Guy Capuzzo
Eastman School of Music
This paper discusses four pitch-space ordering types which appear in Elliott Carter's recent solo music: Frozen Register, CONVERGE, DIVERGE, and BOWTIE. These four pitch-space ordering types clarify passages of music whose pitches do not form primary set-classes. The primary set-classes of a work are contiguously and unambiguously presented at the piece's outset. A non-primary passage is any section of music whose contiguous pitches do not form members of the work's primary set-classes.
The primary set-classes of a given recent Carter work are typically few in number. As such, passages which abandon them re striking and might be heard as anomalous. This paper demonstrates, however, that many such passages utilize primary set-classes which Carter has reordered in pitch-space. Primary set-classes ordered in pitch-space thus underpin passages whose contiguous musical events form non-primary set-classes.
By focusing on how Carter reifies unordered pitch-class sets, the four pitch-space ordering types accomodate and acknowledge the simultaneous multiple modes of organization which impart so much richness to Carter's recent solo music, a repertoire about which no full length studies presently exist. They thus reflect ways in which Carter draws a listener's attention to primary set classes, a focal aspect of the audition, coherence, and analysis of these works.