Temporal Proportions as a Unifying Process in Anton Webern's Variations for Piano Op. 27 (original) (raw)
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Theory and Practice , 2004
Sonata form--the analytical brainchild of Antonin Reicha and Carl Czerny in the first quarter of the nineteenth century--remains today a problematic paradigm. The inadequacy of the "textbook" model to explain the musical choices of especially Haydn and Beethoven is evident whenever one examines their sonata-form compositions. Consequently, writers from Donald Francis Tovey to William S. Newman and Charles Rosen have sounded various cautionary notes concerning this model, and have inspired others in recent times to search for new, more flexible means of describing how Classical sonata form functions musically. The past few years have witnessed the appearance of two analytical approaches that can assist us in the quest. First, there is William Caplin's taxonomy of Classical instrumental music at the level of the four-measure phrase and the two-measure phrase member. It provides us with the technical means to identify thematic and transitional units and to distinguish between them on the basis of their syntactical components. Second, there is James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy's identification of breaks in musical action (i.e., medial caesuras and essential expositional closures) as analogues to punctuation in language, which they use to demarcate formal events in sonata expositions. Both approaches draw heavily on historical views of musical form: Caplin's ideas about formal function derive from Schoenberg and Ratz; Hepokoski and Darcy's interest in musical breaks as large-scale formal determinants is an extension of Heinrich Christoph Koch's concept of "melodic punctuation." Hepokoski and Darcy suggest a rather wide-but nonetheless distinct-range of possible temporal locations, within a sonata-form exposition, for each type of melodic punctuation. Their data suggests that the temporality of musical events is more integral to a listener's perception of musical succession than has been hitherto assumed. Indeed, it could be argued that the musical proportion of an exposition's formal components (i.e., main theme, transition, subordinate theme, closing section) influences subconsciously how we formally partition a sonata exposition, regardless of the literal form-functional meaning of each expositional segment, as determined by Caplin.
2010
This article presents some of the laws of sound matter in temporal organization, which I have discovered in European musical works of the early 20th century - the modern period. The research is novel through a demonstration of new principles of formal structuring, determined by the features of sound systems: tonal, modal, atonal. Alongside tonal functionality - a generally accepted law, now extended to post-romantic works, we propose intervallic functionality and the functionality of colour (of the complex sound).
2020
The Use of Registral Spacing and Rhythmic Density as Musical Trajectories in a Portfolio of Original Compositions is a doctoral research in composition that focuses on the construction of a musical trajectory of a composition by using the transmutation of its registral spacing and rhythmic density. The thesis consists of two parts: a portfolio of original compositions and an academic commentary. The portfolio comprises compositions for a vocalist with various mediums, small ensemble (up to six performers), solo instrument with electronics, small ensemble with electronics, and gestural devices with electronics. The academic commentary covers the initial ideas regarding expression and abstraction in arts and music which laid the foundation for the study of this research on the organisation of musical spaces in a composition to achieve an alternative musical trajectory that does not rely on the use of thematic/motivic development. It discusses the notion of non-linearity in some compos...
Happy to finally release the results of this long-time research on the Webern's Variations. My goal was to observe how Webern's orchestration interacts with serialism. The paper points to some usefull (I hope!) and unpreceded (I guess!) conclusions, and a lot of future work. Abstract: Webern’s Variationen op. 30 constituted a well-known milestone in the consolidation of serialism as a compositional technique. It has been the target of a large number of investigations focused on the way the composer developed a broader concept. As could it not be otherwise, his orchestral design is also closely tied to his structural concerns. However, it appears to lack a systematization of the composer’s orchestration principles. Thus, to propose an analysis of Webern’s orchestration, one need to elaborate an ad hoc method, virtually starting from scratch. This paper aims to describe the main points of this method in its current experimental stage. At the same time, we point to some conclusions about Webern’s orchestration according to his aesthetics. Direct link: https://musmat.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/07-Didier.pdf
A Study of Variation in Temporal Structure of Sonata Form
2020
In this paper it is shown that the concept of the Eighteenth-Century Sonata form, under certain conditions, implies exact constraints to its temporal structure, which are essential to keep its inner proportions balanced. The plastic number of Hans van der Laan appears to be closely related to the concordance of lengths of the vital parts of a sonata-form movement of type 3 on Hepokoski and Darcy scale. Furthermore, a probabilistic model of basic variation in the structure of such movement is developed from scratch and empirically justified by analyzing instrumental works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
2021
Many studies about musical meter have made a mistake that the target of research is exist in musical stimuli in its complete form. However, without human cognition, music is not yet music but merely physical difference of sounds. Therefore, the essence of music exits not in stimuli but in human cognition. This study postulate that human understands music by means of schemas as in cognitive sciences. Therefore, metrical structure of music can be regarded as the direct reflection of this schema, because for listner's easiness, composers and performer make music correspond to human cognitive schemas. Thus, we can extrapolate the nature of the schema by research of general characteristics of musical works. (This is a draft English translation of Chapter 1 from my dissertation in Japanese.)
The Butterfly Schema in the Classical Instrumental Style: a Product of the Tendency for Congruence
Music Analysis journal, 2020
This article combines theories that explain schemata as psychological and statistical associations of features with those that define schemata as collections of cognitively generated archetypes. It is argued that styles contain a spectrum of features but tend towards congruence. This propensity is thought to originate in cognition and thereafter becomes manifest in and between the features of styles. A localised structure, termed the 'butterfly' schema, is posited to be in part a product of the tendency for congruence in the Classical instrumental style. An analysis of the styles and schemata of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods explicates their distinct forms of congruent structuring. A survey of European instrumental music c. 1750–1850 compares the quantity and type of butterfly schemata in samples from the first half of this time-period with those from the second. It is found that butterfly schemata with highly congruent features are more common in the earlier, Classical-period samples, suggesting that they are a product of the tendency for congruence in the particular form defined. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/musa.12133
Symmetries In Classical Music. From Guillaume de Machaut to Cesar Franck
Symmetry: Art and Science | 12th SIS-Symmetry Congress
Reflection, translation, rotation are terms frequently used in mathematics and generally associated with the sense of sight: we can use tiles or stained glass to clarify these concepts, but it is possible to exemplify the same concepts using the sense of hearing. In the first case the x and y coordinates of the plane are, for example, the width and height of a stained-glass window, in the second case the variables are respectively time and sound height, but instead of vision, we need hearing and memory to recognize the symmetry. Musicians and composers are aware of these con- cepts and use them with rigor and ingenuity. We present several musical examples from different eras, analysing compositions ranging from Guillaume de Machaut (14th century) to Cesar Franck (19th century), through Mozart's joviality and Bach's genius (18th century).
Memesatz contra Ursatz: Memetic Perspectives on the Aetiology and Evolution of Musical Structure
Musicae Scientiae, 2010
This article discusses the aetiology and evolution of musical structure, specifically the sonata-form exposition, from a memetic perspective. It regards established musical forms as replicated schemata arising from the conglomeration of foreground-level memes, the resultant archetypes (structural memes or Memesätze) being replicated (reinstantiated) by different collections of functionally analogous (allelic) memes. After a discussion of the theoretical background — including the top-down/bottom-up generative dichotomy as it applies to form, and some attributes of memes affecting conglomeration — three sonata expositions, by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, are discussed as specific evidence in support of the general hypotheses advanced.