Conference Agenda

Anton Bruckner’s symphonic style is nothing if not distinctive—on this, his partisans and detractors have always agreed. However, the sheer idiosyncrasy of Bruckner’s music, coupled with the deep obscurity of many of his successors, has made determining his impact an open question. Thankfully, with the benefit of modern recordings and a greater willingness among today’s scholars to examine marginal(ized) figures and side-streams of the repertoire, a clearer picture of Bruckner’s influence can be resolved.

This presentation considers Bruckner’s shadow from a strictly formal perspective, evaluating whether his distinctive methods of organizing large-scale musical sections transferred to other symphonists. The motivating question here is larger than any one single composer’s influence: is form, in all its potential for idiosyncrasy, a heritable musical parameter when it comes to compositional “genetic” lineages? In this particular case, results suggest that those Brucknerian formal quirks were infrequently adopted—even among his most blatant of imitators—and virtually never applied without substantial modification.

Two “generations” of Bruckner-offspring are examined in turn. First, a moderately-sized Bruckno-corpus of sorts is introduced, comprising over forty composers writing in a “Post-Brucknerian” idiom, one in which an adherence to sonata-allegro form and functional tonality is still enforced. These works are inspected for the presence of six sonata-formal idiosyncrasies identified or inspired by Darcy (1997) and Korstvedt (2004). Out of this survey are found movements with all the rhetorical hallmarks but none of the formal devices of a Bruckner symphony (Glass III); all the formal devices but none of the rhetorical ones (Foerster IV); and both formal and rhetorical devices (Wetz II)—a rare few of which are themselves strikingly original in their formal conception (Wellesz II, Senfter IV, Tyberg III, Klenau I).

The second part of this presentation considers “Neo-Brucknerian” forms, those filtered through modernist and avant-garde techniques, often resulting in a more deconstructive, quotational, or transfigured take on the Brucknerian model. Here, an extended case-study is devoted to the first movement of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Third Symphony (1960)—an extraordinary synthesis of Bruckner’s rhetorical and formal devices, amazingly based on rigorously dodecaphonic pitch-organization.

Recent decades have seen a rising interest in tonal expansions and formal ambiguities in sonata-form expositions. Special attention has been given to three-key expositions, where tonal and rhetorical features often collide in post-TR zones and deviate from the norms of two-part expositions (Hunt, 2014; Grant, 2022). Generally, studies examine cases that proceed from the home key via a second tonal center to the final key. This paper addresses rare examples where, after the S-zone has been sufficiently established, a non-transitional action space articulates a new tonal area – only to eventually return to the SK. These outliers differ from situations of MC declined or TMB (Hepokoski and Darcy, 2006) or Modulating ST (Caplin, 2013); rather, I suggest they represent hierarchically lower-level tonal centers existing within an overarching two-key division.

Several analytical concepts are suggested to provide a more flexible form-function model. I apply the term “Interrupted SK Expositions” (ISK) to describe instances that include an expanded SK digression, and “Retracted Tonal Areas” (RTA) to describe the digressive action space. Most often, the RTA is divided into a thematic zone and a transitory passage leading back to the SK. Given that such transitory passages are not always characterized by energy gain, and also reassert the SK rather than modulate to a new key, I label them “S-RT” (SK retransition) instead of TR2 (a concept more appropriate for linear three-key expositions). In this paper, I discuss three subtypes of RTAs: those that include a PAC (“Cadenced TA”), those not including tonal confirmation (“Non-Cadenced TA”), and those comprising more than one local center (“Consecutive TAs”).

Many studies have focused on Schubert’s music as well as later canonic composers to illustrate related circular progressions and retrospective form functions, or what Schmalfeldt (2011) terms “the process of becoming”. In this article, I contextualize Schubert’s modifications of sonata form by looking at sonata expositions by less frequently analyzed contemporaries of his. The case studies include opening movements of piano sonatas and chamber works from the first third of the nineteenth century, composed by Dussek, Reicha, Burgmüller, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, Berwald, Onslow, Potter, and Schubert.

This study will examine various instances of a technique I call the “Augmented 6^th Medial Caesura,” in which an augmented 6^th chord immediately precedes the Subordinate Theme in a sonata exposition, rather than the expected dominant harmony. It will explore this form-defining gesture in 19^th-century works by composers such as Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, and Dvorak, and consider its harmonic and tonal contexts, arguing that it blurs the boundary between transition and subordinate theme because of the harmonic progression that bridges the TR/ST border, rather than precedes it. This use of the Augmented 6^th chord as a form-defining feature at this point in sonata expositions has only been referenced fleetingly in previous discussions of Tchaikovsky and Bruckner.

A well-known example of the augmented 6^th MC occurs in the exposition of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet; the A7 dominant harmony that concludes the transition is enharmonically re-interpreted as a “German” augmented 6^th chord in Db major when it resolves directly to a dominant 6-4 chord as the iconic love theme enters. This direct motion to the dominant means that unlike in Classical MC’s, in which the medial caesura and its associated dominant harmony are separate from the subordinate key, the Augmented 6th harmony initiates an auxiliary cadence in the subordinate key and is thus connected to it both texturally and harmonically. There are also several examples where the augmented 6^th interval resolves to the tonic scale degree and a root-position tonic harmony. In this case, the chord is spelled not with the usual scale degrees (♭)6 and ♯4, but with (♭)2 and 7. As Harrison (1995) discussed, this type of augmented 6^th chord takes on a dominant, rather than pre-dominant, harmonic function, so these MC’s simultaneously provide harmonic closure and formal/thematic initiation. In some cases, the augmented 6^th chord is “inverted”, with the bass on a scale degree other than the expected (♭)6 or (♭)2. Rarer still are examples where the augmented 6^th chord resolves to dominant then tonic before the Subordinate theme, meaning the medial caesura (or its effect) occurs after the tonic harmony rather than after the augmented 6^th harmony.

Despite the enormous body of research inspired by the new Formenlehre, sonata form in the violin concerto remains largely unexplored. Form theory also remains focused on canonical, Austro-German repertoire, and the question of how concepts derived from late eighteenth-century practice need to adapt to nineteenth-century evolutions remains a topic of debate. A corpus study of first-movement form in the nineteenth-century violin concerto, encompassing works from Viotti to Elgar, addresses these imbalances. The focus is on recapitulatory compression, which in some geographic subcategories is as prevalent as the presumably more normative tonic return of P and S. Composers explore multiple alternatives: bypassing recapitulation of either one or the other of these zones, merging them, or recapitulating neither in a truncated form that flows into the slow movement. These practices raise typological questions, unsettling the tendency to treat the Mozartian type 3 version of the type 5 form as the analytical yardstick for both the classical and Romantic concerto, and exposing the pitfalls of over-reliance on canonical Austro-German repertoire.

Two non-canonical case studies demonstrate the corpus’s relevance to interpretation of individual works and highlight related practices across its chronological span. The first explores Viotti’s recapitulations, including: their avoidance of S in type 3 contexts; embedding of P material within S in type 2 contexts; incorporating S or S-like material within the C display episode; and S truncation notwithstanding its normative location. The second compares the type 2 organization of Saint-Saëns’s Third Concerto and Morceau de Concert with the possibility of either type 2 or recapitulatory reversal in his First Concerto, with the combination, in the corpus, of numerous type 2s and scarcely any reversed recapitulations tenuously sustaining a type 2 interpretation.