The Romantic-Virtuosic Sentence in Liszt’s B Minor Sonata, or, Positive Feedback as Formal Accelerator

The classical sentence (Schoenberg’s ‘Satz’), or ‘Bar form’ (Alfred Lorenz), have long been discussed in music theoretic terms. Existing studies of the sentence in Romantic music have focused on the music of Wagner or Liszt’s symphonic poems, but study of Liszt’s pianism is perhaps even more revealing because it allows us to consider the sentence in energetic terms as a formal accelerator, a coefficient of Liszt’s virtuosity. To appreciate the extent of the sentence’s dramatic energy, this article borrows from the meta-discipline of cybernetics, which concerns systems of control and communication through feedback loops. Feedback loops, particularly the ‘positive feedback’ that leads to a system’s collapse, speaks to the dialectic between virtuosity and form. Exploring Liszt’s B minor Sonata, I examine sentences which, under Liszt’s control, become forces of ‘positive feedback’, constantly breaking the phrase structures apart under their own weight

Art · Combinatorics · Humanities · Literature · Minor (academic) · Natural language processing · Prime (order theory) · Romance · Sentence · Computer Science · Diverse Musicological Studies · Mathematics · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Psychology