The Submediant Complex: Its Musical and Poetic Roles in Schubert's Songs

Abstract

Universally composition, motives resonate not only at the surface of a work but also at its deepest levels.1 To date, motivic analysis has commonly involved identifying a particular melodic gesture as an integral compositional feature, and then tracing its various literal restatements or transformed repetitions throughout the levels of musical structure. Many analyses focused exclusively on transposed repetitions, in which the scale-degree relationship between the motive and the tonic is maintained in each of the subsequent keys. In untransposed repetitions, however, the reverse is true: the pitch classes of a motive are retained while their scale degrees are redefined in subsequent tonicized keys. Recurrent pitch classes are frequently diatonic, though non-diatonic pitches may also recur, and, indeed, are often more aurally prominent precisely because of their foreign nature. Recent studies gone so far as to consider a single recurrent diatonic or chromatic pitch class as motivic, though it may be argued that such views unnaturally isolate the chosen pitch class from its musical context, thus possibly inhibiting, rather than enriching that note's transformational potential.2 While several analysts acknowledged the important role chromatic pitch-class motives may play in a composition, many consider them anomalies, unique to the composition under investigation.3 The notion of untransposed motives was discussed as early as Schenker's Harmony (1906), in which the author recognizes long-range motivic associations between recurrences of the same pitch class even though in radically dissimilar musical contexts.4 Then in Free Composition (1935) Schenker addresses the issue more directly, writing that repetitions of chromatic pitch classes have a far-reaching effect in synthesis. They contrast strongly with the repetitions usually taught today, which tend only to restrict the scope of synthesis.5 That Schenker points out repetitions of a single chromatic pitch or dyad demonstrates that he viewed such an association as significant, particularly when the repetition occurs much later in a composition or in an unusual voice-leading context.6 This study focuses on the issue of chromatic pitch class and its interaction with

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