ABSTRACT
JohannesBrahms designated the second movement of the Piano Trio, the third movement of the Piano Quartet, and the fourth movement of the Horn Trio, as scherzos. Each of these three scherzos makes use of elements characteristic of the pastoral genre, especially 'horn' fifths and lengthy pedal points. Although each movement also possesses features less typical of the pastoral most notably the minor mode in each includes a sufficient number of pastoral features to cue the pastoral mode. What is noteworthy in these three scherzos is the relative degree of congruence between tonal and rhythmic-metric structures. Periodic four-measure, eight-measure, and even sixteen-measure hypermeters are not only operative but are strongly projected. Tonal arrivals generally fall at the beginning of hyper measures, and structural melodic pitches are often evenly spaced and situated in metrically strong locations. In the context of all of Brahms's scherzo-type movements, the scherzos highly stable rhythmic-metric and tonal structures.
