“Structuring
Timbre in an Octatonic Context: the Music of Bohuslav Martinu”
Recent
theorists have debated octatonicismís ability to integrate the diatonic and chromatic
elements of much early twentieth-century music. While many analyses rely primarily
on pitch structure, recent research in the field of music perception and cognition
has provided analysts with tools for using timbre as an essential element in delineating
form. Timbre is dependent upon a number of variables including but not limited
to: spectral content, loudness, attack characteristics, and pitch itself. The
attractiveness of timbre as an analytical paradigm lies in its potential to permeate
an entire musical work as it proceeds in time, perhaps doing for sound what Schenkerian
analysis doesfor pitch in tonal music.
In the course of mapping out a terrain in which timbre
operates, this paper invokes the Terhardt/Parncutt model of pitch perception,
in particular the notions of pitch salience, pitch commonality, and critical bandwidth.
The notion of ìtimbral harmonyî as a structural entity is posited. Using three
short examples from Bohuslav Martinuís Fourth Symphony and Memorial to Lidice,
I examine how Martinu utilizes timbral-harmonic complexes in his orchestrational
technique as a way of mediating octatonic and diatonic aspects of the music, casting
further light on Pieter van den Toornís notion of octatonic-diatonic interaction.
The goal is not to turn musical works into listening exercises,
nor to use cognition results to validate any particular way of hearing, but rather
to use psychoacoustic knowledge to inform musical readings, and to seek that elusive
middleground between what Nicholas Cook calls “attention-driven” listening
and perception-driven “pre-attentive” listening.
"Non-Functional
Chromaticism in Ragtime and Early Jazz"
In
ragtime and early jazz, harmonic function often seems easy to describe; the chord
progressions in the music are usually diatonically based with any chromaticism
the result of conventional secondary dominants and augmented sixth chords. While
this description fits many pieces in the repertory, other pieces have provocative
harmony that sounds distinctly modern, using procedures more commonly associated
with the pervasive chromaticism of Charlie Parker or the third-relations of John
Coltrane. Such practices within the basic tonal framework of ragtime and early
jazz raise questions of coherence. How should we approach such anomalous passages?
Is it better to proceed via the tonal grammar associated with the more conventional
harmonic areas or should we develop distinct approaches for these non-functional
passages? Might a hybrid model, incorporating insights from both approaches, work
best? For this investigation, I focus on three problematic pieces: "Ballin'
the Jack" (Smith, 1914), "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise" (Gershwin-Gershwin-DeSylva,
1922), and "Euphonic Sounds" (Joplin, 1909), each of which contains
non-functional progressions that traverse tonal areas only distantly related to
the tonic key. In particular, I compare standard models of tonal harmonic progression
to neo-Riemannian techniques in which cycles of chords involving parsimonious
voice leading are seen as organizational determinants. I conclude with a summary
of this studyís implications for the analysis of ragtime and early jazz and its
relationship to the mix of functional harmony and non-functional chromatic progressions
found in later jazz styles.