Sonata Fragments

Andrew Davis

Description

In Sonata Fragments, Andrew Davis argues that the Romantic sonata is firmly rooted, both formally and expressively, in its Classical forebears, using Classical conventions in order to convey a broad constellation of Romantic aesthetic values. This claim runs contrary to conventional theories of the Romantic sonata that place this nineteenth-century musical form squarely outside inherited Classical sonata procedures. Building on Sonata Theory, Davis examines moments of fracture and fragmentation that disrupt the cohesive and linear temporality in piano sonatas by Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann. These disruptions in the sonata form are a narrative technique that signify temporal shifts during which we move from the outer action to the inner thoughts of a musical agent, or we move from the story as it unfolds to a flashback or flash-forward. Through an interpretation of Romantic sonatas as temporally multi-dimensional works in which portions of the music in any given piece can lie inside or outside of what Sonata Theory would define as the sonata-space proper, Davis reads into these ruptures a narrative of expressive features that mark these sonatas as uniquely Romantic.

Introduction: Romantic Musical Discourse, Or, A Rhetoric Of Romantic Music

Part I. Fragmentation and Atemporality
1. Fragmentation: Aesthetics of Nineteenth-Century Romanticism
2. Atemporality in Narrative and Music

Part II. Structural and Rhetorical Strategies in Music with and Without Text
3. Music With Text: Two Slow Movements by Brahms
4. Music Without Text: Forms of Atemporality

Part III. Brahms's Piano Sonatas
5. Treatment of the Medial Caesura
6. Treatment of the S-Space
7. Treatment of the Development and Recapitulation
8. Treatment of the Slow Introduction and Coda

Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Culture musicale
• Histoire de la musique
• Styles
• Genres
• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• Art music
• History of classical music traditions
• Schumann
• Classical
• Frédéric Chopin
• Musique savante
• Robert Schumann
• Johannes Brahms

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 21 août 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253025456
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SONATA FRAGMENTS
MUSICAL MEANING AND INTERPRETATION
Robert S. Hatten, editor
SONATA FRAGMENTS
Romantic Narratives in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms
Andrew Davis
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Andrew Davis
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Davis, Andrew C., 1973- author.
Title: Sonata fragments : romantic narrative in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms / Andrew Davis.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Series: Musical meaning and interpretation
Identifiers: LCCN 2017008807 (print) | LCCN 2017013823 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253025456 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253025333 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253028938 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Sonata-19th century. | Chopin, Fr d ric, 1810-1849-Criticism and interpretation. | Schumann, Robert, 1810-1856-Criticism and interpretation. | Brahms, Johannes, 1833-1897-Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC ML1156 (ebook) | LCC ML1156 .D38 2017 (print) | DDC 786.2/18309-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008807
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
For Corey
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Romantic Musical Discourse, or, a Rhetoric of Romantic Music
Part I. Fragmentation and Atemporality
1 Fragmentation: Aesthetics of Nineteenth-Century Romanticism
2 Atemporality in Narrative and Music
Part II. Structural and Rhetorical Strategies in Music with and without Text
3 Music with Text: Two Slow Movements by Brahms
4 Music without Text: Forms of Atemporality
Part III. Brahms s Piano Sonatas
5 Treatment of the Medial Caesura
6 Treatment of the S-Space
7 Treatment of the Development and Recapitulation
8 Treatment of the Slow Introduction and Coda
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I THANK THE UNIVERSITY of Houston for a Faculty Development Leave in fall 2012, during which I wrote most of the initial draft of the manuscript.
The Moores School of Music and then director David Ashley White consistently provided generous support for travel to professional conferences, domestically and internationally, during my many years on the Moores School s music theory faculty.
Many individuals have contributed to this project in meaningful ways; any omissions here are unintentional, and any shortcomings that remain in the final product are entirely my own. Robert Hatten read and commented extensively and incisively on all aspects of the manuscript. Michael Klein offered invaluable suggestions for focusing my arguments and refining my interpretations. James Hepokoski read portions of the manuscript and generously lent his time critiquing the work via e-mail, telephone, and during a short residency at the University of Houston in spring 2013. And the staff at Indiana University Press was exceptionally professional and a pleasure to work with in every way.
Finally, I extend my deepest gratitude to my wife, Corey Tu. It is hard to overstate the extent to which her brilliant performances of and insights into the music of the Romantic period have informed my own thinking about this repertoire.
SONATA FRAGMENTS
Introduction: Romantic Musical Discourse, or, a Rhetoric of Romantic Music
T HERE IS A moment in the transition of the first movement of Chopin s Piano Sonata in B minor, op. 58 that raises difficult questions. As shown in example 0.1 , the movement opens with what seems to be a structurally unproblematic, if weighty, eight-bar primary theme (P) that ends by tonicizing its own dominant (F minor) in m. 8. The transition (TR) then begins immediately (m. 9), opening with a restatement of the P idea on the subdominant E minor and continuing in a normative fashion. The rhetoric suggests tonal and motivic dissolution-as would be expected in a sonata transition-before we eventually reach a dominant pedal in the bass in m. 14. The pedal is on an F dominant of the original B minor, which appears to signal that this transition is of the nonmodulating variety-one that never leaves the tonic key. None of this is necessarily unusual.
The first sign that this transition may not continue in the most normative fashion-the first sign of trouble, perhaps-appears in m. 17, when the F pedal seems to be abandoned in favor of a rather surprising half-step move downward in the bass, to F, a pitch staged as the dominant of B major. This emergent B major veers immediately, in the very next bar, toward its own relative minor, ultimately aiming at a dominant-seventh chord in that key (g:V7) at the end of m. 18 and, one would assume, a G-minor local tonic triad on the downbeat of m. 19. Thus, obviously, mm. 17-18 introduce a chromatic tonal shift into the TR. But even this move is not necessarily unusual, and there may well be no reason at all for surprise: perhaps this is a sonata transition that appears to be openly rethinking or reconsidering its original (nonmodulating?) tonal course; or, more broadly, perhaps this TR is exceptionally developmental and chromatic-not surprising, after all, in a piece that employs a typically mid-nineteenth-century chromatic harmonic language.
Whatever one chooses to make of the events in mm. 17-18, the movement s rhetoric becomes even more strained and the questions more numerous at the downbeat of m. 19. Here, the dominant seventh from m. 18 b. 4, instead of resolving as expected onto a G-minor triad, crashes onto a jarring, sforzando , fully diminished-seventh chord of the E-G-B -C variety, which in turn gives way to material that initially seems rhythmically fragmentary and then, shortly afterward, appears to become tonally disoriented. Measures 20-21 point toward but never successfully stabilize E (is this a tonic that was foreshadowed by the earlier dominant, B major? And is this E major or minor?); mm. 23-27 point toward a D minor that is equally ambiguous with regard to its large-scale function (should we regard the earlier E as a Neapolitan? And should we regard this D minor as parallel to D major, itself the relative of the movement s home key?); and m. 28 implies a dominant of G minor (is this a return to the tonal implications of mm. 17-18?) that resolves deceptively, in m. 29, onto an E -major triad (is this, finally, a realization of the E implications from a few measures back?).

Example 0.1. Chopin, Piano Sonata in B minor, op. 58, i, mm. 1-45.
At this point, thankfully, the transition (surely we must still be in the sonata s transition?) becomes somewhat more coherent and easier to explain: m. 33 arrives on a dominant pedal in D major (the original nonmodulating transition has become a modulating one), which in turn leads unproblematically to a half cadence in m. 39 (the exposition s medial caesura [MC]) and, finally, in m. 41, to a typically Chopinian secondary theme (S)-a lyrical nocturne in D major.
Exactly what do we make of these events, structurally and expressively? What do we make of the diminished-seventh chord in m. 19 and the music that follows? Is this all part of an exceedingly developmental transition that we should accept as representative, within the expanded tonal-formal language of the mid-nineteenth century? Is it possible that we have no transition at all in this piece, and that instead we have a lengthy, exceptionally developmental P-theme that modulates and cadences (in m. 39 or m. 41), and that as a whole obviates the need for a Classical sonata transition-all in the name of achieving unity and organic growth typical of nineteenth-century musical style and aesthetics? Or is it possible that all these events together manifest Chopin s struggles with how to build a coherent, large-scale form such as a sonata, and that they confirm the long-standing critical notion that he may have been better served by working in the smaller genres-character pieces and other kinds of salon music-in which he had found so much success?
* * *
A similar problem, articulated a bit differently in the surface musical details, emerges in the first movement of Brahms s Piano Sonata in F minor, op. 2. This movement opens as shown in example 0.2 , with another relatively unproblematic, eight-bar P-theme-a typically Brahmsian theme, in that it appears to spin out of itself continuously rather than fit comfortably within a Classically conceived notion of period or sentence rhetoric. P yields at m. 9 to the TR, which opens (as in Chopin s op. 58) by restating the initiatory motive from P, on the tonic F minor. The module then veers almost immediately toward the relative major, A major, with predominant harmony (A:IV) in mm. 11-12 leading normatively to a dominant in m. 13. Measure 13 falls, via a descending arpeggiation through the dominant-seventh chord, toward what one surely must assume is an impending III:HC MC, probably at m. 14 b. 1. But, in a most surprising move, m. 14 appears to reconsider, moving away from the b. 1 dominant via parallel, descending stepwise motion-essentially backing up, it seems, to the subdominant (A:IV, middle of m. 14) before settling on an equivocal C -major triad at the downbeat of m. 15. Should we regard the m. 15 downbeat as a half cadence, and an MC, in the original tonic, F minor? Shoul