Hearing Homophony

This book examines a repertoire of homophonic vernacular partsongs composed around the turn of the seventeenth century, and considers how these partsongs exploit rhythm, meter, phrase structure, and form to craft harmonic trajectories. Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi, Thomas Morley, Hans Leo Hassler, and their contemporaries engineered a particular kind of centricity that is distinctively tonal: they strategically deployed dominant harmonies at regular periodicities and in combination with poetic, phrase structural, and formal cues, thereby creating expectation for tonic harmonies. Homophony provided an ideal venue for these experiments: spurred by an increasing demand for comprehensible texts, composers of partsongs developed rigid text-setting procedures that promoted both metrical regularity and consistent phrase rhythm. This rhythmic consistency had a ripple effect: it encouraged composers to design symmetrical phrase structures and to build comprehensible, repetitive, and predictable formal structures. Thus, homophonic partsongs create and exploit trajectories from dominants to tonics on multiple scales, from cadence to sub-phrase to phrase to form. Ultimately, this book argues for a model of tonality—and of tonality’s history—that centers not pitch, but rhythm and meter. Metrically oriented harmonic trajectories encourage tonal expectation. And we can locate these trajectories in a variety of repertoires, including those that we traditionally understand as “modal.”

Becoming Beethoven: Theorizing Bonner Zeit Transitions

Beethoven wrote about thirty sonata movements before leaving Bonn. Often disparaged as awkward (when not neglected entirely), these pieces deserve rehabilitation for the insights they can bring to the composer's masterworks. Influenced by local Rhenish models—Christian Gottlob Neefe, Andrea Luchesi, and Johann Franz Xaver Sterkel, the Bonner Zeit music imbues a galant style with Empfindsam colorings, producing an idiosyncratic approach to transitions and genre blending—particularly involving cue play surrounding multiple medial caesuras, elisions, phrase expansions, and undermined secondary themes—that responds immediately to Janet Schmalfeldt's perspective on the process of becoming as well as a mix of ideas from Heinrich Schenker, William Caplin, and the work of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, all applied here. Three of Beethoven's Bonn sonatas, as well as several works by Rhineland contemporaries, are given close study for their transition-related harmony, voice leading, phrase rhythm, topics, and formal implications.

Melody

Melody is a fundamental concept in Western musical thought; it connotes the form and affective power of successive sounds in motion, perceived as an aesthetic unity. Yet for many writers, melody does not exist as an autonomous form, and for those who credit its existence, few agree on what it is, or how it functions in relation to harmonic voice leading and phrase rhythm. This chapter examines the historical emergence of a theory of melody in the West, from Aristoxenus to Leonard Bernstein; it traces the rich intellectual currents that saw melody variously coupled to ideas of voice, schemes of rhythmic symmetry, overtones, spatial organization, theories of evolution, and computational analysis.

Alternative Paths, Phrase Expansion, and the Music of Felix Mendelssohn

William Rothstein’s seminal work on phrase rhythm has been foundational for scholars who study phrase expansion using Schenkerian principles, such as David Beach, Charles Burkhart, Joseph Kraus, and Samuel Ng. Other scholars consider phrase expansion from the perspective of William Caplin’s form-functional theory, such as Janet Schmalfeldt and Steven Vande Moortele. Both groups tend to emphasize structural concerns. Recent theories of musical meaning, however, challenge analysts to consider phrase expansions through an expressive lens. This article engages with that challenge using the metaphor of musical motion, a concept that is informally present in numerous analytical writings but was formalized in work on conceptual metaphors by Steve Larson and Mark Johnson. In particular, we introduce a category of expansion techniques called “alternative paths” in which a phrase deviates from its expected course toward a goal via the addition of new material. By defining how the new material is initiated and concluded, alternative paths provide a more nuanced view of passages that might otherwise be described by the more generic terms “parenthesis,” “interpolation,” or “purple patch.” We use Felix Mendelssohn’s works to demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our approach, though the theory of alternative paths is by no means limited to that repertoire.