Harmony in Haydn and Mozart by David Damschroder (review)

David Damschroder’s third installment in what has amounted to a trilogy of interconnected monographs, Harmony in Haydn and Mozart (hereafter, Haydn and Mozart), is an inspiring work of music theory and analysis that casts yet another new light on select compositions by two late-eighteenth-century masters. Based on the historical insights from his Thinking About Harmony (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Damschroder then developed his own method of harmonic analysis that incorporates the theories of Heinrich Schenker into an analytical forum on the music of a specific composer in Harmony in Schubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; hereafter, Schubert). Haydn and Mozart adds to Schubert in Damschroder’s goal to help us “understand the logic through which the composer has set down a composition’s pitches” (p. ix). In addition, Damschroder distinguishes between Schubert and Haydn and Mozart in that the latter is more focused on demonstrating connections between harmony and form.

The larger organization of Haydn and Mozart is in two parts, which, in this sense, parallels the structure of Schubert. The first and longest part, “Methodological Orientation” (chapters 1–4) familiarizes readers—or those “serious listeners and performers who seek to develop fresh ways of thinking about this music, and thereby deepening their capacity to bring it to life in performance” (p. vii)—with his own combination of German Stufentheorie and Schenkerian analysis. The final and shortest part, “Master pieces” (chapters 5–10) compares Damschroder’s analysis of five complete instrumental movements and one opera scene to previously-published readings of these works by the following respected music theorists: James Webster (chapter 5); Robert O. Gjerdingen (chapter 6); V. Kofi Agawu and Michael Spitzer (chapter 7); Carl Schachter (chapter 8); Leonard Meyer (chapter 9); and James Hepokoski, Warren Darcy, and Lauri Suurpää (chapter 10). Damschroder also includes a lengthy bibliography and multiple indexes of in-text references to important concepts and to the analyzed works of Haydn and Mozart.

As with any new approach or systematic analytical endeavor, though, a decent amount of patience is required, and Damschroder is the first to admit it: “Though ultimately an analytical fluency will develop, in the initial stages one needs to proceed slowly and methodically in working through the substance of a composition” (p. ix). He assists the reader immensely by providing a detailed section in the preface (as he did in Schubert) that points out some of his innovative typographical conventions and frequently-used abbreviations. By far, however, the biggest challenge for contemporary students and teachers familiar with traditional Schenkerian (i.e., linear) and Roman numeral (i.e., functional) analysis is Damschroder’s preference for labeling harmonic sonorities in a manner that subverts traditional figured bass symbols and the designation of triadic and seventh-chord inversions. In other words, he prefers to label chords in root position regardless of the actual inversion of the chord, while also simplifying the number of available Roman numerals to those involved in a basic harmonic progression (e.g., in major keys: I, IV, V, and occasionally II).

As he discusses in chapter 1, Damschroder’s concept of harmonic “assertion” cautions against the quite standard textbook practice of labeling all sonorities in a passage with a Roman numeral (p. 8). Rather, we must ask whether a certain chord embellishes another chord that asserts itself as a harmony based entirely on contextual realities, which coincide with his wonderfully illustrated Schenkerian graphs. For example, Damschroder uses a IV ^5–6 label to show that the subdominant is prolonged (i.e., embellished) by the supertonic (II), which arrives on a more foreground level during the “6-phase” of IV, on its way to the dominant (V) for contextual and voice leading reasons (p. 4). He thus demonstrates a dual hierarchy of linear analysis and harmony, where the former serves to embellish the latter through prolongational or sequential motion. The idea of multiple hierarchies is at the core of Damschroder’s thesis and how he understands...