“Tonal
Polarity and Chromatic Harmony in Liszt's Symphonic Poem Hamlet”
The
evolution of tonal practice during the nineteenth century has received much attention
in recent decades, and the music of Franz Liszt has been frequently analyzed to
demonstrate techniques such as chromatic harmony and tonal duality. With the exception
of the Faust Symphony, however, most such analyses have been drawn from the composer's
works for piano. This paper explores Liszt's use of advanced compositional techniques
in the introductory section of his symphonic poem Hamlet (1858). In a possibly
unprecedented tonal plan, the main tonality of B minor is juxtaposed with the
semitone-related secondary key of C minor. A transformational approach is used
to explore the relationship of these two keys. The introductory section features
several harmonic progressions that range from triadic but nonfunctional to seemingly
atonal. These passages are modeled using techniques drawn from neo-Riemannian
theory, including Cohn's LPR loop. An apparently atonal passage illustrates the
confluence of diatonic and chromatic structure. The passage can be understood
as a series of parallel tenths, supported at a deeper level by the principle of
parsimonious voice leading. Liszt's Hamlet thus serves both as an early example
of neo-Riemannian relations and as an instance of that compositional practice
situated on the cusp between diatonic and chromatic harmonic organization.
"A
New Theory of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Chromaticism"
This
paper has two purposes: To briefly survey existing theories of earlier chromatic
works, and to propose a new theory of this chromatic repertoire.
Recent
scholarship has emphasized the differences between twentieth- and sixteenth-century
conceptions of chromaticism; namely, that earlier theorists only considered chromatic
works containing the chromatic semitone, and that the definition of chromaticism
as tones outside the key is therefore irrelevant to this music. However, limiting
chromaticism to melodic progressions containing a chromatic semitone is also invalid,
for two reasons: First, the distinction between chromatic and diatonic semitones
is false, and second, composers of this period had a much broader view of chromaticism
including many progressions without any chromatic semitone.
I
will therefore propose a new method of understanding and analyzing this chromatic
repertoire, one based not on semitones but on tonal systems. I will show that
not every chromatic tone is an essential part of the musical structure, and that
chromatic progressions arise not from any particular kind of semitone but from
ambiguities in tonal systems. These ambiguities result either from the juxtaposition
of two incompatible systems (juxtaposed diatonicism) or from the abandonment of
any diatonic context (suspended diatonicism). These concepts of juxtaposed and
suspended diatonicism can be used along with reducing out non-essential chromaticism
to present a more complete, coherent picture of this chromatic repertoire. I will
conclude with the implications of this work for chromaticism of later periods.