Sonata-Principled Kangaroos

This month and next, I’ll continue last month’s focus on sonata, particularly the “sonata principle,” Edward T. Cone’s name for common-practice-music’s propensity to present distinctive melodic material first outside of the movement’s main key and then later in the main key.

When you tonally attend to this leap of a minor seventh,

I suspect that you hear it in G, even though there’s no G there. The presence of the C natural keeps it from being in D (D as tonic would rather have C#), and the greater weight afforded to the D by its lower register, longer duration, and downbeat position keeps the C from materializing as tonic. Instead, the key of G matches these different weights well: the more weighted pitch of D is dominant, tonic’s second-in-command, and the less weighted pitch of C is a more subordinate subdominant.

So, with this in place, the “Kangaroos” movement of Carnival of the Animals, which Camille Saint-Saëns began composing 140 years ago this month, contains a rather subtle instance of the sonata principle. The movement clearly begins in C minor, but then the bass’s leap of a D-C seventh in mm. 4-5, especially when accompanied with notes taken from the G harmonic minor scale, leans toward G.

At the end, the minor seventh appears again in the bass, but transposed to G-F, accompanied by notes taken from the C melodic minor scale. Thus this minor-seventh leap is restored to the Kangaroo’s main key of C minor.

What appears even more clever is that the last three measures embed this minor-seventh recapitulation within a clear pattern in the bass: G--F#-G--F-G--E. This could be heard as a musical cross-dissolve: the repeated low G-major chords draw out the dominant of C, while the functional progression of higher chords—V/V, Fr. 6, V—prepare the key of A, which is the tonal center of “Aquarium,” the next movement where the same Fr. 6 returns as a less-functional coloristic harmony.