Immuring and immured tonalities: tonal malaise in the First Symphony, Op. 55

TL;DRAbstract

We have already begun to develop an approach fitted to a particular work, and when the object of study is Elgar's First Symphony there are additional complications. How are we to analyze a piece in four movements, whose middle movements are joined, and which makes such a point of beginning and ending with a ‘motto’ theme in A♭, but spends most of its time with other material and in or on unrelated keys (A minor, D major, and D minor being especially notable)? This question is not limited to analysis of early modernist music. Despite its grounding on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the archetypal four-movement narrative, Schenker's Ursatz does not explain how musical arguments are carried over the gaps between movements, or even why there are usually four movements in a symphony instead of, say, seven or two. Both Jonathan Dunsby and Nicholas Marston have tried to answer these questions in analyses of smaller pieces, but I know of no comparable attempt to stretch the Ursatz over a whole sym

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