Response to Carissa Reddick

Abstract

[1] I extend a huge thanks to Carissa Reddick for opening this volume with a fabulously rich and probing essay. Reddick has brought my notion of becoming into association with the idea of functional overlap-a concept that, as she says, has been proposed and explored by others, especially in reference to nineteenth-century music. Her essay gives me the opportunity to acknowledge the place of my work within a broad spectrum of analytic approaches that invite us to perceive musical form as a temporal process, rather than only as a finished product.[2] Especially new and bold is Reddick's proposal that, in the case of Dvorak's E-Major String Quartet (1876), "functional overlap" can serve to uncover a long-range cyclical process unfolding over the span of the complete quartet. In my book, I attempt a similar processual interpretation of Mendelssohn's four-movement Octet, Op. 20-the formally and motivically cyclical masterpiece that he completed in 1825, at the age of 16. As with Dvorak's finale and with the last movement of Brahms's Piano Quintet, Op. 34, both discussed by Reddick, the large-scale form of Mendelssohn's finale can best be described as an "expanded Type 1 sonata," the category identified as such by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy (2006).(1)[3] Like Reddick, I also address the first movement of one of Haydn's Op. 33 string quartets (from 1781)-the beloved and much discussed Bird Quartet in C Major, Op. 33, No. 3 (Hob. III:39). A brief comparison of the openings and retransitions within these movements-Reddick's analysis and mine-will help me to draw a distinction between the Hegelian-inspired idea of becoming on the one hand, and functional overlap on the other. I do not think that these two ideas should be conflated.[4] Let us return to Reddick's Example 1b-from Haydn's B-Minor Quartet, Op. 33, No. 1. The fermata at measure 49 signals the beginning of a retransition process at measure 50; as Reddick has noted, this passage opens in A major, with the subordinate-theme version of the quartet's opening idea, and it reaches a half cadence in the home key at measure 58. Reddick proposes that, when the initial version of that idea then returns in measure 59, the idea "suggests D major," just as was the case in the famously ambiguous opening of the movement. We can listen again to that opening (Reddick's Example 1b: ); it might have been harmonized like this: (listen to Example 1 below).(2) Reddick also suggests that measure 59 initiates what "sounds almost like the beginning of a consequent." This view comes as a surprise. By contrast, James Webster points to "one tiny change that effects a stunning reversal": as shown in Haydn's score (Reddick's Example 1b), the second violin in measure 59 now provides the leading tone Ain B minor, thus "resolving the original ambiguity," and also creating an augmented triad (Webster 1991, 129); at measure 60, this phrase ends, without ambiguity, on a half cadence in B minor. Whether we hear measure 59 in D major or B minor, Reddick's almost-"consequent" rubs against current uses of that term: in recent years, there has been an acceptance of Arnold Schoenberg's generalization that a "consequent" will begin with the basic idea of the antecedent in the same key.Example 1. Opening of Op. 33, No. 1, as if in D major[5] But perhaps Webster would fully endorse Reddick's idea of a functional overlap in this movement. He does not clarify where he thinks that the retransition begins, but he notes that (presumably from measure 57 onward), "the entire retransition and first-group recapitulation prolong the dominant; there is no bass tonic anywhere" (130). In fact, the same can be said for the opening of the movement-the passage that Reddick proposes as an "Introduction becomes MT"-there is no structural tonic in either key until the elided authentic cadence in B minor at measure 11. This observation lends support to her idea that the beginning of the movement invokes the "rhetoric" of an introduction; both large-scale slow introductions and short thematic introductions often fundamentally prolong dominant harmony. …