Gebrauchs-Formulas

• Published in: Music theory spectrum Vol. 33; no. 2; pp. 191 - 199
• Main Author: Gjerdingen, Robert O.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University of California Press 01.10.2011; Oxford University Press
• Subjects: Apprenticeship; Apprenticeships; Art music; Composition; Keyboard instruments; Memory; Music; Music composition; Musical phrases; Musical recordings; Musicians; Musicians & conductors; Responses
• ISSN: 0195-6167; 1533-8339
• DOI: 10.1525/mts.2011.33.2.191

1630: [T]he actor must see to it that his mind controls his memory (which dispenses the treasure of memorized phrases over the vast field of opportunities constantly offered by comedy).4 Elsewhere I have detailed how eighteenth-century musicians built up their "treasure of memorized phrases" through long apprenticeship to masters who taught them using an array of pedagogical materials known, in the Italian tradition, as regole, partimenti, solfeggi, and intavolature.5 Regole were exemplars of basic patterns such as cadences and various sequences. When Stravinsky's teacher Kalafati chose to employ the Romanesca schema in a large sonata for piano, he did so in a way that calls attention to it (Example 9). [...] when Tchaikovsky, in the first movement of one of the repertory's most heart-rending and psychologically intense symphonies (No. 6, 1893), chose to offer a theme of hope and redemption (characteristically marked teneramente, molto cantabile, con espansione), he laid it out in a form barely distinguishable from that of small Italian minuets from the first half of the eighteenth century: statement, restatement, Fonte digression, return of statement.