a brief analysis of German Dzhaparidze's Prelude and Fugue in C major (video-score posted by Esteban Colucci on YT)

Esteban Colucci has posted a video of Prelude and Fugue in C major by German Dzhaparidze, this time with a read-along score.  Naturally, Wenatchee The Hatchet, who has had a long-standing habit of discussing preludes and fugues for classical guitar, had to make a few notes.  The internet being what it is, my idea of a brief analysis is 1,607 words.  I am assuming that you not only watched the video link but read through the entire score.  If you haven't done that by the time you read what comes after the link then, well, this blog post wasn't written for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7upUfeTXM8

Prelude             00:00 to 01:31

This is moto perpetuo prelude evokes both J. S. Bach's Prelude Number 1 from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier and, in my oblique way of hearing, Heitor Villa-Lobos' iconic Etude No. 1 from his 12 Studies.

 

Because I am more of a fan of guitar fugues I'm not going to say too much about the prelude.  I like it.  It sounds charming and has a fun vibe.

 

On to the fugue.

Fugue                           01:38 to 04:10

Exposition                     01:38 to 01:58 (measures 39-47)

The subject is stately, and gives off the vibe of an 18th century royal precession. The subject starts at middle C and spans the G below to the E above.  There’s kind of a Mussorgsky Promenade mood to this with a notably narrower melodic range and much squarer rhythms.

 

The subject is answered at the dominant by a higher voice and the third entry has the subject enter on the C below middle C.  This is a good case study for showing how fugues often do not present the voices in strictly ascending or descending order. 

 

As for what kind of fugue this is, it’s what many theory books would call a simple fugue.  There are no countersubjects and there is no convertible counterpoint.  Dzhaparidze freely introduces new material as he fleshes out his three-voiced texture without attempting to create melodic lines that interlock and can be presented in double or triple counterpoint. For an example of a fugue in C major for the guitar that has convertible counterpoint you can go here.

 

So, here’s the breakdown of the exposition.

Subject (C)                   01:38 to 01:43

Answer  (G)                  01:44 to 01:50

Bridge                           01:51 to 01:52

Subject (C)                   01:53 to 01:58

Let’s get to the first episode.

Episode 1                      01:58 to 02:08 (measures 48-53)

Dzhaparidze took a snippet from the second half of the first measure of his subject and creates an undulating episode of the G-A-G rippling riff alternating between the middle and lower voices under a high open E string.  Before long he’s taken us into A minor, which is where he gives us the first middle entry.

 

What’s a middle entry, you ask?  It is when the composer presents the entire subject of the fugue in a new key that didn’t appear in the fugue’s exposition.  The subject may appear in any voice but so long as it runs its full course you can count it as a middle entry.  Because Dzhaparidze has paired presentations of his subject in different registers I will talk about middle entries in an admittedly fuzzy way because entries of a subject don’t always indicate middle entries.  The cascade of subject entries in Bach’s C major fugue from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier come some fast and furious that fugue is often called a stretto fugue.  This fugue has what I would call middle entries but Dzhaparidze layers entries of the subject as he goes through keys.  Now let’s get to the A minor passage.

 

Middle Entries 1 & 2      02:09 to 02:21 (measures 54-59)

A minor (prime, middle) and E minor (prime, upper)

A minor             02:09 to 02:15

E minor             02:15 to 02:21

 

Here we get two middle entries, as it were, with the subject presented in A minor and then, just as it seems to have run its course a new form of the subject appears in an upper voice in the key of E minor. 

 

Dzhaparidze has either cut short the resolution of his first middle entry by abruptly changing keys or, another way to think of it, has introduced a second middle entry in a related key that is elided into the end of his preceding middle entry. This fugue subject is very square, maybe a bit too square.  It’s good that he introduced this gambit in his first pair subject presentations in this middle entry.  He thereby destabilizes both the key and the harmonic rhythm of the fugue by bringing in the second middle entry half a measure too early for where the downbeat of the prevailing meter is, and introducing a new key just as the first middle entry has resolved itself in A minor.

 

Episode 2          02:22 to 02:39 (measures 60-67)

 

To be honest, I don’t think the episodes are particularly mysterious and don’t feel much need to explain the composer’s compositional technique in them.  They’re fun episodes. 

 

What is interesting is where the composer goes next.  He sets up a middle entry in G major but is what he does next really a middle entry?

 

The first voice that appears to have the subject has a form of the subject, but it’s upside down.  Middle entries can be made of inversions of a subject and countersubject  But then we see that Dzhaparidze introduces the subject in a higher voice before the subject in the lower registered (in its inverted form) has finished.  That is a big tell that what we are looking at hear is not a normal middle entry.  When the subject appears across all the voices of a fugal texture and each appearance of the subject appears before the previous statement of the subject has been finished that is what is traditionally called a …

 

Stretto 02:40 to 02:54 (measures 68-73)

Entries 3, 4 & 5

G major (lower, inversion) and G major (upper, prime)

 

This isn't a grand stretto in the "strict" sense because the first entry of the subject, though in the lowermost voice, is presented in a free tonal inversion. The second entrance is in the middle voice and features the subject in G major in its prime form but the subject is revised so that when the third entry, in the uppermost voice, enters, the material is changed.  Actually, Dzhaparidze could have done a canon on this subject.  but just opted not to.

 

This stretto is obscured by the two upper voices being active but it is definitely a stretto.  This is, however, an unusual placement for a stretto.  Traditionally composers tend to put a stretto at the syntactic or structural climax of a fugue.  They do not normally put something as grand  as a stretto right in the middle of a fugue and then move along to some other episode or middle entry.

 

Episode 3          02:54 to 03:08 (measures 75-80)

The tonic of G is destabilized by the introduction of an F natural.  Without further ado, the episode leads not to C, because the composer doesn’t want to “go home” yet.  No, instead we get a somewhat unusual modulation to the key of F major.

 

Middle Entries 5 & 6      03:09 to 03:19 (measures 81-86)

F major (prime, lower) and F major (prime, upper)

 

Like the first middle entry this has a double presentation of the subject in a lower and then an upper voice.  In contrast to the first middle entry that began with the subject in A minor and was followed by the subject in E minor, this is a monotonal middle entry.  What’s happening here is Dzhaparidze is making sure his paired presentation of the subject stabilize rather than destabilize whatever key he is in. 

 

Notice how in this middle entry the music seems stripped down to two voices and when the third appears it’s moving in nice, easy thirds?  That’s because every guitarist knows that F major is a devious key to play in for long stretches of time.

 

On to the next episode. 

 

Episode 4          03:20 to 03:35 (measures 87-92)

This episode moves from F major to what promises to be a half-cadence on A7 that resolves to D minor.  Are we going to get that?  No.  There’s a deceptive resolution to B-flat and before long the episode is wrapped up and we get to the syntactic climax of the fugue, the reappearance of the subject in the tonic key after a whole fugue’s worth of other keys.

 

Something I note in passing, if you’ve read along the score with me you’ll have noticed whole systems in which there are only two voices. That’s an easily overlooked lesson in composing fugues.  As George Oldroyd put it so memorably in The Technique and Spirit of Fugue (though I am freely paraphrasing), it’s rookies who think you have to have very voice in a fugal texture active at all times. 

 

Climax/Coda     03:36 to 04:10 (measures 93 t0 end)

The subject appears in C major in the lowest voice for the first time since the end of the exposition.  A nice touch with the end of the subject is how Dzhaparidze shifts into parallel minor at the very end of the phrase.  I like this fugue but a misgiving I have about the subject is how long that half note is at the end of the subject. It feels too firm, too final, and it's the end of the subject, which means I can understand why Dzhaparidze leaned so much into stretto and eliding subject statements across his middle entries.  At any given middle entry the finality of that half note on the second half of the fourth measure in relentless four-measure phrases would bring closure anywhere you land. 

 

This is a fun fugue and I had meant to do some analytical writing about it for years but the work has never been formally published in score form to my knowledge.  So much thanks to Esteban Colucci for revisiting this recording and sharing the score. 

 

I hope that German Dzhaparidze's 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar gets published.  I have meant to do more analytical work on Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues when the second half of that cycle should get recorded and released. 

POSTSCRIPT

For regular readers (I guess I might still have those), I realize my blogging has become sporadic in the last six years and I don't write as much here as I used to.  This kind of post, and the Matiegka series are technical.  When I roll out an entire public domain score and then include alternate ways of handling musical material in a sonata form or a menuet that's not just analytical work on published music, there's also new composition afoot, showing how there were unexplored possibilities in musical works I really do like.

If I had my druthers the entire Dzhaparidze cycle would have been published by now and I could ell you where to find the score.  We're living in an exciting time for the classical guitar.  There are several cycles of preludes and fugues out there in our time.  Maybe that kind of music isn't your jam but I am excited by the possibilities being explored in contemporary guitar music.  It's one of the reasons I kind of roll my eyes a bit when people talk about the state of classical music as if the plight of the orchestra were the "real" state of the art.

I still have to get to Matiegka's Op. 23, III and I mean to do that but this weekend had a surprise, a good surprise as far as I'm concerned.  So I felt I had to strike while the iron was hot, while inspiration was with me, and because a video with a read-along score is up, I had been wanting to write a blog post like this one for literally years and to finally be able to do so was a treat.  Thanks to Colucci for his YT post and I hope that the analysis may be of some interest to people who read it this weekend (or whenever they happen to read it). 

Stevie Wonder's "Contusion" is the best rondo written in the last fifty years (a brief essay for the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life)

Okay, having done a fairly detailed analysis on Matiegka's Op. 23, II not too long ago, I wanted to really change gears, seeing as we're approaching the 50th anniversary of Stevie Wonder's epic double album Songs in the Key of Life, by discussing my favorite later 20th century rondo.

Not that you really asked me, but if you did ask me “What is the most important rondo composed in the last fifty years?”, I would immediately say Stevie Wonder's "Contusion" from Songs in the Key of Life. 

 

Why?  Because it is a five-part rondo.  For those who don’t already know, a rondo is a musical form in which a refrain alternates with contrasting episodes.  People normally think of this as entailing something like ABACA or ABACADA, but that's not strictly required.  It's possible to obtain the effect of a five-part rondo just alternating a refrain with a single episode, which is exactly how Wonder organized "Contusion"

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xDSTP3uecE

 

Intro:               00:00 to 00:24

Refrain (A)       00:25 to 01:04

Episode (B)      01:05 to 01:34

Refrain (A)       01:35 to 02:14

Episode (B)      02:15 to 02:44

Refrain (A)       02:45 to 03:18

Coda                03:19 to 03:47

 

The song ends on an unresolved half cadential gesture that prepares the entrance of the next track “Sir Duke”, which makes the end of "Contusion" the most spectacular transition in the history of American popular music, as far as I'm concerned.  Now "Sir Duke" was discussed earlier this year by Ethan Hein,  and I couldn't resist suggesting Ellington's "Warm Valley" as a possible inspiration for its chorus.  So "Contusion" is an amazing track within the context of its full album, but I want to mention that more in passing, because this is a piece that is fun to hear entirely on its own terms, too, and I'd like to explain a little of what I have come to love about it over the course of my life. Yet to do that I feel like I need to situate it between two different extremities in basically white rock musical trends. 

 

Across the 1970s you had the emergence of art rock or progressive rock (we’re not going to count jazz fusion here even if many could legitimately argue that “Contusion” is an example of jazz/rock fusion in the manner of Miles Davis or maybe Weather Report).  There was also the reaction movement known as punk.  We can think of the extremes as being exemplified by Yes and The Sex Pistols.  I didn’t warm up to either of those bands. While prog rock generally had so many ideas you couldn’t actually keep track of them all, punk embodied what was, for me, an essentially reactionary and punitive rubric of “authenticity” in which the more raw and simple the music the more “real” it was.  That is nonsense and has never been aesthetically compelling to me.  Both prog rock and punk erred in opposite directions.

 

This would be where “Contusion” has stood as an alternative.  If you’ve heard it you can hear that its surface is quite complex in terms of rhythm and modal mutations.  I will, frankly, leave it to someone like Ethan Hein (if he has time and opportunity) to tackle a more detailed analysis if that’s something he’s game for.  I’m a classical guitarist and hobbyist composer so I don’t have the score for “Contusion” on me, alas.  

But what I can tell you is that the sheer complexity of Stevie Wonder’s surface is balanced by the elegant simplicity of his approach to form.  You get a two-part refrain alternating with a two-part episode.  As each refrain is presented there is more room for improvisation or rocking out.  We’ve heard the refrain enough times that more liberties can be taken in performance without the listener being at a loss for “where” we are in the musical form.  In that sense it’s not at all like a song by Rush such as, oh, “Zanadu”, which you can’t even start mapping out without getting far enough into the alphabet to get to E through G.  Wonder’s rondo, by contrast, is as simply and perfectly put together as a rondo by, say, Haydn (and I am very much a Haydn fan).  Haydn’s complaint about many of his contemporaries was they swamped listeners with so many ideas there were none of them that stuck in the memory long enough for the listener to have any emotional resonance with any of those ideas.

 

I submit that Stevie Wonder has never had that problem.  He avoided the Scylla and Charibdys that were exemplified by prog rock and punk, styles of 1970s rock that strained too far in the direction of complexity and simplicity in the name of "seriousness" and "authenticity" without necessarily achieving either.  Wonder's formal instincts have always been impeccable, so impeccable, in fact, that when we listen to his music we are not likely to do “structural listening” because we’re having fun.  I think I can go out on a limb and say that both Haydn and Stevie Wonder would want you to have the fun first and then come back for a more analytical take on what’s going on in the music later.  

 

So in that sense, too, “Contusion” has been the best rondo written in the last fifty years.

 

Ethan Hein's new post on that one weird chord in "Sir Duke" and my response post, on hearing the chorus of "Sir Duke" as a transformation of the opening chords of "Warm Valley"

Since I did recently ask if Ethan could do a post on "Sir Duke" I am very pleased to read his newest post. Maybe he was planning his post anyway, but this year there should be a ton of discussion of Stevie Wonder's music.  

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2026/that-one-weird-chord-in-sir-duke/

 

Sir Duke” is one of the greatest songs written in the last fifty years, bar none.  Yeah, I’m just putting my cards on the table about this.  Normally I actually hate music that sings the praises of music but Wonder gets away with it because his song is a tribute to Duke Ellington and to the big band jazz greats of the past who inspired him. To put this in staid Romantic terms, when a genius pays tribute to a genius the genius can get away with stuff that other people shouldn't even seriously consider trying. 

 

The chords in the chorus of “Sir Duke” are amazing in their simplicity and in the magnificent weirdness of that F minor 7^th chord. It’s not unheard of to have a tritone pivot in music like this.  I can think of a B minor to F major shift in the first theme of String Quartet No. 7 by Shostakovich, for instance (00:14-00:17).  But B major to F minor 7^th is a lot weirder.

 

I think the introduction sets up the chorus chord in a very simple, easily overlooked way.  The introduction moves from B major to G sharp minor to G natural major to F# major.  Right from the start we have a progression that goes from the tonic to the submediant and immediately flattens the submediant and drops to the dominant.  That chromatic modal borrowing plants a seed that Wonder is going to do whatever chromatic alterations will sound fun, and what sounds fun is chromatic mutation of roots and fifths while leaving thirds and (if applicable) sevenths) alone. We should also not forget those chromatic chains of chords in the pre-chorus.  The key has been so thoroughly destabilized by the time the chorus hits F minor 7 really does sound like the most natural chord to hear despite the fact that it could be read as a minor dominant chord built on a flattened fifth as easily as a sharpened fourth. 

 

Ethan Hein links to a video where Adam Neely discusses a couple of theories as to what is going on in the chorus of “Sir Duke” that is well worth checking out. 

 

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

The shadow chord thesis is interesting. The G#7 isn't how I hear it and I think there's a simpler and far more direct way to argue that Wonder was drawing on Ellington's linear/harmonic nexus of chord formation.

 

Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke" has a chorus with chords that go as follows:

 

B major, F (natural) minor 7th, E major 7th, C# minor 7th, F sharp 7

 

I was looking at those changes and then it hit me, “Hey, wait a minute. I am pretty sure I know which Ellington standard has something like these chord changes in the first three bars.”

 

"Warm Valley" which has

B flat major 7th, E7,      E-flat 7 and so on ...

Now, just do a handful of individually simple things:

1. Kick the key up a half step into B major

2. Remove the major 7th from the first chord

3. Sustain the 7th factor of the E7 but

4. Drop the third into parallel minor (this will yield the F minor 7th chord of "Sir Duke"

5. Retrain the G# and D# and then let the bass and alto of the SATB texture drop by parallel fifths while the S and T factors stay in place. 

 

The oblique motion off-setting parallel motion in interlocked voices is what makes this voice-leading genius on Stevie Wonder's part.  It also manages to evoke a legendary Ellington standard.  Where “Warm Valley” is a famously languid ballad, “Sir Duke” is a buoyant tribute”.  The chordal kernel, if you will, can be heard in common across the two songs. 

 

I think the core of the shadow progression idea makes sense but I think it makes way more sense to just go straight from "Sir Duke" back to Ellington's "Warm Valley".  No "shadow progression" is needed to hear the connection.  We can just make the connection very directly by comparing the two songs. 

 

The “Warm Valley”/”Sir Duke” connection is an intuitive association on my part having listened to Ellington and Wonder for decades.  I didn’t start putting it together, though, until I read Ethan Hein and heard Adam Neely discuss the chord progressions and then it clicked for me that a half-step transposition and a gentle modal mutation showed that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. 

SECONDARY SECTION

Now ever since I slogged through that CT podcast series I've been loathe to mention podcasts.  What Ethan has done with "Sir Duke" is exceptional enough that I'm breaking my rule of not linking to podcasts because you should give him a listen as he walks through the chords that Stevie Wonder "could" have chosen that make more sense based on prescribed theories and why they don't actually work as well as what Wonder did.

https://ethanhein.substack.com/p/you-can-feel-it-all-over

links for the weekend: a chiasm of links from Ethan Hein and Kyle Gann about notation, vernacular music, kleinmeisters and AI-slop

This is a links for the weekend with a dual thread of blogging about music by Ethan Hein in the present and Kyle Gann from the past.

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.