“—Where is your Mother?” and Other Astonishing Ellipses

Abstract A standard strategy for analyzing a stylistically ungrammatical harmonic disjuncture is to argue that it ultimately can be interpreted as embraced within an overriding, logical voice-leading framework. In certain instances, however, such moments of discontinuity might be more fruitfully understood by appealing to expressive devices that have analogies with those employed by classical rhetoric for dealing with ungrammatical passages in language. This is especially so when an extreme harmonic discontinuity closely precedes a large formal/tonal return, as is proposed in a series of analyses of selected works by Joseph Haydn, C. P. E. Bach, and Ludwig van Beethoven.