrase structures, making the wrong-note chromatic modulations to distant keys within phrases seem as if they are modernist spices added to an otherwise tonal structure. However, these wrong notes are a consistent part of Prokofiev's early Russian and late Soviet style and as such the label "wrong" hardly seems appropriate. The chromatic excursiorts that wrong notes incite are not wrong at all, but rather they are an essential aspect of Prokofiev's music.
Wrong-note passages create a weak structural coherence because their foreground progressions are not direct diminutions of middleground ones. Their structures rely on foreground progressions that do not have harmonic function but rather have only voice-leading significance. The paper discusses how such weak hierarchical relationships are part of Schenker's analyses as well as part of the analytic tradition continued by contemporary Schenkerians. I will show that strong motivic connections created by the chromatic voice-leading that the wrong-note passages inspire, mitigate the weakened structural coherence of wrongSnote progressions. In light of these structural motivic connections, the term "wrong note" is particularly ironic.