Ryan McClelland's 2004 dissertation examined fifteen of Brahms's ‘scherzo-type’ movements from the chamber works.Footnote 1 The qualified genre description, he explains, applies to any comparably ‘lively’ interior movement from a larger work that, independent of vagaries of titling, metre and mood, continues to embody ‘some shade of scherzo, minuet, or intermezzo’ (p. 11). In this book, the purview of study has been extended to cover all of the instrumental genres, among them piano solo, piano concerto, serenade and symphony. The new inclusions bring the tally of movements up to a very respectable thirty-five. The pieces surveyed span Brahms's full output, from the first piano sonatas of the early 1850s to the clarinet sonatas of the late 1890s. The only notable omission is of the Scherzo, op. 4 in E-flat minor, a work which the young Brahms played for Schumann and showed to Liszt, and that thus played a critical role in establishing his early reputation.Footnote 2

The scope of the book is consistent with its stated aim of providing a ‘comprehensive consideration’ of this genre type in Brahms. Though scherzos represent a central aspect of Brahms's œuvre, scholars have to this point have largely overlooked them, concentrating on the sonata forms (Webster, Mitchka, and Peter Smith) and slow movement forms (Notley and Sisman).Footnote 3 Simply by virtue of its clever premise and rich content – its bulk is taken up by substantive, intelligent analyses – this book succeeds in addressing a salient gap in Brahms studies and may be appropriately hailed as an important contribution to that literature.

Of course to say all that is the easy part. A more probing question one might ask of a comprehensive survey like this is ‘By what means does it synthesize its material?’. With 35 pieces to cover, how will they be circumscribed by a set of firm, useful conclusions (conclusions that ideally should apply to scherzo analysis at large)? Potential readers should be aware at the outset that McClelland dedicates precious little space to distilling findings into conveniently memorable bits of information. The introduction offers a short but effective overview of Brahms's proclivities concerning metre, movement titles and key relationships both internal and external (scherzo–trio and scherzo–piece). The discussion of form is particularly well handled, with careful consideration given to transitions, codas and variations in binary form type.Footnote 4 The discussion of the primary characteristics of Brahms scherzos culminates in a valuable summary chart.

The only passage that reads at all like a conclusion appears on a page near the book's end, where in near apologetic tones the author offers some ‘crude, overly broad generalizations’ about the scherzos. Opp. 1, 2, 5 and 8, we learn, ‘are not particularly concerned with large-scale thematic development’; this is in contrast with those from 1860s that are. (This point concerning opp. 35, 36, and 38 is subtly enriched by the observation that in this period of first maturity, Brahms ‘provocatively’ explores ‘sharp metric contrasts and extreme tonal and rhythmic-metric destabilization of beginnings’.) As for works penned during the last three decades, these ‘operate within a slightly smaller range of tonal, and especially rhythmic-metric dissonance’, and there is ‘frequent engagement with formal innovation in the global design’ (p. 297).

These modest syntheses are about all we get. There is no formal conclusion to the book; the above comments are drawn from a ‘Concluding Thoughts’ subsection awkwardly bookended with an analysis of movement III from the Fourth Symphony. Presumably to defuse criticism that too few global arguments are advanced within, the author confesses the book's goal is more ‘to probe Brahms's scherzo-type movements’ than to ‘create new theoretical constructs or analytic methodologies’ (p. 297). A predominantly analysis-based approach to any corpus, as we have begun to see, greatly complicates the task of assembling a grand framework for explaining it. Much of the remainder of this review will in fact be dedicated to further unpacking this point. We should not proceed too hastily to that discussion, though, so as not to overlook one of the book's richest contributions to musical knowledge.

An important aspect of McClelland's insight into these pieces is communicated through their organization. In place of a strict chronological ordering, he groups the scherzos according to contextual subgenres. At first blush the categories appear to be specific to the composer: there are the ‘Early Minor-Mode Scherzos’ (Chapter 2), all exhibiting intense, demonic characters, ‘Some Intermezzos’ (Chapter 5) from the C minor String Quartet, the First and Third Symphonies, and the G major Quintet, and ‘Late Minor-Mode Scherzos’ (Chapter 6). Chapter 7, of decidedly lighter heft, deals with the minuets from the Clarinet Trio, op. 114 and Clarinet Sonata, op. 120/1. But there are new stylistic designations as well. ‘Pastoral Scherzos’, the subject of Chapter 4, are marked superficially by the appearance of familiar elements such as horn fifths and pedal points, but significantly at deeper levels exhibit high degrees of conformity between tonal and rhythmic-metric structures (p. 127). Chapter 3 describes ‘Neoclassical’ minuets and scherzos – primarily movements from the Serenades and Sextets – that signal their engagement with tradition through overt thematic associations and an avoidance of powerfully destabilized beginnings. Chapter 8 investigates ‘Three Impostors’, formally-innovative pieces that openly call into question their connection to scherzo-trio form: they are the third movements from the Second Symphony and the Clarinet Quintet, op. 115 and the finale of the Violin Sonata, op. 108)

The author does not fully justify the criteria used to establish these families, and several key terms are conspicuously under-contextualized: neither ‘pastoral’ nor ‘neoclassical’ merits a single footnote. The stylistic categories hold up nonetheless. Understood as a product of style analysis supported by McClelland's tireless score study and profound musical sense, there is good reason trust them implicitly. On this basis alone it seems likely this categorical framework will continue to influence scherzo analysis for decades to come (note: it is primed for extension by further scherzo types!) and that would indeed be a boon to analysts. As the author consistently demonstrates, a topical-stylistic understanding of these works can provide a powerful springboard into analysis. In discussing the ‘neoclassical’ minuet from the E minor Cello Sonata, he seizes immediately upon its extended upbeat, a gesture the significance of which is amplified by its connection with tradition: it is known to occur in string quartets by Haydn and Mozart.Footnote 5 He subsequently traces the influence of this bar gesture both locally, as it shapes the unconventional 9-bar structure of the first phrase, and more remotely as it engenders a climactic phrase expansion in bars 71–74 (pp. 113–19). Similar connections to closer contemporaries Beethoven and Schumann are made throughout Chapter 1, casting appreciably new light on the key schemes, melodic structures and narrative trajectories of works such as the F-A-E Scherzo, WoO 2, and the scherzo from the F minor Piano Quintet.

Above the subtle thread of the subgenre idea, an alternate unifying concept runs far more vividly through the book. I refer here to the author's express intent of tying together this diverse set of works by grounding all analysis in musical narrative. It is a noble effort but one that falls short due to an under-defined methodology. McClelland's account of the narrative-analytic process – wherein one proceeds diachronically through a work, interpreting transformations of the opening material's metric/tonal/motivic/emotive states – amounts to little more than a rehearsal of classic Schoenberg-style analysis (pp. 5–7). It is rather surprising to see such thin support given to this topic. There is only a passing reference to the metric narrative techniques favoured by Harald KrebsFootnote 6, and no mention is made of important studies on narrative by Almén, Hatten, Maus or Burnham.Footnote 7 As such, there is no reliable, consistent machinery for marrying observations in the musical sphere to those in the sphere of meaning.

This theoretical chasm turns out to be unproblematic at the surface of the music. McClelland is safe in assuming that readers will accept characterizations of two-note melodic gestures that descend by semitone as ‘pleading’ and of canonic passages as metrically ambiguous and tense. At the higher level, however, he is cut off from more vibrantly dramatic scaffolding such as, to take an extreme example, the romantic, tragic, comic and ironic archetypes effectively adapted by Almén from literary critic Northrop Frye.Footnote 8 McClelland restricts himself to safe, generic paradigms such as tension-to-resolution (or the reverse), or initial-conflict-between-states-to-mediation (or evacuation of conflict). Though each of these musical narratives makes perfect sense in isolation, the overriding neutral tone makes them resistant to collation. The following excerpt illustrates the author's difficulty in establishing meaningful inter-movement relationships among four works:

Here and in similar passages regularly appearing at chapter closings, the prose is compromised by several factors: 1) the aforementioned lack of narrative paradigms, 2) too great a variety of sources from which instabilities, particularly metric ones, may derive and 3) the sense that the summaries are tacked on mostly out of obligation to invoke meta-themes of the current chapter.Footnote 9

More than enough criticism has been levelled at Brahms and the Scherzo for failing to fully realize some of its grander ambitions. None of this detracts from the book's tremendous value as a compendium of scherzo analyses. I characterized these at the outset as intelligent, an assessment meant to simultaneously affirm their comprehensiveness and efficiency. In accordance with the ‘dimensional counterpoint’ approach established and explored by Peter Smith, McClelland delights in exploring multiple facets of the music, putting observations about their variable alignment and incongruence to expressive ends.Footnote 10 He is as likely to initiate an analysis of a movement with discussion of its hypermetric structure as of its tonal ambiguity, an idiosyncratic head-motive or even its texture. To the already rich list of topics Smith coordinates in analysis, McClelland adds more: he gives consideration to issues of genre, compositional models, and, in a most welcome development, performance practice. Revealing asides dissect some of Brahms's more peculiar notation decisions, such as conflicted slurs in bars 17–21 of the op. 60 Piano Quartet and inconsistent beaming in the trio of the Third Symphony. In cases where more than one metre is suggested by the time signature and surface rhythms, he thoughtfully considers the impact of each before indicating his preference and providing concrete instructions to performers to help them realize it.

The analyses typically take up ten to fifteen pages each, a length sufficient for describing either the A or B section in detail and selectively covering the other. The prose moves diachronically, pausing frequently to explicate the nature of the most complex moments. The majority of the analyses examine hypermetre and/or phrase rhythm. In support of the analyses, the book boasts an ample set of well-placed, handsome graphics. Score excerpts, many twenty or more bars in length, are in abundance; they will absolutely do in a pinch if one does not have access to full scores. Many of these are annotated with one or more hypermetric readings, with extended upbeats, suffixes, and interpolations indicated; the accompanying text explains how each interpretation (A, B, C, etc.) can be heard. Other examples reduce densely figurated or ambiguous melodies to their structural pitches (melodic analysis) or show in stages how an irregular surface phrase length derives from a more symmetrical one (durational reduction).

Not all of the analyses are equally effective, of course. One of the most imaginative readings, of systematic phrase extension across the Intermezzo of the First Symphony, turns out disappointingly to mostly rehash an analysis by Frank Samarotto.Footnote 11 And in movement II of the Piano Trio, op. 101, McClelland's fervent interest in metrical processes and his facility with the tools for demonstrating them simply run too far afield (pp. 202–9). He takes extensive pains to illustrate how one can hear the body of the A section in a shadow metre displaced by half a bar. While it is true that the recurring head motive of crotchet-two quavers-crotchet does migrate from an on-beat position in bars 1–4 to an off-beat position in bars 5–30, there is no real ambiguity in either locale. The body of the A section is properly heard as a gavotte with a two-beat anacrusis, with the sparse rhythms in the string parts strengthening the stylistic allusion. Overwhelming evidence suggests that the head motive in this section should be heard as end-accented in support of the notated metre, but McClelland goes ahead and sketches a full ‘displaced’ version of the piece anyway. Strangely, he continues to prefer this version even after noting features that according to Carl Schachter render it almost definitively unworkable, namely: a cadential six-four sonority and inner-voice 7–6 and 4–3 suspensions that are all (now through his efforts) displaced from their proper metric positions.Footnote 12

These two examples, fortunately, represent the only outliers. The remaining analyses are all of excellent quality. Embedded within a dependable flow of outstanding findings, a number qualify as extraordinarily elegant. One of these concerns a massive phrase interpolation and expansion in the trio of the op. 5 Piano Sonata, another a gorgeous set of melodic and rhythmic expansion cultivated over the full length of the scherzo from the Horn Trio, op. 40 (pp. 43–7 and 140–53). The cogent accounts of these thirty-odd works, communicated again with such straightforward technical ease and musicality, would serve as ideal models for those studying rhythmic-metric analysis and multivalent music analysis. For anyone else who holds even a passing interest in Brahms's music, they obviously impart upon must-read status upon this important, timely treatise.