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Listening for Structure: Discerning Formal Patterns in Debussy's Piano Preludes Based on Associative Relationships
Sayers, Gretta Marie
Sayers, Gretta Marie
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Abstract
Corpus studies of post-tonal works are rare due to the challenges in addressing contrasting organizational principles among individual pieces while also providing an overarching method to summarize any shared formal patterns. My analysis of Debussy’s twenty-four piano preludes combines the traditional approaches of William Caplin and James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy with a non-traditional inclusion of a statistical assessment to accommodate diverse patterns in the preludes. To consider how we might discern form in Debussy’s music, I embrace a perceptual or ‘bottom-up’ approach to analysis. Using an a posteriori perspective, I reorient the concept of structural listening to instead ‘listen for structure,’ that is, to begin with musical analysis from which formal patterns are later described. My initial analysis of the preludes identified surface-level relationships of themes and phrases, and the resulting vocabulary, applied to all of the preludes, extends Caplin’s description of tight-knit and loose themes to accommodate Debussy’s style. Thematic organization is described with rotational forms, extending Hepokoski and Darcy’s rotational idea as accommodating any form that emphasizes return and rebeginnings. The non-predictive nature of Debussy’s music does not permit the use of established formal templates or formal expectations in analysis, so I identify associative relationships with a statistical measurement to see whether two elements, such as an introduction and an opening homophonic texture, are likely to occur together or separately. The resulting positive and negative associations among musical elements can function as an ad hoc set of norms or tendencies that serve as the formal backdrop against which the individual pattern of each prelude can be compared.
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2020-01-01
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Music theory, corpus studies, Debussy, empirical approaches to form, measure of association, post-tonal form