Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Daily Overview |
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Analysis in Romantic Music Session Chair: Michael Weinstein-Reiman, University of Wisconsin–Madison | |
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The Tonnetz Pole and the Imagination of Sleep in Hugo Wolf’s “An den Schlaf” Utrecht University This paper sheds light on a type of neo-Riemannian transformation hitherto largely un(der)explored: the tonnetz pole. Coined by Scott Murphy in an (unpublished) symposium paper in 2001, and which inspired Julian Hook to incorporate it in his table of the twenty-four Riemannian UTTs (2002: 81–2), the tonnetz pole comprises the “longest shortest” concatenation of L, R, and P transformations between two consonant triads (five steps in total). As such, spanning the diameter of the tonnetz in the same way as, for example, a hexatonic pole progression spans the diameter of a hexatonic cycle, it maps out the “remotest relation possible as defined by distance in the tonnetz” (Hook 2022: 315). The tonnetz pole is well-known from the cadential guise of iv–V, but in some rare cases it can also be encountered as the product of an altered cadence or a modulation. The aim of my paper is to explore some of these less familiar tonnetz pole progressions and their hermeneutic scope, in the context of Austro-German musical Romanticism. Following some lateral glances at selected works by Felix Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, I will offer a close reading of Hugo Wolf’s “An den Schlaf”, a song which – strikingly – features two tonnetz pole progressions that are uncommon and which are, for that reason, arguably, charged with a particularly heightened degree of expressivity. The analytical findings I shall present suggest that Wolf’s tonnetz pole practice – linked to the song’s double-tonic design, use of chromatic voice leading and plagal harmony and overt allusions to Wagner’s music dramas, as widely examined in the studies of Deborah Stein (1985: 202–12), Daniel Harrison (1994: 138–53) and Amanda Glauert (1999: 65–71) – fulfils a crucial musico-poetic function. In tracing out how Wolf’s use of the tonnetz pole (i.e. the “maximalized” transformational distance) renders sleep, addressed by the set poem, as a “mediator” between life and death (i.e. the “maximalized” poetic distance), my paper seeks to enhance understandings of both Wolf’s place within the history of nineteenth-century sleep music (see Marjorie Hirsch 2007) and the hermeneutic dimensions of neo-Riemannian transformations (see Richard Cohn 2004). | |