Ideas of Order in Key Western Musical Works

Froberger & Buxtehude to Bach

Bach clearly admired the bizarre in the works of Buxtehude and Froberger, and he composed all his own craziness into his revolutionary cosmic order wherein details of the A section that the work of modulating to V are presented in inverted form to accompllish the work of getting from V back to I. ?Whither the caprice? is answered by that brilliant order that became built into his moral backbone.

Beethoven to Brahms –

Brahms develops the bVI business that Beethoven pioneered into a more formal order. Beethoven began firmly in the classical mode and his work pushed out of that. His work was moving from formality toward something more like Froberger’s bizarre caprice, while always retaining key aspects of the classicism from whence he came.

The theme of Brahms’ 3rd formalizes the bVI business. The opening theme is a grand augmented 6 chord spread out horizontally.
And op. 15 is, on titanic scale, a formalization of the tritone transposition (broadly the doings of the augmented 6th chord) with Bb over D pedal at the opening and then E major over D pedal later.

Boulanger taught that such a V4/2 would be over a theoretical Bb root. It’s just a V of IV.

Brahms to Schoenberg

The order that Schoenberg achieves in op. 9 is not unprecedented. Example Here under “Holding”.
What attains structural weight is not a key but an interval cycle or a specific collection. There is a tune for each interval cycle. Subsets of the interval cycles bear the stamp of those cycles. Schoenberg formalized this for the very first time, took it to a larger scale than the examples here under “Holding”.

In op. 9 Schoenberg was creating order that was willfully abandoned by Liszt and such. Joan Forsyth performed “Les jeux d’eau à la villa d’Este” in Tornonto last summer and I was thrilled with the way the work de-functionalizes things as Debussy would do later. I never was so jazzed by its spectacular, deliberate superficiality.

After his period of free atonal work, he got an itch for order again. 12-tone and the neo-classical elements that Boulez hated came out of that, with the help of wars that forced things to proceed faster than they may have otherwise.

We love the modernists whose music I championed, including the minimalists, who are also modernists. They caused a thirst for order to bloom inside me. The order is, broadly, of the Schoenberg op. 9 type. Anyone else? Am I alone?

It Takes One to Know One

I’ve made some attempts in this classical direction, with no interest in sounding like 20th Century neoclassical music as pioneered by Schoenberg, Hindemith, or Stravinsky. Order is independent of style.

My two trios,”1918” – and “Mille Regrez”, come out of a thirst for order comparable to the examples above.

“Mille Regrez” is Carter-infused ear candy, also channelling Brahms in odd ways.
“1918” is built around a different way of doing what Brahms did in op. 15.

These have developed and ripened for over a decade. Trying to get them performed and recorded.