[Friday afternoon, 1 November, 2:00-5:00, Eighteenth Century Studies, paper
2 of 4]
MOZART'S USE OF RECURRING MELODIC PATTERNS AND VOICE-LEADING PARADIGMS
IN HIS HARMONIZATION EXERCISES FOR BARBARA PLOYER
Christopher Park
Mannes College of Music
The Ployer Studies, a manuscript collection now published in the Neue Mozart
Ausgabe, contain exercises in melodic harmonization that Mozart gave to
a student, presumably Barbara Ployer, in the spring of 1784. In the melodies,
Mozart includes slightly different versions of recurring melodic patterns.
The voice leading underlying these patterns resembles the note-against-note
relationship found in the first species of counterpoint. Frequently, the
intervallic relationship between the outer voices produces voice-leading
paradigms--contrapuntal/harmonic formulae that consistently support recurring
patterns.
Mozart used melodic patterns and voice-leading paradigms to teach melodic
harmonization. After determining the voice-leading paradigms derived from
Mozart's own settings of the melodic patterns, I show how Mozart's corrections
of Ployer's work led her to set the appropriate paradigms to the given melodies.
The melodic patterns in Mozart's exercises resemble schemata discussed by
Robert Gjerdingen in A Classic Turn of Phrase: Music and the Psychology
of Convention. Gjerdingen uses a graphic technique called network representation
to indicate how a schema or melodic pattern functions within a particular
context. This paper offers a modification of the network representation
in which the structural voice leading of the passage plays a prominent role.
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ARB: 10/21/96