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DMA Theory Study Guide

Summer 2009

we hope you will find this file to be a useful resource

but please note that it is under construction

and will be revised from time to time

This file is organized into three main sections:

 Introduction (1.1 – 1.9)

 Theory, with suggested readings (2.1 – 2.6)

 Model Readings (3.1 – 3.2)

 Examination (4.1 – 4.3)

We strongly recommend that you use this file as a resource pack to enhance
your study of the Musicology Study Guide, with which all DMA students need to
be familiar.

Introduction

1.1 The concerns of music theory are often to do with what kind of musical
knowledge we can have: how do we know that something about music of a
particular period or style, or about a particular piece of music, is true?
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1.2 For example, consider this sentence, quoted from the DMA Musicology Study
Guide:

The first movement of Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C Major

presents an early instance of a Romantic musical ‘apotheosis’ when
the opening theme—originally for unaccompanied horn—returns in
the coda stated by full orchestra with emphatic accompanying
chords, creating a mood of grandeur and culmination.

Clearly, on the face of it this richly implicative statement captures something of

the historical place of Schubert’s masterpiece. Undoubtedly, thematic
transformation was pioneered compositionally by Schubert—this can be
demonstrated in many of his works compared with those of contemporaneous
composers—and was to become a central compositional preoccupation of later
19th-century composers.

1.3 The music theorist will be inclined to ask questions that test the robustness of
such statements.

Exercise: Before reading on here, you may

wish to examine that model sentence and
ask yourself this question: what underlying
assumptions does it make?

1.4 Every theorist, like any historian, has a point of view. The best thing we can do
about our inevitable prejudices is to be aware of them. It is important to
understand that what follows in this section is, in the end, an expression of
opinion, with which you may not agree. However, our intention is to show that it
is worthwhile, indeed extremely interesting, to interrogate what appears to be
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musical ‘knowledge’. Our initial interrogation of the Schubert sentence may well
begin as follows:

i) What counts as an ‘apotheosis’ and what doesn’t? If Schubert’s theme

had returned ‘stated by full orchestra’, but without any ‘emphatic
accompanying chords’ and presumably therefore with some different sort
of ‘mood’, might this still have been a case of ‘apotheosis’?

From that we can learn that the theorist’s important contribution to musical
understanding will include comparison (with other examples of ‘apotheosis’) and
explanation (here, of the significance of Schubert’s instrumentation).

1.5 The music theorist is also typically interested in accurate musical perception,
and convincing explanations of that perception, carefully expressed. So the next
question might be this, again bearing in mind that this is not to criticize the
Schubert sentence but to learn from it:

ii) Does the music always create this alleged ‘mood’ in every listener at
every performance? If the idea of ‘grandeur’ had simply never occurred to
me, even though I knew the music itself very well indeed, is the
musicologist implying that I have somehow misunderstood what Schubert
wrote?

Clearly that question is also asking about how much information is, as it were,
hard-wired into a piece by its composer, or alternatively how much information is
brought to the music by the listener.

Exercise: Assess whether the Schubert

sentence is reflecting the perception of a
Western art music specialist, or of the
‘ordinary’ listener, or perhaps of both.
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1.6 Also reflecting issues of perception is a question of the following kind:

iii) How do I know about this ‘mood’ of ‘culmination’ until the movement
has finished? The movement could have been much longer, after all: so is
this fact—that the thematic return occurs in what turns out to have been a
‘coda’—what truly creates the ‘mood’; in which case how can it be the
‘return’ itself that is ‘creating’ the mood as we are listening?

You might agree that by this stage of our interrogation we are also beginning to
form strong assumptions about what is often called the musical ‘object’. It
appears to be, rather than an experience in real time, a kind of virtual, complete
object which can be inspected as a whole. This is why theory is often
characterized as, to put it informally, working with the score rather than with the
actual music. Needless to say, it is difficult to say, definitively, what that ‘actual
music’ in fact is—a question that lies more in the field of musical aesthetics.

Exercise: Think of a short piece that you

know well from memory. It might well be a
folksong, or a rock track, not necessarily a
piece of Western art music. Can you analyze
just its second half, usefully, and
realistically? If not, why not?

1.7 Theory puts a premium on the use of language:

iv) Why use the superficially impressive word ‘culmination’, which is hardly
ever used in everyday English, and which Webster’s Dictionary in fact
defines as ‘climax’?—is the musicologist making a point about the overall
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structure of Schubert’s movement and somehow suggesting that the coda

is more significant than other passages in this music?

That may seem to be a detailed and unnecessary criticism of a well-intended

generalization about the Schubert movement. However, music theorists
emphasize the dangers of oversimplification in explaining how we understand
music. It is natural to think that a piece of music may have one special point of
climax, yet when you contemplate a long, complex musical item it seems obvious
that one particular passage is not actually any more ‘important’ than another
passage. Like a movie or stage play, a piece of music may have notable,
memorable events in its ‘plot’, but nevertheless any work of art (or, simply, any
story) exists as a whole.

1.8 You see how, when you think about it, enthusiastic critical verbalizing about
music can simply unwind into empty rhetoric. You will not be able to escape from
or solve the disciplinary tensions between general critique and focused analysis,
but you can learn a great deal from being aware of those tensions, and having the
intellectual freedom to decide how and why you are discussing music in the way
that you do.

1.9 You may think that the theorist’s approach (somewhat exaggerated perhaps
in the above scenario) is unnecessarily introspective, or even an approach that
raises unnecessary difficulties. However, Western art music is extremely
demanding on our musical intuition as well as on our conscious understanding.
Theorists tend to want to concentrate on specific musical substance, rather than
averages, trends, rough comparisons and so on.

Theory, with suggested readings

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2.1 Music theory builds on its commitment to close musical observation, in order
to construct ideas of what is often called musical ‘language’. Music theory has
often overlapped, therefore, with compositional theory, for instance in the field
of counterpoint, ranging from Johann Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum, completed in
1725, and codifying the practices of writing tonal counterpoint, up to stylistic
studies such as H.K. Andrews’ monumental An Introduction to the Technique of
Palestrina, which in 1958 provided a complete set of ‘rules’ based on a
painstaking analysis of the entire works of the supreme master in the Renaissance
period of vocal composition.

2.2 Considerable attention was paid by nineteenth-century theorists to musical

forms, especially sonata form, and it was in that period that music theory became
more speculative, less obviously useful as compositional theory, but more
obviously useful to performers and listeners. In 1885 the Viennese scholar Guido
Adler codified these and similar trends into a division that places theory firmly
within the realm of ‘systematic musicology’:

Adler.pdf

There are likely to be a number of contexts in your comprehensive written

examination where it could be useful to refer to Adler’s ‘map’ of musical
scholarship.

2.3 The scope of music theory is daunting in its extent, and sometimes its
complexity. Something of that scope can be gleaned from examining The
Cambridge History of Western Music Theory. You may browse this book online at:
http://histories.cambridge.org/book?id=chol9780521623711_CHOL9780521623711
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but you need to subscribe to get full text. Every good music library possesses hard
copy of the CHWMT.

2.4 Here, we offer some specific studies that provide a manageable, highly expert
insight into some of the central issues of what is often called ‘theory building’,
from a mass of evidence to focused conclusions.

Charles Smith: ‘Prolongations and Progressions as Musical Syntax’, Music

Theory Special Topics, ed. Richmond Browne (New York: Academic Press,
1981), 139-74. [Introduction to prolongational view of harmony.]

Allen Forte, ‘Foreground Rhythm in Early Twentieth-Century Music’, Models

of Analysis: Early Twentieth-Century Music, ed. Jonathan Dunsby (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993), 132-47. [Simple rhythmic analysis of posttonal music.]

Janet Schmalfeldt, Ch. 1 of Wozzeck: Harmonic Language and Dramatic

Design (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. [Set theory primer.]

Larry Solomon’s theory website provides much valuable information. We

recommend in particular the section on parametric analysis:
http://solomonsmusic.net/paramet.htm

For a systematic online introduction to Schenkerian analysis, the standard

technique for the analysis of tonal ‘masterpieces’, see Tom Pankhurst’s
‘Schenker Guide’:
http://www.schenkerguide.com/

2.5 There is a tendency to divide music theory, concerning recent centuries of

Western art music, into ‘tonal’ and ‘atonal’. Music that is ‘tonal’, or ‘common
practice’, can be said to predominate in the 21st –century repertoire of Western
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art music. You should have learned your way around tonal theory skills, and the
recommended book for review is:

Laitz, Steve and Bartlette, Christopher, Graduate Review of Tonal Theory: A

Recasting of Common-Practice Harmony, Form and Counterpoint (New
York: OUP).
http://www.amazon.com/Graduate-Review-Tonal-Theory-Common-
Practice/dp/0195376986/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243874711&sr=1-3

2.6 Atonal theory ‘skills’ have not been so thoroughly codified. The atonal
repertoire is undoubtedly falling into disuse, but it is important to realize that the
music of virtually every modern composer whose music you encounter is deeply
influenced by what theorists call ‘post-1908’ music—a reference to Schoenberg’s
first completed atonal compositions. One approachable modern theory work in
this area is:

Miguel Roig-Francoli, Understanding Post-tonal Music (Boston: McGraw-

Hill, 2008)
http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Post-Tonal-Music-Miguel-Roig-
Francoli/dp/007293624X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243874822&sr=1-1

A good example of a compelling music theory book about some of the work of an
enduringly popular 20th-century composer is:

Joseph Straus: Stravinsky’s Late Music (Cambridge: CUP, 2001)

http://www.amazon.com/Stravinskys-Cambridge-Studies-Theory-
Analysis/dp/0521602882/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243874946&sr=1-1

Model Readings
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3.1 Whatever you think about that supposed polarization mentioned in 1.4, to get
an informed view it is vital to study some of the best music-analytical literature.
From the vast range of possibilities, we recommend the following excellent
models:

Sheveloff, Joel: ‘Scarlatti’s Duck-Billed Platypus: K. 87’, in Domenico

Scarlatti Adventures: Essays to Commemorate the 250th Anniversary of His
Death, ed. Massimiliano Sala and W. Dean Sutcliffe, Bologna, Ut Orpheus
Editions, 2008, 241- 69.

This is an intense study of a short ‘sonata’, beloved of generations of

keyboard players, including the pianist Vladimir Horowitz
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lmqDOjHx70). In addition to
providing considerable factual information about the various secondary,
manuscript and printed sources, this article attempts to interpret the style
of Scarlatti’s composition, in a jargon-free, deeply probing account.

Schenker, Heinrich: ‘Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony [first part]’, Der Tonwille:

Pamphlets in Witness of the Immutable Laws of Music, ed. William Drabkin
(Oxford: OUP, 2004), 25-33.

Here you can see a reductive ‘graphic’ analysis of the entire movement (p.
28), using no special notational symbols, which provides a kind of map of
the music (advice: follow the analysis listening to the piece), especially
strong in revealing the proportional relationships and the motivic thread
running through 502 bars. Note that Schenker omits the recapitulation,
writing ‘etc.’ and skipping to the coda. In this essay Schenker argues that
there had been an endemic failure to understand the true motivic content
of Beethoven’s movement. Gunther Schuler follows up this point in The
Compleat Conductor (New York: OUP, 1997), explaining how so many
recordings of the 5th symphony have misinterpreted the music, with
detailed critique of three authenticist interpretations in particular.
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Wason, Robert: ‘Signposts on Webern’s Path to Atonality: The Dehmel

Lieder (1906-08)’, Music Theory in Concept and Practice, ed. James Baker et
al. (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 409-32.

Webern’s Dehmel Lieder (only published in the 1960s by his biographer)

provide a missing link between the tonal language of the late 19th century
and the atonal and serial techniques that would characterize most of
Webern’s music that we know. They also illustrate his lyrical approach to
composition, which is not surprising, considering that more than half of his
opus-numbered pieces are vocal, and that he began his career as a
composer of Lieder. In this article, the author argues that certain vertical
sonorities, whose links to late 19th-century harmony are clear, provide a
recurrent and consistent harmonic vocabulary, though now in a much less
tonal environment. He also shows how these “signposts” articulate key
points in the texts and overall form in the pieces, which arguably form a
“cycle” that is certainly deserving of wider recognition and performance.

Jeffrey Perry: ‘Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano:

Performance, Hearing and Analysis’, MTS, 27/1, Spring 2005, 35-66.

3.2 The following essay by William Marvin is a modern, remarkably concise,

memorable guide to analytical writing:
C:\Users\jdunsby\Desktop\Marvin_WritingAnalyticEssays.pdf

Examination
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4.1 In preparing for the comprehensive written examination, we recommend that

you read the Musicology Study Guide, which provides you with one perspective
on Parts I, II and IV. The comments above on a theory-and-analysis approach to
musical study are particularly relevant to Part IV of the comprehensive
examination, and part IIIA mentioned in the following section.

4.2 In Part IIIA you will be required to analyze one piece from a choice of two
pieces, usually one each from the common-practice and the post-tonal
repertoires. Section 3. above is strongly relevant to this examination.

4.3 In Part IIIB you will required to demonstrate your music writing skills.
Typically, you will choose three tasks from tasks such as the following:

 completing two-part species counterpoint against a cantus firmus

 writing a fugal exposition on a given subject

 realizing in music notation a passage of figured bass completing a four-part

passage in chorale style

 continuing an opening from a piece of Classical chamber music

 identifying or commenting on the permutational properties of a twelve

tone row

JMD/v09