Saturday, 2:45–5:00
pm, Whitney Humanities Center
Composer Ursula Mamlok (b. 1928) has gained prominence in the areas of performance, recording, and publishing in the past four decades. The majority of her recorded works draw from serial techniques, but since the 1970s, she has settled into a post-serial style that develops traditional forms and uses classical devices, such as motivic repetition and development. Although Mamlok manipulates the row through conventional operations in Panta Rhei (1981), she does not draw on serial techniques for some sections in the fourth movement, which displays a rondo design. Instead, Mamlok alternates between non-serial refrains and serial middle sections in this movement of her piano trio. She manipulates the entries of the repeated-note unit at the beginning of the refrains, giving the unit duple and triple identities. Although the duple and triple identities of the returning opening unit, the overlapping statements of the unit, and the reinterpreted incomplete measures contribute to the fluctuation in the perception of time, it is the many instances of accelerations and decelerations that give the piece the impression of "time in flux."
Ives’s music, in its treatment of time and temporal experience, is exemplary of early-twentieth century conceptions of time. This talk will focus on a particular procedure that suggests temporal states and relationships via manipulations of musical linearity, what I call temporal displacement: a recurrent phenomenon in which music seems to derive from linear successions whose constituent parts have been rearranged. Examples abound in Ives’s oeuvre and can be found in works of various types, composed at various stages of Ives’s career. Yet to recognize displacement in these pieces is to depart from the leading approaches to post-tonal music. Contemporary analysts, when pursuing connections between disparate sonorities or passages, are most likely to turn to linear analysis or to seek out associative relations, strategies that will often provide inadequate accounts of Ives’s fragmented textures. Identification of displacement enables the analyst to acknowledge and emphasize, rather than smooth over, surface disjunctions, as analyses of portions of the First Piano Sonata, Song Without (good) Words, Three-Page Sonata, Psalm 14, and the song “Nov. 2, 1920” show. Scholars occasionally have noted instances of disrupted or reordered musical chronologies in the music of other composers, but none has undertaken a large-scale study, and few have suggested that such procedures are crucial to the compositional language of a twentieth-century composer. Such a study is appropriate for Ives’s music, in which displacement is a crucial formal element, of comparable significance to Ives’s better-known innovations in the realm of pitch material.
This paper will investigate the two principal factors that determine a perception of form in John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946-48), namely Cage’s rhythmic structure and the table of preparations provided for the work. To this end I will draw on several recorded performances to explore the commonalities and diffferences between them. By contrast to most other discussion of Cage’s music, I will focus on the perceived connections and contrasts that might shape a performer’s interpretation of the work. Consideration of this cycle from an analytical point of view may seem to be hindered rather than facilitated by Cage’s own extensively documented compositional methodology; indeed, the very term “form” must be reclaimed from the special, rather counterintuitive meaning it assumes in Cage’s writings in the 1940s. Throughout the paper, I will draw on three recorded performances by Maro Ajemian, Robert Miller, and Aleck Karis to corroborate my analytical conclusions, which include the following: that Cage’s precompositional rhythmic structure is to a large extent projected in the music through conventional indices of salience, and that Cage’s avowed program for the Sonatas and Interludes, “the expression in music of the ‘permanent emotions’ of Indian tradition . . . and their common tendency toward tranquility,” is realized in virtually every dimension of each movement of the work.