Freakish Variations on a 'Grand Cadence' Prototype in Haydn's String Quartets

Autor: Floyd Grave
Rok vydání: 2009
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of Musicological Research. 28:119-145
ISSN: 1547-7304
0141-1896
DOI: 10.1080/01411890902913115
Popis: Notwithstanding the virtues of ensemble balance, decorum, and registral restraint with which the eighteenth-century string quartet is associated, Haydn's works in this medium sometimes call on the first violin to ascend to a musical stratosphere (above a2, an otherwise normal ceiling), often in connection with whimsical variants of a standard formula that has been identified by Robert O. Gjerdingen as a galant-style “grand cadence.” In Haydn's apparent adaptations of the schema, its elements are sometimes subjected to comical exaggerations that have the effect of undermining rather than reinforcing the points of rhetorical climax and structural closure to which they are connected. The overdrawn climaxes and register-crossing leaps typically involved may be heard as object lessons in the dangers of hyperbole—of trying so hard as to become inappropriately absorbed in the exertion itself—and perhaps as part of the composer's effort to define boundaries of taste and propriety by the very act of overreaching a...
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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