Schoenberg and Liszt: Hexatonic Collections across the Great Tonal Divide

Argentino, Joe

doi:10.1111/musa.12093

Cited by 1 publication

(3 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Since augmented triads are not contained in the natural diatonic scale (Bribitzer-Stull, 2006;Weitzmann, 1853), keyscapes that rely on on diatonic key-finding algorithms do not generate a satisfying analysis of this piece (see Figure 2 and the discussion there). In contrast to Longyear and Covington (1986), Cohn (2012) and Argentino (2018) analyze the opening as an example for the usage of hexatonic scales, composed of the two augmented triads A♭-C-E and C♯-F-A. The wavescapes can help to evaluate these similar but different analyses.…”

Section: Liszt's Faust Symphony S 108mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast to Longyear and Covington (1986), Cohn (2012) and Argentino (2018) analyze the opening as an example for the usage of hexatonic scales, composed of the two augmented triads A♭-C-E and C♯-F-A. The wavescapes can help to evaluate these similar but different analyses.…”

Section: Analytical Case Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As mentioned above, this pink hue is also the dominating color for the opening of the symphony. In contrast to the first two bars (see Figure 10a) where Liszt rotates through all augmented triads, the tonal material used in bars 3–4 presents the overall tonality of the piece (Longyear & Covington, 1986; Cohn, 2012; Argentino, 2018), so that the initial four bars of the first movement can be interpreted as establishing a hexatonic tonality, in analogy to the establishment of a key at the beginning of tonal pieces (e.g. Bach’s C-major prelude, see Figure 3 and the analysis below).…”

Section: Analytical Case Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Wavescapes: A visual hierarchical analysis of tonality using the discrete Fourier transform

et al. 2022

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Many structural aspects of music, such as tonality, can be expressed using hierarchical representations. In music analysis, so-called keyscapes can be used to map a key estimate (e.g., C major, F minor) to each subsection of a piece of music, thus providing an intuitive visual representation of its tonality, in particular of the hierarchical organization of local and global keys. However, that approach is limited in that the mapping relies on assumptions that are specific to common-practice tonality, such as the existence of 24 major and minor keys. This limitation can be circumvented by applying the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) to the tonal space. The DFT does not rely on style-specific theoretical assumptions but only presupposes an encoding of the music as pitch classes in 12-tone equal temperament. We introduce wavescapes, a novel visualization method for tonal hierarchies that combines the visual representation of keyscapes with music analysis based on the DFT. Since wavescapes produce visual analyses deterministically, a number of potential subjective biases are removed. By concentrating on one or more Fourier coefficients, the role of the analyst is thus focused on the interpretation and contextualization of the results. We illustrate the usefulness of this method for computational music theory by analyzing eight compositions from different historical epochs and composers (Josquin, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Scriabin, Webern, Coltrane, Ligeti) in terms of the phase and magnitude of several Fourier coefficients. We also provide a Python library that allows such visualizations to be easily generated for any piece of music for which a symbolic score or audio recording is available.

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