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The objects of this study are the thirty-four gigues of J. S. Bach. This corpus of pieces represents one musician's encounter with the most engrossing dance genre of his time, and by coming to terms with this repertory I develop analytical perspectives with wide relevance to music of Europe in the early eighteenth century. The dissertation has a clear analytical focus but it also speaks to methodological issues of the relationship between theory and analysis, and the problem of reading a creative practice out of fixed works. Its main theoretical commitment is to middle-out perspectives on musical process. The dissertation's main themes are form, hypermeter, and schema. Its primary contribution to music theory lies in setting out an original position on the analysis of hypermeter, and advancing approaches to form and schema that are consistent with that position. "Form" and "schema" refer to compositional formulas that associate with hypermeter on the larger and smaller scales respectively, with observational windows as wide as the first half of a binary movement and as narrow as a couple of bars. Chapter 2 addresses the form of Bach's cello gigues. I arrive at a complete model of formal functions and phrase rhythm by first considering the turning points in the rhetoric of Fortspinnung. Chapter 4 addresses the chain of fifths sequence in Bach's harpsichord gigues. I analyze over fifty sequence passages, develop a typology of their contrapuntal frameworks, and consider the connections from sequence passages to subsequent events. These substantive analytical case studies flank the discussion of hypermeter. Chapter 3 includes analyses of Bach's orchestral gigue and two chamber-sonata gigues but is the most purely theoretical chapter. Its arguments are relevant to the study of meter and hypermeter across the whole "common practice" period. Since Chapters 2-4 address subsets of the corpus, a comprehensive overview is entrusted to Chapter 1, which also introduces the dissertation. Chapter 1's overview anchors the more specialized chapters in a wider reflection on the ability of compositional technique to inflect different styles, idioms, genres, and affects. / Music

An important part of the recent growth in scholarship on meter focuses on reconstructing 18th-century listening practices. Danuta Mirka (2009) studies contemporary accounts of meter in theory treatises to build a model of 18th-century metric listening, while Stefan Love (2016) takes a corpus studies approach, arguing that surveying repertoire provides a more accurate view of meter than 18th-century theorists. But despite the known debt that much 18th-century art music owes to dance and dance music, Mirka and Love only briefly mention dance. In touching so lightly on dance, these and other authors overlook the more fundamental connection between meter and movement. In this paper I examine late 18th-century French contredanses and their music to propose a model of contemporary metric hearing that unites literal and musical motion. There are three features of the contredanse and dancing in general that support their relevance to 18th-century metric experience. First is the contredanse’s role in society—recent writers on 18th-century music often present the minuet as the premier dance of the century, but though it remained the most aristocratic dance, by the middle of the century it had been surpassed in popularity by the contredanse. Second, contredanses involved multiple dancers moving simultaneously, and music helped them coordinate their movements. As a result, hypermetrical schemas matching hypermeasures with dance moves could develop. Finally, the experience of moving in time with musical meter likely had a positive effect on dancers’ ability to find meter in music in general.

I denna uppsats har jag sammanställt olika teorier kring rytmik och metrik för att skapa en metod för analys av klassiska verk. Denna metod använder jag sedan på musik av Hector Berlioz för att undersöka om det finns rytmiska och metriska abstrakt som står ut. Vidare används resultatet från analysen för att skriva ett eget stycke som ska reflektera det studerade styckets rytmiska karaktär. Under projektet upptäcker jag bland annat att aspekter av frasrytm är något svårare att inkorporera i ett nytt stycke än andra aspekter och reflekterar slutligen kring hur metoden kan utvidgas och förbättras, samt kring mitt förhållande till metoden ur ett konstnärligt perspektiv.

This dissertation explores middleground functionality of six-four chords by combining a voice-leading approach with hypermetrical analysis. By acknowledging the functional ambiguity of certain six-four chords that do not fit into traditional classifications (Aldwell and Schachter's cadential, consonant, passing, and neighboring six-four), or that can be seen as fitting in more than one category, I show that our interpretation of deeper-level structures is contingent upon how we choose to hear the functionality of these harmonies. Three types of six-four chords are introduced: cadential/consonant, passing/cadential, and neighboring/consonant six-four, illustrated by works by Robert Schumann, Brahms, and Saint-Säens. Each pair refers to an ambiguity—the same chord invites two alternative harmonic interpretations. I call these chords nontraditional in the sense that they shed more light on the musical structure with their ambiguity, rather than when being wedged into a single type of a six-four chord. This approach renews the ways of hearing the malleability of nonconventional Romantic structures and permits us to trace the path of each work as a unique tonal trajectory from a listener's perspective.