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Negri Júnior, Alexandre Jorge de Andrade

University of British Columbia

There seems to be a change in European art music from roughly the 1820s until the 1920s in the way that composers arrange keys throughout a work. However, this repertoire is often analyzed with theories developed for earlier practices. They rely, to various degrees, on three assumptions—monotonality, structural diatonicity, and harmonic functionality. These assumptions, I argue, may prevent one from appreciating key structures in innovative works of the nineteenth century. As an alternative, I propose a new way of conceiving of key succession that arranges them in a hierarchy that I call a tonal superstructure. In Part I, I provide a four-step method to derive a piece’s tonal superstructure. In the first step, the analyst segments a piece into a succession of time-spans, based on grouping principles from Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. In the second step, the analyst considers the musical phenomena—pitches and chords in their rhythmic context—of each time-span to infer its key (or keys), as well as how strongly the keys are determined. The succession of all inferred keys constitutes the key surface level. In the next step, the analyst groups the surface-level keys into discrete, basic patterns according to a set of preference rules. The highest-ranking key of each basic pattern is promoted to a deeper level, and the key successions at that deeper level are then grouped and hierarchized. The process continues recursively until one arrives at the piece’s tonal superstructure. In Part II, I delve into specific issues and possibilities of the theory by analyzing six pieces from different composers and genres: an etude and a waltz by Frederic Chopin, three songs by Hugo Wolf, and Jean Sibelius’s tone poem The Swan of Tuonela. In Part III, I apply the same principles to longer pieces: the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, and the first movement of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8.

Text; Still Image

2024-09-25

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89296

Music - Theory

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/