Schematic Unfolding, Register, and Line:
Part 2 of Tonal frames in eighteenth and nineteenth century European and American music

File created 27 July 2008; updated 28 February 2010.


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Registral motif in Schubert waltzes

ESSAY: SCHUBERT, D366n1: LINES, REGISTER, SCHEMATA.

I am again using the first waltz from D366 as the example: the entire score is reproduced at the right. At the outset, given a "blank slate" mode of listening, one recognizes the stability of the tonic triad foundation and chord-tone E5 and might assume, therefore, that everything after bar 1 will "relax" from it (following GTTM's tension-relaxation model, which is shown by right and left branching, respectively). In the upper part of the figure below, the left-leaning direction of the first line acknowledges its stability, which the right-branching hypothetical repetitions from it contradict only in the minimal sense of "coda-like" continuation. This version is not offered as a serious option for listening -- by negative example, it shows how much a typical listener brings to the experience and how quickly that information is deployed. The lower part of the figure illustrates this point: by the end of the first bar, a listener will have recognized the style topic or genre of the waltz and will have constructed a simple pitch-time schema for a tonal composition. (I use a very similar figure to model a dancer's cognition in "Description and Interpretation: Fred Lerdahl's Tonal Pitch Space and Linear Analysis," Music Analysis 25/1-2 (2006): 220.)

If Lerdahl says that "schemata are fluid," it should also be observed that they are fragile as well (which is a way of saying that they are heavily dependent on detail). It is clear that the opening E5 is the head of each time span (or group) to which it belongs, but the relationship to C#6 is not as simple as the first part of the figure below suggests. The higher register favors the C#, and, although the off-beat position of the C# counts against it, in reduction the displaced C# would take its position on beat 2. We could also appeal to a style trait: a tendency in the laendler to put some emphasis on the second beat. In other words, there is a surprising balance between E5 and C#6, and it would take only a different second bar to change the analysis (see the right side of the figure with a hypothetical bar 2 that reinforces the register of the C# by a linear connection). Improvisation and variation (both of them central elements in Schubert's waltz practice) are artistic realizations of (or plays on) the fluidity of schematic listening.

The laendler's second beat emphasis is a persistent motif in the first strain, and its effect on register is followed through in the figure below. The cadence (bars 7-8) abruptly breaks the pattern, but that is hardly uncommon in the early waltz repertoire: indeed, one can argue that the very break with "organic" development of a motif aids the cadence's distinctive formal role (not to mention alerting the floor to a potential end to the dance). On the other hand, since the melodic figure that Schubert uses is not one of the simplest laendler formulas, we might say that he simply picks "motif b" out of the first bar and exploits that in the cadence -- in the second figure below, the registral motif is shown as persisting through bar 6 and the "linear motif" as leap-frogging to the cadence.

Finally, then, Schubert might well have decided to follow through on the dominant registral motif by using a waltz cadence cliché of scale degree ^6 as a ninth over the dominant rising to ^7 rather than falling to ^5, as at the right side of the figure below. As the opening sequence made clear -- and as we expect from the waltz repertoire's strong requirement for two-bar groupings -- the registral motif of bar 1 is expanded to the pairing of bars 1-2, then repeated in 3-4 a step lower; it should be repeated again at a lower level in bars 5-6 but bar 6 stretches the pattern (E5, not D5 as the sequence would require, then E6) and opens the way to mapping the registral motif across the entire strain, with bars 1-6 as the "lower element" and the hypothetical cadence below as the "upper element," as the figure shows. (This is the sort of mapping that Schenkerians call "hidden repetition.") I have gathered several similar examples here: Registral motif in Schubert waltzes.

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Proto-backgrounds expand on the idea of integrating register in linear analysis: Summary of Proto-Backgrounds.

Go to a set of tables listing compositions with rising cadence gestures: Compiled list
Sets of examples of pieces with rising cadence gestures (these were read with Schenkerian linear analysis):

All original material copyright David Neumeyer 2008-2010.

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