Here’s the deal, the total deal:

I am working on more Schoenberg analyses using the Hindemith chrd groups, and creating faux-Schenkerian diagrams of them. Soon, I’ll post an analytic reduction of “Der Kranke Mond” that will make the menfolk weep.  I am trying to make sense of where  I was in the composing of the 4th movement of my dissertation piece. All the time I ended up taking away from both the theoretical and compositional work has done horrible things to my continuity. I also have a commission from a member of the Stambaugh Chorus for a set of pieces setting the Beatitudes, in addition to all the other works in progress.

Damn.  I may need a set schedule for the rest of this year.

Here’s two of the three movements from …while the angels, for tenor and piano. The third, a setting of the final lines of Annabel Lee, will be up soon.

from The Conqueror Worm

from Bridal Ballad

So, this is an analytic reduction of Schoenberg’s Op. 19, No. 2. The first element to be addressed is the nearly omnipresent G-B dyad that begins the piece. It occurs in eight of the movement’s nine measures. This repetition is a sure sign of the significance of thirds in the work’s harmonic structure. The first variance from this dyad expands it out to a III.1 chord (including the melodic F-sharp). The III.1 chords are significant throughout the movement- it begins with two such chords in succession and likewise ends with a pair of them. This group contains but is not limited to diatonic seventh chords lacking tritones: major sevenths, minor sevenths, and the possible-but-rarely-encountered minor-major seventh (that is a minor triad with a major seventh above it). The melodic outlining of an A-flat major triad (interpolating what can be considered a nonharmonic A) sounding beneath the G-B dyad creates the second III.1 chord. Comparing this descent to A-flat in measure 3 to the ascent from A-flat to C in measure 6, the A-C-sharp dyad there could be construed as having a nonharmonic function as well.

Moving on to root motion, it is clear that third-relations are significant here as well. Root motion by third appears regularly; five of fourteen root movements are by thirds. An additional three connections are by whole step, harmonized in parallel major thirds, and outlining a whole-tone scale fragment, which is broken by the half-step descent to C-E prior to the final sonority, again a III.1 chord, on G.

The melodic framework extrapolated here has been ‘normalized’ into a single octave for graphing purposes. Again, in it we see the emphasis on thirds, from D to F-sharp, and then descending (in pitch classes only, the actual register of the pitches is generally the octave above) to D at the end of the movement. Also, there is an internal descent by thirds in measure three, continuing from the anacrustic F-sharp in measure two.

Again, further information as this situation unfolds.