Saturday, 9:00–11:-15
pm
Many of the compositional devices found in the music of Bruno Maderna (1920-1973) from the early 1950s are mechanistic in nature, yet his works project highly dynamic and lyrical textures. As the sketch materials for the works from the period document, Maderna’s compositional techniques incorporated multi-layered processes of serial construction and permutation. Whereas these were based on automatic procedures, it is the imagination and flexibility with which Maderna integrated them in his music that renders it so powerfully expressive. This paper presents an overview of Maderna’s serial arrays that lie at the core of his music written between 1950 and 1955, during which time his compositional technique first reached its maturity. The paper documents how Maderna generated his various tone rows (twelve-tone, eleven-tone, diatonic) and shows the ways in which the pitch classes of each series were subjected to a process of order permutations, represented graphically by matrices that tabulate order positions and pitch class space. The paper further documents how some of these matrices served as the source for Maderna’s rhythmic organization, usually in combination with additional transformational processes. The study concludes with a look at Maderna’s construction of form in the light of his serial procedures.
Twentieth-century neotonal music, for example many of the works of Bartók, Britten, Copland, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and others, has been problematic for music analysts. In particular, it is difficult to represent accurately harmonic embellishment in this repertoire. In tonal music clear distinctions exist between embellished and embellishing sonorities. Embellished sonorities are always triads or seventh chords, while embellishing sonorities may not be. In instances in which consonant chords are embellished by other consonant chords, the embellishing chords have a lower status in the tonal hierarchy than the embellished chords. These distinctions do not always exist in neotonal works, in which structural sonorities are not always made of stacked thirds, and the pitch hierarchy may not be the same as that in common practice tonality.
This paper will present a model for analyzing harmonic embellishment, the neighbor space, that is flexible enough to be used with a wide variety of verticalities and tonal hierarchies. A neighbor space is a set of characteristics describing how neighboring motion occurs during a given musical passage. The four characteristics of any neighbor space describe its space-type (pitch or pitch-class), scalar collection, distance between neighbor notes and notes they embellish, and the set-class of the embellished harmony. Distinctions between embellished and embellishing sonorities are made by the use of contextual stability, which is stability created by some salient surface feature of the music, such as duration, metric placement, dynamic accent, etc. This paper will show examples of neighbor spaces from the works of various composers, and will present analyses of complete works by Bartók and Tippett.
Recently, Dmitri Tymoczko has questioned the explanatory power of octatonicism to integrate Stravinsky's chromaticism within a prevalent diatonic-invoking surface. Tymoczko argues that passages can be related to the octatonic as easily as to other referential collections, and that larger pitch collections can sometimes best be heard as superimpositions of scale segments. Such contentions open up the possibility for other pitch relationships to emerge, especially where superimposed and juxtaposed diatonic segments equally resist octatonicism and tonal interpretations, as is the case of the outer movements of Stravinsky's Serenade in A. This paper advances the notion that scalar segments can be conceived without invoking the entire associated scales and their traditional labeling system; and that instead, segments become specified locations within the Guidonean space, a pc framework that integrates all diatonic phenomena. This framework is specially suited to model the harmonic practice prevalent in the "Hymne" of the Serenade en La: pitch configurations traditionally thought of as fusion of diatonic scales; common-tone relationships between collections, which are sharply contrasting, but not easily explainable through traditional notions of modulation; and large-scale syntactical motions which, while returning to a collection, lack a theoretical framework -whether tonal or set theoretical- to trace and measure that motion.