Jan Miyake on the distinction between monothematicism and thematic saturation in finales by Haydn

Regular readers probably recall that one of Wenatchee The Hatchet’s favorite composers is Franz Joseph Haydn.  Well, Jan Miyake has a fun little piece onmonothematicism and thematic reuse in Haydn’s fourth movements. 

Matiegka’s use of V/V to V to IV chord progressions in Grand Sonata II (1808) and Sonata progressive Op. 31, No. 3 in G major (1811)

I have spent about ten years studying the solo guitar sonatas of Wenzel Thomas Matiegka (or Václav Tomáš Matějka), maybe longer.  Of course I have the wonderful edition published by Stanley Yates which I would urge any and all would-be students of the composer’s work go out and get.  

 

In the years I have studied his work I have noticed that when people discuss his work in music journalism at all there is agreement on how conventional and conservative his music style was in his time.  Let’s take Ralph P Locke’s appreciative write-up of David Starobin’s final commercial recording as a performing guitarist, Matiegka’s Op. 31 Sonate progressive:

https://artsfuse.org/253911/listening-during-covid-part-10-so-much-amazing-music-to-discover/

…

You can credit Schubert for, inadvertently, keeping the name of Wenzel Thomas Matiegka alive to our own day. Matiegka (1773-1830), born in Bohemia but active primarily in Vienna, was three years younger than Beethoven and twenty-four years younger than Schubert. His compositions are modest and conventional, as of course was true of those of many of Beethoven’s and Schubert’s contemporaries (with the exception of a few, such as Cherubini, Beethoven’s friend Reicha, and Étienne Nicolas Méhul). Schubert, to please his employer at the time, outfitted a Matiegka trio for flute, viola, and guitar (op. 21, entitled Notturno) with an additional part for cello; the resulting version has had a lively existence in performances and on recordings, sometimes misleadingly labeled “Schubert: Guitar Quartet.”

…

There are relatively few attempts to describe Matiegka’s harmonic vocabulary so Locke’s description probably suffices. For those of us who actually know the music Matiegka did some genuinely weird stuff in his development sections and codas of his sonatas.  It’s hard to describe the comic whiplash of his getting through his recapitulation in Op. 31, No. 3 and seeming to nail down his tonic key only to swerve by way of a C sharp major chord in a first ending back to the start of his development section in F sharp minor.  It’s a little easier to describe how he prepares a great big dominant pedal point on E rather than G in Op. 31, No. 1 in C major and begins his recapitulation in A major; it’s only as he traverses the return of his Theme 1 that he modally mutates from A major to A minor and ends up in C major roughly in time for what you might think, at first hearing, is really his now non-modulating transition, his official Theme 1 double-return recapitulation wrecked by having brought the theme back in an obviously wrong key. 

 

But there’s a reason I mention the gap that can seem to exist between what people say about Matiegka (conventional and conservative for his day) and what he actually does that we can observe in his scores.

 

I mention all that because if there was a cardinal rule in classical music harmony that was never to be broken it was this, you never go from the dominant to the subdominant in any key.  If you’re in the key of C major and you have just gotten to your dominant chord (G major) you are never supposed to regress back to F major.  The error goes double, if you will, if you arrived at your dominant chord by way of a secondary dominant.  Any variation of ii-V-I is the apotheosis of “classical” harmony.  This is so given that I could give you a blog post by Ethan Hein wherein he discusses how normative ii-V-I is in conventional classical music harmony and jazz standards). I could cite Dusan Bogdanovic’s elegantly clear Harmony for Classical Guitar would say the same thing, we don’t follow the V with a IV in conventional tonal practice.

 

But the whole point of my current essay is to point out that Matiegka made use of a harmonic trope where he has a secondary dominant go to a dominant which then falls back to the subdominant, either moving back from that subdominant to another dominant or going through what Robert Gjerdingen would call a Prinner.

 

Here.  I’ll show what I mean.   

Matiegka, Grand Sonata II, I. Moderato (00:00 to 01:08)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJo-rUgGCqI

The first V7/V to V to IV progression happens from 0:04 to 0:07; the second happens from 0:42 to 0:49 and the third happens from 0:58 to 1:03.  There are eight systems on page 1 and the first V7/V to V to IV progression happens within the first six measures.  The second and third cases of this harmonic pattern occur in systems 6 and the shift from 7 to 8.

 

So within just the first page of this sonata we have seen and heard Matiegka use a V7/V to V to IV progression at least three times. 

 

Now I realize what music theorists can do.  Someone could say that maybe that D and F# dyad stands in for a B minor triad.  Sure, but ii is a IV substitute as any first year theory student should probably still be learning by now.  That’s still a flamboyant harmonic progression and it’s made all the more regressive because the supertonic triad is not a secondary dominant.  Maybe we could say that the measure that seems to have B minor as the harmony is part of some dominant ninth chord and such a chord isn’t unheard of in 1808, sure.  But it sounds like an obvious and overt V to IV progression.  Even If we try to explain away this harmony as not really a IV chord because the next chord is a dominant we’ve still go the two next examples to consider.  On the whole I’d say there’s no getting around Matiegka using an obvious harmonic regression after his first big half-cadence that he’s prepared with  a secondary

dominant.

 

Okay, so how about the passage in the sixth system?  At this point I’d say we’re in a modulating transition but Matiegka has a penchant for starting his transitions in his new key and finding ways to reinforce it a few times before introducing his new theme.  If you want a discussion of Grand Sonata I I have done that previously.   Here Matiegka begins his transition by seeming to return to his initial idea and then he follows up his big V7/V to V progression with a continuation on E major. 

 

This, it turns out, becomes the new key but he spends nearly two thirds of a page affirming that key before he introduces his Theme 2.  Along the way we’ll see he has a couple of V7/V to V to IV progressions across systems six through eight.  From 0:46 to 0:52 we see him move from F#7 to B to … A major?  No, let’s call it F# minor because of the fact that there are no E’s in the harmony. 

 

Then again, what do we make of what seems like a really obvious Prinner. Matiegka has moving across these systems?  What’s a Prinner?    In Gjerdingen’s Prinner schema the upper voice has scale degrees 6, 5, 4 and 3 while the lower voice runs down 4, 3, 2 and then 1 of the scale.  Famous examples of this schema in popular song show up in Aretha Franklin’s performance of “Natural Woman” and at the end of major sections of “Let it Be” by the Beatles.    

 

Something to keep in mind about Robert Gjerdingen’s work on galant schemas is that they can elapse over a fairly long period of time, even entire phrases.  That means that the kind of melodic/harmonic schema that elapses in mere seconds in a song performed by Franklin or The Beatles could be stretched out across four whole measures in the transitions of a Matiegka guitar sonata.  What is important about the Prinner as a schema is the linear movement and not necessarily every little detail on the second half of the weakest beats of a measure.  If we keep that crucial rhythmic and metrical element in mind then it seems pretty obvious Matiegka follows up his V7/V and V chord progressions with Prinners. 

 

So that he did this seems obvious and as for why … alert listeners would sense the obvious harmonic regressions and so the question of whether or not the composer would “fix” this harmonic bad habit could be a question that runs through the first movement.  On the other hand, it could telegraph that something similarly odd might be coming up in a later movement, ,such as recapitulating half of the first theme of his slow sonata middle movement in the subdominant key but we’re not talking about the entirety of Grand Sonata II in this essay.  I think the most prosaic explanation makes the most sense, he liked the Prinner gesture and it had the great advantage of letting him move from B7 to E down to an open A string.  Why not use that note if it’s right there?  Prinners can create tonal closure within keys, after all, and so a series of Prinners after a strong half cadence, however regressive, will reinforce E major as the new key awaiting an actually new, clearly identifiable theme.  That doesn’t come until later.

 

For this particular essay I am simply making a point that V-IV progressions showed up three times on page 1 of a big guitar sonata.  For all of us who were music theory students who heard that the V never goes to the IV, well, The Mighty Monarch might declare that this bromide turned out to be nothing but lies and also lies.  Clearly a big guitar sonata by one of the most highly regarded guitarist composers in Vienna in the first decade of the 19^th century got away with a few V-IV progressions.  It isn’t even the only sonata in which he used the progression.

 

 

Remember that passage that described Matiegka’s harmonic language as fairly conventional or conservative for its day?  Keep that in mind.  If Matiegka’s musical language was so normal then we have to explain how and why so many V7/V to V to IV progressions showed up in the first first page of this 12-age three movement guitar sonata published by Artaria in 1808.  Didn’t all those engravers and proofreaders know that this was breaking one of the biggest rules in classical harmony?  Was this Bohemian guitarist just going to get away with it?  Obviously he did because here we are two centuries later looking at this sonata and seeing three V to IV shifts before the composer has even gotten to the second theme in his sonata exposition.

 

This brings us to the composer’s self-published Op. 31, Sonate progressive, six little three-movement guitar sonatas in C major, A minor, G major, E minor, D major and B minor.  Sonata No. 3 in G major features still more passages in which V7/V goes to V and is followed up by IV and it’s even more impossible to dispute than the cases we examined in Grand Sonata II. 

 

Unfortunately, Op. 31 No. 3 in G major does not currently exist in a public domain form that’s easily accessible.  I can share a link to a performance of the Matiegka work.

 

Matiegka Sonate progressive Op. 31, No. 3. I. Allegro moderato

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Uhpa99nxTk

 

Hearing is believing but seeing a score is even better.  What I “can” do, because I am myself a guitarist and a hobbyist composer, is dramatically recompose Matiegka’s Op. 31 No. 3 sonata exposition while retaining the basic harmonies and melodic gestures.  Being the ragtime fan that I am I’m just going to reconceive of Matiegka’s cheerful, plucky little sonata as a ragtime idea. 

 

As we heard, and now can see, Matiegka has yet another obvious case of a secondary dominant going to a dominant which is then followed up by a subdominant.  His Theme 1 doesn’t even end on a tonic!  Instead he ends on a half cadence which spins out, after a brief tonic rest, into a rather awkward half-cadence that sets up an arrival at D major.  Given how much of  Haydn fan Matiegka was I would venture to suggest this awkward modulation was probably chosen for comic effect, it’s too fast and too awkward and it would certainly make a listener realize that abrupt and not always “convincing” modulations were going to be a thing in this sonata. 

 

But as this essay is about just Matiegka’s use of the V-IV progression I am not going to rabbit trail into larger intra-movement and inter-movement patterns.  It’s enough to demonstrate that this Bohemian guitarist composer made no less than half a dozen uses of the V7/V to V to IV progression which is what you probably heard in some theory courses is exactly the kind of regressive harmony you’re never supposed to do.  I know I heard it.

But guess what?  Matiegka obviously didn’t care about that and neither did all of the people working at Artaria who published Grand Sonata II back in 1808.

 

Now I know that in blues a V-IV turnaround is a trope, and a trope that works great in Robert Johnson’s “Kind-Hearted Woman Blues”  To invoke Richard Taruskin, I don’t intend to have some race to the patent office claim that Matiegka did the V to IV change back in 1808 whereas Johnson didn’t get around to it until more than a century later because my real point is that guitarists don’t have to much wonder why guitarists would find it easy and pleasing to just drop down two frets and keep the same basic chord shape.  Whether the virtuoso guitarist was Wenzel Matiegka or Robert Johnson they both decided the fun thing to do would be to have the V followed up by a IV because that chord change sounded good to them.

 

I’m saying that it is obvious from Matiegka’s work that even if this progression was not normative within his work (and it really isn’t) he clearly felt at liberty to use it profusely when he liked how it sounded. 

 

Why does this matter?  I have argued that we guitarists should “cross over instead” when it comes to popular music and the reception of the guitar within the classical music world. The guitarist and music publisher Matanya Ophee used to say that the guitar was not treated as a serious instrument among classical music’s mainstream.  We should not, he urged us, have an inferiority complex about the guitar or its music but should show that we have contributions to make.  I agree.  His admonition that guitarists tended to cross over instead of finding mainstream success in classical music has gotten me thinking …

 

If, after so many centuries, no guitar music has made it into the proverbial Western canon then of what use is it for we guitarists to try to make music that will be considered as “serious” as the music of Bach or Beethoven?  I am ambivalent about the advice that guitarists go out and attempt to be taken seriously by other classical musicians.  It would be nice if that could happen but for so long as advocates of classical music keep acting as if their better taste makes them better people I’m going to say “no”.  This was one of the central points Richard Taruskin kept coming back to across his whole career, those of us who genuinely love classical music are not and have never been “better people” for having that love and we should stop acting as if it were the case. 

 

Furthermore, I have discovered after a lifetime of burrowing into the classical guitar literature that when it comes to stuff as rudimentary as whether your V chord goes to a IV chord Robert Johnson and Wenzel Matiegka have something in common that goes into the tips of their fingers.

 

We guitarists would be fools to not consider what that could tell us about the beautiful heritage of our instrument.  It’s not just in the morphology of how we even play, it comes through in music in different styles across two continents over two different centuries, the V chord can go to the IV chord and that’s fine.  Don’t overplay your riff’s welcome, but Matiegka’s sonatas show that even back in 1808 and 1811 nobody really raised a cry that he was breaking some truly inviolable rule.  It’s been true for centuries that if going from V to IV sounds good you do that.  You can ask Wenzel Matiegka that by way of going through his scores. I’ve shown that using V7/V to V to IV was something he did multiple times. 

 

The implications of this seem obvious, a path toward an approach to sonata forms that takes the vocabulary of blues seriously on its own terms is possible and desirable (and has probably already been done but it wouldn't surprise me if theorists have argued about it, if this is so).  If anyone claims that it isn’t possible because you never go from a V to a IV chord in “real” classical music I’ve just disproven that point repeatedly by looking at just two solo guitar sonatas by one Bohemian guitarist composer who was published two centuries ago. It's the simplest thing in the world to have a V-IV turnaround in E minor blues go from the tonic to the subtonic and thereby have a 12-bar blues theme serve as the basis for a continuous variation form that checks off all the structural points of a "textbook" sonata form.  Here is a potential outworking of such an observation, for what it's worth, and if we're looking at strictly monothematic sonata forms a further implication is that development sections can be written in such a way that a seasoned guitarist could create entirely new development sections over an established bass line as if the score were a partimento, jazz chart or figured bass passage. 

We have all the conceptual and theoretical tools we need to create blues sonatas and we have a precedent in the music of composers like Matiegka to see that the V-IV progression could be normative in his musical language which, as we've seen, has been described as conservative and moderately conventional.  Okay, then, if that's the case then all the possibilities for a synthesis of blues and ragtime with 18th century forms is practical.  Akaba is right over there, it's simply a matter of going. 

 

The classical purists and the blues purists, I dare to say it, can both be wrong. Music theorists, historians and journalists understandably find styles and eras they love and advocate for them but the more I study music, listen to it, play it and write it, the more I am struck by how the people who have the most to gain by segregating every genre into firmly delineated boundaries that are allegedly impermeable are the people with textbooks to sell and this is as true of blues and jazz and rock fans as of classical music fans and fans of “serious” music.  We don’t have to be constrained by those people and their lack of imagination.  In order to find out if we have points of contact and boundary-permeable musical phenomena we have to immerse ourselves in music, sometimes that will require us to consider that the bromides and canards of music theorists and historians get disproven by the actual notes on the page.

If I had confined myself to just studying the music most of the classical guitar community considered "worthy" of studying I wouldn't have spent ten years going through Matiegka's guitar sonatas and I would not have discovered how often he used the V7/V to V to IV progression in his work.  It's not a lot of instances, really, but as I've been saying the implications of how that usage could and should make us rethink what has been taught in textbooks about what actually "never" happens or "isn't good practice" should at least come up for some appraisal.  

Ethan Hein has a piece discussing Jeff Buckley's cover of "Lilac Wine" at MusicRadar

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/musicradar-column-on-lilac-wine-by-jeff-buckley/

https://www.musicradar.com/artists/he-sounds-like-an-alien-or-a-being-from-another-dimension-a-music-professor-breaks-down-the-theory-behind-jeff-buckleys-lilac-wine

 

…

As befits Jeff Buckley’s strangeness, Grace is a strange album. It’s nominally “alternative rock”, but Buckley doesn’t sing or write like a typical 90s alt-rocker, and he includes a couple of songs that are conspicuously not rock at all. One is Corpus Christi Carol, a 500-year-old traditional tune arranged by Benjamin Britten. The other is Lilac Wine. It’s only 75 years old, but it sounds even less like alt-rock than Corpus Christi Carol does.

…

I don’t know anyone who is neutral on Jeff Buckley; people either love him or hate him. Goldin-Perschbacher attributes that to the shocking intimacy he creates with the listener: “Buckley’s performance aesthetic could seem, to some, too private for public performance. The relationship between Buckley and his listeners was so intense that it felt metaphorically, if not literally, sexual, in terms of privacy, pleasure, and self-discovery.” 

…

 

It’s funny Ethan mentioned this because I have found that Buckley really is that polarizing. I was introduced to Buckley’s signature album decades ago and I have happily owned it.  My brother couldn’t resist making fun of the lyrics from “Mojo Pin” by saying “White horses run through the fields as we make love, shaking their sassy manes!”  Which is pretty funny!  The song still sounds great to me, though. 

 

There was a lot of rock in the 1990s I frankly hated.  I hated the bulk of the Seattle sound and grunge in particular.  I hated Nirvana’s music back then and I still hate it.  Never cared for Pearl Jam.  I had a kind of grudging respect for Soundgarden but “Black Hole Sun”, though I liked its chord changes, kinda reminded me of the glorious and elliptical final movement of Toru Takamitsu’s “All in Twilight”.   I don’t know why I made the connection but I made it. 

 

But Buckley’s album I enjoyed, and I remember meeting a musician in my Mars Hill years who just flatly said he didn’t like Jeff Buckley (who was named Jeff, if I recall).  The gender presentation topic is kind of interesting and I suppose for folks who wanted to go DIY indie post-punk authenticity everything about Jeff Buckley was so overtly presentational it would fail all the standardized tests of rock-based masculinity … if rock is all you’ve saturated yourself in.

 

But another potential angle to consider is camp.  Raymond Knapp made a couple of points in his book Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism that spring to mind.  The first and most basic point (about Haydn) was that German Idealism became more hegemonic in its influence on music criticism, history and reception and in German Idealism authenticity and profundity were touchstones.  Knapp contended that these ideals in German Idealism were and are so pervasive they saturate the criteria of authenticity in rock and jazz criticism.  By contrast, camp was rejected as a mixture of not being highbrow enough (musical theater) and not being manly enough. 

 

Knapp made a subsidiary point that, owing to the outsized influence of Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” Anglo-American literary criticism has all but ignored the reality of camp as a feature of straight cultural production.  Knapp was specific, Haydn is camp, very camp.  Haydn is always aware that you are in on his joke and he wants you to be in on the joke without necessarily being insincere.  Camp, Knapp contended, has not always been coded as gay but as expectations of gender performance and “seriousness” evolved in the long 19^th century camp was not prized.  By Sontag’s era camp was all but annexed by or ceded to queer theory readings.  Knapp made a somewhat diffuse plea to remind readers of Making Light that straight people made and make camp plenty and that Haydn was one of the most successful purveyors of straight camp in classical music. 

 

Now the thing is, as a lifelong fan of Batman I get there are gay readings of Batman. They are an option within the reception history but obviously not the whole of the reception history of Batman.  More recently Netflix is planning to reboot Rumiko Takahashi’s spectacularly silly and affectionate rom-com send up or the martial arts genre, Ranma ½, and if all you ever read about Takahashi’s work was by, say, Noah Berlatsky, you’d think the only way to interpret her work is as one long tract in favor of LGTBQ advocacy.  Given Berlatsky’s activist commitments regarding the nature and aim of art criticism that’s what he’s into. 

 

That doesn’t change the fact that millions upon millions of the most conventionally straight guys across the entire planet have enjoyed Takahashi’s work without feeling obliged to read her work the way Berlatsky reads it.  One of Takahashi’s more easily overlooked works was a series aimed at male readers ages 18 to 30 --for my time and money Maison Ikkoku is a masterpiece of slice of life comedy manga.  If anything I’d venture to say the reception history of Takahashi’s work in Anglo-American contexts has been so curated by feminist and LGBTQ readings of her work you might be forgiven for wondering how her work got so popular in Asia that American LGBTQ readings were possible since the 1990s in the first place.  As with Batman in American comics so with Ranma Saotome in manga, the prevalence of a robust subcultural reception history is not the same thing as mainstream reception.  Rumiko Takahashi has been one of the unparalleled comedic geniuses in the history of manga and you will probably never have read much of anything about her in The Comics Journal, unless Gary Groth really repented of not liking manga and I haven’t heard of it.  Perhaps the kinds of guys who spell commix that way are the kinds of guys who wouldn’t want to listen to Jeff Buckley because he’s not really rock?

 

Which only roundaboutly gets me back to Buckley and the concept of camp.  I don’t think anyone would suggest Buckley came across as insincere but the problem for the rockist bros would be that there’s so much affectation in Buckley’s performances. Borrowing rubato from classical musical conventions would just be one of those affectations for the rockists that would be unacceptable. 

 

Ethan Hein gets at something that I like about Buckley’s work, his systemic-bordering-on-rpincipled disregard for genre purity.  Old syrupy show tune?  Go for it?  A Leonard Cohen cover?  Sure, do it!  Benjamin Britten?  Right on.  I also happen to love Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal After John Dowland for solo guitar (check out Marcin Dylla’s performance at the provided link, which has a read-along score).

 

I think I get Hein’s point about Buckley’s gender presentation and that is an interesting thing to read about but coming at Buckley’s music as a classical guitarist who spent high school and college years singing choral music I think the thing that jumps out about Buckley that may be part of why people love him or hate him could be as simple as this, Buckley always wore all of his “that’s not rock” influences on his sleeve and lamp-shaded them conspicuously across Grace.  I have contended for years as a blogger that both pop and classical music have tended to be stuck in ruts over the last half century and those ruts are as bad as they are because the purists in all those lanes want to regain purity by “going back to basics” when that’s never been my own understanding of when, why ad how music can be so much fun.  I’m not saying music is fun when it’s “transgressive” because that’s a tedious and stupid rockist trope.  No, I am saying that fun rock and pop paid attention to (and showed real respect for) other genres.  I normally hate music about music but I love “Sir Duke” because Stevie Wonder was paying tribute not to “his” genre of music but “our” genre of music for those of us who love Ellington’s music and the masters of big band.  Buckley was a relatively rare case study, if I may, of someone in the 1990s who was overt in showing how much he was influenced by “not rock” music and for those of us who were sick of rock `n roll versions of “authenticity” Buckley’s music and its success was a signal that the future of music most likely belongs to people who make music that is fun to hear and perform; music that draws on everything rather than “the good stuff”; and which doesn’t pretend that the last century or so of “pop” and “classical” have never positively interacted with each other.

 

So, sure, put me in the “love” category for Jeff Buckley’s music and I hope I have managed to explain a little of why.  Thanks to Ethan Hein for his post.

POSTSCRIPT

9pm

There is an actual third category on Buckley.  A drummer I've been friends with for years regarded Buckley as immensely talented but as someone where it was potential rather than kinetic energy.  The potential for greatness was there but Buckley died too young and too soon to develop further and my drummer buddy's appraisal was that it seemed to him Buckley fans resonated with the potential but, for him, the actual songs and performances were the tip of a never-to-be-realized iceberg, given Buckley's death.  

My brother thought Buckley was immensely talented but he's never warmed up to what he calls the soul-bro balladeer idiom.  Buckley is better than, say, Shawn Mendes or Vance Joy or Jason Mraz or earlier variants like James Taylor and so on but Buckley was the apex of a performance idiom my brother just hasn't warmed up to.  But it's neither love nor hatred it's more, "He was about as good as that genre of male performer I never warmed up to can get, which was really good but not my thing."

That, in the main, Buckley polarizes can still probably be generally true.  But I might venture a guess that since the two "meh" people I know studied music formally there's that extra variable.  

Ethan Hein discusses Thelonious Monk's Bemsha Swing

Happy Thanksgiving. One of the things I'm thankful for this day is for the music of Thelonious Monk and that Ethan Hein discussed another one of Monk's pieces. :)

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/bemsha-swing/

I might have to write more at this spot after holiday festivities but for the time being enjoy Ethan's discussion of this wonderful piece. 

November 24, 2023 4:30pm 

My own approach to this musical gem is, perhaps ironically, to jettison any discussion of harmony except as background for the linear writing.  Yes, we're totally looking at two-thirds of a twelve-bar blues that recursively turns around on itself ad infinitum.  If we don't know about what a twelve-bar blues is supposed to sound like do we even hear the relentless momentum that tacit expectation creates?  I'm going to say probably not.  

For those of us who know "Bemsha Swing" leverages the expectation of a 12-bar blues that is never released this overt manipulation of a conventional expectation is what gives the song its relentless drive.  For people whose musical experience doesn't draw from either jazz or blues they can't hear an expectation subverted that they don't know about to begin with.  Thus music education is immensely valuable for understanding what Monk has done in this song.  

Granting that, I did say I was going to discuss Monk's linear writing.  Because this piece is so short I've taken the liberty of borrowing Ethan Hein's score to highlight the places where Monk uses chains of oblique, contrary and similar motion in the two voices in the score to create compelling counterpoint.  The voice-leading in this song is as solid as granite.  

In "traditional" contrapuntal studies you'll be told that it's dangerous to rely on too much of one kind of motion, especially similar motion, when you're writing out two voices.  It is best to switch things up between oblique, similar and contrary motion.   Since, if I recall correctly, Ethan has discussed the distinctions between these forms of motion I don't want to belabor terms.  Instead I want to highlight Monk's elegant shifting back and forth from oblique to contrary to similar motion within his four-measure phrases and how he uses contrary motion out to multi-octave strong beat arrivals at the start of each of his four-measure phrases on the roots of his core harmonies.

PHRASE 1 (I)

measures 1-4, measure by measure 

oblique motion, contrary motion, similar motion, oblique motion

from measure 4 to 5 contrary motion outward to two-octave interval on tonic

PHRASE 2 (I)

measures 5-8, measure by measure

oblique motion, contrary motion, similar motion, oblique motion

from measure 8 to 9 contrary motion from upper C natural and lower G flat to four-octave interval on subdominant

PHRASE 3 (IV)

measures 9 to 12, measure by measure

oblique, similar, similar, oblique

from measure 12 to 13 contrary motion from upper G natural and lower D flat outward to two-octave interval on C, the tonic

PHRASE 4 (I)

measures 13-16, measure by measure

oblique, contrary, similar/contrary

Of course you shouldn't just take my word for it. I should show you what I mean.  

A point of clarification for how and why I have designated certain measures as having oblique motion is in order. The G naturals on the second half of the fourth beat of each measure of 4/4 are so metrically weak they function as anacruses. In other words, for harmonic/linear considerations we could cut them out altogether and they don't change the overall linear progression of the two voices.  Thus from measures 1 to 2 in Phrase 1 I consider the movement to be oblique.  The C natural stays where it is while the bass voice descends from C down to A natural and reaches A flat by descent at measure 2. If you fixate on that G in the treble clef at the end of measure 1 and try to think of it as a harmony or as a metrically significant tone you'll get thrown off.  Think of it this way, if you literally don't play that G on the last eighth of measure 1 does the harmony change?  No.  Now melodically it's a necessary part of the song. as it reaffirms the rising perfect fourth interval that permeates the melody and is reinforced by the I-IV harmonies.

What makes Monk's linear writing so great is that within each phrase he continuously cycles through varied forms of motion but at each "arrival point", the transition from a measure 4 to a measure 5 or the transition from a measure 8 to a measure 9 he uses contrary motion to hit octaves on the roots of the core harmony of each phrase, the proverbial I and IV in the two-thirds blues turnaround.  Across the phrases he uses a sequence of oblique then contrary then similar the oblique to contrary motion for his tonic phrases.  He uses oblique to similar to oblique motion in his subdominant phrase and uses contrary motion to shift from Phrase 3 to Phrase 4, with Phrase 3 recapitulating the oblique to contrary to similar to contrary sequence of forms of motion.  

The reason you can go with the barest of bare bones harmony of spiral out into more complex options in "Bemsha Swing" is because Monk's linear writing is so immaculate the song is indestructibly great as long as you respect the melody and the bass line as the foundation for whatever it is you want to do.  As Ethan pointed out, there's also the fact that the head tune lends itself so beautifully to imitative procedures.  A melody that can be played against itself with a measure's separation (or two) is, colloquially speaking, the apotheosis of good contrapuntal writing.  Having said that, here's an annotated image of the score to show Monk's linear writing you can find at Ethan Hein's original post. Thanks to Ethan for writing about Monk again.  

Ethan Hein on Stevie Wonder's "Don't You Worry `Bout A Thing" a couple of thoughts on harmonic language and contrapuntal variation in the song

So Ethan Hein has written about another Stevie Wonder song and while I don’t have a lot I am going to write I can’t not write about this masterpiece of a song, seeing as this year is the 50^th anniversary of the release of Innervisions and this song is on that album. First, go read Ethan Hein’s post:
https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/dont-you-worry-bout-a-thing/

Ethan Hein blogs about David Bowie's "Changes" so, of course, I am linking to that. :)

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/ch-ch-ch-ch-changes/

Rovshan Mamedkuliev performs Nikita Koshkin's Guitar Sonata II for solo guitar (complete), and I discuss the sonata

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak3JegZMAGc 

I haven't managed to link to performances of Nikita Koshkin's two big guitar sonatas over the years.  It's time I fixed that.  I've wanted to discuss this sonata for years and now I figure since I have a recording that’s available from Naxos; have the score; and there's a publicly accessible video of the entire performed piece there's no time like the present.  So here we go, a discussion of Sonata II for solo guitar by Nikita Koshkin, which is published by Editions Margaux.

https://www.edition-margaux.com/en/de/sonata-ii

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I. Allegro moderato (00:00 to 07:07) 

II. Adagio - Con moto (07:08 to 13:24) 

III. Allegro (13:26 to 18:09) 

So let's jump into this sonata and if you have the score on you this will go more easily for you.

I. Allegro moderato (sonata form)

The opening theme is a 12-bar blues. It doesn't "look" like a blues and if you're a purist it won't sound like one but it's got the hallmarks of a blues. If you didn't know this already Koshkin made no secret of hearing Led Zeppelin but I'll let you find Gregory Cain Budds' Nikita Koshkin: Insights Into Compositional Process and Style however you can. I discovered it back around 2007 and blogged about it only too briefly. Go grab this book!

https://books.google.com/books/about/Nikita_Koshkin.html?id=A5jFNwAACAAJ

Which is to say, Led Zeppelin is in Koshkin's wheelhouse of listening. So Theme 1 is pretty literally the first 12 bars of the first movement with an appendix phrase from measures 13-15. In a blues this would be the turn-around after the V to I conclusion that prepares for whatever comes next. In this case what comes next is a transition. This is probably painfully obvious to many of my readers but I am saying it anyway, in the early 21st century blues how so saturated global music that you can't even listen to a contemporary guitar sonata for classical guitar written by one of Russia's most prominent guitarist composers and understand what's going on it if you have no familiarity of any kind with blues. There, I said it, now we'll move along to ...

The transition begins at measure 16 (00:44) and ends at measure 27 (01:10). If you're already familiar with Koshkin there's not much to say about this particularly but I suppose I might want to mention that in guitar sonatas there's a long tradition of having transitions that are more active than the themes in terms of rhythm and figuration. Koshkin's transition bursts forth with a super-expanded range of notes and sixteenth note riffs but it slowly and steadily winds down. Someone like Matiegka would have a flashy and buoyant transition that built UP to the arrival of a paradoxically lyric theme (Grand Sonata I, which I've discussed elsewhere back in 2015 and later in 2016 and along the way I had a full score of the first movement of GS I). A more through discussion of that sonata is something I want to do later this year drawing on earlier work. Before I get side-tracked further, the busy transition leading to a lyric second theme is a trope in guitar music and it's not a bad thing. Koshkin has given us a lively 12-bar blues for theme 1 and a spritely transition that winds down to the arrival of Theme 2 at measure 28.

Theme 2 is a lyric, melancholy theme in G minor (basically) played with tremolo from measures 28 through 48 (01:11 to 02:17). The contrast between the compact and aggressive first theme and this lyric second theme could not be starker in terms of mood.  In that sense it's "textbook" but something that textbook explications of thematic contrasts in sonatas can leave out is that the "punctuation" of first and second themes can be different (and should be according to 18th century aesthetics and treatises on form but I'm hoping to save a discussion of Journeys through Galant Expositions for later).

The main thing is that there's something about how Theme 2 is presented that presents a structural contrast to Theme 1.  If we're talking about a monothematic sonata form the distinctions could be simple but they need to be blunt.  Was theme 1 in minor?  Theme 2 can be theme 1 in parallel major.  Was theme 1 on top?  Bring back theme 1 as "theme 2" in a lower voice and change the accompanying figuration.  You can have a stringently single-themed sonata provided you highlight contrasts around that idea.  That's not what Koshkin did here, of course, he had a dramatically contrasting second theme that is melancholy and expansive as a contrast to the brisk blues.  

He also has his second theme in G minor rather than the "usual" F major or A minor or A major.  In "textbook" sonata forms if you start in D minor you would supposedly need to go to one of those three mentioned keys.  But in the 21st century key contrast is not as important.  Angelo Gilardino's late 20th century guitar sonatas don't use key contrasts at all.  Gilardino relied on thematic contrasts in terms of character and phrasing to ... wait ... let me stop myself from going down that path because I'm trying to point out that  one of the reasons Hepokoski and Darcy's Elements works so well is that even if they developed the idea to explain 18th century sonatas you can draw on those ideas to discuss even 21st century sonatas.  If the rhetoric and structure of thematic progressions is retained (i.e. Theme 1, Theme 2, Theme 3 then Theme 1, Theme 2 and Theme 3 and Theme 1 ... ) then the memory of your listener is primed to hear the "rotation" of the order of the themes regardless of whether the tonal or pitch zones fit "textbook" sonata forms.  Mnemonic devices such as "rotation" can work whether or not you obey "the rules" that were post hoc formulated by 19th century theorists.  

So we've got this established.  First theme (D minor) is a blues with a spunky transition that steadily and progressively winds down to allow for the arrival of a lyric, somber G minor theme with tremolo to bring out the long sustained notes of the melody).  A second transition goes from measures 49 to 51 (02:17 to 02:28).  This transition is a burst of ideas from the first transition that briefly seems to threaten that we're going to go into a development.  Nope, this is a feint, and it leads to Theme 3 at measure 52. 

Theme 3 goes from measures 52 to the first half of measure 59.  This is a chorale in G minor and it's a three-phrase theme built on, this might surprise you, one of the barest bones tropes in all of guitar music, the Andalusian cadence.  It's G, F, E flat and D in the bass, followed by D, C, B flat and A, which is followed by a reprise of the former lick.  The gentle but bleak melody up drops down to D natural to outline a triad that lands on the fifth of G minor just when the bass and harmony hit E flat, which creates a penultimate harmony in the phrase of E flat major seventh, but if you have ears to hear, there's no denying this is an Andalusian cadence-based Theme 3.  It's also short.  By 03:00 in (second half of measure 59, roughly) Koshkin is subjecting Theme 3 to ornamental development that reaches a firm cadence in G minor at measure 68 (03:27). I've mentioned this as something that happened in Beethoven's Op. 111 piano sonata, but some composers shift the weight of thematic development to zones outside the development.  Koshkin doesn't have a particularly big development section in this opening sonata form but he doesn't need one because he's put developing variations on his three themes inside the exposition and recapitulation zones.

So a development here can be proportionally small (and not explicitly marked out in the score by a double bar-line signal since Koshkin favors what Hepokoski might call a "continuous" exposition that has no real "medial caesura".  The development, as I see it and hear it, is a tiny stretch from measures 68-85!  There are hints and allusions to Theme 1 and scraps of Theme 3 but the development here is kind of a big build up passage that gets us back to Theme 1 and is not the kind of development that theory teachers in undergrad courses would ever pick as an example of "this is how you do it".  But there it is.

The recapitulation of Theme 1 runs from measures 86 to 98 (04:19 to 04:49) and Koshkin's opening blues theme has returned.  Only this time it's not even blues.  Koshkin has dramatically revised Theme 1 and develops it in new ways within the recapitulation zone.  The simplicity of the 12-bar blues realization of the idea is thrown aside and Koshkin develops a call and response contrapuntal variation on his material.  There is also no "retransition". Remember how I mentioned there was a "turn-around" in Theme 1 in the exposition?  Here there is no transition and Theme 1 is recomposed so that it resolves seamlessly into the return of Theme 2, which shows up at measure 99 and is now in D minor (04:51).

Theme 2 runs from measures 99 to 117 (04:51 to 05:50) and leads into the return of Theme 3 which is now in D minor.  Theme 3 runs from measures 118 to 124 (05:51 to 06:18) in the recapitulation.  Given that in its expositional form Theme 3 was such a skeletal Andalusian cadential peroration, and so short, you might wonder what Koshkin would do with it now? Will he present it as starkly as he did in the exposition?  No, he has a little surprise here, which is that as each phrase of Theme 3 ends there are commentaries in an inner voice evoking riffs from Theme 1.  Here, too, he's continuously recomposing and extending his material in the recapitulation rather than having done much with it in the development section.  I hope by now you have seen and heard why I have made a point of comparing how Koshkin plays with his material in his opening sonata form with how Beethoven played with his material in his last piano sonata, both composers shifting the weight of developmental processes into the expositional and recapitulational regions of their sonata forms and away from what would be the "expected" development section in the middle. 

Measures 125 to 134 (06:19 to 07:07) brings back the pulsing block chord motif from the development section as a kind of "theme 4" that rounds things off.  Hepokoski and Darcy might call this a big double rotation sonata form that hews to Type 3 structuring, at the risk of laying out contemporary formal analytical theories.  In Elements of Sonata Theory Hepokoski and Darcy explain that what a rotation is is a sequence of themes that are presented in a specific order.  Themes 1, 2 and 3 are presented in sequence.  If themes 1 through 3 are presented sequentially in a development section or two of the three themes, that can count as another "rotation", more or less.  If Themes 1 through 3 come back in the recapitulation zone, however much changed, that counts as a second rotation.  If themes 2 and 3 come back but not Theme 1 (here I'm thinking specifically of Simon Molitor's Op.7 guitar sonata) then the rotation is incomplete and this is where and why Hepokoski and Darcy call something a Type 2 sonata that doesn't have a recapitulation because it doesn't have the proverbial "double return".  Koshkin's sonata form, however, does have a double return. 

Not all sonata forms have it but many of them do. I want to digress into Yoel Greenberg's How Sonata Forms here but I'm trying to resist the temptation to rabbit trail into a bunch of books I've read or been reading.  Still, Greenberg's book is new and a big part of his "bottom up" approach to analyzing forms involves pointing out three different elements that can show up in sonatas and how not all of them show up across all examples.  We should not expect every sonata form to have a "double return",  whether because Theme 1 doesn't come back at all or because it comes back in a strange way.  I'm going to keep on this rabbit trail by reference to my past writing on these kinds of things.  

A warped "double return" is when Theme 1 doesn't come back in the key in which it first appeared.  Theme 1 may come back in a recapitulation but come back in an ostentatiously wrong key.  Wenzel Matiegka did this in his funny Op. 31 No. 1 sonata in C major by having Theme 1 start in C major in the exposition but it shows up in A major in the recapitulation and modally mutates into A minor before finally only recapitulating "properly" in C major in the second half of theme 1.  The absence of a "double return" doesn't mean there has been no recapitulation and this is where I simply differ with Hepokoski and Darcy.  But where I find their theory useful, I use it, and the idea of double rotation to describe what has happened in the first movement of Koshkin's Guitar Sonata No. II is useful indeed!

Something I want to point out about the nature of Themes 1, 2 and 3 in Koshkin's opening sonata movement is that Themes 1 and 3 are very simple and compact while Theme 2 is large and comparatively diffuse.  Because the differentiation between and across themes is very clear the exposition and recapitulation are memorable and effective.  What's interesting about the recapitulation is how little transitional materials there are.  Koshkin writes in a way where there isn't a strong demarcation between formal units in terms of transitions and, arguably, there are no retransitions as much as there are eliding cadential points of prior themes into the start of new themes.  The winding down of Theme 1 becomes the start of Theme 2 and so on.  

So that was our discussion of movement 1.

II. Adagio - Con moto

Theme 1a  (07:08 to 08:26) A minor  [refrain]
Theme 2    (08:27 to 09:10) C major [episode]
Theme 1b  (09:11 to 10:00) A minor  [refrain]
Theme 3    (10:01 to 11:28) E minor  [episode]
Theme 1c  (11:29 to 13:24) A minor  [refrain/coda]

Having written thousands of words about the first movement I don’t want to overwhelm a reader with too much about the second movement.  This slow movement can be thought of as … a five-part rondo?  Did I really just write that?  The music “can” be heard as a giant ternary form with an A minor, C major, A minor section and there’s a new theme that shows up in E minor before a truncated/revised opening theme comes back … but savvy readers will point out that  if the thematic groups are A minor, C major, A minor, E minor and A minor and each section is identifiable in its own right why don’t we just call it a five-part rondo that happens to be a slow middle movement instead of a lively finale?  Yeah, let’s do that.  For people who are used to the notion that a five-part rondo is a closing movement having the central slow movement of a sonata be a rondo is a pretty big subversion of expectations.  We might expect an aria (ABA) or a set of variations and there are slow sonata forms but we get none of those.  I highlight this because it’s such an unusual move on Koshkin’s part and because if you listen to it, and particularly if read through the movement with score in hand I think you’ll understand why I’ve decided to describe this movement as simply as I have and in the way I have.  It’s a fun slow movement but if you’re reading about a sonata online I can’t really be expected to convey what the emotional content of a guitar sonata is to you and I am not given to purple prose that tries to invoke all kinds of extra-musical or non-musical ideas to impress upon you the grandeur or solemnity or melancholy or this or that of a guitar sonata I like.  I’m not Hoffmann and the world doesn’t need another one of those anyway.

III. Allegro

This finale is simultaneously menacing and violent yet also very funny.  I think that Shostakovichian ambivalence might be hard for some listeners to relate to because they may perceive the menace and the violence but not the humor. 

This is an abstruse take on the finale but I have looked through the score a few times and suggest we hear it as a kind of variation form with different forms of a single theme.  I'd call it a double variation movement but the tricky part is that the choppy theme and the lyric theme are audibly derived from the same core materials.  It might be easiest to say the double variation element comes from having an initial version of the theme calling back to theme 1 from the sonata and the secondary variation invoking elements of theme 3 from the sonata.  I've got the score in front of me and perhaps you don't.  Don't feel like you have to take me word for it.  It's just that since so far as I know no one in the English-speaking and English-writing world has attempted to write this much about Koshkin's second sonata I'm kind of winging it this weekend.  

The opening theme from measures 1 through 12.  Between 13:26 and 13:45 we get a staccato reprise of the initial blues theme but there are two things off about it.  The first is that each phrase begins with a single measure burst of chromatic passage work followed by a measure and a half of silence before there is a pizzicato, quiet response to the initial burst.  This happens on i and iv in D minor before presenting a V version of the sequence that resolves to i.  It's a theme that simultaneously lurches forward yet kills its own momentum with large pauses followed by quiet answers to large, loud single-measure calls.  

Where the turn-around phrase was in theme 1 in the first movement there's a chromatic run-up to a new theme at measure 13 that starts at 13:45. This, too, can be heard as a a variant of the opening blues theme that has room for singing, sustained tones--measures 13 to 22.  The end of this theme elides with the return of the opening material, which comes back at measure 23 (14:07).  Now what was the opening gesture becomes a closing gesture as well as a push toward a new point of arrival.  Think of the self-interrupting theme as now having the role of both theme and transition and we zip along to a firm arrival at A minor in measure 34 (14:23).  This long-notes melody floats about violent figuration with rhythmic echoes of the third theme "chorale" from the first movement before landing squarely on the primary theme the finale keeps coming back to at measure 41 (14:38).

I'm going to skip ahead to measure 66 (15:22). Here the dotted rhythm marching theme comes back and now has the opening chromatic serpentine runs going up and down in an inner voice as the melody floats above a low pulsing D pedal tone.  The dramatic effect in play here is whether we'll finally get a melody that is allowed to run its course without being interrupted or commented upon by the chromatic riffs that permeate the finale.  

At measure 84 (18:38) Koshkin gives us thematic material that relies on the pulse of eighth notes.  The sixteenth note runs have dropped out. From measure 84 to 110 there's not a sixteenth note to be heard.  There's a steady dominant pedal point nested in an inner voice through this whole passage as a new kind of chorale with antiphonal response theme emerges that we hear from 18:38 to 

Well, okay there's a subdominant pedal at measure 102 (16:39).  This is a deceptive cadence to B flat with an added sixth and an upper voice augmented fourth (B flat, F natural, G and E natural).  The G pulses away as contrapuntal call and response passage works builds up to an explosive D minor chord at measure 110 (16:56).  Here we finally get the chromatic blues riff back but it's in eighth notes rather than sixteenth notes.  This is the big finale variation, the Great Gate of Kiev, if you will from Pictures at an Exhibition.  And so this variation goes from measure 110 to measure 120 where, at measure 121 after, we're back to the earlier opening form of the theme.  This is the reprise of the head tune if this were a jazz piece.  The finale ends with a burst of D's on three strings that are followed, once again, by a quiet pizzicato answer of the same material.  That contrast between explosive open strings and pizzicato responses has guided the finale from start to finish.  Koshkin has given us a finale that continuously calls back to thematic elements in a variation finale that first appeared as ideas in the opening sonata form.  He does it in such an abstract way that if you don't have the score in front of you you won't like catch this, or you'll hear it if you have trained yourself to hear these kinds of cyclical call backs.  Mileage may vary. 

So, I hope you've enjoyed listening to Nikita Koshkin's Sonata II for solo guitar.  I've wanted to write about this sonata for years but life and events didn't lend opportunities earlier and it slipped my mind.  I hope to have finally done some justice to Koshkin's second guitar sonata.  Later I hope to tackle writing about the first one but for now the second has gotten a discussion.  

Regular readers will know it's been a few years since I wrote about Koshkin's music and last time I did was a pretty serious marathon of going through the first half of 24 Preludes and Fugues.

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2020/03/scgs-newsletter-has-review-of-cds-by.html

I look forward to the second half being recorded and writing about that as opportunity should arise.