A composer, his dedicatee, her instrument, and I: thoughts on performing Haydn's keyboard sonatas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the 1790s Haydn made two extended trips to London. It is during his second, in 1794–95, that he composed his “Grand Sonata” for Piano in C major, Hob. XVI:50. The following three narratives describe its opening measures (shown in Ex. 14.1), each from a different perspective. We first take the score off a library shelf, and read it: Narrative 1 A naked triad, in the simplest of keys, is spelled out, matter of factly, without any trace of hurry. But gradually, as if adding spice to a bland dish, Haydn throws in dissonances. First, a passing tone D between E and C. Then, on the downbeat of measure 3, an upper neighbor F, which resolves to E by the middle of the measure. (This relationship is marked as “y.”) But this upper neighbor (or appoggiatura, that quintessential eighteenth-century ornament) was itself preceded by a lower one. (Marked as “x.”) To understand this double tension is as essential as it is puzzling. On the one hand, a slur (which, according to mid- to late eighteenth-century German sources, marked the first tone as the more expressive one) conveys the message that E is an embellishing tone to F. But the usual interval of a second (two adjacent tones imitating the inflection of a “sigh”) has here been inverted to a seventh. Does this inversion allow F to emancipate itself from the preceding E? If so, does F challenge the dissonance status of E, which should actually be understood as a consonance? In other words: which should be believed, x or y? With delightful delay measure 6 answers this sophistic question: not only is the second-interval restored to a dissonance–consonance pair; the effect of a slur – strong/long first tone, soft/short resolution – is materialized by no less than three performance directives: sforzando, fermata, and diminuendo. We now skip a few pages and look at mm. 120 ff. which harmonize this passage. “Y or x” does not matter any more: E and F have both become part of a descending chain of suspensions, adjusting to the laws of voice leading and counterpoint, fluidly moving in and out of dissonance or consonance status.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".