A scherzo movement consists of three parts: scherzo–trio–scherzo. In this chapter we will be examining the scherzo portions of three movements in detail from the perspectives of formal design and voice-leading structure. The trios, which offer foils to the scherzi, will be discussed, but without accompanying graphs of their voice-leading structures. The three movements, which differ in their instrumentations and character, are the following: (1) the third movement of the Piano Sonata in A Minor, D. 845, written in the early months of 1825 and published that autumn as op. 42 with a dedication to Archduke Rudolph of Austria; (2) the third movement of Schubert's last and most famous chamber work, the C-Major String Quintet, D. 956 (1828), which was first performed publically at the Musikverein in Vienna on November 17, 1850, and published three years later as op. posth. 163; and (3) the third movement of the C-Major Symphony, D. 944 (“The Great”) which was written over a four-year period, 1825–28, and first conducted by Felix Mendelssohn at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on March 21, 1839.

The formal design of a scherzo is designated as ||: A :||: B Aʹ :||, traditionally referred to as rounded binary form, “binary” because it consists of two parts that are repeated and “rounded” because of the return of A, normally with a concurrent return to I, in the second part. However, from the perspective of the voice leading, which does not account for the repeats of parts 1 or 2, the underlying design is ternary: A B Aʹ. The formal design of the scherzo movement from the C-Major Symphony, D. 944, is an expansion of this basic scheme, that is, sonata form. From the perspective of Schenkerian voice-leading structure, the first two parts of the form, A and B, are united by the interruption of the fundamental structure (and its subsequent prolongation in movements in the major mode), and the final portion completes the motion to closure. This can be demonstrated as follows:

From the perspectives of formal design and underlying structure, there is nothing that distinguishes these movements from scherzos by, say, Beethoven or Mendelssohn. What identifies them as Schubert is his distinctive harmonic language, particularly as revealed in D. 845, and their character, especially in the trio of the C-Major Quintet.

The subjects of this chapter are the first movements of the Piano Sonata in A Minor (D. 845) and the Piano Sonata in B-flat Major (D. 960). The first of these two was written in the spring of 1825 and published the following year as op. 42, establishing Schubert as a serious composer for the keyboard. From the perspective of form, this movement adheres quite closely to the “classical model” (my type 1 as described in chapter 4) with the modification that there is an overlap between the development and recapitulation sections. There are several other features of this movement that demonstrate items presented in the first part of this book: the interchange, motivic development, and phrase expansion. From a structural perspective, an interesting issue is identification of the structural close. The interpretation presented here suggests that the coda, which normally confirms closure, functions as a gigantic parenthetical digression delaying closure until the very end. The B-flat Sonata, written along with the sonatas in C minor and A major shortly before his death, has become Schubert's most famous and most frequently performed work for piano. This movement is a prime example of the threekey exposition (my type 2), one of Schubert's innovations in the treatment of sonata form. An important feature of this movement, the expansion of the G♭–F motive into deeper levels of the design and structure, was discussed in chapter 3. Another feature not yet discussed is the appearance of tonic harmony in conjunction with the opening measures of the first theme late in the development section. This requires explanation. Also of prime importance to this movement is modal mixture, particularly as it pertains to the interchange of and. But for me one of the most intriguing features of this movement is the change in the musical narrative from relatively stable to unsettled. That is, the frequent changes in register, fragmentation of ideas, and parenthetical digressions at the end of the exposition and later near the end of the recapitulation leave an impression that there is more to be said.

IN 1800, not long after Méhul had noted his ideas for reform, a comedy performed in Paris appeared to indicate that nothing essential had changed. L’Apollon du Belvéder, a ‘folie-vaudeville-impromptu’ put together by a team of young authors, was another satirical exploration of the familiar theme of the mélomane. This time, uniquely in the genre, the obsessive character was a woman, Madame Despritvieux, a salonnière who kept a stable of modish artists; one of her protégés, the composer Tromboner, was planning a three-day-long opéra comique on the subject of the battle of Jericho, a work on such a lavish scale that it would require the construction of a new theatre. Despritvieux had acquired, through the agency of a broker of antiquities, a talking statue of Apollo; in fact, the broker was the suitor of her daughter, Apolline, and the statue was his valet in disguise. When Tromboner asked Apollo to confirm which musician best embodied the spirit of the day, the statue admonishingly replied ‘Grétry’. ‘That judgement astonishes me,’ gasped Tromboner: ‘I make a hundred times more noise than him.’ The comedy was dedicated to Grétry, who attended the first night at the Théâtre des Troubadours amid much flattering ceremonial, and who wrote the authors a kind letter of thanks.

The impression given by L’Apollon du Belvéder was of a gleeful reawakening of the practice of querelle to suit the preoccupations of post-Revolutionary France. The authors made every effort to incorporate allusions to the crazes of the day, including the magnificent Andalucian horses presented to Napoleon by the Spanish king; the goings-on at the Salon; and the classical statuary of the Louvre, which had reopened earlier the same month with a display of antiquities looted from Italy. The role of the statue of Apollo was a clear reference to this topical theme; the idea that it could talk was borrowed from another current sensation, the ventriloquist bust of Trophonius exhibited in the ‘Salon Acoustique’ of the scientist and showman Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles. Scarcely a line of the play passed without some reference, often highly derogatory, to a play or opera of the day; and the spirit of combative commentary extended even to the authors’ preface, which was used to get their own back for the ‘insults of certain pygmies’ in the periodical press.

Introduction

Thus wrote physiologist J. Z. Young in a script solicited by the Committee for Science and Technology for the 1951 Festival of Britain and for which Young proposed a novel exhibit focused on memory in the octopus. Describing the natural history and behavior of this marine animal, Young explained to his readers those reasons that rendered the invertebrate a model organism for the science of physiology. Noting that octopuses proved to be particularly clever creatures, Young claimed they were highly amenable to training. “The experiment consisted,” he wrote, “in training the Octopus not to attack a crab if a white square was also present” in their aquarium. When the square was not present the octopus could feed on the crab. By presenting the crab and the white square together to the octopus, the animal could be trained to associate the white square and the crab with painful experiences. “This was done by dangling the crab on a thread in front of the square to which a pair of electric wires were attached. When the Octopus came out and attacked the crab, it received an electric shock, dropped the crab and retreated home.”

As Delia Gavrus and Stephen Casper point out in their Introduction, technique is crucial to the success and prominence of the contemporary neurosciences. In their day-to-day work, the latter rely on an astonishing array of techniques—technologies and practices—to produce, disseminate, and promote their research. Since the early 1980s, scientists have used positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to correlate mental states such as hunger, love, even religiosity, to physiological changes in specific regions of the brain; these machines provide evidence of the mind “at work.” Psychoactive drugs can similarly be seen as technologies for producing changes in both physiological and psychological functions. They thus lend support to the idea that the brain is the ultimate substrate of the mind. In addition, technique plays a central role in neuroscientific funding. To give a recent and extreme example, in 2014 the European Commission awarded the Human Brain Project (HBP) more than one billion Euros to be spent over the next decade. The large sum was justified in part by the need to develop new techniques, including neuromorphic computing and neurorobotics. Technique has thus been instrumental in crowning neuroscience queen of the sciences. It is now a reference point for other academic disciplines from across the social sciences and the humanities, which seek to ground, or at least inform, their work through the results of neuroscientific research.

The close relationship between the neurosciences and technique is not simply a contemporary phenomenon; technique has been important throughout their history. But while in the early twenty-first century, technique seems intimately related to the centrality of the neurosciences, once we shift our attention to the past a curious transformation occurs. It is telling that the essays in this volume relate technique, almost without exception, to the marginal. The relationship between centrality and marginality should not be posed in starkly oppositional terms. As Gavrus and Casper note, the marginal, or “that which … appears unusual, unimportant, insufficient, minor, insignificant, on the edge, on the sidelines, [or] flat out wrong” (16), is a shifting category.

SHORTLY before the French Revolution, Michel-Paul-Guy de Chabanon, a man of letters, poet and musician, wrote a play that warned of the dangers of excessive partisan zeal. L’Esprit de Parti concerned a wealthy man, Dorville, who could not resist fanatical involvement with every popular fad – ballooning, mesmerism and, most particularly, the cliques and cabals of the opera house. This made him impossible to live with, his wife complained – dogmatic, distracted, choleric, incapable of treating anything with equanimity. He was risking his health, and the play showed him willing also to endanger his family fortune, the virtue of his daughter and the honour of his son in pursuit of his operatic obsessions. A coalition of well-wishers helped Dorville to avoid the worst consequences, but he ended the play in no way persuaded of his folly. ‘I will rush back to the Opéra to rally my troops,’ he concluded. ‘I will bombard the public with defamatory pamphlets; I will sow discord from the boxes to the pit.’

Chabanon published L’Esprit de Parti in 1788, bound together with other dramatic works and poems of a moralistic and minatory character. He could have picked any aspect of esprit de parti to dramatise, he argued in his preliminary reflections to the volume, but had chosen opera because it seemed so particularly trivial that it laid bare the absurdity of Dorville's position; partisan zeal in relation to, for example, religion or medicine would at least have some existential purpose. Music, he wrote, was especially dangerous from a moral point of view: it ‘speaks to the senses, and inflames the imagination, but has nothing at all to say to reason’. In a poem on the subject in the same volume, he argued that partisanship over artistic matters was of a piece with rivalries in the arena of politics and power:

Introduction

During the early 1950s, dozens of individuals began to show up at London area hospitals with delusions of persecution. Some of them had auditory hallucinations that bolstered their delusional ideas. Clinicians promptly diagnosed them with paranoid schizophrenia and admitted them on an in-patient basis. Within days, their symptoms cleared up and they were discharged.

Further examination revealed that the ingestion of large amounts of amphetamines (or the habitual use of amphetamines over a prolonged period of time) precipitated these individuals’ psychotic episodes. In 1953 a medical student at the University of London, P. H. Connell, studied several patients and coined the term amphetamine psychosis for this rather infrequent but disturbing effect of amphetamine use. In 1958 he published a short, influential monograph with that title. Connell was not primarily interested in the phenomenon from a biochemical perspective. Rather, he was interested in amphetamine psychosis from a clinical perspective, and also from the perspective of a public health advocate. In coining the term, he was not merely giving clinicians a valuable technique for making a differential diagnosis; he was also framing recreational amphetamine use as a kind of silent epidemic or public health nuisance.

While Connell warned the medical profession about the dangers of amphetamine use, biochemical researchers extracted a very different lesson from his monograph. Could amphetamine psychosis be used as a biochemical model of schizophrenia? That is, by studying the mode of action of amphetamines on the brain, could one discover the biochemical basis of schizophrenia itself—and ultimately develop more exacting, pharmacological, treatments? As Solomon Snyder, one of the American architects of the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia, later put it, “a drug which could elicit a ‘model schizophrenia’ would be a boon to psychiatry.” To say that it would be a boon to psychiatry was an understatement. Amphetamine psychosis would give researchers a new window into the mechanism of schizophrenia.

Biochemical researchers, however, were slow to adopt the theory that amphetamine psychosis constituted a “model schizophrenia.”

Novelty and Scale

The history of epidemic encephalitis offers a profound challenge to any assumption that, in the early twentieth century, pathologies of the nervous system were somehow the exclusive province of a systematic body of specialized knowledge known as “neurology.” Admittedly, the condition only began to receive wide recognition once it had been dubbed “encephalitis lethargica,” a term which certainly sounds sufficiently neurological, as it describes a site (the encephalon, the brain), a pathological state (-itis, an affliction or inflammation), and a primary symptom (a profound lethargy). Its neurological pedigree might also be inferred from the fact that it was a neuroanatomist, Constantin von Economo (1876–1931), who, based upon his bedside and postmortem observations in a Viennese neuropsychiatric clinic, gave the condition its name in 1917. Economo's description of feverish and sleepy patients with unusual ocular palsies quickly spread. By the end of the following year, dozens of European and American medical practitioners, many of them claiming some expertise in nervous pathologies, had taken up Economo's term to describe this strange new disease. But the novelty, the epidemic character, and the protean nature of encephalitis lethargica quickly served to breach the boundaries of neurological expertise. Commentators debated whether the disease was truly new or whether it had simply been overlooked in the past. But all agreed its complex symptomatology made it extremely difficult to diagnose. In the absence of clear, standardized neurological or immunological signs (as could be found in cases of syphilis or meningitis), the only way to better understand the disease was to gather together more cases. But encephalitis lethargica's epidemiological profile was occult, at best. The causal organism was unknown, and it was unusual to find even two fresh cases in a single institution (never mind a household). Extending disease surveillance (then described as medical or epidemic “intelligence”) was therefore a priority. And the only way to accomplish that was to move beyond the little world of the neurologists (to adapt a phrase from Ludwik Fleck) and enroll a wider range of other practitioners and publics.

At times, King Arthur has seemed to scholars to be notably underrepresented in the literature of late-medieval England, particularly in light of the chivalric pageantry of the court of Edward III. Christopher Dean, for example, declared in 1987 that Arthur ‘is not the major character of medieval English fiction that manuals of Middle English literature with their inevitable chapter on Arthurian romance might suggest’. If this is so, it does not mean that Arthur was unpopular or unimportant in late-medieval written culture: it means that ‘fiction’ is not the best place to find him. The prose Brut chronicle made the literally prosaic Arthur more popular than ever before.

Arthur is the central figure of the Oldest Version of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut, and his reign constitutes its single longest episode. At 418 lines, it is about a tenth of the whole Oldest Version, or as much space as all the kings from Aethelred the Unready to Edward the Confessor, and it is twice as long as the life of Brut. In the later Anglo-Norman and Middle English Bruts, Arthur's story remains largely unchanged except for the eventual addition of prophecies of Merlin.

The audiences of the Oldest Version knew a very different Arthurian story from the one most familiar to audiences after Malory. Gunnore (Guinevere) appears in two sentences, to marry Arthur and to retire to a convent; there is no Grail quest, no Morgan le Fay, no Galahad, and no Lancelot. Here as elsewhere the Brut's account follows the Galfridian plot, conventionally labeled the ‘chronicle’, or English, tradition. The other branch of Arthurian literature, the so-called ‘romance’, or French, tradition epitomized in the poetry of Chrétien de Troyes, offers the erotic intrigues, tournaments, adventures in trackless forests, women in distress, and mystical quests associated with Arthur's court, as well as the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere. Chrétien's romances and the later French prose Vulgate Cycle were both known in England, but aside from the account of Arthur's fall in the stanzaic Morte Arthur, relatively little of their plots entered the English language until Malory assimilated the matter of both traditions into his massive work.

The Anglo-Norman prose Brut is a substantial but not enormous work, long enough to be the only work in a codex, but not so long that it demands to be the only work in a codex, nor so dauntingly long that it may repel copying at all, as Mannyng's massive Story of England may have done. It is also highly supplementable, easy to expand with supporting material or material broadening its range of subject matter and time. Just such additions at beginning and end with material that proved durable gave rise to what are now considered the Short and Long Versions of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut. The process of expansion through continuation went on into the fifteenth century with the Middle English versions. The Latin genealogical charts and poems found at the beginning of RD329 and the brief Anglocentric chronicle of Scottish affairs found at its end represent another variety of expansion, with complementary material that might aid in the reading of the main text or flesh out areas given less attention in it.

In roughly 40 percent of its manuscripts, the Anglo-Norman prose Brut is the only work in the codex as it currently stands. These manuscripts tend to make for portable and not terribly expensive books, and it is easy to imagine these qualities as attractive to the people paying for them. They certainly seem to confirm Connolly's view that ‘the market for English books may have been moving towards the production of single texts before printing’. Of these manuscripts, however, not a single one is in an original or even early binding, and just over half are fragmentary or imperfect at beginning and/or end. Only a few are in volumes that begin and end so tidily as to give one every reason to think that they are complete and intact. With the manuscripts that begin or end incomplete, although it may be possible to estimate the amount of material missing from the prose Brut itself, there is generally no indication – like contemporary page numbers or quire markings – of what else might be missing. It would be rash to presume that all of them always contained only a prose Brut.