Cadence as Gesture in the Writings and Music of Arnold Schoenberg

Abstract

This article focuses on the writings and music of Arnold Schoenberg to establish concrete techniques for form‐functional analysis, particularly cadential function. In both Fundamentals of Musical Composition and ‘Problems of Tonality’, Schoenberg discusses how form can be communicated to an audience in music with and without tonal functions. I use the already established field of energetics and Robert Hatten's theory of gesture (2004) to describe the musical effect of a number of compositional techniques employed in the service of cadence. This leads me to define rhetorical and syntactical markers for cadential function in Schoenberg's music. I demonstrate this with tonal excerpts from Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, where harmonic function supports and coincides with these rhetorical and syntactical functions. This same technique is then examined in the Musette and Minuet from Schoenberg's Suite for Piano, Op. 25, where the twelve‐note structure is less useful for hearing formal boundaries. Although this study focuses on Schoenberg's music, it also suggests that there is more in common between what might be termed ‘Romantic’ formal functions and early non‐tonal formal functions.

Second‐Order Topics and Prokofiev's String Quartets

“…7. This understanding echoes Andrew Eason's approach to Schoenberg's music through the lens of formal functions (see Eason 2019 and.…”

“…77This understanding echoes Andrew Eason's approach to Schoenberg's music through the lens of formal functions (see Eason 2019 and 2022). In exploring how Schoenberg's music expresses formal functions in lieu of tonal harmony, Eason notes that Schoenberg himself believed that sections of form can convey function without recourse to harmonic processes (2019, p. 3).…”

Chromatic Function in Schoenberg’s Little Piano Piece, op. 19, no. 1

“…Return to text 8. Of particular importance are studies by Andrew Eason (2019), who applies formal-functional interpretations and Caplinian theme-types to Schoenberg's atonal and dodecaphonic pieces, Anabel Maler (2018), who proposes novel formal functions and applies Caplinian formal functions to post-war modernist composers, and Ma hew Arndt (2018), who analyzes Schoenberg's atonal music extensively from a motivic point of view and who proposes more complex formal functions that depart from Caplin's beginning-middle-end paradigm. All these studies reconcile classical formal procedures with 20th-century musical formal procedures while using Schoenberg's theoretical concepts as a foundation.…”

“…I use the neutral term "thematic unit" to avoid drawing on theoretical concepts that describe tonal-formal organization. To be sure, passages in Schoenberg-especially in his later, almost neoclassical twelve-tone works-evoke classical form, as Eason (2019) has astutely shown. But since the theory of tonal form rests upon an understanding of motivic organization and tonal harmony, it is safer at present to avoid the use of such terms in conjunction with a repertory whose harmonic principles are fundamentally different and whose motivic organization is often significantly looser and amorphous.…”