Analysis by Key: Another Look at Modulation

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CARL SCHACHTER ANALYSIS BY KEY: ANOTHER LOOK AT MODULATION Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance (T. S. Eliot) Until fairly recently, most musicians thought of Heinrich Schenker (if they thought of him at all) as the theorist who reduced whole pieces to three notes and denied that they modulated to different keys. Nowadays anyone familiar with music theory knows that Schenker did more than analyse the first movement of the Eroica as 'Three Blind Mice' with a college education. But many still believe that he rejected outright the concept of key change, and indeed there is more justification for this misconception than for the other. Schenker was, to say the least, highly critical of the way the concept had been generally formulated and applied, and his own theory greatly reduces its scope. Near the beginning of Free Composition, for example, he writes as follows: But the most baneful error of conventional theory is its recourse to 'keys' when, in its lack of acquaintance with background and middleground, it finds no other means of explanation. Often its helplessness is so great that it abandons even this most comfortable means of avoiding difficulties. Nothing is as indicative of the state of theory and analysis as this absurd abundance of 'keys'. The concept of the 'key' as a higher unity in the foreground is completely foreign to theory: it is even capable of designating a single unprolonged chord as a key. 1 Although Schenker thus acknowledged that keys might appear as 'higher unities in the foreground', his own work - especially in its later phases - sheds little light on the compositional role of such higher unities; nor have later Schenkerians concerned themselves very much with this question. The time is perhaps ripe for theorists and other musicians to take another look at the notion MUSIC ANALYSIS 6:3, 1987 289
CARI SCHACHTER of modulation and to see how far a greater emphasis on key change can be incorporated into a monotonal approach like Schenker's. That hearing modulations belongs to our moment-by-moment experience of tonal music is so obvious as to need no comment. But a deep and intense hearing of music cannot be only from a moment-by-moment perspective, and existing conceptions of modulation have surely not done justice to the piece of music as a 'com-position' - something put together to form a unity. The Tonic as Centre 8 " 8 To hear something in a key, we have to be aware of a tonic note, a pitch that functions as a centre of orientation to which, directly or indirectly, we relate all the other pitches . The inference of a tonal centre can result from several factors, singly or in combination. One factor, mentioned by a host of authors including Schenker, is the presence of a diminished fifth or tritone between 7 and 4, expressed either simultaneously (as in a V7 chord) or in succession (as in a progression of IV or II tO v).2 This diminished fifth is indigenous to major and must be imported into minor to offset that mode's tendency to gravitate to its third scale ste?, a tebndency produced by minor's own indigenous diminished fifth between 2 and 6. It is easy to hear how the diminished fifth clinches the key in b. 3 of the C major Prelude from Bach's WTC I (Ex. 1). Ex. 1 Bach: WTC I, Prelude I, bs 1-4 + 11 - 8 8 1 Of course our awareness of the tonic cannot come from a disembodied diminished fifth; we must hear it in a context that includes other pitches as well. In the Bach excerpt, all of the notes of the C major scale appear by b.3; in addition, b. 1 contains the tonic triad. Beginning with tonic harmony, though it is the norm, is by no means a prerequisite to our immediate feeling for the key. Chopin's Prelude Op.28, No. 18 sounds unmistakably in F minor at least from the end of b. 1, though a stable tonic chord does not appear until the very end of the piece. The dominant ninth, with its tritone Bb-E, locates F as the tonic pitch (although the only Fs in the citation are passing notes), and the emphasized DS s suggest - even in the absence of Ab- that this F is going to be minor (Ex. 2). Tonal music's power to create a sense of future through the specificity of the . . expectatlons lt can arouse has no parallel in any other kind of music of which I am aware; that its signals are at least as often contradicted as they are confirmed 290 MUSIC ANALYSIS 6: 3, 1987 5th
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Analysis by Key: Another Look at Modulation

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