Le 30 juin 2017
de 16h00 à 16h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3202
Pré-acte / Acte
Taking their lead from Dahlhaus’s 1968 book on harmonic tonality, a number of theorists have explored a great variety of contrapuntal patterns and their genre-, style-, and composer-dependent usages. Despite the growing scholarly interest in the study of voice-leading schemata, an issue that has not yet been sufficiently addressed is schema concatenation, i.e. the principles governing the succession of schemata in individual compositions (see Gjerdingen, 2007). In my talk, I shall tackle this issue by linking voice-leading patterns with musical form. Some recent studies have demonstrated that voice-leading patterns play a crucial role in expressing “formal functions” and hence can easily be integrated into Caplin’s powerful form-functional theory (Caplin, 1998).
In nuce, Caplin’s approach states that any musical composition can be understood to consist of a hierarchically nested succession of basic formal functions. In expressing an intended formal function, a given musical unit can draw on various schemata to project the three types of harmonic progression associated with the beginning-middle-end paradigm: prolongational, sequential, and cadential harmony.
Based on a large corpus of keyboard music (incl. works by Haydn, Clementi, Mozart, and Kozeluch), this talk examines schema concatenation in music between ca. 1770 and 1800. In particular, I shall scrutinize the extent to which successive schemata fall into the broader categories of beginning, middle, and end, and how they relate to both inter- and intra-thematic functions. The findings proposed in this talk contribute to reconstruct modes of historical listening and hence to uncover the “archaeology of hearing” (Byros, 2009).
