Chapter 3 challenges the critical commonplace in accounts of the lyric that Schubert’s thematic groups compose closed, self-contained entities that yield static forms.In particular, it re-examines the perceived equivalence of the term ‘closed’ with cadential closure and the Perfect Authentic Cadence (PAC). It argues that Schubert’s lyric forms compose ’closed’ ABA structures while simultaneously undermining or downplaying the role of cadence as a marker of finality. The first section clears the theoretical path by examining the primary and secondary parameters of closure and their non-congruence. Three analytical case studies follow and address, respectively, the concept of functional retrogression in Schubert’s earliest quartets, the composer’s particular ways of articulating or downplaying the medial caesura (MC), and his use of the elided PAC MC, explored through the formally unorthodox Quartettsatz. Each analytical case study demonstrates the destabilisation of moments of punctuation in Schubert’s lyric forms as well as the charged conflict between tonal and rhetorical parameters, which often creates a critical tension between punctuation and continuation.

This chapter discusses three stylistic hallmarks of Clara Schumann’s songs: (1) a fascination with expansive themes; (2) a tendency to modify cadences so that themes pushe onward to the next and decisive closure arrives only at the end of songs; and (3) an inventive use of the piano. I explore each of these hallmarks via brief analyses of representative songs, in preparation for the more detailed music analyses in later chapters.

This chapter considers the rhythms of George Eliot’s prose; it shows that George Eliot had a fine ear for the cadences of her writing and that she controlled the fluency and blockage in the progress of her sentences to variously suggestive effects. Her rhythmical prose responds to the balance her realism strikes between immediate description and reflective narration, between dreamy ideals and difficult realities. The tension that her characters experience between a willingness to struggle on and a desire to relent is also registered in the fluency and friction of her sentences.

One of the most striking aspects of Clara Schumann’s songs is the way they flow. They tend to move in four-bar phrases, but each four-bar phrase is connected seamlessly with the one that follows it. One way that she creates this feeling of seamless continuity is by weakening or avoiding cadences at the ends of musical sections and the poetic stanzas associated with them, fusing together adjacent sections and stanzas by softening, smudging or even erasing the musical and poetic punctuation marks at the end of them. This chapter considers how and why she does this. Through a close analysis of two representative songs – ‘Warum willst du and’re fragen’, Op. 12 No. 11, and ‘Ich hab’ in deinem Auge’, Op. 13 No. 5 – it highlights the strategies that she uses to join together sections and stanzas, as well as the various ways that those strategies relate to the poetry. In so doing, the chapter not only reveals a crucial hallmark of Clara Schumann’s song aesthetic, but also ponders a question that has been largely neglected in recent studies of romantic form: how do musical and poetic closure relate to one another?

This chapter is the first of three that set out the basic building blocks of musical syntax in Renaissance music, beginning with those connected to pitch. The first section sets out the key concepts of music theory dating back to the time of Guido of Arezzo in the eleventh century, whose pertinence endures into the Renaissance (thus, the gamut, mode, the species of fourth and fifth, the so-called Guidonian Hand, and the hexachord). The next section lays out the complex (and at time fraught) relationship between these concepts and composed polyphony, laying bare in particular the tension between modes (which were initially adapted from Greek theory to classify plainchant) and polyphony. This is seen most obviously in the functioning of the most fundamental element of counterpoint, the cadence. The chapter concludes by considering other key elements of pitch-treatment, including musica ficta, dissonance treamtment, and enhanced or expanded chromatic practice.

The discussion of cadence in Chapter 4 leads to a consideration of voice-names, ranges, and functions as key compositional and stylistic determinants. The discantus/tenor relationship constitutes polyphony’s fundamental framework; the nomenclature, ranges, and functions of the voices surrounding it condition the evolution of musical style during the Renaissance. This chapter traces the changes in these parameters to c.1600, showing their audible impact on musical style. At their heart are two fundamental shifts, the first from a texture comprising two registral tiers in the early fifteenth century to the three-tier setup first introduced to continental polyphony c.1440 with the dissemination of the English ‘Missa Caput’, and the second during the last quarter of the century with the emergence of a four-voice texture with a separate range for each voice. The stylistic implications of these devopments are considered in detail, continuing into the next century with the stabilization of the handling of texture into a typology of mode, range, and polyphony, independent of the number of voices present.

Deals with the perceived conventional and formulaic aspects of the style, starting with a discussion (and defence) of convention itself. I show how through various forms of distortion and contextual manipulation, conventions and formulas may be renewed. One such convention is the grammatical essential of the cadence, which is often refreshed when a simple, understated cadential formulation appears to undercut a preceding passage of a brilliant or emotionally heated nature. I consider how this and other such patterns demonstrate a taste for reduction, ‘to say more with less’, showing a creative distrust of a certain kind of rhetorical eloquence. Another way of understanding such manoeuvres is that they compel the attention of the listener, and this term is found frequently in writings on music of the time. Its opposite state, boredom, is, I argue, ‘written into’ some music in the form of distractions and non sequiturs. A further type of renewal of attention can be achieved by mixing up or conflating the three formal functions of beginning, middle and ending, and the final portion of the chapter considers the handling of such functional signs.