1.2 Moving beyond the foreground
As you know, the essence of analysing the foreground of a piece of music lies in distinguishing between consonant and dissonant notes. Dissonant notes, whether passing notes, neighbour notes or suspensions, are all subsidiary to the consonant note to which they resolve. The same goes for arpeggiations, where the subsidiary notes are consonant. In all of these cases, we can say that the subsidiary notes elaborate the main (consonant) note.
The big difference, when we look deeper into the structure of the music, is that we discover that some consonant harmonies (notes or chords) elaborate, or are subsidiary to, the main harmonies. This is what defines the ‘middleground’. You may have noticed that this was the case when we analysed the opening of the last movement of Mozart's Sonata in B flat, K570, in the video clips in AA314_1.
Activity 1
Example 1 is the score of bars 1–4 of the third movement of K570 and Examples 2 and 3 show part of the multi-layered analysis built up in the video clips. Listen to the extract below, and then listen through three more times, first following the score (Example 1), then Level 4 (Example 3), then Level 2 (Example 2). Why does Level 2 omit some of the notes found in Level 4?
Click to listen to Extract 1
Discussion
As was explained in the video clips, the notes that have been removed from Level 4 to give Level 2 are passing notes, which lead in each case between different versions of the same chord. Even though these ‘passing harmonies’ are consonant within the score (at the foreground), we might say that these notes are dissonant at the deeper level. Strictly speaking, this means that Level 2 is a middleground structure, whilst Level 4 is a foreground structure.
Throughout this course, you will be making distinctions between main harmonies and the subsidiary harmonies that prolong them. Just as in AA314_1, the most important consideration in doing this is to trust what your ear tells you about the music. Analysis is not a mechanical or abstract activity; it is rooted in careful listening. Always ask yourself exactly what you hear in any individual passage, and then how this can be expressed using analytical language or notation. Some new techniques will be needed to analyse middleground harmonic structures, but we will still be dealing in this course with relatively short extracts from Mozart's piano sonatas. Although I want to show how Mozart organises whole self-contained phrases, those I have chosen are no longer than eight bars. The techniques you will learn here, however, can be applied to much longer stretches of music. Do not worry, though, that you will be expected to produce complicated analytical graphs yourself. The aim of all the AA314 courses presenting voice-leading theory is to enable you to understand what an analytical graph says about the music. The analytical activities you are asked to do yourself are all directed towards this end, and as a result, there is much more emphasis on reading graphs presented to you rather than writing or annotating your own.