‘Revisiting Expectations for the Opening Ritornello in Louis Spohr’s Violin Concerti’
SMA Zoom Colloquium, 8 February 2024, 6:30pm GMT
Please use the following Zoom link:
https://citylit.zoom.us/j/95549497846 [citylit.zoom.us]
Meeting ID: 955 4949 7846 Passcode: 526057
Abstract:
As the number of composers studied by scholars of the New Formenlehre expands, interest in other formal genres is likewise growing. Specifically, studies of concerto first-movement form are on the rise, as evidenced by recent publications of Julian Horton, Omer Maliniak and Yoel Greenberg, and Peter Smith. In my talk I consider form in the first movements of Louis Spohr’s violin concerti, composed between 1802 and 1844. Placing Spohr’s works in dialogue with Mozartian models reveals a rift between theory and practice, which I highlight through detailed analyses of the opening ritornello, or R1, across Spohr’s concerti. My analyses foreground modulating R1s and their impact on formal functions in the opening tutti, as well as the changing role and formal import of R1 in Spohr’s oeuvre. Ultimately, I assert that the degree of variety manifest within Spohr’s violin concerti exemplifies the fluidity of this formal genre, and by extension the fluidity of form more generally.
Biography:
Caitlin Martinkus is a faculty member at the Cleveland Institute of Music. She has presented her work on musical form at the Society for Music Theory’s annual meeting as well as EuroMAC and NewMAC, and published in Music Theory and Analysis and Music Theory Online, with forthcoming work in Theory and Practice and The Oxford Handbook of Musical Variation. Caitlin is also an affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Music at the University of Toronto.