Dora A. Hanninen
University of Michigan

As in many chamber works, the quartet of players in Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 2 (1959) is an evolving paradox. At times a collection of individual voices clearly distinguished by characteristic rhythms, articulations, and intervals; at others, an integrated ensemble in which significant harmonic and motivic features emerge only in the totality of the instruments' interaction, it has been characterized by Carter himself as a dialogue that develops among four instrumental persona. Drawing upon Carter's own comments on pitch structure in the Quartet that suggest a dialectic between discrete intervallic vocabularies and concerted associations via all interval tetrachords, this paper explores connections between subtle changes in the substructure of musical segmentation and their manifestations in changing modes of instrumental interaction.

Analytic observations stem from a fundamental distinction I draw between two types of segments--genosegments and phenosegments--that model the individual and cumulative influence of various musical dimensions, respectively. After defining some essential theoretic concepts, a series of analytic excerpts demonstrates how changes in segmentation substructure give rise to various modes of instrumental interaction along the continua from instrumental individualism to integrated ensemble, from contrapuntal to harmonic textures which, in turn, impinges on the study of form. In closing, I place the genosegment-phenosegment theory in a broader context to consider some of its implications for analytic process and product.