Le 30 juin 2017
de 11h00 à 11h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3206
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Janet Bourne
Scholars tend to analyze topics and schemata separately even though listeners experience these patterns together in eighteenth-century music: schemata provide topics with formal function and topics provide schemata with extra-musical association. While other scholars have identified musical passages where schema and topics co-occur (Byros 2014), I argue that schema and topic combinations should be treated differently; neither schema, nor topic, but a new pattern with its own constraints and principles. Following Gjerdingen and Bourne (2015), I label this new pattern a “schema-topic construction” after “constructions” from cognitive linguistics. I survey three schema-topic constructions in Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven: horn fifths (horn call topic and Mi-Re-Do schema), lament bassline (descending bassline schema and lament topic), and Stabat Mater Prinner (Prinner schema and church style topic). In the first part of this paper, I outline analytical principles that these schema-topic constructions share. For example, one principle is that schema-topic constructions are patterns with fixed components. In the second part, I describe how composers “play” with musical constructions, using the horn fifths as a case study. Based on a corpus of 24 different movements, I demonstrate that composers use horn fifths both in typical and atypical ways for compositional play. I draw on research from cognitive science to argue that historically-informed listeners use analogy to make sense of these atypical patterns. By recognizing the schema-topic construction as its own pattern, scholars can better analyze the interplay between two important sources of convention Western art music and contribute to cognition-focused trend in scholarship.
