Saturday, 1:15 am–2:45 pm
Monroe 213
The Harmonic Structure of Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony
In his analyses of his own “extended tonal” works in Structural Functions of Harmony, Schoenberg tends to analyze cycles built from intervals 2/4, 3, and 5 as altered tonal chords, thereby interpreting interval cycles within a tonal context. Schoenberg’s op. 9 Kammersymphonie (1906), however, also includes spans in which (1) interval cycles are independent of tonal function and (2) tonal chords and interval-cyclic voice leading are mixed ambiguously. As a result, the work’s harmonic language is governed by different principles on local (foreground) and global (middleground and background) levels of structure, a situation that problematizes organic unity.
This paper offers two complementary methods of analysis to explain how unity is suggested, refuted, and affirmed on each level. On the local level, an analytical method called “Harmonic Practices” traces a dialectic between tonality and interval cycles, thereby showing foreground continuity and discontinuity; on more global levels, “tonal pillar analysis” shows a hierarchy of widely separated tonal chords that achieve or postpone tonal closure. By clarifying tonal ambiguity on their respective levels, these two methods offer a critique of organic unity. This stance strikes a balance between the forward-looking and retrospective aspects of Schoenberg’s thought, one that is similar to the recent viewpoints of Walter Frisch (2005) and Michael Cherlin (2007).
Conflict as a Critical Framework in Nocturnal for Guitar by Benjamin Britten
Analysts generally agree that Britten’s musical language embraces conflict. Descriptions of Britten’s music often contain a variety of polarized adjectives such as conflictive, oppositional, antithetic, dualistic, and so on. In fact, we can describe Britten’s music as conflicting because of vital compositional mechanisms that inform his style of expression. This paper explores two compositional mechanisms that express conflict in the first movement of Nocturnal for Guitar (1963).
Fundamental to Nocturnal’s conflicting musical structures are two devices: interval-class 1 pairings and inversionally symmetrical sets. Britten analyst Arnold Whittall calls interval-class 1 pairings a “well tried device” and states that Nocturnal develops through “the interaction of notes, chords, and keys a semitone apart.” In Philip Rupprecht’s approach to Britten, oppositions of chromatically distant pitch classes (interval-class 1 pairings) inform discrete tonal-textural layers. Working here in conjunction with interval-class 1 pairings are inversionally symmetrical sets. Sets such as these may be seen to convey a sense of conflict because they consist of two opposing halves, polarized around an axis of symmetry. Interval-class 1 pairs and inversionally symmetrical sets are repeatedly combined in Nocturnal into an integrated whole.
We can designate three interval-class 1 pairs as the most prominent in Nocturnal. These three semitones themselves generate a symmetrical structure: a hexatonic collection. The abstraction of the hexatonic collection receives immediate support in the second movement, where it is found in its To transposition.