Saturday, 9:00 am–12:00
pm, Sudler Hall In W. L. Harkness (WLH)
Traditional techniques of musical analysis are based on the assumption of a governing unity in the musical language. Thus, the musical collage, which by definition subverts the concept of unity by juxtaposing fragmentary quotations from different musical styles within the composition, poses the most stimulating questions for the analyst: What is the relationship between the disparate elements in a collage? What are the structural implications of combining such a variety of disparate elements? Finally: What theoretical tool should be used to analyze music with such diverse musical idioms?
Using concrete examples from Berio's Sinfonia (1968), considered by many the prototype of a musical collage, the current paper describes a sophisticated structural model that is based on concepts that simultaneously subvert and transcend traditional notions of unity. The apparently disparate musical layers are related in a variety of ways, including pitch relations of exclusion (which become a paradoxical source of unity through the concept of chromatic completion). Moreover, the concept of chromatic saturation in pitch space exploits the redefined concept of musical space, which the musical collage gives special meaning to through its reliance on layering and referentially, as the basic for structural connections that function on many different and simultaneous levels. The paper outlines the major features of these pitch connections and demonstrates their intimate relationship to the formal and dramatic structure of the piece, thus uncovering surprising sources of unification and continuity which complement the referential, poetic, and dramatic concurrent of the work in creating a pattern of expectation that transcends mere formalism.
Very little analytical work has been written on Luigi Nono's music, mostly because of perceived difficulties in listening to it and in reconciling its overt social agendas to musical techniques. This paper examines four choral pieces composed from 1957 to 1960 and examines their particular reinvention of classical polyphony in relation to Nono's more general practice of social subversion and resistance.
Nono's idiosyncratic text-setting technique is examined as a surface manifestation of his new polyphony. The concept of "resonance" is introduced as a strategy for hearing "voices" in a new conceptual sense. Resonance is shown to operate more deeply in the music, and it establishes several additional, simultaneous realms of motion in dimensions such as pitch, duration, and dynamics. Streams of resonating events are fitted to a traditional contrapuntal model, the employment of which uncovers interdimensional motion from a unison, parallel motion, and motion to a cadence. The adaptation of Nono's music to this conventional model delineates a strong link between his compositions and the traditional polyphonic repertoire, a repertoire that Nono explicitly addresses.
Nono's reinvention of conventional musical time and space can be illuminated with--yet only partially captured by—my model for "multidimensional counterpoint." The model can be used to uncover strategies that Nono uses to confront the musical past in order to reshape the musical future. In this way, it is possible to see how he stages a revolution of his own, doing with music what others might do with words, and sometimes arms.
There have been numerous junctures in Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s career when he seemed to embark on a radically different path from the one that he and his music had previously traced: Despite stylistic differences between them, all of these works are the products of common organizational concepts and procedures. From 1975, with the composition of the chamber work Ave Maris Stella, all of his workshave been organized with reference to magic squares, which he uses to control melodic, harmonic ,rhythmic, structural, and sometimes proportional aspects of his works.
The second movement of Image, Reflection, Shadow, a chamber work, written for Davies’s group the Fires of London in 1980, exemplifies his use of magic squares as organizational tools. Two cells abstracted from the plainsong tune Lux Aeterna are used to construct transpositional matrices which are used togenerate magic squares, which in turn are used to create pitch-transformation processes and harmonicsequences which are the basis of the work’s structure. Each stage of the development of this complex of material remains available for use in the work, giving the work a depth of reference between elements with greater or lesser closeness to the initial source, and given, by the particular workings of the square in that work, a connection between the structure of the work and its initial conceptual poetic image.
This paper advances an analytical approach to Morton Feldman's Palais de Mari (1986) predicated on categorization and reconfiguration of musical ideas among "associative sets," informed by Lewin's injection function and other means to construe transformational distance among musical segments, and by recent theories of voice-leading. Analysis focuses not on the fixing or justification of category boundaries, but on their permeability and potential for internal reorganization with respect to particular musical contexts and theoretic tools. With this foray into some of the fluid connections and interconnections among segments and sections of Palais, my hope is to enable and encourage analysts to grapple with multiple and shifting musical associations and continuities, not only in other late works by Feldman (in which they are particularly characteristic and the approach is perhaps most directly applicable), but in general and as a matter of course in a wide range of repertoire. En route and in closing, the paper considers questions of a general nature in music analysis, engaging issues surrounding categorization in music analysis (and in the study of Feldman's music in particular), and points of contact among categorization, similarity, transformation, and analytical interpretation.