Rising lines in the Playford collections

Although rising cadence figures are by no means unknown before the mid-eighteenth century, I was surprised to find that the volumes of John Playford's [English] Dancing Master were a rich source for music with rising lines. I have created a PDF essay with examples: link to Playford.  [Note: link updated 6-09-16]

And here is a sample, "From Aberdeen":

More on "The Moon and Seven Stars" (Calvert manuscript book)

I was surprised to learn that "The Moon and Seven Stars" is a common fiddling tune. I was not surprised to find that the first C# in the final bar of the Calvert manuscript version is very likely a copying error. In notated versions readily available online, the end of both strains is identical: A-D-C#-D. See, for example, Seven Stars or listen to David Hansen. In this performance, Anahata mixes "The Moon and Seven Stars" and another tune called the "Spanish jig" and, just after the minute mark, closes the first tune with what sounds like a mistake, either D-D-C#-D or C#-D-C#-D. It is anomalous but makes perfectly good musical sense -- that is, it seems to realize the ascending line implicit in the consequent phrase, as I argued in my original post.

A dance from the William Calvert ms. booklet

One page from a manuscript fiddler's tune book that, according to its IMSLP entry, dates from 1812. The tune at the top is "The Moon and Seven Stars" -- see the facsimile. It is a jig in two strains, the first of which holds close to the ^5-^8 interval frame it announces immediately, the second of which realizes a rising figure within that space, a figure that was possible but remained unrealized in the first strain. See the second graphic, an analysis with comments; and also the third graphic, which shows the interval spaces (proto-backgrounds).

Facsimile:

 Analysis:

Proto-background (intervallic) spaces:

Additions to the literature on Caplin's form theory

This post expands on the previous one about William Caplin's form theory and the scholarly literature on it. 

For the present, this is simply a list of recently published articles. I hope to comment on individual items in future posts. I have not included work jointly published by or in response to Hepokoski and Darcy, Schmalfelt, and Caplin.

A special issue titled "Contemplating Caplin": Intersections: Canadian journal of music/Revue canadienne de musique XXXI/n1 (2010).

Peter Franck, "Canon and Its Effect on Tight-Knit Organization within Classical Themes." Intégral (Eastman School of Music) vol. 26 (2012).

Nathan Martin, "Formenlehre goes to the opera: Examples from Armida and elsewhere." Studia musicologica: An international journal of musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 51/ns3-4 (2010): 387-404. 

Michael Oravitz, "The use of Caplin/Schoenberg thematic prototypes in melodic dictations." Journal of music theory pedagogy 26 (2012): 101-139.

Mark Richards, "Teaching sonata expositions through their order of cadences." Journal of music theory pedagogy 26 (2012): 215-252.

Mark Richards, "Viennese classicism and the sentential idea: Broadening the sentence paradigm." Theory and practice 36 (2011): 179-224.

William Caplin's form theory and 18th century dance

The scholarly literature making use of William Caplin's form theory is growing, if slowly. Some recent examples include Nathan Martin's "Schumann's Fragment," in Indiana Theory Review 28 (2010); Steven Vande Moortele's "Sentences, Sentence Chains, and Sentence Replication: Intra- and Interthematic Formal Functions in Liszt's Weimar Symphonic Poems," in Intégral 25 (2011); and Matthew Riley's "Haydn's Missing Middles," in Music Analysis 30 (2011).

Almost all of the work, so far as I can tell, has focused on extending the reach of the method deeper into the nineteenth century--even into the early twentieth. This tendency includes a rumored forthcoming book by Caplin himself. My interest, on the other hand, was originally in expanding the available style knowledge for the Vienna School composers by looking at their social dance repertoires. Obviously, their published work on its own is inadequate to describe the actual practice of music played for social dancing, but it is what we have. I worked out pages with analyses of menuets, German dances, and Laendler by Beethoven: WoO7, WoO8, WoO11, WoO14, and WoO15; and contredanses by Mozart and Beethoven (all of these were accessible from a website, but the server has been decommissioned). This work was extended to a few contemporaries, notably Czerny, Hummel, Marschner, and Weber.

The principal results to date are that the historical narrative charting a turn from the period theme to the sentence over the course of the Vienna School heyday, or roughly 1770-1830, is incorrect. The period does become much more prevalent at one historical moment -- about 1770, when the French style of contredanse became popular in Vienna. (This was due to the fact that French contredanse music was heavily oriented to the gavotte, whose dance figures effectively required an antecedent-consequent design in the music.) But even after 1770, the period co-existed with other theme types, including the sentence and the hybrid antecedent-continuation. The latter, in fact, was far more congenial to the menuet than was the period, for the reason that the dance emphasized variety of detail, and a theme with antecedent-continuation offers more variety than any other theme type. Indeed, if the composer chooses, every 2-bar unit of this theme can be different: basic idea followed by a contrasting idea, followed by another idea (or fragmentation of a new model), followed by the generic cadence. (Its antipode is the hybrid presentation-consequent, a type so rare in the Vienna School repertoire that Caplin deletes it. It does, however, have a role to play in the Laendler repertoire, which tends to emphasize sameness within strains but contrast between strains.)

As the preceding suggests, once the influence of the French contredanse was established, I wanted to look into earlier dance repertoires. To date, this work has extended as far back as the English country dances in the Playford collections, which confirm the variety of theme types (sentences are surprisingly common, for example) but also highlight the extent to which French court dance practices tended to reduce the number of available theme types.

In the course of all this work, I have also realized that Caplin's catalogue of theme types does not work as well as one would like for some of the subtler idea and phrase length figures common in the social dance repertoire, and my goal over the next few months is to revise (or expand) his taxonomy to account for these, the goal continuing to be to acquire useful style information.

Peter Franck on Canon (Imitation)

Peter Franck, "Canon and Its Effect on Tight-Knit Organization within Classical Themes." Intégral (Eastman School of Music) vol. 26 (2012), 1-45.

A well-written, clearly organized presentation on how canonic passages can be interpreted within theme-sized units. Beethoven and Haydn do figure, but the great majority of the repertoire discussed is by Mozart. Although "canon" is in the title, the author is actually talking about "canon and imitation," as he acknowledges almost immediately (2).

The distinction between tight-knit and loose organization that is central to William Caplin's form theory is in the foreground of the argument, but as canonic passages seem to find a place in all segments of different types of themes (occasionally including entire themes), the article's strength lies not in revealing some particular "effect" of canon but rather in offering a useful style survey.