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<jats:p>The reification and theorization of the octatonic scale, arguably one of the principal organizational devices of twentieth-century music, have been long in coming. Rimsky-Korsakov was the first to describe the scale, in an 1867 letter, discussing its use as a Leitmotiv in the symphonic poem Sadko. Stravinsky used the collection as the basis for many of his groundbreaking works, especially The Rite of Spring, but never acknowledged the fundamental role that the "Rimsky-Korsakov scale" played in his compositional technique. It took another thirty years for Messiaen to identify the collection as one of the "modes of limited transposition." And another twenty years would pass before Arthur Berger, in a 1963 article, coined the name "octatonic scale."The post-Berger generation of scholars, beginning with van den Toorn and Taruskin, have continued to shed light on the functional and formal uses of the octatonic scale. Taruskin has traced the influence of Schubert's and Liszt's use of harmonic progressions based on mediant and diminished-seventh relations on Rimsky-Korsakov, who in turn influenced a whole generation of early modernist Russians. However, the fact that Rimsky-Korsakov never wrote down in any systematic way the theory underlying the scale that bore his name--in the same way that he codified his theories of orchestration--meant that its presence in early modernist compositions, although used frequently and conspicuously by his followers, remained obscure to those outside his circle. Therefore, the presence of the octatonic collection in the music of non-Russian early modernist composers cannot be easily explained, and the sources of influence are harder to trace. Interestingly, it appears that an important historical link between nineteenth- and twentieth-century octatonic composition--a link with particular implications for the presence of octatonicism in early modernist French music--is found in the music and theoretical writings of Prince Edmond de Polignac (1834--1901), an aristocrat and amateur French composer, who, in 1879, penned not only the first pervasively octatonic composition, but also what appears to be the first treatise on octatonic theory; he went on to write several other compositions based on the "gammes chromatico-diatoniques." In 1894 one of PolignacÕs contemporaries, musicologist Alexandre de Bertha, wrote and lectured extensively about his "discovery" of the "gammes enharmo-niques." In this article, I examine the reception of the works and ideas of Polignac and Bertha by contemporary critics and composers, and PolignacÕs role as an important precursor of modern octatonic theory.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article explores and explains August Halm's and Heinrich Schenker's differing opinions of Brahms and Bruckner based on Halm's notions of corporeality and spirituality, body and soul, in music, and on differences in symphonic style between the two composers. Corporeality manifests itself in thematic gestures whose contours trace distinctive shapes in music's imaginary space, resulting in the impression of depth, something metaphorically tangible. When the dynamic course of a passage is clearly manifest in the aural immediacy of its rhythmic and thematic gestures, Halm acknowledges its corporeality (Korperlichkeit). When a work's dynamic course is concealed or musically too subtle to be readily perceived, it exemplifies a different quality, spirituality (Geistigkeit), which resides in between the notes and occurs, so to speak, subterraneously. Schenker's Urlinie was thus for Halm a case of unnecessarily "spiritualizing the spiritual yet again."Halm's advocacy for Bruckner's symphonies as marking the beginning of "a new era and culture" was incomprehensible for Schenker, who conceded to Bruckner only a "very modest power of invention." SchenkerÕs unqualified enthusiasm for Brahms, on the other hand, the "last master of German composition," gave Halm a "painful jolt." For Halm, Bruckner is a "cosmic epicist," for Schenker "too much a foreground composer." Letters between Schenker and Halm as well as other, hitherto unknown archival materials among Halm's estate papers delineate Halm's views in contrast to those of Schenker.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the title characters conceive their union as a direct linkage between self and world, a linkage that involves a crucial short circuit, bypassing societal conventions and institutions, and echoing the nineteenth-century Germanic disdain for "Civilization" as opposed to "Culture." Facilitating this Wagnerian short circuit is a fluid musical discourse that can seem, alternately and even simultaneously, either to simulate a single consciousness, in which impressions and memory freely commingle, or to provide a deep sense of the world, bypassing surfaces to evoke a kind of world-sublime (or "world-breath," as Isolde would have it). Generally absent from Wagner's music are the correlatives of "Civilization": well-articulated forms and other markers of conventional musical types, which would disrupt the sense of musical flow essential to WagnerÕs "Gesamtkunstwelt."In this article, I trace the roots of Wagner's practice both in German Idealist thought and in Beethoven, especially as received through a totalizing mode of Beethoven reception fostered by Wagner, in which Beethoven's "voice" seems fully coextensive with his music while resonating on a deep level with the Germanic Welt. I then sketch two separately developed modes of post-Wagnerian dramatic music. I first describe how Mahler's novelistic musical discourse sometimes imposes a sense of continuity on the broken surfaces of a world through an overpowering musical "flow," a process that derives from the ways that Leitmotivs emerge from the fluid orchestral fabric of Wagner's music, but reverses the latter's sense of intrinsic embeddedness by beginning with the sounding surface of the experienced world. I then briefly lay out how and why WagnerÕs technique has proven so useful for film music and consider the ways that the overtly Wagnerian scoring of Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981) supports a particularly Wagnerian retelling of the Arthurian legends.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The Prelude to the third act of Parsifal is one of Wagner's most advanced essays in expanded tonality. One author has described it as "set[ting] foot in atonal territory as it re-explores the melancholy, disjointed polytonal idiom of the introduction to the third act of Tristan," and a noted analyst has suggested that it is motion around the diminished-seventh chord including Bb rather than the tonic triad of Bb minor that defines the background structure of the Prelude. This music also raises issues of form and expressive meaning that have yet to be thoroughly addressed. A valuable means of approaching the Prelude is through Wagner's surviving compositional documents, particularly the individual sketches for the Prelude that preceded the writing-out of his first continuous draft for the third act (the Kompositionsskizze [Composition Draft]). These manuscripts are held in the Wagner-Archiv at Bayreuth. When these sketches are transcribed and compared with the detailed record contained in Cosima Wagner's diary entries, insight can be gained into the way that Wagner composed the Prelude, during late October 1878. This article shows in detail how the Prelude was composed on the basis of sketch sources that are virtually complete. It is supported by several facsimiles of Wagner's sketches, transcriptions, analytical graphs, and music examples. The study indicates that the "melancholy, disjointed polytonal" idiom of the Prelude is coordinated with a framework of associated tonalities reaching across vast stretches of musical time. These include not only the Bb-minor idiom of Titurel's burial, but also the associated tonality of Parsifal's Prophecy motive. The structural background of the Prelude to act III of Parsifal is not simply a diminished-seventh prolongation, but a tensional framework of motivic combinations and rotational cycles that effectively convey the bleak wandering and promise of deliverance that lie at the core of the drama.</jats:p>