"Brahms in the New Century": A Conference Report

[1] The conference "Brahms in the New Century" was organized by the American Brahms Society (http://brahms.unh.edu/), hosted by the CUNY Graduate Center's Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation (http://brookcenter.gc.cuny.edu/), and sponsored by Ball State University's College of Fine Arts (http://cms.bsu.edu/Academics/CollegesandDepartments/CFA.aspx/).(1) Participants heard thirty presentations on a wide array of topics concerning Brahms, his milieu, and his music. Given the readership of Music Theory Online, the following report will emphasize the analytical and theoretical papers before providing a brief overview of some of the historical and performance-orientated papers.[2] The last two decades have witnessed impressive advances in the study of Brahms's manipulations of rhythm and meter. (See my overview of recent publications, Platt 2009, 115-20.) Many of these studies have been shaped by the rhythmic theories and analytical methodologies pioneered by Harald Krebs (1999) and Richard Cohn (2001). Aside from the influence of such innovations, the papers on the conference's Rhythm and Meter session were related in a number of ways: Sam Ng and Richard Cohn scrutinized the structure of five-measure phrases, while Ryan McClelland and Cohn examined the nature and function of Brahms's hemiolas. Both of these last two papers drew on Channan Willner's (2007) insightful analyses of hemiola in the music of Handel, Bach, and Francois Couperin.(2) The three papers together explored rhythmic and metric techniques in a wide range of Brahms's compositions, including the first movement of the op. 5 Piano Sonata (Cohn); the C-sharp minor Intermezzo, op. 117, no. 3, the G-minor Ballade, op. 118, no. 3, and the E-flat major Rhapsody, op. 119, no. 3 (Ng); and a broad sampling of chamber and orchestral pieces, including the Piano Trio in C minor, op. 101 (McClelland). The session did not deal with any works for voice, and although recent publications by Yonatan Malin (2006 and 2010) and Cohn (2001) have examined some of the expressive rhythmic structures in selected lieder, it seems that there is still significant work to be done with texted genres.[3] Analyses of brief excerpts of Brahms's compositions have been a feature of many of Cohn's innovative articles on rhythm and chromatic harmony (see for example Cohn 1996, 13-15). His paper at the conference, "Hemiola Varietals in Early Brahms" (which had originally been titled "Ten Measures from Opus 5") concentrated on a five-measure phrase starting in m. 7 of the op. 5 Piano Sonata's first movement. Cohn theorized that this phrase is structured through a "staged combination of three hemiola techniques. " The second of these stages involves the recognition of an embedded hemiola (see Willner 2007) in which a two-bar unit is inserted into a three-bar unit to create the 5-bar phrase. The sophistication of this rhythmic structure led Cohn to question a conclusion in Walter Frisch's pioneering study of Brahms's metrical displacements. Although Frisch examined rhythmically intricate passages from Brahms's early works including opp. 1 and 9, he concluded, "It is not really until the early 1860s . . . that the composer begins to explore such 'progressive' techniques in a more systematic and thoroughgoing fashion" 1990, 142-43). Cohn had already questioned Frisch's thesis at the conclusion of his earlier discussion of the rhythmic structure of the op. 5 movement's closing section (2002, 7). Going further, in this paper and the earlier article, Cohn also questioned Tovey's (1929, 70) classification of works leading up to the op. 34 Piano Quintet as the "first maturity," a judgment that most other scholars have adopted without question.(3)[4] McClelland's "Hemiola as Agent of Metric Resolution in the Music of Brahms" drew on Willner's thesis that a hemiola may effectively serve to right preceding rhythmic dissonances, and thus to ease metric tensions before a cadence. …