The Influence of Harmonic Rhythm and Melodic Pacing on Musical Climax
This presentation reconsiders the common assumption that a fast pace, a fast rate of harmonic or melodic change, contributes to tension at points of climax. I refer to the notion that a fast pace creates tension as the pace-tension hypothesis. Some, like Wallace Berry, apply this hypothesis to music of many styles; but others, including Leonard B. Meyer, assume its applicability to nineteenth-century music, in particular. One encounters many instances in nineteenth-century music, however, that contradict the pace-tension hypothesis. For instance, a deceleration (a decrease in pace) often occurs just before a climax and creates a sense of struggle, with tension resulting from the delay in the arrival of the climax. I propose a set of pacing scenarios, each of which pairs acceleration or deceleration with intensification preceding a climax or with abatement following a climax. A struggle scenario, for instance, is the combination of deceleration with intensification.
Passages from the first movement of Brahms Violin Sonata in A major, op. 100 serve to illustrate pacing scenarios, and the movement as a whole serves as a sample repertoire for testing the pacing-scenario hypothesis. The pacing-scenario hypothesis predicts that pacing scenarios that contradict the pace-tension hypothesis, such as the struggle scenario, will occur as well as pacing scenarios that support it. Indeed, the two pacing scenarios that contradict the pace-tension hypothesis occur more frequently in this movement than do the two pacing scenarios that support it.
Modulation to the Minor Dominant in Major: Three Examples by Bach
In a modulation to the dominant, the mode of the local key is usually the same as that of the global key or tonality; in other words, the key of V is normally major in major, and minor in minor. An important but rarely discussed exception is modulation to minor V in major. The present study examines this phenomenon in three keyboard preludes by Bach (BWV 532, 654, and 870), each of which presents a different context or rationale for the modulation. In these works, minor V is introduced indirectly—as IV of II—yet may be heard in retrospect as minor V because of its proximity to the major V that follows. Although the character and context of the modulation to minor V is different in each piece, all three pieces share an interesting tonal strategy: the placement of minor V relatively close to the conclusion, such that its dark quality contrasts with the bright, goal-directed major V. Arguably the most intriguing of the three examples is the organ chorale “Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele,” BWV 654, whose modulation to minor V evokes the text of the chorale. Although modulations of this type are seldom mentioned in harmony texts, they can be just as effective or appropriate as the more familiar or “normal” procedures, and therefore deserve closer examination than theorists have given them.
Tiered Polyphony as a Signal of Motivic Primacy in the Piano Music of Brahms
Tiered polyphony is defined as a special type of texture in which multiple voices express independent melodic material at proportional speeds. Common in Bach in the context of trio sonatas and chorale preludes, tiered polyphony also appears fairly regularly in Brahms’s music. When it does occur, the effect of the polyphony is quite striking: passages exhibiting this texture give off an aura of extreme drive and inexorability. In Brahms’s tiered polyphony, usually one line of the texture serves as a guide rail following a chromatic path, another exhibits the surface-melodic pitch cells unique to the piece at hand, and additional voices act as filler. One of the engines driving tiered polyphony is the proportional rhythm. The other is the motivic content, which provides tension as it pulls at the harmonic fabric of common-practice tonal composition . This paper will examine three piano works by Brahms employing tiered polyphony, the two Rhapsodies, op. 79 and the Scherzo from the op. 5 sonata. For all three works, the paper will examine how the unique motivic shapes lead to idiosyncratic harmonic syntax. For the Scherzo, a deeper, deconstructive view of pitch-cells will point in a new direction for the understanding the nature of motive itself in Brahms.