In this article, I examine passages from more than a dozen works by Rachmaninoff—especially the Third Symphony, op. 44—in order to better understand the significance that certain modal idioms (diatonic and equal-interval) have in his harmonic language and to show the consistency with which he treats these idioms across his oeuvre. I describe three types of diatonic modal idiom and three types of equal-interval modal idiom and I outline their basic rhetorical associations in Rachmaninoff’s music: diatonic modal idioms are consistently associated with introduction, exposition, digression, and post-climactic activity while equal-interval modal idioms are consistently associated with intensification, climax, and destabilization. I consider the implications those rhetorical associations have for the analysis of entire compositions, and, along the way, I suggest possible avenues for future research on Rachmaninoff’s position within both the pan-Europeanfin de siècleand the so-called Russian “silver age.”
This article discusses the use of tonal quotation/pastiche in George Crumb’sBlack Angels(1970) in the context of an analysis of the entire work. I draw from Losada’s work on postmodernism and collage to understand the organization of the quotation/pastiche movements, and I draw from Bass’s work on Crumb to understand the non-tonal pitch structures in the quartet as a whole. But I suggest that the quartet—an unusual combination of palindromic design and goal-oriented, programmatic activity—also engages the paradigms ofErlösung(Darcy) and teleological genesis (Hepokoski), which suggest a link betweenBlack Angelsand the romantic symphonic tradition and which provide a context for understanding the role played by the quotation/pastiche movements in the work.
This article considers the implications that Sergei Rachmaninoff's concept of the ‘culminating point’ has for the analysis of his music, using the off‐tonic climax in his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, as exemplar and case study. In the first part of the essay I position Rachmaninoff's idea in relation to Schoenberg's and Schenker's contemporaneous views of musical coherence and goal orientation, and in relation to recent hermeneutic approaches to music from Rachmaninoff's era (especially those derived from Hepokoski's work), showing how Rachmaninoff's idea, although it shares a nineteenth‐century heritage with those theorists' ideas, has its own analytical and hermeneutic entailments. In the second part of the essay, drawing on metaphors used by Rachmaninoff and on theoretical work by Candace Brower, I outline a model for understanding a culminating point as a moment where contextually determined rhetorical‐structural features map in striking, potentially ‘extraordinary’ ways onto physically oriented ‘image schemas’. I demonstrate the model in brief analyses of four Rachmaninoff works and then treat the Rhapsody at length, showing how image schemas involved at the culminating point interact with the work's generic‐ formal features and large‐scale tonal plan.
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