Analytical essays on music by women composers [electronic resource] 9780190236878, 0190236876

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Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers

Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers Concert Music, 1960–​2000 Edited by Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. Oxford University Press 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Analytical essays on music by women composers : concert music, 1960–2000 / edited by Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft.   pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–023686–1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1.  Mamlok, Ursula. Panta rhei.  2.  Beecroft, Norma. Improvvisazioni concertanti, no. 1. 3.  Tower, Joan, 1938– Silver ladders.  4.  Gubaidulina, Sofia, 1931– Quartet, no. 2. violins (2), viola, cello,  5.  Chen, Yi, 1953– Symphonies, no. 2.  6.  Saariaho, Kaija. Grammaire des rêves.  7.  Larsen, Libby. Chanting to paradise.  8.  Lutyens, Elisabeth, 1906–1983. Essence of our happinesses.  I.  Parsons, Laurel, editor.  II.  Ravenscroft, Brenda, 1961– editor. MT90.A556 2016 780.92′52—dc23           2015027822 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan, USA

Contents Acknowledgments About the Companion Website Chapter 1. Introduction

vii ix 1

Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft PA RT I :  O R D E R , F R E E D O M , A N D D E S I G N

Chapter 2. Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei, Third Movement (1981) “Twelve-Tone in My Own Way”: An Analytical Study of Ursula Mamlok’s Panta Rhei, Third Movement, with Some Reflections on Twelve-​Tone Music in America Joseph N. Straus

Chapter 3. Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 by Norma Beecroft: Serialism, Improvisatory Discourse, and the Musical Avant-​Garde Christoph Neidhöfer

Chapter 4. Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) “Octatonicism,” the Octatonic Scale, and Large-​Scale Structure in Joan Tower’s Silver Ladders Jonathan W. Bernard

15 17

18

32 33

67 68

PA RT I I :  G E S T U R E , I D E N T I T Y, A N D C U LT U R E

Chapter 5. Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987) “Difference Inhabits Repetition”: Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 2 Judy Lochhead

Chapter 6. Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993) The Transformative Power of Musical Gestures: Cultural Translation in Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2 Nancy Yunhwa Rao PA RT I I I : M U S I C , W O R D S , A N D V O I C E S

Chapter 7. Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia … ,” From the Grammar of Dreams (1988) Superposition in Kaija Saariaho’s “The claw of the magnolia …” John Roeder

Chapter 8. Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997) Music as a Mirror: Libby Larsen’s Chanting to Paradise Brenda Ravenscroft

99 101 102

127 128

153

155 156

176 177

Chapter 9. Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968)

196

“This Imaginary Halfe-​Nothing”: Temporality in Elisabeth Lutyens’s Essence of Our Happinesses Laurel Parsons

197

Glossary Bibliography Index

vi Contents

221 225 237

Acknowledgments

A project of this size and scope, designed to stimulate change in a somewhat traditional environment, requires not only intellectual curiosity, but passion and advocacy to bring it to fruition. We acknowledge, with appreciation, all those who shared our vision and believed in this endeavor, and who encouraged us over the years, especially our trusted and generous advisor Joe Straus and our intrepid editor at Oxford University Press, Suzanne Ryan. Thank you to those who assisted in the research and production of the book, including all of our editorial assistants at OUP—​ Jessen O’Brien, Lisbeth Redfield, Daniel Gibney, and Andrew Maillet—​and our research assistants—​Timothy Wyman-​McCarthy, Calista Michel, and Justin Boechler. We are grateful for the financial support provided through research funding from the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science at Queen’s University in Kingston. One of the guiding principles of our project has been to include works for which readers can acquire both a score and a recording. When efforts to make the archival BBC broadcast recording of Elisabeth Lutyens’s Essence of Our Happinesses available to our readers were unsuccessful, Dr. Jonathan Girard, director of the University of British Columbia Symphony Orchestra, responded with enthusiasm and generosity to our request for help. We are grateful to him and to the orchestra for recording the “Chronikos” section of the second movement, making it possible for readers to hear this excerpt through the companion website. In addition, Claire Irwin of the University of York Music Press helped secure the necessary scores, parts, and permissions with her usual efficiency and good humor. Co-​ editing and co-​ authoring requires a special partnership, and we deeply appreciate in each other the complex blend of inspiration, dependability, tenacity, and simple hard work that has carried us through this first phase of our multivolume project, while allowing us to remain friends.

The shared moments of unwavering support—​and sometimes unbridled hilarity—​have sustained us in trying times. The original concept of this book dates from 2007; we are indebted to our long-​suffering authors for their patience, and acknowledge the suffering of our long-​patient families. Glenn Parsons was a rock, stepping up in countless ways to keep the North Vancouver editorial headquarters from falling into chaos when he would probably have preferred to be out kayaking. We dedicate this volume to the six children (now young adults) who have shared their growing-​up years with “The Book”: Andrew, Sarah, Sean, Rebecca, Berg, and Mitzi.

viii Acknowledgments

About the Companion Website

www.oup.com/​us/​musicbywomencomposers Username: Music5 Password: Book1745 Oxford has created a password-​protected website to accompany Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers. On this companion website, readers will find all musical examples and illustrations, including color versions of Figures 5.1, 5.3, and 5.5, Example 7.2, and an audio recording for Chapter 9. For those who wish to examine larger versions of the volume’s visual materials, Oxford University Press has made it possible for readers to zoom in on all examples and illustrations. The reader is encouraged to consult this resource in conjunction the chapters. Examples available online are indicated in the text with Oxford’s symbol: .

Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers

1 Introduction Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft

I have no doubt that women think and feel differently than men, but it is not very important whether I am a woman or a man. What matters is that I am myself and develop my own ideas strictly toward the truth. —​Sofia Gubaidulina

This book celebrates, through musical analysis, the work of eight outstanding composers active in the late twentieth and early twenty-​ first centuries: Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–​1983), Ursula Mamlok (b. 1923), Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931), Norma Beecroft (b. 1934), Joan Tower (b. 1938), Libby Larsen (b. 1950), Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952), and Chen Yi (b. 1953). Their compositions—​in genres ranging from solo song to symphony, opera, film, and electroacoustic music—​represent some of the most important musical trends of the twentieth century. Many of them have won the highest awards available to contemporary composers and have been honored by prestigious fellowships and commissions. Collectively, their lives and careers extend from Edwardian England to twenty-​first-​century North America, and their individual creative voices have thus been forged in environments shaped by the major political and cultural events of this period, including Nazi Germany, postwar Soviet Russia, and China’s Cultural Revolution. As we write in 2014, six of the eight composers—​some now in their 80s and 90s—​continue to pursue lively, successful, and productive careers. Each chapter in this volume presents a detailed analytical exploration of a single representative composition in the genres of song, chamber, and large-​ scale orchestral or choral music. (Electroacoustic, computer, and other contemporary musical genres will be represented in a later volume.) The compelling nature of the music, both aurally and intellectually, has been the primary motivation in the analysts’ selection of these particular compositions, as well as each work’s ability to demonstrate fundamental 1

aspects of its composer’s characteristic musical language. Without exception, these are the first published analytical studies of the works in question—​hopefully, the first of many. The analytical approaches taken by the authors are as individual as the compositions they have chosen to analyze, ranging from Joseph N. Straus’s meticulous diagrams of hexatonic pitch-​class structures in Mamlok’s Panta Rhei to Nancy Rao’s critical exegesis of Chinese operatic gestures in Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2, and from Judy Lochhead’s examination of Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet through the perspective of Gilles Deleuze’s critical theories of différence to John Roeder’s illumination of Saariaho’s song “The claw of the magnolia …” through a blend of rhythmic, pitch, and poetic analysis. What they have in common, however, is the technical nature of the approach, and the depth and detail of the analytical insights into the music. As professional musicians making their living in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, the composers featured in this collection—​all women—​have helped shape a remarkable period in the history of music in the classical Western tradition. While women have composed throughout that thousand-​year history, it is only in the past century, propelled (as in many fields) by the early fight for women’s suffrage and, later, the civil rights movements of the 1960s, that they have flourished and gained public recognition as professional composers. Access to higher musical education has allowed women not only to attain the same level of advanced training in composition as their male peers, but also to begin forming the kind of social and institutional networks that have always been crucial in securing performances and establishing a professional reputation. In recent years, what James Briscoe has optimistically called the “new, powerful wave of composition by women” has brought with it an unprecedented opportunity for listeners to hear and explore a rich array of fresh, contemporary musical voices, born out of the experiences and ideas of female composers.1 Why, then, is it necessary or even justifiable today to link these essays together as exemplars of music by “women composers,” with that term’s old-​fashioned and potentially marginalizing adjective? In many present-​ day societies, particularly in the developed world, activism and legislation have led to high levels of equity in professional fields, and women have achieved proportional representation in many areas, rendering terms such as “the woman doctor” antiquated if not obsolete. Surely when Gubaidulina asserts that “it is not very important whether I am a woman or a man,” she is stating a contemporary truth, an acknowledgment that in the twenty-​first century there should be no need to distinguish music based on the sex of the composer.2 Her declaration expresses a desire—​one expressed by many female composers over the last century—​to have those who listen and consider her music receive it as an integral part of the world of contemporary 2  Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers

music, rather than as a marginal subset of compositions whose intrinsic interest lies merely in the composer’s gender. In this Gubaidulina has been particularly successful, her music having achieved wider international acclaim and scholarly attention within the still overwhelmingly male domain of contemporary classical composition than almost any other living female composer except Saariaho. Gubaidulina and Saariaho are, however, exceptions. The “powerful wave of composition by women” has not yet led to a similar wave of exploration into this repertoire, whether in the form of performance, listening, or scholarship, and the musical voices of many female composers remain as yet relatively unheard and unknown. Critical discussions of gender and classical composition by Marcia Citron and Jill Halstead in the 1990s point out that decades after the women’s movements of the 1960s began to recognize and promote the professional achievements of women in many traditionally male-​dominated fields, perceptual and systemic barriers still prevented the music of female composers from being integrated into the canon, their music remaining largely underperformed and unstudied.3 Similarly, after describing in her preface to the 1995 Norton/​Grove Dictionary of Women Composers “a sea-​change with regards to public acknowledgment,” Rhian Samuel notes that despite the increasing number of recordings, performances, and publications of music by women in score anthologies, these successes had not yet led to women composers becoming “established” in the same way as their male counterparts, particularly in terms of the absence of their compositions from the musical canon and from scholarly musical discourse.4 The volume of research into music by women has certainly grown since 1995, and in recent decades musicologists and a few music theorists have made outstanding contributions to our knowledge of the lives and careers of female composers and to our understanding of their music within a cultural context; feminist music scholars have also suggested alternative analytical approaches to music by female and male composers alike.5 However, most pertinent to this collection, mainstream music theory—​traditionally the locus of the most detailed and rigorous analysis of individual musical compositions—​has not kept pace, as we explain below. Our research into the 20-​year period from 1994 to 2013 shows that since 1994, only 23, or 1.51 percent, of the 1,524 articles published by eight peer-​ reviewed music theory and analysis journals over 376 issues have been devoted to music by a female composer.6 At the time of writing, Music Theory Online leads these statistics with the highest percentage of articles on music by women at 2.91 percent (or 7 of 240 articles over 93 issues); the respective rates for Music Theory Spectrum and the Journal of Music Theory for this period are 1.25 percent (2 of 60 articles) and 0.58 percent (1 article out of 172).7 Introduction 3

While we have not sought similar data for books and monographs that have published analytical research into music by women composers, they are relatively rare, often blending biographical and analytical perspectives. An increasing number are available, however, including significant books by Straus on the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger and by Ellie M. Hisama on music by Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon.8 Research presentations on music by women composers in scholarly fora such as the Society for Music Theory (SMT) annual meetings also remain infrequent. Since 1994, of 1,372 SMT conference presentations, only 34, or 2.47  percent, were on compositions by women. This ratio is skewed upward, however, by the fact that 18 of the 34 papers were presented in special sessions sponsored by the Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in 2001, 2002, and 2010, making these annual conferences the only ones in the Society’s history to include more than three presentations on music by female composers; the rate for the other 17 conferences over this period is 1.41 percent.9 This low representation of women composers in theoretical and analytical presentations is paralleled in the European scholarly environment, where 1.98 percent (11 of 555) of the papers in 14 recent conferences focused on music by women.10 To appropriately interpret data representing scholarship into music by women composers, we need to take into account factors such as the ratio of female-​to-​male composers in a given period. Is the dearth of analytical writing about music by female composers because this music has been disproportionately ignored, or because it reflects a similarly low rate of participation by women in classical Western composition owing to a lack of access to higher education and the social restrictions placed on women’s creativity until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Our research into this question has found that ascertaining this ratio is no easy task. Even in the field of contemporary music definitive data is unavailable, but, based on consultations with several national and international composers’ organizations, it would seem that approximately 20  percent of contemporary composers are female—​unquestionably a remarkable increase, but still a minority.11 There are many other factors that complicate the interpretation of the data we have presented above, including the degree to which analytical research has also overlooked much worthy repertoire by male composers owing to enduring interest in music by composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. What even the raw data highlight, however, is the disparity between the continuing near-​absence of music by women from scholarly music-​t heoretical discussion and the unprecedented rise in professional activity and compositional achievement of women over the past century. 4  Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers

Accordingly, the purpose, not only of the current collection of essays but of the entire multivolume project that it initiates, is threefold. First and foremost, we wish to ignite readers’ curiosity about a body of exciting and powerful contemporary concert music of which they may not yet be aware. Second, if we can inspire new research into serious and deserving—​but as yet unexamined—​music by women, a foundation of knowledge about the music can be established, enabling it not only to become an integral subject of music-​theoretical colloquy, but also to influence the direction that colloquy will take, with regard to analytical methodology as well as musical value and canonicity. Finally, since the inclusion of music by women is still relatively rare in concerts, we hope that this collection will stimulate in performers and conductors an eagerness to program and perform this repertoire, based on its excellence and musical interest rather than its composers’ gender. Toward these ends, this inaugural volume brings together eight analytical studies of individual works or movements, each by a composer who has made a significant national or international contribution to contemporary classical music. Omissions are inevitable, owing in part to the proliferation of female professional composers over the last half century and in part to the current state of analytical research into music by women composers; in some cases we were not able to find any scholars engaged in the analytical study of a given composer’s music.12 The resulting essays thus reflect the nascent state of music-​analytical research into the music of women composers. But if this collection of in-​depth analyses of single works cannot possibly be comprehensive, we are confident that it is representative: in its inclusion of such internationally respected creative artists as Saariaho, Gubaidulina, and Tower; in the range of nations and interacting cultures represented by its composers (the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, Finland, Russia, and China); and in its exploration of music in a variety of genres from symphony to song cycle, through a spectrum of sophisticated analytical approaches. Some readers may ask if by choosing the particular compositions explored in this project, we are attempting to establish a new or revitalized musical canon. The answer to this is “no,” for two reasons. First, there would need to be a much deeper and more extensive tradition of scholarly analysis and performance before collective decisions could be made about which works, if any, could be considered canonical. Moreover, in recent decades the vigorous contestation of the very idea of canonicity challenges the basis of the question itself. We argue that a much more important question to ask is whether these compositions offer substantial aesthetic, intellectual, and musical rewards to analysts, listeners, and performers who pay them close attention, and to that we answer an unqualified “yes.” Introduction 5

The chapters in this volume are grouped thematically by analytical approach into three sections, each of which is preceded by a short introduction placing the analytical methods used in the essays that follow into the context of late twentieth-​and early twenty-​fi rst-​century music theory. The essays in the first group, by Joseph Straus, Christoph Neidhöfer, and Jonathan Bernard, focus on pitch organization in serial or octatonic works by Mamlok, Beecroft, and Tower respectively. The second group of essays, by Judy Lochhead and Nancy Rao, takes a different approach, invoking gestural and cross-​c ultural theory to gain insight into the music of Gubaidulina and Chen Yi. Finally, the essays in the third group, by John Roeder, Brenda Ravenscroft, and Laurel Parsons, analyze in detail the ways in which Saariaho, Larsen, and Lutyens have responded musically—​even in a wordless orchestral movement—​to texts they have chosen to set. Within these sections, each essay is preceded by a brief biographical sketch of the composer, providing the reader with a glimpse into the composer’s career and cultural-​historical context. Each sketch highlights her greatest professional successes, the influential forces and figures that helped to shape her compositional language, and the ways in which she, in turn, has influenced younger composers or otherwise had an impact on the development of contemporary classical music. In addition to the print version of the book, the companion website offers important resources such as all examples and figures available in a format that allows readers to zoom in for closer examination, including several in their original color versions. The website also features a recording by the University of British Columbia Symphony Orchestra of an excerpt from Elisabeth Lutyens’s Essence of Our Happinesses, the only full recording of which is unavailable to listeners except by appointment at British Library’s National Sound Archive in London.13 Recordings of the remaining compositions explored in this volume are commercially available either on compact disc or through Internet music sources such as iTunes. While the analyses are complete with appropriate musical examples, we recommend that the reader wishing to use a particular analysis as a springboard for further research or teaching have the accompanying full score close at hand. Full scores for all works can be accessed either through university library holdings or directly from publishers. In both scholarly and popular discourse surrounding female creators in all the arts, the question often arises of whether the artistic creations of women exhibit common characteristics that bind them together as a group, making them in some way distinct from those of male creators.14 In the realm of musical composition, arguments about these potential 6  Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers

distinctions have had a long and, from a twenty-​first-​century perspective, sometimes uncomfortable history, especially when focused on perceived distinctions in quality (or “greatness”) as much as trait.15 As Halstead and Citron have shown, critical tropes abound in historic descriptions of music by female composers, from the use of adjectives such as “delicate” and “graceful” to assumptions that women are “naturally” better at writing in small forms like song and chamber music than they are at composing in large-​scale forms such as symphony and opera.16 The compositions represented in this volume—​and those to follow—​demonstrate the inaccuracy of such stereotypes. However, readers may be curious to know what kind of threads weaving among the lives and music of these eight composers—​if any—​are revealed in this collection of essays. The biographies that introduce each composer note their diversity in terms of national or cultural background, as well as the aesthetic influences, attitudes, and techniques that have helped shape their compositional styles. But we also observe certain recurrent themes. Most notable, perhaps, is a common rejection by these composers of absolute formalism (integral serialism, for example) in favor of cultivating a more flexible and intuitive individual voice. Ellie Hisama, writing about modernism and gender, argues that women composers’ relative isolation from mainstream contemporary music circles in the first half of the twentieth century may have had the unintended benefit of liberating them to develop independent compositional voices and technical tools.17 This is not to suggest that these composers did not engage the most advanced compositional techniques of their time, but rather that, as the analyses in this volume show, their approaches to formalized systems are fluid—​for example, in the way that Lutyens, Beecroft, and Mamlok mix serialism and free atonality to achieve their expressive goals. The rejection of strict formalism is not only about creating a unique compositional voice; it is also rooted in the keen desire expressed by many of the composers in this volume to reach out and connect with listeners through their music. Saariaho, for example, rejects structural complexity in favor of “communicating” through “audible musical forms,” Gubaidulina conceives of her music in terms of re-​ligio (re-​connecting), and Larsen argues that “it is the composer’s task … to communicate something about being alive through music.”18 Beecroft expresses this need for human connection in the clearest of terms: I want whatever I’m writing to communicate with somebody, and it has to have been inspired by some human factor, human emotion or reaction to something, otherwise it just doesn’t come out. . . . I’m not one of those composers who does not want an audience. I would like Introduction 7

an audience for what I write. I would like to know there’s a listener out there.19

But are these apparent commonalities attributable to the sex of these composers, or do they merely reflect attitudes and values shared by many late twentieth-​and early twenty-​fi rst-​century composers, regardless of gender? Certainly we can find the same compositional approaches and beliefs in the works of many male composers of the past 50 years. Moreover, attributing shared characteristics to a group of composers on the basis of whether they are female or male perpetuates the binary categorization that in the early twenty-​fi rst century is gradually giving way to more the flexible, finely nuanced concept of gender identity as a spectrum. Yet the question of whether there is a discernibly female compositional voice persists in contemporary scholarship, particularly in the work of feminist musicologists such as Sally Macarthur. In her 2002 book Feminist Aesthetics in Music, Macarthur confronts the dilemma for music analysts wishing “to demonstrate that women’s music is worthy of close analysis and of being included in the canon of masterworks,” citing Nicholas Cook’s question, “do you attempt to position women’s music within the mainstream, thereby risking its being swamped by a predominantly male tradition, or do you promote it as a separate tradition of its own, as women’s music, thereby risking marginalization within a male-​dominated culture?”20 Macarthur opts for the latter, seeking common characteristics in compositions by women that are, in her view, distinct from those in “men’s music.”21 While welcoming the challenges that feminist scholarship poses to analytical methodologies developed in the still male-​dominated discipline of music theory, we have taken the opposite approach in this book and the volumes that follow. We believe that to exclude music by women composers from these methodologies would be to artificially separate them from the epistemological context in which these composers received their formative training—​surely as relevant to an understanding of any composer’s work as consideration of its sociocultural context. Furthermore, in the quest for insight into the inevitable, difficult, and likely unanswerable question of whether there is a compositional voice that is discernibly female, analysis has a vital, even urgent role to play. Although close analytical study of a musical composition can never in itself reveal more than part of what makes the music meaningful, delightful, or profound, it can nevertheless supply something that has hitherto been somewhat lacking in the discourse surrounding music by women composers: evidence from the works themselves. Whether or not there is such a thing as a female compositional 8  Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers

voice, or whether one finds the question completely irrelevant, until we know more about the music women have created, generalized claims that men and women compose differently will necessarily be based on provisional hypotheses and personal observation—​perspectives that may be valuable but are insufficient for purposes of comparison. In this, we agree with Rhian Samuel’s argument, published in 1997 but just as relevant nearly 20 years later. What if a woman composer should speak differently from a man? Should she not then be evaluated differently? The fact of sociological conditioning certainly encourages us to consider the likelihood of a “gendered voice” for both men and women. And given the physicality and sensuousness of music itself, is it beyond the realms of possibility that even biology might have some influence on musical utterance too? Some critics emphatically deny its existence; but given that a comparative study of the male and female repertories is the only condition, by definition, that would reveal the existence of such a voice (and its male counterpart), and that no large-​scale, detailed study of women’s music to rival that already afforded men’s has yet taken place, surely no soundly based judgment on this issue can at present be offered.22

It is in this spirit that we offer our collection of analytical studies as a contribution to the development of a body of evidence extensive and robust enough to respond to old questions and generate new ones. We invite our readers to join in this endeavor of discovery. For the scholarly community, these thoughtful analytical essays provide eight distinct entry points into a treasure trove of repertoire awaiting the attention of music theory and musicology researchers. For post-​secondary instructors, the analyses may suggest potential new repertoire for inclusion in post-​tonal theory and history courses, both graduate and upper-​level undergraduate, and provide starting points for serious discussion of these compositions in courses on women and music. Finally, the detailed insight that distinguishes these essays makes this a useful sourcebook for the performing world; we hope that conductors, music directors, and performers will be inspired to explore and program the music of these composers and will find its analytical information a useful aid to making performance decisions. The musical and professional achievements of the composers featured in this volume provide clear evidence of an unstoppable wave of women’s participation as musical creators. And, while much work remains to be done, we look forward with excitement to the energy and renewal that their inclusion will inevitably bring to the future of contemporary music. Introduction 9

Notes 1 James R.  Briscoe, ed., Contemporary Anthology of Music by Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xi. Women’s participation in the world of music performance has also expanded. Women are regularly seen on the concert stage as soloists and, occasionally, on the podium as conductors. Female membership in orchestras is increasing, albeit gradually, and even the Vienna Philharmonic, with its notoriously misogynist policies, finally hired its first permanent female member in 1997 (William Osborne, “Art Is Just an Excuse: Gender Bias in International Orchestras,” Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music 2, no. 1 [October 1996]: 6–​14). 2  Cited by Michael Kurtz in Sofia Gubaidulina:  A  Biography, ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown, trans. Christoph K. Lohmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), vi. 3  Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (1993; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); and Jill Halstead, The Woman Composer: Creativity and the Gendered Politics of Musical Composition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997). In her 2007 reflection on the 15 years that had passed since the publication of Gender and the Musical Canon, Citron lauds the progress made in the “repertorial and disciplinary canons” of musicology, and in the dissemination of music by women composers. However, she cautions “we need to be careful lest historical women become erased again” (214) and emphasizes that “women’s music—​scores, recordings, books—​must continue as an important priority” (215) (“Women and the Western Art Canon: Where Are We Now?” Notes 64, no. 2 [Summer 2007]: 209–​15). 4  Rhian Samuel, “Women’s Music: A Twentieth-​Century Perspective,” in The Norton/​ Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, ed. Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995), xiii. 5  Such scholarship focuses primarily on issues of gender and social context rather than technical analysis of the music, reflecting feminist music theory’s rejection of traditional analysis, with its valorization of an impossible objectivity and its lack of interest in the impact of composers’ gender, social, and cultural identities on the music they create. These views are presented in two notable issues of Perspectives of New Music (PNM) from the early 1990s, where a “Feminist Theory Forum” was followed in the subsequent volume by four papers grouped under the heading “Toward a Feminist Music Theory.” Pertinent articles include Fred Everett Maus, “Masculine Discourse in Music Theory,” PNM 31, no. 2 (Summer 1993):  264–​93; Suzanne Cusick, “Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/​Body Problem,” PNM 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 8–​27; Marion Guck, “A Woman’s (Theoretical) Work,” PNM 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 28–​43; Marianne Kielian-​Gilbert, “Of Poetics and Poiesis, Pleasure and Politics—​Music Theory and Modes of the Feminine,” PNM 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 44–​67; and Susan McClary, “Paradigm Dissonances:  Music Theory, Cultural Studies, Feminist Criticism,” PNM 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 68–​85. Founded a few years after these groundbreaking issues, the scholarly journal Women and Music publishes articles that explore “the relationships among gender, music and culture” (http://​www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/​product/​Women-​and-​ Music,673171.aspx) but to date has published no detailed analyses of music by female composers. The Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music includes a broad spectrum of items about the professional achievements and activities of female composers, but, again, no detailed analyses. Karin Pendle and Melinda Boyd’s annotated bibliography, Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), assembles more than 25 years of feminist scholarship on music. 6  Journals reviewed for these statistics include the Dutch Journal of Music Theory, the Indiana Theory Review, the Journal of Music Theory, Music Analysis, Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, Perspectives on New Music, and Theory and Practice. For the

10  Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers

purposes of this study, a “journal article” was defined as a substantial work (usually over 15 pages) devoted primarily to the theoretical analysis of music. Book, conference, and performance reviews were excluded, as were prefaces, afterwards, short forum contributions, compositions, “in memoriam” pieces, and letters. To be counted as analytical work on a female composer, the music of the composer had to be the focal point of the article. 7  While the cited numbers for journal publications cover 1994–​2013, in the case of Music Theory Spectrum (MTS) and the Journal of Music Theory (JMT), two of the oldest music theory journals, these numbers remain unchanged when one views their entire publishing histories. Launched in 1979, MTS has published two articles on music by women:  Jocelyn R.  Neal’s examination of music by the Dixie Chicks in “Narrative Paradigms, Musical Signifiers, and Form as Function in Country Music,” MTS 29, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 41–​72; and Marianne Kielian-​Gilbert’s exploration of the music of Gabriela Ortiz in “Musical Bordering, Connecting Histories, Becoming Performative,” MTS 33, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 200–​207. The single article published by JMT since its founding in 1957 is Jennifer Bain, “Hildegard, Hermannus, and Late Chant Style,” JMT 52, no. 1 (2008): 123–​49. 8 Joseph N. Straus, The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Ellie M. Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Harald Krebs and Sharon Krebs, Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Burt Jerome Levy and Laurdella Foulkes-​Levy, Journeys through the Life and Music of Nancy van de Vate (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), combine biographical and analytical approaches in their studies. Also worthy of note are two multiauthor essay collections: Deborah Stein, ed., Engaging Music: Essays in Music Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), which includes analytical chapters on music by Lang, Barbara Kolb, and Sarah Maclachlan; and Tim Howell, ed., Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues (Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). Michael Slayton, Women of Influence in Contemporary Music: Nine American Composers (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011), includes analytical observations, as does the ecomusicologist Denise von Glahn’s Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 9  Of these 17 SMT meetings, eight did not include any papers on compositions by women; aside from one conference with three papers, the rest included one or (less often) two. 10  There is very little archived conference information available. By consulting the host organizations’ websites, we reviewed 14 conferences including ten Music Analysis TAGS (graduate) conferences that took place in the United Kingdom between 2005 and 2014 (159 presentations) and four European analysis conferences, three from 2011 and one from 2013 (396 papers). 11  In 2006 the British Music Information Centre (later absorbed into the organization Sound and Music) estimated that 17–​20 percent of contemporary composers in the United Kingdom were women (cited by Jennifer Fowler in “The Proms 2006: Where are the Women?” Women in Music (May 2006), http://​www.womeninmusic.org.uk/​ PROMS06.htm). More current numbers are challenging to find. According to Kealy Cozens, Creative Project Leader for Sound and Music, out of 660 applicants for their composer programs, 183 (27.7  percent) were female. Cozens notes that applicants to these programs represent mostly emerging rather than established composers (e-​mail message to the editors’ research assistant Tim Wyman-​McCarthy, June 6, 2014). Data from the Canadian Music Centre, obtained through an e-​mail message

Introduction 11

from Steve McNabb, Information Architect/​Senior Developer, on May 21, 2014, indicate that 149 of 695, or 17.6 percent, of Canadian composers are female. The percentage of women composers listed in the American Composers Alliance database (accessed May 17, 2014, http://​www.composers.com/​content/​aca-​archive-​collections) is lower, at 12 percent (62 of 515 composers), the lower percentage likely reflecting the fact that this includes both living and deceased composers. Given the size of the American population, it is clear that their methodology for compiling the database means that these numbers are too low to reflect the current gender distribution among American composers. 12  The early development of this collection included a widely publicized call for proposals, the responses to which, although more numerous than we had expected, revealed unfortunate gaps. One of the goals of this collection is to stimulate research that will result in these gaps being filled. 13 The recording on the companion website of the second movement’s orchestral “Chronikos,” discussed by Parsons in c­ hapter 9, has been made available thanks to Dr. Jonathan Girard, director, and the University of British Columbia Symphony Orchestra. The National Sound Archive’s recording is a reel-​to-​reel tape of the BBC Orchestra’s premiere of Essence of Our Happinesses under the direction of Norman del Mar. 14 The French poststructuralist literary critic and writer Hélène Cixous’s groundbreaking notion of l’écriture feminine holds that women’s bodies and experiences must be inscribed in women’s writing through (in part) the cyclical, nonlinear use of language, in direct opposition to the so-​called phallogocentric norms of the male tradition. See Cixous, “Le rire de la Méduse” (1975), in Le rire de la Méduse et autres ironies (Paris: Galilée, 2010), translated into English as “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs:  Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (Summer, 1976):  875–​93. See also Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius:  Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1989); Hilde Hein and Caroline Korsmeyer, eds., Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and Gisela Ecker, ed., Feminist Aesthetics, trans. Harriet Anderson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), among others. 15  Telling examples of the “quality” debate since the late nineteenth century can be found in Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman:  A  Study of Secondary and Tertiary Sexual Characteristics (1894; London:  Heinemann, 1934), and in a series of articles published over the past century bearing remarkably similar titles. In chronological order, these are George Trumbull Ladd, “Why Women Cannot Compose,” Yale Review 6 (July 1917): 789–​ 806; Carl E. Seashore, “Why No Great Women Composers?” in In Search of Beauty in Music: A Scientific Approach to Musical Esthetics (New York: Ronald Press, 1947): 363–​67; Grace Rubin-​Rabson, “Why Haven’t Women Become Great Composers?” High Fidelity/​ Musical America 23 (February 1973): 47–​50; and Eugene Gates, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Composers? Psychological Theories, Past and Present,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28, no. 2 (1994): 27–​34. 16 See Citron, ­ chapter  4 (especially 130–​ 32), and Halstead, ­ chapter  6 (171–​ 214). Halstead opens her chapter by citing the English psychologist Glenn Wilson, writing in 1989: “Many women have written successful songs … but they have seldom put together musical works on a grander scale such as operas, symphonies or even musical comedies. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that some factor such as intrinsic motivation or ‘scale of thinking’ is another contributor to artistic genius” (171). 17  “Because it released these composers from the strictures of a common musical style by giving them the technical means to forge new musical procedures and narratives, modernism did not prove harmful to them, but rather stimulated their work in inventive and liberating ways.” Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism, 11.

12  Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers

18  See Pirkko Moisala, Kaija Saariaho (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2009), 9; Kurtz, Sofia Gubaidulina: A Biography, 119; and Libby Larsen, Libby Larsen’s website, accessed January 5, 2013, http://​libbylarsen.com/​index.php?contentID=216. 19  Norma Beecroft, interview by Eitan Cornfield, Canadian Composers Portraits: Norma Beecroft, Centrediscs CD-​CMCCD 9303, 2003, compact disc. A transcript of this interview is available at http://​www.musiccentre.ca/​sites/​www.musiccentre.ca/​files/​resources/​ pdfmedia/​beecroft-​portrait-​en.pdf. If, as composers, these women have placed a high value on connecting and communicating with listeners through their music, a remarkable number have also initiated projects designed to revitalize the connections between contemporary composers, their audiences, and their communities. Larsen, for example, founded what is now the American Composers Forum to support and advocate on behalf of composers, and Lutyens instituted the Composers Concourse in London. Lutyens and others, including Beecroft, Tower, and Saariaho, also established or produced new music ensembles, concert series, and radio and television documentaries. 20  See Sally Macarthur, Feminist Aesthetics in Music (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 88. 21  In her conclusion, Macarthur suggests that, in terms of structure, music by women differs from that of men with regard to its positioning of climaxes, relative lengths of sections, and gestural construction (178), although elsewhere in the book she uses terms such as “warmth,” “tenderness,” and “softening [of dissonance]” to describe music that she hears as distinctively “feminine” (see, for example, her discussion of Elisabeth Lutyens’s serialism, 96–​102). 22  Samuel, “Women’s Music: A Twentieth-​Century Perspective,” xiv.

Introduction 13

Part I

Order, Freedom, and Design The unprecedented experimentation with new ways of ordering pitch marks the twentieth century as a uniquely creative period for musical composition. The most inf luential of these new compositional approaches was serialism, which evolved from Schoenberg’s establishment of the twelve-​tone system in the years following the First World War into the all-​e ncompassing integral serialism of Boulez and Babbitt following the Second. Alternative pitch-​class collections, often involving the symmetrical distributions of intervals, also offered new possibilities to composers. Both Stravinsky (inf luenced by his Russian predecessors Mussorgsky and Rimsky-​K orsakov) and Bartók created new sound worlds by drawing on one such collection—​the octatonic scale—​in many of their compositions. Composers continued to explore the possibilities of both serialism and octatonicism in the second half of the century, and the analytical essays that open this volume illustrate how Ursula Mamlok, Norma Beecroft, and Joan Tower have creatively adapted these principles in three works, each in its own way exemplifying the tension between order and freedom in postwar contemporary composition. To begin, Joseph N. Straus examines the third movement of the German-​ American composer Ursula Mamlok’s enigmatic 1981 twelve-​tone piano trio, Panta Rhei (Time in Flux). Elucidating Mamlok’s distinct form of serialism, he traces the interplay of trichordal, triadic, and hexatonic collections throughout the movement and demonstrates how she extends the serial principle to rhythm. As Straus observes, the result is not simply an ingeniously structured composition, but a beautiful and expressive one. His essay ends with a reflection on the place of Mamlok’s music in the context of postwar American serialism and his seven “myths” of serial composition, arguing that Panta Rhei is “typical of the best twelve-​tone music of the postwar period in America.” 15

In ­chapter 3, Christoph Neidhöfer introduces readers to the Canadian composer Norma Beecroft’s 1961 twelve-​tone flute concerto Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1, written in Italy during a period in which she studied in Rome and attended the summer schools of Darmstadt and Dartington. While little known, this short but intense work perfectly encapsulates the dichotomy in the contemporary music of its time between the total compositional control offered by approaches such as integral serialism, and the renunciation of that control exemplified by the revolutionary chance music of John Cage. As Neidhöfer points out in his essay, despite her use of the word Improvvisazioni in the work’s title, Beecroft does not in fact allow the performer much freedom. Rather, she creates the illusion of extemporization through her flexible segmentation of the row coupled with precise notation of complex but aurally unpredictable rhythms. Following a careful explication of Beecroft’s sketches as well as her final score, Neidhöfer explains how this paradoxical composition fits into the broader aesthetic dialogue of the time, represented particularly in the writings of Umberto Eco. Finally, in ­chapter 4, Jonathan W. Bernard examines Joan Tower’s complex but creative use of octatonic collections in her highly successful orchestral composition Silver Ladders (1986), identifying a constellation of compositional strategies that he finds unprecedented in the works of earlier twentieth-​ century composers. Not limiting herself to a single transposition or rotation at a time, Tower combines simultaneous octatonic collections in multiple but distinct instrumental layers, and uses different techniques to gradually transform one octatonic collection into another or to transition from an octatonic to a non-​octatonic collection. On the basis of meticulous analytical observation, Bernard develops a useful typology outlining the specific compositional mechanisms Tower uses to achieve these transformations and considers how their deployment may contribute to an understanding of the work’s formal design. He closes his exploration of Tower’s music by relating his analytical findings to her own statements describing her working methods, and her thoughts on contemporary composition. Given the originality of the compositional strategies he finds in Silver Ladders, Bernard’s essay represents an important contribution to the study not only of Tower’s music, but also of octatonicism in postwar American music.

16  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

2 Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei, Third Movement (1981)

Ursula Mamlok was born in Berlin in 1923.i Barely one step ahead of the European conflagration, she emigrated with her family to Ecuador in 1939. One year later, at the age of 17, she moved on her own to New York to study composition with George Szell (much better known as a conductor than as a composer) at the Mannes School of Music. In New  York Mamlok was introduced to modernist, atonal music, an experience she initially did not enjoy.ii During the 1940s, however, her appreciation of this repertoire grew, particularly after 1944, when she attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina; there she heard regular performances of the Schoenberg string quartets by the Polish Quartet. She also had the opportunity learn from Ernst Krenek, Eduard Steuermann, and Roger Sessions, whose influence led her away from tonality and toward the adoption of serialism. Mamlok completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in her 30s at the Manhattan School of Music. Composition lessons with Stefan Wolpe, Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and George Perle exposed her to more systematic approaches to serialism, while subsequent studies with Ralph Shapey taught her to “take away the squareness” and develop a more imaginative rhythmic language.iii After teaching for over 40 years at the Manhattan School of Music and other universities, in 2006 she returned to her native Berlin, where she i.  Biographical information about the composer is drawn from Barbara A. Petersen, “Mamlok, Ursula,” in Grove Music Online, ed. Deane L. Root, http://​www.oxfordmusiconline.com, and the composer’s website, www.ursulamamlok.com, both accessed September 10, 2014. ii.  Ursula Mamlok, interview with Roxane Prevost, “Conversations with Ursula Mamlok,” Ex Tempore 11, no. 2 (Spring–​Summer 2003): 125. iii. Ibid., 129.

17

now lives and works. She has written more than 60 works for piano and various instrumental ensembles, large and small, and recordings of her music are currently available on nearly 20 CDs, four of them devoted exclusively to her compositions. Among the honors she has received are fellowships and commissions from the Guggenheim, Fromm, and Koussevitzky Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Although Mamlok is known today as a serial composer, her approach is as intuitive as it is systematic: I will wait until I find something that gives me a system for that particular piece. . . . And what’s interesting was for me to see that I can [mix serial and free atonal movements] because you don’t want to become a slave of the system.iv

“Twelve-​Tone in My Own Way”: An Analytical Study of Ursula Mamlok’s Panta Rhei, Third Movement, with Some Reflections on Twelve-​Tone Music in America Joseph N. Straus Mamlok’s piano trio, Panta Rhei, dates from 1981 and has been widely performed, recorded, and discussed.1 The work is in five movements, the third of which is a lyrical, meditative slow movement, marked molto tranquillo. Example 2.1 provides the score for mm. 1–​15, roughly the first half of the work, with some analytical annotations  . Throughout this excerpt, and throughout the whole movement, there are three independent lines. In mm. 1–​7, the violin plays Ostinato 1 (sustained F ♭s, punctuated with a snap pizzicato); the piano right hand plays Ostinato 2 (short, repeated Ds, with the performance instruction to stop the string inside the piano with a finger of the left hand); and the cello, high in its register, plays a slow-​moving melody, marked espressivo. In m. 8, these three lines change instrumentation: Ostinato 1 moves from violin to piano, Ostinato 2 moves from piano to cello, and the melody moves from cello to violin. Then, in m. 15, the lines change instrumentation again. The movement as a whole consists of four distinct formal sections, articulated by these shifts in instrumentation and texture (see Figure 2.1  ). iv. Ibid., 131.

18  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Example 2.1 Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei, third movement, mm. 1–​15, with hexatonic collections, triads, and members of sc(014)

(Continued)

The three different lines move systematically through the three instruments (and vice versa), with the fourth section restoring the arrangement of the first.2 In instrumentation and texture, then, we have a four-​stage process, involving the systematic departure from and return to the original state. In the domain of pitch, shaped by a twelve-​tone plan to be discussed shortly, the second half of the piece is the rough retrograde of the first: the P and I forms of the first half are repeated in retrograde and in reverse order in the second.

Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 19

Example 2.1 (Continued)

Figure 2.1 Formal chart

Looking in more detail at the pitch organization of the first two sections (see again Example 2.1), we note a profusion of consonant triads (members of sc(037)) and members of sc(014). These lie mostly within the melody, although some involve the combination of two melody notes with one note from one of the two ostinatos. In some passages, the music features triads gradually morphing into other triads (with occasional hints of 014), while in others the music features 014s gradually morphing into other 014s (with occasional hints of major or minor triads). And all of this activity 20  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

unfolds within the bounds of two of the hexatonic collections (members of sc(014589)). This sense of gradual shape shifting is mostly a result of the leisurely progress of the melody, which constantly reaches back to recall previously stated notes even as it slowly moves forward to bring in new ones. The first triad we hear is F♯ major, formed by the first two notes of the melody (B ♭ and D ♭, equivalent to A ♯ and C ♯) together with the F♯ in Ostinato 1. As the melody proceeds, the repeated B ♭ and D ♭ are followed by F, creating a new triad, B ♭ minor, that shares two notes with the preceding one. The melodic B ♭ and F can then be heard to combine with the D in Ostinato 2 to create a third triad, B ♭ major, which shares two notes with the preceding B ♭ minor. The melody moves next to A. The resulting D minor triad shares two notes with the preceding B ♭ major triad. Amid this progression of triads, in which each shares two notes with the previous one, we can hear hints of 014, for example in the combination of the first two melodic notes, B ♭ and D ♭, with the D in Ostinato 2. Other than the E in the melody, all of the notes in mm. 1–​4 are referable to one of the four hexatonic collections, labeled HEX1,2 in Example 2.1. In m. 5 the hexatonic reference shifts to the complementary collection, HEX3,4, and the harmonic focus simultaneously shifts from triads to 014s. As with the triads in the preceding passage, the 014s bleed into each other, each one retaining two notes in common with the preceding one. And amid the progression of 014s we get distinct hints of triads, most notably in the recurring G ♯ major triad in the melody (C and E ♭, equivalent to B ♯ and D ♯ , together with G ♯). In m. 8 the hexatonic reference stays the same (still HEX3,4), but the harmonic focus shifts back to triads. The movement as a whole can be understood in a similar way, as involving progressions of triads or 014s, either of which might unfold within either of two complementary hexatonic collections. Figure 2.2 provides a more systematic account of both the harmonic progressions and the hexatonic sound world in which they unfold. Figure 2.2 offers a particular rendering of what Richard Cohn has designated the Northern and Southern hexatonic systems.3 Both systems (as well as the Eastern and Western systems, not shown here) arrange a progression of six major and minor triads around the circumference of a circle. Reading clockwise from C major in the 12 o’clock position of the Northern system, we have C major, C minor, A ♭ major, G ♯ minor, E major, E minor, and back to C major. As Cohn and others have observed, each move around the circle involves holding two notes in common and moving the third note to produce another major or minor triad.4 These six triads taken together involve only six pitch classes, namely those belonging to HEX3,4. The Southern system works the same way: six triads are arranged around Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 21

Figure 2.2 Triads and 014s plotted on Cohn’s Northern and Southern hexatonic systems

the outer circle, the triads are linked by two common tones, and together they project the notes of HEX1,2, the complement of HEX3,4. For both the Northern and Southern systems, I  depart from Cohn by inserting a new circle inside the outer, triadic circle. This inner circle connects forms of 014 in the same way that the outer circle connects triads. Each move around the inner circle holds two notes in common and moves the third one, taking us to another form of 014. We still have a chain of harmonies, with two common tones retained, moving around a circle and projecting a hexatonic collection. The dotted lines connecting the 014s in the inner circles with the triads in the outer circles indicate the multiplicative operation M5, by which dissonant 014 trichords can be transformed into consonant 037 triads and vice versa.5 22  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

On these two double circles, Figure 2.2 traces the progression of Mamlok’s harmonies. The piece starts with PHRASE 1A (mm. 1–​4) at the lower left of Figure 2.2: starting with an F♯ major triad, the music moves counterclockwise around the circle, through B ♭ minor and B ♭ major to D minor. D minor is the hexatonic pole of F♯ major—​that is, these two triads, at opposite sides of the circle, are complements with respect to the underlying hexatonic collection.6 At this point, the music jumps to the inner circle of the Northern collection, to the 034 in the 12 o’clock position (indicated as PHRASE 1B, mm. 5–​7). The music moves counterclockwise to the opposing form of 014: 034 and 78e, opposite each other on this inner circle, are hexatonic poles, just as F♯ major and D minor are. At this point (PHRASE 2A, mm. 8–​10), 78e morphs into G♯ minor (with two notes, G♯ and B, in common), and the music moves clockwise around the outer Northern circle to C major. PHRASE 2A remains within HEX3,4, but the progression consists of triads instead of 014s. Having arrived at C major, the music jumps to the Southern circle, the inner circle, and Phrase 2B traces a progression of 014s within HEX1,2. In moving from phrase to phrase, the harmonic focus (triads vs. 014s) and the hexatonic reference (HEX1,2 vs. HEX3,4) may either change or remain the same. As suggested earlier, all of these harmonic and collectional relationships unfold within a twelve-​tone framework. Figure 2.2 acknowledges that by identifying PHRASES 1A and 1B with a P ordering of an underlying twelve-​tone series and identifying PHRASES 2A and 2B with an I ordering. Order positions within the series are indicated by numbers in italics.7 Figure 2.3 shows the twelve-​tone series for the movement and for the whole work. This movement uses only the P and I forms shown plus their retrogrades. The hexatonic collection is the hexachord for the series, and these two series forms are hexachordally combinatorial: the first hexachord of P comes back as the second hexachord of I, and vice versa. As Figure 2.3a shows, both hexachords are ordered as RI-​chains:  for each bracketed trichord, the last two notes of one become the first two notes of the next, and the two trichords are related by the inversion that exchanges those two notes.8 The RI-​chain of triads in the first hexachord of P is entirely systematic. The RI-​chain of 014s in the second hexachord of P, however, has a glitch. The RI-​chain shown in Figure 2.3a depends on reversing the written order of the G ♯ and B. In their actual written order, the chain is interrupted and a G ♯ major triad—​D ♯ –​C (B ♯)–​G ♯ —​pops up in the middle. This connects nicely to the G ♯ minor triad that begins the I form of the series, which then proceeds with its own RI-​chains of triads and 014s. Mamlok’s musical realization, of course, is not as neat and systematic as Figures 2.2 and 2.3 might suggest, but these basic materials and their precompositional arrangement obviously exert a good deal of influence on the sound and progression of the music. Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 23

(a)

(b)

Figure 2.3a and 2.3b Pitch-​class series and duration series

In this movement, and in much of her music, Mamlok is also interested in bringing the durations under some kind of serial control, and she has a number of different strategies for doing this. Figure 2.3b shows the duration series for this movement: 24 durations, measured in sixteenth notes, that mostly range in length from one to six sixteenth notes. After the P form of the duration series, we hear the same thing in retrograde (labeled R). In the duration series labeled I, each value in the P duration series is replaced by its complement mod 6: 5 becomes 1, 4 becomes 2, 3 stays as 3, and 6 stays as 6. Inversion in this case thus means complementation mod 6. There are a few glitches in the scheme, indicated by parentheses and asterisks on the chart (parentheses indicate omission of expected durations, and asterisks indicate durations that are slightly off). But for the most part, the durations are systematically serialized. They are also coordinated with the pitch series, as indicated at the right of Figure 2.3b: duration series P is projected by pitch series P; duration series R by pitch series I; duration series I by pitch series RI; and duration series RI by pitch series R. While the basic arrangement is clear enough, its musical motivation is more obscure. It is not obvious why the composer uses values between 1 and 6 (and thus relies on complementation mod 6 for her definition of inversion), how this 24-​note duration series is internally organized, or how it relates to the pitch-​class series. In other works, including the fourth movement of this piece, Mamlok uses a 12-​note duration series that corresponds exactly with the 12-​note pitch-​class series, but in this movement she uses a 24-​note duration series understood in terms of mod 6. It may be that she was not attempting an integration of pitch-​class and duration series but instead was creating the duration series in an entirely free and possibly random way, perhaps by literally rolling the dice to produce random values from 1 to 6. That notion, purely conjectural, leads me to experience the free and unpredictable rhythms of the melody as a deliberately and perhaps literally aleatoric aspect of this piece. Example 2.2 presents the complete score of the movement. A 12-​count of the pitch-​class series is indicated by numbers corresponding to the order positions within the two series forms shown at the top of the example. The circled notes in the series (in order positions 1 and 5) are assigned to the two ostinato lines. The duration series, which unfolds within the melody (not within the two ostinato lines), is indicated by numbers in parentheses. The two ostinato lines have distinctive rhythmic patterns of their own. Ostinato 1, which starts with repeated F♯ s in the violin, projects a pattern of alternating values:  from the initial attack to the pizzicato in the first measure is a duration of 10½ sixteenth notes. Seven sixteenth notes of rest follow. Then we hear another F♯ for 10½ sixteenth notes, and another rest of 7 sixteenth notes. Although this ostinato line moves from instrument to Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 25

Example 2.2 Complete score annotated with reference to the pitch-​class and duration series

instrument, the durational pattern continues throughout: 10½ on, punctuated by a pizzicato, then 7 off. Ostinato 2, which begins with repeated Ds in the piano, involves attacks separated by 11 sixteenth notes, and this pattern continues, with occasional 26  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Example 2.2 (Continued)

(Continued)

slight glitches, throughout the movement. The periodicities of the two ostinato lines do not coincide with each other, and neither coincides in any simple way with the beats of the notated $ 3 meter. The result is a sense of kaleidoscopic rhythmic interplay, with the aleatory but serialized durations of the melodic line interwoven with the regular patterns of the two ostinatos. This is a beautiful musical work, deeply thought out, richly imagined, and highly expressive. In each of those respects, it is typical not only of Mamlok’s music, but also of the best twelve-​tone music of the postwar Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 27

Example 2.2 (Continued)

period in America. This repertoire has been sadly mischaracterized in both the scholarly and popular literature. A more accurate and balanced description of it provides a useful context for understanding Mamlok’s compositional achievement.9 Mamlok’s career and music vividly refute many of the myths that have accreted to twelve-​tone music. The Myth of Serial Orthodoxy maintains that there is one normative, standard way to compose serial music—​an orthodox mainstream—​and composers must choose either to follow the orthodoxy or to deviate from it. The Myth of Serial Purity maintains that 28  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

serial compositions follow certain generic rules in relation to which nonconforming tones are understood as freedoms or liberties. In twelve-​tone music, however—​t hat is, in the actual twelve-​tone music written by a very large number of composers over a long period of time—​t here is no orthodoxy, just a series of local practices. And there are no general rules; rather, composers make up their own rules, grounded in innovative compositional designs of their own creation. So it would be wrong to measure Mamlok against Schoenberg, or Webern, or Babbitt, or any other composer you might care to name. They all differ from each other, and she differs from them. What they have in common is a commitment to a systematic exploration of the twelve-​tone aggregate, but not much more than that. Rather than a coercive set of rules, the twelve-​tone idea has been a point of departure for a variety of compositional initiatives. Many of the features of the third movement of Panta Rhei—​its insistent repetition of notes and groups of notes, its frequent reference to major and minor triads, its ostinati, its playful attitude toward serial ordering, and its frequent systemic glitches—​might give the impression of deviation from some normative standard, of liberties taken from some established, orthodox procedure. In fact, however, proceeding in this individual, idiosyncratic way—​creating new compositional designs and realizing them in distinctive ways—​is what twelve-​tone composers have always done. Mamlok’s practice places her in a varied and eclectic mainstream of twelve-​tone composition. Among the alleged rules of twelve-​tone composition we often find ideas about non-​repetition of tones and avoidance of tonal references. The Myth of Non-​Repetition maintains that serial music is designed to prevent any of the twelve tones from receiving any particular musical emphasis by requiring that no tone may be repeated until the remaining 11 have been sounded. The Myth of Antitonality maintains that twelve-​tone music is designed to avoid referring to the triads and key centers associated with common-​ practice tonal music. As we have seen, however, Mamlok’s music is full of repetitions of all kinds and deliberately cultivates tonal and triadic references. Indeed, it would be more accurate to turn these myths entirely on their heads and assert that the twelve-​tone approach, as practiced by postwar American composers like Mamlok, is designed precisely to produce certain kinds of repetitions and to produce tonal effects. The Myths of Serial Tyranny and Serial Demise are falsehoods about the history of this compositional approach. The Myth of Serial Tyranny maintains that serial composition dominated the American musical scene during the 1950s and 1960s. I’ve written about that myth at some length, and I won’t belabor it here, except to say that to imagine Mamlok as a party to some sort of monstrous conspiracy to hold American music hostage is laughably false.10 The Myth of Serial Demise holds that at Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 29

some point (there is wild disagreement in the literature about the actual date) either the mythical serial tyranny ended or composers simply stopped composing twelve-​tone music altogether. In fact, the twelve-​tone enterprise is alive and well into the 1980s, 1990s, and up to the present. Certainly that is true of Mamlok herself—​she became a twelve-​tone composer in 1961 and has remained true to that approach, in one way or another, ever since. A particularly nasty myth is the Myth of Inexpressiveness, which holds that twelve-​tone music is inexpressive, uncommunicative, and ultimately meaningless. Insofar as it has expressive gestures, these are inappropriately borrowed from earlier music. It lacks human feeling and operates, at best, within an extremely narrow expressive range, usually having to do with pain and anguish, horror and alienation. That myth is refuted by a wide range of twelve-​tone pieces, very much including the evocative and emotive third movement of Panta Rhei. Mamlok approach to twelve-​tone composition has evolved over time, but her basic commitment to it has not wavered: From the 1960s onward, I’ve refined my style and have been doing that ever since. I  think the moment you stop learning, that’s the end. As years go by, you change and your inf luences and goals are different. Now my music is less complex than it was in the ’50s and ’60s. I’m very comfortable writing 12-​tone music but you will hear composers say, “That’s passé.” That’s the same as saying the C Major scale is passé—​you can’t go by that, you have to have your own language.11

Mamlok’s own twelve-​tone language has often involved taking unusual musical paths through the familiar 12 × 12 matrix of row forms. In some works, for example, the musical lines trace a spiral path through the matrix, a succession of diminishing concentric squares culminating in the notes that lie at the center of the matrix (see, for example, Stray Birds [1963], Haiku Settings for Soprano and Flute [1967], the Sextet [1977], Der Andreas Garten [1987], and Girasol [1990]). In many other works, including the fourth movement of Panta Rhei, she creates new sorts of charts, combining series forms in interesting, original ways. Mamlok has said that all of her music since 1961 has been “twelve-​tone in my own way.”12 As the third movement of Panta Rhei clearly demonstrates, Mamlok’s way involves music of subtle craft and great expressive force, part of a musical idiom and an individual career that continue to grow and evolve into the second decade of this new century.

30  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Notes 1.  “Panta rhei” is a term from Heraclitus meaning “time in flux” or “everything flows.” There are two published recordings of the work: American Masters—​Ursula Mamlok, various artists, CRI 891, 2002, compact disc; and Contemporary American Piano Trios, Vol. 2, with the Francesco Trio, Music and Arts 933, 2000, compact disc. Published discussions of the work include Roxane Prevost, “A Woman Composer among Men: A Theoretical Study of Ursula Mamlok’s Serial Works” (PhD diss., State University of New  York at Buffalo, 2003); Roxane Prevost, “Metrical Ambiguities in Ursula Mamlok’s Panta Rhei, IV,” Canadian University Music Review 23, nos. 1–​2 (2004):  147–​67; and Joseph Straus, Twelve-​Tone Music in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 2.  The twelve-​tone origin of these lines, identified in the chart as P, I, R(I), and R(P), will be discussed later in this chapter (see Figure 2.3a). 3.  Richard Cohn, “Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-​Romantic Triadic Progressions,” Music Analysis 15, no. 1 (1996): 9–​40. 4.  Cohn and other neo-​Riemannian theorists have been particularly interested in the minimal distance (a semitone) through which the moving note moves, considering this an instance of parsimonious voice leading. In the analytical discussion that follows, I will ignore this aspect in order to accommodate progressions of 014 as well as 037. 5.  Pitch-​class multiplication by five, mod 12 (M5), has the effect of mapping the chromatic scale onto the circle of fourths, and vice versa. Intervallically, its effect on a pitch-​ class set involves preserving the instances of ics 2, 3, 4, and 6, while exchanging the instances of ic1 and ic5. Tn(M5) maps members of sc(014) onto members of sc(037) and vice versa, retaining the minor and major thirds common to both sc, while replacing the perfect fifth of the triad with the semitone of the 014. In Figure 2.2 the dotted lines in the Northern system connect sets related by M5 followed by T4; in the Southern system the dotted lines connect sets related by M5 followed by T8. 6. On the structural and affective qualities of the hexatonic pole relationship, see Richard Cohn, “Uncanny Resemblances:  Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57, no. 2 (2004): 285–​324. 7.  This movement uses only P6 and I3 (a combinatorial pair) and their retrogrades (R6 and RI3). The series forms are labeled without subscript in the discussion that follows. 8.  RI-​chains are a recurrent point of interest in the theoretical and analytical work of David Lewin. See Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). 9. Straus, Twelve-​Tone Music in America, offers close readings of more than 30 twelve-​ tone works and a refutation of the many myths that have gathered around it. The following discussion condenses material found there. 10.  Straus, “The Myth of Serial ‘Tyranny’ in the 1950s and 1960s,” Musical Quarterly 83, no. 3 (1999): 301–​43. 11.  Liner notes to CRI recording (2002). 12.  Ursula Mamlok, interview with the author, May 11, 2010.

Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 31

3 Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961)

Norma Beecroft’s influence on Canadian contemporary music from the 1950s to the 1980s was immense, not only as a composer, but also through her promotion of other Canadian composers and their music.i Born in Oshawa, Ontario, in 1934, Beecroft was trained in music from an early age by her father, a pianist and inventor. She left home at 16 to pursue a career in music, studying piano at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and, later, composition with John Weinzweig, Canada’s first twelve-​tone composer. During this period Beecroft also began working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC’s) fledgling television network, initiating a long and illustrious parallel career as a contemporary music producer and host. In 1958 she received a scholarship to study with Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, where she was inspired to further her compositional career in Europe. From 1959 to 1961 she studied composition with Goffredo Petrassi at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome and flute with Severino Gazzelloni. Beecroft also attended the summer schools of music at Dartington and Darmstadt, where her exposure to new ideas and sounds inspired radical changes in her compositional language. In particular, as Neidhöfer relates in his essay on her Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1, she was profoundly influenced by Bruno Maderna’s i. Biographical information about the composer is drawn from The Canadian Encyclopedia, s.v. “Norma Beecroft,” by Kenneth Winters and Betty Nygaard King, last modified December 15, 2013, http://​www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/​en/​article/​norma-​beecroft-​emc, and from Norma Beecroft, interview by Eitan Cornfield, Canadian Composers Portraits: Norma Beecroft, Centrediscs CD-​CMCCD 9303, 2003, compact disc. A transcription of this interview is available at http://​www. musiccentre.ca/​sites/​,www.musiccentre.ca/​files/​resources/​pdfmedia/​beecroft-​portrait-​en.pdf.

32

lectures on twelve-​tone technique. But Darmstadt also introduced her to the aleatory music of John Cage, and there she heard an early performance of Stockhausen’s Kontakte for four-​channel tape and live instruments, an experience that led her to devote the remainder of her compositional career primarily to electroacoustic music. Following her return to Canada, Beecroft worked with Myron Schaeffer at the University of Toronto and Mario Davidovsky at the Columbia-​Princeton Electronic Music Center. As she developed her own electroacoustic musical voice throughout the 1960s, she also continued her broadcasting career, first with the CBC and later as a freelancer. Her contributions to contemporary Canadian musical life are remarkable: she produced many documentaries and a 13-​album set of records featuring twentieth-​century Canadian composers and computer music, hosted a weekly radio series called Music of Today, and cofounded and managed the Toronto New Music Concert series for nearly 20 years. In the 1980s, Beecroft taught electronic music and composition at York University in Toronto. She has been the recipient of many honors for her contributions to Canadian music, including the Canada Council’s Lynch-​Staunton Award for composition (twice), the Major Armstrong Award for her 1975 documentary The Computer in Music, and an honorary doctorate from York University. Today Beecroft is retired and lives north of Toronto.

Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 by Norma Beecroft: Serialism, Improvisatory Discourse, and the Musical Avant-​Garde Christoph Neidhöfer Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 for solo flute and orchestra (1961), together with Tre Pezzi Brevi for flute and harp (1960–​61), marks the beginning of the Canadian composer Norma Beecroft’s international career.1 Both works were written during her three years in Europe, where she studied composition with Goffredo Petrassi, attended the summer courses and festivals in Darmstadt and Dartington (1960–​61), and took flute lessons with Severino Gazzelloni, the virtuoso who inspired and performed much of the new music written for flute in the context of Darmstadt and other contemporary music venues.

Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 33

When Beecroft entered the European scene, avant-​garde music was at a crossroads. Following the rapid and breathtaking expansion of serial technique in the first half of the 1950s, and stimulated by the music of the New York School that was prominently featured at Darmstadt and elsewhere, many composers had begun to incorporate elements of chance and indeterminacy into their music by the end of the decade.2 Around this time, in 1959, Umberto Eco responded to recent compositional developments with an article, eventually included in the collection of essays entitled The Open Work, in which he presented a theoretical framework for the understanding of art and literary works that involve elements of chance and indeterminacy somewhere in their making, performance, or reception, usually leading to multiple and ambiguous meanings.3 Composers frequently turned to elements of improvisation by requiring performers either to literally improvise or to determine the order of sections in a piece during the performance itself. Sometimes composers would create an atmosphere of improvisatory discourse by way of written-​out improvisations. This fresh interest in improvisation among the avant-​garde led to a revival of the concerto genre, which—​ although enjoying continuing popularity among neoclassical composers—​had been neglected by the pioneers of integral serialism during the first half of the 1950s.4 Norma Beecroft’s eight-​minute concerto Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 exemplifies the revival in the intellectual climate portrayed by Eco’s essay. While Beecroft would eventually embrace aleatory techniques, the score of Improvvisazioni does not make use of them quite yet, nor does it require direct improvisation. The solo and orchestra parts are entirely written out, and the performative choices granted to the soloist stay completely within the range of a fully notated concerto score. Overall, however, the work creates the impression of a spontaneous, improvisatory discourse involving solo and orchestra. The work’s “simulated improvisations”—​to borrow the term coined by André Hodeir for his written-​out improvisations—​are carefully worked out within a serial fabric that binds the solo and orchestra parts.5 I propose that Beecroft’s Improvvisazioni alludes to improvisation in three ways: (1) the solo flute part sounds as if it is presenting a sequence of extemporizations on a basic (serial) material, quasi-​spontaneously transformed; (2) the soloist and the members of the orchestra give the impression of frequently taking license (abruptly changing speed, bringing about sudden and unexpected turns in the discourse); and (3) the form of the work does not follow a standard outline—​such as the sonata, adagio, ritornello, or rondo form common in concerto movements since the Baroque—​ but unfolds in the manner of an “improvisation of form.”6 In the following

34  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

analysis I will survey the musical characters and the interaction between soloist and orchestra in Improvvisazioni and then examine Beecroft’s compositional techniques, based in part on information gleaned from her sketches. I will show how, on the one hand, Beecroft treats serial material in the solo part in a manner that could in fact have been extemporized by a skillful improviser, and how, on the other, many of the textures involving soloist and orchestra are of a serial complexity that simply could not have been improvised without some preestablished, mutually agreed-​upon strategy. In conclusion, I will demonstrate how the work’s serial structure and discourse between soloist and orchestra—​in the way they trade gestures, assert their respective identities, and so on—​inspire a multitude of hermeneutic perspectives.

“Simulated improvisation” in Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 The five key passages reproduced in Examples 3.1–​3.5, annotated with my serial analysis to be discussed below, show the range of strategies Beecroft uses to create the impression of improvisation in this work. I will first explore the features of each passage that contribute to the improvisatory character (or, as in Example 3.3, a lack thereof) before turning in more detail to the serial design. Example 3.1 shows the opening two pages of the full score.7 Over a low, soft rumbling harp tremolo and tam-​tam roll, the solo flute enters in the second measure with partly tentative, partly assertive gestures against a backdrop of static, frosty string harmonics in mm. 3–​5. The somewhat uncanny atmosphere is intensified by the soft thunder in the bass drum of mm. 4–​5 and the brief, incisive gesture in the celli (beating the strings col legno) and harp at the end of m. 5, while the flute crescendos on B5 into a brief eruption in m. 6. As the solo line comes to a rest two measures later, the percussion continues with distant thunder. We may wonder: are soloist and orchestra a single entity here—​that is, do they represent one “voice”—​ or are they instead pitted against each other in a polyvocal texture? While the phrase that immediately follows (not shown here) is equally ambiguous in this respect, the continuation shown in Example 3.2a draws a sharper distinction between orchestra and soloist, featuring larger sound masses versus solo virtuoso flourishes toward the end of the passage, which continues beyond the example. Still, it may not be clear whether the agitated flute response in m. 24 is one of opposition to or extension of the

Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 35

Example 3.1 Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1, mm. 1–​10 (© 1973 by Norma Beecroft)

simultaneous forceful brass swells. (Example 3.2b shows the serial combination used, reordered and with some pcs filtered out, in the brass and strings of mm. 19–​21; I will return to this in Examples 3.13 and 3.14.) Contrasting with the improvisatory discourse between soloist and orchestra in the first two examples, the section shown in Example 3.3 , which follows these earlier passages, features a more steady and coordinated flow of materials. The high strings enter with chains of note-​against-​note dyads in opening and closing wedge counterpoint in quasi-​canonic imitation (mm. 37–​42) over continuing, disquieting rustling in the percussion, followed by a distant echo of an opening and closing wedge in the muted trumpets of mm. 43–​44. The solo flute remains silent here, but when it reenters soon afterward (not shown), it again alternates between impulsively agitated and more lyrical improvisatory gestures, building up to an aggressive response from the orchestra in m. 65, as shown in Example 3.4 . 36  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Example 3.1 (Continued)

(Continued)

The leaps and runs in the flute of mm. 63–​64 use only six different pitch classes, as annotated in the example, presented in various orderings as if the soloist were freely improvising on a hexachord against the backdrop of sustained tremolos in the lower strings holding the complementary hexachord. (My labeling of the hexachords will become clear later on.) The two hexachords then clash head-​on in the sound masses of m. 65. Sound masses burst onto the scene a few more times in the ensuing measures, leading into the section shown in Example 3.5 . This passage generates a strong continuous harmonic pull via a progression of sustained and pulsating chords built from fourths and fifths that progress via semitones (mm. 74–​77) and an added fourth (m. 78)—​as summarized below the example—​culminating in the brass and percussion eruption of mm. 80–​82. Examples 3.1–​3.5 give a clear idea of the improvisatory character of the flute part, which, while fully written out, seems to unfold from spur-​of-​the-​moment Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 37

Example 3.1 (Continued)

inspiration.8 Beecroft’s textures create this impression by means of a number of key features: (1) the solo part rarely shares rhythmic patterns with the orchestra—​it usually goes its own way in this respect; (2) the soloist gives the impression of reacting quickly to sudden stimuli from the orchestra (e.g., in mm. 24–​25 of Example 3.2); (3) where the orchestra might appear to be chasing or threatening the soloist (as in the same passage), the latter responds with 38  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Example 3.2a Mm. 16–​25 (© 1973 by Norma Beecroft)

(Continued)

gestures of a clearly distinct identity; and (4) in a few places the soloist seems to be improvising while the orchestra is in a holding pattern (Example 3.4). Let us now examine these passages and the rest of the concerto in more detail in order to explore how the dramaturgy of the work interconnects with the serial construction. Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 39

Example 3.2a (Continued)

Example 3.2a (Continued)

Example 3.2b Combination of P6+I6, arranged as shown in Beecroft’s sketch

Series, invariants, and interval tension profiles The improvisatory character of Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 stems in part from reiterations of pitch material that sound like extemporized transformations of a motive or pitch-​class set. Particular pitch-​class cells recurring within short time spans following intervening material may create the impression of stream-​of-​consciousness discourse, wavering in and out of recurring materials. Example 3.6 compiles all forms of the twelve-​tone series that Beecroft uses in the work, most of which occur in Examples 3.1–​3.5. The format of Example 3.6 follows that of a 12 × 12 matrix, whereby prime forms of the series appear horizontally, to be read from left to right (with the corresponding retrogrades to be read from right to left), and inversions appear vertically, to be read from top to bottom (retrograde inversions from bottom up). For the purpose of illustration, I have filled in only the row forms that are actually employed in Beecroft’s score. Notably, they share a good number of shorter segments with each other, thanks to special properties of the particular twelve-​tone series. For instance, the discrete dyads that I have marked with solid and broken brackets in P6 at the top recur frequently in other row forms, as indicated. Table 3.1 and Examples 3.7–​3.13 take a closer look at these invariant pitch-​class materials. Table 3.1 explains four types of invariant and discusses specific examples of each from the score: (1) the near-​identical pitch-​class ordering in the hexachords of the prime form and its inversion at the upper fifth (Examples 3.7–​ 3.8); (2) preservations of pitch-​ class cells under the twelve-​tone operations P6, RI3, I3, R6 (Examples 3.9–​3.11); (3) the retention of the same dyads, in permuted order, formed between two series (Example 3.12); and (4) the near-​identical pitch-​class content of the hexachords between the series and its inversion starting on the same pitch class (Example 3.13). Beecroft carefully analyzed the succession of intervals that results from the latter serial combination (used in the strings of Example 3.3), as shown in the excerpt from her sketches reproduced in Example 3.14 . With the two arrows above the second staff she draws attention to the wedge formed by the succession of dyads (with repeating dyads now omitted), in terms of their size as interval classes, beginning with the 42  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Example 3.3 Mm. 37–​44 (© 1973 by Norma Beecroft)

(Continued)

Example 3.3 (Continued)

Example 3.4 Mm. 63–​66 (© 1973 by Norma Beecroft)

(Continued)

unison F♯ followed by major second (ic2) and tritone (ic6), continuing with a decrease in interval-​class size from a major third (ic4) and major ninth (ic2) to a unison on C, with another shorter wedge immediately following (minor sixth, major third, major second). Below this, Beecroft notes the “increase of tension” in the interval succession. She indicates this with a hairpin, the opening of which presumably symbolizes the approximate overall increase of both dissonance (tension) and interval size up to the fifth dyad (the major ninth B3–​C ♯5), the insertion of the consonant and smaller fourth dyad notwithstanding.9 Beecroft’s attention to the tension of intervals was likely influenced by composer and conductor Bruno Maderna, whom she heard lecturing in Dartington in 1960, the year before the composition of Improvvisazioni. The Norma Beecroft Fonds of the University of Calgary Library, Special Collections, hold the notes that Beecroft took during Maderna’s lecture, partially reproduced in Example 3.15 . The excerpt at (b) shows how Maderna classified intervals, which loosely follows the categorization proposed by Paul Hindemith.10 As Beecroft demonstrates in her notes, Maderna assigned number values to the intervals, except the tritone, classifying them from most consonant (+3 for the perfect consonances) to least consonant (–​2 for minor second and major seventh).11 Beecroft noted the cognitive rationale behind this ordering at the bottom: “Intervals are typed in this order for psychological reasons (of tension + consonance).” As we know from Maderna’s sketches for his own music, he had himself made use of this interval classification while teaching it to his students, including Luigi Nono.12 Like Maderna, Nono constructed, permuted, and analyzed twelve-​tone series with respect to “tension profiles,” meticulously keeping track of the distribution of interval qualities within a series.13 Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 45

Example 3.4 (Continued)

Although Beecroft does not specifically plot out interval tension profiles in her sketches for Improvvisazioni, her notes from Maderna’s lecture and the reference in the sketch of Example 3.14 (“increase of tension”) suggest that she must have been thinking in terms of such profiles as she reordered the dyads from P6+I6 in the high strings of Example 3.3.14 Example 3.16 lists the succession of dyads from the second violins of Example 3.3 and visualizes the palindromic tension profile, using the number values from Example 3.15b.15 As the graph at the bottom of Example 3.16 illustrates, the 46  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Example 3.5 Mm. 74–​82 (© 1973 by Norma Beecroft)

(Continued)

progression fluctuates between dyads of higher and lower degrees of dissonance. For present purposes I have placed the otherwise nonclassifiable tritone at the juncture between dissonant and consonant intervals (between values –​1 and +1), even though Beecroft (following Maderna) would probably not have assigned a number value to the tritone (Example 3.15b).16 By way of an overview, Table 3.2 describes the form of Improvvisazioni, as delineated by changes in texture and in the ways soloist and orchestra interact, and summarizes the serial organization of the work. I have highlighted all serial labels in the table to illustrate how the work is built primarily from P6, isolated statements of its hexachords A and B (often internally reordered), I6, and the combinations of P6+I1 and P6+I6. The prevalence of these materials is what focuses the work around a handful of pitch-​class constellations: I1 shares the same (unordered) hexachords A and B with P6 and R6 Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 47

Example 3.5 (Continued)

(Example 3.7). The discrete hexachords of I6 share five pitch classes with hexachords A or B from P6 respectively (Example 3.13). As a result, the first half of Example 3.13 expands hexachord A by one pitch class (E) to a chromatic heptachord, while the second half extends hexachord B by one pitch class (A ♭) to an inversionally symmetrical (0234568) heptachord. In other 48  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Example 3.5 (Continued)

words, these heptachords—​t hrough their close affinity with hexachords A and B—​further contribute to the unity of the pitch structure. In practice, Beecroft often slides subtly from hexachord to heptachord and vice versa, as in the excerpt shown in Example 3.17 .17 A few further transpositions of the series notwithstanding (I3, RI3, P8, Pt, P0, I7 ), whose hexachords share Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 49

Example 3.6 Row forms used in the work

Table 3.1  Invariants in Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 1. Invariants between hexachords (Exx. 3.7–​8):

2. Invariants in a chain of series (Exx. 3.9–​11):

The ordered second hexachord B of the series is almost a transposed inversion of the first hexachord A (Ex. 3.7a). As a result, these ordered hexachords and those in the inversion of the series starting at the upper fifth (Ex. 3.7b) are almost identical: as per Ex. 3.8, the second hexachord of I1 is a slightly reordered version of hexachord A from P6, and the first hexachord of I1 is a slightly reordered version of hexachord B from P6 (the middle dyads of these hexachords are retrograded). Series P6, RI3, I3, and R6 share the four invariants a {G♯, A, C, C♯}, b {F, G}, c {D, E}, and d {B♭, B} (Ex. 3.9). Of these, a (partly fragmented) and b are most prominently featured in the opening solo line, in different registers (Ex. 3.10). Beecroft overrides serial principles in m. 14 in order to add one more (incomplete) statement of a and b. Compare m. 14 in Ex. 3.11 (which shows the original series from Beecroft’s sketch) with m. 14 in Ex. 3.10 (final version, altered to feature another partial statement of invariant a while preserving the melodic contour). The four invariants are internally ordered the same in P6 and RI3, and ditto in retrograde ordering in I3 and R6. (continued)

Table 3.1  (Continued) 3. Near-​preservation of the order of dyads formed between two series (Ex. 3.12):

From category 1 above it follows that the note-​against-​note combination of P6 and I1 yields almost the same order of vertical dyads in both halves (the third and fourth dyads occur in reverse order; Ex. 3.12a). This combination is used in mm. 43–​44 (muted trumpets and trombones at the end of Ex. 3.3, continuation not shown). The same six dyads arise, in a different order, in the combination of P0+I7 (Ex. 3.12b). Given the high degree of invariance here and the fact that Beecroft further reorders these dyads, P6+I1 and P0+I7 can be heard interchangeably (e.g., in mm. 43–​57 and at the end of the work, mm. 103–​8).

4. Near-​identical hexachordal content in the series and its inversion starting on the same pitch class (Ex. 3.13):

The first hexachords of P6 and I6 share five pitch classes, thus adding up to a heptachord, and ditto for the second hexachords. Pruning immediate repetition of dyads yields the nine unisons/​dyads numbered (compare with Exx. 3.2b and 3.14).

Example 3.7 P6 and I1

Example 3.8 Similarity between the discrete hexachords of P6 and I1

Example 3.9 Chain of P6, RI3, I3, and R6 and salient invariants

Example 3.10 Opening of solo flute part, mm. 1–​16 (© 1973 by Norma Beecroft)

Example 3.11 Mm. 13–​16 as they appear in Beecroft’s sketch, with serial analysis added

Example 3.12 (a) Note-​against-​note combination of P6+I1; (b) tritone transposition (P0+I7)

Example 3.13 Note-​against-​note combination of P6+I6

Example 3.14 Excerpt from a sketch for Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 showing intervallic tension profile. Reproduced by permission of Norma Beecroft.

Example 3.15 Excerpts from the notes Beecroft took during Bruno Maderna’s lecture. Reproduced by permission of Norma Beecroft. (a)

(b)

Example 3.16 Fluctuating tension profile in the second violins of mm. 37–​41

Table 3.2  Form and serial organization in Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (strong eruptions) ↓

mm. 19 (with pickup)–​36

mm. 37–​44

Sections:

mm. 1–​18

mm. 45–​57

Musical characteristics:

Flute solo against background of soft, sustained string harmonics and rumbling percussion.

Three eruptions in the orchestra, each of which quiets down (mm.19–​23, 24–​28, 29–​36). Flute participates in the second and third of these.

Soft, shining, high string lines moving in contrapuntal wedges, punctuated by high vibraphone and glockenspiel entries and distant, rumbling percussion (mm. 37–​43). After a brief percussion crescendo the wedge is imitated by muted trumpets and trombones (mm.43–​44).

Extended solo flute passage ranging from quiet to lively, accompanied by horn (initially), strings, and harp.

Serial organization:

Interlocking chain of P6–​RI3–​I3–​R6

Mm. 19–​23: combine dyads 1–​4 from P6+I6 with fragment of first four pitch classes from P6, fragment of first three pitch classes from Pt, and an incomplete statement of P6. Mm. 24–​28: two interlocking statements of P6 with some pitch classes omitted (mm. 24–​26), followed by improvisatory passage in the flute based on hexachord A and then dyads 1–​4 from P6+I6 (mm. 27–​28). Brass of mm. 27–​28 repeat and sustain pitch classes from before. Mm. 29–​36: several statements of the first hexachords of P6 (hexachord A), P8, and I6interlocked (mm.29–​30), incomplete statement of P6(m. 31), dyads from P6+I6 (in original order with entry of F and B delayed, mm.32–​36).

Mm. 37–​42: dyads from P6+I6 wedge reordered. Vibraphone and glockenspiel play fragments from P6. Mm. 43–​44: dyads 1–​4 from P6+I1 wedge (they continue into the following passage).

Mm. 45–​51: flute slowly traverses P6, frequently repeating pitch-​class segments on the way. Horn, strings, and harp add dyads from P6+I1 (these dyads intersect with the flute line). Mm. 52–​57: flute and strings/​ harp share dyads from P6+I6 (mm. 52–​53), P6+I1 (mm. 54–​55), and again P6+I6 (m. 56 with pickup). Strings and harp share dyads from P6+I1 in m. 57 (with pickup), ending on a fermata. The flute line of mm. 52–​57 maintains much of P6.

(strong eruptions) ↓ mm. 58–​64

(final eruption, at end of section) ↓ mm. 65–​85

mm. 86–​102

mm. 103–​8

After a fermata, the solo flute takes the lead in a gradual, improvisatory buildup to the outburst of orchestral sound masses in m. 65.

Brief, very violent tutti outburst (mm. 65–​66), followed by two further outbursts (mm. 67–​73) and a nervous buildup to another eruption that then quickly calms down (mm. 74–​85). The solo flute participates in all of this.

Quiet percussion texture with much resonance from the pitched instruments (glockenspiel, vibraphone, harp, timpani). Flute enters in m. 91 with mostly high and medium-​range sustained pitches and flourishes, while the double basses (divisi) gradually form a carpet of sustained harmonics. Over this double-​bass chord with added bass drum roll and a few vibraphone attacks, the flute performs a written-​out cadenza (mm. 96–​100) that leads into a final eruption in the percussion (mm. 100–​101), followed by an echo of sustained brass harmony (m. 102 with pickup).

Final cadenza of the solo flute, flaring up and then quieting down (mm. 103–​4). Woodblock attacks, accelerating into tremolo and overlapping with the end of this cadenza, lead into the concluding measures of the work (mm. 105–​8). These combine quietly resonating percussion (triangle, tam-​ tam, cymbals, harp) with soft pointillist echoes in the muted brass, over which the soloist performs high harmonics, concluding with an upward leap to an accented and fading B♭6.

Flute unfolds P6 and fragments thereof, sometimes reordered. Fragment of P8 (fifth toeighth note) at end of m. 61. Starting in m. 59, the lower strings outline hexachord A (P6) which gradually enters in mm. 59–​62 and whose pitches are sustained as tremoli and harmonics into mm. 63–​64. Over this sustained harmony in mm. 63–​64, the flute permutes hexachord B.

The sound masses in mm. 65–​66 superimpose hexachords A and B. The following two outbursts both start with hexachord B in the brass followed by hexachord A in the solo flute and some of the other instruments (mm. 67–​73). The following buildup initially focuses on hexachord B (mm. 74ff). over which the flute and other instruments present P6 and selected dyads from P6+I6 (mm. 77–​85).

Mm. 86–​91 extract and reorder the discrete trichords from P6. Flute enters with I6(mm. 91–​94) and projects dyads 1 and 2 from P6+I1 (mm. 94–​95). Double-​ bass harmony is built from (reordered) hexachord B (mm. 92–​100). Flute cadenza in mm. 96–​100 permutes hexachord A. Hexachord A is echoed in the brass of mm. 101–​2.

Flute cadenza starts out with hexachord B (continuing from previous hexachord A in the brass), then uses dyads from P6+I1 and fragments from P6 and I6 (mm. 103–​4). Concluding four measures are built from the dyads of P6+I1 or P0+I7 (both combinations form the same dyads).

Example 3.17 Improvisatory elaboration of hexachord A and first heptachord of P6+I6, mm. 27–​28 (© 1973 by Norma Beecroft)

fewer than five pitch classes with hexachords A or B, the overall focus on the latter and on constellations closely resembling them (Table 3.2) centers the work mainly on one twelve-​tone “area.”18

Some thoughts on musical plot It is tempting to hear the musical discourse of a solo concerto in terms of a plot, and I would now like to contemplate this idea for Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1. Given the numerous perspectives from which listeners and analysts may approach a work such as this, I will not attempt one single interpretative reading of Improvvisazioni here, but rather will review the parameters that could inform a number of interpretations. In a concerto, an assigned plot would likely focus on the opposition of, and interaction between, soloist and orchestra (the individual vs. the masses), and while I will consider this angle, I would like to broaden the notion of plot to embrace possibilities that are not limited to metaphors of human behavior (I give an example of this in point 5 below). The main hermeneutic difficulty not only arises from the fact that music by itself is nonreferential, but also derives from the problem that any attempt to assign signification to music will invariably lead to contradictions. Yet, as I will demonstrate, for Beecroft’s concerto, being alert to potential interpretative contradictions is precisely what enriches our understanding of the music. The opening of Improvvisazioni (Example 3.1), as pointed out earlier, is a good example for the interpretative challenge: if we think of plot in terms of characters, do orchestra and soloist form one “voice” at the beginning, or is the soloist pitted against the orchestra, or are there perhaps more than two parties involved (e.g., rumbling percussion and harp vs. solo flute vs. string shimmers)? The flute line is sufficiently different from the rest to be perceived as a separate entity, and yet we could just as well hear the (generally softer) orchestra as a dimension of the persona of the 56  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

flute. In such a reading, a single character (flute plus orchestra) could be understood as struggling with an inner conflict rather than as being involved in an external one between individual and masses. Or perhaps the entire texture should not be interpreted as being about conflict at all, since, to me, even in places where sudden outbursts occur, they sound fairly nonconfrontational (for example, in the orchestra at the end of m. 5, or in the flute in m. 6). And so, in the end, perhaps the opening of the work is not about human character altogether, but about movement of a more abstract kind. The work’s title, the concertante genre it references, Beecroft’s sketches, and her few published commentaries on this composition do not give many clues to dramatic intent, and they give no indication at all of possible programmatic content.19 This does not mean, of course, that there is none. In fact, some of the biographical information mentioned earlier could stimulate a programmatic interpretation, as I suggest in point 6 below. But my question is a broader one, namely, what the work could mean to different listeners independent of, and perhaps despite, the composer’s specific intent. Answers to this question will depend heavily on factors such as the background, experience, interest, and mood of the listener, the particular insights of the analyst, the musical decisions of the performers, and so forth. Below I present a few thoughts on what could inform interpretative readings of Improvvisazioni.

1. Character and identity of the solo flute part One notable difference in the treatment of the solo instrument compared to that of the orchestra, for the most part, is the jaggedness of the flute lines. The flute generally moves in larger leaps, spanning a wide tessitura over often several octaves. By contrast, the instruments of the orchestra generally move with fewer skips and within smaller ranges (save for passages with incisive gestures, such as in mm. 19–​23 of Example 3.2 or m. 65 of Example 3.4). The profile of the flute thus clearly distinguishes the soloist (individual) from the rest (masses). This distinction is particularly strong in places where the orchestra remains static while the flute rules the foreground (the opening in Example 3.1, the cadenza in Example 3.4, and even the buildup of Example 3.5). While this differentiation readily supports a reading of the concerto as nurturing an opposition of solo and orchestra, the leaps in the flute could also be understood less in terms of (confrontational) contrast than in terms of instrumental balance: leaps provide the flute with acoustical strength that it may not otherwise have. Against the trombone choir in m. 24 of Example 3.2, for instance, the Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 57

flute would be far less audible were it to play all of its pitches in a narrow range, say, between A4 and D5. The same would be true for Example 3.5. In these and similar places, one could thus understand the flute as moving on a par with, not in contrast to, the orchestra. I will come back to this in points 4 and 5.

2. Character and identity of individual orchestr al instruments Aside from textures that bind orchestral instruments into a more or less homogenous blend (e.g., the high strings in Examples 3.1 and 3.3, the brass in Example 3.2, and the entire orchestra in m. 65 of Example 3.4), individual instruments of the orchestra occasionally take on solo roles as well. Although this happens infrequently, such solos in the orchestra nevertheless suggest the presence of further “individuals,” perhaps in the manner of “third parties” (e.g., the solo trumpet in dialogue with the solo flute in mm. 34–​35 and the dialogue with the vibraphone in mm. 97–​99 over a sustained string chord, not shown here). The presence of multiple solo instruments is of course a central element in the concertante genre. Beecroft wrote two more Improvvisazioni Concertanti, No. 2 in 1971 and No. 3 in 1973. In No. 2, “leading players of the orchestra are often treated as soloists, performing in chamber ensembles such as a string quartet or woodwind quintet.”20 No. 3 also features solos.

3. Who are the protagonists, and how do they inter act? (External conflict) In a number of passages, two of which appear in Examples 3.4 and 3.5, the solo flute and orchestra could be heard as being embroiled in a conflict in which the flute eventually gets drowned out by the sound masses of the orchestra. These passages are located in the second half of the work (see Table 3.2, between the second and third arrows). The last of them (leading up to mm. 100–​101, not shown) precedes the final cadenza, in the course of which the soloist bursts out a few more times before calming down and striking a conciliatory tone into the quiet final four measures of the work, shared with soft percussion and brass. A possible reading of this process is summarized in Table 3.2: soloist and orchestra peacefully stand side by side at the opening of the work (mm. 1–​18). The orchestra provokes the flute with three short eruptions (mm. 19–​36), the second and third of which generate immediate and agitated responses from the soloist. After a mostly quiet orchestra passage

58  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

(mm. 37–​44), flute, strings, and harp engage in a friendly dialogue that ends on a fermata (mm. 45–​57). Suddenly agitated, now about halfway through the piece, the flute initiates a nervous and accelerating buildup, triggering fp accents in the strings (held pitches, mostly tremolo) and prompting a most forceful response from the orchestra with the tutti clashes in mm. 65–​66. This is followed by three more outbursts (in mm. 67ff. and 70ff., and leading into mm. 81–​82) in which flute and orchestra seem to be struggling side by side, eventually collapsing in mm. 82–​85. A quiet, peaceful section ensues (mm. 86–​96), leading into the cadenza of mm. 97–​100; this culminates in an intense crescendo, provoking one last violent response from the orchestra (mm. 100–​101), and is followed by the final cadenza and conclusion of the work as described earlier. In sum, an interpretative reading such as this highlights the conflict between two main protagonists—​with perhaps the addition of a few more agents along the way—​and its eventual resolution.

4. A single protagonist? (Inner conflict) Although listeners are likely to think of the soloist and the orchestra as two different characters, especially when they see a performance, Improvvisazioni could also be heard as embodying a single persona, as I suggested for the opening of the work earlier. Such a reading could relocate the external conflict described under point 3 inside a single identity (merging flute and orchestra) in a type of monodrama that shows the inner emotional states and struggles of a single being, perhaps along the lines of Schoenberg’s Erwartung. Such inner struggles may imply the presence of a (perhaps hostile) outside world—​itself, however, not represented in the music itself.

5. No conflict Another hearing, whether conceiving of flute and orchestra as one or several bodies, might reject the idea of conflict in Improvvisazioni altogether. In such a hearing, the orchestral sound masses that burst onto the scene would not feel confrontational, nor would the many “agitated” flute gestures. To some listeners—​I am among them—​Beecroft’s gestures come across not as aggressive but as beautifully and nonconfrontationally vibrant, in a discourse that vividly explores instrumental timbres, contrasts (but not conflicts) in harmony and register, and so forth. The overall “plot” that I hear is one of gradual intensification, in terms of sequence of ideas as well as of richness in combination. The beginning conveys a sense of open space (through wide registral gaps and a slow pace; Example 3.1) that is then filled in and thinned

Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 59

out again, with the flute eventually reaching a degree of density that could hardly be surpassed (Example 3.4). This is followed until m. 85 by a breathless sequence of events (including those shown inExample 3.5) combining many of the kinds of gestures and colors heard earlier. The remainder of the movement (from m. 86 on) reenacts this overall discourse, compressed into a shorter timespan, progressing from open space and slow motion to rapid intensification, culminating in m. 100 and the following final cadenza, before completely calming down in the final measures.21

6. Biographical dimension Further interpretative angles could consider the biographical dimensions of Improvvisazioni. The work features Beecroft’s own instrument, the flute, in the solo part. With this in mind, we could hear the solo instrument as representing the composer conversing, dialoguing, struggling, or however we hear it, with the orchestra. Or we could experience the orchestra as an extension of the soloist, as suggested before, and thus as a dimension of the composer herself in the “plot,” whatever it may be. At the time Beecroft composed the work, she was studying with Severino Gazzelloni, whose unparalleled virtuosity had inspired many composers in Darmstadt and elsewhere to write solo pieces or works featuring solo flute for him.22 As she mentions in the 1982 interview, Improvvisazioni “was written essentially for Gazzelloni because I was so fascinated with the incredible things that he could do on the flute.”23 We could thus hear the solo instrument representing Gazzelloni and weigh possible interpretations accordingly, perhaps in conjunction with points 3, 4, and 5 above.And there is a third figure that belongs in the biography of the work and that could inform a reading of it: Beecroft’s composition teacher in Rome, Goffredo Petrassi, to whom the work is dedicated.

7. Serial construction Details of serial construction could provide further clues for interpretative readings of the work. We may, for instance, wonder about the serial relationships between protagonists. Do they pit different serial materials against each other or are their parts integrated on the serial-​structural (as opposed to the gestural) level? This question, as the analysis has shown, has a clear answer: soloist and orchestra are for the most part intricately intertwined in terms of serial structure. For example, serially speaking, the opening of the work develops from one, not several, “lines.” It is almost 60  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

always a single row that unfolds at any given time; soloist and orchestra select their pitches from the same row but only rarely state it individually in a complete form.24 And this is by and large true for most of the work, including where Beecroft pairs two rows. As naïve as such a reading may be, the serial structure of the work might thus metaphorically suggest a nonconfrontational relationship between solo and orchestra. Or else, we might argue, what may sound confrontational on the surface (in terms of musical gesture) is mediated on the serial level.

Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 in the context of the Darmstadt avant-​garde and Eco’s The Open Work As noted at the beginning of this essay, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1, together with Tre Pezzi Brevi, written the previous year, stands at the beginning of a group of Beecroft’s works that intersects with the latest developments in the European musical avant-​garde. These works combine her sensibility for instrumental color—​inspired particularly by Debussy, whose music has had an enduring impact on Beecroft ever since she first encountered it as a child—​with some of the new serial and formal principles championed by the Darmstadt School. In Tre Pezzi Brevi, Beecroft worked out her own version of the type of serial permutation technique invented by Maderna, although she did not make use of it in Improvvisazioni.25 She also applied a variant of Maderna’s technique in her next work, Contrasts, for six performers, which was premiered in Palermo in 1962 and conducted by Maderna at Darmstadt in 1963. The nonteleological “moment form” of the latter work was strongly influenced by the music of Stockhausen, whose Kontakte for piano, percussion, and tape had left such a deep impression on Beecroft when she first heard the work in Darmstadt in 1961. Neither Improvvisazioni nor Tre Pezzi Brevi and Contrasts make use of aleatory composition, an approach then appearing more and more frequently in the works of certain other Darmstadt composers, but Beecroft would eventually incorporate such strategies in her own music (Rasas from 1968 and Improvvisazioni Concertanti Nos. 2 and 3 feature aleatory techniques, for instance).26 In 1959, the year Beecroft arrived in Italy, the journal on contemporary music founded and edited by Luciano Berio, Incontri musicali, published a number of essays that focused on the concept of the “open work.” The issue included the seminal essay on the open work, or “work in movement,” by Umberto Eco. In his article, Eco, inspired by the latest developments in contemporary music of the time, explains the extent to which works of art and literature are open and shows how these possibilities had been radically Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 61

expanded by the inclusion of aleatory technique in recent compositions by Berio, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Pousseur.27 Eco observes that works of art certainly can be, and have been, open without the use of aleatory techniques as well, and he enumerates a number of features that contribute to a work’s openness even where its text is fully written out. In a nutshell, according to Eco openness arises from ambiguities somewhere in the making or understanding of a work. These occur, for instance, when a work breaks with a particular convention, such as was the case with the new musical forms developed by contemporary composers who did away with traditional forms. In Darmstadt this interest in new approaches to form was nurtured by extended discussions and analyses of Debussy’s and other composers’ compositions. Debussy’s music and that of Webern were seen as the harbingers of a new way of thinking about form. To mention just two authors, Stockhausen, in a talk in 1954, recognized precursors of his “statistische Form” in Debussy’s Jeux, and Boulez spoke of “une forme en perpétuel renouvellement” in the same work.28 What Boulez meant was that in Debussy the musical material undergoes constant development and transformation, and that a work’s form resulted from the particular path of that transformation, rather than from the material’s being subordinated to a well-​known form type. This represented a preference shared by many composers at the time—​form as process as opposed to form following a fixed model—​and Beecroft’s Improvvisazioni fully subscribes to this procedure of creating new forms. As we have seen, her work avoids symmetrical phrase structures, new gestures grow fluidly from earlier ones, pitch materials constantly expand upon earlier (serial) material, and so forth, without recourse to recurring “themes” and recapitulations.29 As Eco explains, openness results from “an act of improvised creation” when the form of a piece is chosen during performance.30 Obviously, anything that sounds as if it were the result of improvisation—​whether literally improvised or performed from a written-​out score—​w ill give the impression of an open work, because it creates the feeling that the “improvisation” could in fact have led down a different path, requiring a different continuation than the one actually heard. And here again, Beecroft’s Improvvisazioni, with its fully written-​ out “improvisations,” takes full advantage of such suggestive possibilities. Through flexible and intricate use of serial techniques, distancing from traditional forms, constantly metamorphosing timbres, incorporation of a wide variety of instrumental techniques (particularly in the solo part), and lively improvisatory discourse, the work situates itself firmly in the avant-​garde of its time. By synthesizing in this way the latest developments in the guise of a concerto for her own instrument, Beecroft delivered a most personal response to current trends in contemporary music. 62  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Notes 1. I  would like to thank Friedemann Sallis, Department of Music, University of Calgary, for drawing my attention to the sketches held in the Norma Beecroft Fonds of the University of Calgary Library, Special Collections. It was Professor Sallis who first observed in Beecroft’s sketches that she used techniques similar to those I  had been studying in the music of Bruno Maderna. I  would like to thank Archives & Special Collections, Libraries and Cultural Resources, University of Calgary, and especially librarian Apollonia Steele, for granting me access to Beecroft’s sketches and for their support during my stay at the archives and beyond. I am also grateful to the Archivio Luigi Nono in Venice and the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel for the opportunity to study the manuscripts of Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna. Archival research for this project was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Finally, I wish to extend a warm thank you to the composer, Dr. Norma Beecroft, for her permission to reproduce the score excerpts, as well as facsimiles and information from her sketches, in this essay. The score of Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 was originally published by Leeds Music (Canada) and is now distributed by the Canadian Music Centre. A commercial recording is available on Canadian Composers Portraits: Norma Beecroft, with Nicholas Fiore (flute) and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra,conducted by Victor Feldbrill, Centrediscs CD-​ CMCCD 9303, 2003, compact disc. This is a remastering of the original LP recording released in 1972 (Audat 477–​4001). I wish to thank Robert Aitken for confirming the name of the soloist, not listed on either record jacket. 2. Chance and indeterminacy constitute distinct aleatory compositional features:  chance involves the use of chance operations somewhere in the compositional process, such as when a composer throws the dice to choose a musical object or attribute from a list of options, with that choice then being fully notated in the score. Compositions involving indeterminacy leave certain elements open, such as when a performer is required to improvise on a given material or when the type of sound production is only vaguely (or not at all) defined in the score. 3.  Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni, introd. David Robey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1–​23. The article was originally published under the title “L’opera in movimento e la coscienza dell’epoca,”Incontri Musicali 3 (1959): 32–​54. 4. Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen did not publish any “concerti” in the 1950s, for instance. Between 1951 and 1958 Luigi Nono composed only two works featuring soloist and ensemble (Epitaffio per Federico García Lorca N. 2 [1952] and Varianti [1957]), Bruno Maderna one (Flute Concerto [1954]), and Luciano Berio two (Serenata I[1957] and Tempi concertati [1958–​59]) before the onset of a new stream of concerti in Maderna’s œuvre and a long series of works featuring solo instruments and ensemble in Berio’s music. 5.  André Hodeir, “Die simulierte Improvisation: Ihre Entstehung—​Ihr Einfluß im Bereich des Jazz,” in Jazz Op. 3: Die heimliche Liebe des Jazz zur europäischen Moderne, ed. Ingrid Karl (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1986), 97. See also Wolfram Knauer, “‘Simulated Improvisation’ in Duke Ellington’s ‘Black, Brown and Beige,’”Black Perspective in Music 18, no. 1–​2 (1990): 20–​38. 6. I am borrowing the terms “license” (“license granted by improvisation”) and “improvisation of form” from Joseph Kerman, Concerto Conversations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 72 and 79.

Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 63

7.  The work is scored for a reduced orchestra of two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion (bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, tam-​tam, triangle, wood block, glockenspiel, and vibraphone), harp, and strings. Aside from the solo flute, no other woodwinds are used. For ease of orientation, I show the solo flute part in larger print in the examples from the full score. (The published edition, which reproduces Beecroft’s handwritten score, shows all parts in the same size.) In my analysis, unordered sets are shown in braces (curly brackets), prime forms and normal orders of sets in parentheses. Pitch-​class successions of series are shown with letter names on the scores; omitted pitch classes are indicated in square brackets. 8.  I borrow the expression “spur-​of-​the-​moment inspiration” from Kerman, Concerto Conversations, 80. 9.  In this reading, the tritone would be considered less dissonant than the major ninth (see also the discussion of Example 3.16 below). In the last three dyads of Example 3.14, the larger intervals are less dissonant than the smaller one. 10.  Maderna apparently deviated from Hindemith in that he paired the major third with the major (rather than the minor) sixth, and the minor third with the minor (rather than major) sixth. Compare Example 3.15b with Hindemith’s “series 2” in Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, trans. Arthur Mendel (New York: Schott, 1970), 85. Maderna’s interval classification mixes the theories of Hindemith and Gioseffo Zarlino, who in the third part of Le istitutioni harmoniche divides the imperfect consonances into two groups, the major third and major sixth on the one hand, and the minor third and minor sixth on the other. See Gioseffo Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche (Venice, 1558), 155–​56. I am indebted to Peter Schubert for pointing me to this passage. 11. The staff notation of the fourth and fifth groups (minor second/​major seventh and major second/​minor seventh) should switch places, as Beecroft indicates by small arrows. The number values that Maderna assigned to the intervals, and hence the grouping together of minor third and minor sixth, etc., are confirmed by his own preparatory notes for the Dartington lecture (July 31, 1960)  preserved in the Collection Bruno Maderna of the Paul Sacher Foundation. 12.  Veniero Rizzardi, “La ‘nuova scuola veneziana,’ 1948–​1951,” in Le musiche degli anni cinquanta (Archivio Luigi Nono, Studi II, 2003), ed. Gianmario Borio, Giovanni Morelli, and Veniero Rizzardi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2004), 6–​9. 13.  I borrow the term “tension profile” from Jeannie Ma. Guerrero, “The Presence of Hindemith in Nono’s Sketches: A New Context for Nono’s Music,” Journal of Musicology 26, no. 4 (2010): 492. 14. Beecroft must already have been familiar with Hindemith’s theories from her studies with John Weinzweig, who encouraged his students to read The Craft of Musical Composition. See Robert Aitken, “How to Play Weinzweig,” in Weinzweig: Essays on His Life and Music, ed. John Beckwith and Brian Cherney (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011), 355. 15. The first violins in Example  3.3 imitate this succession in a truncated version that omits some dyads. The layers in the second and first violins form palindromes in themselves. 16. Distinct note-​against-​note combinations with clear tension profiles such as in Example 3.16 appear twice more in the work, in mm. 43–​44 of Example 3.3 (muted brass) and in mm. 34–​35 (not shown). 17.  The two distinct heptachords of P6+I6 (Example 3.13, first and second half respectively) have maximally different pitch-​class content, sharing the minimum number of pitch classes any two heptachords will have in common (two), thus still maintaining a sense of complementarity.

64  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

18.  I am borrowing the term “area” from David Lewin, who in his analysis of Schoenberg’s Fantasy Op. 47 called distinct transpositions of the (unordered) discrete hexachords of the twelve-​tone series “areas.” See David Lewin, “A Study of Hexachord Levels in Schoenberg’s Violin Fantasy,” in Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 78–​92. 19. Beecroft briefly speaks about the work in a 1982 interview with Karen Kieser (“Interview with Norma Beecroft,” in Anthology of Canadian Music: Norma Beecroft [Radio Canada International, 1982]) and a 2003 interview with Eitan Cornfield (Canadian Composers Portraits: Norma Beecroft, Centrediscs CD-​CMCCD 9303, 2003, compact disc). The liner notes for the LP of the first recording of Improvvisazioni state: “The flute solo demands much from the performer who plays almost without interruption and conveys the spirit of the improvisation, against a background of sustained orchestral passages” (see n. 1). 20.  CD booklet notes (no author given) based on information provided by the composer (Ovation, vol. 3, Canada Music [CBC Records PSCD 2028-​5, 2003, compact disc]). 21.  With respect to recent work in musical narrative, the potential plots that I  have drafted here suggest that Improvvisazioni does fulfill the conditions for a musical narrative as set out by Byron Almén, who “understand[s] narrative as articulating the dynamics and possible outcomes of conflict or interaction between elements, rendering meaningful the temporal succession of events, and coordinating these events into an interpretive whole.” A Theory of Musical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 13. Following the lead of Douglass Seaton in his review of this book, I prefer “plot” to “narrative” in my readings of Beecroft’s concerto sketched out here. Seaton’s review appears in Journal of Musicological Research 30 (2011): 72–​76. 22.  To mention just a few, Nono’s Epitaffio per Federico García Lorca N. 2 (1952) featuring solo flute, Maderna’s Flute Concerto (1954), Berio’s Serenata I (1957), Sequenza I (1958), and Tempi concertati (1958–​59) were all written for and premiered by Gazzelloni. 23.  Kieser, “Interview with Norma Beecroft.” 24.  An early “exception” is RI3, fully stated by the solo flute in mm. 5–​7. Also, P6 is echoed here in the orchestra while the soloist has already moved on beyond this row. 25. For introductions to Maderna’s permutation techniques, see Markus Fein, Die musikalische Poetik Bruno Madernas: Zum “seriellen” Komponieren zwischen 1951 und 1955 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001); Gianmario Borio, “Tempo e ritmo nelle composizioni seriali, 1952–​1956,” in Le musiche degli anni cinquanta (Archivio Luigi Nono, Studi II, 2003), ed. Gianmario Borio, Giovanni Morelli, and Veniero Rizzardi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2004), 61–​115; Rizzardi, “La ‘nuova scuola veneziana,’ 1948–​1951”; and Christoph Neidhöfer, “Bruno Maderna’s Serial Arrays,”Music Theory Online 13, no. 1 (2007), http://​ www.mtosmt.org/​issues/​mto.07.13.1/​mto.07.13.1.neidhofer.html. 26.  “Norma Beecroft,” The CanadianEncyclopedia; Cornfield, Norma Beecroft. 27.  Eco, “L’opera in movimento e la coscienza dell’epoca,”Incontri musicali 3 (1959): 32–​54. Eco’s notion of indeterminacy in music is quite narrow at this point; he does not discuss Cage and the much broader implications of this concept in his music. This issue of Incontri musicali also featured Italian translations of Boulez’s article “Alea” and an article by Heinz-​Klaus Metzger on Cage, as well as the first publication of Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” (in English), in addition to articles by Nicolas Ruwet, Henri Pousseur, André Souris, Berio, Niccolò Castiglioni, and Alfredo Lietti on serialism, form, timbre in Debussy, text and music, and aleatory phenomena in electronic music. 28.  Stockhausen, “Von Webern zu Debussy: Bemerkungen zur statistischen Form,” in Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, ed. Dieter Schnebel (Cologne: DuMont, 1963), 75–​85. Pierre Boulez, “Debussy: Jeux (poème de danse),” Gravesaner

Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 65

Blätter 2–​3 (1956): 4–​5. For an in-​depth discussion of the reception of Debussy’s music in Darmstadt, see Gianmario Borio, “La réception de l’œuvre de Debussy par les compositeurs sériels: discours analytique et construction collective d’une image du passé,” in L’analyse musicale: une pratique et son histoire, ed. Rémy Campos and Nicolas Donin (Geneva: Droz, HEM—​Conservatoire supérieur de Musique de Genève, 2009), 197–​222. 29.  In a later essay titled “Series and Structure,” originally published in 1968, Eco, following Boulez, considers serial technique to lead to inherently open structures: “Serial thought aims at the production of a structure that is at once open and polyvalent. …” Eco, “Series and Structure,” in The Open Work, 217–​35, at 218. 30.  Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” 1.

66  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

4 Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986)

Joan Tower is one of the most successful and highly regarded American composers of our time. Born in New Rochelle, New York in 1938, her family moved to La Paz, Bolivia, when she was nine. There her immersion in the vibrant music and dance rhythms of Bolivia profoundly influenced the rhythmic language of her later music.i After returning to the United States in 1954, Tower enrolled at Bennington College in Vermont, initially studying physics and later taking music courses with the composer Henry Brant, who inspired in her a revelatory interest in composition.ii After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in music in 1961, Tower moved to New  York, where the twelve-​tone composers Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and Mario Davidovsky became important mentors for her. She enrolled in the master’s composition program at Columbia University and studied with Otto Luening, Benjamin Boretz, Chou Wen-​chung, and Ralph Shapey. In 1969 Tower founded the Da Capo Chamber Players, a contemporary music chamber group with herself as pianist, whose contributions to new music were recognized in 1973 by the esteemed Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award; she remained with the group for 15 years. Tower began teaching at Bard College in 1972. By the mid-​1970s she was becoming disenchanted with what she perceived as the limitations of serialism and its lack of connection with most contemporary audiences. Beginning with Breakfast Rhythms II in 1975, Tower began to devise her own pitch systems “in which every pitch had a unique identity and a ranked order of importance in relation to all other pitches”—​a principle that led

i. Biographical information about the composer is drawn from Ellen K.  Grolman, Joan Tower: The Comprehensive Bio-​Bibliography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007). ii.  She later asserted that physics “fascinated me from the point of view of studying action and reaction phenomena in nature—​something I have explored in music all my life.” Joan Tower, as cited in Grolman, Joan Tower, 15.

67

her back toward tonality.iii She also became dissatisfied with the arcane “rhythmic acrobatics” of much contemporary music, returning instead to the compelling rhythmic vitality of Latin dance music: Achieving an identity in music depends on risks. If you don’t take any risks, your particular compositional talents never shine through. Creating high-​energy music is one of my special talents; I like to see just how high I can push a work’s energy level without making it chaotic or incoherent.iv In 1978 Tower completed her doctorate in composition and returned to Bard College, where she is currently Asher Edelman Professor of Music. She was composer-​in-​residence for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra from 1985 to 1987, during which time she composed the powerful Silver Ladders, a work that earned her the 1988 Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize and the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition two years later—​the first time this prestigious prize was awarded to a woman. She has also received fellowships and grants from the Koussevitsky, Fromm, and other major foundations. In 2007, her orchestral piece Made in America (2004) won the Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.v

“Octatonicism,” the Octatonic Scale, and Large-​Scale Structure in Joan Tower’s Silver Ladders Jonathan W. Bernard It would be hard to imagine a less ambiguous announcement, musically speaking, of the significance of the octatonic scale to a work than the opening of Joan Tower’s Silver Ladders (1986), the piece that, together with her earlier Sequoia (1981), secured her reputation as an orchestral composer of great brilliance, and that won her the Grawemeyer Award in 1990. The rising progression , its first three notes played iii.  Ibid., 27. For an analytical discussion of Breakfast Rhythms II, see Judy Lochhead, “Joan Tower’s Wings and Breakfast Rhythms I  and II:  Some Thoughts on Form and Repetition,” Perspectives of New Music 30, no. 1 (Winter 1992):  132–​56. This landmark article was the first full-​length, English-​language analytical study of music by a female composer to appear in a peer-​reviewed music theory journal. iv.  Tower, as cited in Grolman, Joan Tower, 28. v.  The album on which it was recorded won two additional Grammys, for Best Classical Album and Best Orchestral Performance.

68  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Example 4.1 Joan Tower, Silver Ladders, opening octatonic scale, mm. 12–​24 (brass and low woodwinds only)

(Continued)

by the percussion alone in the first 11 measures, gets properly under way in m. 12 with most of the rest of the orchestra entering full force, in a new beginning on C. By m. 21 the entire scale, projected by way of staggered entries, is complete up to B; the octave of the initial C arrives at the fermata three measures later (see Example 4.1)  .1 And as even the most cursory of hearings will bear out, the promise embodied in this dramatic gesture is delivered on as Tower’s work opens up before us: octatonic structures of various types seem to be everywhere. Prominent among these structures are, specifically, scales, as readers of the prefatory note to the score of Silver Ladders will already have been led to expect: “The first section is based on upward-​moving scales (the ladder) formed largely of whole and half steps.”2 It is in the nature of such prefatory notes to simplify, of course, and also to avoid technical language where possible; however, the statement does at least suggest a plausible analytical approach to the work. First, one may infer that the upward-​moving scales are not unrelievedly octatonic, even if the phrase “whole and half steps” is taken to mean regularly alternating whole and half steps, since the scales Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 69

Example 4.1 (Continued)

are only “formed largely” of such intervallic progressions. Nevertheless, they are so formed to a sufficient extent to suggest that the octatonic form of the scale comes to be heard throughout the work as the referential norm. Second, one may further conjecture that the contents of such scales can 70  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

also be taken as collections, to be deployed, perhaps, in lines that are not entirely or not at all scalar, or as harmony (chords)—​in short, that the octatonic collection, or sc(0134679T), serves as a kind of master set class for the first section of Silver Ladders (ending around m. 365), if not for the rest of the work as well. Before getting down to actual analysis, however, where some hypotheses about Tower’s use of the octatonic in Silver Ladders will be developed and tested, a few preliminary matters need to be addressed. Octatonic structure, or “octatonicism,” has by now quite an extensive history in Western art music and in the secondary theoretical and analytical literature that has accumulated in response to that history. Whether it was the French, the Russians, or someone else who came up with the octatonic scale sometime during the latter half of the nineteenth century (or perhaps even earlier than that), or whether, as seems more likely, the idea arose more or less simultaneously in different geographical locations, its importance to the composition and analysis of music written since the early twentieth century is by now well established. Except in the most limited of situations, however, it must have been clear to composers from the time the octatonic first came into use that it can hardly stand as the exclusive source from which a composer’s pitch material would be drawn; in this respect it resembles the whole-​tone scale, the limitations of which spring from its symmetrical properties. And like the whole-​tone scale in, for instance, the music of Debussy, the octatonic seems deployed to best advantage in combination with other materials. Ideas of this sort readily made their way into the modern analytical literature, as for instance in the article by Arthur Berger that opened a major path to the study of Stravinsky’s music by exploring ways in which the octatonic might interact, or at least be juxtaposed, with diatonic or tonally based materials.3 Similarly, the octatonic has turned out to be of notable significance in the music of composers as diverse as Bartók, Messiaen, Scriabin, Shostakovich, Dallapiccola, and Takemitsu—​usually, however, as but one mode of pitch organization among at least several and sometimes quite numerous possibilities.4 Although Tower’s music has not yet attracted sufficient attention from analysts to permit comparably general statements about it,5 on the evidence of her procedures involving scales of “whole and half steps” in Silver Ladders it does appear that she has arrived at an octatonic strategy quite markedly different from anything in the music of her twentieth-​century predecessors. Under this strategy—​perhaps more accurately called a cluster of strategies—​the sound of the whole step/​half step can remain insistently present for long periods of time without seeming to require relief in the form of diatonic or any other differently configured material. Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 71

In the excerpt from Silver Ladders beginning at m.  151 and ending at m. 365, during which scalar motion is featured to the effective exclusion of any other kind of texture, we find the octatonic employed in six basic ways. Category 1. Single scales are the simplest form of presentation. Such scales almost always begin with the whole step (organized, that is, according to van den Toorn’s Model B, a 2-​1-​2-​1 tetrachord)6, as in Example 4.1 above.7 Category 2. Slightly more intricate are scales that are doubled at the minor third or major sixth (or minor tenth, etc.), resulting in composite formations in which all parts belong to the same octatonic collection at the same time (Example 4.2) . Where the parts shift to a new collection, they do so together, as in this example from T1 (mm. 177–​78) to T0 (mm. 179–​81). Example 4.2 Strings, mm. 177–​81: Category 2 (doubling at minor third/​major sixth)

Category 3. Next in order of intricacy are scales that are doubled at the major third (or minor sixth, or compounds of these intervals), resulting in composite formations in which each line belongs to a different octatonic collection. In Example 4.3, the viola and the cello’s higher notes are members of T0; the bass and cello’s lower notes are members of T1 . Example 4.3 Strings, mm. 61–​64: Category 3 (doubling at major third/​minor sixth)

72  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Category 4. Probably the most involved of all are offshoots of Categories 2 and 3 (referred to henceforth, respectively, as “2-​variant”and “3-​variant”), in which the formations are doubled, resulting in composites of four lines, now with two or even all three octatonic collections represented. One possible 2-​variant is shown in Example 4.4a . Here, the first and second trumpets in parallel minor thirds project T0, while the horns and third trumpet, also in parallel minor thirds, project T1. Notated as pitch intervals, the composite of parallel intervals forms the stack 3-​5-​3, or two sets of minor thirds separated by a perfect fourth, which could be thought of, informally, as “parallel major-​minor triads in first inversion.” Example 4.4b illustrates a 3-​variant in which the interval stack 6-​4-​4 is formed, with the two scales separated by a tritone belonging to one collection (cello and viola: T2), and the two others at successive major-​third distances belonging to the other two collections (second violin, T0; first violin, T1). Example 4.4a Brass, mm. 246–​47: Category 4 (2-​variant)

Example 4.4b Strings, mm. 289–​90: Category 4 (3-​variant)

Category 5. Within a scalar segment (usually repeated several times) of four or five notes, two pitch changes are introduced, producing the

Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 73

basis for continuation of scalar motion in a different octatonic collection (Example 4.5) . In this example, the segment is repeated for two measures (mm. 121–​22, the tail end of an unbroken series of repetitions of this segment that began in m. 185); then, in m. 123, B falls to B♭ and G♯ falls to G♮, shifting the octatonic collection from T0 to T1.8 Example 4.5 Scalar parts only, mm. 221–​26: Category 5

Category 6. The last type of octatonic usage enumerated here involves shifts to or from the fully chromatic collection. These shifts are sometimes accomplished gradually, in which case they resemble the repeating-​ segment technique of Category 5 (Example 4.6) . In this example, the transition is indeed gradual: the fully chromatic scalar segment () persists through m. 315; at m. 316 a whole-​tone gap opens up, as the G♯ falls to G♮; at m. 320 the A falls to G♯; at m. 323 the G and the A♯ fall to F♯ and A♮ respectively, bringing the scalar segment into conformance with T0.9 74  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Example 4.6 Full score, mm. 305–​26: Category 6

(Continued)

To summarize: among these scalar usages, the first and second categories are confined to a single collection; the third and fourth combine two or three collections in simultaneous projection; and the fifth and sixth provide ways of “mutating” a given octatonic collection, either into another octatonic collection or into one that is non-​octatonic. The usages of Categories 1 and 2 are certainly straightforward enough; the mechanism of mutation from one octatonic collection to another in Category 5 equally so. The shift between octatonic and chromatic in Category 6 dilutes the octatonic content, but not by very much:  we have already been led to expect that other scales will occasionally appear, and the inference drawn above—​t hat octatonic forms dominate as the norm—​ remains intact. However, Categories 3 and 4 compel one to ask: just what is the meaning of “octatonic” in this piece? The customary definition of an octatonic structure requires the pitch classes that it contains (with relatively rare exceptions) to belong to a single octatonic collection. Granted, in the case of Tower’s parallel scales in major thirds, or in four-​note chords, the collections are projected as separate strands, played by different instrumental parts; but without any rhythmic, timbral, or other means of differentiating them within their composite texture, the chances of the listener being able to hear them as truly separate entities would seem dim. Nor is there any apparent reason, in the excerpts illustrated in Examples  4.3 and 4.4 (typical of such usages), to assign priority to any one octatonic strand, which might enable the listener to hear the others as some form of coloration. Quite to the contrary, the strands all appear to be weighted equally, whether or not they belong to the same octatonic collection. The only real differences among the parallel-​scale treatments inhere in the necessarily heavier orchestration of the 2-​and 3-​variants under Category 4. Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 75

Example 4.6 (Continued)

Before considering these issues any further, it would be well to examine the details of the excerpt itself. Example 4.7 provides a condensed view of the first part, mm. 151–​239, keyed with boldface numbers to the categories above .10 The occasional all-​chromatic passages that do not involve mutation to or from the octatonic (that is, are not classifiable under Category 6 above) are simply labeled “chrom.”11 One fruitful way to begin listening through this excerpt is to concentrate on the fluctuations between passages during which just one octatonic 76  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Example 4.7 Pitch reduction, mm. 155–​239

(Continued)

Example 4.7 (Continued)

Example 4.7 (Continued)

collection is heard and passages during which two or all three collections are deployed simultaneously. For a while, this approach is helpful. As summarized below in Table 4.1, after an initial, almost entirely chromatic rise in parallel major thirds (mm. 151–​62), the major thirds are doubled in the manner of a 3-​variant (Category 4) in mm. 163–​64, as parallel major seventh chords (all three octatonic collections); then T0 takes over entirely for mm. 165–​67, doubled in minor thirds (Category 2). In m. 168, the doubled minor thirds continue, but the figure, carried over from mm. 163–​64, is now extended to A ♮ , introducing a chromatic tinge. In m. 169, the minor thirds are now doubled in the manner of a 2-​variant (Category 4), bringing all three octatonic collections into the texture and connecting clearly with the previous mm. 163–​64 even though the chordal structures are different. (One hears the connection also by way of the C ♯ –​B –​A ♯ of those earlier measures, as well as more locally to the version of that figure extended to A ♮ in the immediately previous m. 168). At m. 170, T2 takes over completely in doubled minor thirds (Category 2). At m. 179, E and G from the previous measure (top part) shift to E ♭ and G ♭ respectively, and C ♯ and E in the lower part shift to C ♮ and E ♭ (Category 5), returning the octatonic identity to T0. From mm. 179 through 222, T0 remains in place, at first rising and falling in doubled minor thirds in by now familiar fashion; then getting stuck on a rising five-​note figure (m. 185). At m. 190 the minor-​third doublings disappear, leaving just the rising in three octaves, projected as an ostinato. Under this rapid motion, longer notes in the lower parts (marked with stems in Example 4.6), beginning with G ♭ in m. 195, project an eventually complete T0 scale. Just as this scale is reaching its final notes, a Category 5 shift occurs in the ostinato (in m. 223, G♯ and B mutate to G ♮ and B ♭ respectively), changing the reigning collection to T1. T1’s duration is considerably shorter than that of the preceding T0 passage: at m. 239, another Category 5 shift (F♯ and A to F♮ and A ♭) introduces T2—​which, however, is heard unadulterated only as a five-​note figure for one measure. The action of mm. 151–​239 is summarized in Table 4.1. Up to the end of this section, the fluctuations between octatonic transpositions, and the categories of usage into which they fall, are characterized by relatively long passages

Table 4.1  Summary, mm. 155–​239: Categories of octatonic usage mm.

151–​62 163–​64 165–​67

168

169

170–​78 179–​222 223–​38 239

Collection chrom

T0, T1, T2

T0

chrom T0, T1, T2 mix

T2

T0

T1

T2

Category

4 (3-​var)

2

4 (2-​var)

2

5; 2, 1

5; 2

5; 1

80  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

during which a single scale/​collection is heard exclusively, interspersed with relatively short passages (one or two measures) in which two or three collections are simultaneously present. Perhaps more interesting is the difference in “behavior”: while the multiple-​collection parallel-​chord patterns are confined to more or less narrowly bounded pitch spaces, the single-​collection scalar patterns travel appreciable distances through these spaces and thus more clearly fulfill a ladder function (in keeping with the title of the work). In mm. 240–​365, the pace of change accelerates appreciably. In contrast to the section discussed above, simultaneous use of different octatonic collections is more the rule than the exception. Where single collections occur at all, their duration is brief, soon superseded by other single collections or (much more frequently) composite usages that also tend to be fairly short in duration. Adding to the complexity of these 125 measures are two extended interjections of chromatic scales, as well as the fact that the excerpt comes to rest in chromatic territory. Particularly notable throughout this passage is the combination of Category 4 (2-​and 3-​variants) with the Category 5 mutation technique to connect short composite-​collection segments. Example 4.8 presents a typical instance. Here (mm. 268–​71), the first and second trumpets, at a distance of a minor third, together initially project T0, while the horns and third trumpet, also at the distance of a minor third, initially project T 1. Since these two pairs of instruments are separated by a perfect fourth and remain so throughout these four measures, they are always in different octatonic transpositions (Category 4, 2-​variant). Note that the 3-​5-​3 vertical configuration is the same as the one illustrated in Example 4.4a; in contrast, however, to that earlier excerpt, Example 4.8 is characterized by rapid changes in the horizontal dimension as well (Category 5)  . The T0/​T1 pairing is maintained through m. 269; at the downbeat of m. 270 there is a shift to T2/​T0, which lasts for only half a measure, succeeded in the second half by a shift to T1/​T2; this in turn is followed by T2/​T0 again at m. 271. At each shift, at least two notes change in each instrumental part, with the others remaining as common tones. Example 4.8 Brass, mm. 268–​71: Categories 4 (2-​variant) and 5 combined

Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 81

As a kind of counterweight, perhaps, to the rapid-​fire, almost dizzying pace of fluctuation, in this second section of the excerpt substantial use is made of single octatonic collections in long tones unfolding in the lower parts. This is a feature already remarked upon in its one occurrence earlier in the excerpt, mm. 195–​229 (see Example  4.7), to which I  now recur to make a few additional, brief comments. The actual structural significance of such long tones remains somewhat enigmatic, although they do powerfully convey the idea of the octatonic collection working on different levels of motion and durational scale—​an especially obvious feature of the long tones of T0 beginning at m. 195 on G ♭, since the first five of these long tones duplicate, in the same order, the notes of the rapidly articulated triple-​octave ostinato higher in the texture. The long scale ends on F♯ , exactly at the point where the upper, rapid scalar motion, having mutated meanwhile from T0 to T1, simultaneously breaks free of the diminished-​fifth span to which it had been confined and reacquires a minor-​third doubling as it resumes its characteristic oscillating path. This synchrony seems to reinforce the importance of G ♭/​F♯ in particular as a common tone between collections T0 and T1, although it is difficult to enlarge upon that observation to draw any general conclusions about pitch priority or centricity in this music. Even earlier in the piece, in fact at the very opening, the octatonic scale projected on two distinct durational levels seems to stand as an emblem of the importance of the octatonic at all levels of musical meaning. Example 4.9 is a reduction of the opening 35 measures, part of which was already examined in Example 4.1. Earlier we noted the opening in the percussion (mm. 1–​11), a series of notes that takes on a kind of motivic significance in this passage in two ways. First, it occurs again in mm. 21–​24 in the trombones (see Example 4.1), even before the full octatonic scale that began with the C in m. 12 has reached its octave (m. 24, fermata). Next, the T0 collection begins again, but now on D, the textural and rhythmic shift at the downbeat of m. 25 suggesting this point of articulation. This time the octatonic scale, doubled in registers 1 and 2, climbs up through two octaves; as this ascent proceeds, doublings successively added in registers 3–​7 (not shown in Example 4.9) eventually bring the highest parts to E ♭ at the downbeat of m. 35, at which point new musical developments ensue . The large-​scale outlining of seems quite explicit. Although one could not say that such “leveled” projection of the octatonic is a constant condition of Silver Ladders, there can be no doubt that Tower has made extensive use of it in the passage following the one treated in detail in Example  4.7. The first such usage (see Example  4.10) emerges quite clearly starting at m. 262, as a descending partial T 2 scale beginning with B . The first three long tones in the lower parts duplicate the initial 82  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

pitches of the rapid groups of five notes in the upper parts; then their content diverges as the partial scale ends with G and F (mm. 268–​70). This last major second is filled chromatically (in the upper parts) by F♯ , the purpose of which very shortly becomes clear: in m. 271, another descending octatonic scale begins, in the T0 collection beginning on F♯ and continuing with F, thus dovetailing with the conclusion of the previous scale. As the stemmed notes in Example 4.10 show, this new scale continues in somewhat irregular durations down through D ♯ and D ♮ (mm. 271–​72), then up to C in the upper registers (m. 275, as shown by the broken arrow) until its descent resumes. This descent can be traced by way of the uppermost first notes of each slurred group starting in m. 281 (B, A, G ♯ , F♯ , E ♯), but also doubled at the major third below (hence Category 3, joining T0 with T2). Although not literally on a separate plane of long notes, this descending scale can be traced a little farther by way of the uppermost last notes of the slurred groups starting in m. 285—​D ♯ , D, C ♭ (skipping C)—​before it peters out completely. In this final stage, the scale effectively merges with the upper parts for which it had been serving as a rhythmic reduction since m. 275, emphasizing the downbeats of the rapid-​note figures.12 The last use of long-​tone scales in this excerpt is also the most protracted, beginning in m. 305 in the T0 collection on G ♯ and descending a full octave plus a minor sixth before subsiding into the chromatic motion that serves as transition to the next part of the work (see Example 4.11) . It begins, interestingly enough, in the midst of a chromatic passage as well; as it descends, the accompanying rapid-​note figures mutate from fully chromatic (m. 305) to fully octatonic (m. 323), also in the T0 collection. (This is the same passage that served to illustrate Category 5 above; see Example 4.6). There follows a series of shifts in the rapid notes, from T1 to T2 and back to T 1; then, just as the octave of the long-​tone scale is about to be completed at m. 334, the figures become chromatic again and stay that way until the end of the excerpt. The long-​tone scale does likewise, with a C ♯ intervening between the D and C, then continuing in all-​chromatic motion from m. 354 on (not shown in the example). In all but one of the long-​tone scales, T0 is either the sole component or the dominant one. This fact alone might suggest a kind of tonal interpretation, in which Silver Ladders is “centered” on that octatonic collection, with T2 perhaps in a secondary role. Since these long-​tone scales cut across often numerous changes of collectional identity in the rapid-​note strands that always accompany these scales, it might seem reasonable to hypothesize a hierarchical relationship, with the local rapid motion eventually subsumed under the structures of longer range. But to infer from this relationship a tonal orientation to the music might be forcing more out of the evidence than is really warranted. The long-​tone scales are not always present—​and Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 83

Example 4.9 Pitch reduction, mm. 1–​35: levels of octatonic projection

Example 4.10 Pitch reduction, mm. 262–​88

Example 4.11 Condensed view, mm. 305–​54

even if their periodic appearances were to be taken as reaffirmations of a tonal basis that was otherwise in flux, one would find it difficult, owing to the symmetrical structure of the octatonic collection, to choose any particular one of its component pitch classes as a tonal center without other factors present to decide in favor of one interpretation or another. These issues are complicated enough with just one octatonic collection to deal with at a time; in the presence of octatonic combinations, such as the places where T0 and T2 work in tandem, the range of available choices becomes even more bewildering. My sense, as a listener, is that such factors are not in fact present to any significant degree—​that is, that even the limited force of tonality usually denoted by the term “pitch centricity” does not figure strongly in Silver Ladders. Rather, what gives this piece its impetus, and its coherence, is the consistency of the division of pitch space into alternating whole and half steps, interestingly variegated by shifts between one octatonic collection and another or between composites featuring one pairing and another, or by all three collections at once. Such shifts occur at many different rates of speed and are accomplished through textural variation that verges at times on the positively kaleidoscopic. In other words, the listener is not encouraged to track pitch-​class membership in octatonic collections and to make sense of the music in that fashion; rather, it is the indirect effect of the shifts in collections, and their groupings, that yields a satisfying aural result. The import of this strategy on Tower’s part becomes a good deal clearer in the last large section of the piece, where the motive force formerly assigned to alternating whole and half steps is diverted to perfect and augmented fourths. Again, quoting from Hyslop’s program note: “Although [Tower] does not consider Schoenberg to be a primary influence, a beautiful moment in his Chamber Symphony No. 1, Opus 9—​a slow, stately motive in rising fourths—​stuck in her ears throughout the years. This motive has appeared and reappeared in different guises in several of Tower’s works; she decided to give it prominence in this piece.”13 The imprecision of the musical reference to Schoenberg is striking:  the famous rising motive of (purely) perfect fourths in the Chamber Symphony would sound very different if it combined perfect and augmented fourths. In fact, it ends up making a great deal of difference that Tower’s rising progressions of fourths consist of free alternations of intervals of five and six semitones—​ essentially free, that is, although she tends not to write more than two consecutive fourths of the same type.14 The combinations of perfect and augmented fourths turn out to be crucial because “the scale passages from the first section eventually mingle with the rising-​fourths motive”15 —​and motives consisting of all perfect fourths would have severely limited the Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 87

extent of this mingling, since even two perfect fourths in a row cannot belong to the same octatonic collection. To be sure, the possibilities are not greatly enlarged by allowing augmented fourths into the mix: written in semitone-​span equivalents, the only available combinations are 5-​6, 5-​6 -​6, and their reorderings (6-​6, of course, also “works,” and would continue to do so in indefinite extension, but is essentially the trivial case here). What these mixed chains of fourths help bring into being is an environment in which shifts of octatonic collection occur either very rapidly or somewhat less so—​that is, with some flexibility, although not a great deal—​ since such shifts could hardly happen very slowly: in the presence of some kind of octatonic harmonic vocabulary, no single octatonic collection could remain in place for very long. In fact, that last statement turns out to hold the key to what happens in the final section of Silver Ladders: chains of perfect and augmented fourths (descending as well as ascending, though more often the latter) typically divide into two or three segments as they travel from low to high, or high to low, with no two adjacent segments belonging to the same octatonic collection. This technique is analogous to the simultaneous projection of different octatonic collections as scales in the earlier section of the work, but it produces completely different surface features: the adjacent intervals seem to (and often literally do) project a single line, but the line is compound by implication, owing to disjunct melodic motion through different registers, rather than literally compound like the parallel scales in the first section. The excerpt reproduced in Example 4.12 (mm. 544–​48) is representative of this technique.  Naturally, however, the boundaries to be drawn between collections are not always perfectly clear, since any two octatonic collections have four pitch classes in common. This basic fact of octatonic usage already served to blur the respective identities of the parallel scales in the first section, and it becomes even more pertinent in the stacked-​fourths section, where collections are often presented in far from complete form. In mm. 494–​503, shortly after the beginning of the final section, the adjacent segments could be interpreted in at least two ways, with one pitch in each case doing double duty as a member of two segments (see Example 4.13, where the two alternatives are laid out above and below the two-​stave reduction). Nothing Example 4.12 Thread of ascending and descending perfect/​augmented fourths, mm. 544–​48

88  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Example 4.13 Extracted chain of ascending perfect/​augmented fourths, mm. 494–​503

in either the orchestration or the rhythmic domain would appear to suggest that either of these partitionings should be favored over the other. Here, as in the first section, a successful hearing of the music seems to depend less on perceiving precise articulations of specific, distinct octatonic collections than on recognizing the intervallic consistency of (in this case) the stacked-​fourths structures and their propensity for spreading across different octatonic regions.16 This kind of hearing, absent the octatonic context established in the earlier sections of the work, would probably not have much plausibility. And even with the anchoring effect of that context, its continued influence in the final section would seem to depend on at least occasional recourse to or reminiscence of octatonic structures. This does happen to some extent, although never to the extent of wholly eclipsing the new stacked-​fourths basis. Example 4.14 displays one passage in which the T2 collection briefly assumes a primary role once again, assisted by T0 (mm. 558–​78). Some of the harmonies here are hybrids, blending frameworks in fourths with other intervals. Immediately thereafter, however, stacked fourths reassert themselves with a vengeance, progressing as 5-​5 in parallel chromatic scales and thus blotting out the octatonic completely until m.  586. The scalar motion comes across as a kind of vestige of the first section (and one must remember that chromatic scales do occur there, if rarely), but what one would imagine as an explicit synthesis of materials—​a 5-​5 or 5-​6 structure, say, in parallel octatonic scales—​never achieves the status of a climactic or cadential gesture in Silver Ladders. The “mingling” promised in the program note happens in more subtle and elliptical fashion. Example 4.15 (mm. 586–​627) provides a continuation to Example 4.14, in which linear passages confined to single octatonic collections are punctuated by chords in stacked fourths—​some of which also belong to single octatonic collections, although in more densely scored passages such as mm. 620–​21 the collections are separated registrally, as earlier. (An interesting additional feature of this passage is the trumpet line, recognizably octatonic though consisting of only three notes, , but drawn from the one collection not represented in the accompanying chords.) By and large, as the piece draws to a close, the larger chordal structures tend to be drawn from single octatonic collections, and the last sonority heard, {E, G, B, D} (mm. 749–​54), falls within T2. The last octatonic scales heard, beginning in m.  720 and ascending in a kind of rhythmic acceleration familiar from the opening of the work, are entirely in octaves, unadorned with fourths or, for that matter, any other harmonies. As these scales reach their apogee at B (m. 730), a Category 5 shift takes place: T2 is superseded by T0 in the form of the repeating segment , which then acquires, for five very quick measures (mm. 730–​34), a 5-​5 90  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

Example 4.14 Condensed view, mm. 558–​78

Example 4.15 Condensed view, mm. 586–​627

harmonization. The synthesis achieved here, far from being emphasized, seems almost deliberately underplayed. Although the foregoing analysis of Silver Ladders can hardly be called comprehensive, it is possible to draw a few conclusions without indulging in excessive speculation. Regarding the conjecture set forth at the beginning of this article, the octatonic does extend in its sphere of influence to formations other than scales in two ways:  first, in terms of the literal contents of lines, chords, parts of chords, and so forth (since the three collections are often combined, this octatonicism is more often than not expressed in terms of characteristic subsets of the octatonic rather than all eight pitch classes); and second, in the analogy to parallel scales of different collections (first section) that can be drawn to the stacked-​fourths usages of the final section. Nevertheless, this conjecture does not pan out completely, for sc(0134679T) is not a “master set” in the sense that one might expect. In the same sense, it may not be altogether appropriate to call Silver Ladders an octatonic work. For one thing, as noted, the more or less conventional meaning of the term—​applying to works or distinguishable sections or passages governed by a single collection—​is only sporadically valid in Tower’s piece; for another, in sections like the music from about m. 495 on, where stacked-​fourths structures take over, the influence of the octatonic is felt unevenly, and mostly, as explained, by implication or analogy. But is the label “octatonic” all that important, anyway? One might infer, from Tower’s own comments about her working methods, that it is not. In an interview conducted shortly after she finished composing Silver Ladders, she calls herself “a left-​sided composer” and proceeds to explain what that means: You see, I don’t do sketches in advance. I do start out with a basic idea, but basically I’m not very “pre-​compositional” in my thinking. I used to be, but that was because I felt insecure and needed some sort of map to get me through the infinity of choices that were available. Now I’m more of an “organic” composer. I start. Then I take a look at what I’ve done and reshape it until it’s the way I think I want it to be. Then I go on. Then I take another look at what I’ve done. I spend more and more time reshaping, more and more time working on the music’s left side.17

Elsewhere, putting it perhaps more bluntly, she has said:  “I never plan, because I don’t trust it, I don’t trust the planning.” And: “There’s a logic that you can do with pre-​planning that is perfectly therapeutic, … because it gives you the feeling that you know where you’re going; but the problem is that it may not be very musical.”18 Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 93

Of course, there’s no reason to think that the end result of such a process would be any less coherent or organized than music written according to a “map,” as Tower has referred to her earlier modus operandi.19 But it is interesting to note that neither in Hyslop’s program note, cited earlier (in which the composer is given credit as collaborator), nor in any interview that I have come across in which Silver Ladders is discussed—​nor, in fact, in Tower’s words about any piece of hers at all—​does the term “octatonic” actually occur. What she does talk about are scales “formed largely” of alternating whole and half steps—​and while one might agree, in the interest of consistent analytical terminology, to call such scales octatonic, the difference between such language and Tower’s own is significant. Because these scales suggested the very title of the work (it is unlikely to have been the other way around),20 in which an ascending stepwise (mostly) motion is evoked, it does not seem absolutely necessary that these scales be invariably constructed of alternating whole and half steps. As mentioned in the analysis above, chromatic scales do sometimes substitute for octatonic, and with essentially the same effect; furthermore, when scalar motion begins to mingle with the stacked fourths in the final section, chromatic scales are used at least as often as the whole-​or half-​step kind. Granted, the latter are still the referential norm, as I’ve characterized it—​but the very looseness of definition does suggest that unrelenting exactitude of pitch relationships may not be the most significant feature of the piece. Tower has hinted as much about her music in general:  “I have gotten more and more away from actually thinking about pitch systems … pitch relationships are not something I spend a lot of time working on.”21 It is difficult to know how best to interpret this statement. True, the attitude expressed here might serve to explain why, in a musical reference to the ascending fourths of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony, some of those fourths could be augmented, as far as Tower is concerned, without it substantially affecting the shape or trajectory of the gesture. But one must also keep in mind the context of the statement, which was an interview conducted in 1993. At this point in the interview, Tower was attempting to clarify the contrast in her compositional approach in (then) more recent years with that of her earlier, serial (or at least serially inflected) style, in which she was much more preoccupied with pitch relationships.22 Although it might be guessed that this preoccupation entailed a focus on the particular types of pitch relationships that are peculiar to serial practice, surely it is possible to be concerned with pitch or pitch class in other ways as well, without demoting it from primary status in one’s compositional method. My own conclusion, if somewhat provisional, is that pitch still matters a lot in Tower’s music, even if neither serial structure nor tonality (in the sense of pitch centrism) is at stake. Without some consistency in the way 94  Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design

pitch is handled, the landscape of Silver Ladders would be vastly altered. Perhaps the best way of putting it is that while Tower may not be much interested in pitches or pitch classes per se, she remains vitally interested in the intervals they form—​an interest that may in itself explain why she has used the octatonic collection in this distinctive and convincing way to project structure on both the small and large scale in Silver Ladders. (It should be borne in mind that the octatonic owes its very identity not to a specific collection of pitches, but to its intervallic makeup.) Does this interest in intervals also account, at least in part, for the special qualities of Tower’s other compositions since the early 1980s? A verdict awaits further analytical exploration. Notes 1.  All score excerpts appearing as illustrations in this essay are notated at concert pitch in all instruments. However, the conventions of octave transposition (higher or lower) for certain instruments (contrabass, contrabassoon, piccolo, glockenspiel, et al.) are observed throughout. 2.  Sandra Hyslop (“in collaboration with the composer”), “Program Note,” in Joan Tower, Silver Ladders, score (New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1989), unpaginated front matter. The only recording of Silver Ladders that has been released commercially to date is Leonard Slatkin’s rendition with the St. Louis Symphony:  Joan Tower, Silver Ladders; Island Prelude; Music for Cello & Orchestra; Sequoia, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, Meet the Composer Orchestra Residency Series, Elektra Nonesuch 79245-​2, 1990, compact disc. 3.  Arthur Berger, “Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky,” Perspectives of New Music 3, no. 1 (Fall–​Winter 1963):  11–​42. Berger’s approach was massively developed and expanded in its explanatory power in the work of Pieter van den Toorn:  “Some Characteristics of Stravinsky’s Diatonic Music” [Parts I and II], Perspectives of New Music 14, no. 1 (Fall–​Winter 1975):  104–​38; 15, no. 2 (Spring–​Summer 1977):  58–​95; and van den Toorn, The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1983). Richard Taruskin has made abundant use of the octatonic in many of his analyses of Stravinsky’s music; see, for example, “Chernomor to Kaschei:  Harmonic Sorcery; Or, Stravinsky’s ‘Angle,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 38, no. 1 (1985): 72–​142; “Chez Pétrouchka: Harmony and Tonality chez Stravinsky,” 19th-​Century Music 10, no. 3 (1987): 265–​86; Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through “Mavra,” 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); and “Stravinsky and the Subhuman,” in Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 360–​467, especially 434–​48. 4. For the octatonic in Bartók’s music, see Elliott Antokoletz, The Music of Béla Bartók:  A  Study of Tonality and Progression in Twentieth-​Century Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1984); Richard Cohn, “Bartók’s Octatonic Strategies:  A  Motivic Approach,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 44, no. 2 (1991):  262–​300. The octatonic in Messiaen’s music appears by his own designation as mode 2 among his modes of limited transposition; see Messiaen, Technique de mon langage musical (Paris:  Alphonse Leduc, 1944), and Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie, 7 vols. (Paris: Leduc, 1994–​2002), especially vol. 7. Studies of these modes

Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 95

permeate the secondary literature on Messiaen, for example: Robert Sherlaw Johnson, Messiaen, new ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1989); Paul Griffiths, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1985); and Jonathan W. Bernard, “Messiaen’s Synaesthesia: The Correspondence between Color and Sound Structure in His Music,” Music Perception 4, no. 1 (1986): 41–​ 68. For Scriabin, see George Perle, “Scriabin’s Self-​Analyses,” Music Analysis 3, no. 2 (1984):101–​22; Cheong Wai-​Ling, “Scriabin’s Octatonic Sonata,” Journal of the Royal Music Association 121, no. 2 (1996): 206–​28; and Taruskin, “Scriabin and the Superhuman,” in Defining Russia Musically, 308–​59. The octatonic implications of Shostakovich’s musical “signature” are explored in Stephen C.  Brown, “Tracing the Origins of Shostakovich’s Musical Motto,” Intégral 20 (2006):  69–​103. For Dallapiccola and the octatonic, see Brian Alegant and John Levey, “Octatonicism in Luigi Dallapiccola’s Twelve-​Note Music,” Music Analysis 25, nos. 1–​2 (2006): 39–​87. Takemitsu’s octatonic usages are investigated in Timothy Koozin, “Octatonicism in Recent Solo Piano Works of Tōru Takemitsu,” Perspectives of New Music 29, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 124–​40; and Peter Burt, The Music of Tōru Takemitsu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); see also Hideaki Onishi, “Tōru Takemitsu’s Japanese Gardens: An Application of Superset/​Subset Networks to the Analysis of Three Orchestral Compositions” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2004). 5.  One substantial analytical treatment can be found in Judy Lochhead, “Joan Tower’s Wings and Breakfast Rhythms I  and II:  Some Thoughts on Form and Repetition,” Perspectives of New Music 30, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 132–​56. For a useful compilation of the extant critical literature on Tower to about 2006, see Ellen K. Grolman, Joan Tower: The Comprehensive Bio-​Bibliography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007). 6.  The designations “Model A” and “Model B,” refer, respectively, to the octatonic scale read in ascending (in semitones: 1–​2–​1–​2 …) and descending (2–​1–​2–​1) directions, yielding tetrachordal partitions sc(0134) and (0235), again respectively. Van den Toorn first proposed them in “Some Characteristics of Stravinsky’s Diatonic Music” part I, 107 ff. Once so generated, of course, these partitions may be used compositionally in either ascending or descending order. In Example 4.1, Tower opts for Model B ascending: the tetrachordal partitions are C–​D–​E♭–​F, G♭–​A♭–​A–​B. For more about the structure of the resulting scale, see n. 7 below. 7.  There are just three distinct octatonic collections, among which the particular one in use in Example 4.1 will be referred to henceforth as T0, in recognition of the fact that it is the first to be heard in Silver Ladders. Note that its identity as “the octatonic scale on C” is different from the form of the octatonic that is usually designated as fundamental in post-​tonal theoretical terminology—​that is, Tower’s fundamental scale begins with the whole step, rather than the half step, and would have to be called “OCT0,2” instead of “OCT0,1.” The other two octatonic collections, T1 and T2, begin on C♯ and D respectively. 8.  Example 4.5 also provides a glimpse of Tower’s inventive orchestration technique, which provides a constantly changing environment of register changes and combinations. At times, this technique can serve as a counterweight to long series of repetitions, such as the one alluded to here. Even where the pitches do not change for considerable stretches, there is movement in other dimensions of the music. 9.  This excerpt also illustrates the use of the octatonic scale in long tones, a feature to be discussed further on in this essay. 10. Again, for labeling conventions, see n.  7. As the various examples of octatonic usage below will show, the collections so labeled need not appear in Model B orientation to retain their respective identities as T0, T1, etc. (Once taken out of a scalar context, the distinction between Model A and Model B pretty much vanishes anyway.)

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11.  In the analytical examples, beginning with Example 4.7, the following conventions have been adopted. Octatonic labels T0, T1, and T2 may refer to whole or partial presentations of the collections they respectively identify, and appear in boxes. The label “chrom,” signifying the chromatic collection, is also boxed. Numbers above the grand staff are measure numbers. It can be assumed that accidentals apply only to the notes that they immediately precede; nevertheless, the natural sign is freely employed for the sake of clarity. 12.  The interested reader may wish to refer to the full score of mm. 282–​88, not shown here, to witness a further complication to the texture in this passage: the simultaneous projection of a segment of another (T0/​T2) scale in major-​third doubling on the upbeats, emphasizing the second beat in each measure of the rapid-​note figures beginning with the upbeat to m. 282 (horns, piano, vibraphone): . This is the same octatonic composite as the one we have been tracing since m. 271; but at the point where it begins, the other scale, already in progress, is on {B, G}. The two octatonic-​ composite segments in regular (half note) values thus form a kind of canon at the tritone; between them, they present the complete contents of the T0 scale doubled by T2. 13.  Hyslop, “Program Note,” Silver Ladders, score. 14.  There are just a few exceptions to this rule, including rare instances of rising gestures consisting entirely of perfect fourths. 15.  Hyslop, “Program Note.” 16.  One might note, in passing, that the mirror-​symmetrical stack of intervals (6-​5-​5-​ 6-​5-​5-​6) lends this sonority more than a passing resemblance to the accumulating chords of Varèse, a composer also cited by Tower in various interviews as an important influence on her work. 17.  James Wierzbicki, “Interview with Joan Tower re:  Silver Ladders,” St. Louis Post-​ Dispatch, January 4, 1987. 18.  Kathryn Mishell, interview with Tower (part 1), radio broadcast, March 28, 2006, www.intothelightradio.org/​special.html (web page discontinued). 19.  In mid-​1983, Tower said, “I got rid of the last map about six months ago.” Interview by Jan Fournier, July 28, 1983), Oral History of American Music archives, School of Music, Yale University. The remark appears on p. 10 of the transcript of this interview. 20.  In a discussion of where the titles of her pieces come from, Tower has said: “. . . most of my titles are like attachments to the piece … I work so hard on my titles. But the titles usually come after the piece—​usually. The piece provides inspiration for the title, not the other way around.” Interview by Jenny Raymond, January 4, 1998, Oral History of American Music archives, School of Music, Yale University, 5. 21. Tower, interview by Julie Niemeyer, April 30, 1993, Oral History of American Music, School of Music, Yale University, 16. 22. In the interview with Niemeyer, Tower spoke of writing up “a hundred-​page description [of Breakfast Rhythms I and II, 1974] that accounts for every note in the piece.” Ibid., 3.

Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 97

PART II

Gesture, Identity, and Culture Discussions of how particular composers have worked toward their own signature compositional styles often invoke the phrase “searching for a voice.” “Voice,” in this context, usually means a characteristic and original constellation of technical procedures in a variety of musical parameters such as rhythm, pitch, timbre, and so on, often held together by the composer’s personal philosophies of musical composition. The authors of the three previous essays, for example, illustrate how Mamlok, Beecroft, and Tower have adapted serial or octatonic principles of pitch organization to create distinct sonic worlds in three of their compositions. Inevitably, however, the notion of voice also connotes an expression of personal identity. The idea that the meanings of an aesthetic creation are to be found in its creator’s identity has been vigorously contested since the mid-​ twentieth century, most famously with Roland Barthes’s proclamation of the “death of the author” in his eponymous essay of 1967.1 But the poststructuralist challenge to authorial identity paradoxically coincided with the rise of feminist and cultural theories arguing that author’s identities were inevitably inscribed in their artistic creations, even if those identities were multiple, overlapping, and mutable.2 In the next two essays, Judy Lochhead and Nancy Rao examine interweavings of authorial identity and compositional technique in works by Sofia Gubaidulina and Chen Yi, revealing the significant role of musical gesture in the creation of form and meaning. In ­ chapter 5, Lochhead explores Gubaidulina’s 1987 Second String Quartet and questions of female authorial identity through the lenses of Deleuzian and feminist theory. Her detailed analysis of the quartet illuminates Gubaidulina’s shaping of small-​and large-​scale musical gestures through compositional nuances of timbre, articulation, pitch, register, and dynamics. Most important, Lochhead examines the composer’s use of repetition and contrast, concluding that the quartet “musically thinks difference.” 99

Chapter 6, an analysis by Nancy Rao of Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2, presents a different perspective on identity, gesture, and musical composition. Rao first explains how the symphony, written in 1993 to commemorate the death of Chen Yi’s father, is replete with allusions to rhythmic percussion gestures from Chinese opera called luogo dianzi, typically used to signify particular character traits or dramatic situations. In her analysis, Rao traces Chen Yi’s use, development, and combination of these musical signifiers throughout the work, illustrating how their interaction contributes to an overarching symphonic narrative of spiritual transformation, from grief and despair at the opening of the symphony to peace and transcendence at its close. More broadly, Rao argues that Chen Yi’s transfer of these signifiers from Chinese opera to Western symphony exemplifies her identity as a transnational composer. Rao further contends that in the global multiculturalism of the early twenty-​first century, awareness of the cultural sources of musical gestures is essential for both analyst and listener. Notes 1. The literary critics W.  K. Wimsatt and M.  C. Beardsley first challenged the idea that the author’s identity was relevant to the meaning of a work in their landmark article “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 (July–​September 1946): 468–​88. Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” was first published in Aspen: The Journal in a Box 5–​6 (1967), but later more conventionally in Image—​Music—​Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1977), 142–​48. 2.  See ­chapter 1 (introduction), n. 15.

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5 Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987)

Born in 1931 in Stalinist Tatarstan to a Russian Orthodox mother and a Muslim Tatar father, Sofia Gubaidulina grew up and established her career in the repressive environment of Soviet Russia.i During her childhood in the 1930s her family suffered religious persecution, and in the late 1940s, as the Cold War began between the USSR and the West, the governing Communist Party’s stifling of artistic expression reached its climax, with Soviet composers whose music deviated from the ideals of Social Realism risking harsh punishments. It was against this backdrop that Gubaidulina began studying piano and composition at the Kazán Conservatory, graduating in 1954. Any suspect tendencies in her music seem to have gone unnoticed until she applied for graduate studies at the Moscow Conservatory, whose composition professors deemed her music an unacceptable departure from the required style. She enrolled nevertheless, but would not have been granted her degree without the intervention of Dmitri Shostakovich, chair of the State Examination Committee, who defended her music and encouraged her to “continue on [her] own, incorrect way.”ii Gubaidulina’s professional career began in earnest during the 1960s, following studies with Nikolay Peyko and Victor Shebalin. In 1975 Gubaidulina formed an improvisation ensemble with the composers Viatcheslav Artyomov and Victor Suslin that experimented musically with Eastern

i. Biographical information about the composer is drawn from Michael Kurtz, Sofia Gubaidulina:  A  Biography, trans. Christoph K.  Lohmann, ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); and Valentina Kholopova, “Gubaydulina, Sofiya Asgatovna,” in Grove Music Online, ed. Deane L. Root, article updated January 31, 2002, http://​ www.oxfordmusiconline.com. ii.  Sofia Gubaidulina, recorded interview with Elizabeth Wilson, cited in Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), 306. Italics in the original.

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European folk instruments along with those of their own invention, such as the “friction rods,” made of rubber balls attached to metal rods, featured in her String Quartet No. 4. Gubaidulina’s music came to the attention of the West with Gidon Kremer’s performances of Offertorium, the violin concerto she had dedicated to him and completed in 1980. Since then her powerful, expressively nuanced, and often intensely spiritual music has attracted the attention and admiration of performers, audiences, critics, and scholars. Her compositions range from solo vocal and chamber to large-​scale choral and symphonic works, many of which have been commissioned and recorded by the world’s major artists and ensembles, including the Kronos and Arditti Quartets, Anne-​Sophie Mutter and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic and Boston Symphony Orchestras. Gubaidulina holds honorary doctorates from Yale University and the University of Chicago and has received many international awards, including the Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the 2013 Venice Biennale music festival. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Gubaidulina moved to Germany, where she resides today. For Gubaidulina, “there is no more serious reason for composing music than spiritual renewal,” an ideal more important to her than musical innovation for its own sake:  “The public strives for active spiritual work … Listening to a musical composition … helps people restore themselves, even though critics might give a negative evaluation because ‘there was nothing new in this music.’”iii

“Difference Inhabits Repetition”: Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 2 Judy Lochhead Difference requires artful negotiation for the woman who has chosen to take on the authorial role of music composer. The composer who is female must carefully control how her difference from male colleagues, in particular, is figured. She must hew out a place not only in which her compositional voice is heard as unique and hence different, but also in which her compositions are heard as “just” music—​not marked as an exemplar of an identity group. Difference not only affirms originality but also serves as a

iii. Kurtz, Sofia Gubaidulina, 26, 29.

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means of exclusion. Composers who are female necessarily confront this dilemma in their daily professional lives. Concepts of difference and the related concept of identity have been of central philosophical concern since the early years of the twentieth century. In structural linguistics, meaning was understood to arise from relational differences between linguistic elements; and for various poststructuralist thinkers after World War II, meaning is multiply differential and always in a state of “deferral,” in Derrida’s formulation.1 And in feminist thought of the late twentieth century, concepts of sexual difference proved crucial to articulating both a conceptual and a political agenda and for providing insight into real-​life dilemmas for the aspirations of women. Of particular note here is the philosophical work of Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, and Elizabeth Grosz, who have focused on positive and productive notions of difference, especially with respect to gender and sex.2 In the title of my essay I invoke the work of Gilles Deleuze, who in his 1968 work Difference and Repetition advances a critique of identity in the Western philosophical tradition, arguing that difference and repetition are presupposed by identity.3 Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and his critique of the logos of Western thought—​and in particular the critique of a logos dependent on binary oppositions such as mind/​body, rational/​irrational, and male/​female as producing meaning—​prove valuable for feminist thought about music. But some parts of his philosophical work, especially that written with Félix Guattari, pose conceptual and ethical problems, most significantly when considering the real-​life struggles of women. In their work A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari articulate a concept of “becoming-​ woman,” which, like other “becomings” (“becoming-​intense, becoming-​ child, becoming-​animal”), is an experimental mode of being that discloses the hierarchies of power.4 This concept of “becoming-​woman” received early critiques from Alice Jardine and Luce Irigaray.5 As the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has noted, these strong critiques encompass a wide variety of issues, which she summarizes into the following points: the concept does not acknowledge its “investments in masculine perspectives;” it is a “male appropriation and recuperation of the positions and struggles of women,” which risks depoliticizing the reality of those struggles; it “prevents women from exploring and interrogating their own specific, and nongeneralizable forms of becoming”; it makes the real struggles of women invisible; it discourages men from seeking their procedures for “dissolution and reorganization”; and it romanticizes the “Other” from a male perspective.6 Despite these issues, Grosz, like some other feminist philosophers, argues that because “becoming-​woman involves a series of processes and movements outside of or beyond the fixity of subjectivity and the structure of stable unities, [it offers] an escape from the systems of binary polarization that Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987)  103

privilege men at the expense of women.”7 The operative concept for such an escape is “difference,” which, along with the related concept of “repetition,” is the focus of Difference and Repetition. Deleuze presents a notion of difference in itself—​or “pure difference.” This is a nonrelational notion of difference that is not dependent on the “four shackles of representation: identity in the concept, opposition in predication, analogy in judgment, and resemblance in perception.”8 Difference in itself is not difference in opposition to or in relation to (through analogy or resemblance) some other identity. Rather, difference is logically prior to identity and defies the binaries of representation, such as those resulting in the marked category of the “Other.” While Deleuze’s concept of pure difference implies temporal passage—​ since such differing is manifest through time—​the concept of repetition clarifies the nature of this temporality. A repetition motivated by difference occurs over time and constitutes a “creative transformation of things.”9 Repetition, then, not only shows the essential uniqueness of events—​as Deleuze’s evocative phrase “difference inhabits repetition” implies—​but also is a generative and creative force. Such an intertwining of difference and repetition must have been somewhere in Sofia Gubaidulina’s musical thinking when she composed her Second String Quartet in 1987.10 Her program note, much of which is quoted below, suggests that difference and repetition were indeed formative principles (the italics are mine): This was the first time in my life I  set myself the task of realizing a certain musical problem of great importance to me personally, not in a large scale form but in a small scale one. In the course of many years my attention has been persistently drawn to an idea I call “Musical Symbolism.” This means that what appears as a symbol (i.e. a knitting together of things of different significance) is not some sound or other, nor yet a conglomeration of sounds, but the separate constituent elements of a musical instrument or the properties of those elements. Specifically in this particular context, the discourse springs from the difference between the means of extracting the normal sound from stringed instruments and the means by which harmonics can be made to sound. It is possible to consider the passage across this difference as a purely mundane acoustical phenomenon and to make no particular issue out of it. But it is just as possible to experience this phenomenon as a vital and essential transition from one state to another. And this is a highly specific aesthetic experience, the experience of a symbol. It is just such an experience which distinguishes between everyday time and true essential time, which distinguishes between existence and essence. 104  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

And this modulation, this transition between the two, happens not through “depiction” nor through “expression” but through transformation or transfiguration by means of an instrumental symbol. For this transition actually happens on the very instrument. In its acoustic self.11

In short, Gubaidulina set for herself the compositional problem of creating a musical discourse of the “small scale,” of the “transformation or transfiguration” of “separate constituent elements” which creates a “vital and essential transition from one state to another.” Gubaidulina’s prose suggests an intertwining of sonic difference made manifest through temporal passage, and as such it resonates strongly with Deleuze’s weaving together of difference and repetition. A detailed analysis of the quartet allows for a more deeply nuanced sense of how Gubaidulina musically thinks difference in this sense; but before delving into a material engagement with the sounds of the quartet, I must clarify what I mean by the idea that Gubaidulina “musically thinks,” and to do that I turn again to Deleuze. In his solo book on the artist Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, and together with Guattari in What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze recognizes three ways of “thinking the world”: philosophy, art, and science.12 Distinguishing the three from one another and claiming their equal status, Deleuze and Guattari characterize philosophy as the creation of concepts, art as the composition of monuments through sensations, and science as the determination of functions.13 The thinking of the artist in this formulation consists of the material creation of a “monument”—​or a work of art—​t hat produces sensations. Thus, art thinks the world through its very materiality—​t hrough paint, sound, shape, and so on. Further, Deleuze links the sensations of art to the underlying affective forces of the world, claiming that “music must render non-​sonorous forces sonorous, and painting must render invisible forces visible.”14 My claim about Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet follows from this general point: the sounding music of the quartet renders sonorous the nonsonorous forces of difference through repetition. In other words, the quartet sonically thinks difference as musical sensation. That Gubaidulina confronted difference is obvious for a composer whose gender defied the historical norm in the Western classical tradition. But difference figured in other dimensions of her life as well during the time of the quartet’s composition. As a modern composer, she would have been expected to develop a unique compositional voice that would have distinguished her from others. And within the context of the musical avant-​ garde in the latter half of the twentieth century, originality was an essential defining feature for the successful composer. Further, in her personal life, Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987)  105

Gubaidulina often drew attention to her multicultural heritage—​she had a Tatar father and a Russian mother—​and to herself as a bridge between East and West.15 In the following analytical discussion of the quartet, my goal is to express how the work sonicizes difference, and in particular how its various forms of repetition engage differing. In expressing the work’s thinking of difference, I am not arguing that it represents Gubaidulina’s difference as a composer who is female, or as a composer of the avant-​garde, or as a consequence of the uniqueness of her compositional voice. Rather, I argue that the quartet musically thinks difference through “transformations” of sonic “elements,” which create a “vital and essential transition from one state to another.” Repetition is crucial to enacting this sense of transitioning, since its proliferation effectively dissolves the identity of the thing repeated and allows difference to become sonically present as such. The quartet has two main parts, each of which carries out a unique process, and a concluding part. The overall temporal design of the quartet may be visually mapped in a wide variety of ways. Figure 5.1 is a depiction made by Ji Yeon Lee, who was my student in a graduate class in which we studied the work . The figure is a scan of a watercolor painting done on parchment paper; the full-​color version can be seen on the companion website for this volume. The

Figure 5.1 Depiction of the overall design of Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 2.  Reproduced by permission of Ji Yeon Lee.

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Figure 5.2 Overall temporal design

swirling blue mass on the left depicts Part 1, the snaky green-​yellow-​orange figure over the right depicts Part 2, and the dark blue–​red rectangular figure at the bottom right depicts the concluding passage. The map elegantly evokes not only the timbral shadings and distinctions in the three parts of the quartet, but also the gestural movements that inhabit them. My own, more traditionally analytical map, given as Figure 5.2, shows the three parts and labels the types of functions that the music of each part enacts . I name each of the three parts according to their function: Part 1, Reaching Out and Tethering; Part 2, Reaching Up and Renewing; and Part 3, Affirmation. The processes of each part entail significant amounts of simple musical repetition that reveals difference. In the following, I explain in more detail the functions of the parts, particularly as they are manifest in musical sounds, and demonstrate how the musical details of the quartet effectively think the forces of sonic differing.

Part 1: Reaching Out and Tethering The Reaching Out and Tethering function of Part  1 arises from the “reaching-​out” gestures, which move above and below a generalized pitch hub—​a hub defined by G4—​and the consequent tethering back to that hub (to G4 or a close pitch, with some exceptions). This effect is created by three types of events:  (1)  “Continuous-​G” events—​the continuous articulation of G4 played with one of two timbral types:  harmonic non vibrato or ordinario vibrato; (2) “Inflections-​of-​G” events—​inflections of G4 played with five timbral types (ordinario vibrato, harmonic sul ponticello, ordinario non vibrato, tremolo ordinario, and tremolo sul ponticello); and (3) “Reaching-​ Out” tremolo gestures in the first violin and cello that move predominantly by half-​or whole-​step linear movements above and below G4.16 The function of Reaching Out and Tethering depends on the Continuous-​ G and Inflections-​of-​G types, which establish a kind of hub from which the Reaching-​Out gestures pull away and to which they tether back. The Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987)  107

movement begins with the Continuous-​G and Inflections-​of-​G, as shown in the score excerpt of mm. 1–​6 in Example 5.1 . The Reaching-​Out gestures start at rehearsal number 5 and continue through the end of Part 1, an excerpt (rehearsal numbers 5–​9) of which is reproduced in Example 5.2 . The following discussion of Part 1 considers first its processes of differing and then its function of Reaching Out and Tethering. Each of the three types of events occurs in forms that maximize difference, either through their combination with the other types or through successive groupings. Figure 5.3, a graphic depiction of events from the beginning through rehearsal number 3, demonstrates some features of processes of differing in the opening of the quartet .17 The top layer of the figure shows the Continuous-​G events, the next lower layer the Inflections of G, and the bottom layer the dynamics of the whole. The figure combines traditional notational signs along with icons that represent some sonic feature or quality of the musical elements that make up the types. In some instances, shades of black and shapes are used to suggest some sounding quality. For example, the black and gray ovals depict a short string event, the shadings indicating different timbral inflections. Dynamics are indicated with a scale from ppp through ff, using the typical performance indications for dynamics. Example 5.1 Rehearsal numbers 1–​2, mm. 1–​6

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Example 5.2 Reaching-​Out gestures in first violin and cello, rehearsal numbers 5–​9, mm. 15–​21

The articulation of differing as a process arises from the distinctions occurring in two ways: (1) differing of succession—​nearly constant timbral distinctions between events that emphasize succession, and (2) blurry patterning—​a coincident patterning with blurry boundaries that articulates differing across longer temporal spans. Both types of differing may be observed visually in Figure 5.3. The differing of successive elements during the passage arises largely because of the interaction between the Continuous-​G and Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987)  109

Figure 5.3 Modes of differing in the Continuous-​G and Inflections-​of-​G events

Inflections-​of-​G layers. The frequent changes of timbre do not simply inflect the constant presence of G4; they also virtually dissolve the identity of that pitch, drawing attention to the timbral differing of succession. A similar process operates in the dynamics of the passage. The frequent changes and the louder dynamics of the Inflections-​of-​G with respect to the Continuous-​G layer draw attention to processes of dynamic differing. A scorelike visual reading of Figure 5.3 can give some sense of the aural impression of the passage. The coincident process of blurry patterning brings out processes of differing over larger spans of time. The patterning creates groupings that have blurry boundaries because of the nature of their constituents, qualitative distinctions between timbres and dynamics, and durational distinctions between groupings. The distinctions of both timbral quality and duration in the nonpulsed rhythmic context of the opening define not sharply delineated but rather indistinct boundaries. Some of the possible groupings of the passage are indicated in Figure 5.3 with circles and connecting dotted lines. I refer to such groupings by the number of elements they comprise; for instance, a group with two elements is a duplet and is indicated in Figure 5.3 by . In the Continuous-​G layer, for example, the succession of the two timbral qualities, harmonic non vibrato and ordinario vibrato, creates a duplet that occurs twice during the passage. While the sense of duplet arises from a two-​part pattern, the distinctions between each duplet allow the processes of differing to emerge within a longer temporal span.18 As Figure 5.3 indicates, such groupings occur frequently during the opening, establishing triplets and quintuplets. Another mode of differing occurs through changes of groupings patterns, as for instance in the transformation of the quintuplet of mm. 2 and 4 into that of m. 10 (indicated by the broken line and the label Transformation). This timbral transformation, schematized in the lower right-​hand box of Figure 5.3, involves a change of timbre for two elements—​ from ordinario vibrato to ordinario non vibrato—​by way of a transitioning triplet that fragments the first quintuplet and leads to the reconstituted second. Similar processes of differing occur by means of dynamic changes during the passage. As shown in the Dynamics layer of Figure 5.3, and specifically in the Inflections-​of-​G strand, differing dynamics create groupings with blurry boundaries. As shown in an additional pair of layers beneath the Inflections-​ of-​ G strand labeled Dynamic Groupings and Differences, these groupings can be organized hierarchically. The (a) layer of dynamic groupings shows how the sequence of “loud–​louder” ( f–​ff ) occurs primarily in groupings of triplets or quintuplets, instances of such groupings occurring in mm. 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10. The quartet of m. 6 differs, however, having a sequence of “louder–​loud–​louder.” The inclusion of softer dynamics (ppp through mp) serves to create longer grouping spans. As indicated in the (b) layer of the Dynamics, a sequence of “loud–​loud–​softer” (in which, in Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987)  111

this context, “loud” comprises f–​ff and “softer” comprises mp–​ppp) occurs in the first two triplets. The last triplet transforms the “louder–​softer” sequences of the previous triplets into an end emphasis on ff. While Figure 5.3 shows events through rehearsal number 3 only, it exemplifies the processes of Part 1 that continuously develop into new modes of differing with respect to successive events and the longer spans created by blurry patterning. The processes of differing, however, arise from the constant presence—​the constantly sounding repetition—​of G4, whose identity as this specific pitch becomes audibly transparent. As may be observed in Example 5.2, the tremolo lines of the Reaching-​ Out gestures, always entailing a pairing of the first violin and the cello, move predominantly by half or whole step upward—​with the occasional larger interval that protrudes from the line. For instance, at rehearsal number 5 the violin initiates an upward-​directed gesture that is mirrored by the cello shortly thereafter, each gesture reaching up or down by an interval of seven semitones, only to be tethered back to G♯4 at its end. And at rehearsal number 8, the cello again answers the violin but now repeats the violin’s upward line, both “Reaching Out” slightly further by an interval of eight semitones. Part 1 consists of 13 instances of these paired Reaching-​Out gestures, the occurrences schematized in Table 5.1. The columns indicate the number of notes; the starting and ending pitch for both violin and cello; the relation of the violin and cello gestures to each other (mirroring or matching of contour and coordinated or offset beginnings), and the intervallic span and ending pitch of each gesture. As Table 5.1 demonstrates, the succession of Reaching-​Out gestures enacts a process of differing through constant variation. Over the course of the passage, the number of notes of successive gestures increases, although not in a consistent way; the gestures are offset temporally until rehearsal number 16, when they begin together; after the initial alternation between mirrored and matching contours, the passage ends with mirroring of the last seven gestures (starting from rehearsal number 14); and the distance of the Reaching-​Out constantly increases by one semitone from rehearsal numbers 11 through 18, after which the distance increases by five and three semitones. The intervallic shaping of the Reaching-​Out gestures also enacts processes of differing, as Figure 5.4 indicates for the gestures of rehearsal numbers 5 and 8 . At rehearsal number 5, the figure shows the mirroring relation between the violin and cello, and the annotations on the pitch intervals indicated underneath the staves show trichordal and pentachordal repetition and retrograde inversions for each of the instrumental lines. At rehearsal number 8, the figure shows the internal palindrome. The internal intervallic relations within and across the Reaching-​Out gestures enact differing through the recurrences and transformation of sub-​units. Throughout Part 1, the Reaching-​Out gestures enact processes not only of differing but also of intensification, owing to the increase in the number 112  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

Table 5.1  String Quartet No. 2, Reaching-​Out gestures of first violin and cello Rehearsal Number number of notes

Starting pitch

Ending pitch

Violin1 Reaching-​Out and distance from G4 cello relation

Vn1

Vc

Vn1

Vc

5

13

G4

G4

G♯4

F♯4

8

10

G4

G4

G4

10

19

G4

G4

11

10

G4

12

14

13

Semitones Pitch Mirror, offset

7

D5

G4

Same, offset

8

E♭5

G4

G4

Mirror, offset

8

E♭5

G4

G4

G4

Mirror, offset

8

E♭5

G4

G4

G4

G4

Same, offset

9

E♭5

15

G4

G4

G4

G4

Same, offset

10

F5

14

21

G4

G4

F5

A3

Mirror, offset

11

F♯5

15

13

G4

G3

G♯4

F♯4

Mirror, offset

12

G5

16

16

G4

G4

G5

G3

Mirror, together

13

G♯5

17

8

G4

G4

G♯5

G♭3

Mirror, together

14

A5

18

13

G4

G4

B♭5

E3

Mirror, together

15

B♭5

19

21

G4

G4

D♯7

B2

Mirror, together

20

D♯6

20

29

G4

F\♯3

F7

A2

Mirror, together

23

F♯6

of notes and the greater distance from the pitch hub in successive gestures. The totality of the effect of these processes of differing and intensification over Part 1 is suggested in Figure 5.5, which visually schematizes the overall function of Reaching Out and Tethering that manifests over Part  1 . Time is depicted on the vertical axis with the beginning of the passage at the bottom of the figure, and register on the horizontal axis, with the hub of G4 as the middle column. The Inflections of G are shown as the horizontal “stitches” across the column, and the Reaching-​Out gestures emanate out Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987)  113

Figure 5.4 Intervallic differing in the Reaching-​Out gestures

Figure 5.5 Part 1, Reaching Out and Tethering

from the G4 hub according to their intervallic distance from it. The lines at the top of the G4 column are the meandering gestures by the second violin and viola that conclude Part  1. The sense of tethering intensifies gradually over the course of the passage as the Reaching-​Out gestures become 114  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

more insistent, frequent, and extensive. As the visualization in Figure 5.5 suggests, the continual processes of differing and intensification arise by means of the repetitions of the passage, the constant presence of G4, and the recurrences of the Reaching-​Out gestures.

Part 2: Reaching Up and Renewing Part 2 of Gubaidulina’s quartet has a function of Reaching Up and Renewing. This function is enacted by a mosaic design, consisting of three types of events whose recurrences articulate eight stages. These stages (discussed below in more detail) are marked off by a Reaching-​Up gesture, a chromatic ascent that emerges from the mosaic, and a Renewing gesture that refreshes the process and progress of ascent and that also plays a role in the mosaic. The three types of events that comprise this mosaic design are defined as follows, and their first several occurrences are annotated on the score excerpt of rehearsal number 21 (mm. 44–​50), reproduced below in Example 5.3  : 1. “Sonority”—​a continuous harmonic event consisting of two or more pitches. Sonorities involving pitch intervals (pi) of four or eight semitones and one or eleven semitones occur frequently, establishing an overall harmonic character for Part 2. 2. “Cry”—​a falling or rising semitone melodic gesture of two elements that has a “cry” character. Often the Cry emerges from a Sonority event. 3. “Multidimensional pitch-​interval 7” (or “Multi-​7”)—​a figure of vertical and successive pitch-​interval 7s, sounding in four timbral types.

The mosaic design of Part 2’s initial stage (rehearsal numbers 21–​25, mm. 45–​67) is suggested by the layout in Figure 5.6 . All three types of events are introduced initially (mm. 45–​51), but then the progressive variation of each type—​entailing changes in pitch and register, timbre, texture, and duration, and their continuous recombination—​creates a mosaic-​like sequence for Part 2. The overall function of the part is characterized by two gestures that emerge from the mosaic events. The Reaching-​Up gesture is characterized by chromatic ascent and occurs several times during Part 2. As shown by the pitch names in boldface in Figure 5.6, the first Reaching-​Up gesture begins with the A4 in m. 58, occurring in both the Sonority and Cry events, and rises chromatically to an F♯5 in m. 67. Since the notes of the Reaching-​ Up gesture play a role in mosaic events, it effectively emerges from the mosaic design, largely because of the force of the rising chromatic line. The Renewing gesture (not shown in Figure 5.6) consists of a dyad of either interval class 3 or 4, which because of either dynamic or textural emphasis has the effect of renewing the overall ascent at various moments throughout Part 2. Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987)  115

Example 5.3 Three event types of the mosaic design

This gesture is an element of the Sonority events, but because of its musical emphasis, it takes on an added role—​that of reinitiating upward passage. As noted above, the overall Reaching Up and Renewing function of Part 2 is enacted through eight stages. Each stage begins with a Renewing gesture, and all but two also entail occurrences of the Reaching-​Up gesture. As Figure 5.7 indicates, the upward trajectory of this passage spans three octaves, from A4 through A7, but the upward ascent is not smooth—​it stalls in Stages 2 and 4 and is steeper in some stages (“steeper” being a function of time and size of interval) . The Renewing gestures, also indicated in Figure 5.7, mark the beginning of each stage of the trajectory, renewing afresh the sense of progress upward. For instance, as the score excerpts of Example 5.4 show, the Renewing gesture of Stage 2 (m. 67) is set off by texture and dynamics, and the gesture of Stage 5 (m. 86) is set off by texture, register, the vibrato in 116  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

Figure 5.6 Mosaic design, Part 2, Reaching Up and Renewing

Figure 5.7 Stages of Reaching Up and Renewing

Example 5.4 Renewing gestures, mm. 65–​67 and 86–​87

the viola and cello, and the dynamic swells in the violins. It is noteworthy that the Renewing gestures initiate an upward chromatic ascent for each stage with two exceptions: Stages 2 and 4. The Renewing gestures have the effect of restarting the ascent, but in these two stages the ascent stalls. The interactions of the mosaic events and Reaching-​Up/​Renewing gestures enact the overall function of Reaching Up and Renewing. Tracing these interactions in an abbreviated form, Figure 5.8 maps out their occurrences in order to suggest how the function emerges from the events and gestures . As the figure suggests, each stage and each occurrence of the events and gestures differs from the one preceding, such that an overall process of differing characterizes the upward trajectory of the passage. In other words, the repetitions of the chromatic ascent and of its renewal allow the process of differing to become salient. Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987)  119

Figure 5.8 Interactions of mosaic events and Reaching-​Up/​Renewing gestures

Part 3: Affirmation The Affirmation function of the concluding part (rehearsal number 36, mm. 123–​36) is enacted by the alternation of two related sonorities that affirm processes of the previous parts. This function projects a sense not of temporal becoming, but rather of stillness that dissipates the more forward-​directed motion of the preceding parts. As in Parts 1 and 2, however, differing emerges from repetition, in this case the repetition of two sonorities with features that I describe as “Diffuse” and “Focused.” As may be observed in the annotated score excerpt of Example 5.5 (mm. 123–​26), the Diffuse sonority consists of larger intervals and a wider range; the Focused sonority, of smaller intervals and a smaller range. A  schematization of the occurrences of the Diffuse and Focused sonorities in Figure 5.9a shows that the Diffuse sonority spans 65 semitones and that its harmonic intervals are relatively large, especially in the lower register. The Focused sonority, by contrast, spans only 18 semitones, its constituent intervals are smaller, and its pc set is a subset of that of the Diffuse sonority.

Example 5.5 Alternating sonorities, mm. 123–​26

Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987)  121

The alternation of the Diffuse and Focused sonorities manifests difference not through the inflections of G4 during Part 1, nor as in Part 2 through the progressive changes of successive events and their recombination in mosaic design. Rather, differing in Part 3 arises primarily from changes in the duration of the two sonorities (varying from 3 to 15 beats), with some distinction in dynamics as well. As Figure 5.9b indicates, the Focused sonority always has a forte dynamic, and the Diffuse sonority, a piano→forte dynamic, with the exception of its last occurrence, which is played pianissimo. A grouping of the sonorities into “Diffuse-​Focused” pairs demonstrates a blurry patterning that enacts a progressive differentiation. Figure 5.9b also illustrates how the pairings show a reversal of the long–​short pattern in the third pair, an increase by one beat of the longer duration of each pair, and an overall increase by one beat of the succession of pairs. The duration of the final Diffuse sonority, as if in response to the reversal of the third pair, is significantly longer at 15 beats. While the final occurrence of the Diffuse sonority has a greater durational and dynamic difference with respect to the preceding sonorities, the distinctions between events in the Affirmation passage are finely drawn. The subtleties of the distinctions both allow the differences of the repetitions to become manifest and the final, more distinct statement of the Diffuse sonority to provide an ending to the passage and to the quartet. The Affirmation function of Part 3 arises from features of the Diffuse and Focused sonorities that affirm earlier events of the piece through allusion or repetition. The two sonorities comprise pitch classes and registers that have played significant roles in the preceding two parts. In particular, G♯ is prominent as the highest pitch of both the Diffuse and Focused sonorities. In place of G, which played such a crucial role in Part 1, G♯ now reaches up from that tethering pitch into a directed pitch-​class space, and its manifestation as G♯7 affirms the Reaching Up process of Part 2, which, before the wafting up in the first violin, rested momentarily on G7. The doubling of D in different octaves in both sonorities also affirms the important role of that pitch class in Part 2, and particularly its role in the D–​F♯ sonority that occurs so prominently at the beginning of Part 2 in both the Renewing gestures and Multi-​7 events. Finally, in the most obvious sense, the Diffuse sonority affirms the Reaching Up and Renewing process of Part 2 with its high register and the airy breadth of its spacing. In perhaps a less obvious sense, the alternation of the Diffuse and Focused sonorities in this concluding passage affirms the Reaching Out and Tethering of Part 1: the Focused sonority tethers the registral reach of the Diffuse sonority. That the quartet culminates with the registral reach and breadth of the Diffuse sonority suggests not that one process has triumphed over another, but rather that the alternation of sonorities—​which in itself affirms multiple and different processes—​ends with the one that allows space for the other. In other words, the quartet ends with the sonority that manifests, in its totality, both difference and repetition. 122  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

Figure 5.9a Alternation of Diffuse and Focused sonorities, mm. 123–​36

Figure 5.9b Durational differing

Concluding Remarks As a composer who is female, Sofia Gubaidulina has had to encounter and negotiate difference in ways unique to her identity as a woman and her particular life circumstances. The Second String Quartet seems focused especially on difference as a lived reality, but not simply as a difference that leads to the binaries of exclusionary thought. Rather, through musical repetitions and changes in both short-​and long-​term temporal relations, Gubaidulina musically thinks difference itself. Through the constantly varying events that combine and recombine in new ways, complex threads of association proliferate throughout the quartet. The processes that run through these threads of association give shape to the repetitions and to the differences they reveal. While the Affirmation passage functionally ends the piece, it does so by opening up a sonic place for the Reaching Up and Renewing and the Reaching Out and Tethering processes to reverberate. If, as Gubaidulina suggests in her “Composer Note,” we hear in the quartet the “vital and essential transition” from one sounding event to another, then we may begin to have a palpable sense of the difference—​the “pure difference”—​that the music thinks.

Notes 1. The classic authors in structuralist linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure, whose ideas were extended by Claude Lévi-​Strauss into structural anthropology. For representative works see Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (LaSalle, IL:  Open Court, 1986), and Lévi-​Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New  York:  Harper & Row, 1969). For a representative poststructuralist work, see Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 2.  See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), and Gender Trouble (New  York:  Routledge, 1990); Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance:  A  Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1991); Elizabeth Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics,” in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. Constantin Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York: Routledge, 1994), 187–​210; Grosz, Volatile Bodies:  Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1994); and Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion:  Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995).

124  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

3.  Deleuze’s work, the French title of which is Différence et répétition (Paris:  Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), is available in English as Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994). 4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1980; Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 5.  Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), and Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (1977; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 6.  Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes,” 187–​90. 7.  Ibid., 207. Other feminist philosophers sympathetic to the Deleuzian project, while not necessarily to all of his concepts, are Braidotti (see “Toward a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzean Tracks; or, Metaphysics and Metabolism,” in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, 159–​85); Moira Gatens (“Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power,” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 162–​87; Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); see also the essays in Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, eds., Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 8. Daniel Smith and John Protevi, “Gilles Deleuze,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008), ed. Edward N. Zalta ; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 29. 9.  Smith and Protevi, “Gilles Deleuze.” 10.  There are two available scores: one printed—​Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (Hamburg:  H. Sikorski, 2002)—​and the other a facsimile reproduction of the manuscript (Hamburg: H. Sikorski, 1991). When working on this analysis, I relied primarily on two recorded performances by the Kronos and the Danish Quartets; I did not have access to recordings by the Arditti and Rubin Quartets. The Danish Quartet performance was the one that most closely affirmed my own analytical observations. Kurtag, Lutoslawski, Gubaidulina, Arditti String Quartet, Montaigne Auvidis MO 782147, 1994, compact disc; String Quartets, Danish String Quartet, Classic Produktion Osnabrück 999064 2, compact disc; Short Stories, Kronos Quartet, Electra Nonesuch 9 79310-​2, 1993, compact disc; and 20th Century String Quartets, Rubin String Quartet, Arte Nova 770690, 2006, compact disc. 11.  Sofia Gubaidulina, “Composer Note,” String Quartet No. 2, Schirmer Music Sales Classical, accessed September 21, 2014, http://​www.musicsalesclassical.com/​composer/​ work/​24110. 12.  Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (1981; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (1991; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 13.  Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 117–​200. 14. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 48. 15.  Michael Kurtz, Sofia Gubaidulina: A Biography, ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown, trans. Christoph K. Lohmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), details the various dimensions of Gubaidulina’s multicultural heritage and its role in shaping her artistic vision. 16.  I indicate the function of parts in italics, as for instance in the Reaching Out and Tethering function of Part 1, and indicate specific gestures in quotations, as for instance in the Reaching-​Out gesture. 17.  Figures 5.3 and 5.5 were originally conceived with color. In the original version of Figure 5.3 I used color to indicate timbral differences, and Figure 5.5 continued the color

Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987)  125

depictions utilized in Figure 5.3. For the purposes of publication, these figures have been recast using shades of black. The original color versions of Figures 5.3 and 5.5 may be seen on the companion website for this volume. 18.  The careful reader and listener will note that in Figure 5.3 I have made some specific interpretations of timbral quality or dynamics that are ambiguous in the score. My interpretations are like the ones that musicians would make in performing the work. For instance, in the cello part of m. 10, the first G4 is marked ord. and downbow at f. I have interpreted this as non vibrato, since earlier instances of a related figure clearly show ord. vibrato.

126  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

6 Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993)

Born in 1953 in Guangzhou, Chen Yi studied violin and piano in the conservatory system from the age of three and was exposed by her parents to Western classical music.i Her family life changed dramatically with the onset of China’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, and when she was 15 they were separated from one another and sent to forced-​labor assignments in different parts of the country. Chen Yi was sent to the countryside in southern China, where she helped to build military fortifications and grow rice. For all the difficulties she endured during this time, Chen Yi found value in her musical experiences. When she was 17 the local authorities appointed her concertmaster of an orchestra comprising both Western and traditional Chinese instruments that performed revolutionary Chinese operas, and she credits the countryside experience with allowing her to encounter and understand her Chinese cultural roots: I also found my own language when I realized that my mother tongue really is the same as what the farmers speak . . . [and] when I translated it into music, it’s not the same as what I was practicing everyday! For this reason, I  believe that I  really need to .  .  . find a way to express myself in a way of real fusion of Eastern and Western musics in my music. The result should be a natural hybrid, and not an artificial or superficial combination.ii

i.  Biographical information about the composer is drawn from Grove Music Online, s.v. “Chen Yi,” by Joanna C.  Lee, article updated August 27, 2003, http://​www.oxfordmusiconline.com, and “Chen Yi,” Theodore Presser Company, updated March 22, 2013, http://​www.presser.com/​ Composers/​info.cfm?Name=ChenYi. ii.  Cited in John de Clef Piñero, “An Interview with Chen Yi,” accessed October 5, 2012, http://​ www.newmusicon.org/​v9n4/​v94chen_​yi.htm (web page discontinued).

127

In 1979 Chen Yi began composition studies at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where the curriculum included both Western and traditional Chinese music, as well as field trips into rural China to collect songs from local villagers, further sowing the seeds for the cross-​cultural fusion that would later characterize her music. In 1986 she became the first woman to complete a master’s degree in composition in China, an event that was celebrated by a concert of her orchestral works performed by the Central Philharmonic Orchestra in Beijing. After graduating, Chen Yi moved to New York to complete her doctorate of musical arts at Columbia University, where she studied with Chou Wen-​ chung and Mario Davidovsky. Her music—its distinctive style engaging a wide range of musical traditions from fugue to serialism to American vernacular, as well as everything from traditional Chinese ensembles to choirs, orchestras, and symphonic bands—has attracted commissions by such eminent performers as Yehudi Menuhin, Yo-​Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, and Evelyn Glennie. She has been recognized with numerous prizes, including the Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the ASCAP Concert Music Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She is also the subject of two documentaries, the 1989 series Sound and Silence (ISCM/​ Adamov Films) and a 2002 film entitled Chen Yi in America (A Cantonese in New York) (Guangdong TV). Currently teaching at the University of Missouri–​Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance, Chen Yi has also taught at the Peabody Conservatory and from 2006 to 2015 served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music and Tianjin Conservatory of Music in China.

The Transformative Power of Musical Gestures: Cultural Translation in Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2 Nancy Yunhwa Rao An important thread running through the musical narrative of Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2 (1993) is the memory of her late father.1 Chen Yi, who by then had moved to the United States, wrote this dramatic work in commemoration of his recent passing in China. It articulates a narrative of spiritual transformation through contrasting sections that depict deep sorrow, profound reflection, and, finally, revelation. 128  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

At the close of the symphony, against a shimmering background that gradually fades into silence, the composer introduces a crucial four-​ measure expression of homage—​ played on percussion—​ referring to a particular musical gesture in Chinese opera associated with dignified characters, chongtou (to be discussed later). Quite unlike in a typical symphonic ending, a percussionist plays a quiet string of syncopated rhythms on a small gong in a clear, bright, metallic timbre. Compared to earlier parts of the symphony, where the heaviness is unrelenting and melancholy lingers, Chen Yi’s touch here at the end is light and unadorned, signaling an almost cheerful outlook. But to listeners familiar with the conventions of Chinese opera, the simple musical gesture also signifies the image of a man with the qualities of simple elegance, genuine aspiration, and unfeigned optimism. Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2 is rich in such musical gestures, whose distinctive characteristics are derived from several Chinese music traditions. Many of these gestures are connected to traditional percussive patterns in Chinese opera called luogu dianzi, patterns that are closely associated with particular meaning and bodily movement. As a result, they help to create a listening experience ripe with potential for emotional and physical engagement. Although that potential may not be fully realized for listeners unaware of these gestures’ meanings within their original cultural context, I argue that a close consideration of their significance in Chinese music is crucial, both because of the way these gestures can elicit an embodied listening and because these musical gestures—​culturally coded in interesting ways—​lead to particular aesthetic implications. This essay therefore seeks to delineate the rich and complex meanings embedded in the musical gestures of the symphony, by examining their dynamic and musical shapes and—​most important—​t heir expressive effects in terms of physical engagement and cultural associations. In the following discussion of musical gestures in Chen Yi’s symphony, I  will draw not only from an understanding of their cultural context, but also from recent literature on musical embodiment. Since the 1990s scholars have brought analytical scrutiny to the embodied aspect of music experiences, examining the multifarious forms of physical engagement in relation to musical sound, musical gestures, and their expressive content. Suzanne Cusick and Andrew Mead, for example, have explored the close connection between the body and the acts of performance, composing, and listening.2 Others, such as Naomi Cumming, Daphne Leong, and David Korevaar, have demonstrated the value of linking performers’ physical engagement with music to our understanding of musical voice and the analysis of musical gestures.3 The embodiment aspect of musical gestures—​how discrete units exemplify what Robert Hatten calls the Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993)  129

“energetic shaping of sound through time” and can elicit the physical engagement of listeners—​is the focus of study for several scholars, including Hatten, David Lidov, and Arnie Cox.4 Their insightful work provides the analytical tools that form the basis of my approach in this essay. One difference, however, sets this study apart from the earlier work. While the above-​mentioned studies focus primarily on music of the European and American traditions, my study reaches into Chinese culture, demonstrating how an understanding of this transnational context is crucial to an analysis of the cross-​cultural gestural connotations. Accordingly, my essay is divided into several parts. First, I discuss the transnational cultural context of Chen Yi’s musical gestures, and examine the Chinese operatic tradition of luogu dianzi through the lens of recent theories of musical gesture. Second, I offer an interpretation of two particularly significant musical gestures in the symphony, by defining their musical characteristics and demonstrating their associations with luogu dianzi. Third, I analyze how Chen Yi’s interweaving of these gestures guides the symphony’s larger musical narrative and its dynamic process of spiritual transformation. Fourth, I examine the structure and significance of the symbolic musical gesture that brings the symphony to a close. In conclusion, I  consider the work from the perspective of shi, a concept in Chinese aesthetics.

The transnational cultural context of Chen Yi’s musical gestures Since musical gestures are inevitably culturally coded, and since Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2 draws on gestures and genres that traverse cultural and national borders, questions arise about how to situate the composer herself in the transnational context. There is no simple answer:  the borderlines in such late twentieth-​ century cross-​ cultural significations are formulated in flexible and sometimes unexpected ways. For Chen Yi, immersed since early childhood in Western classical music and having gone through rigorous conservatory training and, later, doctoral studies in the United States, knowledge of the European music tradition is firmly established. At the same time, she is deeply rooted in Chinese traditional and contemporary music, cultivated through her experiences as a child growing up with Cantonese opera and music around her, as a teenager receiving “re-​education” by being sent to live and labor in the countryside, as the concertmaster playing in a revolutionary Chinese opera orchestra, and as a conservatory student studying subjects of Chinese traditional music 130  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

and conducting fieldwork. Furthermore, these aspects of her musical background are intimately mingled with a type of music cultural fusion made prominent during the Cultural Revolution, namely the revolutionary or “model” opera—​a genre that integrated traditional Chinese operatic and other vocal traditions with elements of European orchestral music to achieve a certain dramatic and aesthetic result.5 Chen Yi’s sophisticated compositional palette brings together elements of these diverse musical heritages, experiences, and education and reflects not only an ongoing engagement with Chinese folk traditions, but also her exposure to the contemporary vernacular music of the United States. As a cosmopolitan figure of the early twenty-​first century, Chen Yi has experienced various cultural relocations and developed a plurality of vision, giving rise to her “simultaneous awareness of multiple dimensions” of sonic possibilities and cultural contexts.6 Her statement that “music composition reflects the precipitation of a composer’s cultural and psychological construct” deliberately celebrates a diversity of cultural belonging.7 Yet, despite her thorough knowledge of and training in European classical music, as a person of Chinese heritage she occupies a minority ethnic position in her country of residence, the United States. In this context her work is “naturally” viewed as an articulation of that ethnic perspective, codified as “marginal” but often greeted with multicultural enthusiasm. At the same time, in the context of China, where she aligns with the majority, Chen Yi continues to occupy a position deeply invested in national culture, as well as in extending and reaffirming that tradition by creating new work.8 Therefore, in multicultural America, Chen Yi’s work inevitably involves what might be called the translation of the “national” into the ethnic, and the recognition she has received in America does little to change this ethnic subject position. Her transnational position means communicating both across cultural borders and from interstitial spaces. In many ways musical gestures play an important role in the complex signification associated with the pivotal translation of national into ethnic articulation. For example, sometimes a musical gesture from Chinese culture could be taken as an ethnic marker, linking to a certain notion about the culture and structuring the ways in which her works are received, heard, and discussed in the United States. (The same gesture might not, however, be considered “marked” as ethnic when performed in China.) None of these complexities and paradoxes, however, interferes with the ease with which Chen Yi moves between cultures, as reflected both in her professional success in the two countries and in the unique sound world she creates. The symphony represents a crucial work of self-​reflection and spiritual renewal, moving from expressions of grief, pain, agitation, and agony to eventually close with an expression of optimism. An analysis of this Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993)  131

work from the perspective of musical gesture—​in terms of both physical and cultural embodiment—​allows a deeper understanding of the expressive way in which Chen Yi uses gesture to shape the musical processes that symbolize this spiritual transformation.9 As we will see, she employs musical gestures associated with a genre in one culture (Chinese opera) to derive a musical narrative that evokes emotive responses in a genre of another culture (the traditional Western symphony).

Luogu dianzi as mimetic musical gestures As I have discussed in an earlier publication, percussion music constitutes a vital part of the system of signification in Chinese opera.10 Over one hundred preexisting rhythmic patterns—​collectively called luogu dianzi—​ performed by a percussion ensemble of drum, clapper, small Chinese cymbal (naobo), small gong (xiaoluo), and large gong (daluo)—​are used as musical signs to establish an ambience, punctuate a speech or dramatic movement, or denote an opera character’s persona, class, or state of mind. Theatrically, the rhythmic patterns also form a body of musical topics and conventions that can be used to distinguish between nobles and commoners, and to reflect the mood and inner states of characters.11 Functioning as sonic signifiers that provide clues about dramatic situations, the luogu dianzi rhythmic patterns are widely understood across Chinese communities, forming a basic musical language shared not only among singers and musicians, but also audiences. Going one step further, I would argue that many luogu dianzi have an inherently mimetic quality and therefore can be understood within the framework of gestural music theory. As noted earlier, Hatten defines “gesture” in part as a “communicative … , expressive, energetic shaping through time.”12 But the fundamental reason gestures can be communicative and expressive is that they “can emulate those precise energetic shapes that hold expressive meaning for us” (108). These two elements of Hatten’s definitions—​temporal shaping and the notion of emulation—​are particularly suggestive for the current study. The former focuses on the importance of the temporal dimension and the rhythmic aspect of musical gestures, qualities of equal significance in the rhythmic patterns of luogo dianzi. The latter, on the other hand, focuses on a mechanism by which these gestures can acquire expressive significance, that is, by emulating or mimicking those familiar patterns of physical energy we have come to associate—​whether from personal experience or by cultural convention—​w ith common emotions or actions. Both train the analytical sight on the dynamic process itself—​in other words, on the unfolding and the affect of musical gestures. 132  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

Although musical gestures can be discussed in terms of discrete qualities such as rhythm, tone quality, articulation, dynamics, and pacing, these qualities come together to create a single expressive unit—​in Hatten’s words, “emergent gestalts that convey affective motion, emotion, and agency by fusing otherwise separate elements into continuities of shape and force.”13 According to Cumming, such a “complex of contextual features … add[s]‌up to the dynamic ‘feeling’ of agency at different levels.” She further notes that “the ‘interpretant’ of a figure as gestural would have to be bodily, whether that bodily reference were made self-​conscious or not.”14 Focusing on embodied cognition, Arnie Cox places emphasis on the relation between emulation and gestural signification and proposes what he calls his “mimetic hypothesis.” An important component of this hypothesis is the listener’s “mimetic participation.” He notes that “part of how we understand music involves imagining making the heard sounds for ourselves, and this imagined participation involves covertly and overtly imitating the sounds heard and imitating the physical actions that produce those sounds.”15 Cox suggests that we might comprehend the musical gesture “via an amodal, visceral imitation of the exertion dynamic evident in the sound (a pattern of exertions that would produce the same or similar sounds).”16 By “visceral,” Cox means that the mimetic may not just involve our limbs, head, or lips, but also “something in the gut that somehow matches the energy pattern of the music.”17 Such visceral imitations concern the imaginary yet physical dimension of listening that can affect the listener deeply. Part of musical pleasure is the physicality of subconscious mimicry associated with the musical gesture. In addition, Cox points out, our mimetic participation involves imitating not only the imagined physical actions that produce those sounds, but also the physical actions that those sounds signify. To illustrate how these concepts apply to luogo dianzi, let us examine ji-​ji-​ feng, an important luogu dianzi that is nearly ubiquitous in Chinese opera. Example 6.1 is a rendition of a typical ji-​ji-​feng rhythmic pattern played by percussion ensemble . The first two measures shown in the example constitute the generic opening rhythm for many luogu dianzi. The “middle bar,” indicated by repeat signs, is repeated ad libitum depending on the dramatic situation. Its distinctive profile of gradual acceleration and crescendo articulated by continuous strokes distinguishes the ji-​ji-​feng and imbues it with a sense of intensity. The last two measures constitute an ending also commonly found in many luogu dianzi. Ji-​ji-​feng is used to signify hasty, rushed physical activities and the intensity typically associated with a fighting or military scene, a quick march, or a chase. It typically starts at a moderate speed and gradually builds up to a climactic moment by an increase in volume and tempo, and by using rapid drum strokes to create an accumulation of microactivity. The increasing Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993)  133

Example 6.1 Chinese opera percussion pattern ji-​ji-​feng

intensity of ji-​ji-​feng depicts physical exertion and denotes a psychological dimension of tension and anxiety. An embodied listening could evoke its topical reference to fighting by activating not only a listener’s internal emulation of the sound production (physically demanding fast strokes), but also the imagined physical dimension of fighting (physical exertion) and the psychological state associated with such an intense activity. These are interactive and inseparable parts of ji-​ji-​feng. This discussion of ji-​ji-​feng illustrates how luogu dianzi, as musical gestures, can shape the experience of temporality in crucial ways, acting both as musical signs characterized by what Kofi Agawu terms “mimetic qualities” and as musical topics that connote specific feelings or affects.18 Because luogu dianzi as musical gestures enact physical expressions of the affects that can stimulate the mimetic participation of listeners, the notion of embodiment will play a central role in my interpretation of Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2. The analysis will identify musical gestures that are closely associated with the conventions of Chinese opera. Although these may not be readily recognizable to an audience unfamiliar with this genre and its repertoire of topics, the purpose of such an analysis goes beyond mere identification of stylistic or topic affiliations: it enables a close reading of the inner dynamic and expressive narrative of this symphony. Considering the symphony’s musical gestures in the context of the sound world of Chinese opera and through its interpretive lenses will inevitably enhance listeners’ understanding not only of their meaning, but of the composer’s musical language.

Two musical gestures and their origins in Chinese opera Two musical gestures provide most of the expressive content in Symphony No. 2: the gesture of agony and the gesture of epiphany. While “epiphany” is a term taken from Chen Yi’s own description of the symphony, I use the 134  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

term “agony” to indicate a sense of agitation, struggle, gloom, and heaviness associated with the deep-​seated grief the composer felt after her father’s death.19 The appearances of these gestures in the work range widely: from obvious, immediate surface to subtle, distanced background, and in forms of either raw energy or specific cultural reference. In some cases the musical phrasing of the gestures also mimics the temporal articulation and physical or choreographic movement characteristic of the Chinese opera stage. Yet regardless of forms or referential association, these gestures shape the temporal process and emotive content of the symphony. After introducing each gesture in its musical context and describing its musical characteristics and connection to luogu dianzi, I will discuss the ways by which the gestural interactions are set in motion.

The gesture of agony The symphony begins with a series of dark, low rumbling sounds at the lower extreme of the orchestral register, creating a sense of gloom or anxious motion. This effect arises from a succession of gestures: first a tremolo on the double bass and then a roll on the timpani, both shaped by gradual crescendos and decrescendos. Characterized by their low register, rapid attacks, gradual dynamic changes, and sometimes accelerations, these gestures effectively convey the burning torment of bereavement—​and for this reason I refer to them as gestures of agony. Essential to the intensity of the gesture of agony is its physicality, the continuous quick strokes, crescendo, and acceleration that require from the performer a gradually increasing exertion of energy.  Certain key characteristics of the gesture of agony are heard in the ensuing passages, including the shaping of a gradual crescendo at the low end of the contrabass (mm. 21 and 26) and tuba (m. 31), and the fast repetition of strokes, emulated by various woodwind instruments by means of long tremoli (mm. 27, 30, 35, 39, and 40). A sense of agitated motion remains at the core of this opening section, sustained by the prevailing gestures of agony. To listeners who are familiar with luogu dianzi, the dynamic shape formed by the agony gesture’s tremolo/​roll connects closely to ji-​ji-​feng, with its characteristic process of gradual buildup through the smooth crescendo and the quick-​stroke acceleration (the main challenge for the performer). Given this association, the gesture of agony’s increased intensity conveys both physical exertion and psychological tension. The physicality of this musical gesture extends beyond the imagining of the muscular tension of rolling mallets on the timpani, since, as a musical topic, ji-​ji-​feng signals the intense and fiery atmosphere associated with battling and fighting. Yet Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993)  135

Example 6.2 Opening gesture of agony in Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2

it is the psychological intensity of ji-​ji-​feng that the gesture of agony most vividly evokes throughout the symphony. Against the continuum of the agony gestures, starting in m. 12 the double bass articulates a twelve-​tone row, , which is picked up canonically in the next measure by the tuba (beginning on C ♯ , the third pitch class of the row). From here until m. 35, double bass and tuba repeat this row in canon, together providing a contrapuntal but otherwise grounding sonority in the lowest register; meanwhile, the higher strings also play the row, first in tremoli and then glissandi. These twelve-​ tone statements eventually become ostinato figures whose staggered repetitions add to the momentum created by the agony gesture. Another important melodic idea, variations of which are played by several different instruments throughout the symphony, is introduced in m. 13 by the double bass, tuba, and contrabassoon. This melodic idea oscillates between two notes a perfect fifth apart, with added upper or lower semitone 136  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

Example 6.3 Tritone-​inflected melodies

neighbor notes often creating a tritone-​inflected melody. (As a result, set classes 016 and 0167 occur frequently in this passage.) Example 6.3 shows two such melodies that occur later in the oboes: the first oscillates between C and G, decorated by B and D ♭, and the second oscillates between F♯ and B, decorated by E ♯ and C. Tellingly, Chen Yi once noted that she regards “dissonance intervals of adjacent pitches” as the sound of tragedy.20 In the context of Symphony No. 2, these tritonal melodic fragments thus add to the sense of agony and deep sorrow. 

The gesture of epiphany The orchestra, with its continuing succession of agony gestures, has been simmering in a dark abyss of low-​register melodic fragments and harmonies. Then suddenly, as shown in Example 6.4 , at the end of m. 42 a new, higher musical gesture breaks out as a rush of quick notes on woodblock, flute, harp, and vibraphone leads to two accented fortissimo attacks on the downbeats of mm. 43 and 44, and a third in the oboe leading into m. 45. Against the sharp attacks in the woodblock, the pause in activity in the flute and other instruments creates suspense, enhancing the gesture’s acute sense of energy. In Chen Yi’s own words, “The atmosphere of the heavy background is interrupted by the sharp percussion sound, which

Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993)  137

Example 6.4 Gesture of epiphany, mm. 41–​45

symbolizes the sparkle of the sudden epiphanies.”21 Accordingly, I refer to this figure as the gesture of epiphany. Characterized by the penetrating timbre of the woodblock, this startling gesture is quickly repeated by various combinations of instruments, injecting new energy into the symphony with every statement; at the same time, each repetition seemingly threatens to bring the music to an abrupt stop. For example, in mm. 58–​60 the epiphany gesture’s appearances within the whole woodwind section, or the whole orchestra, mimic the previous woodblock gestures, as shown in Example 6.5 . When epiphany gestures occur in quick succession, as they do in these measures, the staggering of their accented final strokes creates a dramatic effect. Like the gesture of agony, the gesture of epiphany also has clear associations with luogu dianzi. In Chinese opera, dramatic moments of sudden revelation, surprise, shock, or epiphany are typically marked with signifying percussive patterns that are stylistically similar to the passages shown in Examples 6.4 and 6.5. These styles of luogu dianzi often combine the more general sibian yiluo, used to emphasize an especially dramatic moment, with the more explosive leng chui, associated particularly with astonishment, shock, anger, and alarm. In the sibian yiluo pattern drum rolls, implying internal turmoil or mental activity, and a brief segment of quickly repeated notes lead to an accented attack, followed by a sudden pause that creates a sense of disquiet. In the leng chui, a few loud, abrupt 138  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

Example 6.5 Gestures of epiphany, mm. 58–​60

drum strokes, punctuated by silence, similarly lead to a final accented attack. Examples 6.6a and 6.6b reproduce versions of the sibian yiluo and leng chui rhythmic patterns, respectively  . To my hearing, the psychological dimension of these two percussion patterns is visceral and direct, much like the physical reaction to an arresting moment, with the body held in suspense. These two musical gestures, sibian yiluo and leng chui, play an essential role in Chinese opera, where their punctuating effects do not simply add to the music’s characteristic sound, but supply a sonic skeleton without which the drama would be shapeless. In her symphony Chen Yi evokes these musical gestures in similar ways to create the distinctive effect of Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993)  139

Example 6.6a Chinese opera percussion pattern si-​bian-​yi-​luo

Example 6.6b Chinese opera percussion pattern leng chui

punctuation and angularity. In a kind of sonic sculpture, she transfers the percussive punctuations to a variety of pitched instruments, often using a swift upward sweeping motion to emulate the resonance of the accented sharp percussive sound. Despite the epiphany gesture’s varied guises, the effect remains similar—​vividly startling. I propose that the dynamic exertion implied by this gesture can be experienced by listeners on a physical level through the kind of “visceral imitation” suggested by Cox. The epiphany gesture draws on pitch materials used frequently by Chen Yi during this period in such works as the Piano Concerto (1992) and her octet Sparkle for woodwinds, strings, piano and percussion (1992). Specifically, in addition to the aforementioned tritone-​inflected melody and twelve-​tone row, a five-​note melody that the composer herself has identified as the “Chen Yi theme” (hereafter “CY theme”) is also prominent. Example 6.7 repro22 duces the theme in Chen Yi’s Concerto. In the symphony (as indicated on Example 6.7 CY theme in Chen Yi, Piano Concerto

140  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

Example 6.4), this melody is incorporated into the opening of the epiphany gesture and later appears in numerous similar contexts. Its appearance in the symphony is particularly pertinent because the composer notes that the CY theme “has recurred in her mind since her father fell ill.”23

Dramatic interplay and transformation The two primary musical gestures of agony and epiphany in Chen Yi’s symphony first appear successively and in contrasting occurrences but eventually merge to effect an expressive transformation. If the opening darkness, expressed by agony gestures, alludes to grief and torment, and the epiphany gesture the sudden “sparkle” of a new vision, then the merging of the two represents a transformational process from the former through the latter to a new sense of revelation. In the following discussion I describe how Chen Yi’s music enacts this process throughout the three major sections of the symphony. The first section (mm. 1–​61) opens with repeated agony gestures, expressed in dark and heavy timbres, and moves through a gradual expansion of register, activity level, and volume before the bright, startling strokes of the epiphany gesture intervene. These gestures provide a continuum against which other musical materials are set, such as the melancholy tritone-​ inflected melodies and the staggered ostinatos formed by twelve-​tone row fragments noted earlier. At times several elements are stacked up to create a thickly textured sound mass, as for example in mm. 31–​34 (not shown). While recurrences of the agony gesture may sustain a listener’s visceral imitation of relentless physical exertion at a constant level, successive entries of the epiphany gesture work to surprise, echo, or interrupt. The CY theme gradually becomes more central to this epiphany gesture, eventually creating the final ascending motion of the gesture in mm. 57–​59. Gradually, though, the differences between the agony and epiphany gestures subside, and, as their musical features merge, they become one large combined gesture leading to the climax of the symphony in the third section. This merging and augmentation is achieved in part through the common references in both agony and epiphany gestures to the ji-​ji-​feng figure. As we have seen, the agony gesture prolongs ji-​ji-​feng’s rapid strokes and opening crescendo; the first segment of each epiphany gesture incorporates ji-​ji-​feng’s characteristic beginning (quick strokes, with crescendo and accelerando, but this time leading to a sharp downbeat). The second section (mm. 61–​165) alternates between arching melodies and passages of tonal and timbral stasis. Again, the tritone-​inflected melodies have a prominent presence. The section begins with solo flute (recalling the timbre and pitch inflections of the Chinese xiao [vertical bamboo Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993)  141

flute]), followed by solo cello (recalling the timbre and low, sorrowful singing tone of the erhu [Chinese fiddle]), and then solo clarinet (using its full range of timbre and register). A succession of long, languid melodic lines with wide registral spans creates a pensive passage of melancholy and memory, as if reaching into an ethereal world. The agony and epiphany gestures play a secondary role in the opening of this section, with agony gestures receding into the distant background as accompaniment and occasional epiphany gestures punctuating the otherwise tranquil passage. However, as the section progresses the epiphany gestures interrupt with growing frequency, in tremolo lower strings or quick strokes in the percussion. These gestures, together with increasingly frequent entries of smaller musical fragments, generate more energetic musical motion, finally leading to a series of stuttering tutti melodies. The melodies’ ascending motion and frequent halting elevate the intensity, and the energy simmering in the pause after each epiphany gesture accrues as the motion becomes busier. In mm. 155–​65 Chen Yi creates a thick, six-​layer texture by stacking twelve-​ tone-​row segments in the woodwinds while distributing the total chromatic collection among the violin and viola sections in sustained notes. Then, against this sound mass, the bleak sound of the woodblock enters, evoking the epiphany gesture. But when this gesture’s characteristic fast strokes continue instead of leading to a pause, they recall instead the gradually accumulating rhythmic patterns of the agony gesture. In the third section (mm. 166–​231) Chen Yi finally combines the agony and epiphany gestures in an expressive climax that follows a graduate buildup of rhythmic intensity (shown in the reduction in Example 6.8). After the lead-​in by explosive woodblock strokes, a distinctive rhythmic figure first appears in mm. 166–​67, characterized by two sextuplets completed by a rushing thirty-​second-​note ending. It enters abruptly and almost abrasively, played on a pair of large naobo (cymbals). Its metallic, percussive sound, heightened volume, and increased speed articulate the percussion pattern ji-​ji-​feng, suggesting the return of the agony gesture. But after three beats the rhythm’s forceful drive suddenly halts, the pause as abrupt as the entry. This pattern of rhythmic starting and halting repeats continuously, with the distinctive rhythmic figure returning 16 times and the intensity increasing with each return after the pause. The persistent repetitions of these quasi-​agony gestures are spaced closer together each time, giving rise to a large-​scale, ji-​ji-​feng-​like accelerando and a ferocious dramatic buildup. The accelerando in mm. 166–​97 is created by Chen Yi’s merging of the luogu dianzi with another musical tradition known as shifan luogo, used in instrumental ensembles for ritual occasions and characterized by its numerological manipulation of rhythmic processes in the percussion. Shifan luogu comprises certain rigorous patterns of periodicity that 142  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

place emphasis on the numbers one, three, five, and seven.24 In this passage, shown in Example  6.8, the three-​beat, sextuplet rhythmic unit’s recurrences are separated by rests that initially increase from five to seven eighths, but then gradually shorten to five, three, and finally one. Table 6.1 lists the succession of beat durations of notes and rests, as well as the periodicity implied by each unit of combined duration of notes and rests in mm. 166–​97. These gradually shortened rests effectively increase the haste and anxious character of the agony gesture.25 The musical process of shifan luogu is thus maneuvered to shape the temporal continuum in an exceptionally energetic way. After this process, the percussion ensemble no longer draws attention to itself or stands apart from the other music elements, as it would in Chinese opera; rather, it blends into the overall orchestral timbre, discernible only when the woodblock occasionally punctuates pauses with its quick strokes. And in this unified timbre the musical process builds the momentum that leads to the culminating gesture, as illustrated in Example 6.8. The effect of the dramatic buildup throughout these measures is intensified by the contrast between the vigorous fast strokes in the percussion and the continuing, often tritone-​inflected melodic fragments in brass and strings. That is, every time the agony gesture—​or the ji-​ji-​feng rhythm—​ returns, it interrupts the flow of these melodic ideas.26 In the shaping of the large-​scale motion, the metallic, unadorned naobo sounds add to the intensity. Chen Yi uses this harsh timbre, together with incessant repetitions, to create a passage so powerful that listeners may experience it viscerally. As the fragmented agony gestures create a forceful momentum toward the climactic moment, their sharp sounds and hurried rhythms recreate the psychological intensity of ji-​ji-​feng. Finally, the musical process culminates when ji-​ji-​feng evolves from fragments into steady sextuplets, creating a continuous statement of the agony gesture.27 The accrued energy peaks with a piercing sfz tutti chord that is followed by a sudden drop into deep silence. And with this tutti chord the succession of hurried rhythmic fragments completes its transformation into an augmented epiphany gesture. The repeated interruption of forward motion in this passage is as haunting and frustrating psychologically and physically as it is musically; when the rhythmic motion eventually flows steadily without interruption, it also alleviates—​in significant ways—​the inner frustration of its listeners. In my view, the mimetic participation that this large-​scale gesture (mm. 166–​200) evokes is key to a deep engagement with the experience of this transformative process. That is, mimetic responses to musical gesture play an important part in how the musical process effects this spiritual transformation, not only by expressing the transformation, but also by creating it for Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993)  143

Table 6.1  Patterns of periodicity influenced by shifan luogu Beginning measure

166

168

170

173

175

178

180

182

184

186

188

189

191

192

193

194

Number of beats* notes (rest)

3(5)

3(5)

3(7)

3(7)

3(7)

3(7)

3(5)

3(5)

3(5)

3(3)

3(3)

3(3)

3(1)

3(1)

3(1)

3

8

8

10

10

10

10

8

8

8

6

6

6

4

4

4

n/​a

Duration in quarter notes

* A beat unit equals a quarter note.

Example 6.8 Buildup of rhythmic intensity

the listeners. Cox argues that, through mimetic participation—​the physical, though subconscious, imitation of musical gestures—​“we also understand these as the intentional, expressive gestures that we have made and have seen made in other domains of our experience.”28 Accordingly, I argue that Chen Yi’s symphony encourages a sense of spiritual transformation through the listener’s internal mimetic participation in the musical process, the music engaging its listeners in an emulation of the energetic shapes that transform from agony into ultimate epiphany in an experience of spiritual transcendence. The gradual musical evolution throughout the symphony, from the opening darkness of agony through sparkling epiphany to revelation and peace of mind, is richly woven from smaller-​scale musical gestures related to Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993)  145

Chinese opera’s luogu dianzi (employing their expressive content and imaginative movement, as well as their rhythmic characteristics and timbre) and careful proportions derived from the tradition of shifan luogu (employing its succession of rhythmic repetitions, as well as abstract numerological manipulation). The musical gestures evoke the gesture of agony in terms of both psychological and imagined-​yet-​physical mimicry. In the case of the agony gesture, many layers of this mimicry may be at play: enacting the psychological associations of ji-​ji-​feng, imitating the imagined physical movement associated with ji-​ji-​feng, and emulating the exertion of playing tremoli or a timpani roll. Together these layers produce a musical process of visceral connection and psychological intensity.

Closure and a third musical gesture The final passage of the climax (mm. 207–​31) is marked by characteristics of the epiphany gesture in a greatly augmented manner. The steady forward motion discussed in the previous section comes to a full stop in m. 203 and is followed by the strings emulating the quick strokes of epiphany gesture’s rhythmic pattern. Then in tutti, the instruments combine to create the upward swing of a grand leng chui (starting in m. 207), and at the high point the clarinets slide upward in a glissando from their lowest to highest register over two measures. This is the ultimate moment of the large-​scale gesture of epiphany. With it, the metamorphosis of the agony gesture into the epiphany gesture is complete, and the opening dark abyss has now been fully transformed musically and spiritually. If the symphony’s first three sections form a musical process in which cross-​cultural references are suggested through the gestural articulations and transformations, then in the last section cultural references are drawn into sharper focus through the use of another type of gesture. Following the loudest tutti section, the orchestral texture lightens. Quick sparkles of quiet percussion patterns—​a milder version of the epiphany gesture—​ punctuate the silence in the postclimactic section, similar to the way luogu dianzi are used in Chinese opera in moments of quiet suspense. The succession of epiphany gestures, though sparse and seemingly spontaneous, is tightly controlled, with four nine-​beat epiphany gestures being followed by two seven-​beat epiphany gestures. Then Chen Yi switches to a different texture, creating a dreamy atmosphere with sparse notes in disparate registers and continuous bar-​long glissandi in harmonics on the violins. The glissandi glide back and forth between the extremes of a tritone melodic

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interval (C–​F♯ or F–​B), creating a sonic fabric of overtones. Soon even this motion subsides in the violins, and against their sustained tones the tritone glissando passes to the solo timpani, gliding quietly between its outer pitches. Then, in the serenity of stillness, a final musical gesture of simple elegance marking the close of the symphony is stated on the small gong—​a high-​pitched Chinese opera instrument with a unique ringing timbre. After two quick strokes on the woodblock, the gong presents a rhythm recalling chongtou—​a pattern frequently employed in Chinese opera when characters enter or exit the stage in various dramatic contexts. Although chongtou can occur at different tempi, the slow version of chongtou typically evokes a stately character heading off on a grave mission, suggesting not only the air of the poised character, but also the graceful pace. Example  6.9a reproduces a typical chongtou rhythmic pattern used in Chinese opera.  The first three measures of the pattern are introductory. The following two measures constitute the main body, which can be repeated ad libitum according to the length of the stage movement. In this traditional example, at the tempo of quarter note  =  76 or slower, the small gong is joined by the naobo to create a syncopated succession of metallic ringing attacks on the off beats. In Chen Yi’s version (shown in Example 6.9b), she uses the woodblock to mark the brief opening, while the succession of syncopations is marked by the bright ringing resonance of the small gong alone. This chongtou rhythmic gesture has a simple timbre, but it dramatically changes the symphony’s sonic world, introducing elements of grace and poise. As noted above, for those who are familiar with the sound and symbolism of this luogu dianzi in Chinese opera, its rhythmic pattern and timbre inevitably conjure up the image of a dignified statesmanlike figure gravely exiting the stage and stepping into the future. For others not familiar Example 6.9a Chinese opera percussion pattern chongtou

Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993)  147

Example 6.9b Chongtou in Symphony No. 2

with Chinese theater, but sensitive to the physical “feel” of the gesture, the rhythmic gesture suggests an unrushed yet steady pace. Comprehending the latter would perhaps be sufficient, as in Chen Yi’s words, the ending “carries a mysterious dream toward the future.”29 This music’s solemn reference to chongtou crystallizes not only the composer’s ultimate homage to her late father, to whom the symphony is dedicated, but also the integrity, compassion, and unbounded optimism that he represented.

Conclusion In her preface to the published score, Chen Yi explains: “Symphony No. 2 contains the experiences of waking up to reality, introspection and longing.”30 Indeed, this work communicates in a profound way the process from introspection through epiphany to transformation. A reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle has described the symphony as “a memorably powerful statement whose emotional and even philosophical impact emerges from carefully crafted musical materials.”31 In my analysis, I have shown how musical gestures structure this dramatic musical process, one whose communicative and expressive energies are central to this deeply affecting symphony. The composer’s use of rhythmic patterns, melodic fragments, contrasting timbres, luogu dianzi, and the numerological manipulations of shifan luogu all contribute to that energetic shaping that holds expressive meaning. Through her skillful use of these gestures, Chen Yi conveys an engagement with the mystic spirit—​ the darkness—​as well as an intense process of transcendence. Many of the techniques Chen Yi employs in this work have by now become part of her personal musical language, including the use of the CY theme, twelve-​tone rows, and tritone-​inflected melodies. And characteristics deeply influenced by Chinese opera—​percussive timbre, steady acceleration, poised pacing, and nuance of tonal inflection—​are part of her compositional rhetoric. Finally, I suggest that this dynamic, gestural shaping can also be viewed from the perspective of a Chinese aesthetic, shi, which is most often used in descriptions of calligraphy and painting (as well as military strategies). 148  Part II: Gesture, Identity, and Culture

The French sinologist François Jullien has written extensively about shi, which he calls “the propensity of things.” As he notes, “Shi gives depth to a representation and exceeds its concrete limitation by revealing a dimension of perpetual, soaring flight. Shi is not only the internal energy from which that form has proceeded, it is also the effect of the tension this energy produces.”32 In the musical domain, the notion of shi vividly depicts a certain disposition whose potential and dynamism in musical space are carried out through time, and whose tension animates various elements to create a musical gesture in its various manifestations. We can consider the dynamic process at the core of Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2 as a kind of shi, from which an internal energy emanates and is carried through to its full expression. Considering the symphony through its shi also makes us more keenly attuned to the breath that lives through this dynamic process. As a composer who works actively and intentionally across cultural boundaries, Chen Yi not only brings musical expressions from one culture to bear on the other, but also creates new musical expressions reflecting the cultural terrains of the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. She draws heavily on gestures deeply ingrained in Chinese opera to compose for standard Western instruments and ensembles such as orchestras, string quartets, and bands; yet she is never limited by the tradition of either medium. As this analysis has shown, the ways in which these gestures shape sound and time result in a work that is expressive of deep spiritual forces. One critic’s response to the premiere of Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2 attests to her effective use of musical gestures in this work. Even though their cultural references were not accessible to him, Joseph Kosman wrote in his review: [The symphony’s] rhetorical force and dark beauty are undeniable. The dramatic shape is a large, cresting wave, building up from glowering primordial dissonances in the percussion and lower strings and gathering mass and momentum as it goes. The piece’s crushing climax is persuasively prepared by the dense accumulation of material that has come before.33

Kosman’s depiction of the symphony affirms the comprehensibility of Chen Yi’s cross-​cultural translation. Nevertheless, within the new environment of global multiculturalism in the twenty-​first century, I would argue that musical gestures need to be deliberately considered in terms of their cultural associations, if only because this environment is no longer monolingual, so to speak, and works of art cannot be fully appreciated without reaching beyond a single, narrowly defined cultural tradition. The musical compositions of our time, and their expressions, are deeply affected by Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993)  149

transnational and multilingual processes. In this sense, Chen Yi’s use of musical gestures and topics from Chinese opera to effect a sense of spiritual transformation reflects not only her crossing of borderlines between cultures and nations, but also the bringing together of these simultaneous dimensions in her plurality of vision. Notes 1. Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2 was her first composition as the three-​year resident composer of the Women’s Philharmonic in San Francisco; the orchestra also produced a recording. See Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (Bryn Mawr:  Theodore Presser, 1993); and Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2, on The Music of Chen Yi, Women’s Philharmonic, conducted by JoAnn Falletta, New Albion Records NA 090, 1997, compact disc. More than twenty graduate theses or dissertations have been written about Chen Yi’s music. Representative works include Wendy Hoi-​Yan Wong, “Recurrence as Identity in Chen Yi’s Music” (MPh thesis, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007); Wendy Wan-​ Ki Lee, “Unpacking Aspects of Musical Influence in Three Piano Works by Chinese Composers” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2006); Xiaole Li, “Chen Yi’s Piano Music: Chinese Aesthetics and Western Models” (PhD diss., University of Hawai’i, 2003); and Xin Guo, “Chinese Musical Language Interpreted by Western Idioms: Fusion Process in the Instrumental works by Chen Yi” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2002). Though none of these studies treats issues of musical gesture directly, Xin Guo discusses at length the shape of Symphony No. 2 in terms of registral choices, timbre, and texture. 2. Suzanne Cusick, “Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/​ Body Problem,” Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (1994):  8–​ 27; Andrew Mead, “Bodily Hearing: Physiological Metaphors and Musical Understanding,” Journal of Music Theory 43, no. 1 (1999): 1–​19. 3.  Naomi Cumming, The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), in particular pp. 190–​94. In their study, Daphne Leong and David Korevaar focus on the “feel” of musical gestures in the performance situation. See “The Performer’s Voice: Performance and Analysis in Ravel’s Concerto pour la main gauche,” Music Theory Online 11, no. 3 (2005), http://​www.mtosmt.org/​issues/​mto.05.11.3/​ mto.05.11.3.leong_​korevaar.html. 4.  David Lidov, “Mind and Body in Music,” Semiotica 66, no. 1 (1987): 69–​97; Lidov, “Emotive Gesture in Music and its Contraries,” in Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 24–​44; Robert Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures and Tropes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); and Arnie Cox, “Hearing, Feeling, Grasping Gestures,” in Gritten and King, eds., Music and Gesture, 45–​60. 5.  Nancy Yunhwa Rao, “Sonic Imaginary after the Cultural Revolution,” in Listening to China’s Cultural Revolution:  Music, Politics, and Cultural Continuities, ed. Paul Clark, Laikwan Pang, and Tsan-​huang Tsai (London: Palgrave, 2015), 213–​38. 6.  Here I use Edward Said’s concept and terms to describe Chen Yi’s position; Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 186. I have also addressed the issues of cultural boundaries more fully in a separate essay, “Cultural Boundary and Intercultural Memories:  Recent Works of Tan Dun, Chen Yi, and Bright Sheng,” in Contemporary Music in East Asia, ed. Hee Sook Oh (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2014), 211–​40.

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7.  Chen Yi, “What Do You Expect to Hear When Someone Says ‘American Music?’” New Music Box, article published August 1, 1999, http://​www.newmusicbox.org/​articles/​ What-​do-​you-​expect-​to-​hear-​when-​someone-​says-​American-​music-​Chen-​Yi-​Composer/​2. 8.  A prime example of her prominent national position in China is the Chang-​Jiang Scholar Chair Professorship, to which the China Education Ministry appointed Chen Yi for the 2006–​9 term. 9.  An analytical approach to musical gesture is particularly germane to many recent works of cultural fusion. See Yayoi Uno Everett, “Gesture and Calligraphy in the Late Works by Chou Wen-​chung,” Contemporary Music Review 26, no. 2 (2007): 569–​84; and Timothy Koozin, “Traversing Distances: Pitch Organization, Gesture and Imagery in the Late Works of Tōru Takemitsu,” Contemporary Music Review 21, no. 4 (2002): 17–​34. 10.  Nancy Yunhwa Rao, “The Tradition of Luogu Dianzi (Percussion Classics) and Its Signification in Contemporary Music,” Contemporary Music Review 5, no. 6 (October–​ December 2007): 511–​27. 11.  The theory of musical topics has received much scholarly attention. I use the term in much the sense developed in Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980); Wye J. Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: “Le Nozze di Figaro” and “Don Giovanni” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, and Pastoral (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); and, most recently, The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 12. Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures and Tropes, 109. 13. Ibid., 95. 14. Cumming, The Sonic Self, 190–​91. The concept of the interpretant was introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce as the third element of his tripartite model of the sign (object, sign, interpretant). As cited by Albert Atkin, Peirce writes: “I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the later is thereby mediately determined by the former.” See Atkin, “Peirce’s Theory of Signs,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 ed.), http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​sum2013/​entries/​peirce-​semiotics. 15.  Cox, “Hearing, Feeling, Grasping Gestures,” 46. 16.  Ibid., 50. By “amodal,” Cox means across different media of sound production. A musical gesture representing a sigh can have the same effect whether it is played on piano, violin, or oboe. 17. Ibid., 51. 18.  Kofi Agawu, Music as Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 44–​45. 19.  In my interpretation, the grief is not limited to that associated with the death of her father, but is also a reflection of the weight and pain of that generation—​what he and China suffered during the Cultural Revolution, a period of true darkness that sent their family through separations and excruciating hardship. 20.  Wong, “Recurrence as Identity,” 37. In addition, the tritones that emerge from these melodies also resemble a kind of “crying tone” called kuyin, characteristic of many Chinese folk melodies, opera, and instrumental genres. There is little English literature on kuyin, but a brief discussion can be found in Stephen Jones, “Gender and Music in Local Communities,” in Gender in Chinese Music, ed. Rachel Harris, Rowan Pease, and Shzr Ee Tan (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 35. 21.  Chen Yi, “Preface,” Symphony No. 2. 22.  Chen Yi, “Piano Concerto” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1992), 42.

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23.  Wong, “Recurrence as Identity in Chen Yi’s Music,” 41. 24.  Shifan luogu is a type of string, wind, and percussion genre performed mainly in parts of Jiangsu province. It is unique for the complex ways in which the musicians count the various strokes on the drums, gongs, and cymbals, as well as combinations thereof. The phrase lengths are constrained by a method of counting one, three, five, or seven strokes. Sequences of numbers are used to produce phrases, which are then subjected to permutations such as inversion, retrograde, etc., and the result is further complicated by variables in dynamics, timbre, and instrumentation. See Boyu Zhang, Mathematical Rhythmic Structure of Chinese Percussion Music:  An Analytical Study of Shifan Luogu Collections (Turku:  Turun Yliopisto, 1997). This results in a duple-​meter periodicity—​ eight-​, ten-​, six-​, or four-​beat units—​each marked by a recurrence of the rhythmic patterns, while an asymmetry characterizes the subdivision within each unit. 25.  Chen Yi uses the term “telescope” to describe the recurrence of a rhythmic pattern that increases or decreases proportionally. As Guo notes, “[Chen Yi] has discussed the idea of the rhythmic ‘telescope’ directly derived from shifan luogu, in which a rhythmic kernel appears repeatedly with progressive expansion or contraction, thereby becoming a structural element that comprises a formal section.” Guo, “Chinese Musical Language,” 127. 26.  The gesture used by Chen Yi in Symphony No. 2 has only a partial resemblance to the typical ji-​ji-​feng, which may raise questions about analyzing and labeling it as such. However, similar rhythmic gestures occur in the third movement of her Percussion Concerto (1998), which is titled “Ji Ji Feng” (“speedy wind”). Although the diversity of instrumentation in the symphony brings different characters to the rhythmic topics, in both works the rhythmic pattern is performed by the same instrument (the naobo) at a similar tempo, with similar six-​note groupings; these parallels between the two works suggest that the identification of ji-​ji-​feng in Symphony No. 2 is appropriate. 27.  In Chinese opera, a luogu dianzi like ji-​ji-​feng would never be employed in this fashion; the fragmentation, dramatic or not, is uncharacteristic. Chen’s treatment of it here illustrates her creativity in adapting conventional Chinese opera gestures for her own compositional purposes. 28.  Cox, “Hearing, Feeling, Grasping Gestures,” 53. 29.  Chen Yi, “Preface,” Symphony No. 2. 30. Ibid. 31.  Joshua Kosman, “Premieres of Different Stripes Engaging New Works by Oakland, Women’s Orchestras,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 31, 1994. 32.  François Jullien, The Propensity of Things: A History of Efficacy in China, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 78. 33. The rest of the sentence reads, “Along the way, Chen Yi intersperses lighter strands—​a series of plangent or optimistic solos from the woodwinds (which often bend tones breathily in imitation of Chinese instruments), and an array of tinkly orchestral colors—​and these strands return at the end to form a beautiful, genuinely uplifting coda.” Kosman, “Premieres of Different Stripes.”

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PART III

Music, Words, and Voices In the final three essays, voices proliferate, both literally and figuratively, and identity takes on new meaning as words and music are combined. In vocal works for unaccompanied soprano and mezzo-​soprano duet; soprano and piano; and tenor, chorus, and orchestra, the respective compositional voices of Kaija Saariaho, Libby Larsen, and Elisabeth Lutyens intertwine with those of poets and singers, both female and male. In music with text, whose voices do we hear, and whose identities are conveyed? The concept of polyvocality animates John Roeder’s examination of Saariaho’s 1988 cycle of vocal duets From the Grammar of Dreams, based on writings of Sylvia Plath. Saariaho views the cycle as a multivoiced representation of a single identity, describing the soprano and mezzo-​soprano parts as “two voices … which are as if the same person.”1 In his essay Roeder carefully traces the interweaving of these voices in the third song, illuminating Saariaho’s artful superpositions of multiple meters and tonalities through detailed analysis of the motivic, tonal, registral, and metric relationships between soprano and mezzo. Finally, he considers the possible implications of the song’s polyvocality in light of feminist theories of “double-​voicedness,” and of the composer’s own “cultivation of a distinctively feminine identity” in her music. Libby Larsen’s understanding that her vocal settings reflect her own beliefs, as well as her interpretation of the poet’s text, provides the starting point for Brenda Ravenscroft’s essay in ­chapter 8 on Larsen’s 1997 song cycle Chanting to Paradise, for soprano and piano. Her examination of “Bind Me” and “In This Short Life” shows how Larsen’s adaptation and reconstruction of Emily Dickinson’s poems in her musical settings further blur the distinctions between the identities of the poet and the poem and those of the composer and the composition. Analyzing Larsen’s symbolic use of constrained pitch-​ class, intervallic, rhythmic, and gestural materials in her intimate settings, 153

Ravenscroft argues that not only do the songs mirror the verbal nuances and possible meanings of Dickinson’s poetry, but also the relations between the composer and poet, resonating with feminist concerns of power and escape, and with the role of the woman composer in contemporary society. In the final chapter, Laurel Parsons considers Elisabeth Lutyens’s Essence of Our Happinesses (1968), for tenor, chorus, and orchestra. In contrast with the voices of female poets and singers in Saariaho and Larsen’s compositions, Lutyens sets male-​authored texts for a male soloist (sometimes supported by a mixed chorus). But her own voice is still unmistakable, particularly in her choice of text for the second movement: a meditation by John Donne on the nature of time and human happiness that echoed her own regrets as a woman in her sixties looking back on her life. During the first section of the movement, tenor and chorus sing Donne’s text. But, as Parsons shows, in the short instrumental dance that follows the orchestra itself voices the temporal imagery of Donne’s meditation through Lutyens’s irregular juxtapositions of fleeting melodic motives and gestures against a relentlessly ticking ostinato. Note 1.  Kaija Saariaho, “Kaija Saariaho on her From the Grammar of Dreams,” article published February 29, 2012, http://​www.carnegiehall.org/​BlogPost.aspx?id=4294984862.

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7 Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia … ,” From the Grammar of Dreams (1988)

The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho is unquestionably one of the finest composers of her generation, and one of the few female composers whose music has not only been performed and recorded to wide acclaim, but has also attracted scholarly analytical attention.i Born in 1952, Saariaho was educated in Helsinki at the Rudolf Steiner School, where the curriculum included a strong focus on arts and music.ii She studied violin and piano and, later, guitar, and began writing her own compositions at the age of ten. Upon graduation from school, she first enrolled in the Institute for Industrial Arts and Crafts to study graphic design. A few years later, in 1976, Saariaho entered the Sibelius Academy, where she studied composition with the modernist Finnish composer Paavo Heininen and began experimenting with tape music. After graduating in 1980, Saariaho attended the Darmstadt summer school, where she was attracted to the spectral music of the French composers Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail. She also met Brian Ferneyhough there, and went on to study with him and Klaus Huber in Freiburg even though she felt unsatisfied by the opacity of the so-​called New Complexity’s “complex techniques and inaudible structures.”iii It was not until she

i.  See for example Vesa Kankaanpää, “Displaced Time: Transcontextual References to Time in Kaija Saariaho’s Stilleben,” Organised Sound 1, no. 2 (August 1996):  87–​92; Damien Pousset, Joshua Fineberg, and Ronan Hyacinthe, “The Works of Kaija Saariaho, Philippe Hurel and Marc-​André Dalbavie—​Stile Concertato, Stile Concitato, Stile Rappresentativo,” Contemporary Music Review 19, no. 3 (2000): 67–​110; and Tim Howell with Jon Hargreaves and Michael Rofe, eds., Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). ii.  Biographical information on the composer is drawn from Pirkko Moisala, Kaija Saariaho (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009). iii. Ibid., 9.

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attended a course at IRCAM in Paris that she felt she had found the ideal environment for the development of her musical ideas, and in 1982 Paris became her permanent home. Saariaho spent several years at IRCAM experimenting with technology and timbre and producing such works as her tape piece Vers le blanc (1982), as well as several compositions combining acoustic instruments with live electronics. In the 1990s Saariaho’s music moved into a new phase, characterized by greater expressivity and rhythmic activity. Her violin concerto, Graal théâtre (1995), was composed for Gidon Kremer, and 1996 saw the composition of two works for the soprano Dawn Upshaw, Château de l’âme and Lonh, for soprano and electronics. Many other collaborations and commissions have followed, for orchestras such as the New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin Philharmonics, the Orchestre de Paris, the Boston Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra. Her first opera, L’amour de loin (2000), was staged by Peter Sellars at the Salzburg Festival and won her the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 2003.iv Her music has also been recognized by the Prix Ars Electronica, the Nordic Council Music Prize, the Léonie Sonning Music Prize, and, in 2013, the Polar Music Prize.

Superposition in Kaija Saariaho’s “The claw of the magnolia …” John Roeder Kaija Saariaho’s From the Grammar of Dreams, composed in 1988, is a cycle of five unaccompanied duets for soprano and mezzo-​soprano that sets “Paralytic,” a late poem of Sylvia Plath.1 The text gives vivid voice to the reveries of a male polio victim, immobile and speechless in an iron lung, who remains aloofly sensible of the women (nurses, wife, and daughters) attending to him. The composer apportions the ten brief stanzas to her songs in a dramatic and provocative way that highlights the concluding lines. In Songs I and II, the soprano sings the first four and next five stanzas, respectively, while the mezzo simultaneously sings excerpts from The Bell Jar that treat similar themes of dreams, numbness, and death. Song IV polyphonically combines two other excerpts from the novel that portray the beating of a woman’s iv. Two additional operas, Adriana Mater and Emilie, were premiered in 2006 and 2010 respectively.

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heart as a motoric “brag” that overrides her self-​destructive impulses. But only temporarily: the last song begins as a vocalise on the phoneme [a]‌that, just as it opens up to revisit stanza nine’s words “I smile”—​the only first-​ person declaration of affect in the poem—​abruptly cuts off, according to the composer’s direction “as if in the middle of a phrase.” All four of these songs include exaggerated vocal techniques such as accented whispering, Sprechstimme, glissandi, and melismatic acciaccaturas. In Song III, the central song of the cycle and the focus of this essay, the composer sets the crucial concluding lines, in which the narrator metaphorically articulates a double-​edged epiphany: “The claw /​Of the magnolia, /​Drunk on its own scents, /​Asks nothing of life.” The power of this text derives from its superposition of starkly contrasting images:  petals/​ talons, perfume/​inebriation, enlightenment/​self-​infatuation, vitality/​t he void. The narrator’s condition offers him apparent spiritual freedom, but at the price of physical imprisonment; the alluring fragrance of autonomy mingles with the toxic odor of death. The strongly feminine connotation of the magnolia exposes Plath’s ventriloquism, transmuting the paralyzed male, his senses stifled in “cellophane,” into Woman in her bell jar. Compared to the elaborate surrounding songs, Saariaho’s music for these lines is simple. The singers share a single text, and they sing plainly, with no pyrotechnics. The tempo, expressive, and dynamic marks of the score direct them to project a sustained and subdued affect that may be taken to denote the paralytic’s “buddha”-​like mindfulness (described in the preceding lines). These qualities, along with its position at the center of the set, give a strong and appropriate focus to this striking stanza. The directness of the compositional language in Song III invites especially close listening. By drawing upon a variety of mutually supportive analytical techniques, this essay will show how artfully the composer coordinates various aspects of its music, not only to suit the form and syntax of the text, but also to create concurrent, contrasting processes that symbolize its metaphorical superpositions. This essay will first discover those processes through a detailed consideration of the first measures, then follow their actions throughout the rest of the song, showing that, although the voices rarely attack together or double each other, they may be heard to collaborate to articulate the lines of the text, and to create a fairly traditional flux of tension and relaxation, through coordinated changes of pitch, intervals, and rhythmic behavior. The setting of the first line, beginning with “the claw,” immediately manifests this collaboration. Sustaining the phoneme [a]‌, the voices dwell for twenty seconds on just four pitches, {F4, F♯4, A ♯4, B4}, a collection that features two semitones, two perfect fourths, a major third, and a tritone, but no interval classes 2 or 3. Melodically they emphasize the semitones, Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia …” (1988) 157

switching almost simultaneously from one to the other. This reinforces the familiarly progressive quality of these small intervals while also imbuing the larger intervals with a more harmonic identity, since they appear mostly as simultaneities. This unvarying pitch content, ordered palindromically by the soprano (from her second attack until the end of this texture in m. 4), conveys a sense of timelessness and self-​enclosure expressive of the paralytic’s state of mind. Nevertheless, interactions between the parts and exchanges of register subtly shape the unvarying pitch content and timbre. The voices connect verbally from the very start, when the soprano sings the definite article “the” and the mezzo directly provides the corresponding noun, “claw.” This cooperation becomes intervallic as the soprano imitates the ascending semitone of the mezzo and grows in a rapid exposition of all four possible ways to combine the two lower pitches in the mezzo with the two higher pitches in the soprano.2 These four harmonic intervals are labeled between the staves at the beginning of Example 7.1a, a skeletal sketch of the passage. The last of them, a tritone, sounds like an ending because it is followed by the first simultaneous attack, in m.  2, that initiates the first registral exchange of the voices.  This segmenting function for the tritone is affirmed as the voices’ rhythms interact to form phrases through a varying meter. By this I mean not the notated beat, which is hardly articulated past m. 1, but “projective” meter:  the process, theorized by Christopher Hasty, of immediate durational reproduction.3 The symbols surrounding Example 7.1b express this dynamic measuring activity. Vertical strokes ( | ) denote the “dominant beginnings” of the durations, indicated by solid curved arrows, that, as they become definite, generate expectations that they will be reproduced by subsequent events. The two levels of the analysis show such “projections” forming for both shorter and longer durations. Not every event is equally important in this process; those marked by diagonal slashes contribute to the accumulation of durations already begun. The analysis shows that the mezzo first assumes the role of timekeeper, realizing a “projective potential” Q, and also realizing its projection Q′ (the metrical sensation that Q will be replicated) by its move to F4, which creates the first instance of a tritone between the voices.4 Such simultaneous tritones, indicated by the boxed 6s in Example  7.1a, will prove to have a consistent metrical function. The soprano supports the action, providing an anticipatory anacrusis ( /​) to the mezzo’s third attack and establishing the projective potential of duration R, to which the mezzo’s second duration has contributed as a continuation ( \ ). In other words, upon the completion of R, the listener expects events a half note and a whole note later. However, an attack—​a strong one, in both voices simultaneously—​comes 158  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

Example 7.1 Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia … ,” aspects of mm. 1–​4: (a) simultaneity intervals, imitation and melodic structure, and register exchange; (b) four phrases (boxed) articulated by metrical process, recurring pitches, and distinctive simultaneity intervals; (c) how pitches function as scale degrees with respect to two tonics, B and B♭ (A♯)

earlier than expected, dispelling the emerging sense of meter (symbolized by the interruption of the broken arc following arrow R). With this new “dominant beginning” ( | ) on the shared attack, the process of setting up and disrupting meter repeats. The mezzo’s change from her initiating A ♯4 to a tritone-​creating B4, supported by a soprano anacrusis, establishes a fresh duration S and its projection S′, but that projection terminates through a metrical “hiatus” ( || ) after no event arrives in time to realize S′. Thus projective meter again arises at, but then is disrupted immediately after, the onset of a tritone simultaneity. A longer phrase is initiated in m. 3 by a new, striking simultaneity interval, a semitone (indicated on Example 7.1a by a circled 1), when the mezzo leaps down to F♯4 over the soprano’s F4. However, as in the first phrase, its projections are cut off after a tritone simultaneity. The reattack of F♯4, whose duration is continued by a half-​step-​forming F, creates a fourth dominant beginning. Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia …” (1988) 159

The rhythm then regularizes to a series of triplet quarter notes that act as an anacrusis to a new dominant beginning at the shared attack in m. 5, and so the tritone that initiates this anacrusis signals the ending of the fourth phrase. By conceiving of the meter of the opening section of the song in this way, then, one can hear four metrically distinctive phrases, marked by exchanges of register, that associate particular pitches and harmonic intervals with metrically activating or closing functions. As the larger intervals in the fixed-​ pitch collection are exhaustively exposed, they create shifting priorities among the notes. Example 7.1c shows how the events can be interpreted (sometimes enharmonically) as scale degrees in two different keys during mm. 1–​4 on the basis of common intuitions about the rootedness of intervals and the position of semitones in diatonic scales.5 Stems indicate the most stable events, which always appear as members of tonally definite simultaneities, while less stable events appear unstemmed and slurred, as melodic prefixes or suffixes, to them. The initial perfect fourth simultaneity {F, A ♯} prioritizes A ♯ as an enharmonic B ♭ .6 Then both notes ascend to a perfect fourth {F♯ , B} that prioritizes B. (Open and solid stemmed note heads distinguish notes that are stable in B and B ♭, respectively.) As these fourths recur in mm. 3 and 4, the tonal focus shifts back to A ♯/​B ♭ and then “modulates” again to B. The repeated assertion of two alternative tonal contexts suggests a special interpretation for the stable dyad {F♯ , A ♯} in m. 2, which is emphasized as the only one that both voices attack simultaneously: it might be heard to allude to both tonalities at once, superposing the tonic of B ♭ with the dominant of B. However, such intuitions raise an interpretative problem:  they do not attribute repose to a tritone, which makes it hard to hear closure at the {B, F}s that terminate every phrase. As I will show later, the piece solves this problem later on by reprising the special {F♯ , A ♯} in a way that provides both convincing closure and an ingenious musical expression of the paralytic’s mentality. Across mm. 1–​4, other processes cooperate with the coalescing metrical and tonal organization documented in Example 7.1 to contribute to the general musical affect. Attacks come more rapidly. Registral exchanges appear almost regularly. In m. 2 a process begins of running through all four possible combinations of the high mezzo A ♯4 and B4 with the low soprano F and F♯ , but the last combination (mezzo B4 over soprano F♯4) is withheld until just before the many changes in m. 5. A larger-​scale relationship also develops, as shown in Example 7.1a: the mezzo imitates the soprano’s opening succession of four pitches, after which the soprano imitates the mezzo’s last three pitches. We seem to be caught in an enclosed chamber with intensifying, circular echoes. The paradoxically animated stasis of this opening passage sensitizes the listener to processes that will shape the rest of the song: changes and 160  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

exchanges of register, fluctuations of imitative intensity and rhythmic density, the definition and succession of distinctive pitch collections, and varying meter and tonality. The following discussion shows how each of these produces and articulates a distinctive musical continuity, and how they coordinate to create sections (starting at mm. 1, 5, 10, 12, and 15) that match the divisions of the text and bring out its associations of conflicting images. I draw upon a variety of analytical approaches to discuss these aspects; in the interests of concision, however, I will relegate expositions of methodology to the endnotes. Example 7.2a renders the pitch sequence of each voice as a continuous line—​dotted for the soprano, dashed for the mezzo—​coordinated with the measure numbers and text shown along the top. In the contour of the soprano a traditional arch shape spanning the entire piece is evident, rising to a first peak around mm. 6–​8, falling off, gaining a climax in m. 14, then falling back to the original register. The highest pitch, emphasized by a leap, sets the only verb of the text, “asks.” Its musical tension highlights the possibility that the paralytic might engage with “life” outside his reverie, but the rapid drop-​off in register that follows it emphasizes the irony of the “nothing” he demands. Although the mezzo line includes some striking low points, its contour otherwise traces the same shape, at about the same pace, as the soprano’s, even though the voices almost never sing the same pitch. Thus each often encroaches upon the other’s range, with special intensity when they hold high pitches only a semitone apart. Example 7.2a indicates two such moments; both times the semitone is {F, F♯}—​t he same dyad that initiated phrases in the first section, but an octave higher, and it seems to spur the soprano on to melodic high points. The graphical superposition of the two lines also reveals the recurrence of three distinctive coordinated behaviors that associate the words they set and articulate formal divisions of the song. Consider, for instance, the voices’ exchanges of register in mm. 1–​4; these are evident in Example 7.2a as line crossings, creating a series of four registral arrangements corresponding to the four phrases discussed above. These exchanges disappear at m.  5 but resume at m.  10, marking both moments as the beginnings of sections and associating the contrasting words “claw” and “magnolia.” They cease again at m. 12, marking the beginning of the third line of the poem. They then proceed to another distinctive shared activity: each voice alternates between notes separated by a leap. This begins with the word “drunk” in m. 12 and recurs in mm. 15–​16, setting “asks nothing of life.” Both instances precede a third sort of distinctive collaboration, the immediate succession of trills in each voice on the same semitone, respectively {A, B ♭} (mm. 12–​13) and {F, G ♭} (mm. 17–​18). The latter sounds closural partly Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia …” (1988) 161

Example 7.2 (a) Registral processes of mezzo-​soprano (dashed line) and soprano (dotted line); (b) Imitation between the voices; (c) Attack density

because a similar juxtaposition (on {D, E ♭}) appeared in m. 9, just before the alternating-​register behavior recommenced. The alternating trills in m. 13 likewise prove to conclude another process that will be discussed below. All three types of registral interactions contribute to larger-​scale imitative processes. These may be observed in Example  7.2b, which, extending Example 7.1a, indicates distinctive melodic gestures that are stated by one voice and immediately repeated by the other. This imitation varies in exactness and intensity, sometimes involving longer, slower-​paced patterns, at other times tightening up with shorter and more frequently changing motives, and sometimes completely absent (as denoted by shaded areas in the example). The variation imposes a large-​scale segmentation on the text and the melodic lines. The leisurely imitation in mm. 1–​3 accelerates in m. 4, then suddenly disappears at the onset of the poem’s second line. From then until m. 14 it gradually intensifies again, the motives continually shortening, but then abruptly disappears during the words “on its own scents,” as the lines push toward their climaxes. It resumes to mark the beginning of the last line, focusing intensely on dyads for the rest of the song. Imitation also participates, along with the rhythms of the individual voices, in another formative textural process: the variation of attack density. To represent this variation across the entire piece, Example 7.2c plots the number of distinct moments that are attacked within the span of a whole note (five seconds) after every quarter-​note beat, suggesting how the density prospectively changes at that beat.7 The slope of the curve indicates a growing intensity at first, smoothing over the changes of material and imitation at m. 5. A sudden drop-​off accompanies the other substantial changes at m. 10.8 Density then reaches another distinct peak at the line beginning in m. 12, only to fall off again while imitation disappears and the voices move to their climaxes at the beginning of the last line. As the imitation recurs for the last time on “nothing of life,” the density also peaks before relaxing to provide closure. The coordination evident among the three visualizations of Example 7.2 indicates the composer’s careful attention to the various easily apprehended aspects of texture:  register, voice relations, and rhythm. More technical aspects of the piece, discussed below, are integrated equally well. For instance, the initial focus on a single four-​note collection and its intervals suggests a productive way to hear the remainder of the song. Example 7.3a identifies tetrachords that are clear melodic segments in a single voice, are recurring pairs of dyads from both voices, or are otherwise registrally and temporally contiguous. Each is labeled by the set class to which to which it belongs. Although this is an abstract way to consider them, it seems appropriate because some sets recur with exactly the same pcs (as indicated by broken lines in the example) but in different registers, Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia …” (1988) 163

Example 7.3 Pitch-​class-​set recurrences (a)

(b)

and because there are some clear instances of sets related by transposition or inversion.9 Indeed, the timing and ordering of related sets support hearing m. 10 as an important articulation in the flow of the music, just as do the changes in registral behavior, imitation, and density at that moment (recall Example 7.2). This is the moment that initiates the repetition of sets introduced earlier. Also, the intense activity preceding m. 10 interlocks two types of tetrachords, 0236 and 0135, whose other instances are organized similarly, as shown by Example  7.3b. For both series of tetrachords, two sets related by T3 are linked by I9 to two other instances of the same set class, themselves linked by I9. Before they entangle, only 0236 is present (in m. 5); after m. 10, only 0135. Some recurrences associate words of the poem. For example, the 0147 type {F♯ , B, C, E ♭} sets both “drunk” and the soprano’s “asks nothing.” Also, the final four notes, {F, F♯ , A ♯ , B}, setting “nothing of life,” reprise the tetrachord that set “the claw” at the start of the song, linking those allusions to death. There are no other instances of this 0156 set class, and these two have exactly the same pitches except for A ♯ , which appears an octave lower at the end. The significance of this change will be discussed below. The music is not as harmonically diverse as the numerous labels seem to assert; to the contrary, they unify the song by maintaining a fairly constant collection of intervals. Only six of the 29 tetrachord classes (counting the two all-​interval sets as different) contain the four ics of the opening set, 1, 4, 5, and 6. All six appear prominently. All the other tetrachords shown in Example 7.2 also include ics 1, 4, and either 5 or 6. This consistency also manifests more concretely in the similar dyadic organization of different passages; for instance, mm. 7–​8, 10–​12, and 15–​18 all feature the dyads {D, E ♭}, {G, A}, and {F♯, B}, even though those are combined into various tetrachords. Some dyadic repetitions are associated with formal articulations: for instance, the ordered dyad marks section beginnings at mm. 5, 12, and 15. These overarching interval and pitch continuities are articulated by contrasts between simultaneous or successive tetrachords, which also clarify texture or suggest harmonic progression. For example, a series of such contrasts at m. 5 breaks the voices’ initial entwinement within {F, F♯, A ♯, B}: first, the singers shift to new notes (notably ); then they present two ics (2 and 3) that were lacking in the opening tetrachord; and finally, they diverge completely from each other in pc content and register. Changes to previously unheard types of tetrachords also mark all other important registral, imitative, and textural articulations (which correspond to syntactic articulations in the poem): 0157 at m. 10, 0147 at m. 12, and 0237 at m. 15. Lastly, the sudden change during the final text phrase “nothing of life” (mm. 15–​16) from one dyad pair, {{E ♭, C}, {D, G}}, to a completely different one, {{B, F♯}, {F, A ♯}}, dramatically highlights the return of the opening tetrachord. Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia …” (1988) 165

Comparing Example 7.3 to Example 7.2, one can see how pitch groupings coordinate with texture to provide unity, continuity, shape, and sectionality that match the articulations of the text and associate its words. However, while such a multifaceted account does some justice to Saariaho’s art, it does not adequately address the most interesting musical feature of the setting: its polyvocality. In the other songs of this opus, the concurrency of different texts requires such a texture, but in Song III both voices sing the same words, sometimes to different music, at other times echoing each other’s intervals. This musical and textural imitation has a dual temporality, on the one hand highlighting two independent concurrent processes that compete for attention, on the other also imbuing the following voice with the special continuity of repetition. Are there musical processes that support this disunited unification, and if so, do they relate to the poem and its themes? In order to address these questions it is necessary to go beyond a description of content to examine the senses of musical time and space created by the shifting metrical and tonal relationships between the voices. As they variously imitate, synchronize, and diverge, truly dual points of reference emerge—​t wo equally present tonalities and the coexistence of multiple meters—​t hat artfully portray the stanza’s symbolic superpositions. The principal sections of the music after m. 4 pass the voices through a variety of metrical interactions, each involving a concurrency of two independent streams of activity. Across mm. 5–​9 (Example 7.4a), they reverse metrical roles. First they attack together twice, a half note apart (very unusually for this song), and the soprano provides an anacrusis to the second attack, thus collaborating to establish projection Q–​Q′. Thereafter the mezzo’s regular attacks realize that projection, and even articulate a longer projection R–​R′, creating a sense of tactus and measure. But the soprano untethers her rhythm from the mezzo’s meter, placing regular attacks off the beat, and suggesting a five-​quarter-​note projection (S–​S′) rather than a whole note. The G5 she attains triggers more novel behavior:  the mezzo begins a series of three oscillations within dyads, singing irregularly stressed accelerating durations in such a way as to thwart entrainment at any tempo. Into this temporarily unmeasured continuity, the soprano gradually assumes the timekeeping role, indeed establishing a metric field very similar to the mezzo’s at the beginning of this section. Also changing roles, the mezzo, like the soprano at first, now provides anacrustic support. Thereafter, however, despite the presence of the longer projection, the sense of tactus dissolves in the accelerations toward the sustained trills. A striking change marks the beginning of the following passage, mm. 10–​12, as the voices engage differently to create two definite and distinct concurrent meters.10 To clarify this collaboration, Example 7.4b places each event on one of two staves, representing different streams of pulse, with 166  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

Example 7.4 (a) Projective meter in mm. 5–​9; (b) Concurrent pulse streams in mm. 10–​12; (c) Metric coordination of voices, mm. 15–​end

the stem direction indicating the voice that sings it; attacks with stems across both staves contribute to both streams. During mm. 10–​11, a pulse stream on the top staff arises from the recurring eighth notes, while the regularly repeated peak on E ♭5, indicated by brackets over the staff, creates a sense of meter. Meanwhile, six attacks alternate between F♯/​G ♭ 4 and B4. They are not exactly regular—​the second attack is a trifle early, and the sixth attack quite delayed, like a ritardando—​but can nevertheless be perceived essentially as the five-​sixteenth pulse shown in gray below the staff. Its strong beats (on the F♯ s, recalling mm. 1–​4) have the same tempo as the other’s E ♭ strong beats but do not coincide with them. At m. 12 the pulse streams change, each dividing the same time span differently. The changing stem directions on each staff make it clear how, across the entire Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia …” (1988) 167

passage, the two voices switch between the two metrical streams, much as they exchanged registers in mm. 1–​4 . Immediately following this rigorous construction, the closural trill alternations reappear, and the song suddenly and strikingly abandons meter for a while. During the text “on its own scents” the durations vary widely and unpredictably—​a common way to signify inebriation. Some of this uncoordinated irregularity may be heard to persist into the last line of the song, mm. 15–​18. But meter does return, now in a complex but eventually clear coordination of rhythmic behaviors that are laid out in Example 7.4c. Separately, each voice has a varying, loosely projective meter, indicated by the symbols above and below the rhythms, which is further complicated by the aforementioned imitative relations between them. However, their combination is much more regular, providing attacks nearly every quarter note, as shown by the lines in the middle of the figure. One compelling way to reconcile the sensations of separate meters with this combined quarter-​note pulse stream is to focus on the reiterations of the crucial word “nothing.” Nearly all its instances are set to a distinctive short-​long “snap” rhythm, consistent with English prosody and emphasizing the onset of the first syllable despite its shorter duration. The quarter-​ note beat itself arises from the mezzo’s two attacks on her first “nothing,” recalling her initial role as timekeeper, and although she misses the next attack (at the moment when the voices shift to the final tetrachord), she reaffirms the beat with two following attacks. The soprano’s first two “nothing”s appear off this beat, even competing with it. However, at the moment marked with a dagger (†)—​the only simultaneous attack of the passage—​t he soprano places her third “nothing” on the beat, and she supports it thereafter. Indeed, at this shared attack one can sense a projection Q–​Q′, initiated by the mezzo’s first “nothing,” that will eventually be realized by the soprano’s final onset. Thus, for the first time in the song, the two voices work together to articulate a plain tactus—​yet it appears only from the superposition of their separately complicated meters. Superficially one might hear the metrical cooperation as symbolizing the narrator’s attitude of resolve, apparent in the last line of the poem. This regaining of future-​ directed temporality becomes ironic, however, when the following projection R–​R′, suggested by the clear whole note in the soprano, is realized exactly at the moment, marked by an asterisk (*), when both voices cut off their final word, “life.” The varying priority of pitch also gives rise to multiple concurrent processes, which Example 7.5 represents using a special notation. Note size and the presence or absence of a stem indicate the degree to which the corresponding event stands out within its local context, owing mostly to its accents of duration and contour.11 The first four measures summarize 168  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

Example 7.5 Interacting tonalities across the entire song

Example  7.1c, the hearing in which B and B ♭, supported by their respective dominants, alternate in priority, and in which small melodic intervals are interpreted as manifesting neighbor-​note relations. With this priming, one is more sensitive to the reappearance of these same notes as well as others that reinforce their priority. Accordingly, it is easy to hear that the soprano’s most important high pitch events, indicated by upward-​stemmed open note heads, are all members of a B major triad (reading E ♭ enharmonically as D ♯). Indeed, as shown by beams above the staff, the succession of the soprano’s most prominent notes arpeggiates that triad up twice and then down. During the passages framed with brackets, the mezzo also emphasizes notes of B major, as shown by downward-​stemmed open note heads. However, during other passages, marked with asterisks, she asserts B ♭ major, indicated with stemmed solid note heads, even arpeggiating that triad up and down concurrently with the soprano’s B major arpeggiations.12 Indeed, the song’s entire pitch field (shown by the black letter names labeling the vertical axis of the pitch-​time graph of Example 7.2a) might be conceptualized abstractly as the combination of two harmonic series based on fundamentals B ♭ and B, a semitone apart. That is consistent with “spectral composition” procedures that Saariaho studied at IRCAM and applied in other works,13 but in this specific context it can also be heard to have a particular significance that becomes apparent at the conclusion of the song. Other, less salient events are represented by Example 7.5 as bearing traditional melodic relations (neighbors, passing tones, and arpeggiations) to the more important notes, again as suggested by mm. 1–​4 . Among them, Cs and Gs are singled out, with eighth-​note flags, as notes that seem to act consistently as longer-​range upper neighbors to the tonics and dominants of the two salient triads.14 By following this representation of the changing, overlapping tonalities, and by correlating them with the polyvalent metric and imitative activity, as discussed below, one can appreciate deeper aspects of Saariaho’s setting. After m. 4, the mezzo next prioritizes B ♭ in m. 6, when she leaps down an enharmonic perfect fifth from F4 to A ♯3, evoking a common tonic-​defining bass-​voice gesture. (The latter is the lowest pitch in the song and is isolated, with the next lowest a major third away.) This is also exactly the moment when, according to the analyses presented above, the two voices diverge metrically and registrally, and cease their imitation. Subsequently, during the metrically and melodically uncertain G5 in the soprano, the mezzo provides a few notes in support of B major. This might be heard to prepare for the soprano’s resumption of imitation, which transforms the mezzo’s motive into a version that emphasizes B and F♯ . But just before the soprano regains metric and tonal definition with her F♯5, the mezzo undercuts her 170  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

by reemphasizing notes of B ♭ major, noticeably the high F5 that creates a semitone harmonic dyad with the soprano. Similarly, the semitone {D, E ♭} trills that the voices alternate in m. 9 superpose the major mediants of the two triads. The blending of a neighbor-​note C with them gives this moment a special quality of tonal ambiguity that nicely matches the dissolution of the tactus. Resolving these uncertainties, the many changes of m. 10 reassert a unification of the voices in which they share a single tonality and collaborate to create concurrent pulse streams (Example 7.4b). This vividly depicts the “magnolia” as self-​sufficient, controlled, and multifaceted. But all sense of coordination vanishes, appropriately enough, when the voices begin to sing the next line of the text, “drunk on its own scents.” As meter dissolves under a repeatedly stressed F♯5, a B ♭ major triad arpeggiates up from F4 to F5, again creating a semitone clash. (It involves the B ♭-​sounding 0135 tetrachord, {A, B ♭, C, D}, shown in Example 7.3b, which is a transformation of the B minor–​sounding 0135, {F♯ , G, A, B}, of mm. 10–​11.) A moment of B major clarity briefly stabilizes the soprano’s climax on B5. But then B ♭ major arpeggiations reappear and persist together with B major. The two tonalities seem clearest and most distinct at the song’s conclusion: the return, in the mezzo, of the falling fifth to A ♯3 strongly affirms the latter as tonic; it opposes the contour of the equally definite ascending F♯4–​B4 dominant–​tonic successions in the soprano; and neither voice sings the other’s tonic. The sense of separate meters, analyzed in Example 7.4c, contributes to the tonal independence, even as the tactus they cocreate suggests stability. Analogously, the concluding trills make the final tonal superposition seem terminally irresolvable. Both voices alternate the same two pitches, F and F♯ , but in the soprano they sound like a chromatic lower-​neighbor embellishment of the dominant of B, while in the mezzo they appear as a chromatic upper-​neighbor embellishment of the dominant of B ♭ . Thus, this final superposition of F♯ and F stands as a synecdoche of the prevailing dual tonality. The song concludes with the same tritone simultaneity, {F4, B4}, that concluded the phrases of mm. 1–​4, but now it is clear that this dyad combines the tonic of one key with the dominant of the other—​just as the {F♯ , A ♯} of m. 2 did, but with the associations reversed. The listener has been primed to expect the mezzo’s last F4 to fall again to A ♯3 tonic, but this goal, like the affirmation of the whole-​note projection R–​R′ (Example 7.4c), fails to be realized, leaving the listener musically, like the paralytic literally, in a state of suspended animation.15 Thus, while meter and tonality support the linear, form-​g iving processes of texture and pc-​set succession, they also manifest in superposed, concurrent continuities that simultaneously interact and vie for Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia …” (1988) 171

attention, creating more global, systematic effects analogous to those arising from the voices’ imitative declaiming of the text. Indeed, the superposed processes stand as metaphors for the combined temporalities expressed so starkly in the poem’s conflicted introduction and close. Time for the paralytic is manifested both in the events passing in an outside world he cannot affect (“it happens”) and in the looming possibility of extinction (“will it go on?—​,” its em dash directed into the blank margin). The magnolia with which he identifies experiences a serene detachment from the time of “life,” but the very features upon which it narcissistically transfixes, the clawlike shape and intoxicating odor, prefigure its own inevitable demise. The tonal and metrical dualities, without mapping simply onto the paralytic’s, nevertheless also make alternative temporalities simultaneously available. When two concurrent but differing meters are manifested, a given moment can be heard as onbeat and pulse-​continuative with respect to one meter, but as offbeat and pulse-​resistive with respect to the other. When two different tonalities can be heard, they can be heard to impart different temporally charged functions to a given note—​as when B ♭ can be heard both as a stable tonic and as a leading tone expected to resolve—​a nd thus promote different expectations about the music’s future. Although one may not literally hear both tonalities or both meters at the same time, they are nevertheless available as different and sometimes mutually exclusive frameworks for perceiving the events of the piece, options that may be exercised differently with every new listening. These poetic and musical dualities might be understood as examples of what feminist theory calls a “double-​voicedness” that keeps “two alternative oscillating texts simultaneously in view,” a “dominant” discourse (reflecting, say, conventional gender roles) and a “muted” discourse subversive to it.16 Indeed, it is tempting to interpret From the Grammar of Dreams biographically by speculating on what its texts might mean to a composer who abandoned her native Finland early in her career complaining that “in every domain there was always one wise old guy with a bald head, the male authority whose aesthetics or politics ruled. …  I  felt squeezed to be something that I’m not,”17 and who has subsequently cultivated a distinctively feminine identity in her choice of texts and focus on women’s voices.18 In the absence of any more specific commentary about this work from Saariaho herself, however, one can only guess the extent to which she sympathizes with the gifted but thwarted poet, or with the paralytic’s antipathetic sensations of freedom and imprisonment. Whether or not one hears such power struggles, the analysis presented here shows how the superposed processes compellingly represent the narrator’s wavering between life and death. 172  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

Notes 1.  An overview of the entire work, placing it in the context of Saariaho’s other vocal compositions, is given by Éva Pintér in “Was die Träume erzählen: Textdeutungen in den Vokalwerken von Kaija Saariaho,” in Woher? Wohin? Die Komponistin Kaija Saariaho, ed. Hans-​Klaus Jungheinrich (Mainz: Schott Music, 2007), 75–​83. She characterizes Song III as the slow movement in a five-​movement arch form but does not analyze any specific musical details. She also mentions two other, later versions: one for soprano and electronics (2002), and a “stage version,” presumably intended for the concert tour, called by the same name and featuring this work, that the composer organized in the late 1990s. From the Grammar of Dreams differs completely from Saariaho’s similarly titled Grammaire des rêves, also from 1988–​89 for two female soloists, but on texts by Paul Eluard, and with instrumental accompaniment. 2.  At least, this is what the score specifies. However, in a definitive recording of this song (featuring singers who are identical twins!) the soprano shifts to B after only a quarter note on A♯. Kaija Saariaho, “From the Grammar of Dreams, III,” on From the Grammar of Dreams, with Anu Komsi and Piia Komsi (vocalists), Ondine OSE 958-​2, 2000, compact disc; also available on iTunes. This does not seem to be a mistake, since the rest of the performance conforms more exactly to the score, but I have not determined whether the composer authorized the change, perhaps in the course of constructing later versions of the work mentioned in n. 1. In any case, it matters little to my analysis, except that it delays the entrance of the last of the four possible simultaneity intervals, the major third, until the first simultaneous attack in m. 2. 3.  This processive conception of meter is theorized in Christopher Hasty, Meter as Rhythm (New  York and Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1997), the later chapters of which analyze music in post-​tonal idioms close to Saariaho’s. The quoted terms in my discussion have specific technical meanings explained in that book. 4.  The meter of the different rhythm performed on the recording cited in n. 2 can be heard as similar to the meter I describe in the notated version. 5.  A well-​known exposition of intuitions about the roots of intervals is Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition:  Theoretical Part—​ Book 1, trans. Arthur Mendel (New York: Associated Music, 1942), 68–​89. The idea of using “rare intervals” to orient one’s hearing is discussed in Richmond Browne, “Tonal Implications of the Diatonic Set,” In Theory Only 5, nos. 6–​7 (1981): 3–​12. 6.  Consistent with the first melodic motion in the soprano, the score nearly always shows A♯, not B♭, implying a leading-​tone function, but I see this notation as increasingly ironic, since F continues pairing with A♯ to make it sound like a tonic. 7.  Quantifying attack density requires deciding some methodological questions that implicitly engage rather tricky issues of temporality: over how long a span of time does one gather impressions of the activity of new onsets, and does one attribute those impressions to the beginning, middle, or end of the span? In this context I justify my choice of referential time span not only on notational grounds (that is, the meter signature is 4$ ) but also by the regular appearance on the downbeat of a change of texture, or of an event marked by substantial phenomenal accent, especially during mm. 5–​6 and 8–​13. Although one’s sensation of changes in attack density must necessarily be retrospective, I nevertheless attribute it to the moment that initiated the changes, that is, prospectively from that moment. In other words, I hear the density of the time span as a quality that inheres in the beginning of the span, adapting ideas found in two essays by Christopher Hasty, “Rhythm in Post-​Tonal Music: Preliminary Questions of Duration and Motion,” Journal of Music Theory 25, no. 2 (Fall 1981): 183–​216, and “On the Problem of Succession

Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia …” (1988) 173

and Continuity in Twentieth-​Century Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 8 (1986): 58–​74. Attributions to the middle or end of the span could be represented by shifting the curve of Example 7.2c two or four beats to the right; but neither alternation would substantially affect my reading of how density articulates and directs time. 8.  Considering the nature of vocal performance, I hear the semitone trills in m. 9 and m. 13 as sustained tones with vibrato, making them rhythmically cadential events, rather than intensifying, rapid alternations of discrete pitches. To represent them otherwise as dense, as if they were performed on a piano, would require altering Example 7.2c to show high density all the way through m. 9, and through m. 13; but it would still result in a change of slope, indicating sectional divisions around m. 10 and m. 14. 9.  This way of hearing treats perfect fourths as equivalent to perfect fifths, which supports the hearings of tonal focus proposed by Example 7.1c. 10. For a summary of a method for analyzing concurrent pulse streams, see John Roeder, “Rhythmic Process and Form in Bartók’s ‘Syncopation,’” College Music Symposium 44 (2004): 43–​57. 11.  Fred Lerdahl first proposed hierarchizing pitch by perceptual salience in “Atonal Prolongational Structure,” Contemporary Music Review 4 (1989):  65–​87. His exposition addresses concerns raised by Joseph N. Straus in “The Problem of Prolongation in Post-​ Tonal Music,” Journal of Music Theory 31, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 1–​21. He expands the method in the last two chapters of Tonal Pitch Space (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), enumerating on p. 320 salience conditions for choosing an event to represent a time span and analyzing several atonal works. My hierarchical analysis notationally distinguishes between more and less salient events, but it is not consistent with Lerdahl’s notational system, because I focus principally on the salient recurrence of certain possibly conflicting pc collections, not on an essentially monophonic process of tension and relaxation. I  imagine that a tensional analysis could be made of this song, but that would entail simplifying the texture and rhythms, as well as obscuring the superpositions of tonality and meter that I claim are essential to relating music and text. Spencer N. Lambright, in “L’Amour de loin and the Vocal Works of Kaija Saariaho” (DMA diss., Cornell University, 2008), presents similarly reductive diagrams to indicate “hierarchical pitch schemes in her vocal lines” (110); he calls them “Schenkerian,” but most of them, like mine, do not involve an a priori background contrapuntal framework. 12.  There are numerous precedents for hearing simultaneous competing tonics. My approach here is influenced most directly by the work of William Benjamin, for example “Abstract Polyphonies: The Music of Schoenberg’s Nietzschean Moment,” in Political and Religious Ideas in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Charlotte Cross and Russell Berman (New  York:  General Music, 2000), 1–​39, and “Tonal Dualism in Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony,” in The Second Practice of Nineteenth-​Century Tonality, ed. William Kinderman and Harald Krebs (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 237–​58. Benjamin’s readings, however, usually interpret pitches as factors of chords that participate in functional harmonic progressions, whereas the reduction here simply identifies membership in a tonic triad. 13.  For a general overview of Saariaho’s compositional procedures, see Moisala, Kaija Saariaho, 61–​64. The composer herself outlines some of her early techniques in Kaija Saariaho, “Timbre and Harmony: Interpolations of Timbral Structures,” Contemporary Music Review 2, no. 1 (1987): 93–​133. Superpositions of rooted sonorities are common in her works. One early example is Lichtbogen (1985–​86). After the nine instruments open in unison on F♯4 (the source of the harmony for the work was a Fourier analysis of a cello playing this pitch with increasing noise), the texture evolves into overlapping arpeggiations that combine various pairs of triads, often a semitone apart, for example: F♯ and

174  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

G in m. 43, A and B♭ in mm. 48–​50, and A♭ and A in m. 54. In a later work, Ariel’s Hail (2000), a motive heard several times in the first measures combines the pitch classes of the F♯ major and G major triads. Further examples, including analyses and an extended discussion of harmonic procedures, may be found in Lambright, “L’Amour de loin.” 14.  For example, this reading shows the prominent G5 in mm. 6–​7 as subsidiary to the F♯5s that precede and follow it. I hear it this way because the F♯ carries residual strength from its prominence in mm. 1–​4, and because G does not belong to any of the recurring, tritone-​containing tetrachord classes of the work. It therefore seems to function as neighbor to or passing from F♯ later in the song (mm. 10–​11 and m. 14). 15.  Just as the first four measures can be taken, as pursued here, to establish the musical material and processes that are important in the remainder of the song, it is interesting to consider how they also foreshadow the large-​scale organization of tonal and metrical dualities. They present four imitative phrases, each with a distinctive meter, and with varying tonality; the final phrase comes to some tonal and metric clarity as the voices focus on {F♯, B} and alternately attack to create a (triplet quarter-​note) beat. Starting at m. 5, we then hear four large imitative sections, each with distinctive superpositions of meter and of tonality; the final section comes to metric and bitonal clarity as the voices focus on the synecdochal F/​F♯, and alternately attack to create a (quarter-​note) beat. 16.  Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 2 (1981): 179–​205. 17.  Nick Kimberley, “Kaija Saariaho: The Sound of Dreams (and a Few Nightmares),” Independent (London), November 18, 2001. Saariaho’s construction of her position in male-​dominated European art-​music culture is considered in two essays by Pirkko Moisala, “Gender Negotiation of the Composer Kaija Saariaho in Finland: The Woman Composer as Nomadic Subject,” in Music and Gender, ed. Beverley Diamond and Pirkko Moisala (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 166–​88; and “Decentering the Term ‘Woman Composer,’” in Frau Musica (nova):  Komponieren heute/​Composing Today, ed. Martina Homma (Cologne: Studio-​Verlag Sinzig, 2000), 83–​94. 18. For example, Saariaho’s three operas to date focus on women:  L’amour de loin (2000), which foregrounds a countess’s perspective on the idealized love of the troubadour who seeks her; Adriana Mater (2006), about a mother who seeks to mitigate the harsh consequences of a wartime atrocity; and La passion de Simone (2010), a monologue dramatizing the writings and life of Simone Weil.

Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia …” (1988) 175

8 Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997)

Libby Larsen (b. 1950) is arguably one of the most prolific American composers of today, having written over five hundred compositions ranging from song cycles to an impressive 15 operas.i As a child growing up in Minneapolis, where she still lives, Larsen studied piano and voice, gaining a range of vocal perspectives through her participation in school choirs and, later, as the singer in a rock band. She attended a Catholic school, where she sang Gregorian chant and learned about music as a symbolic language in the tradition of the medieval quadrivium. Being taught sequentially how to represent .  .  . abstractions with numbers, letters, notes, and color has completely influenced the way I  think about music. A  composer makes an order of sound through time and space. Any sound (this is not because I  am a daughter of Cage—​although I am) is potentially musical, depending on the culture and the interpretation of the sound in a context.ii Another early influence was Rimsky-​Korsakov, whose use of tone color in Scheherazade enchanted her and later informed her approach to musical gesture and orchestration. In the 1970s she completed her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate in composition at the University of Minnesota, where she studied with Paul Fetler and Dominick Argento. During this time she cofounded, along with Stephen Paulus, the Minnesota Composers Forum, now known as the American Composers Forum.

i.  Biographical information about the composer is drawn from Tina Milhorn Stallard, “Libby Larsen,” in Women of Influence: Nine Contemporary American Composers, ed. Michael K. Slayton (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 191–​250, and Larsen’s official biography, available from her website at http://​libbylarsen.com, accessed August 12, 2014. ii.  Stallard, “Libby Larsen,” 203–​4.

176

Early in her career Larsen decided she wanted to work independently as a freelance composer, and one of her first professional successes was her appointment as composer-​in-​residence with the Minnesota Orchestra (1983–​87), the first such position offered to a woman by any major American orchestra. She has collaborated with orchestras and soloists from around the world, and has held residencies with the California Institute of the Arts, the Philadelphia School of the Arts, the Cincinnati College-​Conservatory of Music, the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, and the Charlotte and Colorado Symphony Orchestras. Her works have been recorded on more than 50 CDs. Among Larsen’s major prizes and honors are the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Harissios Papamarkou Chair in Education at the Library of Congress, the latter in recognition of her dedication to the cause of school music education. Larsen sees herself as a distinctly American composer, in the tradition of Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. She believes her music should be relevant to the society she lives in and draws on America’s cultural heritage for musical ideas, turning to its literature and poetry for her many vocal settings. Her lifelong fascination with the interrelationships between music and language is reflected in her “text-​driven” approach to vocal composition, the music of which she derives from close study of the rhythms and meanings of the libretto’s text on almost a word-​by-​word basis.iii

Music as a Mirror: Libby Larsen’s Chanting to Paradise Brenda Ravenscroft In a letter to Rosemary Killam, who was preparing a feminist analysis of Larsen’s Songs from Letters, the composer writes: “One thinks that one can hide sometimes, in music, but I see that instead of a mask, the music is a mirror.”1 Larsen’s statement comments on the way in which Killam’s analysis made her aware that her musical settings in Songs from Letters, whose texts draw on Calamity Jane’s letters to her daughter, convey her own beliefs and attitudes about the role of women in society. Thus Larsen’s realization is that the music is a reflection of the composer herself, not just a distanced interpretation of a text, making it both a personal and a political statement.

iii.  Philip Kennicott, “Text Message,” Opera News 73, no. 2 (2008), 34–​35.

Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997) 177

This merging of identities in vocal music is captured in Edward T. Cone’s concept of a single musical persona, the “poet-​composer,” comprising “a unitary vocal-​instrumental protagonist that is coextensive with the persona of the actual composer.”2 Other writers and analysts have focused their attention on the symbiotic relationship between words and music. David Lewin explains this interrelation as one in which “music and text … enact each other” (emphasis in original),3 while Lawrence Kramer describes a process of “fusion” (as distinct from the musical imitation of a text) in which the poem loses its stature as an independent text and the music’s identity is enriched.4 Larsen’s approach to vocal composition embraces a similar synthesis of music and text. Poetic form inspires musical form (which, in turn, reshapes poetic structure), and, while her songs include occasional examples of literal word painting in which the music graphically depicts a poetic image, their strength lies at a deeper level, where poetic and musical symbolism fuse with and mirror each other. Larsen has written extensively for the voice. Her repertoire includes close to a hundred pieces for chorus and over forty works for solo voice and vocal duet, in addition to her many operas. Most of her solo songs set poems by female writers, reflecting her interest in “the raw struggle towards honesty” that she reads in first-​person texts by women.5 In contrast to the distancing she experiences with texts by male writers, Larsen finds the language used by women to be “subjective and very personal,” creating a vulnerability whereby the poet “risks exposing herself directly to the reader.”6 The sonic characteristics of language are also important to Larsen, who is attracted to particular texts by “the content of the consonants and the vowels.”7 Using syllables and phonemes as building blocks for her rhythmic language, she allows natural speech inflections to guide melodic lines. Ultimately, for Larsen, the text is the primary source for the music: “I generally let the rhythm of the words, the varying length of phrases and the word emphasis dictate specific rhythm, phrase structure and melodic material.”8 In her 1997 song cycle Chanting to Paradise for high voice and piano, Larsen sets four poems by the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–​ 1886). The poems exemplify Dickinson’s technical and expressive practices, showing her sensitive use of phonetic and syllabic patterns as well as her interest in intensely personal perspectives.9 Explaining her approach toward setting a Dickinson poem, Larsen describes how her compositional process is “to ferret out the game she set for herself in working on the poem, and then illuminate that game through the musical setting.”10 In my essay I analyze the technical means by which Larsen achieves this expressive goal by examining two representative songs from Chanting to Paradise. Although miniature in scale, reflecting the laconic nature of the poems, these songs demonstrate the exquisite care with 178  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

which Larsen selects every note to “illuminate” her reading of the texts. In the conclusion of my essay I examine the concept of mirroring more broadly by exploring parallels between the composer and poet, both as artists and as women.

Transcending the bonds In her program notes for Chanting to Paradise, Larsen describes the central theme of “Bind me—​I still can sing” as a spiritual conundrum in which “the spirit, bound by life’s challenges, is made stronger, more hopeful, and more infinitely true, through steadfast being.”11 Bind me—​I still can sing—​ Banish—​my mandolin Strikes true within—​ Slay—​and my soul shall rise Chanting to Paradise—​ Still thine—​12

The poem explores the struggle between oppression and transcendence through a series of strong images suggesting acts of repression—​“bind,” “banish,” “slay”—​each of which is countered by a statement showing that the speaker is beyond the crushing power of these acts. The violence implied in the restrictive actions contrasts with the serenity and grace of the transcendent responses, affirming that the speaker cannot be silenced either literally or metaphorically. Her spiritual strength is embedded in music—​in singing, in the sound of a mandolin, and in the chanting that transports her soul to Paradise.13 The last line, “Still thine,” introduces a note of ambiguity. In Larsen’s interpretation it alludes to “steadfast being,” asserting the speaker’s inner strength and ownership over her spiritual freedom. However, one can also read this line as closing the circle of oppression–​transcendence–​ oppression, leaving the speaker ultimately unable to escape the cycle. Structurally, the poem is cast in two three-​line stanzas with a parallel metrical scheme in the first two lines of each stanza—​iambic trimeter, with the opening foot reversed. The final line of each stanza is shorter in length, with a heavier emphasis than elsewhere in the poem realized through the spondees. For example, by stressing both words in the final phrase of the poem, “still thine,” Dickinson focuses attention on the ambiguous last line, which presents the essence of what Larsen calls the “spiritual conundrum.” Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997) 179

Larsen’s adaptation of the poem is true to the original in the first stanza, but she expands the second stanza through repetition of words and phrases, as shown below. Dickinson Slay—​and my Soul shall rise Chanting to Paradise—​ Still thine—​

Larsen Slay slay slay—​and my Soul shall rise my Soul shall rise Chanting to Paradise—​ Still thine. Still thine. Still thine.

At the opening of the second stanza, “slay” is articulated three times, emphasizing the arrival of the lowest point in a series of progressively more brutal attempts at repression; this is offset by Larsen’s repetition of the phrase “my Soul shall rise,” which reinforces that the speaker’s inner life cannot be extinguished by destructive forces. These added words expand the length of the stanza’s first line considerably, and Larsen balances this formally in the last line by stating “still thine” three times. While Dickinson’s poem avoids the stability of full rhyme, it features extensive partial rhyme, which she uses to create sonic coherence within each stanza.14 In the first stanza, all three end-​line words—​“sing,” “mandolin,” and “within”—​rhyme in a general way because of their assonant use of the short i vowel as well as the repetition of the nasal consonants ng and n. Similarly, the three lines in the second stanza, ending “rise,” “Paradise,” and “thine,” connect to each other through their use of the long i vowel. By replacing the sibilant s with another nasal consonant in “thine,” Dickinson also creates a longer-​range link back to the previous stanza. Larsen’s interest in language, words, and sounds leads her to a reading of the poem that focuses on the assonance created by Dickinson’s repeated use of the vowel i, which is featured not only in the end-​line partial rhyme scheme, but also in other key words such as “bind” and “banish,” as well as “I,” “still,” “my,” and “strikes.”15 In her program notes Larsen writes, “If one follows … the journey of i, one follows the journey of the soul of the first person voice of the poem” (emphasis in original).16 The composer naturally chooses to follow this path: her musical setting of the i words mirrors the changing contexts of the vowel and reflects the speaker’s spiritual struggle against oppression. Larsen establishes this reading right at the start of the song in the first vocal phrase, shown in Example 8.1.  Pointing out that the i of “bind” is “bound by the b and n,” she explains how she confines the words musically by setting them in short durations (eighth notes) with the smallest possible interval, a minor second: “This first gesture, setting the words bind me, is surrounded by musical rests, binding the music to itself rather than to the suggestion of growth by association to a musical 180  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

Example 8.1 Opening vocal phrase of “Bind me” from Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise

line. In essence, very little pitch or rhythm is able to escape.”17 In contrast, the vowel i, like the speaker’s spirit, is freed from its limitations in the second part of the phrase, where an emphatic “I” initiates a lyrical phrase that ends with a melismatic flourish in rubato sixteenth notes on the word “sing.” This setting of “bind me” introduces two important pitch elements—​t he descending semitone (especially ) and the interval class to which it belongs, ic1. Over the duration of the short song, Larsen focuses melodic attention on the descending semitone motive to connect each word describing an act of oppression, as shown in Example 8.2.  Example 8.2 Semitone motive and pitch connections

“Banish” is also set to a tightly controlled falling semitone, (and is surrounded by rests, similar to the setting of “bind me”). Contour and register expand for the setting of “slay,” but Larsen maintains the pitch links to both “bind me” and “banish.” In an embellishment of the motive, a rising octave on A ♭ 4 for the first articulation of “slay” is followed by an ascending octave from A4 for the second, the overall descending motion of the motive now inverted.18 The third repetition of “slay” restores the descending semitone motive to its original level, . Perhaps more surprisingly, Larsen uses the same motive to establish a connection to the last words of the song, “still thine.” After setting the transcendent phrase “my soul shall rise /​Chanting to Paradise” to a rising melodic line, she reintroduces descending motion, setting the first statement of “still thine” to a falling third and the last second two to descending semitones, followed by . Larsen feels it is “absolutely paramount to end the song this way, going against the freeing of the musical line, in order to place both the singer and the audience squarely in the center of Dickinson’s spiritual conundrum.” Using the motive as both the first and last vocal gestures of the song not only provides musical closure, but also symbolizes the circular and codependent nature of oppression and transcendence in the poem. Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997) 181

Although the preceding discussion has highlighted the prominence of the melodic semitone in the voice, ic1 has a pervasive presence in the piano part as well, both melodically and harmonically. Focusing especially on the pitch interval 11 (pi11), Larsen features major seventh dyads in the opening piano prelude and the concluding postlude, while in the bleak setting of the word “banish,” reproduced in Example  8.3, the piano integrates and extends this intervallic idea. Following the pi11s in m. 6, the motion in the left hand reverses the voice’s pitch motive while also introducing the idea of octave displacement, explored subsequently in the vocal setting of “slay” (discussed earlier). This passage also introduces a fast repeated-​note figure in the piano that Larsen uses to evoke the sound of a mandolin throughout the song, aurally highlighting the musical symbolism in the poem. Performed with the indication “ghost mandolin,” the mandolin figuration has an ethereal presence, appearing later with the expressive indication lontano.19 The repeated thirty-​ second-​ note mandolin gestures contrast strongly with the other musical materials in the song, which proceed in longer durations and with little direct repetition. This concept of musical opposition, mirroring the dichotomy between repression and freedom articulated in the poem, is embraced by the music in other ways as well. For example, the piano introduction, reproduced in Example 8.4a, not only initiates the focus on ic1 with the major seventh dyad {E ♭ 4, D5} mentioned earlier, but also introduces ic2 in the form of a whole-​tone cluster spanning the tritone {F4–​B4}. The two contrasting intervallic elements are then brought together a few bars later in a vocal flourish on the word “sing” (Example 8.4b). Example 8.3 Pitch interval 11 in the setting of “banish”

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Example 8.4a Intervallic materials, m. 1

Example 8.4b Intervallic materials in the setting of “sing”

After outlining the piano’s dyad, an ascending whole-​tone run in the voice is followed by a four-​note stepwise descending figure consisting of two semitones enclosing a whole step, . This combination figure, which I  will refer to as “motive x,” is imitated in the piano’s left hand in m. 5—​t hree octaves lower and rhythmically intensified to a triplet sixteenth figure—​and plays a significant role later in the song. Of particular interest is a passage in the emotionally charged center of the song, the setting of the words “slay, slay, slay” (Example 8.5) , where Larsen assembles the different pitch elements that unify the song and draws explicit connections to earlier materials. The passage opens with a statement of motive x in the piano’s right hand, which is mirrored in the left hand by a rhythmically identical, melodically inverted form of the motive. The sustained {A ♭ 4, G ♭ 4} dyad on which the motives converge prepares the entry of the voice on A ♭ 4 while emphasizing the whole-​tone intervallic element. Comparison of this passage with the opening measure, shown in Example 8.4a, reveals several significant connections. The wide leap in the piano’s left hand from F1 to B2 recalls, Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997) 183

Example 8.5 Pitch elements in the setting of “slay, slay, slay”

in pitch-​class terms, the span of the opening whole-​tone cluster {F4–​B4} in the right hand of m. 1. Immediately following the leap, the right hand articulates a series of chromatically descending major seventh dyads that comes to a rest on {E ♭3, D4}, the same notes as m. 1’s left-​hand dyad {E ♭ 4, D5}, here displaced down an octave. In m. 11 the voice, having arrived on the sustained A5, uses another statement of motive x, transposed and altered rhythmically, as a bridge to the final resting note of the phrase, F5. Finally, the entry of the third “slay” is prepared by mandolin figuration in the piano’s right hand, accompanied by two wide leaps in the left: , echoing the first vocal “slay,” followed by . The ascending pi11 is reminiscent of the opening pitches of m. 6 (see Example 8.3). The cohesiveness and deliberate economy of Larsen’s musical materials and compositional devices allow her to create powerful and expressive musical tools with which to mirror the text. At the heart of this mirroring is the idea of opposition, realized in the poem through the recurrent themes of oppression and liberation, and established musically through Larsen’s careful choice of fundamental musical elements with contrasting characteristics. Interval classes 1 and 2 are introduced as discrete features (before being combined later into motive x), syllabic passages contrast with melismatic and rubato settings, and the fast repeated notes of the mandolin figuration stand in sharp aural relief to the established texture. Distinct musical behaviors are not, however, associated with specific instruments; rather, voice and piano work together to enact the words by drawing on a common language. Larsen weaves these relatively simple, complementary materials together in subtle ways to reflect a closed, cyclical world, recasting pitch and pitch-​ class elements such as the {A/​A ♭} and {E ♭/​D} dyads in different contexts throughout “Bind me.” There is, ultimately, no resolution to the narrative of opposition; instead, through her combination of contrasting elements in the last measures of the song, Larsen’s setting highlights the tension 184  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

between repression and transcendence to mirror a reading of the poem that suggests the cycle cannot be escaped. The song ends with a lingering whole-​tone mandolin figuration in the right-​hand piano, accompanied in the left hand by the complementary ic1s discussed earlier, while the “binding” descending semitone setting of “still thine” is sustained until it fades, symbolically, into silence.

Seeking power in patterns “In this short Life,” the poem chosen by Larsen for the second song of the cycle, is characterized by brevity and formal balance. Consisting of a single two-​line sentence, the poem ends with a full rhyme (“hour,” “power”), creating closure. The stability of the poem’s formal structure is reinforced by its metrical symmetry, each line articulating five iambic feet. In this short Life that only lasts an hour How much—​how little—​is within our power.20

Dickinson creates momentum in the poem by delaying the critical verb “is,” forcing the reader to wait until the end in order to realize its meaning. The conciseness of the structure and the conclusiveness of the rhyming last line imbue the poem with a tone of conviction, giving authority to the speaker’s voice, but the words create a lingering sense of uncertainty.21 The brevity of “Life,” which only “lasts an hour,” suggests an existential disquiet, and resolution between the oppositional quantities of “much” and “little” is never actually reached. If one understands “how little” to be embedded within the phrase “how much … is within our power,” Dickinson could be suggesting that the balance of power lies within our control. On the other hand, by coming second, “how little” could be interpreted as canceling “how much,” implying we have little influence. Ultimately Dickinson leaves the question of how much power we have in our lives, particularly when its short duration is beyond our control, unanswered. Instead of reproducing the poem’s formal stability in her setting, Larsen focuses on this unresolved opposition embedded in the poem’s meaning. To emphasize the contrast between the key phrases “how much” and “how little,” she separates them, devoting a full stanza to each before combining them in a third stanza, as shown below. Repetition of the key phrases at the end of each of the first two stanzas further stresses their importance, while the opposition between them is highlighted in stanza 3 by their juxtaposition and repetition: “How much—​how little /​How much—​how little.” Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997) 185

Dickinson Larsen In this short Life that only lasts an In this short Life that only lasts an hour hour How much—​how little—​ How much, how much, how much In this short Life that only lasts an hour

How little, how little, how little

In this short Life that only lasts an hour How much—​how little—​ How much—​how little—​ is within our power is within our power.

By drawing out individual phrases in this way Larsen significantly changes the poem’s structure, converting Dickinson’s succinct and balanced verse into an asymmetrical three-​stanza poem, in which repetition provides sonic unity and serves to emphasize the uncertainties suggested in the original poem. The opposition between “much” and “little” becomes the key focus of the song, and the poem’s temporal flow is disrupted by the extensive repetition. Syntactic tension accumulates over a much longer duration, the open-​ended stanzas finally finding closure—​and meaning—​ in the last line of the third stanza, “is within our power.” Emphasizing her tripartite reorganization of the text, Larsen’s setting includes short piano interludes between each stanza, in addition to a piano introduction and postlude. The opening piano prelude, reproduced in Example 8.6, establishes the pitch and rhythmic patterns on which the song is based. 

Example 8.6 Primary pitch and rhythmic patterns in “In this short Life”

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The listener’s attention is drawn immediately to the repetitive pitch groupings:  three eighth notes in the left hand set against four sixteenth notes in the right hand.22 The surface rhythm is enriched further when the voice enters in m. 3 with duplet quarter notes, expanding the hemiola rhythm into a measure-​long polyrhythmic unit, shown in Example 8.7.  These opening rhythms allow Larsen to set the tone for the song:  the restless running sixteenth-​note motion creates a sense of unease, of searching rather than arrival, and the metrically dissonant multi-​layered rhythmic patterns embody the opposition suggested in the dichotomy between “much” and “little.” The pitch/​rhythm material of m. 1—​which I will refer to as the fundamental unit—​acts as the song’s primary building block, undergoing a series of exact transpositions which generate the formal shape of the entire piece (discussed later). The first shift occurs in m. 5 when, after four statements at the original level, the fundamental unit is transposed down a semitone in the second part of stanza 1 for another four iterations (see Example 8.8). The second stanza of the song parallels the first musically, reflecting the parallel construction of the first two stanzas of Larsen’s text. Both piano and voice present the material of the first stanza transposed up a second, with only minor variations occurring in the vocal part on the words “how little” (see Example 8.10 below).

Example 8.7 Polyrhythm between voice and piano

Example 8.8 Fundamental unit, m. 1 and m. 5

Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997) 187

Table 8.1  Tonal plan for “In this short Life” Mm.

1

3

9

11

16

20

Piano prelude

Stanza 1 “how much”

Piano interlude

Stanza 2 “how little”

Piano interlude

Stanza 3 “how much—​how little”

No. of statements of fundamental unit

2

2

4

2

3

2

0.5

1

2

4

1

2.5

0.5

1.5

Piano (RH/​LH)

C/​B♭

C/​B♭

B/​A

D/​C

D/​C

C/​B♭

A/​G

A/​G

E/​free

E/​D

C♯/​B

B/​A

A/​G

E/​free

Voice B♭1 pedal

A♭4

B♭4

C5

The relative stability of the first two stanzas comes to an abrupt end in the piano interlude leading to the third stanza, which introduces dramatic changes to set up the culminating stanza of the song (see Example 8.9). The fundamental unit is replaced in m.  17 by contrary motion runs that rapidly extend the register from the center of the piano’s range up to A5 in the right hand and a low B ♭ 1 pedal in the left. The total piano range, which has been maintained at only 16 semitones (a major tenth) within each statement of the fundamental unit, expands to 47 semitones, a span of nearly four octaves. The significance of this moment is intensified by a crescendo to f, the loudest dynamic level so far in the song, and, once the right hand resumes its basic pattern in m. 18, by the addition of an inner-​voice melody in the left hand that imitates the pitch and rhythm of the opening vocal melody, shown in Example 8.6. Example 8.9 Piano interlude, mm. 17–​19

After the mesmerizing repetitive patterns of the first two verses, these changes in register, dynamics, and texture serve to alert the listener to the imminent arrival of the climactic third stanza, in which the forces of opposition are brought together in an uneasy union. The third stanza begins much like the first two, with the piano and voice patterns transposed up another second (albeit with the right hand displaced up an octave and the B ♭ 1 pedal lingering for the first four statements); but now Larsen destabilizes the piano patterns, frequently transposing and sometimes truncating or fragmenting the fundamental unit as the singer vacillates between “much” and “little.” The volatility of the third stanza is apparent from the diagram in Table 8.1, which provides an overall “tonal” plan for the song showing the different pitch-​c lass levels at which the fundamental unit occurs (identified by the pitch classes of the first notes in each hand) and the number of statements.23 (The opening vocal pitch of each stanza is included to indicate how the voice parallels the piano patterns.) To avoid unnecessary clutter, I  have not indicated register for the piano; with the exception of the right-​hand “E” pattern at the start of the third stanza, which is displaced into the C5 register, all fundamental units are located in the central piano register between C3 and C5. Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997) 189

The diagram clarifies the extreme economy of musical materials Larsen employs in this song, with only two brief “free” passages presenting material other than the fundamental unit. Through the use of recurring pitch and rhythmic patterns, she mirrors the repeated words and phrases in the text; just as individual words are reused in different contexts, so individual pitch and rhythm patterns are presented in different tonal contexts and repeated at different transpositional levels. Within this relatively static framework, small changes can have great significance, a property that Larsen exploits to highlight the opposition she reads into the poem’s meaning, focusing the listener’s attention on contrasting settings of the dichotomous phrases “how much” and “how little.” As illustrated in Example 8.10, which presents the vocal settings of these two phrases, Larsen creates contrast primarily through her manipulations of interval, contour, and rhythm. Example  8.10a shows that in the first stanza, although the initial two statements of “how much” are relatively subdued (being set syllabically to small intervals), they are followed by an expansive ascending arpeggio in m. 7. The melisma on the word “much” and the sustained high A5, with its dynamic elaboration, emphasize the richness implied by this word. In contrast, settings of “how little” in the second stanza, shown in Example 8.10b, are marked by their sparseness. While the second statement of “little” is set to a rising perfect fifth, the other two statements set the three syllables of “how little” to a falling interval followed by a repeated pitch. The repetition of an individual pitch, while a seemingly small detail, gains greater meaning when one considers that there are no other immediately repeated pitches in the vocal line at any point in the song other than the setting of “little.” The distinction between “much” and “little” becomes even more marked in the third stanza when the two words are juxtaposed (Example  8.10c). The florid melisma of m. 23 and the soaring octave leap in m. 25 associate Example 8.10 Comparison of settings of “much” and “little”: (a) mm. 5–​8; (b) mm. 13–​16; (c) mm. 22–​26 (a)

(b)

(c)

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“much” with bountiful plenty and magnitude, in contrast to the constrained, impoverished settings of “little,” first as repeated notes and then as a syllabic pair of descending seconds. The difference in relative duration of “much” and “little” reinforces their dissimilarity. While Larsen’s contrasting settings of “much” and “little” suggest rather literal word painting, it is important to remember that the distinction between them goes beyond mere surface depiction to the heart of her interpretation of Dickinson’s poem. Having clearly established the opposition between these two measurements of power in the first two stanzas, Larsen increases the intensity of the debate in the third verse, the rapidly shifting patterns of the fundamental unit magnifying the undertone of anxiety created by the metrically dissonant, constantly running rhythms. The authoritative tone and sense of closure in Dickinson’s original poem are absent; Larsen has transformed the poem structurally and in doing so has recast its central message: the conflict between how much or how little of life lies within our power can never be resolved. Although the song ends with an unambiguously consonant chord—​root-​position B ♭ major, gently arpeggiated24 —​it comes across as a sigh of exhaustion following the singer’s intense deliberations, rather than as a chord of repose and resolution. For Larsen, life, no matter how short, does not appear to have ready answers, particularly when it comes to complex issues of power and control.

Reflections: Larsen and Dickinson These analyses of “Bind me” and “In this short Life” elucidate the compositional tools Larsen employs to illuminate the details of sonic and verbal patterns and to convey, on a symbolic level, her nuanced understanding of the meaning of each poem. While music and text mirror each other in multiple ways, it is intriguing to consider whether there is a similar mirroring between the composer and the poet. Certainly Larsen’s position as a female composer in a male-​dominated profession resonates with Dickinson’s status as a female poet in the patriarchal nineteenth-​century literary world. Although Larsen feels that her sex was not an issue when she chose to become a composer, she has acknowledged that little has changed to make the musical environment more welcoming for women.25 Suggesting that there are few role models to help young women “to envision their whole lives as composers,” she also recognizes that female conductors “rarely move up the ladder” and that “the compositional canon is overwhelmingly male.”26

Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997) 191

As a successful, independent composer, Larsen herself presents a strong female role model in the compositional world, and she, in turn, is drawn to strong female characters in her music.27 In addition to the powerful literary figures of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, and the women who had the misfortune to marry Henry VIII, many of whom made spirited gallows speeches, she has based compositions on the art of painters Georgia O’Keeffe (Black Birds, Red Hills, for viola, B ♭ clarinet, and piano, 1987, rev. 1996) and Mary Cassatt (Mary Cassatt, for mezzo-​soprano, trombone, and orchestra, 1994) and has composed a cantata on the life of Eleanor Roosevelt (Eleanor Roosevelt, 1996). In Killam’s feminist analysis of Larsen’s Songs from Letters, mentioned in the introduction, she discusses how Larsen uses music to symbolically transform Calamity Jane’s identity from “a homeless outcast” into “an identity of judging, wrathful deity, creating her own role and place in the western mythology and pantheon now accepted by contemporary society.”28 Emily Dickinson, like Larsen, is a powerful female figure, although, unlike Larsen, she cherished privacy rather than life in the public sphere.29 Contemporary scholars have reexamined her life and poetry, questioning the commonly held view of her as a “recluse” and focusing on her strength as an independent thinker and quiet pioneer who “lived a vigorous life of the mind.”30 Dickinson was well aware of her lesser status as a woman in a nineteenth-​century world. As a young girl living in a family whose male members were all actively involved in politics, she protested her exclusion from these activities and later used a male friend and her brother as sounding boards, actively seeking their responses to her experiments in poetic form and tone and challenging their traditional ideas about women writers.31 Her poetry can therefore be read as an exploration of the tensions between the feminine and masculine norms of her time. Recent feminist interpretations of her work note, for example, how Dickinson “redefines traditional images of feminine vulnerability and endows them with all the strength of armor,”32 and several writers have asserted that her use of the masculine pronoun in her poems is not a reference to a strong male figure but symbolic of “aspects of her own personality” more traditionally attributed to men.33 The contemporary reader can, without much difficulty, detect what we consider today to be distinctly feminist themes in Dickinson’s poetry. The two poems discussed in this essay, for example, focus on issues of power, control, confinement, and escape. That Larsen seems drawn to them as inspiration for her musical settings seems natural, since these themes exemplify “the raw struggle towards honesty” that Larsen identifies in the female poetic voice. If we consider again her statement that “the music is a mirror,” we can see that the mirror casts multiple reflections: not only does the composer find herself mirrored in the music she writes, but, more than 192  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

a century later, the figure of the woman composer echoes the image of the female poet. Most significantly, the close mirroring between text and music causes them to merge into a single expressive entity—​the song—​in which the distinction between object and reflection can no longer be discerned.

Notes 1.  The letter is reproduced in Appendix A of Killam, “Women Working: An Alternative to Gans,” Perspectives of New Music 31, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 230–​51. Killam’s is currently the only analytical article in print about Larsen’s music, a fact that seems incongruent with the range of Larsen’s compositional output and her status as a widely performed contemporary American composer. Her music has, however, received a fair amount of attention over the past decade in the form of doctoral dissertations, many of which illuminate aspects of her vocal works. Examples include Gregory Paul Zavracky, “Libby Larsen’s ‘My Antonia’: The Song Cycle and the Tonal Landscape of the American Prairie” (DMA diss., Boston University, 2014); Christi Marie McLain, “Libby Larsen’s ‘Margaret Songs’:  A  Musical Portrait of Willa Cather’s Margaret Elliot” (DMA diss., Arizona State University, 2013); Christy L.  Wisuthseriwong, “Libby Larsen’s ‘De toda la eternidad’:  Creating Infinity through the Words of Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz” (DMA diss., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2011); Juline Barol-​Gilmore, “‘Beloved, Thou Hast Brought Me Many Flowers’ and ‘Sifting through the Ruins’:  An Analysis of Two Chamber Song Cycles by Libby Larsen” (DMA diss., University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2010); and Angela R. Day, “A Performer’s Guide to Libby Larsen’s Try Me, Good King: Last Words of the Wives of Henry VIII” (DMA diss., Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2008). 2. Edward T.  Cone, “Poet’s Love or Composer’s Love?” in Music and Text:  Critical Inquiries, ed. Steven Paul Sacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 182. 3.  David Lewin, Studies in Music with Text (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), xii. 4.  Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 126–​29. 5.  Larsen has used both poetry and prose writing by women for her vocal works. In addition to Dickinson, she has set poems by Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while her settings of prose have drawn on writings by Brenda Ueland, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf. The texts for Try Me, Good King: Last Words of the Wives of Henry VIII (2000) are taken from the queens’ letters and gallows speeches. 6.  Susan Chastain, “A Conversation with Libby Larsen:  A  Transcription of a Taped Telephone Interview from April 17, 1995,” International Alliance for Women in Music Journal 2, no. 3 (February 1996): 5. 7. Ibid. 8.  Libby Larsen, “Double Joy,” American Organist 18 (March 1984): 50. 9.  Jo Gill explains that Dickinson was “deeply exercised by huge abstract questions of life and death, faith and despair, love and loss”; Women’s Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 100. The brooding presence of Dickinson’s existential struggles in her poetry, combined with the metrical freedom of her verse, help to explain why her poems hold such great appeal for twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century composers: the compelling intensity of their subjects and their temporal and rhythmic fluidity resonate with contemporary preoccupations. A small sample of composers who have set poems

Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997) 193

by Dickinson includes Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, George Perle, Gloria Coates, and Judith Weir. In 2002 the American composer Augusta Read Thomas completed a song cycle setting of five Dickinson poems, including “Bind me—​I still can sing,” from which, like Larsen, she draws the title of the work, Chanting to Paradise. 10.  Larsen, “Program Notes,” Chanting to Paradise (Minneapolis, MN:  Libby Larsen Publishing, 1997), i. The song cycle is included on the recording Grand Larsen-​y: Vocal Music of Libby Larsen, Terry Rhodes (soprano) and Benton Hess (piano), Albany Records TROY 634, 2004, compact disc. 11. Ibid., ii. 12.  Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON:  READING EDITION, edited by Ralph W.  Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright ©1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson. 13.  Dickinson frequently uses musical imagery in her poetry. As a singer and pianist, she was particularly sensitive to the ways in which sounds convey meaning. Judy Jo Small, Positive as Sound: Emily Dickinson’s Rhyme (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), points out that sound and music feature prominently in her poetry, as “content and as acoustic texture,” and as “auditory images and aural figures referring to metaphysical concepts” (30). 14.  Dickinson experimented extensively with partial rhyme in her poetry. In Positive as Sound, Small asserts that Dickinson understood that the “instability of partial rhyme can indicate … the sublime transport of freedom,” an interpretation that seems particularly relevant in “Bind me” (83–​84). 15.  I am grateful to the literary scholar Shelley King, a colleague at Queen’s University, for sharing her insights into structural aspects of this poem. As she pointed out, there is so much repetition in this poem that what begins to stand out is the unrepeated sounds. For example, because “true” is not matched elsewhere, the word resonates while the ear waits in vain for its repetition. 16.  Larsen, “Program Notes,” i. 17. Ibid. 18.  Larsen describes the rising octave on “slay” as “a musical gash,” confessing to “giving in to gross literalism” in her setting (“Program Notes,” ii). 19.  While the ghostly “mandolin” music plays a symbolic role in the piano part, the instrument itself comes to the fore in a more directly expressive way in Larsen’s vocal setting of “my mandolin strikes true.” In a deliberate attempt to mirror mandolin technique, each syllable is set to a different pitch with a short sixteenth-​note duration, in imitation of the sound produced when a mandolin melody is plucked with a plectrum (see Larsen, “Program Notes,” ii). 20.  Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON:  READING EDITION, edited by Ralph W.  Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright ©1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.

194  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

21.  Dickinson’s practice of using full rhyme to create a stable tone and to suggest that a poem has “reached a definitive judgment” is examined in Small, Positive as Sound, 177. 22. These pitch and rhythmic patterns appear to be a deliberate reference to the beginning of Chopin’s Waltz, Op. 64 No. 1, (“Minute”), transposed down a fifth in the right hand. 23. Larsen describes her tonal usage in terms of “pools of tonality,” created without the support of traditional functional harmony, in Laurel Ann Thomas, “A Study of Libby Larsen’s Me (Brenda Ueland), a Song Cycle for High Voice and Piano” (DMA diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1994), 9. 24.  The final B♭ major chord resonates with the B♭1 pedal that occurs earlier in mm. 18–​23 and is reestablished in m. 28 (see the diagram in Table 8.1). While the pedals foreshadow the final chord, it would be an overstatement to describe the role of B♭ as “central” or to characterize the song as being “centric.” 25.  Cynthia Green, “Interview with Composer Libby Larsen,” International League of Women Composers Journal 5, no. 1 (June 1992): 25. 26.  Although Larsen made these remarks in an interview fifteen years ago, there is little evidence to suggest these perspectives have changed. Libby Larsen, interview by Richard Kessler, “Libby Larsen:  Communicating through Music,” New Music USA, February 1, 1999, http://​www.newmusicbox.org/​articles/​libby-​larsen-​communicating-​ through-​music/​. 27. These perspectives on the composer are presented in “Larsen, Libby,” in The Norton/​ Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, ed. Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel (New  York:  W. W.  Norton, 1995), 266–​68, and “Libby Larsen,” in Women and Music:  A  History, ed. Karin Pendle, 2nd ed. (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2001), 332–​33. 28.  Killam, “Women Working,” 240. 29.  Dickinson’s fame as a poet was only established posthumously. A mere handful of her poems, of which there are over seventeen hundred, were published during her lifetime. 30. Gill, Women’s Poetry, 100. Other feminist studies of Dickinson include Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson”; Albert Gelpi, “Emily Dickinson and the Deerslayer: The Dilemma of the Woman Poet in America”; and Terence Diggory, “Armored Women, Naked Men:  Dickinson, Whitman, and Their Successors,” in Shakespeare’s Sisters:  Feminist Essays on Women Poets, ed. Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 99–​121, 122–​34, 135–​50; Suzanne Juhasz, ed., Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1983); and Suzanne Juhasz and Cristanne Miller, “Performances of Gender in Dickinson’s Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson, ed. Wendy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 107–​28. 31. Gill, Women’s Poetry, 98–​101. 32.  Diggory, “Armored Women, Naked Men,” 139. 33.  Gelpi, “Emily Dickinson and the Deerslayer,” 124. Rich makes similar observations in “Vesuvius at Home.”

Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997) 195

9 Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968)

Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–​1983) has been credited with “virtually creat[ing] the musical avant-​garde in Britain.”i She was born in 1906 to Lady Emily Lytton and the famed English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.ii As a child, she took lessons in violin and piano and made her first attempts at composition. In 1923 Lutyens became enthralled by the spirit of European musical modernism during her studies at the École Normale in Paris. From 1926 to 1930 she studied viola and composition at the Royal College of Music, and following graduation she cofounded the long-​ lived Macnaghten-​ Lemare Concerts with the violinist Anne Macnaghten and the conductor Iris Lemare. Toward the end of the 1930s Lutyens began composing with tone rows, and in 1939 she started her Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 8 No. 1, often cited as the first serial composition by a British composer (although it is based on a 15-​note row and not rigorously serial beyond the first movement). From 1944 to 1972 Lutyens supported her family by composing for film, including wartime propaganda films, industrial shorts, travelogues, and 1960s horror movies such as The Skull (1965). She also composed incidental music for theater and radio. However, success in the world of concert music eluded her during most of the 1940s and ’50s, with the notable

i.  Stephen Banfield, The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, vol. 6, The Twentieth Century, ed. Stephen Banfield (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 488. ii. Biographical information is taken primarily from Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, A Pilgrim Soul: The Life and Work of Elisabeth Lutyens (London: Michael Joseph, 1989).

196

exceptions of O Saisons, O Châteaux!, Op.  13, a lush setting for soprano and strings of a poem by Arthur Rimbaud (1946), and her Motet (Excerpta Tractati Logico-​Philosophici), Op. 27 (1954), based on the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The well-​received 1962 premiere of Quincunx for soprano, baritone, and orchestra marked a breakthrough for Lutyens in terms of public recognition, and for the rest of the decade she enjoyed the greatest successes of her career. She often lectured at the Dartington Summer School and, through teaching or encouragement, influenced a new generation of composers including Robert Saxton, Malcolm Williamson, and Allison Bauld, as well as the so-​called Manchester School of Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Harrison Birtwistle. Despite Lutyens’s reputation as a twelve-​tone composer and the fact that many row charts can be found in her papers, analysis of her scores shows that even when she did begin from a row of standard length, she was rarely as systematic in her treatment of the row as the term implies. Rows served as sources for melodic motives as often as they were used in their entirety, and she put more trust in her aural instincts than in systems. In 1969 Lutyens was named Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, and ten years later she was given a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, which cited her as “one of the small number of British composers who has worked successfully in the advanced idioms of the twentieth century.”iii She died in 1983.

“This Imaginary Halfe-​Nothing”: Temporality in Elisabeth Lutyens’s Essence of Our Happinesses Laurel Parsons

If this Imaginary halfe-​nothing, Tyme, be of the Essence of our Happinesses, how can they be thought durable? —​John Donne

iii.  Cited in ibid., 264–​65.

Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968) 197

In the 1930s Elisabeth Lutyens was one of the pioneers of the British musical avant-​garde, and by the late 1960s she was the eccentric (and acerbic) grande dame of contemporary British composers, enjoying the greatest successes of her career.1 But she was also a widow and grandmother in her sixties who had endured as much as she had provoked, and perhaps as a result of this, the problem of time’s relentless passing—​ and our attempts to reverse, escape, or transcend it—​became a subject of almost obsessive concern in her music. This concern is epitomized in her extraordinary composition Essence of Our Happinesses, Op. 69 (1968), for tenor, chorus, and orchestra, which has been described as “a truly great work and one of the most unforcedly original contributions to the English choral tradition ever attempted.”2 Its originality lies, in part, in a remarkable juxtaposition of texts and wordless orchestral commentary that, over the course of three movements, presents the composer’s distinctive tripartite characterization of temporal experience: mystical, chronological, and manic. These characters of temporal experience emerge from the diverse perspectives represented by the texts Lutyens chose to set:  Abū Yazīd al-​ Bistami’s mystical Sufi narrative “The Mi’raj of Abū Yasīd” (ninth century); John Donne’s Devotion 14 from his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624); and Arthur Rimbaud’s “Enfin, ô bonheur,” from Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873). Each of the three movements is divided into two parts, the first a performance of one of the three texts by solo tenor with or without chorus, and the second an orchestral choros (conceived in its ancient Greek dramatic sense as both dance and commentary) providing a wordless gloss on the preceding text (see Table 9.1). Lutyens’s subtitles for the choroi—​“Mystikos,” “Chronikos,” and “Manicos,” respectively—​ designate the nature of temporal experience suggested to her by each text. At the same time, they provide a framework whereby listeners can

Table 9.1  Form of Elisabeth Lutyens’s Essence of Our Happinesses, Op. 69

Part 1

Part 2

Mvmt. I

Mvmt. II

Mvmt. III

Title

The Mi’raj of Abū Yazīd

Their Criticall Dayes

Enfin, ô bonheur

Author

Abū Yazīd

John Donne

Arthur Rimbaud

Instrumentation

Tenor, orchestra

Tenor, chorus, orchestra

Tenor, orchestra

Title

Mystikos

Chronikos

Manicos

Instrumentation

Orchestra

Orchestra

Orchestra

198  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

understand the overall structure of the work—​t hat is, a central movement concerned with the passage of chronological “clock” time framed by two outer movements conveying the escape from chronological time experienced by those in altered psychological states such as religious trance or drug-​induced mania.

“That Monosyllable, now”: the genesis of Essence of Our Happinesses In her unpublished program notes for Essence of Our Happinesses, Lutyens recalls: The insemination of this work was a question put to me by a young man when . . . I was asked to give a talk to a group of music students: “Do you understand being interested only in music written now?” That “now” immediately evoked for me the line from Donne:  “Before you sound that word, present, or that Monosyllable, now, the present, and the Now is past.” Past, present and now, so inclusive of each other, all infer time and its corollary, loss or suspension of a sense of time; pre-​occupations of men of all times and in all ways.3

As noted earlier, the passage to which Lutyens refers comes from Devotion 14 of his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, written while he was recovering from a near-​fatal illness. Lutyens set almost the entire devotion as the centerpiece of Essence of Our Happinesses, which accounts for its extended length. For the outer movements, Lutyens was inspired in her choice of texts by R.  C. Zaehner’s book Mysticism Sacred and Profane:  An Inquiry into Some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience (1957), an explicit refutation of Aldous Huxley’s claim in The Doors of Perception that mescaline-​induced psychedelic states were equivalent in nature and value to the transcendent experiences described by religious mystics.4 Zaehner compares accounts of altered states of mind by mystics, poets, users of psychotropic drugs (himself included), and the mentally ill. Lutyens was struck by the similarities he points out between Abū Yazīd and Rimbaud: I was particularly interested in the parallel he drew between similar states of time-​suspended ecstasy and sense of eternity produced by such means as mysticism and mescalin:  mysticism derived from Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968) 199

drunkenness; “drunkenness” from mysticism. (For, as mystic experience can lead to mania, so mania can lead to mystic experience and, in both, time is present—​by its absence: a paradox resolved.)5

While Zaehner himself never explicitly addresses the subject of time in his book, Lutyens perceived a shared temporal dimension between the texts of the two writers: So beginning from that naïve, thoughtless question from the young student, involving “that Monosyllable, now” and its implication of the nature of time, and consideration—​from time—​of the parallel between “sacred and profane” mysticism, I shaped this work, basing it on words from three poets from different periods, race and tradition. Also, I hope, belatedly answering and making my personal comment on the original question.6

My analysis focuses on the middle movement, since Lutyens’s recollection of Donne was the initial inspiration for Essence of Our Happinesses, and because she herself described it as the “main central movement.” 7 In the remainder of this chapter I explore how Lutyens made her “personal comment on the original question” through her rhythmic, motivic, and structural shaping of time, primarily in the brief orchestral “Chronikos,” whose distinct temporal design provides a useful starting point for future studies of the remaining movements.

Movement II (tenor, chorus, and orchestra), part 1: “Their Criticall Dayes” Read in succession, John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions provide a chronological account of the progress of his symptoms, treatment, and eventual recovery from a life-​threatening illness in 1623–​24. Devotion 14, from which the text of this movement is taken, is written from the perspective of a gravely ill man, reminded constantly of the possible imminence of death by the frequent ringing of funeral bells outside his window (as he describes in Devotions 16 and 17).8 In her program notes, the title of the work, and her musical response to Donne’s text, Lutyens highlights three important aspects of the devotion. The first of these, and Donne’s central thesis, is the fragility of our earthly “happinesses,” given their dependence on perfect timing when time itself, in Donne’s memorable phrase, can only be considered an “Imaginary 200  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

halfe-​nothing.” This theme, articulated in the epigraph to this essay, is the source of Lutyens’s title for the entire work, but also in the choral passage that opens the second movement: This much must be presented to his remembrance, that those false happinesses, which he hath in this World, have their times, and their seasons, and their criticall days, and they are Judged and Denominated according to the times, when they befall us. What poor Elements are our happinesses made of, if Tyme, Tyme which we can scarce consider to be any thing, be an essential part of our happiness!

As we have seen in Lutyens’s account of the inception of Essence of Our Happinesses (quoted at the beginning of this section), a second important concept in Donne’s text is his presentation and immediate dismantling of the linear, arrow-​like concept of time—​past→present→future—​t hat has long governed everyday Western perceptions of life, and the illusory nature of “Now”: If we consider Tyme to be but a Measure of Motion, and howsoever it may seeme to have three stations, past, present, and future, yet the first and last of these are not (one is not, now, and the other is not yet) and that which you call present, is not now the same that it was, when you began to call it so. Before you sound that word, present, or that Monosyllable, now, the present, and the Now is past.

Finally, in her program notes Lutyens highlights a third phrase from Donne’s text, describing the second movement as “a meditation on time, with the basic precept ‘. . . Eternity is not an everlasting flux of Tyme, but Tyme is a short parenthesis in a longe period.’”9 In other words, eternity is not just time that keeps on going, but a vast field of existence outside of time, inconceivable in scope and nature except insofar as (for the devout seventeenth-​century Christian) it is the realm of God.10 When Donne wrote Devotion 14, he was the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral and had been renowned as a dramatic and eloquent preacher since his appointment in 1615 as Royal Chaplain to King James I. In keeping with Donne’s role and the rootedness of the text in Christian thought, Lutyens structures the first part of the movement in the form of a responsory, with alternating passages sung by the tenor, accompanied by the orchestra, and a cappella chorus. The allusion to liturgical music can also be heard in the tenor’s oft-​repeated opening passage, which, although derived from a retrograde form (R4) of the twelve-​tone row governing the work, creates the impression of plainchant. Example 9.1 presents R4, with slurs showing its Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968) 201

Example 9.1 Distribution of R4, mm. 48–​61

symmetrical arrangement of tetrachords, that is, two inversionally related sc(0123) tetrachords framing an inner 0167.11 Horizontal brackets indicate how Lutyens distributes its pitch classes between tenor and orchestra. The tenor sings most of the row, in two segments marked a and b, while tubular bells reinforce its opening B3, and strings and woodwinds provide the central pitch classes G and F♯ . Example 9.2 reproduces the opening tenor passage itself, with a reduction of the orchestral accompaniment. After a modal-​sounding elaboration of B3 by its lower neighbor A3, Lutyens sets the crucial word “time” melismatically to R4’s first ordered hexachord, , returning to B3 at the end of the phrase again by way of A3. By placing the first two pcs of R4’s second hexachord into mm. 52–​54’s repeated chords in the orchestra, Lutyens allows the tenor’s second phrase to begin with R4’s final tetrachord , foregrounding the inversional relationship between the row’s symmetrical outer tetrachords noted earlier. R4 is completed with the E4 in the middle of m. 56, following which the tenor doubles back to F4, the melodic apex of the passage, before plunging down a tritone to B3, again setting the word “Tyme.” The phrase continues in mm. 58–​60 with a reprise of the melismatic, B3-​centered “chant” of mm. 48–​51, ending with the word “motion” on B3. While this initiates a second statement of R4, its second hexachord is completed quietly by the orchestra rather than in the voice, allowing the tenor melody to project a clear, seemingly closed aba structure that ends where it began. B3’s role as the “final” of the passage is reinforced throughout by its tolling in the tubular bells six times, evoking the centuries-​old use of church bells as a signifier of time’s passing, and, in Donne’s mind as he listened to the bells from his sickbed, human mortality. Example  9.2 also demonstrates Lutyens’s typically precise but fluid rhythmic setting of the text. Subdivisions of the quarter-​note beat are rarely consistent from measure to measure, and the beats themselves are often obscured by ties, syncopation, and shifting subdivisions of the measure (as 202  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

Example 9.2 Tenor and orchestra, mm. 48–​61. Reproduced by permission of University of York Music Press.

for example in mm. 55–​56, where the three quarter-​note beats of each measure are subdivided into four and five equal units respectively). Although no regular meter is established in this part of the movement, the tenor’s frequent returns to the opening passage nevertheless create recurring moments of temporal focus. The passage shown in Example 9.2 returns periodically throughout the movement, setting important text phrases (“Before you sound that word present or that Monosyllable, now, the present, and the Now, is past,” “If we consider Eternity into that, Tyme never entered. Eternity is not an everlasting flux of tyme …”), and with B3 highlighting important words such as “present,” “past,” “now,” “tyme,” and “eternity.” It also brings the vocal section of the movement to a close, the last B3 melisma lending poignancy to Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968) 203

the final word, “ever,” before voice and orchestra fade a niente: “If happiness be in the season, or in the Clymate, how much happier then are the Birdes than Men … Birdes who can change, change the Clymate and accompanie and enjoy the same season ever—​ever—​ever. …” The choral passages of the second movement are likewise repetitive and nonmetric, their pitch material drawn from a variety of row forms as shown in Example 9.3. Lutyens’s irregular subdivisions and syncopations are typical of her rhythmic language, and in this sense the tenor and chorus passages are metrically similar. But the frequent rests within text phrases and distribution of small word groups across different voices create a somewhat disjointed effect, in contrast to the relative continuity of the chant-​like solo tenor passages that draw attention to the solo voice (as Donne’s own voice must have captured the attention of his congregations). Example 9.3 Opening choral passage, mm. 1–​18. Reproduced by permission of University of York Music Press.

204  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

Movement II, part 2: “Chronikos

”

After the long vocal section of the movement delivers a compelling setting of Donne’s text, the brief orchestral choros in effect acquires a “voice” of its own, offering a wordless commentary on the three ideas embedded in the text that drew Lutyens’s attention: the dependence of human happiness on time; the illusory forward motion of time’s “three stations, past, present, and future” and its impossible “Now”; and the notion of time as a “short parenthesis in a longe period.” From the moment the choros begins, its most aurally salient characteristic is the {A ♭3, B ♭3} eighth-​note simultaneity in marimba and harp that forms the “clock-​like ostinato” to which Lutyens refers in her program notes. Played without interruption at a constant dynamic level of piano and a constant tempo of 108 eighth notes per minute, this insistent series of pulses represents the only temporally predictable element in all three movements of Essence of Our Happinesses. Against it, small instrumental groups take turns in stating short motives or ideas, usually no more than twice. A third layer, rhythmically linked to some degree with these motives, is provided by the claves. Example 9.4 shows this three-​layer structure for the first six measures of the choros.  There are ten such motives, shown below in Example  9.5 in order of appearance. While some of these motives display a distinctive melodic profile (for example, motive d in mm. 11–​13), others are little more than Example 9.4 “Chronikos,” orchestral reduction, mm. 1–​6

Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968) 205

Example 9.5 Motives in “Chronikos” (a) Mm. 1–​3 (woodwinds, strings)

(b) Mm. 4–​6 (bassoon, cello, double bass)

(c) Mm. 7–​10 (English horn, clarinet)

(d) Mm. 11–​13 (flutes)

(e) Mm. 14–​17 (oboe, strings)

(f) Mm. 18–​19 (flutes, clarinet, xylophone)

(g) Mm. 20–​21 (bassoon, cello)

(h) Mm. 22–​23 (English horn)

(i) Mm. 24–​26 (woodwinds, horn)

(j) Mm. 27–​33 (flute, violin, viola)

rhythmic gestures, such as the repeated sixteenth-​note trichords of motives a and b that open the choros. In this analysis, I  will distinguish between these motives and slightly broader motivic clusters, which span not only the first iteration of the motive but also its subsequent repetitions. The varying characteristics of these motivic clusters are shown in Table 9.2, where each cluster is labeled by the uppercase letter corresponding with the individual motive’s lowercase letter (that is, Motivic Cluster A comprises all the repetitions of motive a, Motivic Cluster B all the repetitions of motive b, and so on). One of the most intriguing aspects of the choros is revealed in the “IOI Pattern” column of Table 9.2, which lists the varying inter-​onset intervals (IOIs) between the successive repetitions of motives within each motivic segment.12 These are shown as ordered sets of IOIs, measured in eighth-​note pulses. As the table reveals, the total duration of a series of repetitions of a given motive is not the same as the duration of its motivic cluster; motive a, for example, is only two eighth-​ note pulses long, but the irregular IOI pattern (from the initial onset of the marimba and harp dyads in m. 1 until motive b’s onset in m. 4) results in a total duration of 42 pulses for Motivic Cluster A. Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968) 207

Table 9.2  Profiles of “Chronikos” motivic clusters

§

Motivic cluster

Mm.

Instrument(s)

A

1–​3 (rep.)

Woodwinds, strings

B

4–​6 (rep.)

C

Total no. of pulses

Duration of motive

No. of repetitions

IOI pattern

Dynamic levels§

42

2

4

p

Bassoon, cello, double bass

28

2

4

p

7–​10

English horn, clarinet

22

11

2

mp–​pp

D

11–​13

Flute

16

variable

2

mf

E

14–​17

Oboe, strings

18

variable

2

mp–​mf

F

18–​19

Flute, clarinet, xylophone

14

variable

2

f, ff

G

20–​21

Cello, bassoon

14

3

2

pp

H

22–​23

English horn

12

3

4 (2 per measure)

pp

I

24–​26

Woodwinds, horn

21

variable

3

mf, f, ff

J

27–​33

Flute, violin, viola

36

1

6

fff, ff, f, mf, mp, p

Coda

34–​35

(Marimba/​harp cont’d)

16

N/​A

N/​A

N/​A

p

In the “Dynamic levels” column, dashes indicate changes within a single motive; commas indicate changes between successive repetitions of a motive.

An explanation of Example 9.6, a reduction of the choros’s opening six measures, will clarify the significance of this column on the table. The example represents the first three measures and their reprise as a single stream of 42 eighth-​note pulses, shown as stemless note heads, with the broken vertical line in the center indicating where the reprise begins. The numbers above the horizontal brackets show the IOIs between each iteration of motive a. Despite the stable ticking of the marimba and harp layer, Lutyens’s uneven temporal distribution of motives and their repetitions throughout the choros makes it difficult if not impossible for listeners to infer a regular metric framework. As shown earlier in Example 9.4, the first measure consists of marimba and harp dyads alone, beamed as a single, undifferentiated series of nine eighth-​note pulses. Without the aid of the score or any phenomenal accent other than that produced by the onset of the dyads on the downbeat of m. 1, how could a listener infer a meter from this series of attacks with any certainty?13 Empirical research into the phenomenon of subjective accenting—​the cognitive imposition of a metric structure onto an isochronous, unaccented series of pulses—​suggests that when no phenomenal accent exists to distinguish one pulse from the next, listeners (at least those acculturated to Western music) tend to “hear” binary accent patterns (strong-​weak, strong-​weak, etc.).14 These findings are directly applicable to the opening of “Chronikos.” Motivic Cluster A  begins with a series of nine identical marimba and harp dyads, Lutyens’s performance instructions specifying “strict tempo throughout” and “p sempre.” As shown in Example 9.6 by the topmost “S w” layer beneath the staff, given a default binary interpretation of meter where odd-​numbered pulses are heard as “stronger” and even-​numbered ones as “weaker,” most listeners will expect the ninth pulse to be stronger than the tenth. However, as indicated by the accent mark over the downbeat of m. 2, the entrance of the woodwinds and strings with motive a accents the tenth pulse of the choros, contradicting any binary preference to hear even-​numbered attacks as “weak.” (All accent markings on the example are added for purposes of illustration, and do not appear in Lutyens’s original score.) Already the music is beginning to challenge a listener’s ability to make sense of the indifferent stream of pulses. The accented onset of motive a on the tenth pulse creates a moment of disorientation, as the “weak” must now be reinterpreted as “strong” in order for the preferred binary pattern to continue. However, if the downbeat of m.  2 begins a new strong-​weak pattern, a second moment of disorientation occurs only eight pulses later on the downbeat of m. 3, as the onset of motive a’s second iteration again accents an even-​numbered weak pulse. This third binary interpretation beginning with the onset of the 5*measure places the first attack Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968) 209

Example 9.6 Inter-​onset intervals of Motivic Cluster A, mm. 1–​3 (repeated)

of m. 1’s reprise on the sixth, weak pulse; but since there is no accent at this point, there is nothing to interrupt the continuation of the strong-​weak pattern that began on the downbeat of m. 3. As a result, the onset of the third iteration of motive a now falls on a strong pulse, agreeing with the binary projection and thus not requiring metric reinterpretation. The fourth iteration of motive a in the reprise of m. 3 again arrives on a weak pulse, resetting the binary pattern as it did for the second iteration. The onset of Motivic Cluster B on the downbeat of m. 4 accents the sixth, weak pulse of this new binary projection, and the process of readjustment begins again. Considering Motivic Cluster A  through the lens of metric projection theory, we see a similar pattern of unpredictability and disorientation.15 Listeners who perceive the nine-​pulse IOI between the accented downbeats of mm. 1 and 2 might project the arrival of a third accent nine pulses later, but that third accent in fact occurs after only seven pulses and thus earlier than expected. Any projection of a new accent (and another repetition of motive a) seven pulses later would again be thwarted, since this time the next accent occurs after fourteen pulses—​much later than expected.16 Example 9.7 shows how the repetitions of motive b in mm. 4–​6 (Motivic Cluster B) also occur at unpredictable intervals. The pattern of IOIs here is , the continuation of which may be predictable on paper but is perhaps less so by ear. In Motivic Cluster C the IOIs are identical, but any expectations that motive c will be repeated four times (as were motives a and b) are again disrupted with the arrival of motive d (not shown) after it has been heard only twice. The remaining segments are similarly unpredictable. The opening measures thus present a fundamental duality between two principal elements, described below, the relationship between which underscores the text’s conflicted response to the problem of time and human mortality.

Element 1: The pulse stream I use the term “pulse stream” in John Roeder’s sense to describe “a series of successive, perceptibly equal time spans, marked off by accented timepoints,” usually unfolding along with other independent pulse streams created by phenomenal accents of various kinds and degrees of synchrony.17 In the context of this analysis, I reserve the term for the stream of time spans marked off by the choros’s implacable series of marimba and harp dyads, entirely predictable at the most local level and analogous to the ticking of a clock. But since we can only hear this clock, we cannot see the geometric progress around a dial of second or minute hands in their completion of their respective minutes or hours, or the numerical progress of integers on a digital clock. As a result, Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968) 211

Example 9.7 Inter-​onset intervals of Motivic Clusters B and C, mm. 7–​10

while the absolutely regular repetition of each marimba and harp dyad makes it possible to predict with complete confidence the arrival of the next, we cannot group this stream of 239 dyads into higher-​level periodicities. All we can project is its continuation into the future.

Element 2: The event stream Against the neutral, mechanical element of the marimba and harp stream, Lutyens poses a second, less predictable layer that I call the “event stream,” that is, the series of 10 distinct motives a through j. Considering the 35-​ measure length of the choros, the number of motives in this brief movement is extraordinarily high. Moreover, once each motive has been repeated the requisite number of times, it never returns, denying the listener any opportunity to grasp an overall sense of formal design, as is possible in traditional musical forms such as sonata-​allegro, rondo, or fugue. The constant succession of new motives also makes it difficult if not impossible for a listener to assign greater hierarchical status to one over another (other than perhaps attributing greater perceptual salience to the motive one hears now than to those it has pushed into the past). Table 9.2, to which we now return, illustrates a number of important characteristics and processes in the movement. First, following the initial 42-​pulse Motivic Cluster A, the clusters become progressively shorter for the first two-​thirds of the movement until the 12-​pulse cluster H ending in m. 23, before lengthening again in the final two clusters I and J to 21 and 36 pulses respectively. In other words, new motives arrive at a more or less leisurely pace at the beginning, speed up throughout most of the piece, and then slow down just before the end. This apparent slowing is counteracted by the rate of internal repetition in the final segment, a reduction of which is shown in Example 9.8. Simply by observing the changing time signatures throughout mm. 27–​32, we can see that the final two-​note motive j is stated six times, but at shorter and shorter IOIs (). This generates a sense of urgency as the repetitions consistently return sooner than we expect; metaphorically, it also mimics in a small way the experience of time passing more quickly as we age and become conscious of how little time we have left. And along with this acceleration comes a fading of musical energy, with the rapidly weakening dynamic levels from fff to p. Following the “departure” of the other instruments at the end of m. 33, the inexorable series of marimba and harp dyads comes back into aural focus—​the clock that continues its ticking even as the movement passes into nonexistence.

Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968) 213

Example 9.8 “Chronikos,” mm. 27–​end. Reproduced by permission of University of York Music Press.

The rel ationship between pulse and event streams As I have suggested, the relationship between these two elements—​the neutral, mechanistic ostinato and the event stream—​instantiates familiar aspects of the human experience of time. Painted with the broadest of strokes, this relationship consists of the conflict between measurable, Newtonian time—​ that which is reliable and predictable—​and the natural messiness and unpredictability of psychological time. Henri Bergson famously characterized this conflict by opposing to the model of artificial, mathematical time his concept of “pure duration” (la durée réelle), that is, time as directly and indivisibly experienced in human consciousness. As he observes in his introduction to The Creative Mind, “usually when we speak of time we think of the measurement of duration, not of the duration itself. But this duration which science 214  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

eliminates, and which is so difficult to conceive and express, is what one feels and lives.”18 Susanne Langer’s discussion of the incommensurability of chronological and psychological time in Feeling and Form captures even more vividly the temporal duality enacted in Lutyens’s choros: If we could experience only single, successive organic strains, perhaps subjective time would be one-​dimensional like the time ticked off by clocks. But life is always a dense fabric of concurrent tensions, and as each of them is a measure of time, the measurements themselves do not coincide. This causes our temporal experience to fall apart into incommensurate elements which cannot be all perceived together as clear forms. When one is taken as parameter, others become “irrational,” out of logical focus, ineffable.19

In “Chronikos,” the timing between motivic segments and between the motivic repetitions within them seems “irrational,” but only because we have “taken as parameter” the stable (and countable) marimba and harp ostinato; if the ostinato were absent, would we still experience unpredictable onsets of motivic repetitions as “too early” or “too late”? Expectations are raised and, at least with regard to whether a motive will be repeated, sometimes fulfilled, but this fulfillment is often mistimed. Further undermining any sense of motivic stability is the way in which each motive’s identity has barely been established when it is displaced by a new one and vanishes into the past. This brief passing into and out of existence of motives against the marimba and harp’s ostinato recalls these lines of Donne’s text, the last of which inspired Lutyens to compose the work: If we consider Tyme to be but a Measure of Motion, and howsoever it may seeme to have three stations, past, present, and future, yet the first and last of these are not (one is not, now, and the other is not yet) and that which you call present, is not now the same that it was, when you began to call it so. Before you sound that word, present, or that Monosyllable, now, the present, and the Now is past.

Donne, by this time dean of St. Paul’s, would often have preached of the Christian preference for the heavenly eternity that awaited the faithful after death over this earthly life bound by time. His rejection of “Tyme” in favour of “Eternity” is reflected in the relation of the choros to the first, sung half of the second movement, with its metrically untethered delivery of the text floating along in the seemingly unmeasured manner of plainchant. The two parts of the movement thus exemplify Donne’s distinction between “Eternity” and “Tyme,” a distinction that on a broader scale structures the work as a whole. Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968) 215

For the choros with its regular pulse represents only a small part of a much larger work—​it is indeed a “short parenthesis in a longe period.” The framing first and third movements, designed by Lutyens to musically convey the “similar states of time-​suspended ecstasy and sense of eternity” experienced in mystical trance or mescaline-​induced highs, establish and reinforce the idea of timelessness as the central concept of the work. If the previous quotations focus on the metaphysics of time, other passages of the devotion present a more immediate psychological perspective as Donne considers how heavily dependent our experience of a given life event is on its timing. One of these Lutyens also sets in the vocal section of the movement, to the tenor’s chant-​like music shown in Example 9.2. Honors, Pleasures, Possessions, presented to us, out of time, in our decrepit, and distasted, and unapprehensive Age, loose their Office, and loose their Name. Youth is their Criticall Day . . . and when they come in an unapprehensive Age, they come as a Cordial when the bell rings out, as a Pardon, when the Head is off.

These words find an instrumental corollary in the disorienting effects of motivic onsets that arrive “too early” or “too late” against the relentless passing of chronological time in the choros, reenacting the basis for Donne’s argument that truer joys are to be found in the realm of eternity. But in words and music the composer’s own voice can also be heard. Lutyens often expressed her grief over her husband’s sudden, “too-​early” death from a heart attack in 1962 and her regret that professional success did not come for her until afterwards, when she could no longer share it with him. In terms eerily reminiscent of the choros, with its clicking timbre of the claves against the marimba and harp dyads, she describes the experience of trying to sleep only a few hours after she had helplessly watched him die in bed beside her:  “But knitting-​needles click-​clacked, as morse code, in the void of my mind all night long, saying over and over again, ‘It’s all too late, too late, too late …’”20

Conclusion Is time a line? A circle? A river into which we cannot step twice? I raise these perennial questions because the problem of how to conceive of time geometrically was one that Lutyens herself puzzled over and addressed in her music. As early as 1954 her music theater piece Infidelio told a love story beginning with a woman’s suicide and moving backward through time to her first meeting with her lover. Her unpublished opera “The 216  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

Numbered,” completed in 1967—​a year before the composition of Essence of Our Happinesses—​is set in a dystopic society whose citizens know from birth when they will die, and move through life knowing exactly how far along they are on their trajectory from birth to death.21 In 1968, just a few months before the completion of Essence of Our Happinesses, she wrote both the music and lyrics for her musical “charade” Time Off? Not a Ghost of a Chance! The first scene of Time Off? opens with a scene entitled “Tempus” that includes the following dialogue between the two main characters and the Chorus, in response to the question, “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” (“Where are the snows of yesterday?”) Harold. They are THEN. THEN was now—​once. Then—​then. That yesterday looked to now—​THEN—​tomorrow—​ Stooge. Tomorrow never comes. Harold. Comes. Chorus 2. Goes. [. . .] Harold. Backwards—​forwards. Chorus 2. Now. Chorus 1. Then. [. . .] Harold. Can you hear in the round? See in the dark? Chorus 1 and 2. Labyrinth, spiral, helix, coil.22

Elsewhere in this section Harold attempts to stop time altogether by singing faster and faster. When this does not work, he sings his phrase in retrograde—​pitch by pitch, phoneme by phoneme—​while the chorus sings it forward, on the theory that simultaneous backward and forward motions will cancel each other out. The “Chronikos” section of Essence of Our Happinesses evokes in purely instrumental terms, then, questions Lutyens had already posed not only in the first half of the movement, but in compositions that preceded it: whether time is a straight line connecting past, present, and future; whether it can move backward toward the past as well as forward into the future; and whether it is not a straight line at all, but rather some intricate shape that combines both linear and cyclical motion (“labyrinth, spiral, helix, coil”). In the years that followed the completion of Essence of Our Happinesses, Lutyens composed more time-​focused works, such as The Tyme Doth Flete (1968), The Tides of Time (1969), In the Direction of the Beginning (1969), and Counting Your Steps (1971).23 As yet, however, there are neither published analyses nor recordings of any of these compositions. For scholars and performers intrigued by music that engages the philosophical riddles surrounding the nature of time and its meaning in human consciousness, Elisabeth Lutyens’s music provides a rich repository for future study and performance. Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968) 217

Notes 1. Some excellent sources of information on Lutyens’s life and career are Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, A Pilgrim Soul:  The Life and Work of Elisabeth Lutyens (London:  Michael Joseph, 1989), and Rhiannon Mathias, Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth-​Century British Music: A Blest Trio of Sirens (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). Lutyens also published a lively autobiography entitled A Goldfish Bowl (London: Cassell, 1972) that provides her vivid if sometimes controversial perspectives on the people and events of her life. For an overview of Lutyens’s compositional development, see Sarah Tenant-​Flowers, “A Study of Style and Techniques in the Music of Elisabeth Lutyens” (PhD diss., Durham University, 1991). On the influence of early music on Lutyens’s adoption of serialism, see Laurel Parsons, “Early Music and the Ambivalent Origins of Elisabeth Lutyens’s Modernism,” in British Music and Modernism, 1895–​1960, ed. Matthew Riley (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 269–​92. 2.  British composer Robert Saxton, e-​mail to the author, March 14, 2002. Essence of Our Happinesses was premiered by tenor Richard Lewis with the BBC Symphony and Chorus under the direction of Norman Del Mar on September 8, 1970. The performance was broadcast by the BBC and a recording can be heard in Britain’s National Sound Archive, but there are as yet no commercially available recordings. However, a recording of “Chronikos” by the University of British Columbia Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Dr. Jonathan Girard has been made exclusively for this volume and is available on the companion website. 3.  Unpublished program notes for Essence of our Happinesses, University of York Music Press, n.d. While Lutyens does not specify the subject of her talk, in handwritten speech notes she writes of the innovations of early English composers such as John Dunstable and Henry Purcell, and it is conceivable that the student’s question may have arisen in response to such a presentation. Reference by kind permission of the estate of Elisabeth Lutyens. 4. See R. C.  Zaehner, Mysticism Sacred and Profane:  An Inquiry into Some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience (1961; Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1957), and Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper, 1954). 5. Zaehner writes, “With Abū Yazīd in the ninth century we find Indian monism invading the Muslim mystical world, and Abū Yazīd is, for this reason, as interesting as Rimbaud in that he is torn between the classic Sufi technique of love and the Hindu monistic dogma that the soul is identical with God” (Mysticism Sacred and Profane, 161). In Zaehner’s view, Rimbaud’s conflict lay between his desires for a secular ecstasy through the dérangement de tous les sens (as related in Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer), and for loving union with the Christian God of his Catholic upbringing. 6.  Lutyens, unpublished program notes. 7. Ibid. 8.  Devotion 16 begins with the epigraph “From the bells of the church adjoining, I am daily remembered of my burial in the funerals of others,” while Devotion 17 is the source of his famous phrase, “therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” 9.  Lutyens, unpublished program notes. 10.  Lutyens herself was not a practicing Christian, having been raised by her mother as a theosophist, a doctrine that she rejected along with all organized religion from her early twenties. 11.  Lutyens’s autograph series chart can be found in the British Library’s Lutyens Collection, vol. 355, Add. MS. 64789, Rare Books and Music Reading Room, London St. Pancras. 12.  The term “inter-​onset interval” (IOI) refers to the time span between the onsets (beginnings) of two sounds, or groups of sounds such as melodic motives.

218  Part III: Music, Words, and Voices

13.  I follow Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s definition of “phenomenal accent” as “any event at the musical surface that gives emphasis or stress to a moment in the musical flow.” Phenomenal accents can be created by changes in timbre or dynamics, leaps, extended duration, and so on. Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 17. 14.  See, for example, Thaddeus L. Bolton, “Rhythm,” American Journal of Psychology 6, no. 2 (1894): 145–​238; Richard Parncutt, “A Perceptual Model of Pulse Salience and Metrical Accent in Musical Rhythms,” Music Perception 11 (1994): 409–​64; and Renaud Brochard, Donna Abecasis, Doug Potter, Richard Ragot, and Carolyn Drake, “The ‘Ticktock’ of Our Internal Clock: Direct Brain Evidence of Subjective Accents in Isochronous Sequences,” Psychological Science 14, no. 4 (July 2003): 362–​66. In the last study researchers found that sequences of initially unaccented pulses where the odd-​numbered ninth and eleventh pulses were dynamically deemphasized elicited stronger neurological (ERP) responses in listeners than deemphasis of the even-​numbered eighth and tenth. That is, once given a chance to project their own meter onto an unaccented series, listeners expected odd-​numbered time points to be stronger than even-​numbered ones, suggesting a tendency toward binary metric interpretations. I am indebted to Justin London for alerting me to this article; his own book, Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), was also influential in my thinking about this movement. 15.  Christopher Hasty develops the theory of metric projection in Meter as Rhythm (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). An important precursor to this work is the dynamic attending theory developed in the empirical research of Edward W.  Large, Mari Riess Jones, and others since the mid-​1970s, for example in Large and Jones, “The Dynamics of Attending:  How People Track Time-​Varying Events,” Psychological Review 106, no. 1 (1999): 119–​59. 16.  Since fourteen is a multiple of seven, on paper the IOI pattern would seem commensurate, but given the long series of unaccented pulses in the middle my intuition is that listeners would be unable to maintain a seven-​pulse projection that long without reinforcement. 17.  John Roeder, “Interacting Pulse Streams in Schoenberg’s Atonal Polyphony,” Music Theory Spectrum 16, no. 2 (Autumn 1994): 234. 18. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind:  An Introduction to Metaphysics (1946; New  York:  Citadel Press, 2002), 13. Bergson first described this conflict in Time and Free Will:  An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. A. L.  Podgson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910). 19.  Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribner, 1953), 113. 20. Lutyens, A Goldfish Bowl, 277. 21.  For more on this work, see Laurel Parsons, “Elisabeth Lutyens’s Music Drama The Numbered: A Critical-​Analytic Study” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2003), and Parsons, “Time Management with Twelve-​Tone Lizzie: Dramatic Functions of Meter in a Scene from Elisabeth Lutyens’s The Numbered,” Theory and Practice 30 (2005): 153–​83. 22.  Elisabeth Lutyens, Time Off? Not a Ghost of a Chance! A Charade in Four Scenes with Three Interruptions, Op. 68 (London: Olivan Press, n.d.). 23.  Scores of these compositions are available through the University of York Music Press (UYMP). See http://​www.uymp.co.uk/​composers.php?composer_​id=20.

Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968) 219

Glossary

Boldfaced type indicates terms that are defined in this glossary. { }—​indicate an unordered set, i.e. a set whose elements may occur in varying order or simultaneously. < >—​indicate an ordered set, i.e. a set whose elements are listed in the order in which they occur. acciaccatura—​an ornament in which a principal, accented note is preceded by another very quick, unaccented note either a semitone or whole tone below or above it. Generally indicated by a small slashed eighth note. aggregate—​the complete set of all 12 pitch classes. aleatory—​a form of composition in which the composer relinquishes control over one or more elements, for example by using dice to decide the order of pitch classes, or allowing performers to choose the order in which they play the sections of a piece. anacrusis—​a relatively unaccented note, or group of notes, that begins a phrase and leads to the downbeat of the next measure. Also known as an “upbeat” or “pickup.” attack—​the onset (beginning) of a sound. attack density—​the rate at which attacks occur within a given time span. complement—​for any group of elements (usually pitch classes) that is part of a larger set, the group of remaining elements needed to complete the set. For example, in music where the total set of pitch classes is the entire chromatic collection, the complement of the six-​note whole-​tone set {C, D, E, F♯, G♯, A♯} is the other six-​note whole-​ tone set {D♭, E♭, F, G, A, B}. complementation mod 6—​the principle of complementation described above, but involving a total of 6 elements rather than 12. duration series—​an ordered set of note durations, usually recurring in various contexts and transformations throughout a composition. durational potential—​the listener’s sensation that an event that is just beginning will have a particular duration. dyad—​a group of two different notes, played sequentially or simultaneously. foreground—​a term generalized from Schenkerian analysis referring to the most immediately perceptible layer of a musical composition. gesture—​the synthesis of a sequence of notes or other elements into a single, indivisible temporal gestalt.

hemiola—​a metric device, usually across two measures of triple meter, in which the shifting of accents from to creates the impression of a faster duple meter (, , ) or a broader triple meter (). [Note: Boldfaced type indicates accents.] heptachord—​a group of seven different notes, played sequentially, simultaneously, or in some combination of these. hermeneutics—​the theory and practice of interpreting a verbal or nonverbal text. hexachord—​a group of six different notes, played sequentially, simultaneously, or in some combination of these. hexachordal combinatoriality—​ the relationship between two simultaneous row forms such that the first hexachords of each row are complementary to each other, as are the second hexachords. In this way, twelve-​tone aggregates are formed both horizontally, by each individual row, and vertically, by the combinations of the complementary hexachords. hexatonic system—​a term referring to the hexachordal set class (014589), which has been favored by many twentieth-​century composers because of its high degree of symmetry. I-​ordering—​an inversion or mirror image of a given series such that the order and size of intervals between pitch classes are maintained, but the contour is reversed. For example, two possible inversions or I-​orderings of the pitch class series are and . integral serialism—​a form of serial composition in which aspects such as rhythmic durations, dynamics, and articulations, as well as pitch, are organized into ordered rows of elements. See also serialism. inter-​onset interval—​the time span between the onsets (attacks) of two sequential sounds or groups of sounds. interval—​see pitch interval and pitch-​class interval. interval class (ic)—​the shortest distance between two pitch classes, measured in semitones. See also pitch-​class interval. invariance—​the preservation of one or more pitch classes between an original set and a particular transposition, inversion, or other transformation of that set. For example, the transposition of the set {F, G, A, B} by two semitones is {G, A, B, C♯}, and the invariance between the two sets is the smaller set (or invariant subset) {G, A, B}. inversion—​the process of “flipping” a pitch or pitch-​class set such that the order of intervals is maintained, but the direction in which the intervals were originally measured is inverted (reversed). For example, two possible inversions of the pitch set are and . matrix—​in twelve-​tone theory, a 12 × 12 representation of the transpositions and inversions of a row, usually with transpositions read from left to right and inversions from top to bottom. melisma—​several notes sung to a single syllable. moment form—​ a structural (or antistructural) principle introduced by Karlheinz Stockhausen in which the sections of a work are to be experienced as present, independent units (moments) equal to each other in importance, and whose order is inconsequential. motive—​a short, recognizable melodic or rhythmic figure that recurs throughout a composition, either in its original form or varied in some way. neo-​Riemannian—​a branch of music theory based on the transformational principles introduced by the nineteenth-​century theorist Hugo Riemann, developed and mathematically systematized since the 1980s by David Lewin and others.

222 Glossary

normal order (or normal form)—​the most compact ordering of a pitch-​class set. For example, the normal order of the pitch-​class set {F, B, E} is . octatonic—​an eight-​note scale that divides the octave into alternating whole tones and semitones, either or . Owing to the intervallic symmetry of the scale, there are only three distinct octatonic collections. ordered set—​a group of elements (e.g., pitches, rhythmic durations) listed in order of their occurrence in the music. In this book, ordered sets are enclosed in angle brackets, e.g., . See also unordered set. ostinato—​a repeating rhythmic or melodic figure. P-​ordering—​the original (“prime”) ordering of elements in a series such as a tone row or duration series. permutation—​a reordering of the elements in a set. phoneme—​the smallest sound element of a syllable. pitch—​a specific frequency, usually designated by its musical letter name, and a number representing its register. This book adopts the Acoustical Society of America convention, where A0 is the lowest key on the piano, C1 the lowest C on the piano, and the register numbers increase with every subsequent C (e.g., C4 = middle C). pitch class (pc)—​a group of all pitches related by octave and enharmonic transposition, designated by a musical letter name. For example, pitch class B♭ includes all possible B♭s and A♯s. In post-​tonal music the 12 pitch classes of the equal-​tempered chromatic scale are often represented by integers from 0 to 11, where C = 0 and 11 = B. Pitch classes 10 and 11 may also be represented by the letters “t” and “e,” respectively. Pitch classes are often represented around a circular clock face, with 0 (usually C) replacing the 12 at the top. pitch interval (pi)—​the distance between two pitches, designated either by its traditional interval name, such as “major second” or “whole step,” or by the number of semitones between them. For example, the pitch interval from A4 to B4 is two semitones, but the pi from A4 to B5 is 14 semitones. pitch-​class interval—​the distance between two pitch classes, measured in semitone steps around a circular, clock-​face diagram. An ordered pitch-​class interval represents the distance from one pitch class to another, measured clockwise around the clock; e.g., the ordered pc interval is 7. An unordered pitch-​class interval (or interval class) represents the shortest distance between two pitch classes; e.g., the unordered pc interval {C, G} is 5. pitch-​class multiplication (M-​operation)—​an operation, Mx, in which integers representing the pitch classes in a set are multiplied by a given number (x) to create a new set. Resulting integers larger than 11 are reduced by 12, or multiples of 12, so that they can be mapped onto the 12 pitch classes of the chromatic collection. For example, multiplying the pitch class B (11) by M5 yields 55 less 48 (4 × 12) = 7 (G). Applying M5 to the entire chromatic scale transforms it into (or “maps it onto”) the circle of fourths, and M7 transforms it into the circle of fifths. pitch-​class set—​a group of pitch classes. In an ordered pc set, represented in this book by angle brackets, the order in which the pitch classes are listed matters. In an unordered pc set, represented by curly brackets, the order of elements is irrelevant. prime form—​the numerical representation of a pitch-​class set’s normal (most compact) form, where 0 represents a reference pc and the remaining numbers the distance of the other pcs in semitones “up” from that reference (or “down,” in the case of an inverted set). For example, the prime form of the pc set {C, C♯, F♯, G} is 0167. See also set class. projective potential—​the sensation that a just-​completed duration will be reproduced.

Glossary 223

retrograde—​in reverse order, from the end to the beginning. retrograde inversion—​an inversion of a set of notes, presented backward from the end to the beginning. RI-​chain—​a series of overlapping ordered pitch class sets related by retrograde inversion. For example, the set