Prolongation
In music theory, prolongation is the process in tonal music through which a pitch, interval, or consonant triad is considered to govern spans of music when not physically sounding. It is a central principle in the music-analytic methodology of Schenkerian analysis, conceived by Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker.[1] The English term usually translates Schenker's Auskomponierung (better translated as "composing out" or "elaboration"). According to Fred Lerdahl, "The term 'prolongation' [...] usually means 'composing out' (Schenker's own intention for the term is open to debate)."[2]
Prolongation can be thought of as a way of generating musical content through the linear elaboration of simple and basic tonal structures with progressively increasing detail and sophistication,
A pitch is located in a pitch class, a pitch class is located within a chord, a chord is located in a key region, a key is located in pitch space including the circle of fifths and their relative minors. A rhythmic event is located within the meter which is located within the form. Thus "reductions" are often made at different levels excluding the prolongational from the structural events; these may express the relationships through time-reductions or prologational reductions (which may be Urlinien or tree diagrams).
Prolongation in Schenkerian theory
The early 20th-century music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) was responsible for developing both the conceptual framework for prolongation and a means of analyzing music in terms of prolonged musical structures (called Schenkerian analysis).
Schenker’s own usage of the term differs from the modern one.[5] The German word Prolongation is not common, and Schenker first used it in a very specific meaning (maybe originating in legal, possibly Viennese vocabulary), referring to the extension of the primal laws (Urgesetze) or of the primal concepts (Urbegriffe) of strict composition in free composition[6] and the phenomena resulting from the extension of these laws.[7] He used the word mainly to denote the transformation of a given level of voice-leading to the next one, describing the passage from level to level as a Prolongation. Adele T. Katz appears to be responsible for the shift of meaning where "prolongation" became the American translation of Auskomponierung.[8]
In his analysis of
The concept of Prolongation is important for Schenker because he believes that showing how a masterpiece of free composition remains rooted in the laws of strict counterpoint explains its utter unity, its "synthesis".[11] The means and techniques of passing from one level to the next are subsumed in Schenker's notion of "composing out" or "compositional elaboration" (Auskomponierung, a German neologism), which for him is a mechanism of elaborating pitch materials in musical time.[3] The means of elaboration are described below as "prolongational techniques", in conformity with the modern Schenkerian English usage, but should better be termed "elaborations".
The broadening of the meaning of "prolongation" has been described by Anthony Pople[12] in seven steps: (1) Schenker proposes it as an operational concept in his teaching; (2) Felix Salzer,[13] Allen Forte[14] and others, disseminate and clarify it; (3) it is used within attempted formalisations of Schenkerian analysis;[15] (4) new theories evoking Schenker[16] make use of it; (5) it is used within theories amplifying Schenker's own;[17] (6) definitions are proposed in theories beyond the Schenkerian canon;[18] and (7) definitions of the term are proposed in relation to atonal music.[19] The replacement of Schenker's own term Auskomponierung by "prolongation" appeared in step (2), as an English translation.
The English "prolongation" has been used in The Masterwork in Music to translate German words including Auskomponierung, ausdrücken and Auswicklung.[20] In Free Composition, "prolongation" is more than once used to translate Auskomponierung and "prolonged" for auskomponiert. Oster otherwise translates Auskomponierung as "composing out" and others use "compositional elaboration" or, short, "elaboration."[21] Drabkin quotes as "methods of prolongation" techniques that include Anstieg, Ausfaltung, Koppelung, Tieferlegung, Übergreifen and Untergreifen,[22] which Schenker would rather have described as techniques of Auskomponierung.
Prolongational techniques
In Schenkerian analysis, the analyst discerns ways in which prolongation creates the details of a musical composition by elaborating the background structure. Most of these methods involve contrapuntal processes, to such a degree that Schenkerian theory is a theory that almost completely synthesizes harmony and linear counterpoint in the service of the more global phenomenon of tonal prolongation. Prolongational techniques include arpeggiations, linear progressions, unfoldings, etc., in general aiming at the horizontalization, "the elaboration in time of a governing vertical sonority – a chord or an interval. [...] When an interval is horizontalized, its tones unfold against a background determined in the vertical dimension by the governing sonority of which it is part."[27]
Conditions for prolongation
Schenker intended his theory to apply only to music of the
- Consistent distinction between consonance and dissonance.
- A scale of stability among consonant harmonies [see diatonic function].
- Ways in which less structural pitches embellish more structural pitches.
- A clear relationship between harmony and voice-leading.
Straus concludes that such conditions do not exist in atonal music and therefore that "atonal prolongation" is impossible; although he is open to the possibility that prolongation is a possibility in other post-tonal music (he gives the example of music composed with the octatonic scale), he argues that in practice most post-tonal music does not display this. Instead, he suggests that in post-tonal music, including atonal music, a model of 'association' is more defensible than strict prolongation. However, Lerdahl argues that Straus' argument is based on circular criteria.[32] Lerdahl's own formulation of prolongation is more amenable to atonal structures. For example, in atonal music, strong prolongation may be distinguished from progression, repetition of an event versus movement to a different event, while weak prolongation, repetition of an event in altered form, may not easily be distinguished due to the lack of a referential triad (klang).[33] Miguel Roig-Francolí has proposed a related theory of 'Pitch-Class-Set Extension', in which contiguous harmonic units are linked through common-tone or chromatic connection and successive harmonies are understood to 'extend' earlier ones.[34]
Sources
- ^ "It is one of the most valuable services of Schenkerian theory to have revealed for the first time the unity of composing-out and the prolonged application and validity of the laws of voice leading." Oswald Jonas, Introduction to the Theory of Heinrich Schenker, trans. John Rothgeb (New York: Longman, 1982), p. 54. 2nd English edition (Ann Arbor: Musicalia Press, 2005), p. 59.
- ISBN 0-19-517829-7.
- ^ a b William Drabkin. "Prolongation." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. 2 Aug. 2011 <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/22408>.
- ISBN 0-486-22275-6.
- ^ See N. Meeùs (2021), Prolongation, Orfeu 6/3, pp. 109-124.
- ^ For instance when he explained that the task of the study of counterpoint is to reveal how its fundamental laws can be extended to apply to free composition: "But to reveal the basic form together with its variants, and [thereby] to uncover only prolongations of a fundamental law even where apparent contradictions hold sway – this alone is the task of counterpoint!" Kontrapunkt I (1910), p. 315; English translation (1987), p. 241. This is the usage to which Oswald Jonas refers in the quotation from note 1 above. See also J. Dubiel, "When You are a Beethoven: Kinds of Rules in Schenker's Counterpoint", Journal of Music Theory 34/2 (1990), p. 293, and R. Snarrenberg, "The Art of Translating Schenker: A Commentary on 'The Masterwork in Music,' Vol. 1", Music Analysis 15/2-3 (1996), p. 324.
- ^ Schenker claims among others that three-voice counterpoint is subject to the same laws as two-voice counterpoint, of which it represents a "Prolongation": "In three-voice settings, the [laws of] two-voice settings actually continue to apply; three-voice setting therefore represents merely a prolonged phenomenon". Kontrapunkt II (1922), p. 1; English translation (1987), p. 1.
- ^ Adele T. Katz (1935). "Heinrich Schenker's Method of Analysis", The Musical Quarterly 21/3, pp. 311-329. This conception of "prolongation" may have its origin in the teaching of Hans Weisse.
- ^ Der Tonwille 5 (1923), p. 8, Fig. 1; English translation (2004), p. 180. Later in the same volume, p. 33 (transl., p. 202), Schenker describes a similar figure as showing "the succession of prolongations, that is, the layers of the voice-leading."
- ^ Der freie Satz, 2d edition (1956), § 45, p. 57; English translation (1979), p. 25.
- ^ Deriding the lack of the "art of prolongation" in Bruckner, he writes "his ear could not hear the beginning and end of a motion as an entity. The two points remain without inner relationship to one another; and everything shoved and squeezed in between, though executed with so much art on an individual level, exhausts itself purely physically without any concern for connection." Der Tonwille 5, p. 46; English translation, p. 213.
- ^ Anthony Pople, "Using Complex Set Theory for Tonal Analysis: An Introduction to the 'Tonalities' Project", Music Analysis 23/2-3 (2004), pp. 162-164. Pople describes "prolongation" as "a Humpty-Dumpty Word".
- ^ Structural Hearing, 1952/1962
- ^ 1959: "Schenker's Conception of Musical Structure", Journal of Music Theory 3/1, 1959.
- ^ e.g. Forte and Gilbert, Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis, 1982.
- ^ e.g. Lerdahl & Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 1983.
- ^ Neumeyer 1987, Beach 1988, 1990
- ^ Morgan, 1976.
- ^ Straus, 1987, 1997.
- ^ Robert Snarrenberg, "The Art of Translating Schenker: A Commentary on 'The Masterwork in Music'", Music Analysis 15/2-3 (1996), p. 325.
- ^ Nicolas Meeùs, "Formenlehre in Der freie Satz: A Transformational Theory", Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale XXI/2 (2015), p. 105, note 12.
- ^ William Drabkin, "Prolongation," in I. Bent and W. Drabkin, Analysis, The New Grove Handbooks in Music, London, Macmillan, 1987, p. 128.
- ^ Jonas (1982), p.37.
- ISBN 0-415-97398-8.
- ^ Pankhurst (2008), p. 51.
- ^ ISBN 0-03-020756-8.
- ISBN 0-231-07039-X.
- ISBN 0-486-22275-6.
- ^ Morgan, Robert (1976). "Dissonant Prolongation: Theoretical and Compositional Precedents" in Journal of Music Theory 20/1, 49–91.
- ISBN 0-521-02832-9.
- ^ Straus, Joseph N. (1987). "The Problem of Prolongation in Post-Tonal Music", Journal of Music Theory 31, p. 1-21. cited in Lerdahl (1989).
- ISBN 3-7186-4953-5.
- ^ Lerdahl (1989), p.74.
- ^ Roig-Francolí, Miguel (2001). "A Theory of Pitch-Class-Set Extension in Atonal Music". College Music Symposium. 41: 57–90.