Sunday,
11:00 a.m. –12:30 p.m.
Room 2330
Modal Harmonic Cycle Direction and Vaughan Williams’ Harmonic Practice
In common-practice major keys, the harmonic progression approaching the tonic triad typically presents the diatonic tritone. Because scale-degree 4 generally precedes scale-degree 7, major-key harmonic progressions cycle in a counter-clockwise direction when represented on a circle of third-related scale degrees. In this paper, the relationship between the approach to the tonic triad and the presentation of the tritone is used to theorize characteristic harmonic approaches to the tonic in the six diatonic modes used by Vaughan Williams. Moreover, these characteristic approaches are shown to predispose each mode to cycle harmonically in a particular direction on the circle of thirds: Lydian and Dorian cycle clockwise, while Ionian, Aeolian, Mixolydian, and Phrygian cycle counter clockwise.
Analysis of passages from Vaughan Williams’ works demonstrates that the theorized approaches to the tonic consistently reflect the composer’s modal harmonic practice. However, while the effect of these tonic approaches on overall harmonic cycle direction is readily apparent in four of the six modes, Vaughan Williams’ Mixolydian and Phrygian passages often exhibit a palindromic structure by cycling clockwise before adopting the expected counter-clockwise cycle for the approach to the tonic. Since Mixolydian and Phrygian are predisposed to cycle in the same counter-clockwise direction as Ionian and Aeolian, many chord successions characteristic of Mixolydian and Phrygian are rotations of Ionian and Aeolian progressions, and the resulting modal ambiguity tends to destabilize a Mixolydian or Phrygian tonic in favor of an Ionian or Aeolian tonic. For this reason, the initial clockwise cycle direction seen in Vaughan Williams’ Mixolydian and Phrygian passages is necessary for their modal stability.
Making Many from Few: Orchestration in the Chamber Works of Ruth Crawford Seegers
In 1930, the American composer Ruth Crawford won a Guggenheim fellowship based in part on her proposal to write an orchestral work while abroad. Her compositional achievements that year were extraordinary, but the orchestral piece was never finished. Of her limited output, the works Crawford saw most often performed in her lifetime, and those which have received most critical attention since her death, have been works for solo instruments or chamber ensemble. She never completed a large-scale piece for orchestra, and no sketches from her planned Guggenheim piece have survived.
With Crawford’s catalogue of contemporary art music thus populated almost exclusively by works with five players or fewer, attention is not often given to the role of orchestration in her music. Given her significant creative contributions in other musical parameters and their trailblazing implications for the modernist movement in mid-century America, this neglect is perhaps unsurprising. In this paper, however, I will show that orchestration—a term I use here not to refer to orchestral music specifically but to the structure and manipulation of the available textures and timbres of any ensemble—is a vital part of Crawford’s concert work, not just in her few forays into large mixed ensembles, but in pieces for timbrally homogeneous and even solo instruments. Works discussed include the Piano Study in Mixed Accents, Three Songs to Poems of Carl Sandburg, the late Suite for Wind Quintet, and her best-known and most influential work, the String Quartet 1931.