Le 29 juin 2017
de 14h00 à 14h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3201
Séance précomposée - Modulation as Perceived by the Listener
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Ildar Khannanov
Modulation is viewed today mostly as either the aspect of pedagogy of part-writing or as a part of Schenkerian graphic analysis, which seems to ignore the psychological aspect of modulation as an event of live music. Following one of the themes of EUROMAC9, it makes sense to shift the focus of study of modulation from the score to the act of musical perception.
In his Allemande from the French Suite No. 5, Bach presents nine events in order to modulate from tonic to dominant in the first half. He first establishes the key by passing through the full functional cycle TSDT three times. Then, instead of modulating into the dominant, he swerves from the path and lands in a key of submediant that has nothing to do with both tonic and dominant. Then Bach takes the listener through the sequence; he touches briefly the new key, but immediately returns to the tonic, which makes the listener change the opinion about what tonic is. When the key of the dominant arrives by the end of the first half of the Allemande, the listener perceives the dominant as a completely, phenomenally new key. Modulation back from dominant to tonic in the second half of the Allemande looks even more complicated.
It is a paradox that modulation to a closely related key is more difficult for a composer to accomplish than an abrupt modulation to a remote key.
