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Marianna von Martines's Dixit Dominus

ately after the movement’s central division (the caesura tightly organized measures. In the Dixit, however, Mar-
and reprise of the opening material at mm. 79-80), it oc- tines uses the same pattern on a much larger scale to

curs very shortly thereafter. It also serves both to empha- structure the first half of the binary forms employed in
size an important non-tonic key and to smoothly return movements 2 and 3 (Tables 9 and 10 on page 19). There
the piece to the tonic. Martines’s usage thus shows an are cadences and phrase breaks within these passages,
understanding not only of the schema as an isolated unit but in both movements, the textual and motivic content
but of its typical role in the formal grammar of galant works together to clearly demarcate the three passages as
music. distinct sections. When we examine the harmonic struc-
In fact, Martines’s larger formal syntax itself embod- ture in light of these sectional divisions, the sequences of
ies galant schemata. In his analysis of the fi rst movement concluding cadences clearly reveals the schema identi-
of Martines’s A major piano sonata, Burstein notes that fi ed by Burstein in the A major sonata.

the first half of the movement is structured according to: An exhaustive tabulation of galant schemata in Mar-
tines’s Dixit Dominus would be tiresome and unnecessary.
a basic pattern shared by many other sonata The piece contains a number of instances not discussed

movements, in which a large tonal motion leads here; Godt identifies some in his analysis of the piece, 30
from the tonic key to a perfect authentic cadence and there are undoubtedly more. The aim of this discus-
in the key of the dominant. This motion is sub- sion is simply to show that Martines used these schemata
divided into three phrases, in a standard manner often and idiomatically in her galant movements, con-
that was described and demonstrated in music veying her mastery of the most current and courtly style.

theory treatises of the time: the first phrase (mm.
1–3) drives toward a resting point on the tonic
harmony, the second phrase (mm. 4–7) toward Harmony
a resting point on V/V, and the third and fi nal In the realm of harmony, it is diffi cult—and perhaps
phrase, known as the closing phrase (mm. 8–13), inappropriate—to attempt to distinguish between “Ba-
concludes with a perfect authentic cadence in roque” attributes and “galant” attributes. As Gjerdingen
the secondary key. 29 notes, the main markers of the galant style were me-
lodic or voice-leading-based schemata; these often had
In the piano sonata, this schema unfolds in thirteen a harmonic component, but the progressions involved

18 CHORAL JOURNAL April 2021 Volume 61 Number 9