Зараждането на хемидитоновостта и Бетовен
The Origin of Hemiditonicity and Beethoven

Summary/Abstract: The study examines the origin of hemiditonicity (or, in English terminology, octatonicity, the octatonic scale) in the works of composers from the 18th and early 19th centuries. By applying the terminological apparatus of the author’s own universal theory of symmetric modes, fragments from the following works, in which a feeling of hemiditonicity arises on the basis of the diminished seventh chord, are analysed in detail: the Sarabande from English Suite No. 3 in G minor by J. S. Bach (1715–1720), the Sonata in F sharp major K. 319 by Domenico Scarlatti (1730), the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 in D major Op. 36 (1801–1802), the first movement of Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C major, D. 944 The Great (1825–1828), as well as his Impromptu No. 3 in G flat major, D. 899 (1827), and finally, the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor Op. 74 Pathétique (1893). The study places special emphasis on the example from the coda of the first movement of Beethoven’s Second Symphony, in which the outlines of a complete symmetrical scale structure over a chromatic interval system basis of hemiditonic type are clearly heard. This case is unique not only in Beethoven’s oeuvre, but also in the music of the Viennese Classicism in general. It is undoubtedly a phenomenon beyond the musical vocabulary of the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, a prognostic hearing of the genius in regard to future events in musical creativity. It shares a typological similarity with the dynamic culmination that is the reprise of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, created almost a century later, in which through the hemiditonic symmetric mode of alternating whole and half steps the composer decisively breaks through the Classical and Romantic foundations of tonality and produces an artistic solution that verges on the Late Romantic tonal system, without, however, going beyond its limits and violating the original tonal foundations of his style. The similar hemiditonic ascending progressions used by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky as the lead-up to brilliant culminations are often cited in German musicology as cases of the so-called Teufelsmühle or Voglerscher Tonkreis, related to the Omnibus Progression, theoretically described in English-language music theory – a harmonic model found in most German composers of the 18th and 19th centuries after Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Put in a music history perspective, the examined examples of early hemiditonicity, as well as the analogous composition technique cases of early whole-tonicity, gradually increase in number, acquire various forms, gain a more independent compositional status and a more significant stylistic role, and finally, form an independent line in the Romantic harmony of the music of the 19th century – the line of chromatic scale symmetry, which plays the role of a trigger for the processes of the invention and the increasingly more systematic usage of all sorts of artificial, hitherto non-existent mode structures. In the music of the 20th century, these structures acquire the dimensions of the individual composing of all components of the musical work’s pitch structure.

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