From Musical Work to Model of Musical Structure: The Chorale in American Music Theory

Abstract

This dissertation critically examines the chorale in American music theory. Part I examines the present day and Part II is historical. I first outline a theoretical polarity between musical works and music-theoretical objects, illustrating this through editorial decisions in musical scores of a four-part chorale harmonization by Johann Sebastian Bach (Chapter 2). I then present the results of a survey of American theorists and follow-up interviews. I show the field’s wide use of chorales, particularly Bach’s settings in early undergraduate instruction, and that theorists consider these pieces illustrative of fundamental harmony and voice-leading principles (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 undertakes a corpus study of undergraduate music theory textbooks, showing that four-part chorale harmonizations by Bach constitute a substantial proportion of musical examples, and that authors’ idiosyncratic visual and aural presentation of these pieces, already examined in Chapter 2, casts them as music-theoretical objects. I also describe the conceptual haze linking these pieces with four-part vocal writing and the mediating role of “chorale style,” at once a musical texture, a notation for illustrating harmony and voice-leading principles, and a target texture for reductions of musical works; through this resemblance, Bach’s four-part chorale settings become images of musical structure. In Part II, I examine the origins of these practices and beliefs surrounding Bach’s chorale settings. Chapter 5 shows how not only the unusual notation in present-day practice in fact derives from the first edition, but also the approach of casting them as music-theoretical objects. I also show how Johann Philipp Kirnberger, despite his chorale-centric approach, his amenable conception of musical structure, and his belief in Bach’s settings as models of musical structure, declines Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s call to employ them as such in his own curriculum. Chapter 6 studies a similar absence in Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s otherwise chorale-intensive compositional instruction and a return by his teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter to conceiving of Bach’s chorale settings as musical works grounded in a specific liturgical context. In Chapter 7, I trace Carl Ferdinand Becker’s attempts to present these pieces as models for four-part conception against new information challenging this immediately following the Bach Revival, and I describe the chorale’s institutionalization at the Leipzig Conservatory under Ernst Friedrich Richter—but again, absent Bach’s settings. I then describe the chorale’s naturalization in the United States through adaptations and translation of German music-theoretical writings and the efforts of Richter’s students (Chapter 8). I reveal that the notion of treating Bach’s chorale settings as musical models was available to Americans already in the 1850s, but unpursued; authors omitted them as just beyond the realm of harmony studies. Chapter 9 shows how Donald Tweedy’s 1928 textbook, the earliest recorded music-theory curriculum based upon Bach’s chorale settings, does not yet treat these pieces as music-theoretical objects. While for Heinrich Schenker, Bach’s chorale settings are masterworks of free composition, his American disciples present them as repositories of ultimately universal harmonic practice and cement their place in the bridge from abstract music-theoretical principles to “real” music, a position that characterizes present-day American music theory. The relatively late assumption of this position contradicts theorists’ perceptions that studying Bach’s chorale settings as models is a long tradition; in fact, this is part of the field’s mythology.