Rounds, Catches, and Canons:Interval Frames and Ascending Figures

David NeumeyerProfessor Emeritus of Music

The University of Texas at Austin

December 2018

Unless indicated otherwise by note or citation, nothing in this file has been published previously, with the exception of referenced and unreferenced material that has appeared in other essays of mine published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform or in my blog Ascending Cadence Gestures (link). Musical examples all come from public domain sources, most of them downloaded from IMSLP (http://imslp.org). All new material and the compilation copyright David Neumeyer 2018. The license under which this essay is published is: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States. No alterations or commercial uses are permitted without express permission from the author.

Abstract:

The play of register in the compact designs of vocal rounds sets up a structure that is quite amenable to rising cadence figures. Repertoire presented here comes from two general groups of sources: (1) nineteenth-century amateur and school collections, which include both traditional and contemporary rounds; (2) seventeenth-century publications by Thomas Ravenscroft, John Hilton, and Henry Purcell.

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !2

Table of contents

Thursday, October 25, 2018: Rounds and canons, part 11

From Novello's School Round-Book, published in two volumes (1852, 1854)Round from the New York Glee Book (1844)Two from Thomas Ravenscroft's Pammelia (1609)

New material for this essay: John Hilton, Catch That Catch Can. London, 1652

Thursday, November 1, 2018: Rounds and canons, part 2 (from volume 22 of The Works of Henry Purcell)2

New material for this essay: Additional nineteenth-century sources

Woodward, The Convivial Companion or Vocal Harmonisticon (c. 1820)Bradbury and Sanders, The School Singer (5th ed., 1845)White, The Boston Melodeon (1846)Fitz, The Parlor Harp, and Boston Social Melodist (1848)Fitz, The Columbian Song Book (1855)

Bibliography

A post on my blog Ascending Cadence Gestures: link to the post.1

A post on my blog Ascending Cadence Gestures: link to the post.2

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !3

Thursday, October 25, 2018 Rounds and canons, part 1

The play of register in the compact designs of vocal rounds sets up a structure that is quite amenable to rising cadence figures—although of course we have to keep in mind that what constitutes the ending depends entirely on the circumstances of performance.

In "Row, row, row your boat," the registral units (intervals) are ^1-^3, ^3-^5, ^8-^5 (expanded to ^8-^1), and ^5-^1. In "Frère Jacques," the sequence is ^1-^3, ^3-^5, ^5-^1, and ^1-^-5-^1. Any of these units that include ^1 or ^8 can act as the close. Here are some examples:

From Novello's School Round-Book, published in two volumes (1852, 1854). "Thou, poor bird" is a registral sibling of "Row, row, row your boat," the only difference being that the third unit stays on ^8-^5. If the end is taken with the fermatas (as suggested by the volumes' editor), then one easily imagine a singer repeating D5 for the second syllable of "warble."

In "The rose's age is but a day" from volume 2, the first three units are the same, but the fourth is restricted to a functional but non-melodic bass. There are no fermatas this time, but one can easily imagine four voices ending together, with the simple rising line in the uppermost register.

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !4

In "Go learn of the ant," also from volume 2, the harmonic vocabulary is a bit richer, and we can discern in the first unit the shape of an ascending Urlinie variant: ^5-^6-^8-^7-^8.

Three-voice rounds can easily dispense with the upper fourth—in fact, many do in the 19th-century collections I have examined to date—but a few are like "The rose's age is but a day." In "Come let us all a maying go," for example, the division of soprano, alto, bass is quite clear, and the soprano—after its descending octave in the first phrase—remains in the upper fourth for the second phrase.

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !5

This round from the New York Glee Book (1844) is similar in its basic design but manages to spread melodic values over the three parts.

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !6

Canons, catches, and rounds were very popular entertainments in earlier centuries, as well. Here are two from Thomas Ravenscroft's Pammelia (1609), which is subtitled "Musicks Miscellanie, or, a Mixed Varietie of Pleasant Roundelayes, and delightfull Catches." Note in "Dame lend me a loafe" that the ending (final unit) is in the upper fourth.

The first example was about food; the second is about drink. I have marked the three units and boxed their closing figures.

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !7

New material for this essayJohn Hilton, Catch That Catch Can. London, 1652

John Hilton was credited with “Now we all a-maying go” (see page 4 above). I include his originally published version of it in this section (no. 13).

Hilton, n9: “Me thinks that I do heare.” As with later examples in this section, the score marks the entrance of the second voice with a special figure but not the entrance of the third voice. I have marked both entrances with a double slash, //. In this round, the first voice finishes in the upper octave — see boxed notes.

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !8

Hilton, n11: “I poor and well, thou rich and ill.” Here again the first voice reaches the upper octave with a very clear and formulaic cadence figure (boxed). To show the entrances of the voices but also to write out the cadence when all voices are present, I have written out my own score notation, preserving the alto clef of the original.

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !9

Hilton, n13: “Come let us all a Maying go.” See also page 4 above.

Hilton, n29: “Here lies a woman, who can deny it.”

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !10

Hilton, n53: “Come follow me merrily.”

Hilton, n58: “Coridan, thou Swain.”

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !11

Hilton, n82: “Three blind mice.” This version duplicates the one in Ravenscroft’s Deuteromelia or The Seconde part of Musicks melodie (1609), the first known publication of the piece. Note that the mode is minor.

Hilton, n86: “The silver Swan.” A nicely worked out composition in four voices.

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !12

Thursday, November 1, 2018Rounds and canons, part 2

Volume 22 of The Works of Henry Purcell (London: Novello, 1922) gathers rounds and catches (edited by W. Barclay Squire), as well as two and three part songs. For the rounds and catches, n = 57. The editor mentions ten other catches in Purcell's stage works (iii). Of the 57 in volume 22, six are of interest. I discuss them below in their numerical order, not topically, though as it happens they are all closely related in design, with a well-confirmed focal tone ^8 and a return to it in the cadence.

As the editor of volume 22 notes, "The work [of gathering these pieces] has been rendered more troublesome owing to the fact that in many cases the original words are so grossly indecent that later editors have reprinted the music with new words, but without indicating what was their original form" (iii). The singing of rounds and catches was part of men's entertainment, and the topics are largely confined to drinking, politics, and varying but often misogynistic views of women.

Acknowledging all this—and also admitting that I did not include 2 or 3 pieces that would have been appropriate otherwise but whose texts, even as editorially curated, were still too offensive—here are the six.

1. Ascending figure in the third voice.

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !13

2. Wedge figure with the lower voice 1 coming up to ^8 while the upper voice 2 descends from a strong focal note ^3, A5 (as written).

3. Unusual minor key; not ascending cadence figure in voice 3 but return to a focal note ^8 (as G5, written).

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !14

4. As in no. 37, a minor key with ^8 as focal tone, but now G5 is traded between voices: bar 2 in voice 1, bar 3 in voice 3, and bars 4-5 in the voice 2.

5. Still another minor key, with the design very like no. 42.

6. If anything, the status of the focal tone ^8 is even stronger in this, with that note beginning voice 3, reached in voice 4 in bar 2, double neighbor figure in voice 3, bars 3-5, and cadence in voice 4, bars 5-7.

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !15

New material for this essayAdditional nineteenth-century sources

The volumes from which I drew examples are as follows:

Edward Woodward, The Convivial Companion or Vocal Harmonisticon Being A Selection of the most popular & approved Amatory, Sentimental, Patriotic & Comic Songs &c. Vol. 1. Norwich, England, c. 1820.

William B. Bradbury and C. W. Sanders, The School Singer, or Young Choir's Companion: a choice collection of music, original and selected, for juvenile schools, Sabbath schools, public schools, academies, select classes, etc. Including some of the most popular German melodies, with English words adapted, or poetry translated from the German expressly for this work. Also, a complete course of instruction in the elements of vocal music, founded on the German system of Kuebler. 5th ed. New York, 1845.

E. L. White, The Boston Melodeon: A collection of secular melodies, consisting of songs, glees, rounds, catches, &c. including many of the most popular pieces of the day. Boston, 1846.

Asa Fitz, The Parlor Harp, and Boston Social Melodist, containing a selection of the most popular English, American and German melodies, consisting of songs, glees, catches, anthems, rounds, devotional melodies, chants, &c. adapted to the family circle, social parties, high schools and musical associations. Boston, 1848.

Asa Fitz, The Columbian Song Book. In two parts containing a choice collection of songs, duets, glees, rounds, and devotional music, for the school room. Boston, 1855.

All of these collections draw on a variety of sources, historical and contemporary. Not surprisingly, a few individual numbers appear more than once—for example, “’Tis a Southerly Wind,” my only example from Woodward’s The Convivial Companion, is also in Fitz’s The Parlor Harp. See both versions on the following page. The second voice carries the inescapable rising cadence gesture. As with many of the earlier examples in this essay, the two most likely performance modes will bring the rising line at the end in one, but not the other: If the voices follow all the way through (whether once or twice), the third voice will close on its own, after the others have finished. Alternately, the voices can end together in the manner suggested by the arrangement of the score on the page.

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !16

The one other example from The Parlor Harp is similar.

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !17

From White’s Boston Melodeon, one example similar to the ones above in design but very compact. Like the simple familiar rounds, the voices hold closely to intervals: the first voice sits on the third ^1-^3, the second voice takes the third ^3-^5, the third voice runs the octave but is framed as ^1-^5-^8, and the final voice is a simple bass ^5 below-^1.

The School Singer of Bradbury and Sanders uses such interval frames in rounds as a very simple device to vary the singing of basic exercises. In the initial instructional section of the volume (“a complete course of instruction in the elements of vocal music, founded on the German system of Kuebler”), there are multiple examples. Here is one:

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !18

And here is another:

In the second, anthology section, several pieces are of interest. The first of these (no. 71) is barely more complicated than the simple familiar rounds. The frame is ^1-^3 in the first voice, ^3-^5 in the second, and ^5-^8 in the third.

Here are others that are similar:

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !19

And two that are a bit more developed:

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !20

Bibliography

Neumeyer, David. 2018. Johann Strauss, jr., Die Fledermaus: Ascending Cadence Gestures on Stage.Die Fledermaus (1874), today the best-known operetta by Johann Strauss, jr., is also a treasure trove of ascending cadence gestures. This article documents and interprets those multiple instances and their effects.

Neumeyer, David. 2015/2018. Kingsbury Hymns of Praise: Rising Lines.Pieces with rising cadence gestures in Hymns of Praise: For the Church and Sunday School. Compiled by F. G. Kingsbury. Chicago: Hope Publishing Co., ©1922. A hymn book from my father's collection. Because of their largely nineteenth century origins, it seemed reasonable to think that hymns in the evangelistic tradition would be more likely than older tunes to have rising cadence gestures.

Neumeyer, David. 2017. The Ascending Urlinie (Journal of Music Theory, 1987): Studies of Music from the Endnotes.In the endnotes to an article published thirty years ago, I list about thirty compositions as representative examples of different forms of the ascending Urlinie. This document provides analyses and discussion of all those pieces, as well as additional discussion of two pieces from the article’s main text: Bach, Prelude in C Major, BWV 924 (as compositional exercise); Beethoven, Piano Sonata in Bb major, op. 22, III (rising Urlinie and register).

Neumeyer, David. 2017. Seventeenth-Century Germany and Austria: Ascending Cadence GesturesThe seventeenth century in Europe was a particularly rich time for experimentation in musical performance, improvisation, and composition. This essay, meant as an addendum to Ascending Cadence Gestures: A Historical Survey from the 16th to the Early 19th Century (published on Texas Scholar Works, July 2016), documents and analyzes characteristic instances of rising cadential lines in music by composers active in Germanophone countries--and, as it happens, particularly in the cities of Hamburg in the north and Vienna in the south.

Neumeyer, David. 2017. English, Scotch, and Irish Dance and Song: Supplement 2 Another supplement to the essay English, Scotch, and Irish Dance and Song, which is primarily a documentation of rising cadence figures in dances, fiddle tunes, and songs from late eighteenth and early nineteenth century published sources. Gathered here are an additional 70 examples taken from files downloaded in May and June 2017.

Neumeyer, David. 2017. English, Scotch, and Irish Dance and Song: SupplementA supplement to the essay English, Scotch, and Irish Dance and Song, which is primarily a documentation of rising cadence figures in dances, fiddle tunes, and songs. Gathered here are another 50 examples found in files downloaded on 2 May 2017. These were the coincidental result of a search for more information on Nathaniel Gow, the son of the famous Scottish fiddler Niel Gow.

Neumeyer, David. 2017. English, Scotch, and Irish Dance and Song: On Cadence Gestures and FiguresThis is a documentation of ascending cadence gestures in some 260 songs and dances from

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !21

the British Isles, taken from eighteenth and nineteenth century sources, with some emphasis on collections for practical use published between about 1770 and 1820 and on the later ethnographic collections of P. W. Joyce and the anthology of Francis O’Neill.

Neumeyer, David. 2017. Addendum to the Historical Survey, with an Index This is an addendum to the essay Ascending Cadence Gestures: A Historical Survey from the 16th to the Early 19th Century (published on Texas Scholar Works, July 2016), consisting of posts since that date to my blog “Ascending Cadence Gestures” (on Google blogpost). This is also an index to musical compositions discussed in essays published or re-published on this platform since 2010, through 03 March 2017.

Neumeyer, David. 2017. A Gallery of Simple Examples of Extended Rising Melodic Shapes, Volume 2This second installment of direct, cleanly formed rising lines offers examples from a variety of sources, ranging from a short early seventeenth century choral piece to Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, and from Scottish fiddle tunes to Victor Herbert operettas.

Neumeyer, David. 2017. A Gallery of Simple Examples of Extended Rising Melodic ShapesPrevailing stereotypes of formal cadences and arch-shaped melodies were especially strong in the eighteenth century, but they did not prevent European musicians from occasionally introducing rising melodic figures into cadences and sometimes connecting those figures abstractly in lines with focal notes earlier in a composition. This essay presents a few of the most direct, cleanly formed

Neumeyer, David. 2017. Ascending Cadence Gestures in Waltzes by Joseph Lanner.Rising melodic figures have a long history in cadences in European music of all genres. This essay documents and analyzes examples from an especially influential repertoire of social dance music, the Viennese waltz in the first half of the 19th century. The two most important figures were both violinists, orchestra leaders, and composers: Josef Lanner (d. 1843) and Johann Strauss, sr. (d. 1849). Lanner is the focus of this essay, with waltz sets ranging from prior to 1827 through 1842.

Neumeyer, David. 2017. Ascending Cadence Gestures in Waltzes by Johann Strauss, sr.Rising melodic figures have a long history in cadences in European music of all genres. This essay documents examples from an especially influential repertoire of social dance music, the Viennese waltz in the first half of the 19th century. The two most important figures were both violinists, orchestra leaders, and composers: Josef Lanner (d. 1843) and Johann Strauss, sr. (d. 1849). Strauss is the focus here, through twenty five waltz sets published between 1827 and 1848.

Neumeyer, David. 2016. On Ascending Cadence Gestures in Adolphe Adam's Le Châlet (1834).Adolphe Adam’s one-act opéra comique Le Châlet (1834) is a milestone in the history of rising cadence gestures and, as such (combined with its popularity), may have been a primary influence on other composers as rising cadence gestures proliferated in opera bouffe and both French and Viennese operetta later in the century, and eventually in the American musical during the twentieth century.

Neumeyer, David. 2016. Scale Degree ^6 in the 19th Century: Ländler and Waltzes from Schubert to HerbertJeremy Day-O’Connell identifies three treatments of scale degree 6 in the major key through

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !22

the nineteenth century: (1) classical ^6; (2) pastoral ^6; and (3) non-classical ^6. This essay makes further distinctions within these categories and documents them in the Ländler repertoire (roughly 1800-1850; especially Schubert) and in the waltz repertoire after 1850 (primarily the Strauss family). The final case study uses this information to explain some unusual dissonances in an operetta overture by Victor Herbert. Other composers include Michael Pamer, Josef Lanner, Theodor Lachner, Czerny, Brahms, Fauré, and Debussy.

Neumeyer, David. 2016. Ascending Cadence Gestures: A Historical Survey from the 16th to the Early 19th Century.Cadences are formulaic gestures of closure and temporal articulation in music. Although in the minority, rising melodic figures have a long history in cadences in European music of all genres. This essay documents and analyzes characteristic instances of rising cadential lines from the late 16th century through the 1830s.

Neumeyer, David. 2016. Rising Gestures, Text Expression, and the Background as Theme.Walter Everett's categories for tonal design features in nineteenth-century songs fit the framework of the Classic/Romantic dichotomy: eighteenth-century practice is the benchmark for progressive but conflicted alternatives. These categories are analogous to themes in literary interpretation; so understood, they suggest a broader range of options for the content of the background than the three Schenkerian Urlinien regarded as essentialized universals. The analysis of a Brahms song, "Über die See," Op. 69/7, provides a case study in one type, the rising line, and also the entry point for a critique of Everett's reliance on a self-contradictory attitude toward the Schenkerian historical narrative.

Neumeyer, David. 2015. Proto-backgrounds in Traditional Tonal Music. This article uses an analogy between "theme" in literary studies and "background" in linear analysis (or other hierarchical analytic models) for music to find more options for inter-pretation than are available in traditional Schenkerian analysis. The central construct is the proto-background, or tonic-triad interval that is understood to precede the typical linear background of a Schenkerian or similar hierarchical analysis. Figures typically or potentially found in a background, including the Schenkerian urlinie, are understood to arise through (informal) transformations, or functions, applied to proto-backgrounds.

Neumeyer, David. 2015. Nineteenth-century polkas with rising melodic and cadence gestures: a new PDF essay.This essay provides background on dance in the nineteenth century and then focuses on characteristic figures in the polka, especially those linked to rising cadence gestures. The polka became a popular social dance very quickly in the early 1840s. Its music was the first to introduce rising melodic frames and cadence gestures as common features. This essay provides a series of examples with commentary. Most pieces come from the 1840s and early 1850s. Variants of the polka—polka-mazurka, polka française, and polka schnell—are also discussed and illustrated.

Neumeyer, David. 2015. Rising Lines in the Tonal Frameworks of Traditional Tonal MusicThis article supplements, and provides a large amount of additional data for, an article I published nearly thirty years ago: "The Ascending Urlinie," Journal of Music Theory 31/2 (1987): 275-303. By Schenker's assertion, an abstract, top-level melody always descends by step to ^1. I demonstrated that at least one rising figure, ^5-^6-^7-^8, was not only possible but could be readily found in the repertory of traditional European tonal music.

Neumeyer, David. 2015. Carl Schachter's Critique of the Rising Urlinie

Rounds, Catches, and Canons, p. !23

A detailed critique of two articles by Carl Schachter (1994; 1996), this study is concerned with some specific issues in traditional Schenkerian theory, those connected with the rising Urlinie—these can be roughly summarized  as the status of ^6 and the status of ^7. Sixteen of twenty three chapters in this file discuss Schachter’s two articles directly, and the other seven chapters (2, 4, 5, 17-20) speak to underlying theoretical problems.

Neumeyer, David. 2015. Analyses of Schubert, Waltz, D.779n13This article gathers a large number of analyses of a single waltz by Franz Schubert: the anomalous A-major waltz, no. 13 in the Valses sentimentales, D 779. The goal is to make more vivid through examples a critical position that came to the fore in music theory during the course of the 1980s: a contrast between a widely accepted “diversity” standard and the closed, ideologically bound habits of descriptive and interpretative practice associated with classical pc-set analysis and Schenkerian analysis.

Neumeyer, David. 2014. Table of Compositions with Rising LinesA table that gathers more than 900 examples of musical compositions with cadences that use ascending melodic gestures.

Neumeyer, David. 2014. Complex upper-voice cadential figures in traditional tonal musicHarmony and voice-leading are integrated in the hierarchical networks of Schenkerian analyses: the top (most abstract) level of the hierarchy is a fundamental structure that combines a single upper voice and a bass voice  in counterpoint. A pattern that occurs with increasing frequency beginning in the later eighteenth century tends to confer equal status on two upper voices, one from ^5, the other from ^3. Analysis using such three-part voice leading in the background often provides richer, more complete, and more musically convincing analyses.

Neumeyer, David. 2012. Tonal Frames in 18th and 19th Century MusicTonal frames are understood here as schemata comprising the "a" level elements of a time-span or prolongation reduction in the system of Lerdahl and Jackendoff, Generalized Theory of Tonal Music (1983), as amended and extended by Lerdahl (Tonal Pitch Space (2001)). I use basic forms from these sources as a starting point but call them tonal frames in order to make a clear distinction, because I have a stricter view of the role of register.

Neumeyer, David. 2010/2016. John Playford Dancing Master: Rising LinesMusical examples with rising cadence gestures from John Playford’s Dancing Master (1651). This set was extracted from the article “Rising Lines in Tonal Frameworks of Traditional Tonal Music.” A revised version of this was published in 2016: link.

Neumeyer, David. 2009. "Thematic Reading, Proto-backgrounds, and Transformations." Music Theory Spectrum 31/2: 284-324.

Neumeyer, David. 1987a. "The Ascending Urlinie,” Journal of Music Theory 31/2: 275-303.