Conference Agenda

Two conceptions of “poetic” instrumental music competed in early nineteenth-century aesthetics. For Ludwig Tieck, poetry inhered in thematic disquisition—music “composing and explicating its own poetry” through instrumental argument. For Hegel, it inhered in melody as a “language of the soul,” an expressive utterance prior to thematic working-out (Dahlhaus 1989, 142–144). This paper argues that certain late Romantic piano pieces reconcile these positions through what I call developmental ternary form: a form that adopts sonata-like developmental logic while retaining the lyric, single-theme conception of salon character pieces.

Developmental ternary form is a variation on William Caplin's small ternary model (Caplin 1998). The exposition (A) presents a single theme that modulates to the dominant, the B section expands Caplin’s contrasting middle into a full development section, and the recapitulation (A’) resolves the exposition's open tonal plan by concluding with a perfect authentic cadence in the tonic. The result parallels sonata form's three action zones—exposition, development, recapitulation—without introducing the secondary theme essential to sonata form proper (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, 23–24). While Caplin notes that sonata developments are "a higher-level analogue to the contrasting middle" (1998, 139), the continuum between these formal functions remains undertheorized. Through form-functional analysis of works including Amy Beach’s Op. 23, Heinrich Schenker’s Op. 4, No. 5, and Sergei Bortkiewicz’s Op. 13, No. 5, I demonstrate their commitment to formal process reflective of nineteenth-century sonata form within the scope of character pieces.

This taxonomy illuminates how Romantic composers mediated between the aesthetic poles Tieck and Hegel represent. Developmental ternary form domesticates sonata's disquisitive logic within the compressed, lyric frame of the character piece, producing a hybrid genre attuned to the processual, narrativized quality of nineteenth-century formal thought. It thus reconciles the "mutually exclusive" impulses Dahlhaus identifies—the "learned" sonata style and "conversational" salon style—exemplifying a broader tendency: the absorption of large-scale formal procedures into intimate genres, yielding works whose artifice remains present but concealed beneath an expressive surface.

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).

Hermeneutic Keys to Deflective Structural Praxis in Schubert's Late Instrumental Music

Many works in Schubert's late instrumental music (1824-1828) contain striking expressive detours and unforeseen courses of structural action. Studies in Schubert's sonata forms by Peter Gülke and James Webster discuss Schubert's distinctive three-key exposition as related to song form, a description underscored by long, lyrical sections closer to Lied than to motivic models of sonata design in Haydn and Beethoven.

Beyond song description as formal pattern, this paper proposes two hermeneutic keys to help uncover Schubert's instrumental praxis. One is the underworld, the Romantic 'topos' of haunting: the oppressive threat in nightmares and dreams which crosses the boundaries of consciousness. This 'topos' takes Erlkönig as case study, as the interpolation of the underworld into the 'overworld' of physical reality, reflecting back Freud's essay 'The Uncanny' as psychological contour onto Schubert's instrumental praxis.

The second hermeneutic key is the juncture. Instead of expected tonal direction in a sonata exposition, at the threshhold to the second subject Schubert either switches track by an enharmonic or shared pitch-hinge, as in the 1^st movement of the B flat piano trio, Op. 99 recreating time past, or uses a semitone displacement, as in the haunted B minor section interpolated into the 1^st movement of the E flat piano trio, Op. 100.

As distinct from the work of Christopher Gibbs, Suzannah Clark and Kristina Maxfeld, Freud's psychological models of trauma, described in 'The Uncanny' and 'The Interpretation of Dreams', help unlock both hermeneutic keys: the underworld and as the juncture between expressive domains. The contours of trauma are transformed into structural praxis – as dislocation, interpolation, and, like Proust's time past, into the recourse to memory. The paper considers how these hermeneutic keys impacted both the tonal landscape and course of structural action in some of Schubert's greatest late instrumental works, from the 'Unfinished' symphony to the C major string quintet.