Tonality Since 1950 351511582X, 9783515115827

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Tonality Since 1950

Tonal

lity

Since 1950

Musikwissenschaft

Franz Steiner Verlag

Edited by Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler and Philip Rupprecht

Tonality Since 1950 Edited by Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler and Philip Rupprecht

Tonality Since 1950 Edited by Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler and Philip Rupprecht

Franz Steiner Verlag

Mit freundlicher Unterstützung der

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar. Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig und strafbar. © Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2017 Druck: Offsetdruck Bokor, Bad Tölz Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier. Printed in Germany. ISBN 978-3-515-11582-7 (Print) ISBN 978-3-515-11589-6 (E-Book)

Contents Contributors

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Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht Introduction

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Concepts and Contexts



Ulrich Mosch Foundation or Mere Quotation? Conditions for Applying the Tonality Concept to Music After 1950

27

Wolfgang Rathert Total Tonality or Tonal Totality: A Compositional Issue in Music After 1945

51

Joseph Auner The Stopped Clock: Tape Loops, Synthesizers, and the Transfiguration of Harmony

65

Nicole Biamonte Pop/Rock Tonalities

89

Perspectives of the Mid-Century Thomas Ahrend “Das Wunderland”: Tonality and (Political) Topography in Eisler’s Songs Around 1950

105

Ullrich Scheideler Tonality in Henze’s Music of the 1950s and Early 1960s

129

Felix Meyer “Everything we love belongs to us”: George Rochberg’s Adoption of Tonality

153

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Judit Frigyesi The Macro- and Micro-Lives of Sounds in Morton Feldman’s The Viola in My Life I

167

Processes, Objects, Functions, and Resonances: Directions Since 1970 Keith Potter Harmonic Progressions as a Gradual Process: Towards an Understanding of the Development of Tonality in the Music of Steve Reich

189

Philip Rupprecht Tonality Rediscovered: Oliver Knussen and the Musical “Object” in the 1970s

209

Peter J. Schmelz Tonality After “New Tonality”: Silvestrov, Schnittke, and Polystylism in the Late USSR

233

Eric Drott Saariaho, Timbre, and Tonality

259

Simone Heilgendorff Projected Resonance: Tonal Dimensions of Microtonal Composition in Music by Georg Friedrich Haas

283

Felix Wörner Tonality as “Irrationally Functional Harmony”: Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet

295

Volker Helbing “Hungarian Tonality”? György Kurtág’s … rappel des oiseaux … from the Perspective of Albert Simon’s Theory of Tonfelder

313

Index

333

Contributors Thomas Ahrend is a member of the editorial staff and management team of the Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe at the Music Department of the University of Basel. He was previously a member of the editorial staff of the Hanns Eisler Gesamtausgabe in Berlin. His publications include a monograph on Eisler’s instrumental music, Aspekte der Instrumentalmusik Hanns Eislers: Zu Form und Verfahren in den Variationen (Berlin, 2005), and critical editions, with Albrecht Dümling and Volker Helbing, of some of his works (Wiesbaden, 2002 and 2012). He is co-editor with Matthias Schmidt of Der junge Webern: Texte und Kontexte (Vienna, 2015) and Webern-Philologien (Vienna, 2016). Joseph Auner is Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Music at Tufts University. His scholarly work focuses on Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, turn-of-the-century Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and music and technology. He is author of Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (New York, 2015) for the Norton series Western Music in Context, A Schoenberg Reader (New Haven, 2003), Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, co-edited with Judy Lochhead (New York, 2001), and the Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, co-edited with Jennifer Shaw (Cambridge, 2010). Nicole Biamonte is Associate Professor of Music Theory at McGill University and has taught at Yale University, Skidmore College, and the University of Iowa. Her dissertation explored the historical context and function of modal structures in works of Beethoven, Brahms, and Schumann. She remains interested in musical historicism in the nineteenth century, and has published on connections between the “Crucifixus” of Bach’s B-minor Mass and Chopin’s and Scriabin’s E-minor Préludes (Intégral, 2012). Among her publications on popular music are articles and book chapters on pitch and rhythmic structures in rock music in Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online, and elsewhere; on exoticism in the music of the Canadian band Rush (in Rush and Philosophy, 2011); and on musical representation in the video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, in her own edited collection Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom (2010). She is editor-in-chief of the Society for Music Theory’s open-access journal Music Theory Online. Eric Drott is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Texas at Austin. His research span several areas, including the aesthetics, analysis, and cultural politics of avant-garde musics; contemporary music cultures in France; music, politics, and social movements; and music in contemporary algorithmic cultures. He is author of Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981 (Berkeley, 2011). Recent work includes an essay on

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music, social movements, and the controversies surrounding the drum circle at Occupy Wall Street, to appear in a special issue of Contemporary Music Review devoted to actor-network theory and music; a study of how technologies of information retrieval employed in the distribution of music online are reshaping notions of musical genre; and a re-evaluation of Jacques Attali’s Noise (in Critical Inquiry, 2015). Currently, he is co-editing with Noriko Manabe the Oxford Handbook of Protest Music. Judit Frigyesi is Associate Professor of Music at Bar Ilan University, and Visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University and the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. As a musicologist and ethnomusicologist, she is a leading scholar of Béla Bartók – author of Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest (Berkeley, 1998) – and of Eastern European Jewish prayer chant. She is the only scholar who has systematically collected the music of Jewish ritual in Communist Eastern Europe after the Holocaust. In the past decade her interests have turned toward new or unusual modes of expression in music, literature, and film (including works by Ligeti, Kurtág, Feldman, Schultz, Celan, Sebald, and Tarr). She is also active as a writer, poet, photographer, and creator of multi-media projects. She has recently published her documentary novel Writing on Water (Libri, 2014). Simone Heilgendorff, a German musicologist and violist, is currently head of the international research project “New Music Festivals as Agorai” at the University of Salzburg and head of the ConTempOhr program – on mediating contemporary music – in the cooperative research area Wissenschaft und Kunst at the University of Salzburg and University Mozarteum. She is also the violist and a founding member of the Kairos Quartett, a Berlin-based string quartet specializing in contemporary music. Her main research areas are contemporary and Baroque music, cultural and psychological contexts of music, the Americana around John Cage, analysis, performance practice, and cultures of musical interpretation. Her scholarly publications include the book Experimentelle Inszenierung von Sprache und Musik: Vergleichende Analysen zu Dieter Schnebel und John Cage (Freiburg, 2002) and more than forty journal contributions and book chapters. Volker Helbing is Professor of Music Theory at Hannover University of Music, Drama, and Media; previously he was Visiting Professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and at Trossingen University of Music, Lecturer at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, and Lecturer at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen. His publications include the monograph Choreographie und Distanz: Studien zur Ravel-Analyse (Hildesheim, 2008), a chapter in Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music (Rochester, 2011), the essay “Tonalität in der französischen Musiktheorie zwischen Rameau und Fétis” (in Musiktheorie, ed. Helga de la Motte-Haber and Oliver Schwab-Felisch, 2005), and several essays on twentieth-century European composers including Debussy, Eisler, Scelsi, Ligeti, and Murail.

9 Felix Meyer is the Director of the Paul Sacher Foundation. He has published widely on twentieth-century music, and has edited and co-edited a number of books including Settling New Scores: Music Manuscripts from the Paul Sacher Foundation (Mainz, 1998), Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary (Woodbridge, 2006), Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents (Woodbridge, 2008), and Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000 (Woodbridge, 2014). Ulrich Mosch is Professor of Musicology at the University of Geneva, and was previously Curator of Music Manuscripts at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. His main research interests concern music and music aesthetics in the twentieth century and through the present. His publications include Musikalisches Hören serieller Musik: Untersuchungen am Beispiel von Pierre Boulez’ “Le Marteau sans maître” (Saarbrücken, 2004), and several edited volumes, including the collected writings of Wolfgang Rihm (Ausgesprochen: Schriften und Gespräche; Winterthur, 1997), Paul Sacher: Facetten einer Musikerpersönlichkeit (Mainz, 2006), and Igor Strawinsky, Le sacre du printemps: Facsimile of the Autograph Full Score (London, 2013). Keith Potter is a Reader in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was Head of the Department in 2004–07. Active as both musicologist and music journalist, he was for many years Chief Editor of Contact: a Journal of Contemporary Music, the thirty-four issues of which will soon be available online. For a decade, he was a music critic for The Independent daily newspaper. A founding committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music, he was its Chair during 2011–13. His book Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass was published by Cambridge in 2000 (paperback edition, 2002); The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, co-edited with Kyle Gann and Pwyll ap Siôn, appeared in 2013. He is currently working on several projects arising from research on the archive of Steve Reich’s materials at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Wolfgang Rathert is Professor of Musicology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich; his research interests cover music of the twentieth century through the present. He has published Charles Ives (Darmstadt, 1996) and co-edited Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000, with Carol Oja, Anne C. Shreffler, and Felix Meyer (Woodbridge, 2014); he also co-edited the Chamber Music volume of the Kurt Weill Critical Edition with Jürgen Selk (New York, 2004). He is a member of the advisory boards of the Géza Anda Foundation (Zurich), the Paul Sacher Foundation (Basel), and the Routledge book series Musical Cultures in the 20th Century. He contributed the essay “The Legacy of German Rule: Some Reflections on Another Musical Iceberg in the Transatlantic Relationships of Music History” to Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice (Stuttgart, 2012).

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Philip Rupprecht is Professor of Music at Duke University. He is the author of British Musical Modernism: the Manchester Group and their Contemporaries (Cambridge, 2015) and Britten’s Musical Language (Cambridge, 2001); editor of Rethinking Britten (Oxford, 2013); and co-editor, with Felix Wörner and Ullrich Scheideler, of Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice (Stuttgart, 2012). Other recent writings have appeared in Harrison Birtwistle Studies, Music and Narrative Since 1900, Musical Quarterly, and Tempo. Ullrich Scheideler is Head of Music Theory at Humboldt-University in Berlin and a former editor of the Arnold Schoenberg Critical Edition. His publications include Komponieren im Angesicht der Musikgeschichte: Studien zur geistlichen a-capella-Musik in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts im Umkreis der Sing-Akademie zu Berlin (Berlin, 2010), the critical editions of Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand (Mainz, 2005), and Autorschaft als historische Konstruktion, co-edited with Andreas Meyer (Stuttgart, 2001). He is currently preparing a book on Alban Berg’s String Quartet, Op. 3. Peter J. Schmelz is Associate Professor of Musicology in the School of Music at Arizona State University. His article “Valentin Silvestrov and the Echoes of Music History” recently received a Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. His first book Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (Oxford, 2009) also received a Deems Taylor award. He is currently completing a book titled Sonic Overload: Polystylism as Cultural Practice in the Late USSR, about Schnittke and Silvestrov. He is also writing a book for the Oxford Keynotes series on Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1. He serves as editor, with Jesse Rodin, of the Journal of Musicology and, with Simon Morrison, of the Russian Music Studies series at Indiana University Press. Felix Wörner is a research associate and Lecturer in the Music Department of the University of Basel, serves as co-editor of the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, and was previously Assistant Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include the music of the Second Viennese School, and the history of music theory and aesthetics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; his book Imagining Form in Music is in preparation. Other publications include a monograph on the early twelve-tone works of Anton Webern (Berne, 2004), numerous articles in journals and edited books, and Lexikon Schriften über Musik, Bd. 1: Musiktheorie. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, co-edited with Ullrich Scheideler (Kassel, 2017).

Introduction Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht To speak of tonality is less to point by ostensive definition to an object, than to engage in a language-game. The word catches at our most familiar musical experiences of pitch and harmony, and yet the concept evades univocal meaning.1 Tovey’s quip about tonality – “a thing which you can no more describe except by metaphors and comparisons than you can describe the taste of a peach”2 – encapsulates its resistance to language. Whether or not tonality constitutes a sharply-defined category or merely a verbal sign for facets of music’s time-bound arc, it remains central to the shared discourse of composers, performers, and listeners. As a concept, tonality appears perennially caught between the acoustical and the metaphysical, between sonic realities and mediating contingencies of culture. The difficulty, in a sense, is with tonality’s very familiarity: behind the “second nature” of its conventional invariance, as Adorno observed, lie the sedimented layers of history.3 It is through historical framing, likewise, that one begins to narrow down the conceptual field of view, by defining tonality, for example, as a type of “key-feeling” that succeeded earlier periods of modal polyphony; or (with greater precision of chronology) by recognizing a musical phenomenon that flourished between circa 1600 and circa 1910.4 As our title makes clear, it is the chronological limits of such definitions that we deliberately challenge in Tonality Since 1950.

1 2 3

4

On meaning in definitions versus language-games, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), paragraphs 6–7. Donald Francis Tovey, A Musician Talks 1: The Integrity of Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 47. Theodor W. Adorno, “Musik, Sprache, und ihr Verhältnis im gegenwärtigen Komponieren” (1956), in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978) 16:649–64 (650); trans. Susan H. Gillespie as “Music, Language, and Composition,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard D. Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 113–26. For representative definitions along these lines, see, respectively George Dyson, “Tonality,” Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3rd ed., ed. H. C. Colles (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 5:356; and Brian Hyer, “Tonality,” New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), 25:583–94 (583). For fuller collation of definitions of tonality by French-, German-, and English-speaking authors, see Michael Beiche, “Tonalität,” in Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995), 412–33.

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The volume brings together new essays by fifteen contributors covering a wide repertoire of concert music (and exemplars from the pop and rock genres, too) composed in Europe, America, and the former Soviet Union over the past half-century. Approaching the tonality question in very specific and perhaps unfamiliar historical terms, Tonality Since 1950 serves as a companion and sequel to our earlier volume, Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice.5 Together, the two books map a full century of tonal practices, with contributions from a team of European and North-American scholars.6 We are well aware of the historical revisionism inherent to such a project. While we are hardly the first to find that the historiography of twentieth-century music has ignored or marginalized tonal music, no new historical account has yet emerged.7 For many readers, certain basic questions will immediately arise: Why study tonality in the twentieth century, a period that followed its heyday? Is the history of music since 1900 not better served by other familiar descriptors of pitch relations – post-tonal, atonal, twelve-tone, or serial? Among composers of the past century, the sense of belatedness with regard to tonality is certainly undeniable. Looking back on eighteenth-century music, the French composer Gérard Grisey observed, not without envy and regret, that for Mozart “the tonal language was something unquestionably there, available, known, learned, mastered.”8 For many composers working in the past century, however, a sense of tonality’s availability – of simply being there – has gone. “Earlier music,” Alfred Schnittke remarked in the 1980s, was “a beautiful way of writing that has disappeared and will never come back; and in that sense it has a tragic feeling for me.”9 To György Ligeti, by the early 1990s, the belatedness of musical means was something still broader: “Both functional tonality and atonality have worn out, along with twelve-tone equal temperament.”10 Throughout the last century, tonality has been understood as a lost object, the epitome of the unattainable, the bygone, the vanished. The case is by no means clear-cut, though, and not all composers have shared Schnittke’s bleak view of tonality as a tragic fait accompli. Hans Werner Henze, in the early 1960s, saw an ongoing need for younger composers to study theories “of earlier centuries”; historical and technical continuities between old and new music were, he felt, underestim5 6 7 8

9 10

Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht, eds., Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012). As an aid to readers, the Index below covers both the present volume and Tonality 1900–1950. For a valuable discussion, see Frank Hentschel, “Formen neuer Tonalität in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 63 (2006): 67–93. “Le langage tonal inquestionné était là, disponible, connu, appris, maîtrisé.” Gérard Grisey, “Question de langage,” in Grisey, Écrits, ou L’invention de la musique spectrale, ed. Guy Lelong with Anne-Marie Réby (Paris: Éditions MF, 2008), 185; our translation. Grisey’s manuscript note is undated. Cited in Allan Kozinn, “An Eclectic Mix, Through a Contemporary Prism,” New York Times (22 May 1988), 23. György Ligeti, “Rhapsodische Gedanken über Musik, besonders über meine eigenen Kompositionen” (1991), repr. in Ligeti, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Monika Lichtenfeld (Mainz: Schott, 2007), 2:123–35 (133): “Sowohl die funktionale Tonalität als auch die Atonalität haben sich abgenutzt, ebenso die gleichschwebende zwölftönige Temperatur.” Our translation.

Introduction

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ated.11 Other practitioners, while acknowledging the fact of tonality’s loss, have sensed the possibility of its return. In 1970, Steve Reich predicted that “The pulse and the concept of clear tonal center will reemerge as basic sources of new music.”12 To many present-day observers, Reich’s prediction would appear to have come true. For Ligeti, meanwhile, the way forward was to develop new types of intonation (and of tonality), drawing on non-European musics.13 Even so, it is hard to forget Grisey’s remarks on Mozart’s tonality, for they signal feelings of historical belatedness that seem peculiarly twentieth-century. In the distance between Schnittke’s dystopian pronouncement of tonality’s irrevocable loss, and Reich’s confident anticipation of its return, one glimpses the special historical complexity facing composers working since 1950. There would be no need to assert continuities between twentieth-century tonal practices and those of earlier periods, were it not for the ubiquity of a received narrative. The story of a dramatic break with tonality – in the music of Arnold Schoenberg and his circle after about 1908 – and of its exhaustion and eventual demise, was firmly in place by mid-century. Among many tellings we might cite is this capsule version, published by an eminent music historian in 1960: The first half of the 20th century passed under the sign of violent antitheses. First there was revolutionary dissolution, followed by severe, tradition-oriented concentration; emphatic subjectivity, then dogged objectivity and studied collectivism. […] Melody, in the post-Impressionistic world, became a color patch, an exclamation, the smooth surface of its face ruined by the varicose veins of incessant chromaticism. Then there developed a desire for broad design, diatonicism, folk tunes in the old ecclesiastic modes, even pentatonic melodies, only to be succeeded by “rows.” The tonal system, already showing ambiguities in Tristan, disintegrated, then the aimlessly floating harmonic clouds were blown away, and “atonality” was subjected to military discipline.14

The hectic plot turns within Paul Henry Lang’s account trace a series of reactions to an initial revolution. A varied sequence of later stylistic and technical developments – folkish diatonicism, row composition, atonality – are understood to flow from the singular event of tonality’s “disintegration.” In Lang’s florid metaphors, one catches a certain bewilderment in the face of music’s rapid stylistic evolution, or else a gently teasing retort to the dogmatic polemics of 1950s new-music fashion (as in his later facetious reference to “the government of the avant garde”).15 There is also much to debate in Lang’s narrative. His reliance on a breezily teleological view of music-historical process uncritically asserts influences and causal connections 11 12 13 14

15

See his comments on “[…] den alten Lehren der früheren Jahrhunderte” in Henze, “Über Kompositionslehre (1963),” in Musik und Politik: Schriften und Gespräche 1955–1984, ed. Jens Brockmeier (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984), 91–92 (91). “Some Optimistic Predictions (1970) about the Future of Music,” repr. in Steve Reich, Writings on Music: 1965–2000, ed. Paul Hillier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 51–52 (52). See Ligeti, “Rhapsodische Gedanken,” 133 and 134. Paul Henry Lang, “Introduction,” in Problems of Modern Music: the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies, ed. Paul Henry Lang (New York: Norton, 1960), 7–16 (8–9). Aspects of the tonal-disintegration narrative may be found in most music-historical textbooks published after about 1930. Lang, “Introduction,” 12.

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among an array of musical styles and techniques, synoptically catalogued. Readers seeking music-theoretic perspectives, meanwhile, might bristle at the confident grammatical singularity of Lang’s clipped reference to “the tonal system,” in the absence of any mention of writings by Schenker, Schoenberg, Kurth, or Hindemith. It is not difficult to identify, in Lang’s figure of a “disintegrating” tonal system, the workings of historiographic cliché; in his version of the historical record, tonality’s loss is the foundational myth of what is often called musical modernism.16 Half a century further on, we find it increasingly difficult to accept a history of twentieth-century musical stylistic metamorphoses tethered only to a story of tonality’s purported collapse. In Tonality Since 1950 – as in its predecessor – the conscious aim is to throw new emphasis on continuities with past practices, rather than sudden breaks. The date in the title of the current volume demarcates a period of multiple ongoing engagements with tonality over the past half-century, not the aftermath of some singular collapse. While chronological precision is crucial to the enterprise, we do not claim to provide anything approaching a comprehensive “history” of tonality in the post-1950 period, either as a conceptual category or a compositional practice. More modestly, we lay some groundwork in the form of a series of intersecting and overlapping case studies. The historical scope of our first volume encompassed composers born in the 1860s and 1870s (Satie, Vaughan Williams, Schoenberg) through the 1910s (Barber, Britten), with accompanying essays treating theoretical contexts from Schoenberg and Kurth to Hindemith and Cowell.17 In Tonality Since 1950, the protagonists are no less eclectic a group, extending from (again) Hindemith (b. 1895) to Thomas Adès (b. 1971), by way of Hanns Eisler, George Rochberg, Luciano Berio, Morton Feldman, György Kurtág, Hans Werner Henze, Alfred Schnittke, Steve Reich, Hans Zender, Valentin Silvestrov, Helmut Lachenmann, Oliver Knussen, Wolfgang Rihm, Kaija Saariaho, and Georg Friedrich Haas. To these composers of so-called classical or “concert” music, moreover, we add a smaller but representative selection from the vast pop and rock traditions, moving historically from the Beatles (“Can’t Buy Me Love,” 1964) and Jimi Hendrix (“Hey Joe,” 1966) to Soundgarden (“Black Hole Sun,” 1994). All of these musicians have composed in ways we believe count meaningfully as “tonal,” for all the conceptual difficulties noted earlier. The obvious diversity of tonal practices is something that will emerge more fully within individual chapters. A cursory overview of some broader historical, methodological, and epistemic motifs of the period, meanwhile, will set the scene for a whole circle of creation. It is the inheritance of tonality from earlier music that most often provides a logical starting point for composers working since 1950.18 The idea of a “common 16

17 18

Among recent critiques of the historiography of tonality’s collapse, see Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 358–60; and J. P. E. Harper-Scott, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 175–77. Others composers discussed in Tonality 1900–1950 include Koechlin, Ravel, Prokofiev, Milhaud, Hindemith, Stürmer, Sessions, Harris, and Weill. For thoughtful attention to this point, see Daniel Harrison, Pieces of Tradition: An Analysis of Contemporary Tonal Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), Ch. 1.

Introduction

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practice” shared by composers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, advanced by Walter Piston in his influential textbook Harmony (first published in 1941), was essentially empirical.19 Theory, for Piston, followed practice; his book catalogued norms of chordal vocabulary and usage, ultimately, as a stepping-stone to understanding “the individual harmonic practices of composers of all periods.”20 Newer music, while clearly “divergent” from the past, also presented continuities.21 For most readers, however, the empirical side of Piston’s project quickly settled into a more fixed entity: “the” common practice, as Daniel Harrison notes, became “a conceptual category” in its own right.22 The flourishing of tonality throughout the past twentieth century has increasingly undermined historically closed views of its demise. A post-1900 century of tonality, similarly, poses theoretic-conceptual challenges to the post-Pistonian argument of an idealized common practice. Where George Dyson’s early-twentieth century Grove article speaks of Classical practice tonality as evolving from “modal polyphony,”23 present-day theorists propose other stories. An “extended common practice” – spanning polyphonic structures of Western music from the Renaissance through the present – Dmitri Tymoczko argues, locates Baroque-Classical tonal norms at the intersection of “two separate common practices,” contrapuntal and harmonic.24 Twentieth-century tonality, on this view, is not different in kind from sixteenth-century precursors; both repertories involve techniques of “connecting harmonically significant chords by efficient voice leading.”25 With concepts of harmonic “distance” among triads center-stage, Richard Cohn traces a “double syntax” in nineteenth-century scores: “nonclassical principles exist in close proximity to other behaviors that are normal under classical diatonic tonality.”26 From Romantic-era triadic progressions in chromatic spaces, Cohn discerns a clear historical path to the six-tone (hexatonic) and eight-tone (octatonic) scalar and chordal formations prominent in Liszt and early twentieth-century composers (Debussy, Stravinsky).27 Discussions of common-practice, diatonic, or chromatic tonality among historians of music theory remain far from settled, and proponents of neo-Riemannian and transformation theories have until recently restricted their analytical work to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertories.28 If a post-1950 perspective can 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Walter Piston, “Introduction,” in Harmony (New York: Norton, 1941), 1. Piston, Harmony, 2. “The experimental period of the early twentieth century will appear far less revolutionary when the lines of development from the practice of older composers become clearer by familiarity with the music.” Piston, Harmony, 2. Harrison, Pieces of Tradition, 6. Dyson, “Tonality,” Grove’s Dictionary, 3rd edition, 5:356. Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213; emphasis in the original. Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music, 224. Richard Cohn, Audacious Euphony: Chromaticism and the Triad’s Second Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 11. Cohn, Audacious Euphony, 207. Notable exceptions to this Classical-Romantic bias come in the work of theorists of pop, rock,

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contribute to ongoing and emergent conversation, then, it might do so first by drawing attention to the relatively unfamiliar triad and seventh-chord progressions favored by composers such as Eisler, Rochberg, Schnittke, and Adès, for whom even early-twentieth century practices represent an increasingly remote reference point. A second contribution – arguably more radical – is to recontextualize received ideas of a “classical” (i. e., art-music defined) common practice in relation to other noless widely disseminated norms – those of pop and rock music. While both classical and pop/rock repertories share foundational syntactic norms of pitch hierarchy, centricity, and harmonic function, the details in other respects are strikingly divergent. The subdominant/plagal orientation so common within rock triadic progressions, for example, partly reflects guitar-based blues influences. To many musicians, post1950, the phrase “common practice” might seem opaque – which practice are we talking about? Among a plurality of diverse practices, just who is speaking the lingua franca? Who stands at the center, who on the periphery? In the post-1950 period, one encounters tonality as a leitmotif of the narrative of musical progress central to artistic modernism. It is under the sign of tonality’s abandonment that the progress of “the new music” has often been proclaimed; the bolder pronouncements can make for strange reading at a safe historical distance. In a 1947 newspaper column, “Modernism today,” the composer and critic Virgil Thomson enthusiastically observed that “today’s adventurous young, believe me, are mostly atonal.”29 He restated the claim three years later, under the heading “Atonality Today,” identifying twelve-tone “research and experiment” as “the main field of musical composition where progress is taking place.”30 In the rethinking of all music’s parameters, Thomson observed, a Parisian avant-garde – René Leibowitz, Olivier Messiaen, and the young Pierre Boulez – were leading the way: “If the first problem in atonality is to avoid familiar tonal relations, its second is surely to avoid familiar metrical ones. Complete renewal of the musical language and not a mere abandonment of its decayed portions, still less a spicing up of spoiled material, let us remember, is the aim of the atonal group.”31 Similarly confident assertions of musical renewal abound in the mid-century; the frequency of their circulation in mainstream press outlets (as here) – as well as in specialist periodicals (La Revue musicale in Paris, The Score in London, Die Reihe in Cologne) – is a reminder of just how vast, suddenly, the distance between the new and the old ap-

29 30 31

jazz, and film music; and in the eclectic repertories studied in Tymoczko, A Geometry of Tonal Music, and Harrison, Pieces of Tradition. For neo-Riemannian and transformational perspectives, see respectively The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories, ed. Edward Gollin and Alexander Rehding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Steven Rings, Tonality and Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Virgil Thomson, “Modernism Today,” New York Herald Tribune (Feb. 2, 1947); repr. in Thomson, Music Chronicles: 1940–1954, ed. Tim Page (New York: Library of America, 2014), 589–91 (589). “Atonality Today (I),” Herald Tribune (Jan. 29, 1950), repr. in Thomson, Music Chronicles, 757–60 (757). “Atonality Today (II),” Herald Tribune (Feb. 5, 1950), repr. in Thomson, Music Chronicles, 760–62 (761).

Introduction

17

peared. For modernist or avant-garde musicians working with twelve-tone rows, the old was easily identified as tonal. The rift between tonal practices, widely regarded as outdated, and a serial-led avant garde movement deepens significantly in the 1950s and 1960s. “No one could have foreseen the sudden upsurge in interest in dodecaphonic methods on the part of a new postwar generation,” Aaron Copland reported in 1968.32 Facets of the full complexity of the picture will emerge in the chapters to follow. In a more panoramic way, we note en passant the intensity of the zero-hour ethos of the immediate postWorld War II years; the prominent position of the novel technological means of concrete and electronic music composed in studios in Paris, Cologne, Milan, or New York; and the prestige accorded the post-war “upsurge” of serialism at leading new music festivals such as the Darmstadt Ferienkurse. Tonality, in such a climate, was not much discussed by the more polemical guardians of “progress.” Leading composers who did retain ties to bygone expressive idioms – even figures formerly considered progressives – risked a damaging loss of reputation. Such was the case for Hindemith, who had publicly denounced twelve-tone music for a lack of “higher tonal organization,” and in whose scores of the 1950s triadic consonances were more prominent than ever.33 A younger figure like Henze too, suffered “a kind of excommunication” by his own generation for the excessively Romantic gestures of his newer scores in the 1950s.34 Igor Stravinsky’s turn towards twelve-tone techniques after The Rake’s Progress (1951) was a widely noticed and, for many, highly symbolic “conversion.”35 The burgeoning interests of composers as varied as Copland, Barber, Shostakovich, and Britten, in personal accommodations with row-based composition, in the 1950s and 1960s could be understood, publicly, as further confirmation that tonality was a spent force, at least among composers with ambitions of keeping up, technically and stylistically. In the fraught politics of the Cold War, loosely-defined ideological clouds trailed perceptions of musical style: serial technique, in the West, could stand as the embodiment of an autonomous art, a symbol of freedom; or in the Soviet bloc, as proof-positive of decadent “formalism.” The claim that serial – rather than tonally-oriented – composition dominated the post-war North American scene possibly overstates the ideological anxieties of the day; the workings of cultural prestige remain a topic of music-historical debate.36 What does seem more clearcut, though, is the palpable air of scandal attending the highly visible “defections” 32 33 34

35 36

Aaron Copland, “Preface to the Revised Edition,” in The New Music: 1900–1960, rev. edition (New York: Norton, 1968), 12. Paul Hindemith, A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations (1952; repr. Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor Books, 1961), 140. Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, trans. Stewart Spencer (London: Faber, 1998), 145. Henze’s comment recalls the public walk-out by his colleagues Boulez, Stockhausen, and Nono, from the first performance of his Nachtstücke und Arien at its 1957 Donaueschingen premiere. For the term “conversion,” see e. g. Copland, in The New Music, 92. See Joseph N. Straus, “The Myth of Serial ‘Tyranny’ in the 1950s and 1960s,” Musical Quarterly 83 (1999): 301–43; and Anne C. Shreffler, “The Myth of Empirical Historiography: A Response to Joseph N. Straus,” Musical Quarterly 84 (2000): 30–39.

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of composers like George Rochberg or David Del Tredici from atonal to unabashedly tonal and triadic idioms, from the later 1960s on.37 To collapse the European and Anglo-American experiences of serial and tonal music in the mid- and later twentieth-century into any single narrative would be to overlook differences between geographically remote regions, and obvious contrasts in the timing of the major stylistic shifts. While one might recognize (with Reich) that “clear tonal centers” were already popular with American minimalists by the early 1970s, the debate surrounding “Neo-Tonalität” among German-speaking composers such as Manfred Trojahn and Detlev Müller-Siemens emerges a few years later.38 For Wolfgang Rihm, whose own music revels in specific historical and inter-textual references, the talk about “new tonality” signaled a shallow concern with fashion: “The alternative today is not avant-garde/dissonance versus zeitgeist/ consonance but (as always): strong versus weak, vibrant versus worn-out.”39 Rihm voices impatience with unthinking use of tonal harmonies: in his elaborately metaphorical terms, music’s tonal materials (harmony) embody a corporeal urge toward “dissolution” balanced by the time-bound life force of rhythm.40 The verbal discourses surrounding tonality, unsurprisingly, reflect the particularity of distinct national traditions. Views of a “tonal” 1970s decade will appear quite different according to one’s viewing angle: a fusion of categories of harmony and timbre is crucial to the French musique spectrale discussion (with due awareness of Messiaen’s concept of “color”);41 the meanings of tonality, for Soviet-era composers, appear more bound-up with elegiac historical resonances. And always there is the sheer range of ways in which a composer might construct tonal experiences for listeners – from the modally-based linear-harmonic trajectory of Riley’s early In C (1964) to the bluesy F7 drone of Luc Ferrari’s À la recherche du rhythme perdu (1978) or the elaborately protracted cadences of Silvestrov’s 1980s scores. A multi-author collection affords complementary perspectives on a shared object of interest. In Tonality Since 1950, the conversation develops among scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, and focuses on composers from several countries of origin or professional activity: Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, the United States, and the former Soviet Union. Our analytic and historiographic methods are correspondingly eclectic. From this mingling of histories and outlooks, some unexpected correspondences and overlaps emerge, along 37 On this point, see Shreffler, “The Myth,” 33. 38 On tonal allusion in works by Trojahn and Müller-Siemens, see Hentschel, “Formen neuer Tonalität,” 71–75. The publication Zur “Neuen Einfachheit” in der Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1981) signaled related discussions, though the term neue Einfachheit (“new simplicity”) soon lost currency. 39 Wolfgang Rihm, “Tonalität?: Klischee – Umwertung – Versuch” (1985–86), repr. in Rihm, Augesprochen: Schriften und Gespräche, ed. Ulrich Mosch (Winterthur: Amadeus Verlag, 1997), 2 vols., 1:194–209 (209): “Die Alternative heißt aber heute nicht Avantgarde/Dissonanz gegen Zeitgeist/Konsonanz, sondern (wie immer): dicht gegen schwach, vibrierend gegen schlaff.” Our translation. 40 See Rihm, “Neo-Tonalität?” (1984); repr. in Rihm, Ausgesprochen, 1:185–93 (190). 41 On Messiaen’s wide-ranging legacy, see Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception, ed. Christopher Dingle and Robert Fallon (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

Introduction

19

with a host of new questions. The book’s fifteen essays are arranged in three thematic clusters, each one passing chronologically through the period since 1950. In the remainder of this introduction, we will briefly introduce the individual chapters. * * * Concepts and Contexts. What do we actually mean when we talk about tonality in music composed since 1950? Ulrich Mosch takes this blunt definitional question as a point of departure for his chapter, “Foundation or Mere Quotation? Conditions for Applying the Tonality Concept to Music after 1950.” Mosch observes the role of music’s time dimension in defining the relationships of pitches and chords with a defined center. Apart from the structure of individual chords, it is in surrounding contexts – the “before” and “after” of any event, both locally and globally – that analysts will discover the presence and force of tonality. From this perspective, Mosch explores tonal effects in works by four composers. In Helmut Lachenmann’s Allegro sostenuto (1986–88) a single tonal chord is robbed of framing voice-leading; in Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1968–69), the glimpsed tonality of the background-layer Mahler quotation lends continuity to the collage texture; in Wolfgang Rihm’s Astralis (2001) and the fifth of Hans Zender’s Logos-Fragmente (2006–07), arcs of harmonic tension are defined, respectively, within equal-tempered and microtonal tuning systems. In “Total Tonality or Tonal Totality: a Compositional Issue in Music after 1945,” Wolfgang Rathert takes Hindemith’s opposition between “natural” and “historical” categories of tonality – influenced by the theories of Hans Kayser and Hermann Heiß – as a starting point for discussions of the tonal-systemic dimension in composers as diverse as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono, György Ligeti, and Leonard Bernstein. Among examples of “totality,” Rathert counts the all-interval pitch series in Nono, the Lydian Chromatic Concept treatise of jazz musician George Russell, and the interplay of tunings in Ligeti’s Violin Concerto. His chapter confirms the surprising degree to which tonality was in the air after 1945, whether through systematic exploration of the known tonal universe or bold transgression of its limits. Joseph Auner’s essay, “The Stopped Clock: Tape Loops, Synthesizers, and the Transfiguration of Harmony,” considers the impact of new sound technologies on the development of tonality since World War II.42 Citing a plethora of concert and popular music from the 1960s and 1970s through the present, Auner documents how two technologies – the tape loop and the voltage-controlled modular synthesizer – have caused musicians to reimagine tonal harmony. If “microphonic listening” (Gérard Grisey) reveals sound’s internal dynamics, the static effects of tape delay systems, as in Terry Riley’s Mescalin Mix (1963), create a kind of sonically expanded moment. Auner reveals philosophical connections between the acousmatic sound objects in Pierre Schaeffer’s work and the “slow-motion” aesthetic of 42

Auner’s chapter extends ideas introduced in his earlier essay “Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality,” in Tonality 1900–1950.

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Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht

Steve Reich’s early phase-shifting music. Citing music by Mario Davidovsky and Éliane Radigue, among others, he observes how composers using synthesizers for sound modulation have redefined even very familiar tonal objects, such as the triad. Nicole Biamonte’s chapter on “Pop/Rock Tonalities” considers how paradigms of so-called common-practice tonality might apply to analysis of pop and rock genres. Some “tonal” traits of the classical repertoire – centricity, tertian chord structures, and the interplay of structural and embellishing events – are also important to pop and rock, but in other specific ways, the individual genres diverge. Building on Walter Everett’s 2004 taxonomy of tonal systems in rock, Biamonte proposes a modified scheme reflecting the relative prevalence of particular tonal-modal features in given genres. Biamonte’s discussion synthesizes a wide range of recent analytic literature; her chapter concludes with brief readings of tonal detail in songs composed between the 1960s and the 1990s. Perspectives of the Mid-Century. Under this heading, we present four chapters devoted to composers who came to prominence in Germany and in the US during the 1950s and 1960s. Thomas Ahrend’s essay – “‘Das Wunderland’: Tonality and (Political) Topography in Eisler’s Songs Around 1950” – considers how tonal music fared as a stylistic choice under the ideological pressures Hanns Eisler encountered upon his remigration to the German Democratic Republic in 1948. Abandoning the schwebende (floating) tonality of his earlier works, Eisler’s setting of the GDR national anthem (“Auferstanden aus Ruinen”) traces a folksong-like tonal simplicity, as if to conform to socialist-realist aesthetic doctrine. The anthem’s melodic and harmonic details seem to match utopian images of a new German home. The song “Das Wunderland” (Neue deutsche Volkslieder, 1950), meanwhile, positions tonal materials as historically marked artifacts. At once self-reflective and newly strange, tonality for Eisler itself appears as a kind of ruin. Ullrich Scheideler’s chapter, “Tonality in Henze’s Music of the 1950s and Early 1960s,” explores the composer’s reconstruction of his own creative self-image in light of the dogmatic anti-tonal biases of the serial avant-garde at Darmstadt and elsewhere. Henze, in various essays and memoirs, articulates a position for musical tradition as an enduring aesthetic presence, a resource freely available to artists of eclectic sensibility. Exploring the combination of twelve-tone rows with triadic progressions in the early opera Boulevard Solitude (1951), Scheideler also considers the sophisticated modal-tonal syntax of the ballet Undine (1957). By the time of Der junge Lord (1965), Henze’s intricate tonal syntax – for Luise’s pseudo-Mozartian pianism, e. g. – deploys historical allusions for dramatic ends, as a harsh critique of the opera’s empty social order. Felix Meyer’s essay – “‘Everything we love belongs to us’: George Rochberg’s Adoption of Tonality” – underlines the extent to which an embrace of tonality in the 1960s and beyond was still taboo. Rochberg’s Third String Quartet (1972), by juxtaposing sound worlds reminiscent of Bartók and late Beethoven, provoked a storm of press criticism for its polystylism. Where the tonality of a collage score could be heard within a fragmented discourse, Rochberg’s more sustained idiom was taken as blatant nostalgia. Upon closer inspection, Meyer shows, Rochberg’s score reveals subtle exaggerations of Classic-Romantic gestures of registral placement, dy-

Introduction

21

namic balance, and harmonic rhythm. Later in his career, Rochberg moved beyond a style-based dichotomy of functional tonality and other idioms, to a harmonic language defined by the opposition of symmetrical and asymmetrical sonorities. Readers who associate Morton Feldman with his 1950s avant-garde roots might question his credentials as a tonal composer. In Judit Frigyesi’s chapter, “The Macro- and Micro-Lives of Sounds in Morton Feldman’s The Viola in My Life I,” however, the experience of pitches – judged in dramatic, emotional, as well as structural terms – commands center-stage. When we face a new pitch, Frigyesi asks, what do we truly experience? In a sustained reading of Feldman’s first Viola piece (1970), Frigyesi attends to the refined “micro-life” of individual gesture, linking structures to a phenomenology of personal listening. In Feldman’s hauntingly still landscape, a single A pitch is “corrected” by, then sinks to, later As; behind an evolving D-minor tonic axis lies a chromatically remote shadow-universe. Single pitches take character roles and don timbral costumes. Feldman described his own scores in strikingly existential terms; pursuing the pitches, Frigyesi unsettles some cherished assumptions about tonal experience, not least music’s powers of creating stability or “home.” Processes, Objects, Functions, and Resonances: Directions Since 1970. The balance of the present volume comprises seven case-studies of composers working in six different countries in the past few decades. Keith Potter, in “Harmonic Progressions as a Gradual Process: Towards an Understanding of the Development of Tonality in the Music of Steve Reich,” observes that Reich’s “optimistic” 1970 prediction (cited earlier) that clear tonal centers would return to new music was borne out by his own stylistic evolution. A traditional dominant (“V”) function is evident already in Four Organs (1970); the more recent Triple Quartet (1998) documents Reich’s increased attention to bass-driven chordal progressions and chromatic extensions of reiterated pitch centers. Charting voice-leading in the first movement, Potter reveals a background cycle of V chords rooted a minor third apart, elaborating an overall E-minor tonality. Parsing pitchclass content, Potter observes a pattern by which each new section omits the central pitches of its predecessor. Reich’s sketches convey explicit tonal interests, despite his personal reticence concerning systems (“I’m flying blind”). The varied inspirations for Triple Quartet (Bartók’s Fourth Quartet, Schnittke’s Second) reflect a late-twentieth century hybridity of style, vocabulary, and grammar. Reichian tonality, Potter cautions, harbors crucial ambiguities in relation to earlier tonal musics. In “Tonality Rediscovered: Oliver Knussen and the Musical ‘Object’ in the 1970s,” Philip Rupprecht examines the British composer’s interest in chords as glittering, overtone-rich sound materials, abstracted for aural contemplation. The degree to which Knussen’s scores reveal tonal pitch hierarchies to listeners varies. The intricate surface of Ophelia Dances (1975) projects a chromatic dichotomy of focal pitches; deep-bass pedals and recurring cadences in Sonya’s Lullaby (1977) articulate clearer key feeling, with spectralist attention to the materiality of sound objects. Harmonies in Coursing (1979) move in cyclic chains of trichords, alluding to traditional V–I progressions while skirting real cadence. In Symphony No. 3, a denser pitch vocabulary admits a proto-cinematic focus on the single chord as a

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frozen image, within an overall E major frame. For Knussen (b. 1952), as for many of his generation, tonality offers a linguistic resource fraught with the risk of historical regression, but also an inheritance ripe for rediscovery. Peter Schmelz, in “Tonality after ‘New Tonality’: Silvestrov, Schnittke, and Polystylism in the Late USSR,” observes the appeal of tonal materials as a stylistic anchor to Soviet composers of the post-Stalin era. Tonality represented the accessibility demanded by socialist-realist aesthetics, giving audiences broader images of selfhood in a society contemplating a mythicized past and an idealized future. For Valentin Silvestrov, by the 1970s, tonality connoted kitsch; in his “post style” works of the 1980s, the tone modulates to an open embrace of nostalgia. Within this “tonal atonality,” syntax is stretched, familiar harmonies fade without cadence, and gesture itself becomes oblique or hidden. Alfred Schnittke, moving beyond the brash polystylistic clashes of his earlier works, in the 1980s pursued gradations along a polarity, observing that “atonality can be reached from any point in tonality (and vice versa).”43 In the Piano Sonata No. 1 (1987), Schmelz shows, chorales are both hallmarks of a glimpsed tonal past and bearers of thwarted hopes. Eric Drott’s chapter, “Saariaho, Timbre, and Tonality,” situates a discussion of tonality within the post-serialist scene of Boulez’s IRCAM and the spectralist interest in psychoacoustics. When Kaija Saariaho (in a 1987 essay) dubbed tonality an “out-dated” means of organizing pitch structures, she was exploring the cognitive potential for hierarchy in non-pitch parameters. Spectralists in the 1970s, including Grisey, had challenged modernist orthodoxy, and the “drabness” of atonality, by reintegrating consonance and harmonic motion into a musical language couched in acoustic science. For Saariaho, plausible musical hierarchies were to be defined along a continuum of timbres – from pure to noisy – rather than through the traditional pitch-binary of consonance/dissonance. In Lichtbogen for ensemble and live electronics (1986), Saariaho regulates timbral transformations by microtonal clouding of distinct tonal objects (the opening mid-register F, for example). Tonality here is something akin to a Freudian lost object, never entirely erased but rather the subject of lingering and profound attachment. In “Projected Resonance: Tonal Dimensions of Microtonal Composition in Music by Georg Friedrich Haas,” Simone Heilgendorff charts the Austrian-born composer’s pursuit of microtonal resources for composition. Building on Haas’s published “theses” concerning microtonality, Heilgendorff draws particular attention to the concept of resonance as an experiential and performative facet of the sound spectrum arising over a given fundamental. For Haas – as for Rihm, among others – the microtonal effects of resonance require their own shaping of musical time and form. Analyzing passages from Haas’s Second String Quartet (1998) and the ensemble score in vain (2000), Heilgendorff charts the interplay of microtonal and more traditionally tonal intervallic structures. The aural experience of the seventh partial over the Quartet’s opening C is hardly dissonant; in later “empty” octave-based chords, Haas’s dynamic fluctuations engage the natural variance of the players’ sound production with subtly shimmering results. Haas’s interest in the 43

Composer’s liner note to Schnittke, Violin Concertos no. 3 and 4, BIS CD 517 (1991), 4.

Introduction

23

volatility of intervallic formations also informs in vain: supplementing conventional score notation with precisely performed lighting cues, he further enhances sensory experiences of the sonic. As Felix Wörner argues in “Tonality as ‘Irrationally functional harmony’: Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet,” the British composer treats tonality not as a preconceived system but rather as a fluctuating phenomenon produced during the listening experience. Tonality, for Adès, is bound up with a “search for stability”; individual pitch events, he asserts, are subject to magnetic forces. The familiar tonal materials in the Piano Quintet (2001) – triads and seventh chords – often allude to tonal centers, only to shift in unexpected directions or into chromatic or atonal realms. If the composer’s use of aligned intervallic cycles creates mixed listening expectations, passages of folk-like triadic serenity emerge almost as isolated idylls, impossibly distant. Tonality, for Adès, is not necessarily an integrative structural force or a given; evidence of its presence constantly fluctuates. In motions towards or away from a tonal center, Adès’s music favors a constant fading in and out of tonal definition. In “‘Hungarian Tonality’? György Kurtág’s … rappel des oiseaux … from the Perspective of Albert Simon’s Theory of Tonfelder,” Volker Helbing establishes historical links between Albert Simon’s harmonic theories and the work of Hungarian theorists Ernö Lendvai and Lajos Bardós on Bartók’s music, originally published in the 1950s and 60s. As contemporaries of Simon at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest in the late 1940s, Kurtág and György Ligeti would have known Lendvai’s axis-based Bartók analyses, and Bardós’s exploration of diatonic fifthrows (Quintreihen) in chant, folk music, Palestrina, and Liszt. From this perspective, Helbing analyses two later Kurtág scores – Még egy szó Lendvai Ernöhöz (from Játékok VI, 1997) and … rappel des oiseaux … (from 6 Moments musicaux, 2005) – using the categories of Simon’s theory. The intervallic symmetries attending minor- or major-third rooted pitch cycles are central values in both pieces. In the later work, subtitled “étude pour les harmoniques,” Kurtág seems to reflect on a more distant Rameauian heritage of harmonic possibility, amid his own characteristically layered intervallic sound world. * * * The present volume traces its origins to the international conference Tonality Since 1950 held at the Musikwissenschaftliches Seminar of Basel University in May 2014. On this occasion, most but not all contributors presented earlier versions of their essays. For accepting our invitation to contribute additional essays written exclusively for the book, we are grateful to Thomas Ahrend, Nicole Biamonte, Eric Drott, and Peter Schmelz. The conference was made possible with generous financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Freie Akademische Gesellschaft Basel. For many kindnesses and assistance with both the conference and the book, we would like to express our gratitude to Annette Ahrend, Edith Auner, Markus Böggemann, Seth Brodsky, Margret Bucher, Marc Givel, Johannes

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Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht

Joseph, Simon Obert, Matthias Schmidt, Susanne Stalder, Arne Stollberg, and Hana Vlhová-Wörner. The publication was made possible by generous grants from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, the Freie Akademische Gesellschaft Basel, and a special grant from the Music Department of Basel University. The editors warmly thank Matthew Franke (Howard University) for his excellent copy-editing support. J. Bradford Robinson, Megan Eagan, Carolin Krahnt, and Julia Zupancic prepared translations of German-language chapters by Thomas Ahrend, Felix Meyer, Ulrich Mosch, and Wolfgang Rathert. Mathias Knop has helped edit the music examples. For his work on the index, we are grateful to Harrison Russin. Again, the Franz Steiner Verlag in Stuttgart has been a patient and reliable partner in preparing and producing the book. Particular thanks go to Thomas Schaber for accepting the title for publication, and to Harald Schmitt for the layout and production.

Concepts and Contexts

Foundation or Mere Quotation? Conditions for Applying the Tonality Concept to Music After 1950 Ulrich Mosch Anyone investigating the extent to which “tonality” plays a role in music after 1950, and what that role is, enters a labyrinth of conceptual uncertainties. The term itself is employed to express a variety of somewhat paradoxical meanings, as is immediately obvious from a quick glance at the relevant encyclopedias. Yet “tonality” can also be found beyond the narrow realm of theoretical writings, whether used as a discursive weapon in aesthetic debates, such as those of the 1950s centering on the definition of music,1 or used, as in the case of Helmut Lachenmann, to describe a certain mode of perception relating to what he calls the “aesthetic apparatus [ästhetischen Apparat].”2 The first question, then, is what is actually under consideration, and an answer is not to be found easily without at least roughly sketching the term as it has previously been used. When referring to some aspects of the complex theory and historical discourse of tonality3 in the following paragraphs, I do not aim to settle on a fixed and ultimately arbitrary use of historical terminology. Rather, I examine ways in which the term was used historically, to concretize it, and to acknowledge its specific uses as it relates to the subject matter at hand. The Tonality Concept What, then, as a working hypothesis, should we understand by the term “tonality”? Two historical variants of the phenomenon form the basis of my consideration: “melodic tonality,” which is generated from and can be experienced by melodic progressions; and “harmonic tonality,” which develops through the succession of vertical/chordal harmonies – or, as Carl Dahlhaus put it: in contrast to a melodic tonality deriving from “usual types of major and minor melodies,” the “notion of harmonic tonality places emphasis on the formation of keys through chordal pro1 2 3

See, for instance, Friedrich Blume, “Was ist Musik?”, in Syntagma musicologicum: Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, ed. Martin Ruhnke (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963), 872–86. See Helmut Lachenmann, “Vier Grundbestimmungen des Musikhörens,” in Musik als existentielle Erfahrung: Schriften 1966–1995, ed. Josef Häusler (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1996), 54–62 (55–56). See Michael Beiche, “Tonalität,” in Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995), 412–33.

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Ulrich Mosch

gressions rather than through melodic models.”4 As sequences of events, both variants, obviously, imply the temporal aspect. A discussion of the precise number of elements required for tonality to take shape under specific conditions – such as mere event successions, on the one hand, or melodic/harmonic cadences on the other – is unnecessary; it will suffice here to assert simply that we are dealing with a temporal aspect. Without considering temporal progression – which implies at least two or more consecutive elements – we may not speak of tonality. A single chord, strictly speaking, whether consonant or dissonant, cannot be as “tonal” or “atonal” as a single note, despite formulations one sometimes encounters in the scholarly literature. Labeling a note or a chord as tonal thus implies a corresponding context, even if the latter consists of only another single note or chord. This would form a necessary yet unsatisfactory condition for the existence of tonality, for two arbitrary consonant chords – or one consonant and another dissonant chord – can stand side by side without being connected: they do not constitute tonality in and of themselves. Only if the chords are linked to form a relational unity beyond mere adjacency – even an atonal piece might contain “neighbor” chords – in the sense that at least temporarily a common pitch center is defined, may we speak of tonality. The crucial point is that there should be more than just two random sound aggregates in succession. Rather, in order to constitute tonality, each single note of the aggregate must hold a specific position within a hierarchically structured scale or overtone spectrum held in common: each, that is, must relate to a shared pitch center. Not until this condition is met can one speak of tonality. Beyond the temporal aspect as such, then, it is the type of connections between sound aggregates that matters.5 The basis for my argument is therefore a notion of tonality that emanates from the relatedness of sounds to a given center of local, regional, or global influence.6 After all – this, too, is obvious – melodic and harmonic tonal sequences possess an extraordinary power of cohesion. Brian Hyer described this state of affairs in his New Grove Dictionary article on “Tonality” as follows: [Tonality] gives rise […] to abstract relations that control melodic motion and harmonic succession over long expanses of musical time. In its power to form musical goals and regulate the

4 5

6

Carl Dahlhaus, “Tonalität,” in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, 2nd edition, ed. Ludwig Finscher (Kassel: Bärenreiter 1998), Sachteil, 9:626. In a lecture on “Neo-Tonality?” presented during a colloquium on “tonality” held at the 1984 Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Wolfgang Rihm stated: “Harmonic relations [die Harmonik] find […] a form only through the structuring of time. To cry out ‘This is tonal!’ at the sound of the chord D-F-A is therefore wrong, not only because the chord fails to present a single tonal construct, but above all because this chord can participate in any type of harmony. Only through temporal surroundings is it possible to experience whether it is a tonic or a special case, a foreign body, a mistake, and so on.” Wolfgang Rihm, Ausgesprochen: Schriften und Gespräche, publications of the Paul Sacher Foundation, vol. 6, ed. Ulrich Mosch (Winterthur: Amadeus 1997), 1:189. Translation mine. See Beiche, “Tonalität,” 1.

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progress of the music towards the moments of arrival, tonality has become, in Western cultures, the principal musical means with which to manage expectation and structure desire.7

Ultimately this raises the question: why is tonal harmony able to form such largescale connections in formal contexts? And why do similar processes not occur, with comparable strength, in atonal or serial music? With the idea of centering there arises immediately – especially with regard to the music since 1950 under consideration – the important question of the range of relevant contexts, in particular concerning the “gravitational forces” of any kind of referential pitch center. That range might be quite limited, or perhaps only local – tonal “islands” in a non-tonal context, for example – or of regional (i. e., sectional) or global scope. Phenomena such as harmonic stability or instability in tonal music are closely bound up with such considerations. As a contrasting foil to the following examples from the past five decades, I should like to illustrate the last two points with an excerpt from Richard Strauss’s Hymne op. 34, no. 2. This was written (according to its title) for a mixed choir of sixteen voices,8 to a poem by Friedrich Rückert. The text is from the collection Östliche Rosen, published in 1822. Like other poems in the volume, it was originally untitled, only later acquiring the heading “Gräme Dich nicht!”9 The seventh verse of this poem, on the biblical story of Jacob, the lost son, broaches the issue of his errantry. This – together with multilayered fragments from other stanzas – turns out to be the central subject for more than half of the circa fifteen-minute composition. The verse reads: Zwar bedenklich ist unser Gang. Wo wir uns wenden, Kein Ziel zu sehen; Aber ein jeder Weg, wie lang, Muss einst enden, O gräme Dich nicht!

Writing in 1897, during a period when he was also composing the tone poems Don Quixote (1896–97) and Ein Heldenleben (1897–98), Strauss realized the extended path, via a seemingly endless harmonic circuit (starting from m. 98), in which “homecoming” to an F major tonic finally (at m. 182) becomes a real event. The harmonic pathway first leads through the main key’s subdominant and dominant and third-related regions. After a half-cadence (mm. 130–32) the path makes a further digression: first, by rising in the circle of fifths as far as E major, then in the opposite direction down to A major, then by way of C major and A major, leading back gradually to the home tonic, via an F pedal that for the first time (in mm. 179– 82) is confirmed as tonic with a perfect authentic cadence and then restated until the close. For reasons of space, I reproduce only a short excerpt from this extended 7 8 9

Brian Hyer, “Tonality,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), 23:584. In fact, it is for a mixed double choir of four and twelve voices. See Friedrich Rückert, Gedichte, ed. Walter Schmitz (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), 105–07. Strauss used only the first seven of a total of ten stanzas.

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harmonic “parcours” (see Example 1), specifically the passage immediately before Jacob’s path first touches, at least in harmonic terms, on its ultimate goal (F major), without fully arriving there yet. This example illustrates not only the special powers of cohesion of tonal-harmonic materials, but also Strauss’s extraordinary play with harmonic instability and stability. The scope of tonal gravitational forces is bound up with another question to be addressed later on: to speak of tonality, do we need a fixed point of reference, in the form of a center that goes beyond local conditions, upon which the harmonic events depend? Or might degrees of dissonance that shift from chord to chord – degrees of “sonance” (Sonanzgrade), as Hermann von Helmholtz might have said – be sufficient to create the phenomenon? The questions just raised can be directly translated into an analytical directive: when examining the use of tonality in a musical work after 1950 – this also applies more broadly to works of any period – attention should focus on the qualities of the chordal formations themselves, and their respective roles in context. Only the context permits us to determine whether we are dealing with a tonal phenomenon or not. In making the following (ultimately, of course, arbitrary) selection of four examples for more detailed examination, the question of context has been an essential criterion, while the nature of those contexts is, in each case, quite different. I. Helmut Lachenmann, Allegro Sostenuto Shortly after the opening of the fourteenth section of the Allegro sostenuto for clarinet, cello, and piano (1986–88), entitled “Finale solenne” (see Example 2), within a long passage of simultaneities, the composer uses (in m. 386) a major chord extended by a minor seventh, minor ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth: a chord that in a tonal context would immediately be associated with a dominant function. Musically speaking, though, the chord in this passage seems to be an element – neither tonal nor atonal – of a scale of pitch densities ranging from dyads to expansive semitonal clusters. The context suggests that this chord does not assert any harmonic function beyond that of its immediate appearance. Nonetheless, the ear immediately perceives it as something special. Lachenmann’s compositional strategy aims, so to speak, at suspending, or at least keeping in check the “instinctive life” – Triebleben (Theodor W. Adorno10) – of the chord, in order to neutralize its “striving tendencies.” This strategy involves isolating the chord – robbing it of its “tonal” context – on the one hand, and then recontextualizing it in order to make it newly available for compositional uses beyond tonal ones. Despite Lachenmann’s concern for – as he would put it today – a suspension of tonal “magic,”11 we almost inevitably associate this chord with the traditional tonal 10 11

Theodor W. Adorno, “Ernst Kurths ‘Musikpsychologie’” (1933), in Musikalische Schriften VI, Gesammelte Schriften 19, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 354. See Mosch, “Kunst als vom Geist beherrschte Magie: Zu einem Aspekt von Helmut Lachenmanns Musikbegriff,” in Helmut Lachenmann, Musik-Konzepte (new series) 146, ed. Ulrich Tadday (Munich: Text+Kritik, 2009), 76–96.

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Example 1: Richard Strauss, Hymne for mixed choir of sixteen voices, op. 34, no. 2, to poetry by Friedrich Rückert (1897): mm. 164–74 (with the kind permission of Universal Edition, Vienna).

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Example 1 cont.

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Example 2: Helmut Lachenmann, Allegro sostenuto for clarinet, violoncello, and piano (1986–88), pp. 51–52 (reproduced with the kind permission of Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden).

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Example 2 cont.

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sphere. It also implies for us a cadential tonal resolution, even if the latter is missing here. This magic is obviously not a fact of nature but – to take up Lachenmann’s idea that the material be in our ears – is generated by experience: i. e., it is rooted in our perceptual capacities in the form of aggregated experience. The chord does not in itself bear inherently “tonal” connotations; they stem, instead, from prior usage. Accordingly, we almost automatically complete the chord progression from memory. But why does this chord hold such a privileged position in our perception? The question itself leads to the psycho-perceptual or anthropological foundations of tonality or – to speak more cautiously – “tonal phenomena.” I will return to this question later on. II. Luciano Berio, Sinfonia While the previous example dealt with a chord deliberately isolated from its usual context, this second example, Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia for eight voices and orchestra (1968–69) features larger fragments of explicitly “tonal music” in the context of a collage.12 The example stems from the third movement of the work, a piece of music derived, as is well known, from the middle section of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony, entitled “In ruhig fließender Bewegung.” For an excerpt, I have chosen the section of the Sinfonia (letters H to K, illustrated here only in excerpts from the score with letter I and the beginning of J; Example 3) where Mahler’s movement, the musical basis of the section, is gradually overlaid with quotations: from the “Danse de la terre” ending Part 1 of Le Sacre, and from other sources (above all Stravinsky’s Agon and Debussy’s La Mer). Finally, it becomes unrecognizable, since a massive cluster covers everything.13 Even if one is not aware that the Mahler movement forms the base-layer of the collage, the fragments from the Symphony are recognizable as such because of their tonal melodies and harmonic patterns. The conditions for establishing a “tonal” frame of reference, however, go beyond individual sounds to encompass the scheme of the movement as a whole. It is clear to any listener that this is a case of quotations set within a collage. That Mahler’s symphonic movement may be recognized as the basis of Berio’s music and as a unifying force has to do with the length of the quotations in relation to other quoted elements of the collage. Although often interrupted or hidden, the Mahler-quotations have the ability to evoke an impression of continuity, while it is we who are perceiving who actually establish the connection. Aside from catchy melodies and formal articulation, tonal structure plays an important role as connecting thread. A thought experiment makes this clear straight away: if one were to try to replace the tonal basis of Berio’s piece with an atonal one – for instance with a movement from Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto Op. 42 – the concept of collage would be called into question, even if the quoted snippets were of the 12

See David Osmond-Smith, Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (London: Royal Musical Association, 1985), especially the chapter “In ruhig fliessender Bewegung,” 39–72. 13 Ibid., 62–63.

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Example 3: Luciano Berio, Sinfonia for eight voices and orchestra (1968–69), pp. 55–56 (reproduced with the kind permission of Universal Edition, Vienna).

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Example 3 cont.

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same length and showed a sufficient stylistic distance from the other overlaid quotations. The problem has to do with the consistency of the harmonic language involved. The thought experiment brings us back to the question of why major-minor tonal materials are so effective at establishing cohesion: is there a specific reason for this efficacy? Maybe in our faculty of perception? Excursus At this point a few remarks on the question of the foundation of “tonal” phenomena might be useful. Is tonality a product of culture? Or is it based, rather, on anthropological conditions, that is, on aspects of our perceptual powers? What is the source of the extraordinary potential that lies within tonal harmony to create larger formal connections? Is it the tense relationship, or graduated shadings – degrees of “sonance” – between dissonance and consonance? In the hierarchy of scale degrees? In functional differentiations? The question of whether tonality is a cultural or a natural product caused quite a stir after World War II, and played an important role in the debates around the avant-garde music of the period, which ultimately centered on the basic concept of music. Some later reverberations of this debate persist into the present, for example in Marcel Dobberstein’s pamphlets,14 or in Roger Scruton’s writings on the philosophy of music and aesthetics.15 Both authors are convinced that something akin to musical universals exists. Upon closer examination, the assertion proves to be derived from historical manifestations of music; that is, with this idea, we are facing a normative take on a specific historical notion of music. In this context it will suffice to cite just two early instances of this extensive debate, both from the mid-1960s. The first is Ernest Ansermet’s belief that he could justify the primacy of tonal music by what he called “tonal law” (das tonale Gesetz), and what he considered to be the “logarithmic” structure – a natural, anthropological foundation, i. e. – of aural perception: “This law permits us to call this phenomenon ‘music’ and not simply an ‘art of sounds’ [Ton-Kunst]. This law also confronts the liberty of the creative musician with conditions, through which freedom is no longer absolute.”16 This hypothesis has long been refuted through the proof that logarithmic structure applies to every perception of defined pitches, whether in a sound space based on octaves [octavierender Klangraum] or one based on any other interval.17 This does not explain the cause of specific tonal phenomena, however. 14 15 16 17

Marcel Dobberstein, Neue Musik: 100 Jahre Irrwege. Eine kritische Bilanz (Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel, 2007); see also idem, Musik und Mensch: Grundlegung einer Anthropologie der Musik (Berlin: Reimer, 2000). Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Ansermet, Ernest. “Grundlage und Grenzen der Musik,” Avantgarde: Geschichte und Krise einer Idee, Gestalt und Gedanke, Folge 11 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1966), 45–76 (45); my translation. See Carl Dahlhaus’s review of the German translation of Ansermet’s monograph, Les Fonde-

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As a second example, we may recall the blunt assertion of the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss – in the “Overture” to his monograph Le cru et le cuit (1964) – that music operates along two grids: One is physiological – that is, natural: its existence arises from the fact that music exploits organic rhythms and thus gives relevance to phenomena of discontinuity which would otherwise remain latent and submerged, as it were, in time. The other grid is cultural: it consists of a scale of musical sounds of which the number and the intervals vary from one culture to another. The system of intervals provides music with an initial level of articulation, which is a function not of the relative heights of the notes (which result from perceptible properties of each sound), but of the hierarchical relationships among them on the scale; the division into fundamental, tonic, dominant, and leading notes expresses relations that the polytonal and atonal systems complicate but do not destroy.18

One would have to add: are not able to destroy them. Lévi-Strauss’s rationale hence represents – in contrast to Ansermet’s – a cultural-genetic explanation of tonality. Meanwhile, regardless of these deliberations concerning whether or not tonality is an anthropological or cultural phenomenon, the fact remains that every timebound acoustic object is constituted through the listener’s perception. Ultimately, this also means that the decision to use tonal materials or not is aesthetic in nature. III. Wolfgang Rihm, Astralis Astralis, for choir, cello, and two timpani (2001) on a text by Novalis from the novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, belongs to a series of works begun in 1999 and to date unfinished, bearing the title or subtitle Über die Linie (“over (across) the line”). In this particular case Über die Linie III can be understood as having dual meanings: first, as a crossing of boundaries, in Astralis, for example, of tempo. The tempo marking given in a footnote on the musical expression marking “floating” (schwebend) reads “as slowly as possible” (so langsam wie möglich). Second, the title points to an exploration of the concept of “musical line,” which here plumbs the possibilities ranging from a fine thin line to the thick brush-stroke, and from the continuous to the discontinuous or broken line. “Harmonic” phenomena play a crucial role in this context.19 More generally, this is not about “melody” in the usual sense, but rather about a line of varying quality – changing consistency, with varying width and nature, sharp and fuzzy edges, disruptions, discontinuities, and so on. The more or less consistent course of the line with its typical shape is at the same time overlaid by a ments de la musique dans la conscience humaine (Neuchâtel: Baconnière, 1961), published as Grundlagen der Musik im menschlichen Bewußtsein (Munich: Piper, 1965); Dahlhaus, “Ansermets Polemik gegen Schönberg,” in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 116 (1966): 179–83. 18 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Vol. 1, trans. from the French by John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969, repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 16–17. 19 See Mosch, “Über die Linie: Anmerkungen zu einigen Kompositionen Wolfgang Rihms,” in Annäherungen, Festschrift für Jürg Stenzl zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Ulrich Mosch, Matthias Schmidt, and Silvia Wälli (Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2007), 281–301.

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sequence of shadings of harmonic tension. Qualities such as fragility are manifest on both levels: in the precarious course of the line itself, and through decreasing harmonic stability. This can be demonstrated by examining a short passage (measures 144–157) from a work of some thirty minutes’ duration. With regard to the “two-voice” texture in this example – assuming one chooses to speak in these terms, since the line is obviously intended as a whole – Rihm’s aim is obviously to avoid any generation of a clear key orientation, in spite of his preference for consonant intervals such as sixths, fifths, fourths, and thirds. By favoring wide intervallic steps, even so, Rihm carefully avoids certain progressions and resolutions of dissonances that would be relevant to the formation of a clear center or “tonic.” The sounding progressions are a product of the “tactile” relationship to musical material ordained by Rihm’s compositional methods,20 which admit hardly any advance-planning, but involve writing ahead exclusively in reaction to what already exists. The reach of chord relationships in this music is limited to narrow contiguities with, as it were, a local focus, comparable to the motivic process in “developing variation.” Even so, it seems to me reasonable to speak here of “tonality,” precisely because of Rihm’s preference for certain intervals. Dissonances do occur time and again, but they are always followed immediately by consonances, even when there is no “resolution” in the usual sense. Even someone hesitating to say if Astralis is tonal or not will not deny that this music is about shifting relationships of tension among intervals and chords and – true to Rihm’s assertion that harmony, even more than timbre, is the actual color in the musical picture21 – that it deals with changing coloristic values whose course can be traced as a developing arc of tension. While this course does not define any “key” in the sense of harmonic tonality, it does create harmonic tensions over large distances. In this context, changing degrees of tension linked to dynamics and register matter more than pitch centers. This leads to the question of whether one can speak of tonality even when no focused center is recognizable, but only a sequence of constant, if varying instabilities – comparable to the boldly modulatory segments of Strauss’s Hymne (discussed earlier); the main difference is that for Rihm an ultimate tonal goal is lacking. IV. Hans Zender, Logos-Fragmente (Canto IX), “Fragment V” Hans Zender composed the Logos-Fragmente between 2006 and 2009. “Fragment V,” for three sopranos, three altos, and large orchestra (2006–07), to a text by Valentinus, is based on the ultra-chromatic, microtonal compositional strategy central to Zender’s music since the second half of the 1990s. One goal of this approach is to overcome the disqualification of perceptible intervallic experience introduced by equal temperament, and to restore long-lost qualitative experience. With this compromise in the face of the fundamentally unresolvable contradiction between 20 See Mosch, “Die Taktilität des Klangs – Wolfgang Rihms Poetik,” Österreichische Musikzeitung 63, no. 8/9 (2008): 26–33. 21 See Rihm, “Neo-Tonalität?,” 186.

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Example 4: Wolfgang Rihm, Astralis, “Über die Linie III” for choir, cello, and two timpani (2001), mm. 141–157 (excerpt from pp. 7–8 of the fair copy of the score; reproduced with the kind permission of the Paul Sacher Foundation).

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equal temperament and just intonation, Zender seeks a harmonic idiom that not only aggregates vertically, but also branches out horizontally, exploring the possibility of “logically” concatenating various harmonic-spectral fields through processes of modulation. Zender works with a subdivision of the octave into seventy-two equidistant steps, which allows for an incomplete but close approximation to just intervals. Further, he uses proportions quite distant from the usual ratio of the semitone, 16:17 (including proportions such as 68:100, 76:88, and much higher). The fundamental of a spectrum, in such cases, may lie below the physiological threshold of human pitch perception. Spectra do not have to be harmonic; “broken spectra” and non-octave based spectra are also possible.22 Two consequences of this compositional method are of crucial importance for the resulting music: first, registral location, since it defines a pitch’s position within a spectrum of overtones as a harmonically essential aspect of tonal writing and thus as a central compositional factor. Second, the concatenation of harmonic fields is realized on the basis of a “harmonic” logic, along with “enharmonic” reinterpretations, i. e., modulations produced by changing of the spectral fundamentals. Certain pitches foreign to a given spectrum, moreover, appear “harmony-averse” [“harmoniefremd”]. The decisive factor for harmony, in the sense of the progression of successive fields, is not the actual lowest-sounding pitch at a given moment but the succession of fundamentals. These principles can be explained by means of a short excerpt from the fifth Logos-Fragment (see Example 5) which I have discussed in detail elsewhere.23 Measures 51 through 57 are based on a spectrum above C with a sounding fundamental three octaves below C1, i. e. beyond the realm of human hearing. Harmonic and melodic events in this passage are based on pitches ranging from the eighth to the 328th overtone; measures 57 through 61 basically adhere to this spectrum, while the pitch ratios can also be shown to project a spectrum one octave higher. In measure 61 a modulation to the spectrum of A takes place. Its fundamental tone – five octaves below A1 – is also beyond the realm of human perception. The different spectra overlap briefly on the downbeat of measure 61. Here a modulation takes place in both piccolo parts through reinterpretation of the common tones C5 and A4. Thinking back to the example by Richard Strauss, one cannot deny that the harmonic cohesion in Zender’s fifth Logos-Fragment seems audibly much weaker than that of Strauss’s major-minor tonal harmonic idiom. Zender’s music, however, offers clear harmonic and melodic reference to a center, as well as a principle of progression between successive harmonic fields. Individual chords operate within a single spectral field; modulations occur between fields. Here too, then, talk of “tonal” phenomena seems apt, precisely because the modulations develop in suc22

See Hans Zender, “Gegenstrebige Harmonik,” in Die Sinne Denken: Texte zur Musik 1975– 2003, ed. Jörn-Peter Hiekel (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2004), 95–135. 23 See Mosch, “La théorie microtonale de Hans Zender et son application dans les Logos-Fragmente,” in Unité – pluralité: La musique de Hans Zender, ed. Marik Froidefond, Jörn Peter Hiekel, and Pierre Michel (Paris: Hermann, 2014), 201–30 (219–25).

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Example 5: Hans Zender, Logos-Fragmente, “Fragment V,” mm. 51–61 (reproduced with the kind permission of Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden).

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Example 5 cont.

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cessions, in this case, successions of harmonic spectra. Zender’s is “tonal music,” if in a different sense than that based upon an equal temperament of half steps. Conclusion To conclude, a few further remarks on the title of my investigation. Leaving aside the issue of whether one defines tonality in melodic-linear or chordal terms, the broader question of whether it can be understood as the foundation of an entire form, or as something more limited in significance, provokes a range of quite different responses, as the preceding examples suggest. The question of whether tonal phenomena are even in play seems especially urgent in the cases of Rihm and Zender. The chord from Lachenmann’s Allegro sostenuto is clearly an isolated element without wider influence. Its quotation-like, referential character remains strongly perceptible, even within Lachenmann’s strategy of isolating each chord from every tonal context. The music confirms the strength of our inclination towards “major-minor-tonal” perceptions. In Berio’s case, too, the facts are obvious, and in relation to Lachenmann, the situation is precisely reversed. One finds one’s way, as a listener, into the underlying Mahler movement – despite its being repeatedly and increasingly interrupted, covered up, or hidden by quotations and other materials. This happens to such an extent that, even though it comes into view only partially, the Mahler becomes the harmonic-melodic foundation and reference point for perceptions of the Sinfonia’s entire third movement. That such tonal perceptions entail a certain length of quoted passages and sufficiently frequent recurrence of excerpts is something best understood with reference to a counter example, such as Lachenmann’s Accanto: Musik für einen Soloklarinettisten mit Orchester (Music for a solo clarinet player with orchestra, 1975–76). The piece comprises predominantly short fragments of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, a mostly inaudible tape recording of which runs in parallel with the live performance. An exception comes when a slightly longer segment of the Concerto appears (mm. 192–96); mostly, only brief fragments are perceptible over the loudspeakers, each one “illuminated” for a fleeting moment. Here, the powerful effects of tonality remain, albeit restricted to a local level, given the isolation of the moments when the Mozart appears at all. Even awareness of the continuity of the piece running in parallel on tape does not allow listeners a full view of the work, since the interpolations are initially both isolated and extremely short. They assert a slightly stronger presence as the piece unfolds, only to be reduced to a minimum again towards the end, finally disappearing entirely. With the Rihm and Zender examples, the response to the question in my title will depend on a reader’s willingness to accept specific phenomena as “tonal.” Rihm plays with a clear preference for consonant intervals (major and minor sixths, fifths, fourths, major and minor thirds) and an apparently conscious avoidance of the resolution of dissonances, though dissonances like sevenths or seconds are usually followed directly by a consonance. He plays in a highly idiosyncratic way with our experiences of tonality in general, and of harmonic tonality in particular.

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Zender himself, in works based on “counter-striving harmonies” [gegenstrebige Harmonik], has defined form as an “alternation of parts, each using contrasting compositional strategies.”24 It is clear from listening that his harmonic language, in formal terms, has far weaker powers of cohesion than does Strauss’s – a reflection of the music’s foundation in overtone spectra, rather than in a strongly hierarchical division of scales. Another factor may be the large number of possible intervals in play, hindering the development of strong harmonic relationships, even when moving within one and the same spectral-harmonic field. Whether the weaker cohesion of this harmonic idiom reflects the fact that the higher up one moves in the spectra, the more intervals occur – and interval combinations or successions apt for development are correspondingly rarer – must remain an open question for now. Compared to an intended qualitative experience of intervals, the harmonies may be perceived primarily as timbres. Still, we might speak of tonality here too; even in the absence of concrete chord progressions, the successive spectral fields are related to one another, harmonically. Tonality has become a “foundation” in a broader sense that seems to apply to all music today: namely in terms of perception. The superior power of “major-minor-tonal” music in our everyday acoustic life has left its mark on our perceptual powers to such an extent that the question of whether it is naturally given, as some maintain, or culturally constructed, as others claim, can no longer be decided. Because no one can escape culture’s imprint, evidence to the contrary is hard to find. In this sense, the influence of a “tonal” cultural environment might still provide the basis of any perception of “tonality” in music after 1950 – whether emerging only through quotation; as an island within some other context; as the foundation (more narrowly construed) of an entire piece or work; or simply as a musical phenomenon entirely absent from view. Lachenmann has made the latter argument on more than one occasion. Even in such cases, when no materials with tonal associations are being used at all, composition remains bound up with the influential force of the tonal on us and on our perceptual faculties. Everything, in the end – even that which appears as a dissonance – finds itself incorporated into this world.25 Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. “Ernst Kurths ‘Musikpsychologie.’” 1933. In Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 19, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 350–58. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. Ansermet, Ernest. “Grundlage und Grenzen der Musik.” In Avantgarde: Geschichte und Krise einer Idee, Folge 11 des Jahrbuchs Gestalt und Gedanke, edited by Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste, 45–76. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1966. Beiche, Michael. “Tonalität.” In Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, 412–33. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995. Blume, Friedrich. “Was ist Musik?” 1959. In Syntagma musicologicum: Gesammelte Reden und Schriften, edited by Martin Ruhnke, 872–86. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963. 24 25

“… Abwechslung von Teilen, die sich verschiedener Satzstrategien bedienen”; Zender, “Gegenstrebige Harmonik,” 127. See, among others, Lachenmann, “Vier Grundbestimmungen des Musikhörens,” 55.

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Dahlhaus, Carl. “Ansermets Polemik gegen Schönberg.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 116, no. 5 (1966): 179–83. ––. “Tonalität.” In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, second, new edition, edited by Ludwig Finscher, Sachteil, 9: col. 623–28. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998. Dobberstein, Marcel. Musik und Mensch: Grundlegung einer Anthropologie der Musik. Berlin: Reimer, 2000. ––. Neue Musik: 100 Jahre Irrwege. Eine kritische Bilanz. Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel, 2007. Hyer, Bryan. “Tonality.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie, 23:583–94. London: Macmillan, 2001. Lachenmann, Helmut. “Vier Grundbestimmungen des Musikhörens.” 1979. In Musik als existentielle Erfahrung: Schriften 1966–1995, edited by Josef Häusler, 54–62. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1996. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Le cru et le cuit. English translation by John and Doreen Weightman as The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Vol. 1. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Reprint Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Mosch, Ulrich. “Kunst als vom Geist beherrschte Magie: Zu einem Aspekt von Helmut Lachenmanns Musikbegriff.” In Helmut Lachenmann (Musik-Konzepte, Neue Folge 146), edited by Ulrich Tadday, 76–96. Munich: Edition Text+Kritik, 2009. ––. “Die Taktilität des Klangs – Wolfgang Rihms Poetik.” Österreichische Musikzeitung 63, no. 8–9 (2008): 26–33. ––. “La théorie microtonale de Hans Zender et son application dans les Logos-Fragmente.” In Unité – Pluralité: La musique de Hans Zender, edited by Pierre Michel, Marik Froidefond, and Jörn Peter Hiekel, 203–32. Paris: Hermann, 2015. ––. “Über die Linie: Anmerkungen zu einigen Kompositionen Wolfgang Rihms aus jüngster Zeit.” In Annäherungen: Festschrift für Jürg Stenzl zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Ulrich Mosch, Matthias Schmidt, and Silvia Wälli, 281–301. Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2007. Osmond-Smith, David. Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia. London: Royal Musical Association, 1985. Rihm, Wolfgang. “Neo-Tonalität?” 1984. In Ausgesprochen: Schriften und Gespräche. Publications of the Paul Sacher Foundation 6, edited by Ulrich Mosch, 2 vols. 1:185–93. Winterthur: Amadeus, 1997. Rückert, Friedrich. Gedichte. Edited by Walter Schmitz. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005. Scruton, Roger. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Zender, Hans. “Gegenstrebige Harmonik.” 2000/2002. In Die Sinne Denken: Texte zur Musik 1975– 2003, edited by Jörn-Peter Hiekel, 95–135. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2004.

Total Tonality or Tonal Totality: A Compositional Issue in Music After 1945 Wolfgang Rathert I In his final lecture entitled “Sterbende Gewässer” (“Dying Waters”) given in 1963 on the occasion of his appointment to the order Pour le Merite, Paul Hindemith presented himself less as an enraged conservative than as outright reactionary. The enfant terrible of the Weimar Republic who after the First World War had sounded the death knell of a Wagnerian harmonics of alteration (now deteriorated into cliché) – with provocative works like the one-act opera Sancta Susanna or Kammermusik No. 1, contributing substantially to an overdue return to the material fundamentals of composing and to the functionality of musical expression – now raged against the avant-garde(s) of the 1950s: against the serialists; against endeavors to dissolve valid and traditional notions of the work concept through experiments; and, above all, against the abandonment of what he regarded as “tonality.”1 Hindemith, the exile, professor of composition at Yale University from 1940–1953, and since 1954 professor of musicology at the University of Zurich, had thoroughly alienated himself from developments in the European scene, even though in 1945, at the time of the alleged “zero hour,” he – along with Stravinsky – had initially served as a model for many young composers in Germany. First released in 1935, his Unterweisung im Tonsatz – later published in the USA as The Craft of Musical Composition, with student exercises – was widely received, not least by a certain Luigi Nono who, while studying with Malipiero, worked through it carefully.2 It seems likely Hindemith was fairly frustrated by this estrangement – something which, in a similar way, befell Schoenberg in the 1920s – or else the pungency of “Sterbende Gewässer” would be inexplicable. His compositional production in the 1950s reached its peak with the completion and premiere of the opera Die Harmonie der Welt (The Harmony of the World) in Munich, resulting in Adorno’s crushing criticism of a “turn towards the official.”3 In his late works, such as the Second Organ Concerto – which incorporates the Pentecostal hymn “Veni creator spiritus” 1 2 3

See Franz Knappik, “Hindemith und Harmonik-Konzeptionen in Dodekaphonie und Serialismus: Eine Re-Lektüre der Rede ‘Sterbende Gewässer,’” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 34 (2005): 154– 85. See Jeannie M. Guerrero, “The Presence of Hindemith in Nono’s Sketches: A new Context for Nono’s Music,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 40 (2011): 109–45. Theodor W. Adorno, “Ad vocem Hindemith: Eine Dokumentation,” in Musikalische Schriften 17, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 210–46.

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– and the Mass, Hindemith devoted himself to the Christian cultural canon and to sacred music, displaying an attitude almost reminiscent of an old master. It is in this moralizing context that certain phrases from the “Sterbende Gewässer” lecture must be understood, yet the central expression, “total tonality,” can be considered the textual keystone: the phrase had first appeared in 1959 in the German edition of Hindemith’s Harvard lectures, A Composer’s World (delivered in 1949–50 and published in the USA in 1952).4 At the end of Section V in Chapter V (“Means of Production”), there is a new passage not present in the English edition, dealing with the “essence of tonality.” Here Hindemith delineates the “major-minor sphere as a selected tonality with rather limited possibilities,” a sphere with “a modal (more precisely: scale-related) foundation, just like any other tonality.”5 (Certainly, a supporter of Rameau and Riemann would fiercely deny the claim of such a foundation.) This is contrasted by Hindemith with the “one, all-embracing tonality” characterized by a variety of “melodic and tonal features” which – like water – carve their own path to the ear, in ways unpredictable by theory. In “Sterbende Gewässer,” this idea is extended along these lines: It seems to me that – already in the present-day and in the future – the interacting forces at work throughout the entire musical scene increasingly tend towards a clear division: music, then, will only be recognized as that which takes place within our tonal system according to the realities of the total tonality which – in its unlimited variety – is also a tonal totality. Everything else may be referred to as a game of sounds [Klangspiel]: something that does not confine the creator to the use of a technique by any limits whatsoever. Sound, chance, mood, and improvisation would prevail here: a kaleidoscopic sound world requiring the listener merely to perceive and not at all to participate.6

At first, the distinction between “total tonality” and “tonal totality” appears to be merely a clever pun, yet it illuminates its double meaning in context: Hindemith conceives of total tonality as a material or rather compositional context in a narrow sense, while he understands tonal totality as an ontologically given fact, the assumption of a comprehensive order unalterable by humans, as proposed by Hans Kayser in his harmonic theories, much esteemed by Hindemith.7 The terminological proximity of “totality” to “totalitarianism” suggests an ideological construct operating in the background: If such a totality can be only “tonal,” i. e., organized in a certain way, “non-tonal” sound phenomena would lack philosophical legitimacy. Then the sound game cannot be considered art, either, but at most a techne, a mechanical, arbitrary operation with tones which could as well be replaced by other entities (e. g., numbers). According to Hindemith, this view – which may be read as a criticism of Joseph Schillinger’s system of a fully rationalized and autonomous musical logic, which attracted many musicians in the 1940s, not least in the realm of jazz – leads to the horrifying image of a robot or a computer replacing the composer in the future and calculating any conceivable sound combination. Against this 4 5 6 7

Paul Hindemith, A Composer’s World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). Hindemith, Komponist in seiner Welt (Zürich: Atlantis, 1959), 107. Hindemith, “Sterbende Gewässer” (1963), in Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, ed. Giselher Schubert (Zürich: Atlantis, 1994), 314–36 (334–35), emphasis in the original. See in particular Hans Kayser, Vom Klang der Welt (Zürich: Niehans, 1937).

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negative utopia Hindemith presents the scenario of returning to an ideal musico-acoustic “nature” which, “unpolluted,” frees itself from the historical pressure of modernism. It is an irony of history that Hindemith should find some sort of successor in Karlheinz Stockhausen of all people – primarily through the principle of an integral (super-) “formula” (Formel) that prevailed in his works after the end of the 1960s. As a connecting link, however, one might recognize Hermann Heiß’s concept of “peri-tonality,” developed in his 1949 textbook Elemente der Komposition (Elements of Composition) and in which he referred to Kayser among others.8 Heiß’s holistic definition of music as sound unfolding in space and time, deeply influenced by Hauer’s trope model, led him not only to an alternative to Schoenberg’s motivic-thematic thinking – the concept of “athematic” music, explored in the Sinfonia atematica of 1950, e. g. – and to the establishment of a studio for electronic music at Darmstadt in 1955. It also resulted in a reinterpretation of the twelve-tone row which now, being at the end of a teleological movement of “occidental” music, virtually includes the latter: the twelve tones as a totality of our, i. e., the occidental, sound world embrace all realities of sound and melody, of structure and integration, and in the appearance of precisely these qualities and due to their origin they are not a-tonal in the sense of anti-tonal. Twelve-tone music is neither an isolated refuge nor an entirely different planet on which one could eventually live undisturbed by nature. As the outermost expansion of the tone phenomenon [äußerste Ausweitung der Erscheinung Ton], it is the area accessed last within the enclosure of all sound possibilities: not atonal in a restricted sense, but peri-tonal, enabling the simplest as well as the most highly differentiated relations to form a causal connection.9

Hindemith’s position may be relatively narrow and bourgeois compared to Heiß’s vastly extended notion of the tonal; nevertheless, it challenges us to take a closer look, since Hindemith, unlike Heiß, adheres to a sound-related – i. e., vertical – conception of tonality. (Even in the movement of intervals, Hindemith sees nothing but sound [Klang] extending into time.) While Heiß is forced to speak of the necessity or inevitability of historical developments to justify his own twelve-tone technique, Hindemith’s perception more closely recalls Fétis’s influential construction of the four historical ordres leading from “unitonalité” in the Middle Ages to the “pluritonalité” of the present.10 Accordingly, Hindemith describes the history of tonality as a consistent, organic process leading from the Chinese pentatonic scale to “today’s fully dodecaphonic, non-modal tone system,” through developmental stages of modality, major/minor-tonality, and an “integrated, major/minor-free full chromaticism” at the turn of the century (which Hindemith sees exhibited in the works of 8

Hermann Heiß, Elemente der musikalischen Komposition (Tonbewegungslehre): Schlagsatz, Melodiesatz, Klangsatz, Zwölftonsatz (Heidelberg: Hochstein, 1949). On p. 205, Heiß refers to Kayser’s interpretation of the Chinese “twelve Lu” scale. 9 Ibid., 146–47, emphasis in original. See also further texts by Heiß, e. g. “Die athematische Tonbewegung,” in Hermann Heiß: Eine Dokumentation, ed. Barbara Reichenbach (Mainz: Schott, 1975), 51–54. 10 François-Joseph Fétis, Traité complet de la théorie et de la pratique de l’harmonie (Paris: Schlesinger, 1844).

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Strauss and Reger). Nevertheless, as a consequence – of the “invisible hand” inherent in the rationalization process, as described by Max Weber – the twelve-tone (or rather twelve-pitch) “non-modal” tonal system no longer brings forth any intervallic qualities but merely a stock of pitch components; Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique has decayed into a hollow permutation game which no longer takes into account the controlling instance of listening. This instance, however, may turn into a dialectic corrective in order to use the stock once again for generating new tonal systems: In our total tonality, musical structures, even in their most complicated shapes, can still be analyzed by the ear, since it is up to the composer to adjust his tonal material to any desired degree of comprehensibility. Serial operations, on the other hand, prevent him from doing so, they enslave him; and even what adepts of this technique praise as a great miracle – namely, a state of being free of the chains of tonality – has brought them little more than a palette poor in colors.11

Certainly, Hindemith’s reading can promptly be contradicted with reference to Schoenberg’s hexachordal combinatoriality or Berg’s re-tonalization of the twelvetone series. And is it not true that Schoenberg initially conceived of the twelve-tone technique as an act of positing which might serve to expand traditional tonality, an expansion increasingly realized, moreover, in works of his American exile? Hindemith, however, insists on a categorical opposition between a “natural” and a “historically” enforced tonality; and the latter, he says, is inherent in Schoenberg’s concept of progress.12 In a university lecture given in Zurich in 1955, Hindemith argues accordingly that the treatment of dissonances in twelve-tone technique might also be achieved by other means.13 And the attempt to recreate tonal effects using a system not related to a tonic (twelve-tone technique) strikes him as absurd, for it obscures the only relevant decision – whether the composer defines tonality as nature or as an artistic device: philosophically speaking, as “natura naturans” or “natura naturata.” Even if Hindemith deduces total tonality from history, he continues to regard it as “nature” insofar as the category of the differentiating ear is not abandoned. (Apparently, Hindemith has not considered or approved of the idea that listening, too, is subject to cultural and historical change.) What stands behind this category – interestingly, just as in Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre – is the acoustic or physical reality of the overtone series. From it, in Unterweisung im Tonsatz, Hindemith derives a system of tonal relations and Schoenberg, too, holds on to it in his American textbook Structural Functions of Harmony, which concludes with a historical derivation of tonality. After an Apollonian (Classical) and a Dionysian (Romantic) period, a disintegration takes place, a turning towards the illogical, resulting in his (Schoenberg’s) attempt to re-establish tonality out of the comprehensibility of a tone within the overtone series: dissonances, then, are nothing more than higher consonances. Schoenberg explains the move towards twelve-tone music by stating that in Pierrot and Die Glückliche Hand he had already begun to organize 11 12 13

Hindemith, “Sterbende Gewässer,” 329. See Golan Gur, Orakelnde Musik: Schönberg, der Fortschritt und die Avantgarde (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2013). Hindemith, “Hören und Verstehen unbekannter Musik” (1955), in Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, ed. Giselher Schubert (Zürich: Atlantis, 1994), 293–309.

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even accompanying sounds as vertical projections of melodies whose intervallic proportions were derived from these overtone relations.14 Schoenberg was convinced that even the logic of progressions in twelve-tone music would one day be recognized, particularly with regard to its functional potential. For the law of gradation, he says, is the same: it no longer refers to the relationships of consonance and dissonance, but of mild and harsh dissonances. This functionality replaces a tonality based on progressions among local tonics with a tonality of relations. In Structural Functions, Schoenberg transfers this idea back to traditional tonality which now becomes a “mono”-tonality behind which an elaborate system of harmonic relationships is hidden: different regions are located at defined distances from a central key and together form a virtual musical solar system. It is arguable whether Schoenberg’s late work, including its theoretical base, is concerned with rehabilitating the “nature” of tonality or with taking its functionalization one step further. Tonality (in the old sense) would thus remain a posited system, just like dodecaphony: The origin of both is not the physical reality of the overtone series but in the composer’s imagination, which, as a combination of inspiration, logic, formal sense, and musical taste determines what appropriate usage – a triumph of the musical idea, that is, over the natural resource of pitch. In the final sentences of Structural Functions Schoenberg again firmly rejects an aesthetics of the beautiful in art, just as he denies music’s roots in the quadrivium. Paradoxically, Hindemith’s validation of the “nature” of the pitch, which recurs in total tonality, using evidence from the history of music theory, seems historicist in comparison: the force of history is more compelling than Schoenberg’s autonomy of the creative process. This discrepancy marks the generation gap between a “Romanticist” and a “Modernist,” one that appears to repeat itself within the history of the Second Viennese School in the relationship between Berg and Webern. The consequences each draws from twelve-tone technique reflect ambivalence between a “tonal” (or, more accurately: a substantial) and a “functional” (more precisely: an attributive) notion of tonality. With his row formations – those in Lulu or the Violin Concerto – Berg obviously tried to create a mediation so that the “old” tonality might once again appear as “nature,” allowing it to be a means of expression without losing its functional flexibility; Webern, however, compresses row forms in such a way that they become a mere metaphor for “nature,” symbol of indissoluble genetic links between the detail and the whole. Form, for Webern, can thus take over the functions of the old tonality and of thematic working without being immediately audible. The idea of a totalization, then, has a macro- and a microcosmic side – and this relationship between the part and the whole was about to become a central compositional challenge in early serialism.

14

Arnold Schoenberg, Structural Functions of Harmony, revised 1969 edition, ed. Leonard Stein (London: Faber, 1983), 192–96.

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II What Hindemith was pointing to in 1963 as the overall historical development of tonality reflects something virtually “in the air” after the Second World War, namely the demand for a systematic exploration of the known tonal universe and for transgression of its limits. The reasons for this are many and varied, embracing both a quasi-religious need for an absolute, and the omnipotent fantasy of being able to impose a tabula rasa on a certain unique historical situation, as it resonates in Stockhausen’s (in)famous remark that “the cities are erased.”15 Totalization of the tonal space would not be conceivable without Messiaen’s advocacy of the importance of numbers, thus giving a decisive push to further development of the twelve-tone technique into the serial methods of Stockhausen, Boulez, and Nono. In Messiaen’s music, due to its scalar basis, tonal reminiscences in the modes were not excluded; up to the Turangalîla-Symphony, his music always possessed tonal sprinklings or colors; and even his pupil Stockhausen (previously a student of Frank Martin’s16) combined twelve-tone and freely tonal elements in his early works. In Stockhausen’s treatment of the series, one might even discern adherence to a substantial notion of tonality: already in some early scores, the row embraces thirteen tones, i. e., as starting and end point, the first note is represented twice, thus acquiring a concluding function. This is true of Chöre für Doris in 1950, and holds true for Mantra and the Michael-formula in Licht. The principle of the “tempo octave” Stockhausen establishes in Gruppen represents a consequent extension onto the horizontal, which dates back to Messiaen’s “chromatic” – i. e., gradually rising – tempo series in Mode de valeurs et d’intensités. Stockhausen links the tempo octave in Gruppen to an all-interval twelve-tone row, so pointing to yet another stage within the claim of totalization: through the reduction of the series to a hexachord already containing all six intervals – minor and major second, minor and major third, perfect fourth, and the tritone – the intervallic qualities themselves, as it were, become thematic and no longer require motivic-thematic transformation. III Pierre Boulez’s works of the 1950s will not be discussed here: their tremendous constructive complexity due to the construction of ambiguous matrix-based pitch and duration grids, as well as the production of derived intervals through the so15

16

Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Zur Situation des Metiers (Klangkomposition)” (1953), in Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik. Bd. 1: Aufsätze 1952–1962 zur Theorie des Komponierens (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1963), 48: “One should bear in mind that seldom did a generation of composers have so many chances and was born at such a fortunate moment as the present: The ‘cities are erased,’ and one can begin anew from scratch without regard to ruins and ‘tacky’ relics. Let us not take current architecture as an example …” (my translation). Magdalena Zorn, Stockhausen unterwegs zu Wagner: Eine Studie zu den musikalisch-theologischen Ideen in Karlheinz Stockhausens Opernzyklus LICHT (1977–2003) (Hofheim: Wolke, 2016), 117–72.

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called “modulor”-operation (a variant of the proliferation procedure Berg used in Lulu) may aim at a release of the vertical, and – in conjunction with the inspiration of exotic instruments – at an immediate sensual experience of sound, yet it strictly refuses the tonal association typical of Stockhausen’s row constructions and the melodic course of his formulas. The break that occurs between Boulez’s still-tonal early work and his first dodecaphonic scores is radical. The totality he strives for is of a fundamental quality: each sound in a work is a result and function of the structural specifications of the entire work (and the other way around), and, at the same time, it is a unique, unrepeatable event. The listener is denied a familiar orientation; he is led into the “open” again and again and unable to carry out the game of retention and protention vital for a tonal and/or thematically defined idea of form. As for Luigi Nono, the situation is different; in his musical thinking and works, as early as in the 1950s, the conflict between a substantial notion of the tonal and the demands of the system becomes visible. There is reason to doubt whether, according to Nono, there was a theoretical “zero hour” in the first place. He saw himself on the path to a gradual expansion of the twelve-tone method, once initiated by Schoenberg and continued by Dallapiccola in Italy. The all-interval row on which he bases various works in the 1950s – e. g., Incontri and Il canto sospeso – thus indicates a symbolic anchorage with historical references. This series corresponds to the “fan”-type of fugue subject – well-known in Bach’s Fugue in E minor (BWV 548) for organ (nicknamed “The Wedge,” among English musicians), for example – in other words, a funnel-shaped motion of diverging intervals. In this regard, the series is centrifugal, bursting open, while the row’s mathematical procedures of multiplication and permutation refer back to Messiaen’s and Boulez’s principles of unification. Already at the beginning of Il canto there is a single, clearly audible six-four chord which may be derivable from the logic of the row, but in this case it evidently bears a kind of auratic, magical meaning – of an “other” – perhaps as an expression of absurd hope by the protagonists. In a 1969 text, Helmut Lachenmann dealt extensively with the debate, which, already in the 1950s, exposed Nono to the criticism of orthodox serialists and led to an early misunderstanding with Stockhausen, against whose analysis of Il canto Nono protested.17 Was his adherence to certain forms of tonality to be understood, possibly even in the sense of Hindemith’s second formula, in terms of “tonal totality”? The characteristic Nonoesque pathos already mentioned above arises from the fact that, with the pointillist isolation of the serially available pitch, the very element of gesture dating back to tonal practice has not been shattered entirely, but merely reduced. The act of composition remains expressive, while, throughout, the experiences of the old, tonal style are kept alive and active by timbre and dynamics. Reasonably integrating those remains which cannot be resolved any further into new conceptions poses a problem in the face of which composers are still helpless today.18 17 18

See Stockhausen, “Luigi Nono: Sprache und Musik II” (1957), in Texte zu eigenen Werken und zur Kunst Anderer: Aktuelles. Bd. 2: Aufsätze 1952–1962 zur musikalischen Praxis (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1963), 157–66. Helmut Lachenmann, “Luigi Nono oder Rückblick auf die serielle Musik” (1969), in Musik als existenzielle Erfahrung (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1996), 247–57 (250).

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Lachenmann goes on to interpret Nono’s use of the all-interval series in the following manner: Keeping this [i. e., the zigzag pitch wedge] resulted from the necessity not of turning a previously lifeless sound material into something characteristic but, on the contrary, of deadening the material by a certain equalization [Gleichschaltung], since its inclination to prematurely generate intervallic or even thematic characters was abundant. During this serially manipulated deadening process, however, Nono once again kept the remnants of harmonic themes, not broken but merely reduced, as is unavoidable within permanent chromaticism.19 What about these […] tonal remnants? People have repeatedly accused Nono of standing still. In doing so, they do not recognize what standing still means at a stage in which all other composers have yielded to paths of less resistance. The compositional conflict of Nono’s music […] is the central conflict of this musical epoch: how do I free myself for good from an obviously outmoded tonality, its modes of thought and forms of communication? In other words: how do I get to a music outside of the experiences of tonal consciousness and its aesthetic clichés?20

What follows is an astonishing conclusion which is also the nucleus of a compositional program Lachenmann implemented himself, essentially the negation of the physical totality of pitch – even if only hazily remembered – something that Nono did not forsake to the very end: Serial technique was an attempt to overcome tonality systematically. The attempt to which we owe – as is easily forgotten – crucial experiences: it failed. This realization had a paralyzing effect on some people (see Boulez) while to others it seemed like a signal to pursue an unmethodical fishing in troubled waters based on private euphorias.21

IV For other composers after 1945, the failures Lachenmann speaks of have simply become the premises for their artistic identity – an identity in which tonality survives as indisputable foundation. This applies to György Ligeti, for instance, whose exploration of tonality presents one of the most remarkable cases in the history of new music after 1945. The young Ligeti also carefully worked through Hindemith’s Unterweisung, even though – as is hardly surprising – Bartók’s influence on him was proportionately higher. With polymodal chromaticism, Bartók had created a powerful instrument of tonal ambivalence by producing chromaticism from modality, using the ingenious as well as simple procedure of choosing the same starting pitch for all modes, transposing them onto that note. (Krenek in 1940 had done something similar with the twelve-tone row in his Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae: he permutated the hexachords, then transposed them onto the same tonic.) The peculiar sound effects Bartók achieved with polymodal chromaticism represented for Ligeti a “new tonality.” In 1950 he welcomed Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto enthusiastically: in the slow movement, he notes, a C major chord is introduced in such a 19 20 21

Lachenmann is referring here to the row forms used in Schoenberg’s Variations, Op. 31, and in Webern’s Op. 30. Ibid., 250–51. Ibid., 253.

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way that it sounds as if one is hearing it for the first time ever.22 (In 1963 Terry Riley demonstrated with In C, incunabulum of minimalism, that nothing can sound more paradoxical and disconcerting than static diatonicism. The effect derives in part from another Bartókian principle – use of the so-called acoustic scale incorporating the notes F and B from the overtone series as substitutes for F and B – bound up also, in Riley’s score, with the revolutionary preference in advanced jazz after 1950 for modal scales, rather than harmonic patterns, as the basis for improvisation.) Ligeti’s works of the 1950s – including Musica Ricercata and the First String Quartet – adopt tonal elements in the most varied ways, while always retaining a modal basis. After his experiences with micropolyphony, Ligeti returned from the 1970s onwards in the orbit of the opera Le grand macabre to diatonicism, albeit of a kind that is distorted and no longer perceived as tonal. For this purpose, on the one hand, the use of non-tempered tunings played an important role, and, on the other hand, the employment of floating triads no longer aligned with a common tonic, in combination with modal scales. In the Violin Concerto (1990), Ligeti envisaged “hybrid, ‘impure’ harmonies” arising from the conflict between “composed overtone spectra” of pure intervals and a mirror-world of tempered intervals.23 The novel sound that results appears sweetish, exotic, yet also estranged. Kagel had attempted something comparable with his so-called serial tonality – what is decontextualized here are triads or wandering chords, which lose their effect as tension-laden chords due to the consistent surroundings of seventh and ninth chords.24 While Kagel’s technique does not deny its serial origins – in this case, through combinatorial procedures of rotation and permutation – and one can speak of an attributive tonality, Ligeti leaves us in the dark about which concept of tonality is behind the effects and sounds in his music. Does this virtual tonality still refer to a concept of total tonality, beyond systems of temperament, or is this an ironic post-modern commentary – that tonality is certainly dead, historically speaking, yet continues to haunt us whether we like it or not?

22

23 24

György Ligeti, “Zwölftonmusik oder ‘Neue Tonalität’?” Melos 17 (1950): 45–48. Regarding the use of the C major triad in the middle movement, Ligeti notes that it sounds “like a new natural phenomenon never observed before. Pure harmonies and tonal relations appear in this style, too, yet the logic of these relations is quite different from the clear-cut organization of the old functions; it deviates from the latter just as twelve-tone music does, only in the opposite direction” (45). Ligeti, “Violinkonzert (Urfassung),” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Monika Lichtenfeld (Mainz: Schott, 2007), 2:302–05. See Knut Holtsträter, “Mauricio Kagels serielle Tonalität und Franz Liszts Konzept des ‘poetischen Gedankens,’” in Vom instrumentalen zum imaginären Theater: musikästhetische Wandlungen im Werk von Mauricio Kagel, ed. Werner Klüppelholz (Hofheim: Wolke, 2008), 129– 40.

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V In closing, a late defender of total tonality in Hindemith’s sense may have the floor, namely Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein’s lifelong dealings with the tonality question were twofold, both compositional and reflective. His project fed on an intensive reception of Hindemith at the beginning of the 1940s, on the simultaneously pivotal experience of jazz, and finally on a passionate analysis of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique. For Bernstein, tonality was no monolithic concept but a dynamic and syncretic matter. (Something similar, though with rather different consequences, applies to Hans Werner Henze who, in his First Violin Concerto of 1947, combined tonal and twelve-tone elements: the main subject of the first movement, presented by the violin, is dodecaphonic, while the remaining notes provide an orchestral accompaniment of tonal chords.) Already in his first opera, Trouble in Tahiti (1952), Bernstein employed a theme that starts in C major – alluding to Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel – before exhausting all remaining pitches of the chromatic scale. The theme, in this way, ends openly: although highly memorable, it is at the same time highly ambivalent, a chimera corresponding to the opera’s subject. In the trio “Quiet” from Candide (1956), the situation is reversed: here, Bernstein works with the theme from Bach’s “Wedge” fugue, whose centripetal tendencies seem to multiply in the distortion to which he subjects it. Appearances, however, are deceitful. The travesty of the twelve-tone technique Bernstein employs leads to an even stronger confirmation of the “old” tonality; this is a case of a clearly allegorical use of tonality, possibly even a case of meta-tonality.25 In his 1973 Harvard lectures, in which he deals intensively with Schoenberg’s works, Bernstein makes a case for the idea of tonality: a tonality which may range from diatonicism up to twelve-tone music, but is doomed to fail at precisely that moment when – as Bernstein states for Schoenberg’s music – it achieves too great an ambiguity, becoming too self-negating “to be perceived by our human ears”: The trouble is that the new musical “rules” of Schoenberg are not apparently based on innate awareness, on the intuition of tonal relationships. They are like the rules of an artificial system, and therefore must be learned. This would seem to lead to what used to be called “form without content,” or form at the expense of content – structuralism for its own sake.26

* * * Subsequently, Bernstein defended Schoenberg against the accusation of formalism and emphasized that his harmonic thinking derived “from the same twelve tones of 25

26

See Wolfgang Rathert, “‘Die beste aller musikalischen Welten’: Leonard Bernsteins Candide und die Idee des ‘Crossover’ in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in “… das alles auch hätte anders kommen”: Beiträge zur Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts [Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Giselher Schubert], ed. Susanne Schaal-Gotthardt et al. (Mainz: Schott, 2009), 278–79. Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 283.

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the harmonic series, a universal we all share.”27 On the other hand, Bernstein saw the “old” tonality come to an end, as thematicized in Mahler’s work. That this tonality survived, as it were, encapsulated in a work such as Berio’s Sinfonia, is due to an aesthetic concept no longer concerned with “total tonality” but with “total perception” or “total form” – with a previously unknown semiotic universe to be explored by the listener. Nevertheless, the theoretical and compositional concept of “total tonality” was not dead, quite the reverse: its reception took another, hitherto under-studied path in the advanced jazz of the 1950s, with its paradigm shift from harmonic chord changes to working with scales – a shift introduced around 1950 in bebop and further pursued in free jazz. Thus, in his 1959 book The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation, jazz theorist George Russell explicitly refers to Rudolph Réti’s Tonality, Atonality, Pantonality: A Study of Some Trends in Twentieth Century Music, published the year before.28 Let us review the situation. The problems arising in the attempt to determine the role and significance of tonality after the Second World War are immense: they resemble the effort to define what actually constitutes an object worthy of pictorial representation in the visual arts after 1945. Just as abstraction and figuration lose their dichotomy in painting – even after having made it so simple to distinguish between avant-garde and traditionalist movements and attitudes – so too do the oppositions between tonal composition broadly construed (i. e., by proceeding from a tonic), and a non-tonal composition commonly identified with serial techniques, prove increasingly subject to dissolution. When Kagel speaks of serial or Ligeti of hybrid tonality, it sounds paradoxical, not to say absurd – are these not categorical opposites that have been clamped together? Indeed, such endeavors on the part of composers to restrain centrifugal forces are a token of a fundamental shift in the conception of tonality, which certainly has paradoxical consequences – paradoxical insofar as, at the beginning of the 1970s, they lead to a restitution and new appreciation by the avant-garde of older tonal means thought to have been superseded, whether in phenomena like the “New Simplicity,” polystylism, or reworkings of older music. If, as a consequence from Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique runs, the old tonality had become an artistic means to be used like a color on a palette, now it appears again as a primary means of expression, like a second or even first nature. In his conversations with Alexander Ivashkin in the mid-1980s, Alfred Schnittke said that he held the C major triad to be a natural event, for the simple reason that it was contained in the overtone series.29 For all those who believe in the idea of musical progress, in the “tendency of the material,” such a confession conceals nothing but a crisis, even a “tendency towards regression.” As an alternative, 27 28

29

Ibid. George Russell, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation (New York: Concept Publishing Company, 1959), “Technical Appendix”, p. B; a new edition appeared under the title The Art and Science of Tonal Gravity (Brookline, MA: Concept, 2001); Rudolph Réti, Tonality, Atonality, Pantonality: A Study of Some Trends in Twentieth Century Music (London: Rockliff, 1958). Alfred Schnittke, Über das Leben und die Musik: Gespräche mit Alexander Iwaschkin (Munich: Econ, 1998), 175–76.

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the use of tonal means could be seen as an indispensable part of the compositional freedom to reflect on the limits and possibilities of tonal systems. In the end, the question might be raised as to whether or not the entire spectrum between noise and tone stands at a composer’s disposal after 1945, whether as artistic or expressive means, whenever an artistic idea is to be realized. Tonality and atonality would then be only partial moments of a bigger acoustic universe, the theoretical clarification and preservation of which remains a challenge.30 That Hindemith initiated this in his “Sterbende Gewässer” polemic is to his credit, even if we are no longer convinced by his arguments and even less by his imagery. After all, “total tonality” offers an unimpeded view of what has happened since the 1970s, when a “fragmented” and “utopian” tonality finds its way into compositional practice. It may be less of a reflex and commentary on post-serialism than a token of the vitality of a discourse which disproved Hindemith’s pessimistic expectations. Tonality, or so it seems, is possible without totality. Whether the reverse statement holds equally true, meanwhile, remains to be seen. Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. “Ad vocem Hindemith: Eine Dokumentation.” In Theodor W. Adorno, Musikalische Schriften 17, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 210–46. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982. Bernstein, Leonard. The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. Fétis, François-Joseph. Traité complet de la théorie et de la pratique de l’harmonie. Paris: Schlesinger, 1844. Guerrero, Jeannie M. “The Presence of Hindemith in Nono’s Sketches: A New Context for Nono’s Music.” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 40 (2011): 109–45. Gur, Golan. Orakelnde Musik: Schönberg, der Fortschritt und die Avantgarde. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2013. Heiß, Hermann. “Die athematische Tonbewegung (1950).” In Hermann Heiß: Eine Dokumentation, edited by Barbara Reichenbach, 51–54. Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 15. Mainz: Schott, 1975. ––. Elemente der musikalischen Komposition (Tonbewegungslehre): Schlagsatz, Melodiesatz, Klangsatz, Zwölftonsatz. Heidelberg: Hochstein, 1949. Hindemith, Paul. A Composer’s World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952. (Extended German edition Komponist in seiner Welt. Zürich: Atlantis, 1959.) ––. “Hören und Verstehen unbekannter Musik.” 1955. In Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, edited by Giselher Schubert, 293–309. Zürich: Atlantis, 1994. ––. “Sterbende Gewässer.” 1963. In Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, edited by Giselher Schubert, 314– 36. Zürich: Atlantis, 1994. Holtsträter, Knut. “Kagels serielle Tonalität als Weiterführung von Liszts Konzept des ‘poetischen Gedankens.’” In Vom instrumentalen zum imaginären Theater: Musikästhetische Wandlungen im Werk von Mauricio Kagel, edited by Werner Klüppelholz, 129–40. Hofheim: Wolke, 2008. Kayser, Hans. Vom Klang der Welt. Zürich: Niehans, 1937. 30

For a recent perspective on this point, see Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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Knappik, Franz. “Hindemith und Harmonik-Konzeptionen in Dodekaphonie und Serialismus: Eine Re-Lektüre der Rede ‘Sterbende Gewässer.’” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 34 (2005): 154–85. Lachenmann, Helmut. “Luigi Nono oder Rückblick auf die serielle Musik.” 1969. In Musik als existenzielle Erfahrung, 247–57. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1996. Ligeti, György. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Monika Lichtenfeld. 2 vols. Mainz: Schott, 2007. Ligeti, György. “Zwölftonmusik oder ‘Neue Tonalität’?” Melos 17 (1950): 45–48. Rathert, Wolfgang. “‘Die beste aller musikalischen Welten’: Leonard Bernsteins Candide und die Idee des ‘Crossover’ in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts.” In “… das alles auch hätte anders kommen”: Beiträge zur Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts [Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Giselher Schubert], edited by Susanne Schaal-Gotthardt et al., 261–82. Mainz: Schott, 2009. Réti, Rudolph. Tonality, Atonality, Pantonality: A Study of Some Trends in Twentieth Century Music. London: Rockliff, 1958. Russell, George. The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation, New York: Concept Publishing Company, 1959. New edition as The Art and Science of Tonal Gravity. Brookline, MA: Concept, 2001. Schnittke, Alfred. Über das Leben und die Musik: Gespräche mit Alexander Iwaschkin. Munich: Econ, 1998. Schoenberg, Arnold. Structural Functions of Harmony. First published 1954; revised with corrections, edited by Leonard Stein. 1969. London: Faber, 1983. Stockhausen, Karlheinz. “Luigi Nono. Sprache und Musik II.” 1957. In Texte zu eigenen Werken und zur Kunst Anderer: Aktuelles. Bd. 2: Aufsätze 1952–1962 zur musikalischen Praxis, 157–66. Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1963. ––. “Zur Situation des Metiers (Klangkomposition).” 1953. In Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik. Bd. 1: Aufsätze 1952–1962 zur Theorie des Komponierens, 45–61. Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1963. Tymoczko, Dmitri. A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Zorn, Magdalena. Stockhausen unterwegs zu Wagner: Eine Studie zu den musikalisch-theologischen Ideen in Karlheinz Stockhausens Opernzyklus LICHT (1977–2003). Hofheim: Wolke, 2016.

The Stopped Clock: Tape Loops, Synthesizers, and the Transfiguration of Harmony Joseph Auner My title refers to the proverb “even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day,” which turned into a tape loop featured on the 1993 track “Planet of the Shapes” by the British electronica duo Orbital.1 The thirteen statements of the loop fade in after a short introductory section and then continue on alone until joined by a pulsing bass note that anchors the entire piece. As is typical of the loop-based production of electronic dance music, “Planet of the Shapes” exemplifies what Mark Spicer has labeled accumulative form, shaped by the addition and removal of layers rather than by melodic or harmonic development.2 In the music of Orbital and other sample-based compositions, this formal process depends on defining the individual layers by striking and sharply contrasting timbres, as in this track, which includes driving drums, a tanbura-like drone with richly shifting harmonics, and a four-note looping flute figure. As the instrumental layers fade out at the end, the “stopped clock” loop again takes over, repeating ten times until it is stopped theatrically, as if someone had bumped a record player that was stuck. The “stopped clock” proverb is usually used in situations where a person with a crazy notion or an unlikely prediction accidentally turns out to be correct thanks to chance events or “dumb luck.” I will be using the phrase here somewhat differently to consider how music technologies have opened up new ways of working with pitches, triads, and the other building blocks of tonal music, which though they may at first seem “right” or familiar from traditional ways of hearing, can take on very different properties and potentialities. We might think of the “clock” that has stopped in this case as all those cultural and historical forces that make us expect to hear a chord move, to become part of a functional harmonic progression, to go somewhere. In contrast, there is a vast amount of music today in many styles that focuses on what can happen in a single sustained sound, including spectralist works, 1

2

From Orbital 2 (Internal/FFRR: 1993), also known as The Brown Album. The “stopped clock” sample comes from the 1987 film Withnail and I. While the vinyl surface noise that accompanies the vocal sample at the beginning and end of the track implies that the loop originated on an LP, the two layers are independent and move through different phase relationships with each other. The first and final tracks on the album feature vocal tape loops that move in and out and phase as in Steve Reich’s early phase pieces; notably for the present context, the first track is based on a sample from Star Trek: The Next Generation, using the phrase “where time becomes a loop.” See Mark Spicer, “(Ac)cumulative Form in Pop Music,” Twentieth-Century Music 1 (2004): 29–64; Joseph Auner, “Losing your Voice: Sampled Speech and Song from the Uncanny to the Unremarkable,” in Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, ed. Ulrik Ekman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 135–50.

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experimental electronica, hip-hop, R&B, sound art, ambient music, and granular synthesis.3 We can hear an example of this in the Orbital excerpt, which contains a C major triad embedded in a C-Mixolydian collection. But, as in the vast majority of electronic dance music, like a stopped clock this harmony stands still over the course of the nine-and-a-half minute long piece. And yet it would obviously not be adequate to say that the music is static. Rather it is as if, by anchoring the harmony in place, the component pitches from the samples, and even more so all the other musical parameters of rhythm, timbre, and register, are allowed to flourish, individualize, and blossom with such vitality that the process can only be stopped by brute force. This project extends ideas explored in my essay, “Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality,” which focused on the impact of new sound technologies in the first half of the twentieth century and on how composers, musicians, and theorists heard, worked with, and reimagined the basic building blocks of tonal harmony. In reference to devices for visualizing and reproducing sound, I discussed how harmonies came to be considered as vibrating objects rather than as units in a harmonic progress, how the transductive properties of the microphone broke down distinctions between musical and non-musical sound sources, how the player piano and phonograph allowed music to be heard as points of sound on a scrolling timeline of silence, and how ethnographic recordings made it possible to hear Western art music as just one of many very different traditions around the world, including those that had come and gone.4 This essay focuses on the second half of the twentieth century and two technologies that I will argue have likewise contributed to very different ways of working with pitches and harmonies: namely, the tape loop and the voltage-controlled modular synthesizer. Thinking about the basic tools of electronic music may seem like a peculiar angle into the question of “Tonality since 1950,” since for many the early development of electronic music was defined by the search for a music that would be free from tonality and the limitations of traditional tempered instruments. Indeed, the words tonal, tonality, or harmony don’t appear in the indexes to publications like The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music (2007), foundational texts like Peter Manning’s Electronic and Computer Music (now in its fourth edition, 2013), or the many publications from the early years of the synthesizer in the 1970s discussed below.5 But in what follows I will argue that the synthesizer and 3

4 5

The ability to stop or slow time to experience a dramatically expanded present (used for good and bad ends) has also been the subject of many recent films, such as Clockstoppers (2002), Click (2006), Cashback (2006), and the Quicksilver scene in the time-traveling X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). Christian Marclay’s twenty-four-hour video installation The Clock (2010) assembled a montage of film clips featuring clocks displaying every minute of every hour of a day. Many books explore time in related ways, including, with special relevance for this essay, Alan Lichtman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams (New York: Vintage, 1993), which contains a chapter imagining a world where time stands still. Auner, “Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality,” in Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice, eds. Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht (Steiner: Stuttgart, 2012), 25–46. Nick Collins and Julio D’Escriván, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music

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the tape loop – and their subsequent digital remediations in computer music and sampling – facilitated and required a kind of close listening to and manipulation of sound that could open up new perspectives on any acoustic phenomenon, including pitches, triads, and more extended harmonies. Returning to the stopped clock metaphor, I am interested in how this focused attention, as well as the actual physical and intellectual effort involved in working with tape loops and modular synthesizers, can be linked to new perceptions of time and space through which pitches and harmonies could be heard as existing in a greatly expanded present moment.6 Research on perception has shown that simply the act of closely paying attention to something can result in the phenomenon of “chronostasis,” as in the common experience of looking at the second hand on a clock and having it seem to slow down or even freeze in place. Studies included in the collection Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality provide evidence for how our perception of time can be affected by several factors, including drugs, strong emotions, hypnosis, and psychiatric disorders, some of which play a part in what follows.7 Elizabeth Margulis’s On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind documents ways in which repetition itself can impact a listener’s sense of time and the duration of events. In a chapter entitled “Attention, Temporality, and Music That Repeats Itself,” Margulis discusses how repetition in ritual, trance, and electronic dance music can create a “shift in attention” eliciting “a sense of profundity, sacredness, or transcendence, as everyday goals are set aside, and new insights and perceptions are allowed to emerge.”8 As we can hear in the Orbital excerpt, or in passages like the “Dance of the Adolescents” from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, there are close connections between the kinds of stasis produced by loops and ostinati, on the one hand, and sustained chords and drones, on the other. In both cases there can be a sort of gravitational effect of slowing time, related to Margulis’s observation that “repetition tends to reify a passage – to set it apart from the surrounding context as a ‘thing’ to be mused on, abstractly considered, and conceptualized as a unit.”9 In his history of electronic music, Joel Chadabe associates “The Great Opening Up of Music to All Sounds” with Einstein’s writings on relativity in the first decade of the twentieth century which dethroned any sense of absolute time, showing instead that clocks move

6

7

8 9

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Peter Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). While I focus here on the temporal aspects, there are important connections of the metaphor of the stopped clock and new perceptions of sound in spatial terms. For a probing overview of various formulations of musical space, see Georgina Born, Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 9–24. Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd, eds. Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014); Jonathan Kramer, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (New York: Schirmer, 1988), 381–82. Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 43. Ibid.

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faster or slower depending upon their relative speeds and the forces of gravity.10 Just as a clock in fact moves more slowly the closer it is to the center of the earth, we might consider how beginning in the nineteenth century individual harmonies, and eventually single pitches, increasingly have had the tendency to stop in their tracks and to become their own gravity centers, slowing time around them.11 This phenomenon can be linked to the impact of the impact of sound technologies I discussed in the earlier essay that reified the conception of a sound as a static object defined by its harmonic physiognomy. Gérard Grisey’s 1985 essay “Tempus ex machina: A Composer’s Reflections on Musical Time” deals with the “extreme expansion of time” in his own music as a result of which “we arrive at the very heart of sound whose material is revealed by the effect of an inordinate magnification.” Grisey proposes what he describes as a law of perception whereby “the acuity of auditory perception is inversely proportional to that of temporal perception.” Thus the act of “microphonic” listening – as if through a zoom lens – necessitates long durations and the constriction of “our temporal acuity.” With our ears “riveted to the internal dynamism of sounds,” he ponders what the result would be of our becoming “deaf to every macrophonic event,” namely all those tools for building relations between sounds: “melody, harmony, articulation, rhythmic gesture etc …, in short, all that traditional Western music proposes?”12 Building on his work modeling harmonic spectra at IRCAM, Grisey wrote a series of pieces that explore the possibilities of a dramatic magnification of a sound through an expansion of time. For example, his 22-minute Partiels (1975) unfolds the rich sonic structures embedded in the harmonic spectrum of a low E played on a trombone.13 He describes how a piece like this can be understood as modeling the interdependence of timbre as a simultaneity and form as a temporal process: “The sound object is only a process which has been contracted, the process nothing more than a dilated sound object.” In Grisey’s view, a piece can thus be considered as the process of slowing time to illuminate the rich inner workings of a sound: Time is like the air that these two living organisms breathe at different altitudes. It is the scale which creates the phenomenon and the difference resides in our faculties of perception. The process makes perceptible what the rapidity of the object hides from us: its eternal dynamism.14

10

Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1997), 21–22. 11 See, for example, Dahlhaus’s discussion of the “individualization” of harmony, in “Issues in Composition,” in Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 71–75. 12 Gérard Grisey, “Tempus ex Machina: A Composer’s Reflections on Musical Time,” Contemporary Music Review 2 (1987): 239–75 (259). Emphases in the original. He first wrote the essay in 1980 for lecture at Darmstadt and then revised it for publication in 1985. 13 François Rose, “Introduction to the Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music,” Perspectives of New Music 34, no. 2 (1996): 6–39. 14 Grisey, “Tempus ex Machina,” 269. Emphases in the original.

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We can hear other manifestations of this interaction of attention, magnification, and the slowing of time through sound technologies – leading to what we might call in this context “harmonies of the stopped clock” – in the “single-note” works of Giacinto Scelsi such as his Quattro Pezzi [su una nota sola] (1959) that resulted from his intensive involvement in the 1940s and 1950s with the Ondioline, an early electronic instrument that allowed subtle changes in pitch and timbre. He composed by recording and overdubbing extended improvisations on the instrument, first using wax discs and then magnetic recording tape. In his 1954 essay Son et musique he wrote of the development of a more refined faculty of perception that would open up a “third dimension” of a sound through an experience of its harmonic spectrum.15 Such tendencies are by no means limited to concert music, as with the famous E major triad at the end of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” (from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967) performed on three pianos and harmonium. As the sustained chord gradually fades away, the microphone levels are raised to their maximum level in order to capture all the rich details of the sound we usually ignore. For the Beatles this was still something of an avant-garde experiment, but it would not be farfetched today to have a passage like this be the entire piece. In what follows I will consider a number of examples of how tape loops and synthesizers allowed comparable experiences of pitches and harmonies seeming to stop in place to open up the hidden vistas of their internal dynamics. My focus here will be on developments in the 1960s and 1970s when the impact of these technologies became widespread and much discussed in many areas of music making. But analog modular synthesizers and tape loops have continued to play an important role, both in their original forms and as the conceptual foundation for digital music hardware and software, such as looping pedals and what Peter Manning calls “retro-synthesis,” featuring simulations of classic synthesizers and new musical interfaces that replicate analog devices and patching.16 Sociotechnical Networks of the Stopped Clock At this point, you may be thinking that these connections are a bit far-fetched and coincidental, and that this essay might itself be an example of “even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day.” But once you start looking, metaphors of clocks and clockwork slowing and stopping are surprisingly common in the 1960s and 1970s, as for example with Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique from 1962 with its 100 mechanical metronomes gradually coming to a standstill.17 Cage’s 0’00” from the same year explicitly stopped the clock of 4’ 33”, using maximum amplification to 15 16 17

See Gianmario Borio, “Sound as Process: Scelsi and the Composers of Nuova Consonanza,” in Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi, eds. Franco Sciannameo and Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 31–52 (44). Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, 103. Ligeti’s fascination with clocks and mechanical devices breaking down was a central theme in his music throughout his life. See Jane Piper Clendinning, “The Pattern-Meccanico Compositions of Györgi Ligeti,” Perspectives of New Music 31, no. 1 (1993): 192–234.

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focus our attention on the sounds of any disciplined action. In 1971 the British duo Tonto’s Expanding Head Band released their album Zero Time created by their massive room-filling modular synthesizer Tonto; their second album It’s About Time followed in 1974.18 And as I will discuss below, Steve Reich devoted considerable energies in the late 1960s and early 1970s to exploring technologies that would slow time and reveal the sonic possibilities of a single chord or sound, as in his Slow Motion Sound (1967).19 A particularly literal example of music that enacts a gradual expansion of time to open us up to a different experience of harmony can be heard in the 1967 song, “Time Has Come Today,” by the Chambers Brothers, which spent five weeks near the top of the Billboard Charts. The song begins in a driving soul idiom, but at around two-and-a-half minutes, where one might expect the typical single to come to an end, an extended psychedelic interlude is introduced by the sound of a gradually slowing clock. A repeating exclamation of the word “time” is increasingly extended through a tape delay system causing echo effects and distortions, until the voices create a feedback loop that produces a complex buzzing sonority recalling the conclusion of Reich’s Come Out from the previous year. When the instruments return, the functional progressions of the opening (cycling through D, C, G, and with a clear dominant A) are replaced by modal improvisations over an A drone that is sustained for nearly six-and-a-half minutes. As is made explicit with the line in the lyrics, “and my soul has been psychedelicized,” there are clear connections between such passages and an attempt to represent and intensify the experience of psychedelic drugs like LSD, an association that also relates to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” with its chorus “I’d love to turn you on.”20 Drugs are thus part of what we might call “technologies of the stopped clock,” also relevant to the music of Orbital and electronic dance music in the context of the role of ecstasy in rave culture, as well as with the tape delay pieces like Terry Riley’s Mescalin Mix (1963) performed at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, sometimes accompanied by psychedelic light shows that further contributed to altered mental states.21 There are obviously multiple trajectories leading to the slowing or stopping of the clock of harmonic progressions in these very different musical traditions, just as 18 19

20 21

See Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 171–86. In a 1968 essay, Luciano Berio used the image of the stopped clock to critique the role of prescriptive theories in serial music: “There is the story of the man who stopped his watch, which had been running slow, so that it would at least give the exact time twice a day. The composer’s watch is always too slow or too fast. Still, he falsifies the nature of his work and abdicates his responsibilities if he stops the mechanism to assure himself a narrow range of absolute accuracy and security.” Luciano Berio, “The Composer on His Work: Meditation on a Twelve-Tone Horse,” in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music: A Continuing Symposium, ed. Richard Kostelanetz and Joseph Darby (New York: Schirmer, 1996), 170. Russell Reising, “Melting Clocks and the Hallways of Always Time in Psychedelic Music,” Popular Music and Society 32 (2009): 523–47; B. Lee Cooper, “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs,” Popular Music and Society 30 (2007): 93–106. David Bernstein, ed., The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 214–17.

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there are multiple manifestations in textural music, sound mass composition, minimalism, and postminimalism. There are already examples in the music of Beethoven and Rossini where static harmony allows a focus on rhythm, register, dynamics, and timbre. In his Nineteenth-Century Music Carl Dahlhaus discusses how nature was depicted through the technique of the Klangfläche or sound sheet, in passages like the “Forest Murmurs” in Siegfried, where the music is “riveted to the spot motivically and harmonically,” and thus is “outwardly static but inwardly in constant motion.”22 The influence of non-Western music featuring drones, repetitive cycles, and harmonic stasis also plays an important role from the turn of the twentieth century on. Jonathan Kramer, for example, associates the experience of the timelessness of what he calls “vertical time,” with the impact of music of the Middle East, Indonesia, and West Africa.23 He similarly discusses wide-ranging historical and theoretical sources for his other categories of new temporalities in twentieth-century music, such as nonlinearity, stasis, and moment form, all of which have points of contact with the approaches to harmony I am considering here. For example, in his discussion of moment form he cites Stockhausen’s description of the temporal shift that results from a change of focus away from a sound’s origins or trajectory to its individual characteristics: This concentration on the present moment – on every present moment – can make a vertical cut, as it were, across horizontal time perception, extending out to a timelessness I call eternity. This is not an eternity that begins at the end of time, but an eternity that is present in every moment.24

From a still broader perspective, Robert Fink interprets the repetition of minimalism in the context of a ubiquitous “culture of repetition” that emerged in industrialized societies in the 1960s and 1970s, trends also manifested in disco music, the repetitive cycles of advertising, and broad influence of Suzuki violin.25 But, as Kramer points out, and as I argued in the “Weighing” essay, sound technologies play a much more central role in the story of harmonies coming to a standstill than is usually recognized.26 In an essay that relates in many ways to this project, Alex22 23

24 25 26

Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 307. Kramer, The Time of Music, 387. Kramer’s “vertical time,” which he defines in terms of “the static, unchanging, frozen eternity of certain contemporary music” (7) is a much broader category than the “stopped clock” music I am considering here. Along with Reich’s Violin Phase, which I discuss below, he includes “the conceptual works of La Monte Young, Philip Glass’s early minimalist music, and Cage’s Cartridge Music” (386). Kramer, “Moment Form in Twentieth Century Music,” Musical Quarterly 64 (1978): 177–94 (179). Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1–4. In addition to books cited below, there is a growing literature on the interactions of sound technologies and new ways of conceiving of sound in many musical traditions and contexts. See David Novak, Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 139–68; Joanna Demers, “Maximal Objects in Drone Music, Dub Techno, and Noise,” in Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 91–109; Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Changed Music, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible

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ander Rehding explores “The discovery of slowness in music” in terms of a historical trajectory from Perotin’s slowed-down chant tenors to John Cage’s 639 yearlong organ piece Organ2/ASLSP (1987) and Leif Inge’s twenty-four-hour version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, 9 Beet Stretch. He discusses recent technologies, such as “Time Axis Manipulation” software, that make it possible to alter music’s temporal structure independently of the pitch. But he also points out the crucial role of the much older technology of music notation in slowing down the chant tenors in Notre Dame organum.27 We might similarly consider theoretical models and diagrams as technologies that have opened up new ways for thinking about and working with sound. In her discussion of the impact of theoretical systems on conceptions of Schubert’s harmony, Suzannah Clark compares such diagrams to scientific instruments like telescopes that “both limit and open up our perceptions.”28 It is thus striking to consider the increasing prevalence in the 1960s and 1970s of the clock face metaphor to represent the chromatic scale, inversional balance, and “Circular Pitch-Class Space.”29 Neo-Riemannian theory has pursued the notion of the chromatic universe of pitches and harmonies arrayed in complex symmetries on the clock face in ever more elaborate formations. While such diagrams do not necessarily imply a static, atemporal conception of pitch relationships related to the idea of the “stopped clock” I am exploring here, Daniel Harrison has described a tendency in Neo-Riemannian theory to separate “objects,” consisting of pitches or harmonies, and the “activities” of what is done to these objects through the various transformations. A possible ramification, he argues, is that: Objects are inert and without tendency, and all activity and meaning are supplied by transformations applied to them. From this vantage point, transformational theory appears to model the metaphor of musical motion by constructing a ventriloquist’s dummy; it only appears to be alive, but is in fact a construction of lifeless parts that are made to move by some external force.30

27

28 29 30

Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Arved Ashby, Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Richard Glover, “Minimalism, Technology, and Electronic Music”: in The Ashgate Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, edited by Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll Ap Siôn (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 161–80; and Gianmario Borio, ed., Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015). See Alexander Rehding, “The Discovery of Slowness,” in Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space, ed. Sander Van Maas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 206–25. The 1973 book Clockwork Music traces the historical of mechanical musical instruments back to the ninth century. Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Clockwork Music: An Illustrated History of Mechanical Musical Instruments from the Musical Box to the Pianola from Automaton Lady Virginal Players to the Orchestrion (New York: Crown Publishers, 1973). Suzannah Clark, Analyzing Schubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4–5. See Dimitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 30–33. Daniel Harrison, “Three Short Essays on Neo-Riemannian Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories, eds. Edward Gollin and Alexander Rehding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 548–77 (552).

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It follows that I am not arguing that synthesizers or tape loops on their own brought about these new conceptions of sound. Indeed, Margulis argues that the repetition produced by sound technologies is so powerful and pervasive precisely because it interacts with and exploits fundamental human cognitive mechanisms, hijacking “perceptual tendencies that were in place before the technologies were invented.”31 As with all technologies, tape loops and synthesizers were created, used, and transformed as part of complex sociotechnical networks that include interactions with other technologies along with a vast range of historical and theoretical factors. Thus both technologies could only be used in networks of the many other devices that made up the “classic” tape studio, including microphones, oscillators, amplifiers, mixers, filters, etc.32 Musical and aesthetic developments also created a context for realizing the new potentialities of these devices. For example, there are many connections between the creation of modular synthesizers and the formulation of integral serialism, with both making it possible to work independently with the individual parameters of a sound. Indeed, the whole notion that a sound is made up of individual parameters is intimately bound up with the new technologies and the search for precise control. Donald Buchla describes using a score for Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître in the early stages of designing what a synthesizer should do: “I would imagine patching the Boulez and see something was missing and we would add another knob.”33 As Kramer points out, there were also constant interactions between electronic and non-electronic composition. He describes, for example, Stockhausen’s 1960 Kontakte (for tape with or without instruments) as “the work that opened the door for such further explorations of moment form” in the instrumental works that followed.34 In the case of a work like Riley’s In C (1964), we can explicitly hear how his instrumental music grew out of his work with tape loops and tape delay systems, thus opening up a radically new way to hear a C major triad. We might also cite Helmut Lachenmann’s notion of “instrumental musique concrète,” as in a work like his “Filter Swing” from Ein Kinderspiel (1980) where the pianist filters out various pitches from repeating statements of a ten-note cluster. And it is clear that tape loops shaped Reich’s thinking long after he stopped working with actual tape loops and moved to samplers and MIDI. Finally, it important to emphasize that I am not using the metaphor of the stopped clock to reinforce a narrative about the “death” or “breakdown” of tonality. To be sure, there are connections between stopped clocks and death, as in the children’s song, “My Grandfather’s Clock from 1876.” Accompanied in most performances by a loud tick-tock, the song tells how the clock was purchased on the day grandfather was born and then ticked faithfully for ninety years, “But it stopp’d short – never to go again – When the old man died.” We can hear a related example 31 32 33 34

Margulis, On Repeat, 78. See, for example, Daniel Teruggi, “Technology and musique concrète: the technical developments of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales and their implication in musical composition,” Organised Sound 12 (2007): 213–31. Cited in Bernstein, ed., The San Francisco Tape Music Center, 166. Kramer, The Time of Music, 46.

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with tonal harmonies coming to a standstill in George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children (1970). The brief movement “Each afternoon in Granada, a child dies each afternoon,” is based on a sustained C major triad accompanying a modal melismatic melody in the voice; the performance indication is “hushed, intimate with a sense of suspended time.” At the end, the drone suddenly shifts a tritone to G minor and we hear a toy piano playing “Bist du bei mir” in D major from the Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach, which gradually slows and then stops like a music box running down. The example is also noteworthy in pointing to the way that – in contrast to analog technologies like the phonograph or magnetic recording tape, where such slowing always involved lowering the pitch as well – with the clockwork mechanism, and by analogy in the digital realm, duration and pitch are separated.35 If there is an echo of a narrative of the death of tonality here, my goal is to reframe it as a death and transfiguration. In what follows I explore how these technologies of the stopped clock can serve to create the feeling of an intensely experienced and greatly extended moment, through which a single pitch or harmony can be rediscovered as its own world. We can hear this vividly enacted in the Crumb passage with the slowing music box effect: as the tempo decelerates the individual notes become increasingly detached from one another, demanding our attention as each threatens to become the last one before the clockwork stops for good. Tape Loops Working with magnetic recording tape made composers intensely aware of the passage of time. In his 1957 essay on “Experimental Music,” Cage noted that counting was no longer necessary, since “so many inches or centimeters equal so many seconds.” As a result, he argued: “magnetic tape music makes it clear that we are in time itself, not in measures of two, three, four, or any other number.”36 But it is also striking how the simple act of joining one end of the tape to the other seems to transform time itself. Pierre Schaeffer describes his work with the predecessor of the tape loop, the “closed groove” [sillon fermé] record, specifically in terms of a new sense of time that was embodied in the difference between the spiral groove cut into traditional records and the circle: “The cutter’s spiral is not only the material realization but also the affirmation of time going by, time gone by, which will never come again.” In contrast, the “magic circle” of the closed or locked groove produces “a ‘sound fragment’ that has neither beginning nor end, a sliver of sound isolated from any temporal context, a clean-edged time crystal, made of time that now belongs to no time …”37 Pauline Oliveros, who traces her interests in sound to her early experiences with the sonic effects of a wind-up Victrola phonograph slowly running down, similarly describes her work with analog tape delay systems 35 36 37

See Rehding, “The Discovery of Slowness.” John Cage, “A History of Experimental Music in the United States,” in Silence (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 67–76 (70). Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 31–32.

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in terms of a time machine that breaks down the borders between past, present, and future: Because when I play something in the present, then it’s delayed and comes back in the future. But when it comes back in the future, I’m dealing with the past, and also playing again in the present, anticipating the future.38

I would argue more generally that the process of working with tape can create a kind of focused attention to sound that can result in the expanded moment of the stopped clock. As I will discuss further below in the case of creating a patch on the modular synthesizer, this relates in part to the discipline and concentration required to edit magnetic recording tape. Even the most basic splice involves repeatedly moving the tape back and forth across the playback head to locate the desired sounds amidst the slow motion washes of noise and silence. In turn, the act of composition in the tape studio multiplies and magnifies this experience as a piece is built up sound by sound, passage by passage, so that, as Paul Griffiths writes, the demanding and multifaceted creative process becomes embodied in an experience of the finished work: … the electronic medium has stimulated composers to consider music as process rather than form, and so to create, in many cases, works in perpetual evolution. Electronic means make it possible to generate sounds of long duration, and more importantly, gradually change, so that an electronic work, whether for tape or live resources, can mirror in its progress the techniques of timbre composition and transformation used in its creation.39

Working with tape loops has the potential of greatly intensifying this effect of focused attention. The kind of relentless repetition made possible by a tape loop has, of course, a long history and many musical cultures emphasize repetitive cycles, including the traditions of Indonesian gamelan and West African drumming that were so important for Reich’s development. But there is something fundamentally different about the exact repetition of tape loops, precisely due to the lack of the participatory discrepancies that Charles Keil and Steven Feld have argued are so central to groove-based music.40 Indeed Margulis comments on the anxieties that can be provoked by the verbatim repetitions made possible by recording: On the one hand, technologically engendered repetition can seem ecstatic and expansive – but on the other hand, the mechanical basis of this experience might come to seem dangerous or suspiciously consuming.41

There is clear evidence for this in discussions of the dangers tape loops could pose for composers if not treated with care. For example, Gustav Ciamaga’s 1975 essay on “The Tape Studio,” describes three main uses for tape loops: 1) a means for sustaining a sound indefinitely; 2) a convenient tool for repeating a sound to facilitate testing its compositional possibilities; and 3) in the manner of an ostinato. But he 38

Tara Rogers, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 29. 39 Paul Griffiths, A Guide to Electronic Music (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 27. 40 Charles Keil and Steven Feld, Music Grooves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 96–108. 41 Margulis, On Repeat, 81.

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warns his readers about the last possibility, calling the ostinato “one of the most abused effects in electronic composition,” and one which the “skillful tape composer” learns to mask, by varying the loop in various ways, including “by introducing ‘rests’ to break up the periodicity.”42 The repetition of a tape loop has been discussed in terms of a wide range of aesthetic and acoustic effects. For Schaeffer repetition was the primary tool for achieving what he described as “reduced listening” through the liberation of sounds from their origins; as he wrote: “Repeat the same sonic fragment. There is not an event any more. There is music.”43 Brian Kane focuses on the foundational impact of Schaeffer’s experience of locked groove recordings and tape loops “for stabilizing the emergence of the sound object from within the acousmatic situation.” He notes Schaeffer’s comparison of the effect of looping a sound with that of repeating a word over and over again, which “halts the flow of signification and promotes, through repetition, the hearing of sounds as such.”44 The way in which looping can turn speech into a musical sound has been studied by music psychologist Diana Deutsch in her 2011 article “Illusory Transformation from Speech to Song,” which provides experimental evidence that “a spoken phrase comes to be heard as sung rather than spoken, simply as a result of repetition.”45 But the verbatim repeats produced by a tape loop relate still more directly to my notion of the “stopped clock” and both the phenomenon of temporal expansion and a broader sense of what we understand by “music.” Margulis notes that studies of the cognitive effect of constant repetition of a word demonstrate that semantic meanings are replaced by “a sort of super-salience of the component parts – letters, phonemes, syllables.”46 Thus, as in “Planet of the Shapes,” “Time has Come Today,” and Violin Phase, looping has the potential to turn our attention away from the identity of a harmony – as a triad, or seventh chord, etc. – as well as its functional potential, in other words, all that can make it sound “right.” Instead we focus on the sounds of the individual component pitches, and even more so all the non-pitch elements including timbre, rhythm, and texture. And I would argue that it is the “super-salience” of all these individual elements that contributes to the perception of time slowing down. Ryota Kanai’s study, “Illusory Distortion of Subjective Time Perception,” describes how repetition can produce a suppression of neuronal responses so that any change becomes highly marked and thus can be perceived as having a longer duration. Thus music with some elements that are highly repetitive can intensify and temporally extend our experience of all those aspects that are not strictly repeated, so that, as Kanai writes, “Attention Modulates Time.”47 42 43 44 45 46 47

Gustav Ciamaga, “The Tape Studio,” in Jon Appleton and Ronald Perera, eds., The Development and Practice of Electronic Music (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1975), 68–137 (104– 05). Teruggi, “Technology and musique concrete,” 213. Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 26. Diana Deutsch, Trevor Henthorn, and Rachael Lapidis, “Illusory Transformation from Speech to Song,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 129 (2011): 2245–52 (2252). Margulis, On Repeat, 17. Ryota Kanai, “Illusory Distortion of Subjective Time Perception,” in Arstila and Lloyd, Subjec-

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Steve Reich explored all of these ramifications of looping in his early tape pieces for voice, like It’s gonna rain (1965), Come out (1966), and My name is ___ (1967), but he first introduced triads into the system with his Violin Phase from 1967. As in all of his phase pieces, the richness of the musical results depends on the characteristics of the basic loop. Thus the tonal ambiguity of the repeating pattern, with its implications of F minor, F Dorian, and A major, is reinforced by its metric complication, which is derived from the asymmetrical groupings of the twelve-beat bell pattern of West African Ewe music. Violin Phase enacts and depends upon the perceptual transformations I am characterizing here in terms of “the stopped clock” in both its musical materials and in the creative process of working in the studio with tape loops. In the “Directions for Performance” included with the score, Reich describes in detail the arduous process involved in a violinist making the loops needed for the performance tape. The archival recordings in the Reich collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung make clear the disorientation and discomfort violinists experienced in the act of, as Reich described it, learning to play “exactly as if I were a second tape recorder.”48 Discussions of Reich’s process music rightly tend to focus on the diversity of the resulting patterns that are produced by the phasing process; indeed the main compositional innovation of Violin Phase was having the live violinist point out by playing them the interesting rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic patterns that the overlapping loops create. But here I want to emphasize the overall composite material created by the three out-of-phase loops from which these patterns emerge, and which Reich notated on its own staff in the score. The three layers produce a repeating pattern of four chords in steady eighth notes, which continues for approximately the final third of the overall duration of the piece. With these chords – each of which has two or three common tones with the next in the pattern – the triadic implications of the original loop are replaced by an emphasis on perfect fourths and fifths. Violin Phase thus reaches a point of a kind of highly-charged resonating stasis that, like “The Planet of the Shapes,” is only brought to a halt through the deliberate act of the violinist cueing the engineer to stop the tape. Reich’s interest in the slowing and expansion of time is made even more explicit in the works that follow, in particular another piece from 1967, Slow Motion Sound, which he describes as: “take a tape loop, probably of speech, and ever so gradually slow it down to enormous length without changing its pitch.”49 As with Crumb’s slowing music box effect from Ancient Voices of Children, we might think of the piece as applying the digital logic of a clockwork mechanism to the tape loop, thus separating pitch and temporality. As Reich noted later, when he wrote Slow Motion Sound the technology to achieve what he had in mind did not yet exist, though he did carry out experiments at MIT with a Vocodor using a tape loop of a tive Time, 343–54 (347, 349); Margulis, On Repeat, 71: “repetition in general allows for the freeing up of attentional resources, such that attention can rove to different levels of the stimulus …” 48 Steve Reich, “Early Works (1965–68),” in Writings on Music, 1965–2000, ed. Paul Hillier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 19–32 (22). 49 Reich, Writings on Music, 26.

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girl he recorded in Ghana saying, “My shoes are new.” But he did create an instrumental version of this idea in his Four Organs from 1970, which features the gradual elongation of the individual pitches of a slowly pulsing E dominant eleventh chord. Reich described the piece in terms of slow motion music, and “the longest V–I cadence in the history of Western Music.”50 Reich’s first sketchbook from 1969 shows how productive the idea was of making music from a single sustained chord. His struggles to find language to describe the interaction of elements of stasis and motion – so central to the idea of harmonies of the stopped clock I am developing here – are clear in his notes on the resultant patterns in Violin Phase in terms of “the simultaneous interpretation (psychoacoustic) of several melodies inside of patterns inside of a constant pulsing chord. Patterns which rise to the surface of the music / the ongoing chord which never stops pulsing / the pulsing chord that leans forward.” Even more striking is a page filled with various attempts to come up with a label for the musical ideas he was exploring – beyond what he had already formulated in “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968) – including such terms as “Music as a Slow Motion Process,” “The Gradual Stretch,” and “Music of Expanding Durations.”51 This was also the time of his most intensive involvement with the “Phase Shifting Pulse Gate,” which he designed and built together with the engineer Larry Owens. Arguably the ultimate clockwork instrument, the device made it possible to automate the derivation of melodic and rhythmic material from a single pulsing harmony. Also of great relevance to the present context, the “Phase Shifting Pulse Gate” was neutral in regard to the sonic input, and could carry out its processes with any live or recorded sound sources.52 This tendency of the process works to reach the potentially endless moment of the stopped clock is vividly enacted in his Pendulum Music from 1968. Here again we typically focus on the shifting rhythmic and melodic patterns produced by the musical process of the gradually slowing microphones creating bursts of feedback as they pass above the loudspeakers. But perhaps more significant for the present context is the conclusion of the piece, where, as Reich writes: “the piece is ended sometime after all the mikes have come to rest and are feeding back a continuous tone …”53 The work finally comes to end, again only by an act of force, as with the abrupt conclusions of “Planet of the Shapes” and Violin Phase, with the performers dramatically pulling out the power cords of the amplifiers. The Voltage-Controlled Modular Synthesizer In the original “classical” electronic and tape music studios, the various devices were separate pieces of hardware, but thanks to transistor-based electronics beginning in the 1960s, all-in-one modular synthesizers like a “musical erector set” be50 Cited in Fink, Repeating Ourselves, 54. 51 Reich, Sketchbook 1, Jan 6, 1969–Nov 7, 1969. Steve Reich Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, published with permission; Reich, Writings on Music, 34–36. 52 Reich, Writings on Music, 38–44. 53 Ibid., 32.

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gan to be manufactured by Buchla, Moog, ARP, EMS, Synket, and others.54 While I focus here on the complexity of creating sounds on these new instruments, it is important to emphasize that they were seen by many at the time as making electronic composition faster. Writing in 1973, Elliott Schwartz, for example, points out that instead of “twiddling dials on many different boxes scattered throughout the studio,” the synthesizer introduced efficiencies by bringing devices together in one place, by facilitating their connections, and through the use of voltage control, which I return to below.55 Accounts by composers make clear the sense of excitement and of the unknown the new modular synthesizers offered as they came into existence through partnerships of composers, musicians, and engineers.56 Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms No. 6 for Piano and Tape, composed in 1971 at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, stages in its opening gesture a pitch that is transfigured by standing still. The piece begins with a pianist striking a single G, that as it fades is imperceptibly joined by the tape part answering with a synthesized version of the same note, its dynamic envelope reversed so that it crescendos to a sudden attack. He thus deconstructs that most familiar sound of a piano into its component parts. Over the course of the piece Davidovsky retrains our ears to hear all the complexities and peculiarities of the piano timbre, including the wooden knocks that accompany each keystroke, and the constant variation in the harmonics depending on the dynamic level and density of the chords. The many books about electronic music that appeared in the 1970s, as modular synthesizers became available, enact a comparable rediscovery of sounds through a similar process of disintegration and reassembly. Nearly all open with overviews of the psychoacoustics of sound and hearing, followed by minutely detailed inventories of the individual modules and their functions in building up a sound, including oscillators, noise generators, filters, ring modulators, envelope generators, amplifiers, mixers, and so on. Walter Sear, a composer and engineer who worked with Moog, inserts the idea of atomization and rebuilding already in the subtitle of his 1972 book, The New World of Electronic Music: A practical book that gives the Basic Principles of: Sound, Acoustics, Electricity, Magnetism, Recording Techniques … necessary to understand the Concepts and Functions of the Synthesizer.57 This also points to the way synthesizers required composers to develop some level of scientific and engineering expertise not only to play the synthesizer, but also to set up and maintain an electronic music studio. As noted above, using the synthesizer in the context of the development of integral serialism made it possible to move beyond metaphorical notions of “the unity of musical space” to actually work with all the parameters of a sound as manifesta-

54 55 56 57

See Joel Chadabe, “The Voltage-controlled Synthesizer,” in Appleton and Perrera, The Development and Practice of Electronic Music, 138–88 (139). Elliott Schwartz, Electronic Music: A Listener’s Guide (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), 69. See Pinch and Trocco, Analog Days. Walter Sear, The New World of Electronic Music (New York: Alfred Publishing Company, 1972).

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tions of the same phenomenon of vibration. As Stockhausen wrote in “The Concept of Unity in Electronic Music” (1962): One must proceed from a basic concept of a single, unified musical time; and the different perceptual categories, such as color, harmony and melody, meter and rhythm, dynamics, and ‘form,’ must be regarded as corresponding to the different components of this unified time …58

Stockhausen explored analogies among the categories of harmony, timbre, and rhythm in pieces of electronic music, such as his Kontakte, which ends with the frequency of a note being lowered dramatically until it transforms from a pitch to a rhythm and finally to isolated beats slowly tolling like a clock running down.59 The spectralist composers in turn used this notion of a single unified musical time as a way of moving beyond serialism to work with the kinds of slowly evolving sound masses discussed above in the music of Grisey. As Julian Anderson argues, “the serial obsession with devising separate or related charts for pitch, duration, intensity, dynamics and timbre is replaced with a fondness for attempting to abolish the distinctions between these phenomena.”60 Writings on the relationship of electronic music synthesis and time by Kramer and others have focused on the precise temporal control permitted by synthesizers and tape editing techniques. But less attention has been paid to the experience of actually working with these technologies in real time, though as anyone who has experienced it knows, working in a studio seemingly takes you out of “real time” into a different sphere in which time can seem to stand still. As much as any other factor, I would argue that it is these new working methods and intense forms of attention the synthesizer demanded that stopped the clock so that individual pitches, harmonies, and sounds could be heard for themselves. The early modular synthesizers make it both possible and necessary to build up a sound from scratch. In a process that involves hours of experimentation and careful listening, a sound is created from either a noise generator or an oscillator in interaction with other modules linked together in complex webs using actual cables or other mechanisms for making a signal path. Such patches – which Joel Chadabe describes as “an Amazon nightmare of jungle-like visual confusion” – were difficult to create, and still more challenging to recreate due to the lack of standardized systems for notating them, as well as the finicky nature of analog devices.61 As a result, as Hubert Howe suggests in his 1975 book, the synthesizer thus complicated traditional notions of composition based on the model of writing a score that would subsequently be performed by musicians singing or playing instruments:

58 59 60 61

Karlheinz Stockhausen, “The Concept of Unity in Electronic Music,” Perspectives of New Music 1, no. 1 (1962): 39–48 (42). See Rehding, “Of Sirens Old and New,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Vol. 2, eds. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 77– 106. Julian Anderson, “A Provisional History of Spectral Music,” Contemporary Music Review 19 (2000): 7–22 (8). Chadabe, “The Voltage-controlled Synthesizer,” 153.

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… real-time composition with voltage-controlled synthesizers is not possible except in some limited sense. The user can generate one voice of a composition at a time and store each on a separate track of multi-track tape recorder, to be mixed down later into the final result.62

And yet, as I will argue further below, it was precisely the kinds of “real-time composition” made possible by elaborate patches on the synthesizer that resulted in new conceptions of the creative act as well as the emergence of the harmonies of the stopped clock. In his essay “Music as Studio Art,” Morton Subotnick attributes his involvement with the development of the synthesizer in the early 1960s to his frustrations with the working methods of the tape studio. He writes of envisioning together with Ramon Sender and Donald Buchla a kind “electronic music easel,” with which “I could create and perform in my studio, and it would come out as a sound piece, which was at once a musical creation and a performance.”63 As noted above in connection with tape music, the act of creating music with synthesizers thus had important ramifications for changing conceptions of the interrelations among the categories of creative process, improvisation, production and engineering know-how, performance, and the work – a development with ever-growing relevance given the ubiquity of music software shaped by the synthesizer and tape studio in diverse genres of music around the globe.64 Composers compared composition on a synthesizer to first having to invent a new instrument and then develop the technique and skills to actually play it. John Eaton, for example, describes practicing seven or eight hours a day with the Synket in order to develop the technical virtuosity with the controls necessary to create and to recreate sounds in the studio and in live performance.65 Another crucial factor in the transfiguration of harmony was the design of synthesizers to ensure that sounds would have no a priori relationship to traditional notions of equal temperament or even distinctions between pitched and non-pitched sounds. Indeed the controls on most synthesizers made it difficult to know precisely what pitch you were getting without the use of a frequency meter. As Pinch and others have discussed, a central debate in the early years of the synthesizer was whether standard musical keyboards should be included as opposed to ribbon controllers, joysticks, and other non-traditional interfaces that facilitated the liberation from traditional scales and tunings. Thus while Moog included a keyboard early on, Buchla featured devices such as “a Multi-Dimensional Kinesthetic Input,” that allowed subtle gradations of control voltages by sliding the fingers across an array of pressure-sensitive sensors. Commentaries on the utility of keyboards on modular synthesizers often go out of their way to emphasize their very different potential as controllers. For example, Ciamaga notes that while keyboards have “a long history of usefulness in traditional music,” in the studio they should be regarded as “in ef62 63 64 65

Hubert Howe, Electronic Music Synthesis: Concepts, Facilities, Techniques (New York: Norton, 1975), 138. Bernstein, ed. The San Francisco Tape Music Center, 112. See Laura Zattra, “The Identity of the Work: Agents and Processes of Electronic Music,” Organised Sound 11 (2006): 113–18. Cited in Chadabe, Electric Sound, 146.

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fect a twelve-input mixer,” that makes it “possible to initiate or ‘play’ twelve different signal sources.”66 Éliane Radigue describes intentionally leaving behind the keyboard of her large modular ARP 2500 synthesizer when she changed studios. Her hour-long Kyema (1988) features long sections of static extended triadic harmonies with timbres in constant metamorphosis. She writes that after setting the frequencies of the five oscillators she only adjusted the filters and other modules: “I work after that on all the partials […] Everything is worked out with the potentiometers on the ARP. There are about thirty parameters that you can change easily […] if I change the frequency, it’s another story!”67 Radigue’s creative process also points to the way that, unlike any other instrument, sounds on modular synthesizers could be produced independent of a temporal framework. The prevalence of sounds with long durations in electronic music similarly reflects the design of synthesizers where the most basic patches would typically create sustained sonorities that would continue for as long as the instrument was turned on. An explicit temporal dimension with a synthesized sound only comes into play if a waveform is passed through a device such as an envelope generator that controls the overall dynamic shape. Radigue attributed both the length of her works and her slow and deliberate working method to her central interest in “a very slow changing process with the sound itself. Something which is not external to the sound.”68 With the success of Switched on Bach and the commercialization of synthesizers, keyboards with equal temperament became common. Yet since most early synthesizers had monophonic keyboards, functional progressions or traditional voice leading required using multiple synthesizers or, as Howe described, building up a piece layer-by-layer with a multi-track tape machine, as with Walter Carlos’s Switched on Bach. In other words, while it was very easy to produce a patch that played, for example, a triad, the keyboard only allowed for parallel motion, with the result that a harmony is quickly reinterpreted as a timbre, as with the stops of an organ. When polyphonic synthesizers started to emerge in the mid-1970s, it was once again possible to play the instrument like a traditional keyboard. But it is striking that at the same moment, the digital processing used to make the keyboard polyphonic, with instruments such as the Fairlight CMI (1979) and the E-mu Emulator (1981), also made it possible to sample any sounds and play them from the keyboard. Thus traditional harmonies quickly had to share the stage with sampled voices and noises, as in a work like Reich’s Different Trains (1987) created with his Casio FZ-7 sampler, and composed with a Macintosh computer using digital performer and Midi. A crucial aspect of the modular synthesizer, in terms of the creation of sustained sounds with the “internal dynamism” that allowed them to be free standing and self-sufficient, was the development of voltage control, by which the various devices could be used to modulate each other. Thus an oscillator set to a low frequency could be used to control the pitch of another oscillator, the frequency of the 66 67 68

Ciamaga, “The Tape Studio,” 85. Rogers, Pink Noises, 57. Glover, “Minimalism, Technology, and Electronic Music,” 172.

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filter, the dynamic level, or any other aspect of the sound. Voltage control could be used to simulate aspects of acoustic instrumental technique, such as vibrato, but the same patch could, with the turn of a knob, create effects not possible with traditional instruments, such as an extremely broad and very rapid modulation of frequency. Voltage control also made it possible to create complex patches that ran themselves without the need for further intervention. This became still more developed with sequencers, which automated repeating cycles of control voltages that moved according to clocks that could be sped up or slowed down. Schwartz points out the connections between the tape loop and the sequencer’s ability to repeat and create an ostinato pattern. As with anxieties about the tape loop noted above, he characterizes this as “the most obvious use of the sequencer, and a relatively trivial one at that; as a number of composers have discovered (often to their sorrow), the ‘loop’ effect, unless handled discreetly, borders dangerously on the cliché.”69 Thus the voltage-controlled synthesizer was ideally suited to produce rich and complex timbres and interesting drones and textural effects, sounds that were ideally well adapted to filling the expanded present moment of the stopped clock. At the same time, these new sonic techniques of the synthesizer opened up the possibility of a music that was essentially only the patch. In his book, Any Sound You Can Imagine, Paul Théberge cites a musician who claims: I’ve been getting into sounds lately … realizing that if something has an interesting enough sound, you don’t have to play as much on the instrument. If you get a keyboard that has an interesting sound, you don’t have to play a lot of notes on it. The sound takes over …70

It is no surprise that the attractions of such self-sufficient sounds and textures – often referred to as “synth pads” – have resulted in the proliferation of a wide range of non-keyboard interfaces for hardware and software synthesizers and for manipulating and triggering samples that obviate the necessity of playing any different notes.71 Striking evidence for the continuing transfiguration of harmony in recent decades through technologies of the stopped clock can be found in the broad impact of the very influential Akai MPC [Music Production Controller] with its sixteen pressure sensitive pads, and more recent offshoots such as the Monome with its large grids of assignable buttons. While widely used software like Abelton Live, which facilitates real-time performance of loop-based music, can be triggered with a traditional keyboard, it is increasingly common to use the keyboard on a laptop computer, or customizable IPad graphical interfaces. Just as the “Amazon nightmare of jungle-like visual confusion” of the modular synthesizer patch has found its apotheosis in the vastly more elaborate webs of Max/MSP patches, programs like Abelton Live and Reason also represent the apotheosis of the tape loop. Packaged 69 Schwartz, Electronic Music, 77. 70 Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music / Consuming Technology (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 186. 71 Propellerhead, the maker of the widely-used music production software Reason, offers a massive set of patches and samples called “Pads – the BIG box,” advertised as giving you “all you need when searching for atmospheric patches, bright or dark pads, inspiring soundscapes, rhythmical pads, fx & experimental sounds.” https://shop.propellerheads.se (accessed February 27, 2015).

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with vast databanks of drum and instrumental loops and samples of pitches and triads, the software makes it easy to transform any sounds or music into an endlessly repeating object, defined by the clockwork mechanism’s independence of pitch and time. Such software and other new musical interfaces, such as the graphical Borderlands granular synthesizer app, are designed to facilitate the real-time manipulation of sustained complex sonorities and textures, but are not at all well-suited to creating chord progressions. At the same time, these technologies are making possible the rediscovery of familiar objects such as the triad, as can be seen in the various internet tutorials available, such as “Music Theory for Electronic Musicians: Major and Minor Triads” posted by “The Abelton Cookbook,” which demonstrates, as if for the first time, how one can build a triad by counting lines on the screen.72 Still more broadly, I would argue that it is worth considering the degree to which our hearing in general has been reshaped by sound technologies including the synthesizer and the tape loop, so that any music has the potential to suddenly stop in place and open up a new world. This is vividly exemplified by the proliferation of “stretched” music such as Leif Inge’s 9 Beet Stretch, Hans Zimmer’s microphonic transformation of Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” in the soundtrack for Inception, and the many YouTube versions of vastly slowed-down music by Justin Bieber, Enya, and even Brian Eno’s already quite slow Music for Airports. * * * One of the sections in William Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury features the narrator Quentin as he spends the day preparing to drown himself in the Charles River at midnight. At one point he decides to rip the hands off of his watch to slow down the passage of time. When he happens upon a store front displaying watches, all set to different times, he thinks: “… Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”73 In the same way, we might hear all the examples discussed above in terms of a similar transformation, where stopping the clock of harmonic progressions makes all sounds, including pitches and triads, come alive in new ways.74

72 73 74

“Music Theory for Electronic Musicians: Major and Minor Triads,” https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wXmtiqUtjjE (accessed January 2, 2015). Richard Beaudoin and Neil Heyde, “The Handless Watch: on Composing and Performing Flutter echoes,” CeReNeM Journal 3 (2012): 7–20 (7). This essay was written for the conference “Tonality since 1950” at the University of Basel, May 23–24, 2014; I am grateful to the organizers Felix Wörner, Philip Rupprecht, and Ullrich Scheideler, and to all the participants for their comments and questions. Special thanks as well to Alexander Rehding, Frank Lehman, Steven Cahn, Katherine Kaiser, Richard Beaudoin, and Jonathan Sterne for helpful suggestions along the way.

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Bibliography Anderson, Julian. “A Provisional History of Spectral Music.” Contemporary Music Review 19 (2000): 7–22. Appleton, Jon, and Ronald Perera, eds. The Development and Practice of Electronic Music. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1975. Arstila, Valtteri, and Dan Lloyd, eds. Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Ashby, Arved. Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Auner, Joseph. “Losing your Voice: Sampled Speech and Song from the Uncanny to the Unremarkable.” In Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Ulrik Ekman, 135–50. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. ––. “Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality.” In Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice, edited by Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht, 25–46. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012. Beaudoin, Richard, and Neil Heyde. “The Handless Watch: On Composing and Performing Flutter echoes.” CeReNeM Journal 3 (2012): 7–20. Berio, Luciano. “The Composer on His Work: Meditation on a Twelve-Tone Horse.” In Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music: A Continuing Symposium, edited by Richard Kostelanetz and Joseph Darby, 167–71. New York: Schirmer, 1996. Bernstein, David, ed. The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the AvantGarde. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Borio, Gianmario. “Sound as Process: Scelsi and the Composers of Nuova Consonanza.” In Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi, edited by Franco Sciannameo and Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini, 31–52. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013. ––, ed. Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction. Aldershot:Ashgate, 2015. Born, Georgina. Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Cage, John. “A History of Experimental Music in the United States.” In Silence, 67–76. Hannover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. Chadabe, Joel. Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997. ––. “The Voltage-controlled Synthesizer,” in Appleton and Perera, The Development and Practice of Electronic Music, 138–88. Ciamaga, Gustav. “The Tape Studio,” in Appleton and Perera, The Development and Practice of Electronic Music, 68–137. Clark, Suzannah. Analyzing Schubert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Clendinning, Jane Piper. “The Pattern-Meccanico Compositions of Györgi Ligeti.” Perspectives of New Music 31, no. 1 (1993): 192–234. Collins, Nick, and Julio D’Escriván, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Cooper, B. Lee. “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs.” Popular Music and Society 30 (2007): 93–106. Dahlhaus, Carl. Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century. Translated by Mary Whittall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. ––. Nineteenth-Century Music. Translated by J. Bradford Robinson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Demers, Joanna. Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Deutsch, Diana, Trevor Henthorn, and Rachael Lapidis. “Illusory Transformation from Speech to Song.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 129 (2011): 2245–52.

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Fink, Robert. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Glover, Richard. “Minimalism, Technology, and Electronic Music.” In The Ashgate Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, edited by Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll Ap Siôn, 161–80. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Griffiths, Paul. A Guide to Electronic Music. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1979. Grisey, Gérard. “Tempus ex Machina: A Composer’s Reflections on Musical Time.” Contemporary Music Review 2 (1987): 239–75. Harrison, Daniel. “Three Short Essays on Neo-Riemanian Theory.” In The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories, edited by Edward Gollin and Alexander Rehding, 548–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Howe, Hubert. Electronic Music Synthesis: Concepts, Facilities, Techniques. New York: Norton, 1975. Kanai, Ryota. “Illusory Distortion of Subjective Time Perception,” in Arstila and Lloyd, Subjective Time, 343–54. Kane, Brian. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Changed Music. Revised Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Keil, Charles, and Steven Feld. Music Grooves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Kramer, Jonathan. The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies. New York: Schirmer, 1988. ––. “Moment Form in Twentieth Century Music.” Musical Quarterly 64(1978): 177–94. Manning, Peter. Electronic and Computer Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth. On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Novak, David. Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Ord-Hume, Arthur W. J. G. Clockwork Music: An Illustrated History of Mechanical Musical Instruments from the Musical Box to the Pianola from Automaton Lady Virginal Players to the Orchestrion. New York: Crown, 1973. Pinch, Trevor, and Frank Trocco. Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Rehding, Alexander. “The Discovery of Slowness.” In Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space, edited by Sander Van Maas, 206–25. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. ––. “Of Sirens Old and New.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Vol. 2, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Reich, Steve. Writings on Music, 1965–2000. Edited by Paul Hillier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Reising, Russell. “Melting Clocks and the Hallways of Always Time in Psychedelic Music.” Popular Music and Society 32 (2009): 523–47. Rogers, Tara. Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Rose, François. “Introduction to the Pitch Organization of French Spectral Music.” Perspectives of New Music 34, no. 2 (1996): 6–39. Schaeffer, Pierre. In Search of a Concrete Music. Translated by Christine North and John Dack. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Schwartz, Elliott. Electronic Music: A Listener’s Guide. New York: Praeger, 1973. Sear, Walter. The New World of Electronic Music. New York: Alfred, 1972. Spicer, Mark. “(Ac)cumulative Form in Pop Music.” Twentieth-Century Music 1 (2004): 29–64. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Stockhausen, Karlheinz. “The Concept of Unity in Electronic Music.” Perspectives of New Music 1, no. 1 (1962): 39–48.

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Teruggi, Daniel. “Technology and musique concrète: The Technical Developments of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales and their Implication in Musical Composition.” Organised Sound 12 (2007): 213–31. Théberge, Paul. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music / Consuming Technology. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. Tymoczko, Dimitri. A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Zattra, Laura. “The Identity of the Work: Agents and Processes of Electronic Music.” Organised Sound 11 (2006): 113–18.

Pop/Rock Tonalities Nicole Biamonte Tonality in pop/rock music1 comprises a variety of different systems of pitch organization and hierarchy, encompassing major, minor, modal, pentatonic, blues, and chromatic systems. Many analyses of pitch structures in pop/rock have focused on the ways in which tonalities most strongly diverge from common-practice norms, particularly in rock: as partially or primarily modal or pentatonic,2 influenced by the revival of Anglo-American folk music in the late 1950s and early 1960s; or as subdominant-biased or tending toward harmonic retrogressions,3 a tendency that de1

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By “pop/rock music,” I mean the constellation of genres and styles that has arisen around Anglophone pop and rock music in the latter half of the twentieth century, including rhythm & blues and heavy metal as well as genres with “pop” or “rock” in their names, but not country, hip-hop, industrial, or electronic dance music. I use a slash rather than a hyphen to distinguish this fairly broad range of genres from the specific genre “pop-rock” (a blend of pop and rock music, lighter and more commercially-oriented than rock), but otherwise my usage is like that in Walter Everett, ed., Expression in Pop-Rock Music, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008) and Mark Spicer, “(Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music,” Twentieth-Century Music 1 (2004): 29–64, among others. For discussions of modal structures in rock, see Nicole Biamonte, “Triadic Modal and Pentatonic Patterns in Rock Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 32 (2010): 95–110, repr. Rock Music, ed. Mark Spicer (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 227–42; Nicole Biamonte, “Les fonctions modales dans le rock et la musique métal,” L’analyse musicale aujourd’hui, ed. Xavier Hascher, Mondher Ayari, and Jean-Michel Bardez (Paris: Éditions Delatour-France, 2015), 275–90; Alf Björnberg, “On Aeolian Harmony in Contemporary Popular Music,” Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, ed. Allan F. Moore (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 275–82; Brett Clement, “Modal Tonicization in Rock: The Special Case of the Lydian Scale,” GAMUT 6 (2013), 95–142; Walter Everett, The Foundations of Rock: From “Blue Suede Shoes” to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 247–61; Everett, “Making Sense of Rock’s Tonal Systems,” Music Theory Online 10, no. 4 (2004), [10]; Allan F. Moore, “Patterns of Harmony,” Popular Music 11 (1992): 73–106; Moore, Song Means: Analyzing and Interpreting Recorded Song (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 69–76; Philip Tagg, Everyday Tonality: Towards a Tonal Theory of What Most People Hear (New York: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press, 2009), 115–25 and 217–40; and David Temperley, “Scalar Shift in Popular Music,” Music Theory Online 17, no. 4 (2011). For discussions of pentatonic structures in rock, see Biamonte, “Triadic Modal and Pentatonic Patterns in Rock Music”; Guy Capuzzo, “A Pedagogical Approach to Minor Pentatonic Riffs in Rock Music,” Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 23 (2009): 39–55; Everett, “Making Sense of Rock’s Tonal Systems,” [17]; and Temperley, “The Melodic-Harmonic ‘Divorce’ in Rock,” Popular Music 26 (2007): 323–42. In Trevor de Clercq and Temperley, “A Corpus Analysis of Rock Harmony,” Popular Music 30 (2011): 47–70, the IV chord is identified as the most common harmony after the tonic and is particularly common preceding the tonic (67). Harmonic retrogression as a rock-music norm is investigated in Paul Carter, “Retrogressive Harmonic Motion as Structural and Stylistic Characteristic of Pop-Rock Music” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 2005); Ken Stephenson, What to Listen for in Rock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 100–10; and Don Traut,

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rives most directly from the influence of blues-based patterns,4 but that at a deeper level results from the tuning of guitar strings mainly in fourths, rather than in fifths as is typical of classical string instruments.5 Numerous scholars have emphasized that pop/rock music should be analyzed on its own terms rather than in relation to common-practice norms,6 because it incorporates elements from other non-classical genres such as Tin Pan Alley, folk and blues, and because the tools developed for analyzing common-practice music rely on conventional notation – which is not ordinarily part of compositional practice in pop/rock, where the basic musical text is the recorded track rather than the notated score. As I will demonstrate, however, various analytical paradigms from common-practice music can be usefully adapted and applied to pop/rock, since, in spite of surface differences in pitch syntax, many of the same or analogous underlying functional relationships persist: pitch centricity and hierarchy, harmonies based on fifths and thirds, and relative harmonic stability and instability. Most pop/rock songs have an identifiable tonal center and a limited background collection of five to nine pitches, either throughout the song as a whole or within individual formal sections such as verses and choruses.7 As in art music, structural notes are normally part of the harmony or are emphasized in the melody, while

4

5

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7

“Anti-Circles as an Explanatory Model for Harmonic Motion in Rock Music,” Musical Insights 4 (2015): 55–69. The influence of the blues on rock music is considered in David Hatch and Stephen Millward, From Blues to Rock: An Analytical History of Pop Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); Dave Headlam, “Appropriations of Blues and Gospel in Popular Music,” The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music, ed. Allan F. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 158–87; Bryn Hughes, “Harmonic Expectation in Twelve-Bar Blues Progressions” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2011); Olivier Julien, “L’analyse des musiques populaires enregistrées,” Le commentaire auditif de spécialité – Recherches et propositions, ed. Danièle Pistone (Paris: Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008), 141–66; Allan F. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 73–83; Rob van der Bliek, “The Hendrix Chord: Blues, Flexible Pitch Relationships, and Self-Standing Harmony,” Popular Music 26 (2007): 343–64; John Milward, Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock’n’Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues) (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2013). The influence of guitar tuning on composition in popular music is explored in Dave Easley, “Riff Schemes, Form, and the Genre of Early American Hardcore Punk (1978–83),” Music Theory Online 21, no. 2 (2015); Timothy Koozin, “Guitar Voicing in Pop-Rock Music: A Performance-Based Analytical Approach,” Music Theory Online 17, no. 3 (2011); Allan F. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text, 2nd ed. (Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2001), 50–60; and Gary Yim, “Affordant Chord Transitions in Selected Guitar-Driven Popular Music” (MA thesis, Ohio State University, 2011). Arguments against applying common-practice analytical tools to rock music are made in David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 18–21; de Clercq and Temperley, “A Corpus Analysis of Rock Harmony,” 49; Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990), 104–07; and Moore, Song Means, 70; among others. Some counterexamples of atonal pop-rock can be found in the experimental music of progressive-rock bands from the 1970s such as King Crimson and Gentle Giant, as well as in more recent genres such as punk, post-punk, industrial rock, speed metal, and death metal. Everett discusses some atonal and ambiguous passages in “Pitch Down the Middle,” Expression in Pop-Rock Music, 167–68.

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embellishments are more often in the melody, of shorter duration than structural notes, and connected to structural notes by conjunct motion. Unlike in art music, melodic embellishments in pop/rock are frequently in the form of microtonal pitch inflections or bends that fall outside the twelve-note octave, especially in vocal and guitar parts, another aspect of pop/rock that likely derives from the blues. The basic harmonic units are power chords (open fourths or fifths, often doubled at the octave), triads, added-note triads (with seconds, fourths, or sixths), and seventh chords, although upper extensions such as ninths and elevenths are not uncommon.8 Tonic chords are normally stable, even when expressed as added-note or seventh chords, and other chords less so. The remaining two conventional harmonic functions of mildly unstable subdominant and more strongly unstable dominant are sometimes, but not always, distinct. Christopher Doll has described the function of non-tonic chords that anticipate the tonic, including both dominants and subdominants, as “pre-tonic” harmony.9 On a larger structural level, motions between stable and unstable harmonies allow phrases to be perceived as open or closed; it is worth noting that “reverse periods” and other open-ended formal structures are far more common in pop/rock than in art music. Dmitri Tymoczko has identified two additional features linking tonal and modal art and popular musics from the eleventh century to the present in what he calls the “extended common practice”: harmonic consistency or similarity and conjunct melodic motion. These two features create “a two-dimensional coherence, both harmonic (or vertical) and melodic (or horizontal).”10 However, in much pop/rock music the two dimensions are only loosely temporally aligned, creating what has been called the “melodic-harmonic divorce.”11 Thus in some contexts, it may be appropriate to analyze the melodic and harmonic structures of a song as separate but interrelated domains rather than as expressing a single tonal system. The most comprehensive theoretical model of tonality in pop/rock to date has been set forth by Walter Everett in “Making Sense of Rock’s Tonal Systems.”12 He classifies the tonalities used in rock and related genres into six categories ordered by increasing distance from common-practice tonality, further divided into nine subcategories: major, minor, modal, modally mixed, progressive, blues and minor pentatonic, triads or power chords on minor pentatonic roots, triads or power chords on minor pentatonic roots with chromatic embellishments, and chromatic. Everett’s categories are summarized in his Table 1, which is reproduced below as my Example 1. 8

The relative frequency of different chord types in 1100 popular songs culled from the Billboard “Hot 100” charts 1958–1991 is documented in John Ashley Burgoyne, Jonathan Wild, and Ichiro Fujinaga, “An Expert Ground-Truth Set for Audio Chord Recognition and Music Analysis,” in Proceedings of the 12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ed. Anssi Klapuri and Colby Leider (Miami: ISMIR, 2011), 637–38. 9 Christopher Doll, “Listening to Rock Harmony” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2007), 16. 10 Dmitri Tymoczko, A Geometry of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 27. 11 The melodic-harmonic divorce was first described in Moore, “The So-Called ‘Flattened Seventh’ in Rock,” Popular Music 14 (1995), 189, and explored more fully in Temperley, “The Melodic-Harmonic ‘Divorce’ in Rock.” 12 Everett, “Making Sense of Rock’s Tonal Systems,” Music Theory Online 10, no. 4 (2004).

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Table 1. Classifications of Rock’s Preeminent Tonal Systems 1a Major-mode systems with common-practice harmonic and voice-leading behaviors. May be inflected by minor-mode or chromatic mixture. 1b Minor-mode systems with common-practice harmonic and voice-leading behaviors. May be inflected by major-mode or chromatic mixture. 2 Diatonic modal systems with common-practice voice-leading but sometimes not with common-practice harmonic behaviors. 3a Major-mode systems, or modal systems, with mixture from modal scale degrees. Common-practice harmonic and voice-leading behaviors would be common but not necessary. 3b Major-mode systems with progressive structures. Common-practice harmonic and voice-leading behaviors would be typical at lower, but not higher, levels. 4 Blues-based rock: minor-pentatonic-inflected major-mode systems. Common-practice harmonic and voice-leading behaviors not always emphasized at the surface, but may be articulated at deeper levels and/or in accompaniment. 5 Triad-doubled or power-chord minor-pentatonic systems unique to rock styles: I – III – IV – V – VII. Common-practice harmonic and even voice-leading behaviors often irrelevant on the surface. 6a Chromatically-inflected triad-doubled or power-chord doubled pentatonic systems of early metal. Common-practice harmonic and voice-leading behaviors often irrelevant on the surface. 6b Chromatically-related scale degrees with little dependence upon pentatonic basis. Common-practice harmonic and voice-leading behaviors often irrelevant at deeper levels as well as surface. Example 1: Classifications of Rock’s Preeminent Tonal Systems, reproduced from Everett, “Making Sense of Rock’s Tonal Systems,” Music Theory Online 10 no. 4 (2004), Table 1. Used with permission.

This table provides an excellent starting point for a consideration of tonality in pop/ rock music, but I propose several modifications in light of recent research:13 a simplification of the categories, their reordering roughly according to their prevalence in pop/rock compositional practice rather than in relation to common-practice tonality, the omission of a separate category for progressive tonal structures, and the 13

Recent corpus studies of pitch structures in popular music are described and discussed in Burgoyne, Wild, and Fujinaga, “Compositional Data Analysis of Harmonic Structures in Popular Music,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music 2013, ed. Yust, Wild, and Burgoyne (Berlin: Springer, 2013), 52–63; Burgoyne, Wild, and Fujinaga, “An Expert Ground-Truth Set for Audio Chord Recognition and Music Analysis”; de Clercq and Temperley, “A Corpus Analysis of Rock Harmony”; and Temperley and de Clercq, “Statistical Analysis of Harmony and Melody in Rock Music,” Journal of New Music Research 42 (2013): 187–204. My own previous research on harmony in rock music is published in Biamonte, “Triadic Modal and Pentatonic Patterns in Rock Music,” and Biamonte, “Les fonctions modales dans le rock et la musique métal.”

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separation of background tonal structures from foreground harmonic units and voice-leading behaviors. The major mode is the most common background scale in pop/rock, but conventional minor with a raised leading tone is quite rare;14 thus it makes sense to move minor modes with leading tones further down the list. Moreover, the subtonic is significantly more prevalent overall than the leading tone as both a melodic degree and a chord root, regardless of whether scale degree 3ˆ is major or minor.15 Major and minor modes are nonetheless distinct: scale degrees 3ˆ, 6ˆ, and 7ˆ and the secondary harmonies ii, iii, and vi are strongly correlated with one another in major modes, as are the scale degrees 3ˆ, 6ˆ, and 7ˆ and the secondary harmonies III, VI, and VII in minor modes – although taken by itself, scale degree 6ˆ in a melodic context tends to be raised rather than lowered in minor modes.16 Example 2 offers a revised and simplified set of categories that reflect these norms. Common subsets are listed underneath each system. These subsets – pentatonic and blues scales – are more likely to be used melodically rather than harmonically because they do not allow for multiple complete triads; they also represent the most common melodic degrees within the larger systems.17 The first two categories are expanded versions of major and natural minor that allow for the prevalence of the lowered seventh degree in major and the raised sixth degree in minor. The expanded major mode can be interpreted as a combination of major and Mixolydian, and the expanded natural minor as a combination of Aeolian and Dorian. The “folk modes,” Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Dorian, are included here as subsets rather than in a separate modal category because they are more common in most pop/rock than Phrygian, Locrian, and Lydian; they are the closest in terms of tonal distance to the major and minor modes, and thus they are the least marked and the easiest to harmonize. Phrygian, Locrian, and mixed versions of these modes with flexible scale degrees 2ˆ and/or 5ˆ occur fairly often in heavy metal and related genres but are quite rare in other forms of pop/rock, so I have placed them in category 4, and I have excluded Lydian entirely because of its extreme rarity.18 The third category in Example 2 comprises blues structures with major-mode harmony, usually in the form of major triads or dominant seventh chords, and minor or flexible scale degrees 3ˆ and 7ˆ in the melody. This system replicates the “penta14

The asymmetric usage of major and minor tonal systems in rock music is documented in Everett, “Making Sense of Rock’s Tonal Systems,” [7], and in Temperley and de Clercq, “Statistical Analysis,” 200. 15 The prevalence of the subtonic over the leading tone as a melodic degree is demonstrated in Temperley and de Clercq, “Statistical Analysis,” 197, and as a chord root in de Clercq and Temperley, “A Corpus Analysis,” 60. 16 See Burgoyne et al., “Compositional Data Analysis,” 59–61, and Temperley and de Clercq, “Statistical Analysis,” 200–02. 17 Temperley and de Clercq, “Statistical Analysis,” 198–99. 18 Very little analytical work has been done on heavy metal; the most comprehensive study thus far is Esa Lilja, “Characteristics of Heavy Metal Chord Structures” (PhD diss., University of Helsinki, 2004). Clement, in “Modal Tonicization in Rock,” makes a case for the analytical validity of the Lydian mode in rock music, but he offers only a handful of examples and not all of them are convincing.

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tonic union” scale, identified by Temperley and de Clercq as the second most common melodic structure after major; it represents the union of major and minor pentatonic scales (or of Mixolydian and Dorian), as well as the central section of a fifth cycle.19 Because the blues mode is created by the juxtaposition of minor melody with major harmony, the flexible scale degrees are registrally correlated: the lowered forms most typically occur in the melody and are likely to be voiced in a higher register than their raised versions. The registral placement of minor thirds above major thirds is reflected by the chord-chart notation of a dominant-seventh chord with both thirds as 79; the 9 in the upper structure of the chord enharmonically represents the minor third.20 I have not included scale degree 4ˆ/5ˆ, part of the traditional “blues scale,” in this background pitch collection because it is almost invariably an embellishment of scale degree 4ˆ or 5ˆ rather than a structural pitch. The last category in Example 2 comprises nearly or fully chromatic collections that use multiple forms of multiple scale degrees.21 All of the systems just described represent points along a continuum rather than discrete categories, and could apply to entire songs or to sections within a song – or, less commonly, to passages within a formal section. Along this continuum, instances of modal mixture might fall in between major or minor and the blues, or between any of the first four categories and chromaticism, depending on whether particular scale-degree inflections are perceived as structural or embellishing pitches. In this revised system, I have omitted any version of Everett’s category 3b, progressive tonal structures, for two reasons: first, because it is qualitatively different from the other categories, as it concerns motion between tonal centers rather than around a single tonal center, and secondly, because monotonality is not a firmly established expectation in pop/rock music to the extent that it is in common-practice music. It is very common for pop/rock songs to begin and end in different keys, especially through the device of the “truck driver’s modulation” up a semitone or sometimes a whole step between repeated sections (usually choruses) at the end of the song.22 The narrative of tonal departure and return that is so widespread in tonal 19 Temperley and de Clercq, “Statistical Analysis,” 198–99. 20 This chord and its voicings in the music of Jimi Hendrix are discussed in van der Bliek, “The Hendrix Chord.” 21 Chromatic pop/rock songs are examined in Capuzzo, “Neo-Riemannian Theory and the Analysis of Pop-Rock Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 26 (2004): 177–99; Everett, The Foundations of Rock, 269–80; David Heetderks, “Hipster Harmony: The Hybrid Syntax of Seventh Chords in Post-Millennial Rock,” Music Theory Online 21, no. 2 (2015); and Chris McDonald, “Exploring Modal Subversions in Alternative Music,” Popular Music 19 (2000): 355–63. 22 Popular songs that begin and end in different keys are discussed in Michael Buchler, “Modulation as a Dramatic Agent in Frank Loesser’s Broadway Songs,” Music Theory Spectrum 30 (2008): 35–60; Capuzzo, “Sectional Tonality and Sectional Centricity in Rock Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 31 (2009): 157–74; Christopher Doll, “Rockin’ Out: Expressive Modulation in Rock Music,” Music Theory Online 17, no. 3 (2011), [14]; and Dai Griffiths, “Elevating Form and Elevating Modulation,” Popular Music 34 (2015): 22–44. Burgoyne et al. have empirically confirmed the prevalence of modulation up by semitone; see “Compositional Data Analysis,” 61. See Doll, “Rockin’ Out,” 18n and Griffiths, “Elevating Modulation,” 27, for surveys of additional sources and alternative names for the “truck driver’s modulation,” including “pump-up,” “crowbar,” “gear shift,” “arranger’s,” and “shotgun.”

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art music and in Tin Pan Alley standards still persists in many pop/rock songs, but other songs replace this tonal journey with large-scale structures defined instead by texture, timbre, register, and dynamics. Indeed, perceptual research has confirmed that most listeners are unaware of indirect key relationships even in short pieces of music.23 Tonal Systems in Pop/Rock (scale degrees are shown in relation to major)

1: expanded major mode: 1ˆ 2ˆ 3ˆ 4ˆ 5ˆ 6ˆ 7ˆ 7ˆ Harmony and melody are major, Mixolydian, or use flexible scale degree 7ˆ. Common subsets are the diatonic major hexachord (scale degrees 1ˆ to 6ˆ) and the major pentatonic scale (1ˆ 2ˆ 3ˆ 5ˆ 6ˆ).

2: minor mode: 1ˆ 2ˆ 3ˆ 4ˆ 5ˆ 6ˆ 6ˆ 7ˆ Harmony and melody are natural minor/Aeolian or Dorian. A common subset is the minor pentatonic scale (1ˆ 3ˆ 4ˆ 5ˆ 7ˆ). 3: blues/“pentatonic union”: 1ˆ 2ˆ 3ˆ 3ˆ 4ˆ 5ˆ 6ˆ 7ˆ 7ˆ Harmony is basically major, although chord extensions and embellishments may be minor; melody has flexible third and seventh degrees with microtonal embellishments. A common subset is the minor pentatonic scale. 4: other forms of minor melodic minor: 1ˆ 2ˆ 3ˆ 4ˆ 5ˆ 6ˆ 7ˆ harmonic minor: 1ˆ 2ˆ 3ˆ 4ˆ 5ˆ 6ˆ 7ˆ Phrygian: 1ˆ 2ˆ 3ˆ 4ˆ 5ˆ 6ˆ 7ˆ Locrian: 1ˆ 2ˆ 3ˆ 4ˆ 5ˆ 6ˆ 7ˆ 5: chromatic: 1ˆ 1ˆ/2ˆ 2ˆ 3ˆ 3ˆ 4ˆ 4ˆ/5ˆ 5ˆ 6ˆ 6ˆ 7ˆ 7ˆ

Basic Harmonic Units 1: functional harmony: different chord qualities on different scale degrees 2: major-triad doublings 3: power chords (parallel fifths and fourths; may be doubled at the octave) 4: monophonic: single line; may be doubled at the octave Example 2: Tonal and Harmonic Structures in Pop/Rock (after Everett 2004)

23

See, for example, Nicholas Cook, “The Perception of Large-scale Tonal Closure,” Music Perception 5 (1987): 197–205, and Elizabeth West Marvin and Alexander Brinkman, “The Effect of Modulation and Formal Manipulation on Perception of Tonic Closure by Expert Listeners,” Music Perception 16 (1999): 389–407.

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Another modification I have made to Everett’s system is the separation of tonal from harmonic axes. The last section of Example 2 outlines a second set of categories for basic harmonic structures. Any tonal system has the potential to be realized using different harmonic units, from functional harmonies to parallel triads to power chords to monophony. Functional harmonies, with different triad or tetrad qualities on different scale degrees, have the potential to employ conventional voice leading. This is the most common harmonic system in pop/rock; it is especially typical of pop songs and keyboard-based repertoires. Parallel triads and power chords, in contrast, are typical of guitar-based textures, because of the ease of shifting a particular chord voicing up and down the fretboard without changing hand position. These two harmonic types are unique to rock and related genres. They function as acoustical doublings that thicken the texture, not unlike the organ stops for fifths (usually labeled “quint,” “twelfth,” or “nazard”) or mixtures (added octaves, fifths, and sometimes thirds). While they often add to the surface chromatic saturation of a passage, only the chord roots are structural notes. Power chords are especially common in distorted guitar or synthesizer timbres, in which a complete triad or larger chord would sound unacceptably muddy and unclear. Monophonic melodies are typical in song introductions, which normally have a thinner texture than the rest of the song, but they are also a common texture in heavy metal, particularly in subgenres featuring heavy distortion in combination with fast tempos such as speed metal and thrash metal. In the final section of this chapter, I offer a few illustrative examples. The verses of Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock” (1972), shown in Example 3, have a G-pentatonic melody over diatonic G-major harmony. The chord progression, I–iii–IV–V, is a moderately common alternative to the doo-wop cliché I–vi–IV–V. The E in this example, which is emphasized by its syncopation and status as the high point of the melodic contour, moves from dissonance to consonance and back to dissonance before being resolved in the chorus as the root of E minor.

Example 3: Elton John, “Crocodile Rock,” first verse

An instance of Mixolydian harmony and melody is the famous coda of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” (1968), which repeats a circular double-plagal progression, I–VII–IV– I, in F major (not shown). The body of the song is in diatonic F major, save for F dominant seventh (V7/IV) at the beginning of each phrase of the bridge, so taken as a whole the song provides an example of the expanded major system.

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The minor mode in pop/rock is exemplified by the verse of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” (1979). The first half of the opening verse is shown in Example 4. The vocal melody is constrained to scale degrees 1ˆ through 5ˆ, but both forms of scale degree 6ˆ occur in the harmony, and the leading tone is not used. One unusual aspect of this example is its syncopated harmonic rhythm, which more typically changes on downbeats (as in the preceding examples) or on beats 1 and 3. Another unusual aspect is the harmonic progression, which begins like an expanded version of a descending tetrachord (Cm-B-A-G) but never reaches the dominant. Instead, the bass is deflected back upward to A, creating an unstable diminished triad that stands in the syntactic position of a dominant but whose scale-degree content is more typical of a subdominant.24

Example 4: Supertramp, “The Logical Song,” first half of first verse

An instance of minor pentatonic that omits any form of scale degree 6ˆ is the power-chord riff from Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” (1972), shown in Example 5. The melody moves from tonic through minor scale degree 3ˆ up to 4ˆ and back down, doubled at the fourth below. D and A in the second bar are upper chromatic neighbors, rather than structural pitches.

Example 5: Deep Purple, “Smoke on the Water,” opening riff

The verse of The Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love” (1964), shown in Example 6, demonstrates the melodic-harmonic divorce typical of the blues. The harmony is a typical twelve-bar blues pattern, with dominant seventh chords on I, IV, and V. The notes of these chords add up to the blues or “pentatonic union” collection of category 3 in Example 2: both forms of scale degree 3ˆ and 7ˆ are used (E and B in C7, E in F7, B in G7). The melody, however, is hexatonic in C minor, with no sixth degree and a minor third that directly conflicts with the major third of the C7 chord. 24

Drew Nobile argues for a model of harmonic function based on syntax rather than scale-degree content in “A Structural Approach to the Analysis of Rock Music” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2014), ch. 2.

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Example 6: The Beatles, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” first verse

A single-line melody expressing one of the rarer minor modes is exemplified by the “Hyperspace” riff, the dissonant middle section of Rush’s song trilogy “Natural Science” (1980), shown in Example 7. “Hyperspace,” with its monophonic Phrygian melody on F and then B, asymmetric meter, and dissonant guitar timbre, provides a sharp contrast to the outer sections of the song, which are more tonal, with functional harmonies in 4/4 and more consonant guitar timbres.

Example 7: Rush, “Hyperspace” riff from “Natural Science”

An instance of a triad-doubled chord progression on pentatonic roots is “Hey Joe,” recorded by The Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966. The basic chord progression, repeated throughout the song, is | C G | D A | E, a subdominant chain of descending fourths that ends on the tonic: VI–III–VII–IV–I. These are, not coincidentally, the major chords on the guitar that can be voiced with open strings. The chord roots form a pentatonic 4 scale on E (i. e., the fourth rotation of A minor pentatonic); however, the harmony is most readily interpreted as E minor with a major tonic, because all of the other chords are diatonic to E minor with a flexible sixth degree. Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” (1994) features more emphatically chromatic harmony throughout. The chord pattern of the verse is: | G6 B6 | F Em | E Dsus4 | G6-B° A | in G major. This pattern includes many of the same flat-side triads as “Hey Joe” (III, VII, VI), with the addition of II, which functions as a tritone substitute for V – in the chorus, the chord in the analogous position is D7. However, the flat-side triads are not in a sequence, and they are interrupted by the descending chromatic line that connects F and D. The only chromatic pitch not used in the song is scale degree 4ˆ/5ˆ (C/D).

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Empirical research on tonality in rock music has just begun to provide a more nuanced historical contextualization of its tonal and harmonic structures. Songs from the 1950s are predominantly major and dominated by the harmonies I, IV, and V.25 In the second half of the 1960s, use of the minor mode began to increase, as did the use of the modal “flat-side” triads III, VI, and VII in a major key.26 The period from 1970 to 1990 saw an increase in the prevalence of IV and VII, with a concomitant decrease in the use of V.27 Further research will be able to provide a more detailed account of the development of pitch structures in rock as well as in other popular-music genres, the interaction between harmony and melody, and correlations between harmonic patterns and form. Other productive avenues for further study are harmonic rhythm and its relationship to tempo and form, melodic register and its relationship to texture and instrumentation, and associations between timbre and texture. The next important step will be to identify correlations of harmonic, tonal, and other structures with particular genres and establish generic as well as chronological norms for popular music. Bibliography Biamonte, Nicole. “Triadic Modal and Pentatonic Patterns in Rock Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 32 (2010): 95–110. Repr. Rock Music, edited by Mark Spicer, 227–42, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. ––. “Les fonctions modales dans le rock et la musique métal.” In L’analyse musicale aujourd’hui, edited by Xavier Hascher, Mondher Ayari, and Jean-Michel Bardez, 275–90. Paris: Éditions Delatour-France, 2015. Björnberg, Alf. “On Aeolian Harmony in Contemporary Popular Music.” In Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, edited by Allan F. Moore, 275–82. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997. Brackett, David. Interpreting Popular Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Buchler, Michael. “Modulation as a Dramatic Agent in Frank Loesser’s Broadway Songs.” Music Theory Spectrum 30 (2008): 35–60. Burgoyne, John Ashley, Jonathan Wild, and Ichiro Fujinaga. “Compositional Data Analysis of Harmonic Structures in Popular Music.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music 2013, edited by Jason Yust, Jonathan Wild, and John Ashley Burgoyne, 52–63. Berlin: Springer, 2013. ––. “An Expert Ground-Truth Set for Audio Chord Recognition and Music Analysis.” In Proceedings of the 12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, edited by Anssi Klapuri and Colby Leider, 633–38. Miami: ISMIR, 2011. Capuzzo, Guy. “Neo-Riemannian Theory and the Analysis of Pop-Rock Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 26 (2004): 177–99. ––. “A Pedagogical Approach to Minor Pentatonic Riffs in Rock Music.” Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy 23 (2009): 39–55. ––. “Sectional Tonality and Sectional Centricity in Rock Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 31 (2009): 157–74.

25 See Burgoyne et al., “Compositional Data Analysis,” 60–61; and de Clercq and Temperley, “A Corpus Analysis,” 63. 26 de Clercq and Temperley, “A Corpus Analysis,” 64. 27 Burgoyne et al., “Compositional Data Analysis,” 60–61.

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Carter, Paul. “Retrogressive Harmonic Motion as Structural and Stylistic Characteristic of PopRock Music.” PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 2005. Clement, Brett. “Modal Tonicization in Rock: The Special Case of the Lydian Scale.” GAMUT 6 (2013): 95–142. Cook, Nicholas. “The Perception of Large-scale Tonal Closure.” Music Perception 5 (1987): 197– 205. de Clercq, Trevor, and David Temperley. “A Corpus Analysis of Rock Harmony.” Popular Music 30 (2011): 47–70. Doll, Christopher. “Listening to Rock Harmony.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2007. ––. “Rockin’ Out: Expressive Modulation in Rock Music.” Music Theory Online 17, no. 3 (2011). Easley, Dave. “Riff Schemes, Form, and the Genre of Early American Hardcore Punk (1978–83).” Music Theory Online 21, no. 1 (2015). Everett, Walter. The Foundations of Rock: From “Blue Suede Shoes” to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ––. “Making Sense of Rock’s Tonal Systems.” Music Theory Online 10, no. 4 (2004). Everett, Walter, ed. Expression in Pop-Rock Music, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Griffiths, Dai. “Elevating Form and Elevating Modulation.” Popular Music 34 (2015): 22–44. Hatch, David, and Stephen Millward. From Blues to Rock: An Analytical History of Pop Music. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987. Headlam, Dave. “Appropriations of Blues and Gospel in Popular Music.” In The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music, edited by Allan F. Moore, 158–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Heetderks, David. “Hipster Harmony: The Hybrid Syntax of Seventh Chords in Post-Millennial Rock.” Music Theory Online 21, no. 2 (2015). Hughes, Bryn. “Harmonic Expectation in Twelve-Bar Blues Progressions.” PhD diss., Florida State University, 2011. Julien, Olivier. “L’analyse des musiques populaires enregistrées.” In Le commentaire auditif de spécialité – Recherches et propositions, ed. Danièle Pistone, 141–66. Paris: Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008. Koozin, Timothy. “Guitar Voicing in Pop-Rock Music: A Performance-Based Analytical Approach.” Music Theory Online 17, no. 3 (2011). Lilja, Esa. “Characteristics of Heavy Metal Chord Structures.” PhD diss., University of Helsinki, 2004. Marvin, Elizabeth West, and Alexander Brinkman. “The Effect of Modulation and Formal Manipulation on Perception of Tonic Closure by Expert Listeners.” Music Perception 16 (1999): 389– 407. McDonald, Chris. “Exploring Modal Subversions in Alternative Music.” Popular Music 19 (2000): 355–63. Middleton, Richard. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990. Milward, John. Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock’n’Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues). Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2013. Moore, Allan F. “Patterns of Harmony.” Popular Music 11 (1992): 73–106. ––. Rock: The Primary Text, 2nd ed. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2001. ––. “The So-Called ‘Flattened Seventh’ in Rock.” Popular Music 14 (1995): 185–201. ––. Song Means: Analyzing and Interpreting Recorded Song. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Nobile, Drew. “A Structural Approach to the Analysis of Rock Music.” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2014. Spicer, Mark. “(Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music.” Twentieth-Century Music 1 (2004): 29– 64. Stephenson, Ken. What to Listen for in Rock. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Tagg, Philip. Everyday Tonality: Towards a Tonal Theory of What Most People Hear. New York: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press, 2009. Temperley, David. “The Melodic-Harmonic ‘Divorce’ in Rock.” Popular Music 26 (2007): 323–42.

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––. “Scalar Shift in Popular Music.” Music Theory Online 17, no. 4 (2011). Temperley, David, and Trevor de Clercq. “Statistical Analysis of Harmony and Melody in Rock Music.” Journal of New Music Research 42 (2013): 187–204. Traut, Don. “Anti-Circles as an Explanatory Model for Harmonic Motion in Rock Music.” Musical Insights 4 (2015): 55–69. Tymoczko, Dmitri. A Geometry of Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. van der Bliek, Rob. “The Hendrix Chord: Blues, Flexible Pitch Relationships, and Self-Standing Harmony.” Popular Music 26 (2007): 343–64. Yim, Gary. “Affordant Chord Transitions in Selected Guitar-Driven Popular Music.” M. A. thesis, Ohio State University, 2011.

Perspectives of the Mid-Century

“Das Wunderland”: Tonality and (Political) Topography in Eisler’s Songs Around 1950 Thomas Ahrend I It comes as no surprise that, at the midpoint of his life and career, after his enforced remigration to Europe in 1948 (through expulsion from the USA, after which he initially moved to Vienna) and his subsequent decision to settle in East Berlin, Hanns Eisler composed tonally.1 For one thing, in addition to “atonal” or twelvetone pieces, Eisler had continuously composed tonal works with different functions and styles (workers’ songs, chansons, stage music, film music, etc.) before his return to Europe. Among these works were film scores for two Hollywood productions by RKO from 1947: The Woman on the Beach (directed by Jean Renoir) and So Well Remembered (directed by Edward Dmytryk). Further, Eisler faced certain preexisting conditions particular to the German Democratic Republic (GDR),2 whose state-controlled cultural policy demanded tonality, or explicitly excluded “atonality” as undesirable. In the well-known speech by Andrei Zhdanov delivered in 1948, one of the most crucial attempts at defining “socialist realism” (at least until Stalin’s death in 1953), the issue of atonality arises as a critique of Shostakovich and other Soviet composers branded as “formalistic,” as can be seen from the discussion of the opera Velikaya druzhba (The Great Friendship) by Vano Muradeli: It appears that novelty is almost the main characteristic of the formalistic direction. But novelty is not an end in itself; the new must be better than the old, otherwise it has no meaning. It seems to me that the followers of the formalistic direction use this little word mainly to create propaganda for bad music. […] Yet, the “novelty” of the formalists is above all not even new, since this “new” reeks of the modern decadent music of Europe and America. […] Behind the mask of surface-level compositional complications, a tendency toward the impoverishment of music is concealed. The musical language loses its expressiveness. There is so much coarseness, vulgarity, so much dishonesty carried in the music that it ceases to fulfill its purpose – to give pleasure. […] This music becomes an enemy of the people, purely individualistic, and the people truly have the right to be and to remain indifferent to it. If one requires the listener to praise a coarse, formless, vulgar music, which builds on atonality, on perpetual dissonances, while consonances occur only in isolation and wrong notes and their combinations become the rule, that is a direct departure from fundamental musical norms. Taken together, that threatens to liquidate music, just as cubism and futurism in painting represent nothing more than a tendency toward the destruction of painting. Music that intentionally ignores normal human 1 2

For further details on Eisler’s remigration, see Peter Schweinhardt, Fluchtpunkt Wien: Hanns Eislers Wiener Arbeiten nach der Rückkehr aus dem Exil (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2006), 15–119. In German, the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik).

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Thomas Ahrend emotions, that shakes the psyche and the nervous system of human beings, cannot be popular, cannot serve society.3

Eisler had previously been involved in the so-called realism debate in the 1930s – in fact, he had been accused of defending formalistic tendencies.4 He was confronted with the most recent manifestations of this debate, at the very latest, in 1948, on his return to Europe for the Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics, held from May 20–29 in Prague.5 In the GDR, the relevant musical func3



4

5

Es zeigt sich, daß das Neuerertum geradezu das Hauptcharakteristikum der formalistischen Richtung ist. Aber Neuerertum ist nicht Selbstzweck; das Neue muß besser sein als das Alte, sonst hat es keinen Sinn. Mir scheint, daß die Anhänger der formalistischen Richtung dies Wörtchen in der Hauptsache gebrauchen, um Propaganda für schlechte Musik zu machen. […] Und dabei ist das “Neuerertum” der Formalisten überhaupt nicht einmal neu, denn dieses “Neue” riecht nach der modernen dekadenten Musik Europas und Amerikas. […] Hinter der Maske einer rein äußerlichen Komplizierung der Manier des Komponierens verbirgt sich die Tendenz zur Verarmung der Musik. Die musikalische Sprache verliert an Ausdrucksfähigkeit. Es wird so viel Grobes, Vulgäres, so viel Unechtes in die Musik hineingetragen, daß sie aufhört, ihrer Bestimmung zu entsprechen – Genuß zu verschaffen. […] Diese Musik wird volksfeindlich, rein individualistisch, und das Volk hat wirklich das Recht, gleichgültig ihr gegenüber zu werden und zu bleiben. Wenn man vom Hörer verlangt, eine grobe, formlose, vulgäre Musik zu loben, die sich auf Atonalität, auf ständigen Dissonanzen aufbaut, während Konsonanzen nur ganz vereinzelt vorkommen und falsche Noten und ihre Kombination zur Regel werden, so ist das eine direkte Abkehr von den grundlegenden musikalischen Normen. All das zusammengenommen droht die Musik zu liquidieren, ebenso wie Kubismus und Futurismus in der Malerei nichts anderes darstellen als eine Tendenz in Richtung auf die Zerstörung der Malerei. Eine Musik, die absichtlich, die normalen menschlichen Emotionen ignoriert, die die Psyche und das Nervensystem des Menschen erschüttert, kann nicht populär werden, kann der Gesellschaft nicht dienen. Andrej Aleksandrovič Ždanov (A. Shdanow), “Fragen der sowjetischen Musikkultur, Diskussionsbeitrag auf der Beratung von Vertretern der sowjetischen Musik im ZK der KPdSU (B), Januar 1948,” in Über Kunst und Wissenschaft (Berlin: Dietz, 1951), 55–79 (68–69 and 74–75) (for a contemporaneous English edition of the book, see also A. A. Zhdanov, Essays on Literature, Philosophy, and Music [New York: International Publishers, 1950], 87, 88, 93). Unless otherwise noted, English translations of quoted passages in the present chapter are by the editors. See Ernst Bloch and Hanns Eisler, “Die Kunst zu erben” (1938), in Eisler, Musik und Politik: Schriften 1924–1948, ed. Günter Mayer, Hanns Eisler Gesammelte Werke III/1 [hereafter EGW] (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1973), 406–14; and Eisler, “Antwort an Lukács” (1938), in ibid., 433–35. See the editor’s commentary on Eisler, “Gesellschaftliche Grundfragen der Musik,” in Musik und Politik: Schriften 1948–1962, ed. Günter Mayer (EGW III/2) (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1982), 13–25, at 23: “Eisler spoke on the first days of the congress (before May 23) in the plenary session. […] At this congress a Soviet delegation took part […]. The two last days were devoted to their appearance. On this occasion the results of consultations with representatives of Soviet music among the Central Comittee of the CPSU (B) (in January 1948) and an evaluation of members of the Union of Soviet Composers (February 1948) were presented and explained.” Eisler is among the cosignatories (and, presumably, among the authors most significantly involved) of a “manifesto” from this congress, wherein, among other points, emphasis on “the people” can probably be understood as a reaction to Zhdanov’s speech at the Union of Soviet Composers. (Hanns Eisler, “Manifest [I]”, in ibid., 26–28, at 27: “The music and the musical life of our times shows a deep crisis. […] The overcoming of this musi-

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tionaries adopted this view in their own cultural policy. In particular, Ernst Hermann Meyer formulated this view in his book Musik im Zeitgeschehen of 1952, with significant references to Zhdanov.6 A music theory-based problematization or definition of tonality or atonality is lacking in both Zhdanov and Meyer and is not, of course, their goal. For them, “atonality” acts merely as a cipher which, among other purposes, serves to downgrade “modern” music. Instead, the legitimization of putative “fundamental musical norms,” or “tonal fixedness” [tonartliche Gebundenheit] as “normal” and “popular” [volkstümlich], remains in the foreground. Eisler himself possessed a relatively sophisticated and particularly historically-informed notion of tonality, which had been shaped not least through his lessons with Schoenberg and the study of his Harmonielehre.7 In this situation, he obviously tried to mediate between the implications of “socialist realism” and his own compositional

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cal crisis seems possible to us, if […] music becomes the expression of great, new, progressive ideas and sensations of the masses”). See Ernst Hermann Meyer, Musik im Zeitgeschehen (Berlin: Henschel, 1952), 152: In modern music making, formalistic tendencies always go together with a lack of sentimental content, which is accessible and precious to the people. […] The endeavor of dissonance, the expression of an ever more sharpened emotion in classical music, originally an enrichment of expressive feeling, becomes meaningless, completely uncommited, all leveling out and unfeeling “atonalism”. […] The exclusiveness of dissonant sounds not functionally linked, unresolvedly following one another means in contemporary music […] such a complication of the intelligibility of any content, that the people must see, in these works, content hostility, or only negation, aggression – as in the distorted object contours of many expressionist paintings. […] The relatedness of music to the forms of tonal fixedness in question and, at the same time, the recognition of the need for resolutions in music is, however, the “normal,” the “typical,” the “popular,” the “healthy,” the “human.” [Im modernen Musikschaffen gehen formalistische Tendenzen immer zusammen mit Mangel an Gefühlsgehalte, die dem Volke erreichbar und wertvoll sind. […] Das Dissonanzwesen, in der klassischen Musik Ausdruck eines mehr und mehr geschärften Emotionalismus, ursprünglich als Bereicherung des Gefühlsausdruckes, wird zum nichtssagenden, zu nichts verpflichtenden, alles nivellierenden und gefühllosen ‘Atonalismus’. […] Ausschließlichkeit einander folgender, funktionell nicht verknüpfter unaufgelöster dissonanter Klänge aber bedeutet in der zeitgenössischen Musik […] eine solche Erschwerung der Verständlichkeit eines Inhaltes, daß das Volk in diesen Werken Inhaltsfeindlichkeit sehen muß, d. h. nur Verneinung, Aggression – wie bei den verzerrten Objektkonturen mancher expressionistischer Malerei. […] Die Bezogenheit der Musik auf eine jeweilige tonartliche Gebundenheit und gleichzeitig die Anerkennung der Notwendigkeit von Entspannungen in der Musik ist aber das ‘Normale’, das ‘Typische’, das Volkstümliche, das Gesunde, das Menschliche.] On the structure of “official” music politics in the GDR, see Elaine Kelly’s summary in Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 32–36. See Thomas Ahrend, Aspekte der Instrumentalmusik Hanns Eislers: Zu Form und Verfahren in den Variationen (Berlin: Mensch & Buch, 2006), 107–15; and Markus Roth, Der Gesang als Asyl: Analytische Studien zu Hanns Eislers Hollywood-Liederbuch (Hofheim: Wolke, 2007), 104–15. On the relationship between tonality and atonality for Eisler see also Thomas Ahrend, “Die Freiheit muss man sich nehmen: Hanns Eisler und die Verwendung der Atonalität,” in Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung 2008/2009, ed. Simone Hohmaier (Mainz: Schott, 2009), 155–70.

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preferences and possibilities, without, of course, calling into question the ideological polemic against formalistic tendencies (e. g., “atonality”). Along those lines, a lecture given in Berlin in January 1949 and published in the same year, states in relativizing terms: The pursuit of popularity [Volkstümlichkeit] in highly capitalist countries [is] nothing but the desire for the easiest possible intelligibility. As such, it must certainly be respected. But it is also to be criticized. Because, in general, popularity is considered a certain sentimentality; a playfulness authorized by nothing, like manners and customs, as these do not easily correspond to our modern lives. If one is aware, however, that the most advanced stratum of society – its actual core, its heart – is the working class, then to be popular means to turn, above all, to the workers, who represent the most advanced consciousness of people today. This would, however, render a new characterization of “popular” necessary. Because the workers are not naïve, they learn quickly; they have peculiar manners and customs – from different national particularities, but international in their contents. They are innovation-addicted. They have experienced how necessary change, remodeling, variety of methods, and agility are. They have the most extensive plans and perspectives. A musical style that turns to this most advanced stratum of society must definitely be different, therefore, from what one previously understood by popularity. It will, therefore, be a new kind of popularity. How can this be achieved? Well, such musical questions must be answered on staff paper. […]8

A large part of Eisler’s musical output from 1949 can be interpreted as an attempt to provide his own response “on staff paper” to the demand for popularity, and at the same time – probably at least in his intention – to critique the ideological concept of “popularity,” which he had recognized as abstract. It comes as no surprise that under the given cultural-political conditions, Eisler, in turn, composed tonally. (And it is not without a certain political irony, of course, that for some pieces written under the conditions of “socialist realism,” Eisler fell back on compositions or parts thereof originally conceived for Hollywood feature films).9 8

9

[D]as Streben nach Volkstümlichkeit in den hochkapitalistischen Ländern [ist] nichts als der Wunsch nach möglichst leichter Verständlichkeit. Als solcher muß er gewiß respektiert werden. Aber er ist auch zu kritisieren. Versteht man doch unter Volkstümlichkeit im allgemeinen eine gewisse Gefühlsseligkeit, eine durch nichts berechtigte Spielfreude, auch Sitten und Gebräuche, wie sie unserem modernen Leben nicht leicht entsprechen. Wenn man sich aber bewußt ist, daß die fortgeschrittenste Schicht des Volkes, ihr eigentlicher Kern, ihr Herz, die Arbeiterschaft ist, dann bedeutet volkstümlich sein, sich vor allem an die Arbeiter wenden, die das fortgeschrittenste Bewußtsein der Menschen von heute repräsentieren. Dies würde aber eine neue Charakterisierung des “Volkstümlichen” notwendig machen. Denn die Arbeiter sind nicht naiv, sie lernen rasch, sie haben eigentümliche Sitten und Gebräuche, verschieden durch nationale Besonderheiten, aber international in ihren Inhalten; sie sind neuerungssüchtig; sie haben erfahren, wie notwendig Veränderung, Umgestaltung, Vielfältigkeit der Methoden, Beweglichkeit sind. Sie haben die weitestgehenden Pläne und Perspektiven. Ein musikalischer Stil, der sich an diese fortschrittlichste Schicht der Menschen wendet, wird also durchaus verschieden sein müssen von dem, was man bisher unter Volkstümlichkeit verstand. Es wird sich also um eine neue Volkstümlichkeit handeln. Wie kann sie erzielt werden? Nun, musikalische Fragen solcher Art müssen auf dem Notenpapier beantwortet werden. Hanns Eisler, “Hörer und Komponist [II]” (1949), in Musik und Politik: Schriften 1948–1962, ed. Günter Mayer [EGW III/2] (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1982), 64–72 (69). See Peter Deeg, “Filmographie: Hanns Eisler in Hollywood,” in Horst Weber, “I am not a hero,

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What is surprising, though, particularly in songs such as the Nationalhymne der DDR (Example 1) or the Neue deutsche Volkslieder – both produced in the GDR in 1949 – is the extreme reduction of the possibilities of “advanced” tonality, as Eisler had definitely practiced it in earlier tonal compositions by means of fluctuating tonality (schwebende Tonalität) and other “modern” techniques.10 One could also make use of Eisler’s own term, “retraction” [Zurücknahme], from the early 1960s, which he applied on the broadest historical scale: The cave drawings functioned, to a certain extent, to first conquer the animals graphically and, to a certain extent, to charm, before they are met in real terms. […] That is a highly interesting thing. Because the original function of art – one so practical – reminds me, strangely enough, of the function of the revolutionary labor force. […] Here, I see an immense retraction [Zurücknahme]. Because if we want to explain the history of art at all, the individual fields of art arise – above all, through division of labor. And the secularization – the emancipation of art from religion, from rite, from myth – is its bourgeoisification or its modernization! […] With the secularization of art being a culinary enterprise – that is, art became a stimulant; it developed from the myth of the dull community to an individual activity; it became an entertainment instead of a compulsory community matter – we have to say that these days […] we are going back, I put it most cruelly, to those cave drawings.11

In contrast to Eisler’s earlier tonal compositions, the songs emerging around 1950 appear oversimplified – not primarily because they are tonal, but in comparison to Eisler’s earlier tonal works. These songs appear ill-matched to a historical narrative based upon a progressive history: they are not conveniently inscribed into a history 10

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I am a composer”: Hanns Eisler in Hollywood (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2012), 488–503. Eisler himself refers, as late as the fall of 1948, to such techniques in his music: If I say that the composer himself has endeavored to see the Viennese people witness the musically new, I mean, thereby, something very concrete, musically-technical. Thus the Angst-Ensemble is devised, for example, in a kind of fluctuating tonality. It is in B minor, though the tonic never occurs. This is no technical joke, but is required by the material. In order to concretize a lightweight, an eerily comic, whispered piece, a very modern technique was needed, which goes far beyond the notion of the popular. See Hanns Eisler, “Wie ich Nestroy verstehe: Über die Musik zu ‘Höllenangst’” (1948), in Musik und Politik, 40–41 (41). Apart from the question of whether fluctuating tonality may be referred to, around 1950, as “a very modern technique,” it is still striking that, after 1949, such indications are lacking in Eisler’s remarks. Eisler, Gespräche mit Hans Bunge: Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht, ed. Hans Bunge [EGW III/7] (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1975), 237–38: [D]ie Höhlenzeichungen hatten die Funktion, die Tiere gewissermaßen erst einmal zeichnerisch zu erobern, sie gewissermaßen zu bezaubern, bevor man sie real trifft. […] Das ist eine hochinteressante Sache. Denn die Urfunktion der Kunst – eine so praktizistische – erinnert mich merkwürdigerweise an die Funktion der Kunst der revolutionären Arbeiterschaft. […] Hier sehe ich eine ungeheure Zurücknahme. Denn wenn wir die Kunstgeschichte überhaupt erklären wollen, so entstehen die einzelnen Gebiete der Kunst vor allem durch Arbeitsteilung. Und die Säkularisierung, die Emanzipation der Kunst vom Religiösen, vom Ritus, vom Mythos ist ihre Verbürgerlichung oder ihre Modernisierung! […] War die Säkularisierung der Kunst eine kulinarische – das heißt, die Kunst wurde zu einem Genußmittel; sie wurde vom Mythos der dumpfen Gemeinde zu einer individuellen Betätigung; sie wurde zu einem Spaß statt einer verpflichtenden Gemeinschaftssache –, so müssen wir sagen, daß wir doch in diesen Zeiten […] zurückgehen, ich sage es ganz grausam, auf die Höhlenzeichnungen.

Example 1: Hanns Eisler, Nationalhymne der DDR

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based on musical-technical telos. At best, they can be – considering the representatives of “socialist realism” – subordinated to the idea of a social “advancement,” by justifying their simplicity in terms of the necessity of being understandable by the putative “simple” person. But by no means can Eisler’s “retracted” tonality be understood only as an affirmative adaptation of the dominant discourse around 1950 of “socialist realism” in the GDR. The following analytical observations attempt to show, by contrast, that – as with some of the aforementioned songs – tonality is marked as a medium, one that both draws self-reflexive attention and, in so doing, defamiliarizes itself. In particular, the tonal works call into question the ideological coupling of tonality and “popularity.” II Resulting from a commission in 1949, the East German national anthem – Nationalhymne der DDR (“Auferstanden aus Ruinen”) – is one of the first compositions Eisler finished after his move from Vienna to East Berlin.12 The anthem, undoubtedly, is a tonal composition, since it contains many familiar elements of tonality: pitches of a scale that can be traced back to a tonic (F Major); triads built on different scale degrees (I, ii, IV, V, vi) for the harmonization of its scale-based melody; certain characteristic chord progressions (cadences, for example), and so on. These can be understood – invoking Niklas Luhmann’s distinction between medium and form – as elements of tonality considered as a medium. By the loose coupling of elements, tonality opens up a space of possibilities for ensuing form building, which is based on the strict coupling of the same elements.13 (For instance, the medium of air provides loosely coupled elements which can, when strictly coupled, take the shape of air vibrations perceivable as sound. Media and forms do not “exist” absolutely, but depend on the perspective of their observers. Sound itself can become a medium for certain forms, for instance, of sound art. Air takes on different forms in the medium of gas pressure – or even as “Luft von anderem Planeten”). Tonality can be understood as a medium in which particular forms of music are rendered possible. The musical form of the anthem arising from the tonal elements already mentioned is very simple, and is related to the limitations of the medium. Certain possible elements of tonality are not used: for example, triads built on scale degree 3ˆ, altered chords (with the exception of the secondary dominant in the final cadence), chromatic neighbor tones, modulations, etc. At best, one could consider the use of seventh (or ninth) chords, in particular where they occur on scale degrees other than 1ˆ, as well as the unresolved suspension fourth in the dominant chords (from mm. 20–21 and 24) as “advanced.” Even in its structural design, as a three-part ABA 12 13

On the genesis of the anthem, see Heike Amos, Auferstanden aus Ruinen …: Die Nationalhymne der DDR 1949 bis 1990 (Berlin: Dietz, 1997), 22–48. See Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 102–32. Originally published as Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 165–214.

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form supported by tonal means, the song is conventional: the A and A’ sections each close on scale degree 1ˆ, and the middle section concludes with a half cadence. (However, the subtle energizing arrangement of phrase groups within this formal structure is remarkable: the A section establishes an eight-measure phrase. This is, again, divisible into four-measure groups, which are extended by one bar in measure 17 – perhaps with the function of a transition). The following upbeat leads right into the B section, which starts with a four-measure group (mm. 18–21) and is answered by only three measures. The expansion of the transition from beginning to middle sections and the shortening of the transition from the middle section to the “reprise” compensate one another mathematically. The A’ section sets out “regularly” in measure 25, again with an eight-measure phrase, but is for its part shortened by one measure in its second half.14 In its motivic material, too, the anthem is neither advanced nor original. The opening motive is not particularly concise, and is a run-of-the-mill phrase: four equal-length notes which, after a pitch repetition, descend in a scale of diatonic steps. It is only through its sequencing one step higher that the motive begins to trace a distinctive contour.15 (Example 2) Certainly the phrase is, in many respects, part of an analyzable structural context. Example 2a reduces the anthem to a diastematic framework and shows that the initial motive, in its intervallic structure of three descending tone steps (α↓), is used not only for the melodic structure of the A section at the corresponding points of the antecedent and consequent (m. 1 ff. and m. 9 ff.), but is also reversed (α↑) in the B section (m. 18 ff.) in direction of motion, and combined with the initial model. The A’ section differs from the A section, in particular in the corresponding recurrence of motive α↓ in the consequent (m. 33), which does not equal that of measure 9 ff., 14

In other words, the version of the anthem shown in Example 1 could be complemented by another measure (“measure 40”), in order to produce a consistent answer to the eight-measure group, measures 25–32. Indeed, in the presumably earliest autograph source, a measure 40 can be deduced by a tied quarter note F4 from measure 39, and a following quarter rest. (Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin [Archiv der Akademie der Künste Berlin, Johannes-R.-BecherArchiv C 59], unaccompanied recording of the melody, dated “7. Nov. 1949,” reproduced in Amos, Auferstanden aus Ruinen …, 187, and at https://www.dhm.de/typo3temp/pics/ ebe1ae0d6f.jpg [accessed: 6 June 2015].) Numerous recordings of various arrangements – some executed by Eisler himself – likewise include forty measures. (See, for example, the earliest vinyl recording under the baton of Helmut Koch, ca. 1949 [Lied der Zeit, ET 2240/A132: Fassung für Orchester, ET 2239/B-132: Fassung für Chor und Orchester. Reproduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2-o9QB4M4M]; and the military marching band performance at the “Grand Tattoo” of the National People’s Army directed by Heinz Hacker on October 4, 1989: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFyrZRHcgW8; 26:55–27:55 [both accessed 6 June 2015].) 15 The sequential form of the melody was the subject of a – somewhat absurd – plagiarism allegation, in view of Peter Kreuder’s song, Goodbye Johnny, from the 1939 German feature film, Wasser für Canitoga (director: Herbert Selpin). See Amos, Auferstanden aus Ruinen, 72–76. The sequence can also be understood as a model sentence – for example, a “model parallelism” as defined by Hartmut Fladt (“Modell und Topos im musiktheoretischen Diskurs: Systematiken/Anregungen,” Musiktheorie 20 (2005): 343–69, where the slow movement of Mozart’s String Quintet in G minor, K. 516, is identified as “basis for Eisler’s GDR anthem” (at 346).

Example 2: Hanns Eisler, Nationalhymne der DDR, analytical reduction

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but rather, in the varied direction of motion and its combination, resembles the B section. (The sequence of motive variations is, however, reversed: the B section opens with α↑ followed by α↓; in the A’ consequent, the phrase closes with α↓ following α↑). Example 2b shows that the descending motive α↓ and its sequence serve as the starting point of an ascending scale in the opposite direction of the motive. The scale consists of structural tones usually followed by lower thirds, or (in the bass voice) tenths.16 In the antecedent (mm. 1–8) within section A, the first phrase ranges from scale degrees 3ˆ to 6ˆ, mediated via the lower third of 6ˆ (4ˆ), before leading again to 3ˆ at the beginning of the consequent (mm. 9–16), which repeats its ascent to 6ˆ, before rising further to conclude on 1ˆ. The middle section leads this structural line in two attempts from 1ˆ to 2ˆ and finally back to 3ˆ at the start of the A’ section. In the B section, however, the connection of the structural pitches with their lower thirds is more or less resolved. Indeed, 1ˆ is followed by 6ˆ in the melody; yet, the bass notes no longer correspond to the established pattern of the A section. The m. 18 bass pitch B lies only a third below the lower third of the structural pitch 1ˆ. (In any given performance of the anthem without accompaniment, the harmony would not rely on the IV sonority, but rather on the vi chord.) Scale degree 2ˆ is not followed by its lower third in the melody or in the accompaniment. At this point 7ˆ serves as the leading tone in F major. It is striking how deliberately the leading tone is avoided here. (Avoidance of the leading tone is also a feature of Eisler’s Neue deutsche Volkslieder.) Instead, two other movements, directed downwards – i. e., in contrary motion to the ascending structural line – govern the structure of the middle section: (i) a linking of scale degrees 6ˆ and 5ˆ; (ii) the repeated emphasis on the motion from 3ˆ to 2ˆ (in the B section this appears as a truncated variant of the diastematic structure of the opening motive, only reappearing completely and explicitly at the beginning of the A’ section). The A’ section then repeats the A section antecedent’s structural 3ˆ–4ˆ–5ˆ–6ˆ motion as a continuation of the 1ˆ–2ˆ ascents of the B section (which, for its part, continues the 3ˆ–4ˆ–5ˆ–6ˆ–7ˆ–1ˆ line of the A section’s consequent). No new approach to the ascending line is deployed, however, in the A’ consequent after m. 33. Instead, the line changes direction (mm. 33–35) against a bass line accentuating the 6ˆ–5ˆ motion of the B section. The incomplete 3ˆ–2ˆ approach of the B section is clearly foregrounded in mm. 33–34, with further accentuation – in the 7–6 suspension figure of m. 35 – of the descant melody’s avoidance of scale degree 1ˆ. In the final phrase of the melody, the phrase’s structural descent continues downwards (see Ex. 2b) from 6ˆ–5ˆ, skipping 4ˆ, to land on 3ˆ, from which follows the final melodic descent to 1ˆ, in the last three measures. The A’ section can thus be construed as a mediation of melodic differences between the A and B sections. The end is, moreover, a clear formal closure of the entire song: the three last melodic notes expose, quasi-retroactively, the diastematic structure which underlies the opening motive. This can be conceived not only as a melodic cliché but also, in a more abstract vein, as a replica of the Urlinie (fundamental descent) of a Schen16

On Eisler’s use of (chromatic) structural lines in the so-called Hollywooder Liederbuch see Roth, Der Gesang als Asyl, 141–42 and throughout.

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kerian Ursatz (fundamental structure); such a reading highlights structural connections across the song as a whole (Example 2c). Of course, such a reading does not present itself as an adequate analysis of the anthem in strict Schenkerian terms. Although the descending third, 3ˆ–2ˆ–1ˆ, is articulated in the foreground through the opening motive and the closing phrase, it is nevertheless questionable whether this serves as a plausible structural background for the A section, since those scale degrees clearly appearing in the foreground (4ˆ and 5ˆ) cannot be explained in such a reading. (An explicit and more canonical Schenkerian analysis of the first 16 measures – or of the entire anthem – would probably recognize an initial ascent to a primary tone 5ˆ, with a descending line interrupted at 4ˆ in measure 8, leading to the tonic without articulating scale degree 3ˆ in the consequent. One might question, though, whether Eisler’s anthem – despite its simplicity – may be called “tonal” in Schenkerian terms.) Eisler – as the following quotation illustrates – was familiar with Schenker’s theories and valued them as analyses of historical music. Schenker’s political views, however, were diametrically opposed to Eisler’s: in a lecture from 1931, the composer characterized Schenker as an exponent of “right wing” bourgeois music with reference to a passage in Schenker’s Neue musikalische Theorien unequivocally illustrating his chauvinism. Eisler’s comments, however, also clarify his musical respect for the theorist: According to these records, I must inform you that I hold Heinrich Schenker to be one of the most important theorists of the bourgeoisie. He is one of the few who can still today analyze Beethoven; one of the very few who can understand Bach. But it is precisely his profound knowledge of classical bourgeois music that leads, inevitably, to such a reactionary formulation that, translated into politics, means fascism.17

Eisler’s use of the 3ˆ–2ˆ–1ˆ third motion (Terzzug) as motivic material in the national anthem places a traditional image of tonality in the foreground without conforming entirely to related Schenkerian notions of tonality. The rising structural line – so fundamental to the song’s construction and clearly perceptible in the foreground through the sequencing of the lower-third figure – represents an inversion of the fundamental line of Schenkerian theory (which is necessarily a descending motion). The antagonism between ascending and descending motion in the musical structure also relates to the text set to music: the first line, “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (“Risen from ruins”), describes an upward-leading motion, which, however, is set through a downward-tending melodic sequence. The actual “Auferstehung” (“resurrection”) does not track musically through the motive, but rather through the line rising from the “ruins” of old tonality, in this case a rising structural Urlinie. Such an interpretation of the music is not at all self-evident. It is not immediately at hand, nor does it emerge organically from the musical text; it requires mediation and abstraction: the music’s elements are dissociated by the act of analysis

17

Eisler, “Die Erbauer einer neuen Musikkultur” (1931), in Gesammelte Schriften 1921–1935, ed. Tobias Faßhauer and Günter Mayer, Hanns Eisler Gesamtausgabe IX/1.1 (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007), 132–52 (144).

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– they are understood, in other words, in allegorical terms.18 An allegorical interpretation does not require that the music be “understood” in order for the song to function as an anthem, or for it to be used as a state symbol. This interpretation derives more from the range of possibilities presented in the composition – and in that sense, the interpretation is not external to the composition – possibilities that are not necessarily limited to univocal readings of specific semantic contents. Seen as allegorical, the proposed interpretation can continue: Eisler’s use of tonality as a medium can also be understood as a latent criticism of the ideological link between tonality and popularity, fulfilling the condition of “understandability” without committing to a practice of tonality that would appear – from Eisler’s perspective – retrogressive, even in a political sense. III After its emergence as a “state symbol,” the Nationalhymne der DDR was immediately used and accepted.19 Its symbolic reference to the state is clear. Less clear is the reference of the anthem to the territory that is claimed by the symbolized state. It is well known that the text line “Deutschland, einig Vaterland” (“Germany, united fatherland”) compelled the GDR leadership to accept the anthem in the early 1970s as an official state symbol only without its text, wary of any hint of potential “unification” with West Germany, that might threaten the sovereignty of the East German state.20 In fact, the text was written by Johannes R. Becher in 1949 with a view to possible reunification, according to expectations of the anthem’s political initiators21 – admittedly under the utopian condition that, in the event of a unification the West German state would also commit itself to a socialist social order. This implied utopia, at the time of the foundation of the state, probably carried at least the charm 18

19 20 21

“Allegorical” is defined by Walter Benjamin in his study of German tragic drama as follows: “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things … . If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it isexposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power. That is to say it is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist. He places it within it and stands behind it; not in a psychological but in an ontological sense.” Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 178 and 183–84 (cf. Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928) [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978], 156 and 161). Also, as applied by Luhmann: “But all allegories were still mere signs. In a sense, the artwork debased itself unless it aspired to more than allegory; it excluded itself from participating in the essence of things. In so doing, art gained an important advantage: the true/false schema broke down. Allegories were neither true nor false, or they were both true and false, depending on how one looked at them” (Art as a Social System, 171). Amos, Auferstanden aus Ruinen, 69–91. Ibid., 132–59. Ibid., 60; the quoted letter of thanks of the Prime Minister of the GDR, Otto Grotewohl, to Becher and Eisler from November 19, 1949 reads: “The national anthem that they created for the German Democratic Republic united in tone and word all the benefits and requirements of a common national song of the Germans of all parts of our, still today, divided fatherland.”

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of a gesture of provocation. (Or so the polemical reaction in West Germany to this anthem “of separation” [Spalterhymne] might be interpreted: as a gesture of provocation.) Most likely, this no longer applied in the 1970s: the provocative element turned into a perceived threat to the more or less dictatorial ruling political class. The dominated population’s desire for unification, as alleged in the state symbol, remained unrealized and could potentially become a reproach to the nation’s leaders. The anthem still continued to function, nonetheless, like any other – even without its text – as a symbol. The symbolic function of the anthem independent of its text may be assumed, however, as early as 1950. And Eisler used this function of his piece to refer to the symbolized state and its ambivalent relationship to its territories in other works. The model of the ascending third sequence can be traced quite often in various works by Eisler composed after the national anthem, and interestingly it repeatedly occurs in connection with the thematization of “home.” (“A use of similar melodic traits in various songs, if it revolves around similar content”22 was already pointed out by Heinz Alfred Brockhaus in the first monograph on Eisler, published during his lifetime, in relation to several examples. Brockhaus interprets the connection subjectively: “It has no formal meaning, it merely documents – and not only in the case of Hanns Eisler – that the entire complex of home, Germany, can lead to similar melody formations.”)23 In the song “Deutschland” from the beginning of 1950, likewise composed to a text by Becher and included in the Neue deutsche Volkslieder, the recourse to the model of the national anthem is evident (Example 3a). (The phrase may also be found near the beginning of the same song, in measures 5–8). The ambivalent relationship of problematic popularity and political territory is clearly addressed early on in Becher’s preface to the Volkslieder in a reference to “borders, as they are still drawn through our fatherland”: The past years brought no enrichment to folksong; it was stunted or degenerated to pop. … We want to learn to sing again. It should be a song of freedom and peace. We hope that this new folk song will bridge the borders, as they are still drawn through our fatherland, and will rise up to become a song for all Germans. These songs are dedicated, above all, to the youth: to those who are open to the new …24

The text of “Deutschland” stands apart from this proclamation regarding the intention of the Volkslieder in various ways. Behind the public avowal of a newly won “peace” here is the evocation of unspecified shadows, while the precise temporal location from which the poetry speaks, amid a “twilight,” remains strangely unclear: Heimat, meine Trauer, Land im Dämmerschein, Himmel, du mein blauer, du, mein Fröhlichsein. 22 23 24

Heinz Alfred Brockhaus, Hanns Eisler (Leipzig: VEB Breitkopf & Härtel, 1961), 143. Ibid., 144. Johannes R. Becher, [Preface], in Hanns Eisler and Johannes R. Becher, Neue deutsche Volkslieder: Erste Folge. Für Gesang mit vereinfachter Klavierbegleitung (Berlin: Aufbau, 1950), [2].

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Thomas Ahrend Einmal wird es heißen: Als ich war verbannt, hab ich dich zu preisen, dir ein Lied gesandt. War, um dich zu einen, dir ein Lied geweiht, und mit dir zu weinen in der Dunkelheit … Himmel schien, ein blauer, Friede kehrte ein, Deutschland, meine Trauer, du, mein Fröhlichsein.

It remains an open question whether the “one day” (einmal), pointing towards the future in line 5, has already occurred, thereby indicating that the speech act mentioned in the text is fulfilled within the song itself and that the longed-for unification cited in line 9 (einen) has been realized; or whether weeping and grieving (Trauer) – perhaps over prior conflicts or an existing state of division – persists into the present. The obvious musical reminiscence of the national anthem makes the ambivalent situation even more irritating. Does the “song” addressed in the poem refer only to itself (that is, to the song “Deutschland”)? Or is the national anthem thereby also recognized? In either case, the question of temporal position remains, regarding the musical allusion and its relationship to the text. In a possible reading of the “song” addressed in the text as the national anthem, political interpretation becomes precarious: the “song” arose in exile and was “dedicated” to the country “with you to weep / in darkness …” (lines 10–12). The state symbolized through the anthem has not yet arrived at its territory. In the song “Anmut sparet nicht noch Mühe,” also presumably from 1950, which sets a poem by Bertolt Brecht, reference to the national anthem is illustrated through an explicit quotation in the piano accompaniment (Example 3b). The vocal melody itself also contains fairly loose but still noticeable traces of the rising third sequence. The second (fully composed) strophe contains an unambiguous quotation in the accompaniment, beginning in the final bar of an initial four-measure phrase in the voice part and continuing into the first measure of the following four-measure group – in formal terms, then, the quotation relates to the main structure somewhat indirectly. The text delineates the territory of the Germany sung about at this point: “From the sea to the Alps, from the Oder to the Rhine.” On the one hand, the area is, through the mention of the river Oder as eastern boundary, clearly limited to the territorial dimensions subsequent to World War II. On the other, it also extends far beyond the western and southern borders of the GDR, given the references to the Rhine and the Alps. The musical quotation at this point marks the factual contradiction between the territorial boundaries of the state symbolized by the anthem, and the people – that is, the “we” – supposedly articulated in the lyrics. The allusions and quotations of the national anthem in these and other songs use the already established and well-known form of the anthem and its symbolic function as an additional element of the medium in which the music is shaped, be-

Example 3: Allusions to the Nationalhymne in (a) “Deutschland” and (b) “Anmut sparet nicht noch Mühe”

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Example 4: Hanns Eisler, “Das Wunderland” (with the kind permission of Friedrich Hofmeister Musikverlag GmbH, Leipzig)

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yond its specifically tonal features. The song “Das Wunderland” (Example 4) from the Neue deutsche Volkslieder further elucidates links between tonality as a medium – with its contradictory sphere of popularity – and ties to home and political topography. The song’s lyric, as far as the realization of propagandistic contents goes, is formulated in a similarly ambivalent style to that of “Deutschland.” The song brings “word [Kunde] … of a new era” (mm. 6–8) – though, once again, it is unclear whether that era has already dawned or is still awaited. The second part of the first strophe poses the question of topographical location: “Where is the country, the magical country, […]?” [Wo is das Land, das Wunderland gelegen …?] (m. 16 ff.). Far from asserting the blunt propaganda that this country is the GDR – or, for that matter, the USSR – the second strophe points to necessary events still to come in the future: “And good deeds need to be accomplished, so that this country will also be called Germany one day” (m. 24 ff.). For the present, a location can only be determined metaphorically: “… in our heart it lies, in our hand: here it lies, until it rises brightly from us” (m. 6 ff.) This idealistic perspective – inconsistent in a dialectic-materialistic context, because it either has to be legitimized ideologically or remains suspect – suddenly attains an “international” component: “In every country lies such a wonderland” (m. 13 ff.). This song too alludes to the sequence of thirds from the national anthem, not least through the rhythmic scheme in measures 28 and 29: it is clearly reminiscent of the model, despite the restriction of scalar motion to an ascent from 3ˆ to 5ˆ with a heavily modified harmonic context (Example 5). The actual geographical location of the song, then, in musical terms, seems to be defined unambiguously. The connection of a location to some projected “wonder” – never precisely defined, textually – is called into question, however, through the dissociative use of tonal elements as a medium pointing to the necessary meaning. The song clearly divides into two large sections (A: mm. 2–15, B: mm. 16–32), each comprising two phrases repeated in variation and with melodic parallels (mm. 2–8 and 9–15, 16–23 and 24– 32). The B section is followed by an epilogue (m. 32 ff.) which leads back to the introductory measure after the first strophe (m. 1 and m. 37a, respectively), and to the end after the second strophe (m. 37b). The piano introduction begins with octave repetitions of the tonic, which continue even after the entrance of the voice as an accompanying ostinato figure (until m. 8). Relinquishing this tonic, the vocal melody starts with a rising fifth-plus-fourth ascent, so tracing the two intervals of the overtone series beyond the octave, before a complete scalar descent (only briefly interrupted) from 8ˆ to 1ˆ (Example 5). The interruption of the scale (m. 6) brings the sequence of thirds of the national anthem in its inversion from 5ˆ to 3ˆ (the lower third preceding 5ˆ, m. 6), hinting at a latent dominant harmony before re-attaining the tonic (m. 8). In Schenkerian terminology, one might speak of an initial arpeggiation (Brechung) and a fundamental line (Urlinie) descent from 8ˆ to 1ˆ, unsupported by a corresponding I–V–I bass arpeggiation in the fundamental structure (Ursatz) – though this is evoked through the latent harmony. This seemingly regular tonality – an “intact world?” – is, however, disrupted by the absence of harmonic support: the motoric tonic repetitions in the piano accompaniment stage this absence virtually as a denial. As the melody repeats (m. 9 ff.), the accompaniment leads in an-

Example 5: Hanns Eisler, “Das Wunderland,” analytic reduction

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other direction, fanning out in contrary motion scales (the upper-voice line ascends from 1ˆ to 6ˆ, the lower-voice line descends from 8ˆ to 4ˆ, interrupted once (by the pitch C in m. 12). The resulting harmonies clearly imply a resolving six-four dominant (m. 13), but this leads (m. 14) to a IV sonority, the linear result of the accompanimental scale lines. The closing cadence of the section in this way acquires a modal-plagal character, with less of an anchoring effect than a clear V–I cadence. The B section – in contrast to the A section – begins with a four-part phrase (with optional choral parts) in the accompaniment and articulates an altogether denser harmonic scalar passage, beginning on IV. The structural line descending from scale degree 8ˆ leads to 5ˆ only (mm. 16–17) – in a form that could be heard to allude to the national anthem of the USSR (mm. 24–25)25 – and the same B-to-F motion is structurally imitated in the accompanimental bass line (and the choir), creating an astonishing intensification of the vi as an inverted ninth chord at m. 18. The line in the following phrases initially ascends to 3ˆ, descends to 1ˆ, before leading to 5ˆ and again to 1ˆ (after m. 24). One might interpret the 5ˆ–4ˆ–3ˆ–2ˆ–1ˆ motion after m. 30 as continuing the earlier 8ˆ–7ˆ–6ˆ–5ˆ (mm. 16, 24), thus confirming a structural similarity between the B section and the A section’s complete 8ˆ-1ˆ scalar descent. Even allowing for such an interpretation, the relevance of this structure as a possible fundamental line for the entire song – in terms of a “historical” tonality possibly better described using Schenker’s theory – remains unclear. The ascending scale in the postlude after m. 32 can thus also be understood in a critical way: the potential fundamental line is reversed in its direction of motion and thus deprived of any possible function in the context of a Schenkerian fundamental structure. At the same time it is exposed as an element of the medium. The song is formed from the scattered remains of a historically understood tonality; its allegorical landscape only seemingly and contradictorily fits the (symbolic) image of the real political GDR state. Tonality and landscape together conjure – like the cave painting of a hunt – the yet-to-be-formed “wonderland.” * * * The Eisler compositions discussed here may be understood as a reaction to the cultural-political circumstances of the GDR after 1948, and to the interrelated demands of popularity. In his essay “Die gegängelte Musik,” Theodor W. Adorno had already set down an reaction to the “Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics” in Prague at the end of May. As much as he criticized the lack of freedom in an “administered world” [verwalteten Welt] in the West, Adorno was also taking a clear stand in a political post-war situation, and not only against “cultur25

Sergey Mikhalkov (text) / Alexander Alexandrov (music), State Anthem of the USSR (1943/44). See the beginning of the last line of the refrain (m. 19 ff.):

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al-political measures in the Soviet sphere of influence.”26 It is interesting to observe what Adorno has to say some years later about Eisler’s compositions written in the GDR. (Adorno and Eisler had known one other since the 1920s and had written the book Composing for the Films together while still in exile in the USA, just before their remigration to Europe).27 In notes – published posthumously – from the years 1965–66, Adorno compares Eisler’s GDR works to his earlier, “advanced” pieces: Great among the agitprop choruses before ’33, before the Gleichschaltung. A chorus-like “Kurfürstendamm” is truly a musical counterpart to George Grosz. The very modern assemblage technique from snippets of conversation; similar also to newspaper clippings. All this later suppressed. … The striking weakness of the works from the fifties; something happened there. He was obliged to compose badly. It is his honor, how badly he badly composed. Above all, how poor these simple things sound, listened to now; as if he lost the feel for harmonic degrees, for progression. … What befell him is not so much about the modernity of sounds[,] intervals, etc. as the suppression of differentiation. This is perceived as intolerable by the collective wisdom; it is leveled out as something dull and commonplace, that schrumm schrumm.28

And in a 1967 TV interview, Adorno expresses himself similarly with regard to the national anthem: Someone like Eisler could, of course, declaim brilliantly, that is, set the text to music exactly according to the rhythm of the words. However, here [in the Nationalhymne] he had only to be unpretentious and primitive; indeed he intentionally set the text falsely, thus “áuf-er-stan-den áus Ru-i-nen,” that “aus” is stressed, although this is incorrect. And since he, in reality, actually reacts much more subtly in rhythmic matters, one notices the intent, and one is disgruntled. In other words, he shows traits of the wolf from the fairy tale, swallowing chalk, so that Red Riding Hood mistakes him for Grandmother.29 26

27

28 29

See Theodor W. Adorno, “Die gegängelte Musik” (1948/1956), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 14: 51–66 (51). Adorno’s text uses – at least in its first published version of 1956 – an extensive “Cold War” lexicon, speaking, among other things, of “dictatorships” (52) from “behind the Iron Curtain” (51). Eisler, Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947). On the genesis of this book and the notably lacking acknowledgement of Adorno’s co-authorship in the first edition, see Horst Weber, “I am not a hero, I am a composer”: Hanns Eisler in Hollywood (Hildesheim: Olms, 2012), 91–113. A reflection of Adorno and Eisler’s fairly close collaboration may also be traced in Eisler’s use of the term “culture industry” (so crucial for Adorno) in his presentation at the Prague Music Congress of 1948. See Eisler, “Gesellschaftliche Grundfragen der modernen Musik,” 13–14 (“The culture industry […] has made true art [wahre Kunst] into art commodities [Ware Kunst]”), and throughout. Adorno, “Notizen über Eisler,” in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VII, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2001), 121–134 (129–131). “‘Adorno im Hymnenstreit.’ 1967 TV interview with Theodor W. Adorno conducted by Dagobert Lindlau,” cited by Albrecht Riethmüller, “‘Gott! erhalte’: National Anthems and the Semantics of Music,” in Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field, ed. Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul Scher and Werner Wolf (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 321–336 (332): “Jemand wie Eisler konnte natürlich großartig deklamieren, also Texte genau dem Wortrhythmus nach in Musik setzen. Er hat aber hier, um nur ja schlicht und und primitiv zu sein, absichtlich falsch deklamiert, also ‘áuf-er-stan-den áus Ru-i-nen,’ das ‘aus’ betont, obwohl das falsch ist. Und da

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This critical review is relatively sophisticated, in comparison to numerous polemics from a West German perspective vis-à-vis Eisler’s compositions – in particular, the “separation anthem” slur – in the 1950s and 1960s,30 and it certainly makes an essential point in observing that alleged deficiencies in the pieces represent a reaction to “what befell him.” Nevertheless, Adorno’s virtuosic dialectic-oriented account remains rooted in a narrative of material progress. In contrast, perhaps other perspectives on these pieces would be worthwhile – perspectives not restricted to proving that Eisler could do better “in reality,” by casting the composer as the wolf of the fairy tale. Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. “‘Adorno im Hymnenstreit.’ 1967 TV interview with Theodor W. Adorno conducted by Dagobert Lindlau.” Cited by Albrecht Riethmüller, “‘Gott! erhalte’: National Anthems and the Semantics of Music.” In Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field. Proceedings of the First International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Graz, 1997, edited by Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul Scher, and Werner Wolf, 321–36. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. ––. “Die gegängelte Musik.” 1948/1956. In Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 14:51–66. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973. ––. “Notizen über Eisler.” In Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VII, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 121–34. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2001. Ahrend, Thomas. Aspekte der Instrumentalmusik Hanns Eislers: Zu Form und Verfahren in den Variationen. Berlin: Mensch & Buch, 2006. ––. “Die Freiheit muss man sich nehmen: Hanns Eisler und die Verwendung der Atonalität.” In Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung 2008/2009, edited by Simone Hohmaier, 155–70. Mainz: Schott, 2009. Amos, Heike. Auferstanden aus Ruinen …: Die Nationalhymne der DDR 1949 bis 1990. Berlin: Dietz, 1997. Becher, Johannes R. [Preface]. In Hanns Eisler and Johannes R. Becher, Neue deutsche Volkslieder. Erste Folge. Für Gesang mit vereinfachter Klavierbegleitung, 2. Berlin: Aufbau, 1950. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 2003. ––. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. 1928. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978. Bloch, Ernst, and Hanns Eisler. “Die Kunst zu erben.” 1938. In Eisler, Musik und Politik: Schriften 1924–1948, edited by Günter Mayer (Hanns Eisler Gesammelte Werke III/1), 406–14. Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1973. Brockhaus, Heinz Alfred. Hanns Eisler. Leipzig: VEB Breitkopf & Härtel, 1961. Deeg, Peter. “Filmographie: Hanns Eisler in Hollywood.” In Horst Weber, “I am not a hero, I am a composer”: Hanns Eisler in Hollywood, 488–503. Hildesheim: Olms, 2012.

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er aber in Wirklichkeit rhythmisch viel subtiler reagiert, merkt man die Absicht, und man wird verstimmt. Das heißt, es hat so ein bißchen dann etwas von dem Wolf aus dem Märchen, der Kreide schluckt, damit das Rotkäppchen ihn für die Großmutter hält.” The interview was aired in 1967 in a broadcast of the news magazine “Report,” produced by Bavarian Radio. It is reproduced in excerpts in a film by Henning Burk and Martin Lüdtke, “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen”: Theodor W. Adorno – Philosoph, Soziologe und Kritiker, Hessen Radio and West German Radio, 1989, ca. 11:40 ff. (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMrtcGBFdMA, accessed 6 June 2015). On violent West German reactions to the national anthem of the GDR see Amos, Auferstanden aus Ruinen, 70–76.

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Eisler, Hanns. “Antwort an Lukács.” 1938. In Musik und Politik: Schriften 1924–1948, edited by Günter Mayer 1973 (Hanns Eisler Gesammelte Werke III/1), 433–35. Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik. ––. Composing for the Films. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947. ––. “Die Erbauer einer neuen Musikkultur.” 1931. In Gesammelte Schriften 1921–1935, edited by Tobias Faßhauer and Günter Mayer (Hanns Eisler Gesamtausgabe IX/1.1), 132–52. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007. ––. “Gesellschaftliche Grundfragen der Musik.” In Musik und Politik: Schriften 1948–1962, edited by Günter Mayer (Hanns Eisler Gesammelte Werke III/2),13–25. Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1982. ––. Gespräche mit Hans Bunge: Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht. Edited by Hans Bunge (Hanns Eisler Gesammelte Werke III/7). Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1975. ––. “Hörer und Komponist [II].” 1949. In Musik und Politik: Schriften 1948–1962, edited by Günter Mayer (Hanns Eisler Gesammelte Werke III/2), 64–72. Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1982. ––. “Manifest [I].” In Musik und Politik: Schriften 1948–1962, edited by Günter Mayer (Hanns Eisler Gesammelte Werke III/2), 26–28. Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1982. ––. “Wie ich Nestroy verstehe: Über die Musik zu ‘Höllenangst.’” 1948. In Musik und Politik: Schriften 1948–1962, edited by Günter Mayer (Hanns Eisler Gesammelte Werke III/2), 40–41. Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1982. Fladt, Hartmut. “Modell und Topos im musiktheoretischen Diskurs: Systematiken/Anregungen.” Musiktheorie 20 (2005): 343–69. Kelly, Elaine. Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of NineteenthCentury Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System. Transl. by Eva M. Knodt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Originally published as Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. Meyer, Ernst Hermann. Musik im Zeitgeschehen. Berlin: Henschel, 1952. Roth, Markus. Der Gesang als Asyl: Analytische Studien zu Hanns Eislers Hollywood-Liederbuch. Hofheim: Wolke, 2007. Schweinhardt, Peter. Fluchtpunkt Wien: Hanns Eislers Wiener Arbeiten nach der Rückkehr aus dem Exil. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2006. Weber, Horst. “I am not a hero, I am a composer”: Hanns Eisler in Hollywood. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2012. Ždanov, Andrej Aleksandrovič (A. Shdanow). “Fragen der sowjetischen Musikkultur, Diskussionsbeitrag auf der Beratung von Vertretern der sowjetischen Musik im ZK der KPdSU (B), Januar 1948.” In Über Kunst und Wissenschaft, 55–79. Berlin: Dietz, 1951.

Tonality in Henze’s Music of the 1950s and Early 1960s Ullrich Scheideler In his memoirs, published in 1996, Hans Werner Henze describes an encounter with Sergiu Celibidache which took place in Berlin in 1951: On one occasion – as always, it was snowing – I remember an early morning meeting with the then principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, the young Sergiu Celibidache, at his home in the Königsallee at Grunewald. He greeted me gruffly, sporting a long grey bathrobe and a shock of unkempt hair. I showed him the scores of my Second Symphony and Violin Concerto, but he regarded the presence of note rows as an act of shameless provocation on my part and ventured the suspicion not only that I was not in the least bit serious as a composer but that I could not even write. He would not be able to form a proper opinion, he said, until he had seen something tonal from my pen, something like five two-part piano pieces in G major. I was to return with these pieces in two weeks’ time. Two weeks later I duly returned to the Königsallee and rang the great man’s bell, my five two-part piano pieces in G major under my arm […] but no one answered. Finally I decided to waste no more time, but stuffed my original manuscript under the door and pushed off into the blizzard. That was the last I ever saw of these pieces.1

The anecdote reflects Henze’s position in German musical life in the 1950s, at least as the composer himself saw it. Not only had the serial scores of the Second Symphony and Violin Concerto been met with a lack of understanding; so too – if indeed Celibidache ever saw them – had the tonal piano pieces. It’s not surprising, then, that Henze had the impression – or was given it by others – that he was caught between two camps. For one camp, he wasn’t radical enough; for the other, he was too progressive. Henze’s attitude towards the “Darmstädter Ferienkurse” is in this respect significant. Between 1946 and 1950, Henze was one of the leading composers at the festival. Subsequently, he was outshone by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, and after 1955 he did not return.2 On the other hand, not all of Henze’s works of the 1950s and early 1960s enjoyed unanimous popular approval.3 It would be wrong, however, to claim that he 1

2

3

Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, trans. Stewart Spencer (London: Faber, 1998), 87; for the original German text of this source, see Henze, Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten: Autobiographische Mitteilungen 1926–1995 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1996), 111. Henze often mentioned the premiere of Nachtstücke und Arien in Donaueschingen in 1957 as a turning point in his relationships with Stockhausen, Boulez, and Luigi Nono. The three composers were present, but left the concert hall shortly after the beginning of the piece. See Henze, Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten, 182. Henze’s relationship to the Darmstadt serial avantgarde is examined in detail by Inge Kovacs, “Neue Musik abseits der Avantgarde? Zwei Fallbeispiele,” in Im Zenit der Moderne: Die internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946–1966, ed. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser (Freiburg: Rombach, 1997), 2:13–61. The premiere of König Hirsch was especially unsucessful. Hermann Scherchen’s shortened

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was widely ignored by the musical establishment in Germany, although the composer spoke about himself as an outsider and loner. On the contrary, Henze quickly became well established, as the premieres of his operas show. These took place in well-respected houses: Boulevard Solitude in Hannover (in 1952), König Hirsch and Der junge Lord in Berlin (in 1956 and 1965, respectively), and Der Prinz von Homburg in Hamburg (in 1960).4 The rejection of his music by some members of the avant-garde was partially provoked by its obvious and audible links to musical tradition. Henze described these in his autobiography in the following way (which is not dissimilar to Schoenberg): “Whenever one sets to work on a new composition, all one’s past experiences have to be put behind one and repressed […] By which I do not mean that map and compass would not be of some assistance in one’s voyages through this uncharted terrain. Rather, one’s approach to the composers of the past and to one’s own particular experiences must always remain an integral part of some dialectic, living process.”5 This statement correlates to another more technical remark about teaching composition from 1963, when Henze had started his professorship in Salzburg: “A precondition for studying composition with me is mastery of the traditional theory of harmony and counterpoint. One can approach the matter of new music only through knowledge and deep understanding of these parameters which are elemental for European music, […] because the new techniques are living on the older theory from former centuries in an underestimated, even unrecognized extent, and wouldn’t exist without them.”6 Henze was convinced that only a deep knowledge of tradition could preserve a composer from uttering something that he had only half perceived and half understood. Tradition is not overcome (or repelled) through its negation but only through its acknowledgment. Or, in Henze’s own words: “As one becomes clear about this historical burden, the burden will cease.”7 Once anchored in one’s musical thinking, tradition will become available to generate new compositions. Only the composer’s full absorption of earlier styles, accordingly, will enable truly contemporary production of new works.

4 5 6

7

version might have been responsible for this failure. Important performances of other works unsuccessful with audiences are listed in Jens Rosteck, Hans Werner Henze: Rosen und Revolutionen. Die Biographie (Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 2009), 176–77. Press reviews of the first and early performances of these operas can be found in Deborah Hochgesang, Die Opern Hans Werner Henzes im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Musikkritik bis 1966 (Trier: WVT, 1996). Henze, Bohemian Fifths, 32; Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten, 45. Henze, “Über Kompositionslehre (1963),” in Musik und Politik: Schriften und Gespräche 1955–1984, ed. Jens Brockmeier (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984), 91–92 (91). “Eine Voraussetzung für die Arbeit bei mir ist die Beherrschung der traditionellen Harmonielehre und des traditionellen Kontrapunktes. Nur mit der Kenntnis und nur mit dem wirklichen Verstehen dieser für die europäische Musik elementaren Faktoren kann man sich der Materie der neuen Musik nähern […], da sie [“die neuen Techniken,” i. e.] in einem meist unterschätzten, ja selbst verkannten Maße von den alten Lehren der früheren Jahrhunderte leben und ohne sie nicht existieren würden.” Henze, “Die geistige Rede der Musik (1959),” in Musik und Politik, 59. “Indem sich einer klar wird über den Grad seiner historischen Belastung, hört die Belastung auf.”

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At the same time, Henze understood tradition in a more direct sense as an aesthetic presence. To him, music of former times was not something abandoned or discarded, but was something timeless. This has to do with his experiences as a child and youth, when he encountered songs by Schubert as well as “brass-band music and male-voice choirs in the local beer garden” as a vivid tradition that was part of everyday life. And he continued: It is no doubt as a result of this that “classical” music – in other words, the music of the first Viennese School and the ottocento and the Russian, English and Austrian music of the twentieth century – does not strike me as belonging to the past, as something that we have put behind us and that no longer concerns us today. Rather, it is important to me for its intellectuality, its ability to make us more sentient beings. Here is a way of life and a way of thinking which, not originally my own and never intended for my own social class, I have had to acquire for myself.8

The composer’s openness to a variety of the Classical-Romantic repertoire, which Henze described retrospectively in 1996, seems to have developed only gradually in the period immediately after the war. In a letter to Peter Cahn of May 1947, he reports his efforts to remove “narrow emotions” or “states of feeling” [Gefühlszustände] from his own music since they are “of no real value,” in order to “transport this music to a more valid and more objective statement, free of non-musical elements like sighs, screams, etc.”9 By the following year Schoenberg had already moved to the center of his interests. His “world of late-romantic painfulness in mathematical precision tells us much more than the restrictive classicism of other masters.”10 In Henze’s accounts of the 1950s, as in essays and interviews of the 1960s, there are many references to other composers he was discovering for himself at the time. From the eighteenth century, his chief discovery was Mozart; from the nineteenth, Bellini and Donizetti; from the twentieth, Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg, Igor Stravinsky, and Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Mozart and Mahler were always important for Henze, while the significance of the others changed depending on the genre. As early as 1959, in the face of dogmatic insistence on serial techniques, Henze advocated boldly for tonality as a compositional resource, finding “in the difficulties of today no invitation for an avoidance, but a demand for new contact, re-evaluation, perhaps even a destruction of existing sanctions.”11 Given these premises, it is clear that the question of whether tonal composition was possible after 1945 was a vital one for Henze from the beginning. His essays 8 9

10

11

Henze, Bohemain Fifths, 55; Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten, 73. Peter Cahn, “Aus frühen Briefen Hans Werner Henzes,” in Der Komponist Hans Werner Henze, ed. Dieter Rexroth (Mainz: Schott, 1986), 20–30 (22). “… musik von engen nicht wertbeständigen gefühlszuständen wegzulösen und zu transportieren in eine gültigere objektivere aussage ohne außermusikalische elemente wie seufzer, aufschrei usw. Usf.” Henze, “Unsere Neue Musik,” in Der Komponist Hans Werner Henze, ed. Dieter Rexroth (Mainz: Schott, 1986), 34. Originally published in Die Welt (December 1948). “… aus spätromantischer Schmerzlichkeit in mathematischer Präzision bestehende Welt uns weit mehr sagt als die klassizistisch-restriktive anderer Meister.” Henze, “Die geistige Rede der Musik (1959),” in Musik und Politik, 52–61 (58). “… in der heutigen Schwierigkeit […] keine Einladung zum Verzicht, sondern die Aufforderung zu einer neuen Fühlungnahme, zur Umwertung, vielleicht sogar zur Zerstörung bestehender Sanktionen [zu sehen].”

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contain only brief notes without mentioning technical details, but he articulates, even so, some basic positions: first, a refusal to recognize the concept of “progress” as applicable to musical material12; second, the idea of music which is directly comprehensible (this could result in compositional simplicity or reduction); third, principles like plurality and individuality, which concern contemporary musical language as a whole, within a piece, as well as the differentiation of genres. Paraphrasing Goethe, Henze called himself an eclectic in a positive sense: someone who “from that which surrounds him, from that which occurs around him, takes what corresponds to his nature.”13 Eclectic references to tradition and genre acknowledge – as Henze puts it – associations, transformations, and emblems of past music.14 The following case studies examine the role of tonality in some of Henze’s works from the 1950s and early 1960s – as far as the turn of the mid-1960s, in works like Das Floß der Medusa or Versuch über Schweine, to more overtly political subject matter, a shift with implications also at the level of musical language. The first part of the chapter deals with procedures that combine dodecaphonic and tonal invention. The second part examines forms of tonality in what I will term “free-serial” works (i. e., works in which the use of twelve-tone rows governs only segments of a score). In the third part, I consider tonality in operatic works, in particular at those points when the music played is presented to audiences as music “on the stage.” The term tonality, in the present context, is to be understood in a broad sense. Essential features are: a defined tonic or pitch center; the existence of a scale or pitch collection which allows a distinction between pitches which belong and those that are extra-collectional; relationships between single pitches and chords; and, finally, the integration of elements of traditional tonality (e. g., major and minor triads) into the music’s vocabulary and into polyphonic textures. Tonality in the Context of Dodecaphony In 1947, Henze began to acquire the principles of twelve-tone composition, initially through private study; then – beginning in 1948 – he studied with René Leibowitz.15 The presence of many row tables among the Henze materials housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung proves that twelve-tone-rows remained the basis for most of his compositions, even in later works,16 though it is clear that not all parameters of 12

See Henze, “Über ‘Undine’: Von der Sicherheit des Schwankenden (1957),” in Musik und Politik, 49–52 (51). 13 Henze, “Tradition und Kulturerbe (1966): Aus einem Gespräch mit Klaus Geitel,” in Musik und Politik, 114–17 (117): “… aus dem, was ihn umgibt, aus dem, was sich um ihn ereignet, sich dasjenige aneignet, was seiner Natur gemäß ist.” 14 See, for example, Henze, “Musik als Resistenzverhalten (1963),” in Musik und Politik, 100. 15 Henze also took lessons with Josef Rufer; see Inge Kovacs, “Neue Musik abseits der Avantgarde? Zwei Fallbeispiele,” 23. 16 Row tables are transmitted, for example, in the following works: Symphonies 7–10 (1982– 1999), Tristan (1973), The English Cat (1980–83), Venus und Adonis (1993–1995), and many others.

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his music are organized in a strictly dodecaphonic way.17 In contrast to Ernst Krenek’s guidelines in his textbook about twelve-tone-counterpoint,18 and more in accordance with the ideas of Alban Berg, Henze started to integrate tonal elements into his music from the very beginning of his compositional career. Because his treatment of rows was sometimes rather free, tonal references may appear independently from the specific shape of the row. Nor does the row itself necessarily contain obvious tonal elements. While we find few elements of tonality in Whispers from Heavenly Death (1948), they are more prominent in Apollo et Hyazinthus, composed in 1949.19 In this work, the tone row – (C-F-B-A-F-D-G-B-E-E-G-C)20 – displays a tonal disposition due to the numerous adjacent thirds. In the basic set, order positions 4 to 6 trace a D major triad, 6 to 8 G minor, 7 to 9 E major, 10 to 12 C minor. However, there are only a few passages where these chords are highlighted. In this case they have a formal function. This is most obvious in the fortissimo F minor chord (it comes from the retrograde row starting with F) at measure 230, played by all instruments as a cadence to the harpischord’s solo Adagio rubato. The chord sets the last part of the piece in motion, a setting of Georg Trakl’s poem “Im Park.” The solo voice belongs to a sphere of C minor, most evident at the beginning and end of this passage. The first line of the poem (“Wieder wandelnd”) starts with the notes G-CE-E [= D]; the counterpoint, played by the clarinet, has E and C. At the end of the piece, the solo voice sings E-C-G, which is emphasized by a C minor woodwind chord. The last chord, which contains all twelve chromatic pitches, also contains the 17 As Henze wrote in 1953, his early exploration of dodecaphony fulfilled his need to find an individual means of expression while also providing a “rigorous technical basis” for what he wanted to say. “Erste Werke (1953),” in Musik und Politik, 26. These assumptions were surely in force later in his life as well. 18 See Ernst Krenek, Studies in Counterpoint, based on Twelve-tone Techniques (New York: Schirmer, 1940), 1: “Avoid more than two major or minor triads formed by a group of three consecutives tones […] because the tonal implications emanating from a triad are incompatible with the principles of atonality.” In Die Komposition mit zwölf Tönen, Josef Rufer interprets dodecaphony as a logical step in the context of disruption of tonality (“Zersetzung der Tonalität,” 48). Nonetheless he permits rows (with reference to Berg’s Violin Concerto, the opera Lulu, and Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte), which are tonally colored (“tonal gefärbte Reihen,” 97). For Rufer, the essential elements of dodecaphony are clear and fixed reference to the basic musical idea of a musical composition, a network of pitches within the row, and musical coherence produced through motivic relationships. See Rufer, Die Komposition mit zwölf Tönen, 2nd edition (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1966). 19 A row table to Whispers from Heavenly Death is not among the Henze materials in the Paul Sacher Stiftung. The basic set of the row likely has the following form: G-F-E-B-C-A-G-FE-B-C-D. This row form is presented at the beginning of the piece and acknowledged in Hartmut Lück, “Literarische Bilderwelten: Zu Henzes früher vokaler Kammermusik,” in Hans Werner Henze: Musik und Sprache, Musik-Konzepte, New Series 132, ed. Jens Brockmeier (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2006), 27–50 (29). Tonal elements could be determined only if one divides the row into two unordered sets. In this case, the first half implies the combination of E minor and F minor (and a Dorian scale on E), the second half B major and A major (and a Lydian scale on A). However, Henze does not show these tonal qualities within the piece very clearly. 20 This form is presented at the beginning of the piece (Lück, “Literarische Bilderwelten,” 33).

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C minor chord in the harpsichord, although in a very low register.21 Tonality in Apollo et Hyazinthus is a means to structure musical form, either by marking a decisive point in the piece, or by giving a special harmonic coloration to whole passages. A clearly tonal use of a twelve-tone pitch row can be observed in the First Violin Concerto (1947). The row here – (C-D-E-F-F-B-A-B-C-G-G-D) – is exposed at the very beginning by the solo violin without accompaniment. Tonality is the result of establishing pitches as functional roots, at least in some passages. In the outer movements, two strategies establish C as a root. First, in both cases a C minor triad occurs at important points within the formal process: in the final chord (in the fourth movement, a fourth pitch, F, is added), and when the main theme returns in the first movement (five measures after rehearsal letter G). Second, the main themes clearly treat C as a focal pitch, melodically. This is clear in the first movement at the opening of the solo violin line (m. 2), in the later trumpet melody (eleven measures after letter B), and – most obviously – in the solo horn melody (letter C), taken up in imitation by the soloist with concluding arrival on a C-G dyad (letter C: see Example 1).

Example 1: Henze, Violin Concerto No. 1 (1947), first movement, rehearsal letter C: C as a cadential goal 21

Lück (“Literarische Bilderwelten,” 34) states that the piece ends with an eleven-note-chord. However, this is an error: the missing C is played as a harmonic in the viola.

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This passage can be divided into two sections (mm. 1–6, 7–12) and consists of three layers: solo violin and horn (mm. 1–6); inner-voice ostinato (mm. 7–12); and bass. The horn melody has the pitches G-A-B-C-D-E with C minor defined as a tonal center by the boundary pitches C and G (in mm. 1 and 6, respectively), and by the metric accentuation of C in mm. 1 and 4. The violin melody has the notes D-E-FG-A (and E at the beginning) with D (or enharmonically changed to C) as a center, but this time with a Lydian modal inflection. In both layers, the tonic, fifth and supertonic scale degrees are the same, while the third is doubly defined (either by E, or E/F). In mm. 1–6 the horn melody is the main part, while the solo violin line acts as an accompanying counterpoint, mostly consonant in relation to the horn, and supporting the C-oriented tonality. The bass, playing the basic set, is set off from other layers by register and texture (mostly through dissonances against the horn), so there is no fusion between the layers. The bass line is a (tonal) counterpoint or a counterbalance. The principles of the polyphonic texture are not altered in measures 7–12, despite small changes. The violin takes over the melody formerly assigned to the horn (now transposed up a fifth), acting in a duet with the tonally-similar bass, framing a subordinate inner-voice ostinato whose pitches (G-A-B-C) are foreign to the C-oriented tonality. The hierarchical relationship among layers is particularly important for understanding the impression the passage creates. Tonal layers with a C tonic are in the foreground, accentuated by register, instrumentation, playing techniques, and their function as melody. The counterpoint is in the background and offers the competing tonal claims of the complete tone row (mm. 1–6) or the missing row-numbers (mm. 7–12) that create a near-chromatic field (only the pitch D is lacking). As a whole, the texture can be interpreted as tonal, rather than atonal: at first as C minor, with C as a clear tonic presence (melody in mm. 1–12), and in a broader sense as a tonal space, a key with double scale degrees (mm. 1–6: C-D-E-E-G-G-A-B; mm. 7–12: C-D-E-E-F-G-(A)-A-B). Although the passage includes all twelve chromatic pitches and no major or minor triads, one may still regard it as tonal. Dodecaphony here does not serve as a method of relating the twelve chromatic notes to one another; the aggregate, in this case, frames obvious references to a pitch center. The next section provides a more detailed analysis of two operas: Das Ende einer Welt and Boulevard Solitude. Das Ende einer Welt (1953) was originally composed as a radio opera, and subsequently revised for the stage. Boulevard Solitude (1951) was Henze’s first major success in the field. Both works present clear references to traditional operatic models, by dividing the score into discrete numbers and by designating individual numbers as recitatives, arias, or duets. The basic set of Das Ende einer Welt is given in a sketch in the Sacher Stiftung as D-G-G-B-E-A-A-C-C-F-D-E.22 There are several notable features. First, the row is structured according to principles of hexachordal combinatoriality. Second, 22

A facsimile of this sketch is given in Ulrich Mosch, “Ein Blick in Henzes Werkstatt: Bemerkungen zu den Skizzen und Particelli,” in “Hans Werner Henze: Die Vorträge des internationalen Henze-Symposions am Musikwissenschaftlichen Institut der Universität Hamburg 28. bis 30. Juni 2001,” special issue of Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 20 (2003): 259–76 (264).

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the first half of the row includes pitches of the triads G major, G minor, and A major (the second half has A major, A minor, and F minor); the two hexachords each include a diminished-seventh tetrachord (order positions 1, 3, 4, and 5; 7, 8, 10, and 11). Third, no traditional chord can be generated through adjacent row pitches. It follows that strict usage of the ordered row will not create tonal allusions. Even a superficial glance at Das Ende einer Welt shows that Henze intended not only to reconstruct typical operatic forms and traditional models, but also to combine them with moments of tonality. These tonal allusions occur mostly in two ways. On the one hand, the row is divided into two halves which, when treated as unordered sets, generate tonal units by a rearranging of order positions within the hexachord. On the other hand, a specific selection of row pitches establishes a foreground, leaving the remaining pitches as a subordinate background. The first approach can be seen in the recitative at the end of No. 3 (see Example 2).

Example 2: Henze, Das Ende einer Welt, No. 3 (recitative), with row order positions marked

This section uses a row form starting from B: B-E-F-G-D-G-F-A-B-E-C-C. As is conventional, the recitative starts with a six-three chord (E major) in the accompaniment formed by row order positions 1, 2, and 4. These pitches also appear in the vocal line, so the chord sounds without any foreign tone. The missing row pitches (order positions 3, 5, and 6) are sung in an altered order (5 first, as seventh in relation to an E root, followed by pitch 6 (on the word “nicht”) and 3 as ninth). A concluding chord (with upbeat) provides the remaining row pitches, now introducing a separation between vocal line and accompaniment. The latter executes a nearly “functional” cadential approach, as if to an A major tonic chord (but with a major sixth, F, instead of the chordal fifth, E). In the vocal line, meanwhile, the melodic-rhythmic shape recalls a traditional operatic recitative, but the pitches are foreign to the chords.

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Another approach of Henze’s is clear in Example 3 (which shows the beginning of the same number, labeled “Barcarole” in the score). A distinction between foreground and background tonality can be observed at the beginning of the number.

Example 3: Henze, Das Ende einer Welt, No. 3 (beginning), with row order positions marked

The harp plays not only the typical barcarole rhythm but also (in its constant melodic changes from F to G) refers to Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. In contrast to Offenbach – where the neighbor-motive rocks between A and B or, in the main melody, F and G, in a D major context – Henze establishes F major as the underlying key reference. This comes from the tone row (the basic set starting on D or C), from which the harp plays order positions 1–4. The vocal lines also present segments of four pitches: order positions 5–8 (E-A-G-B) are sung by the soprano (D, pitch 11, is later added), metrically arranged to reveal an E major chord with suspended fourth (the A in m. 3 ff.). The remaining row pitches, assigned to the tenor (pitches 9, 10) and alto (12, 1) as simple dyads, do not admit any clear tonal attribution. Tonality in both excerpts is connected with forms or genres (recitative, barcarole) evoked through details of melodic line, motivic structure, and instrumentation. By combining tonal idioms with a dodecaphonic pitch vocabulary, Henze simultaneously presents listeners with fulfillment and alienation: tonality – the idiom of recitative and barcarole taken as a whole – appears blurred. It stands as a symbol of arrogance and falseness, the sign of an abnormal but ultimately empty consciousness of tradition and privilege. Das Ende einer Welt concludes, not coincidentally, with the spectacle of an island and the visitors upon it sinking into the sea. Though there is no documented twelve-tone row for the opera Boulevard Solitude, the score’s dodecaphonic organization is unmistakable. In his study of the work, Hans Joachim Wagner has identified the row at the opening (first scene, mm. 14–15) as follows: E-D-F-F-A-B-E-C-D-B-G-A.23 Since these measures do not 23

Hans Joachim Wagner, Studie zu “Boulevard Solitude: Lyrisches Drama in 7 Bildern” von Hans Werner Henze (Regensburg: Bosse, 1988), 132.

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Example 4: Henze, Boulevard Solitude, Intermezzo (No. 7; mm. 31–40), with row order positions marked

show a simple horizontal organization of the row, another interpretation also seems possible. In the following analysis a different row form is assumed, one presented in several passages: C-D-B-B-G-F-C-F-E-E-A-G.24 Dividing the row into two halves, one finds hexachords of identical unordered intervallic content (as sets). The two hexachords of the inversion on B are identical to those of the basic set on C. The first half of the row contains triads of G major, G minor, and B minor (in addition to a G-rooted seventh chord). The second half contains a fully diminished chord. Successive G major and B minor triads (or vice versa) cannot be found in the opera, however; instead, Henze favors simpler tonal relationships, as the following two examples reveal. 24

See for example the piano score, pp. 72 (m. 53) and 77 (m. 62). My reconstruction of the row differs from that given by Wagner only slightly (apart from the exchange of prime form and inversion). The hexachords are identical, and in the first half only order positions 3 and 4 are exchanged (Wagner often has to assume reordering of these tones). In the second half pitches 8–10 occur in a different order.

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Example 5: Henze, Boulevard solitude, No. 10 (mm. 10–17)

At the end of the intermezzo which precedes the third scene, a passage of great tenderness arises through the combination of melody, syncopated accompaniment, and bass line. This passage is based first upon the row inversion beginning on F, then (m. 35) upon the basic set on B, finally upon the basic set on C (m. 38). As the ordering of row pitches in Example 4 confirms, successive row pitches appear only rarely, either in the melody or the accompanying chords. Henze prefers to use the hexachords as unordered sets. What principle of pitch regulation might he have used here? One idea might have been to establish in the bass line and chords a layer which could be heard as major-minor tonality, so determining perception of the upper melodic line. The strong element of tonality in the accompaniment (and the slow tempo) allows the listener to hear the melodic line in relation to the chords as suspensions, passing notes, and as an extension of the layers in thirds. In relation to the initial F minor chord, one might hear the melodic E as a leading tone and the G as an upper neighbor – both pitches implying a potential resolution to F. From measure 33 onwards A major or E major are the central tonal region. The chordal sequence is: A minor-E major-A major-C minor; in m. 39, E major returns over a

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bass-voice seventh (D) and diminished fifth (B). Only at the end of the intermezzo does the C major seventh tetrachord make a foreign impression, as a transition to the new tonal region of the following number. Elsewhere in the opera – see Example 5, from the “Terzett” (number 10) – Henze makes tonal allusions in the context of a Classical-era musical syntax. After a measure of introduction, repeated after the varied reprise – the number comprises a sequence of eight-measure phrases, which might be interpreted as antecedent and consequent phrases within a musical period (mm. 2–9), or as a succession of two-measure units arranged for variation or contrast. In measures 10–17 this measure-grouping is combined with a collection of chordal harmonies, in which the main triads are D minor/D major, A major, A major/A minor and F minor/F major. One hears a harmonic succession modulating in a traditional way from the minor tonic to the corresponding parallel major. The twelve-tone row in measures 10–13, which is likely the inversion form on E, again divides into two hexachords (each covering a two measure span). In measures 14–17 – based on the inversion on B – the harmonic rhythm accelerates and the separation of the two halves of the row is less strictly implemented. Only to a limited extent does the texture present a common harmonic basis (compare m. 15, in which Manon has F minor, and Lescaut B minor). That we have in measures 10–13 an obvious connection of tonic and dominant chords (D minor and A major) is due to Manon’s melodic line, which refers to the row only in an unsystematic way (order positions 5-4-7-10-11). The D minor tonality is supported in the orchestral bass line by the downbeat pitches D, E, and C (order positions 2, 7, 10). Order position 1 appears only after number 2 on the upbeat; other row-based elements in the texture color but do not override the harmonic meaning of the passage. In the context of Boulevard Solitude, such an application of dodecaphony is no isolated case. As with the recitative in Das Ende einer Welt, this number is closely related to traditional operatic forms by its tonal content, among other parameters. The function of tonality in each opera is, however, quite different. Tonal references in Das Ende einer Welt carry the weight of critique, expressing a misunderstood tradition. In Boulevard Solitude, by contrast, tonality is a means to produce tender affection, catchiness, and cheerfulness. Das Ende einer Welt begins with an unclouded tonality which will be destroyed in the course of the piece. In both numbers from Boulevard Solitude, Henze fashions a form of tonality which can be interpreted as an extension or continuation of traditional harmonic procedures. Tonal Formation of Melodic Lines and Tonality in Freely-Serial Works In addition to works in which pitch orderings are strictly row-derived, Henze also composed works in which twelve-tone methods are only partly relevant (or not at all). One of these, the ballet Undine, was composed in the summer of 1956 and first performed in London in October 1958. Undine consists of many short numbers,25 25

After developing the plot, the choreographer Frederick Ashton sent Henze a minutage with

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each characterized by individuality of instrumentation, texture, melody, or tonality. The last mentioned feature is often established through ostinati, in which the pitches form a tonality of defined tonics, scales, or chords (without necessarily presenting major-minor tonality, however). No extant row table for Undine survives among the ballet’s sketches. Nonetheless Henze himself referred to a row in his diary of the work’s genesis, at the same time downplaying its wider significance. Its “obligation consists in tensioning or breaking the melodic and harmonic elements sometimes. […] Shorter successions of row pitches would be used as motifs, but without making the score’s structural aspect dependent on the row. The row should only be one element of construction among many.”26 Henze, in his diary, did not reveal a specific pitch ordering. However, Peter Petersen has reconstructed it as follows: C-CF-B-E-A-G-D-E-F-G-B (see for example, Act 2, Scene 8, woodwinds, mm. 15– 22). In his diary, Henze outlines the requirements choreographer Frederick Ashton had formulated for the production, and his reaction to them. He had to invent a simple and clear musical language, which at the same time would allow for a new and exceptional type of singing melodic line.27 Later in the text, Henze added that he had discovered in the “surprising activity and presence of street shouts and canzonets,” a rich store of horizontal and vertical relationships available within even simple pitch successions.28 One means of simplification was to give the melodic line a clear tonal basis derived from a single tonic-like pitch with affiliations to multiple scales. A local tonal center is buttressed by statements of this clear tonic, while other pitches can be grouped in a manner quite free (and, according to Henze, full of tension). This is analogous to the chord usages noted earlier in Boulevard Solitude. Establishment of a hierarchically higher-ranking layer allows the integration of “foreign” elements without destroying the primary layer.

Example 6: Henze, Undine, Act II, Scene 4a, mm. 3–7

26

27 28

detailed instructions for the succession and duration of each scene. A facsimile of the minutage for the third act can be found in Henze, Undine: Tagebuch eines Balletts (Munich: Piper, 1959), 24. Henze, Undine: Tagebuch, 27. “Ihre Verbindlichkeit besteht darin, die (von ihr nicht einmal indirekt abhängigen) melodischen und harmonischen Elemente gelegentlich zu spannen, zu brechen […]. Kürzere Tonfolgen aus dieser Reihe würden auch motivisch verwendet werden, ohne daß der strukturelle Aspekt der Partitur jedoch von ihr abhängig wäre. Die Reihe soll nur ein Bauelement unter vielen sein.” Henze, Undine: Tagebuch, 29. Henze, Undine: Tagebuch, 62. “… die Entdeckung der überraschenden Aktivität und Gegenwärtigkeit der auf einfachen Intervall-Verhältnissen beruhenden Straßenrufe und Can zo netten.”

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Two examples, which will only be briefly analyzed, will give an idea of Henze’s procedures. In Scene 4a of Act II of Undine (“The boat on the open sea”) we hear the melody shown in Example 6. The tonal center B is constituted through the tones of the B-major triad played on the main beats of measures 3, 5, and 7 (F-D-B). The pitch E turns the melodic line into some sort of Lydian mode; the tone G introduces an augmented sixth. As a whole we have the scale B-C-D-E-F-G. This scale is neither a church mode nor a whole-tone or octatonic scale. It could be assigned to Messiaen’s Mode 3 (B-C-C-D-E-F-F-G-A), but this interpretation isn’t very plausible, since the foreground presents only six pitches. At the same time the melody moves towards a clear falling-fifth scalar progression in the upper voice, F-ED-C-B, lending tonal coherence to the whole phrase.29 The supporting bass ostinato, with its main pitches B and F, asserts a B tonic as a fairly simple foundation for the modally expanded tonality of the upper voice. The melody of the oboe in the “Pas de trois” (Act II, No. 5) also presents a distinct tonal center, but this time the tonal frame is expanded through pitches foreign to the scale, or through double inflection of a given scale degree (Example 7).

Example 7: Henze, Undine, Act II, No. 5, mm. 5–12

The melody has eight measures, but there is no symmetrical syntactic grouping (unlike in Boulevard Solitude). Rather, the melody is based on the principle of developing variation of rhythmic and motivic elements (mm. 6 and 7 are rhythmically identical with pitches varied; m. 8, extending the rhythmic and pitch range, pushes the arrival of the new pitch F to the middle of m. 9). An A major tonality is obvious due to the fifth A-E at the beginning (soon followed by a C) and the falling E-A motion at the end. Having emphasized the tonic triad, the middle of the phrase introduces further pitches of an A-major scale collection (D in m. 8, F in m. 9), before foreign pitches arrive (D, E, F in mm. 8, 10). We have therefore an arch-like tonal construction: A sounds at the beginning and end; the middle is constituted through a field comprising tonal departures, but here too there is a prominent falling step29 The melody returns twice in varied form (mm. 15–19, 29–40), but no new material is added. A new pitch, D, is introduced only at the very end of the second return (m. 39). With this new pitch, a transition to a new tonal center begins (the process is analogous to modulation in tonal music).

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wise motion (m. 8 ff.) from D with A as the ultimate goal (mm. 11–12). Henze’s melody is imbued with tensions deriving from prominent registral transfers (as with the high C pitch in m. 10). Whereas discussion of the last two examples from Undine was restricted to melodic elements of the texture, the following examples will focus on interplay between melody and accompaniment. The first is from Act I, Scene 1, where the texture can be divided into melody, bass, and an ostinato (Example 8).

Example 8: Henze, Undine, Act I, No. 2b (Palemon approaches Beatrice), mm. 12–20

Tonality in this case is clearly centered on C minor in the melody (the tonic triad pitches are stressed very plainly), and in the horn fifths of the accompaniment ostinato. But what about the bass, which completes the music’s presentation of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale (but not in connection with the row)? Is the bass line a quasi-bitonal counterpoint, or rather an element of the C minor tonality? One might assume the latter, not only because the melody and ostinato project a very clear C minor but also because the bass itself, which despite chromaticism, affirms the key. The phrase openings (first and the fifth measures) present pitches of the C minor triad (also at the beginning of the third measure). Furthermore the motion is

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initially by diatonic steps, with chromatic notes treated as metrically unaccented passing tones. At the very end a half cadence is implied through the B-G dyad in the upper-voice melody. In the interaction of melody and counterpoint, important formal arrivals are stressed by tonal means, such as tonic emphasis or scalar motion. These arrivals resonate throughout the passage, allowing for material foreign to the tonality to be integrated. The idea of establishing a tonal center, then widening (but not destroying) the tonal space, can be observed not only in melodic details, or through interactions of melody and counterpoint, but also as a principle of large-scale form. The following Example 9 shows the first half of a wedding march (Act I, No. 11). The passage may be divided into three sections: the solo horn line (mm. 25–33), its variation and continuation in the strings (mm. 33–42), and the melody in woodwinds and low strings (m. 43 ff.). These more than twenty measures show a development transforming a diatonic tonality into a chromatic one. Through a selection of structural and dependent pitches, however, the listener’s perception of a local tonic is never endangered. The first section starts with a melody based on a diatonic scale. The melodic syntax presents a sequence of variants: first we hear a two-bar phrase, to which one measure is appended – a pattern immediately repeated.30 It is not easy to determine the tonal center, but at the beginning one will assume C as the referential tonic, although this pitch is heard only on weak metric positions (mm. 27 and 29; E isn’t a plausible center because of the diminished fifth B). The middle segment (mm. 28–30) of the melody then proposes G as a second local pitch center (highlighted through pitches D and G). Because C returns in the last segment in a very strong position (m. 33), the melody confirms the original impression of C Mixolydian (a tonality that also correlates with the horn’s natural seventh). The music’s tonality for now is purely melodic; competing claims of C and G as local tonics are resolved only with the arrival of chordal support finally confirming a C tonic. In the second section, an accompanying chordal layer appears below the melody, along with a bass line. The passage unambiguously projects a C major or C Mixolydian tonality. However, the available pitch collection is now enlarged in the melody by the double degree F/F, and in the accompaniment by the interplay of B/B, E/E, and F/F.31 The tonality proves stable, however, first because the modal tonic and fifth are unaltered, and also because of the stability of the bass, tied to C major. Dissonances occuring between the chordal layer and the bass give the harmony a harsh sound (see mm. 36–38). In the third section (m. 41 ff.) the principle of combining different layers is unaltered but expanded. The upper voice projects an A Mixolydian collection, but in30

31

This melody could have been modelled on the beginning of Schubert’s Symphony in C major (D 944). The first movement starts with a theme, which is also played by a horn and structured asymmetrically (3 + 3 + 2 measures). Peter Petersen has shown that in the Act III divertissement in Undine Henze paraphrases themes by Schubert (“Trout” Quintet) and Tchaikovsky (Sixth Symphony): Petersen, Hans Werner Henze, Ingeborg Bachmann: “Undine” und “Tasso” in Ballett, Erzählung, Konzert und Gedicht (Schliengen: Edition Argus, 2014), 45. In one case we also have C instead of C: see m. 36.

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Example 9: Henze, Undine, Act I, No. 11[b], mm. 25–48

ner voices are now frequently non-diatonic. A proliferation of double degrees (e. g. B/B, C/C, E/E, F/F) presents variants of the tonic, fourth, and seventh scale degrees (but not of the fifth), further destabilizing the tonality. Furthermore, the bass moves to B (at the beginning always with the minor third D, later replaced with D). The dissonances in the second section arise between two layers, but in relation to the same tonic pitch; in the third section, by contrast, textural layers project different tonic pitches, and particularly in the lower voice, there is a vagueness of tonal definition. The textural result is an overall flowing-together of tonal claims – a weakening of the sense of tonality – rather than a more sharply defined contrast. The clarity of the beginning has given way to a more hazy picture. (In contrast to other parts of Undine, clarity of key definition is not restored at the end of the number; rather, Henze intensifies the impression of tonal incoherence by moving to a thicker texture of eight-pitch chords, depriving listeners of the possibility of distinguishing any tonality.) The music’s tonal transformation process matches the dramatic interactions of Tritons, Nymphs, and Tirrenio within the scene. Its movement towards tonal chaos might also be a premonition: that the wedding will not bring Undine and Palemon good fortune.

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In each of the passages analyzed thus far, tonality is a means to produce musical coherence through reference to a central tonic pitch, or through overarching melodic progressions. A defined tonality provides a structural foundation over which more heterogenous pitch materials may be overlaid. In respect to motivic and chordal syntax, this approach makes possible a technique of local variations which are never, however, erratic or arbitrary. Henze incorporates pitches foreign to the scale, and more remote harmonies, without destroying a sense of tonal coherence. Rather, he builds a tension between some governing melodic and tonal motion and divergent details (either within a single polyphonic voice, or in other voices). Foreign pitches may signal other tonal regions, extend a scale or collection, or form a counterpoint to the governing tonal context. Such textures redefine the idea of consonance and dissonance as operating at a higher structural level: tension and resolution effects are no longer defined through intervals or interval-classes, but rather at the level of competing tonal layers – competing tonalities – within a texture. Tonality, for Henze, is at once a matter of structural coherence and dramatic expression. Music on the Stage In Henze’s stage works of the 1950s and early 1960s we find several scenes which represent “music on the stage” – a performance by those playing in the scene – within the score. In Boulevard Solitude we hear dance music, in Das Ende einer Welt, two movements of a fake “Baroque” sonata are played; König Hirsch includes incidental music at the end of Act I for the appearance of clowns; in Der junge Lord, music is sung at the welcoming address for Sir Edgar, and a piano piece is played in the salon of Baroness Grünwiesel. In both Das Ende einer Welt and in Der junge Lord, the stage music communicates a well-defined historical moment, respectively: the early eighteenth century, and around 1830. In each case, Henze has composed rather convincing imitations of a historical style, in each case liberally supplied with “wrong notes.” On one level these mistakes show quite realistically the inadequacy of the performance,32 contributing to an audience’s view of character and situation. The sonata in Das Ende einer Welt expresses an over-zealous attitude towards higher education, reduced to absurdity through obvious signs of poor-quality music and lack-luster playing skills. Luise’s doggerel piano-playing in Der junge Lord stands (among other things) for shallow etiquette, the mere keeping up of appearances. On another level, however, the musical mistakes cannot be interpreted in a realistic way, but rather as hyper-realistic. The sonata is distorted through a series of metrical and harmonic irregularities, and passages where melody and harmony don’t match (see the first movement, mm. 11–12). In this case Henze returns to neoclassical procedures, creating blemishes in a spotless facade. In both cases, the fragility of the music indicates that something has gone wrong for the 32

In Das Ende einer Welt, the harpsichord part of the sonata has instructions like “sich korrigierend,” “sich verbessernd” (correcting himself), or “sich verspielend” (hitting a wrong note).

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Example 10: Henze, Der junge Lord, Scene 1 (mm. 272–83)

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educated middle class. The wrong notes within the major-minor tonality of the incidental music in Der junge Lord serve as caricature. In the welcome scene, the effect is comic; in the salon scene trepidation holds sway. Different procedures of alienation – of making traditional tonality sound strange – play a significant role in each case. What they all have in common is that some “correct” tonality must be heard or understood as a background reference. The Act I welcome in Der junge Lord reminds one of an equivalent scene from the opera Zar und Zimmermann by Albert Lortzing (the rehearsal of “Heil sei dem Tag”), in which through the ambitions of the choir and van Bett the people get confused and sing out of tune, losing track of the meter. In Henze’s opera, a children’s choir sings a simple canon in A major; they get out of tune while repeating the canon and have to start again, but this time the garrison music starts after a few measures (Example 10). The texture divides into three layers: the choir, the garrison-music (on or offstage), and the orchestra. The choir sings a canon quite strictly with the exception of measure 276, where note values are stretched. This stretching opens the space for the E major garrison music, which arrives at precisely this moment (mm. 276–77), so that E major is treated as simultaneously a tonic and a dominant. The whole texture is subsequently further distorted. The phrases of the piccolo are played with wrong harmonies; a diatonic melody is wrongly harmonized (m. 281, F major; m. 284, B major; m. 285, C minor). Nor does the bass (m. 281 ff.) match the harmony of the upper voices. Finally, the phrase structure – after a regular antecedent – is continued in an irregular way. The texture comes apart at the seams, a process in which the orchestra also takes part. At the beginning, the A-major tonality is enhanced only by the pitches D and G, but after m. 279 we find further tonal expansion as the sixteenth-note arpeggio figures introduce other pitches foreign to A major. The musical texture is structured in two ways. In the vertical dimension, different keys, of varying degrees of tonal clarity, are juxtaposed. The children’s choir’s canon is in A major, the garrison music is in E major (at least in the melody), while the orchestra has a clear tonality only at the beginning. In the horizontal dimension, tonality is destroyed gradually through two processes. On one hand, Henze writes overlapping layers; on the other hand, there is a gradually evolving movement away from the starting tonality. Comedy arises through the distance between the rigor of the traditional formal models (strict canon and march, consisting of two-measureunits) and the sloppiness of their execution. As the tonality (and syntax) gets out of control, the crowd loses its sense of middle-class decorum. The piece played by Luise in Scene 2 (Baroness Grünwiesel’s salon) is modified to create an image of some imagined time period after 1800 (see Example 11). At first glance, the number of meter changes is striking. This is already a formal clue that the piece consists of clichés pasted, as it were, next to and over one another. After an introduction (mm. 1–2), the antecedent of a theme starts (mm. 3–7), reminding one of the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 466 (also headed “Romance”). Instead of a consequent phrase, however, another measure group follows, seemingly flowing into a cadence (mm. 8–11), then continuing with

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Example 11: Henze, Der junge Lord, Scene 2 (mm. 1–17)

another middle section (m. 12 ff.). This music traverses first a pre-dominant (mm. 14–16) and then an unclear dominant (m. 17 ff.). Since it is possible to determine the syntactic function of individual measure-groups, it is also possible to determine the location of wrong notes quite exactly. In measures 3–11, upper voice and accompaniment do not fit, and while the piano has a coherent texture (m. 13 onwards), the orchestra’s entry is incompatible. Inspecting measures 3–7 more closely, the tonal “problems” occur in several ways. The upper voice has a regular antecedent

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reaching a half cadence (first note of m. 7). The accompanying lower voice (in the lower system) seems to fit the melody harmonically (assuming only that in m. 6 the left-hand E arrives “late”). But the overall tonal effect is complicated (in mm. 3–4) by the simultaneity of chord tones (E and G) and lower neighbors (D and F). In measures 5–6, the middle voice has wrong notes (C-C-B-G instead of C-B-C-G); further wrong notes arrive (mm. 8–9) through parallel fourth chords and a sudden chromatic swerve. For the cadence in measures 10–12 one would expect the harmonic progression I–I6–II6–V–I (or I6–II6–V64–V7–I). This expectation is satisfied in the lower voice’s C-B-C motion, but the bass line is wrong. The upper voice keeps its figure revolving in place, instead of progressing downwards. A coherent and conventional cadence would have taken the following form:

Example 12: Hypothetical correct version of the cadence, mm. 10–12

The orchestra (m. 12 ff.) provides little tonal contrast. In measures 12–14 we find an interplay of A minor and C major in both orchestra and piano, but local harmonic functions within the keys do not coincide,33 and chords are always enriched by added notes. The sound of the horns in the background clouds the audibility of the piano’s figuration. Heard together, the two textural layers create a morbid and uncanny atmosphere. In this passage, tonality is altered in such a way that the models chosen for pastiche will be clearly recognizable. The resulting tonality, then, is heard as an alienated language. This “Romance” is an empty box, combining many typical elements, but without real coherence. And Luise’s performance is just a mechanical reproduction, lacking in musical understanding. Because this alienation does not extend for just a few measures, but persists over the whole piece – and because it is not shown pointedly – there is no comic effect. Rather one gets the impression, from Luise’s performance, of a false consciousness through and through: the music conveys a sense of distraction or confusion. Henze’s use of tonality in Der junge Lord becomes a dramatic symbol of falseness. Under a nearby perfect surface shimmers a layer which literally unmasks the whole as a facade. Something is out of joint. What becomes obvious only at the end of the opera – that the “young Lord” Edgar is none other than an ape – is thus prefigured musically much earlier in the opera.

33

For example, the orchestral A minor, downbeat of m. 14, is contradicted by the piano’s G-E-G harmony, a V harmony embellished with a suspension.

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Some Final Remarks In a 1965 interview with Klaus Geitel, speaking of his music for the stage, Henze said that his work is defined by a “state of tension: abandoning tonality and returning to it.”34 Bearing Henze’s remark in mind, one might suggest that his use of tonality achieves at least three different purposes, which we might broadly define in terms of form, of expression, and tradition. In Henze’s deployment of tonality to build form, one might recognize techniques for creating unity, coherence, and differentiation. Tonality facilitates the invention of themes with clearly defined beginnings and endings, even in the absence of a traditional syntax. Considering tonality as expression, meanwhile, the composer has observed the possibility of (re)establishing music’s powers of simplicity and catchiness. In the same interview, Henze cites the “renunciation of the relationship to a tonic pitch in modern music” as a possible reason for “the atrophy of comic opera” (the “indeterminate angst” of atonal music, he argues, is the “very opposite of cheerfulness”35). Moods of “cheerfulness” in Der junge Lord can be found in moments of quotation such as the children’s canon, or in the milder form – a “lightheartedness” – of the passages from Boulevard Solitude analyzed above, where the textures recall eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century opera. Linking tonality to traditional forms, meanwhile – the barcarole or recitative in Das Ende einer Welt, the hunt topics in Undine, the duet in Boulevard Solitude – is a ubiquitous feature of Henze’s music. The presence of tonality in Henze’s music is bound up with his wider relationship to a musical past. Only rarely, however, does Henze’s music rely on unaltered citation of the tonal idioms of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Only in passages with citational features does Henze directy imitate functional harmony (mostly with a critical dramatic intent). More often, the music’s tonal-harmonic texture presents a chromaticism made up of contrasting tonal layers. Henze often generates a texture comprising oppositions between differentiated foreground- and background tonalities. The technique encompasses a vertical simultaneity of scales or ostinatos of contrasting tonal affiliation (as in Undine); or a contrapuntal texture with equal, similar, or distinctive tonalities in each part. That Henze combines tonal and dodecaphonic invention within a single texture is already a sign that tonality and atonality are not to be understood as conceptual opposites. Rather, they represent poles of a musical language from which no possible harmonic or tonal formation is excluded. With Henze, musical expression can only be understood in terms of the composer’s direct awareness of tradition: expression assumes a communicative function and the direct comprehensibility, for audiences, of the music as a language. His handling of

34 35

Henze, “Der Einzelgänger (1965): Gespräch mit Klaus Geitel,” in Musik und Politik, 111–14 (113). “Meine Musik lebt geradezu aus diesem Spannungszustand: dem Verlassen der Tonalität und der Rückkehr zu ihr.” Ibid., 113. “… ob das Verkümmern der komischen Oper nicht auf die Abkehr von der Grundtonbezogenheit in der Neuen Musik zurückzuführen ist. Die Abwendung von der Tonalität ruft meiner Ansicht nach ein Gefühl von ‘angoisse’ hervor … einer ungewissen Angst also, die Gegenspielerin der Heiterkeit ist.”

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tonality, then, is never intended to be “conservative,” but is based, on the contrary, on a radical awareness of the present. Bibliography Cahn, Peter. “Aus frühen Briefen Hans Werner Henzes.” In Der Komponist Hans Werner Henze, edited by Dieter Rexroth, 20–30. Mainz: Schott, 1986. Geitel, Klaus. Hans Werner Henze. Berlin: Rembrandt-Verlag, 1968. Henze, Hans Werner. Musik und Politik: Schriften und Gespräche 1955–1984. Edited by Jens Brockmeier. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984. ––. Undine: Tagebuch eines Balletts. Munich: Piper, 1959. ––. Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten: Autobiographische Mitteilungen 1926–1995. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1996; English edition as Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, trans. Stewart Spencer. London: Faber, 1998. Hochgesang, Deborah. Die Opern Hans Werner Henzes im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Musikkritik bis 1966. Trier: WVT, 1996. Kovacs, Inge. “Neue Musik abseits der Avantgarde? Zwei Fallbeispiele.” In Im Zenit der Moderne: Die internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946–1966, edited by Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, 2:13–61. 4 volumes. Freiburg: Rombach, 1997. Krenek, Ernst. Studies in Counterpoint, based on Twelve-tone Techniques. New York: Schirmer, 1940. Lück, Harmut. “Literarische Bilderwelten: Zu Henzes früher vokaler Kammermusik.” In Hans Werner Henze: Musik und Sprache, Musik-Konzepte, New Series 132, edited by Jens Brockmeier, 27–50. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2006. Mosch, Ulrich. “Ein Blick in Henzes Werkstatt: Bemerkungen zu den Skizzen und Particelli.” In “Hans Werner Henze: Die Vorträge des internationalen Henze-Symposions am Musikwissenschaftlichen Institut der Universität Hamburg 28. bis 30. Juni 2001,” special issue of Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 20 (2003): 259–76. Petersen, Peter. Hans Werner Henze, Ingeborg Bachmann: “Undine” und “Tasso” in Ballett, Erzählung, Konzert und Gedicht. Schliengen: Edition Argus, 2014. Rosteck, Jens. Hans Werner Henze: Rosen und Revolutionen. Die Biographie. Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 2009. Rufer, Josef. Die Komposition mit zwölf Tönen. 1952. 2nd edition. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1966. Wagner, Hans Joachim. Studie zu “Boulevard Solitude: Lyrisches Drama in 7 Bildern” von Hans Werner Henze. Regensburg: Bosse, 1988.

“Everything we love belongs to us”: George Rochberg’s Adoption of Tonality Felix Meyer The music of George Rochberg (1918–2005) is heard fairly regularly in the United States but is rather poorly represented in the European music scene. Still, the composer’s name is quite familiar to European musicians and musicologists: wherever talk turns to the way contemporary music changed in the 1960s, Rochberg is frequently cited as an example of a composer who underwent a particularly radical transformation during those years. Just how profound this transformation was may be seen from a brief comparison of two sections from his works, one from the Second String Quartet, completed in 1961 (Example 1), and another from the third movement of his Third String Quartet, written some ten years later between December 1971 and February 1972 (Example 2).

Example 1: George Rochberg, String Quartet No. 2, p. 2, opening, first system (row forms marked)

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Example 2: George Rochberg, String Quartet No. 3, III, mm. 1–5

At first sight, it is indeed difficult to believe that these two pieces were written by the same composer and lie barely a decade apart. The Second String Quartet, whose latter half includes a soprano part on words by Rainer Maria Rilke,1 is strictly dodecaphonic, being based on two intervallically symmetrical tone rows, of which the first, marked in Example 1, occurs at the opening of the piece in two transpositions of the prime form (P0 and P6) and in inversions I11 and I5.2 But the thematic shapes obtained from the twelve-tone row do not unfold in a developmental fashion, as they do, for example, in the music of Schoenberg; rather, they are spliced together as in a mosaic, recalling the juxtaposition of musical “objects” in the works of Ives and Varèse. (This spatial approach is reflected in the staggered notation of the score.) In short, we are dealing with a piece firmly anchored in a specifically American type of modernism that drew on the achievements of the Second Viennese School while taking up and developing impulses from American music in the early twentieth century. By contrast, the third movement of the Third String Quartet, which lasts roughly fifteen minutes in performance, is firmly grounded in functional major-minor tonality. It is designed as a long set of variations on a theme in A major and recalls the music of the early nineteenth century not only through its harmonic structure and its rigorous syntactical subdivisions into four- and eight-measure units, but also through its expressive gestures. In particular, as many commentators have sug1

2

The analogy with Arnold Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet (1907–08) is obvious. Like Schoenberg, Rochberg had come to an impasse during the composition of his work and felt the need to support the musical discourse with a meaningful text. But unlike his predecessor he did not move into uncharted territory in the second half of his quartet, producing instead a work that is remarkably consistent in style and gesture. See Joseph N. Straus, Twelve-Tone Music in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 76–79, where however I9 is taken as the prime (P0).

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gested, it seems to hark back to Beethoven’s late style.3 Such an undisguised, almost provocative re-creation of tonal composition was completely at odds with the notions of musical “progress” that reigned supreme in the contemporary music scene of the 1950s and 60s. It automatically raised the question of whether Rochberg, who just a few years earlier had brought forth works such as the Second String Quartet, had deviated from the path of New Music and turned his gaze backwards from the present to the past. Nor was this suspicion dispelled by the other four movements framing the set of variations: though written in a type of free atonality or pantonality, they are dominated by reflections of early twentieth-century models. The interrelated second and fourth movements, for example, are strongly reminiscent of the music of Bartók and Stravinsky, while certain passages in the sixth and last movement conjure up the world of Mahler’s late symphonies. If Rochberg’s Second Quartet attracted only moderate attention, the reactions to his Third, premièred in early 1972 and available on a recording by the Concord String Quartet from 1973, were extremely violent. Soon the press was speaking of “a shocker in reverse”4 and arguing that Rochberg had betrayed the ideals of modernism by copying earlier composers in a hopeless fit of nostalgia.5 Even the most sympathetic critics, such as John Rockwell, felt ill at ease. Although in his review of the recording Rockwell did not hesitate to call the work a “fascinating piece” that vigorously upheld the American string quartet tradition, its polystylistic character at the same time worried him. He was afraid that other less talented composers were to follow Rochberg’s example and turn themselves into “high-class Rosemary Browns.”6 (As a reminder, Rosemary Brown [1916–2001] was an English amateur musician who set tongues wagging by posing as a spiritual medium and writing down pieces by Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and many others, all allegedly dictated to her from the Great Beyond.) Quite obviously Rochberg’s Third Quartet, and above all its third movement, the A-major Adagio, had broken a taboo. Yet it was not the use of tonality as such that caused a stir: American composers of the 1960s had experimented widely with tonality, or at least with tonal elements. A prime example is minimalism, one of whose founding documents was Terry Riley’s In C of 1964. During the 1960s, numerous scores appeared that quoted segments of various length from tonal works of the past; examples include Lukas Foss’s Baroque Variations of 1967 and Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia of 1967–68 (a piece that could likewise be viewed as American music, given that Berio was living in the United States at the time and the work was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic). But no one would have thought to 3

4 5 6

Rochberg himself was slightly less specific on this matter than his critics: in his liner notes to the 1973 recording by the Concord String Quartet (Nonesuch Records H-71283), he referred only vaguely to “the ‘styles’ of Beethoven and Mahler” that he had employed in this quartet. His notes are reprinted in Joan DeVee Dixon, George Rochberg: A Bio-Bibliographic Guide to His Life and Works (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1992), 139–43 (141–42). Alan M. Kriegsman, “Peak Upon Peak of Excellence,” Washington Post, September 9, 1972. See, for example, Hugh Wood, “Thoughts on a Modern Quartet,” Tempo 111 (December 1974): 23–26. John Rockwell, “Record: Rochberg String Piece Expands Collage Limits,” New York Times, September 26, 1973.

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compare In C to a “dictation” from a dead composer; the work’s quasi-modular overall conception was too innovative, and its tonal relations, though regulated in its broad outlines, were more or less indeterminate on the local level, the progression from one module to the next being left (within certain limits) to the discretion of the performer. Nor would anyone have seriously accused Baroque Variations of intellectual theft: although Foss quoted specifically and at length original music by Bach, Scarlatti, and Handel, even giving the middle piece the ironic title Phorion (“stolen goods”), the emphasis fell so clearly on the manipulation and dismantling of those originals that the “new” obviously outweighed the “old,” which functioned merely as a foil or a subtext. Much the same can be said of Berio’s Sinfonia. In Rochberg’s case, however, such critical detachment from past music was not readily discernible. (That he called his Third Quartet “primarily ironic in tone and in spirit” in an early program note sounds in retrospect like a disclaimer in view of the anticipated controversy.7 It comes as no surprise therefore that in later years he stated exactly the opposite: “This is all very consciously meant. No irony, no effort to imitate.”8) On the contrary, the impression arises that he merely presented historical material rather than commenting on it, and thereby deliberately suppressed his own voice. True, he had kindled the same impression in several earlier pieces by quoting tonal music at length without essentially changing the compositional fabric. Examples include Music for the Magic Theater (1965), which centers on a reorchestration of the virtually complete slow movement from Mozart’s Divertimento in B flat major (K. 287), and the Third Symphony of 1969, which incorporates an entire Schütz cantata, Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich? (SWV 415). But in the Third Quartet Rochberg seemed to have gone one step further by conjuring up past music “generically” rather than referring to specific pieces via textual or programmatic association, and by keeping the conflicting stylistic levels so far apart that a complete self-contained movement, such as the central set of variations, could maintain a consistent idiom. In other words, by replacing the close-knit interaction between the “authorial” and the “nonauthorial” levels of music with a large-scale juxtaposition of contrasting styles of indeterminate authorship, he appeared to have overstepped the bounds of stylistic imitation or pastiche, lending a voice to music which, at least on the material level, could raise little or no claim to novelty or originality. This, at any rate, is how the situation was sized up by his early critics when they accused him of betraying the ideals of the avant-garde or even cozying up to the audience. And this is also the view held by many later commentators, most of whom, not coincidentally, approached the work from the vantage point of a broadly conceived debate on musical postmodernism and largely arrived at the conclusion

7

8

George Rochberg, program note to the Third String Quartet (1972), reprinted in Dixon, Rochberg, 143–44 (143). Rochberg also wrote along the same lines in a letter of April 14, 1972, to his colleague István Anhalt; see Eagle Minds: Selected Correspondence of István Anhalt and George Rochberg (1961–2005), ed. Alan Gillmor (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2007), 96. Robert R. Reilly, “The Recovery of Modern Music: George Rochberg in Conversation,” Tempo 219 (January 2002): 8–12 (11).

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that Rochberg belonged to the conservative if not the reactionary wing of the 1960s musical resurgence.9 But was Rochberg’s realignment, especially his adoption of tonality, indeed motivated primarily by a flight from the present? Did his use of tonality really result in mere imitations of historical models with no character of their own? And how specific (or unspecific, i. e. “generic”) were these models in the first place? It is these questions that I will examine in what follows, first by considering some aspects of Rochberg’s musical thought in the 1960s, and then by taking a closer look at the middle movement of his Third String Quartet. Let us begin with the first question. That Rochberg increasingly distanced himself from twelve-tone music in the 1960s had less to do with dissatisfaction with the technique itself than with deep misgivings about its evolution in the direction of integral, or total, serialism. This path was anathema to him: integral serialism, he felt, obstructed the direct musical gesture, born of an immediate impulse, and produced music that stuttered from one moment to the next (exactly like aleatoric music, which he criticized with equal severity) rather than aiming to achieve a clearly structured large-scale articulation of time.10 He also noted a similar bias in favor of the given instant in the increasingly rapid succession of new compositional techniques – a bias that emerged from a compulsion within the system itself, which made each new technique lose its validity as soon as it had been superseded by a newer one. He viewed this bias as the result of an exaggerated urge to be original “at all costs” and a questionable tendency to consign each previous approach rashly to the dustbin of history.11 At first sight, all of this indeed resembles an ultra-conservative critique of the avant-garde, the more so as Rochberg bolstered his arguments against the depersonalization, rationalism, and structural complexity of contemporary music by referring to the neuro-physiological basis of the human auditory faculty.12 Still, it would be wrong to view his musical thought solely from the negative vantage point of his detachment from particular avant-garde trends or to interpret his plea to keep memory alive primarily as the consequence of a personal tragedy, namely, the death of his son in 1964 (although this loss doubtless reinforced his change of heart).13 For 9

See, for example, Mark Berry, “Music, Postmodernism, and George Rochberg’s Third String Quartet,” in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 235–48; James Wierzbicki, “Reflections on Rochberg and ‘Postmodernism,’” Perspectives of New Music 45, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 108–32; Kenneth Gloag, Postmodernism in Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 91–99; and Andreas Domann, Postmoderne und Musik: Eine Diskursanalyse (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2012), esp. 72–74, 106–13, and 117–19. 10 See, for example, Rochberg, “The Structure of Time in Music” (1973), in The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music, ed. William Bolcom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 137–47, esp. 143–44. 11 See Rochberg, “The Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Survival” (1969), in The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music, revised and expanded edition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 225–41 (226–27). 12 Ibid., 230–32. 13 This view is held, for example, by David Metzer in Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twen-

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Rochberg did not ultimately aim to revert to the past (or to exclude the present); rather, he envisaged a music that would embrace and reflect various preexistent styles (including recent ones) and thus regain some of the historical “depth” that he felt the avant-garde had lost. And even though the means he chose to realize this goal were highly idiosyncratic, his vision was nurtured by ideas that were very much at the forefront of musical thinking in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example, Rochberg’s polystylistic approach can be viewed as part of a general trend to shift the concept of originality from the level of invention (i. e. the artist’s “material” in the narrow sense) to the manner in which the material is organized and assembled. More specifically, the concept of “radial time” that underpinned Rochberg’s approach closely resembled Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s idea of the Kugelgestalt der Zeit (“sphericity of time”). Rochberg once described this concept as follows: “I stand in a circle of time, not on a line. 360 degrees of past, present, and future. All around me, I can look in any direction I want to.”14 At least in theory he thus aimed at a universal historicism in which the composer’s view, to maintain the metaphor, can switch at any moment from any point on the circle to another. What he ultimately had in mind was an art in which the myriad styles and techniques of music history could coexist “on an equal footing,” i. e. without an implicit depreciation of the past as something obsolete and a concomitant valuation of the new as the only thing in tune with the times.15 It was a view fully consistent with the egalitarian spirit of the age, and a view that favored individual choice over adherence to received beliefs. In Rochberg’s words: “Everything we love belongs to us. […] The liberation of the imagination from dogma implies the freedom to move where the ear takes us and to bring together everything which seems good to it. We are not Slaves of History. We can choose and create our own time.”16 In practice, however, Rochberg did not fully exploit the potential of this idea of a universal ars combinatoria: the mainstay of his creative work, especially after his shift away from multiple quotations, centered on the polarity between a freely atonal idiom and one based on models from nineteenth-century art music. (Only occasionally, for example, in such works as the piano suite Carnival Music of 1971 or the orchestral piece Imago Mundi of 1973, did he make use of stylistic devices from early music or elements of popular music and music from other cultures.) Nevertheless, it is this very polarity that prevents us from taking the tonal passages in Rochberg’s music “at face value”: while in themselves they may indeed be taken to represent a lost ideal by evincing precisely those features that the composer found lacking in avant-garde music (repetition, return, regulated flow, pulse direction), the context in which they appear changes our perception of them. And this is even the case when the stylistic layers lie extremely far apart, as happens in the Third String Quartet. In other words, we hear the tonal middle movement of this tieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 114; and Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5:434. 14 Rochberg, “No Center” (1969), in Aesthetics of Survival (2004), 129–34 (132). 15 See, for example, George Rochberg, “Reflections on the Renewal of Music” (1972), in Aesthetics of Survival (1984), esp. 238. 16 Rochberg, “No Center,” 132 and 133.

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Example 3: George Rochberg, String Quartet No. 3, I, mm. 1–6

work differently for the simple reason that is flanked by music of strongly contrasting styles, whether through the “internal frame” of the second and fourth movements, which, as mentioned above, evoke the harmonic language of Bartók and Stravinsky, or the “external frame” of the two outside movements, the first of which (“Introduction: Fantasia”), with its abrupt gestures in parallel chords consisting of (reading upwards) perfect fifth, augmented fourth, and perfect fourth (see Example 3), stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the grand melodic arcs that unfold organically in the A-major middle movement (see Example 4). But it is not only the internal stylistic contrast that robs the tonal passages and movements in Rochberg’s music of their historical innocence, so to speak: particular features of their compositional fabric do this as well by departing from their supposed historical models in small but significant details. This can be seen if we examine the beginning of the A major middle movement (see Example 4) in relation to its purported point of reference, Beethoven’s late style. The first thing to notice in the opening of this movement is the highly unusual spacing of the four voices, i. e. the extreme distance between violin 1 and violin 2. This spacing is not found in Beethoven’s late works even though, as is well known, they very frequently explore extreme registers. To put it bluntly, the first violin constantly plays (at least) one octave too high, as also happens in the Mozart transcription in Rochberg’s Music for the Magic Theater. This upward transposition imparts an ethereal and otherworldly quality to the sound of the entire section. Indeed, the first violin has been added somewhat in the manner of a fifth voice, for the other instruments present more or less clearly a four-voice texture through the frequent use of double stops. This, too, is not to be found in Beethoven.

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Example 4: George Rochberg, String Quartet No. 3, III, mm. 1–16

Equally striking are the unusually detailed dynamic markings, which consistently swell to the middle of the measure and ebb toward the end, conflicting with the music’s subdivision into two-measure units. This is especially evident in the second violin, which carries the melody, and it causes the resolution of the suspension in measure 2 to be played with a swell rather than, as in standard classical phrasing, a decrescendo.17 If the above features raise doubts that we are dealing here with a Beethoven imitation, the same applies to the extremely slow harmonic rhythm of these opening measures. The only harmonic progression occurring in its thirty-two measures, last17 These “subversive” dynamics are emphasized in the first recording of the work, made by the Concord String Quartet in 1973 and supervised by the composer (Nonesuch H-71283), and re-released on a double CD in 1999 (New World Records 80-551-2). In contrast, the members of the Kreutzer Quartet, in their 2001 recording (Metier MSVCD 92051), tend to downplay them, and thus to “classicize” the musical texture.

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ing a full three-and-a-half minutes in performance, is the one outlined in Table 1. This gives the passage a slow-motion quality, suggesting an enhanced artificiality in which the tonal qualities of the music seem to be overemphasized in relation to its temporal movement. The effect of exaggeration is not unlike the one conveyed by a hyper-realist painting (to invoke an analogy with an artistic current that was very much en vogue at the time Rochberg’s work was written). 1

2

I

3

4

5

6

7

8

I V⁄ V V

V

9

I

10 11 12

V

13

14

15 16

I V⁄ V V

17

18

V ⁄ IV

19 20

IV

21

22

23 24

V ⁄ III

III

25

26

V ⁄ II

27 28

II

29

V

30 6 4

7 5

31 32

I

Table 1: Harmonic progression in George Rochberg’s String Quartet No. 3, III, mm. 1–32

1

2

6 4

I 1

I

1

But there is another remarkable feature to this harmonic progression: the harmonic scaffolding is virtually the same as that of another, very well-known piece of music, however remote it might be in character from Rochberg’s Adagio. The piece in question is Nicolò Paganini’s final Caprice for solo violin in A minor (op. 1, no. 24) 3– or, more precisely, its thirteen-measure initial theme, whose implicit harmonies 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 are outlined, and aligned withV the harmonic progression in Rochberg’s work, in V ⁄ IV V ⁄ III V ⁄ II V I V⁄ V I V I IV III II V ⁄V V Table 2. V

2

I

7 5

31 32

I

2

3

4

1b

2b

3b

4b

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

V

I

V

I

V

I

V

V ⁄ IV

IV

V ⁄ III

III

II

I

V⁄ V

I

9

10 11 12

13

I

V

3

4

5

6

7

8

I V⁄ V V

V

14

15 16

I V⁄ V V

17

18

V ⁄ IV

19 20

IV

21

22

V ⁄ III

23 24

III

25

26

V ⁄ II

27 28

29

II

V

27 28

29

30 6 4

7 5

31 32

I

Example 5: Nicolò Paganini, Caprices, op. 1, no. 24, mm. 1–12 (theme)

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11 12

13

14

15 16

I

V

I V⁄ V V

I

V

I V⁄ V V

1

2

3

4

1b

2b

3b

I

V

I

V

I

V

I

17

18

19 20

21

22

23 24

25

26

30 6 4

7 5

31 32

V ⁄ IV

IV

V ⁄ III

III

V ⁄ II

II

V

4b

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

V

V ⁄ IV

IV

V ⁄ III

III

II

I

V⁄ V

I

Table 2: Harmonic progression in (above) George Rochberg’s String Quartet No. 3, III, mm. 1–32, and (below) Nicolò Paganini’s Caprices, op. 1, no. 24, mm. 1–13 (theme)

I

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That this is no coincidence is evident from a genetic connection between the two pieces, a connection which, oddly enough, has been overlooked in the secondary literature on the Third String Quartet, even though Rochberg himself clearly pointed to it in his posthumously published memoirs.18 In fact, the theme of this Adagio, on which the following six variations are based, is a reworking of no. 36 from Rochberg’s Paganini variations of 1970, the Caprice-Variations for solo violin (Example 6), and this “caprice-variation,” a sort of two-voice skeleton of the harmonically padded string quartet texture, draws in turn both on Paganini’s original and on its reincarnation as no. 11 from the first volume of Johannes Brahms’s Paganini Variations (Example 7). The Brahms connection is suggested not only by the change of mode to A major and the similarities in the melodic writing of the upper voice, but also by the andante tempo which is slower than in the original, and which might be seen to represent a position midway between Paganini’s presto and Rochberg’s largo.19 Viewed genetically, the variation theme in Rochberg’s quartet thus represents the result of a transformation in several steps, extending from Paganini’s original piece via its reworkings in Brahms’s Paganini Variations and Rochberg’s own Caprice-Variations. In the process the music underwent an expansion from a single voice to a four- (or five-) voice texture and a deceleration from presto to adagio, while remaining largely within the predefined sequence of tonal harmonies and perhaps leaning toward late Beethoven. (This leaning, however, seems limited to the extreme slowness of the tempo and the borrowing of certain melodic gestures, such as the sequence of descending fourths and descending fifths in measures 1 and 3 of Example 6, which recalls the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, op. 111.) Conversely, something of each of these stages of transformation remains even at the final stage of elaboration, the quartet movement, so that the piece seems like a sort of musical hologram in which the various models overlap and the ties to history begin to blur.20 Like a number of other tonal works by Rochberg, the middle movement of his Third String Quartet is thus a piece whose multiple historical references bear a more than generic resemblance to early nineteenth-century music, but at the same time are not specific enough for the music to be classified as an imitation of a model by a particular composer from the past. Rather, the work is situated in an ambivalent realm somewhere between these two alternatives. Above all, the examples we 18 19 20

Rochberg, Five Lines, Four Spaces: The World of My Music, ed. Gene Rochberg and Richard Griscom (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 38–40. Brahms’s set of variations, in fact, provided the primary stimulus for Rochberg to compose the Caprice-Variations. See Rochberg, Five Lines, Four Spaces, 26. Parenthetically, it should be noted that several of the variations that follow the theme are likewise based on pieces from the Caprice-Variations, and that the latter also underlie certain passages in movements 1, 4, and 5. (These connections are discussed in Five Lines, Four Spaces, 38–40, where Rochberg went so far as to call the Caprice-Variations the “sourcebook” for his Third String Quartet [ibid., 39].) It is no coincidence therefore that all of these passages gravitate harmonically to A. Motivically, however, they are too remote from their point of departure, the Paganini piece, to allow for the emergence of a truly unifying force capable of counterbalancing the stylistic contrasts between the five movements.

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Example 6: George Rochberg, Caprice-Variations for solo violin, no. 36 (mm. 1–8)

Example 7: Johannes Brahms, Variations on a Theme by Paganini for piano, op. 35, vol. 1, no. 11

have examined here demonstrate that Rochberg’s use of tonality, both in its motivation and its practice, is by no means as easy to classify as it might seem at first glance, or as it is said to be in the often polemically or apologetically tinged literature. Further, these examples should also guard us against the common simplification of viewing Rochberg’s position vis-à-vis tonality as that of a “convert,” i. e., a

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composer who left one faith (atonality) and joined another (tonality),21 because Rochberg assigned tonality a rather limited and sharply defined place in his music. The stylistic polyphony described here – a polyphony that employs an artificial tonal idiom with ambiguous historical points of reference – occupied him for little more than a decade, roughly the 1970s. The works he composed during this period (including three further string quartets that he combined under the title Concord Quartets) are noteworthy for their sharp juxtapositions of different idioms. Here Rochberg explored, almost as if in a series of experiments, just “how much past” such a compositional conception could absorb, above all in a single stretch. Beginning roughly in 1980, however, he developed a musical language that is much more homogeneous in style, one which evokes the sound world of Mahler’s late symphonies and the early music of Schoenberg – and which therefore has been linked with the artistic current known as “New Romanticism.” Here the polarity between tonality and atonality continues to play an important role. But as his posthumously published theoretical study A Dance of Polar Opposites makes clear,22 he gave this role a new dimension by viewing it not primarily as an opposition between functional tonality and other idioms, but more broadly as a tension between symmetrical and asymmetrical (i. e., chromatic and diatonic) sonorities and harmonic fields. Indeed, in his later music he was as interested in the convergence and intermingling of these two spheres as in their separation and dissociation. This might well lead us to add a second chapter to Rochberg’s “adoption of tonality,” one more concerned with the reconciliation of opposites than with their conflict. That said, the chapter would also be concerned with a music that no longer stands out so distinctly (and provocatively) from the American musical landscape as was the case in his works of the early 1970s – above all the Third String Quartet. Bibliography Bernard, Jonathan. “Tonal Traditions in Art Music Since 1960.” In The Cambridge History of American Music, edited by David Nicholls, 535–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Berry, Mark. “Music, Postmodernism, and George Rochberg’s Third String Quartet.” In Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, edited by Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner, 235–48. New York: Routledge, 2002. Dixon, Joan DeVee. George Rochberg: A Bio-Bibliographic Guide to His Life and Works. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1992. Domann, Andreas. Postmoderne und Musik: Eine Diskursanalyse. Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2012. Gillmor, Alan M., ed. Eagle Minds: Selected Correspondence of István Anhalt and George Rochberg (1961–2005). Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. Gloag, Kenneth. Postmodernism in Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kriegsman, Alan M. “Peak Upon Peak of Excellence.” Washington Post, 9 September 1972. 21

22

This tag is used, for example, by Jonathan Bernard in his otherwise judiciously balanced overall assessment of Rochberg in “Tonal Traditions in Art Music Since 1960,” in The Cambridge History of American Music, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 535–66, esp. 546–47. Rochberg, A Dance of Polar Opposites: The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language, ed. Jeremy Gill (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012).

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Metzer, David. Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Reilly, Robert R. “The Recovery of Modern Music: George Rochberg in Conversation.” Tempo 219 (January 2002): 8–12. Rochberg, George. “The Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Survival.” 1969. In The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music, revised and expanded edition, 225– 41. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. ––. A Dance of Polar Opposites: The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language. Edited by Jeremy Gill. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012. ––. Five Lines, Four Spaces: The World of My Music. Edited by Gene Rochberg and Richard Griscom. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. ––. “No Center.” 1969. In The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music, revised and expanded edition, 129–34. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. ––. “Reflections on the Renewal of Music.” 1972. In The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music, edited by William Bolcom, 232–38. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Rockwell, John. “Records: Rochberg String Piece Expands Collage Limits.” New York Times, 26 September 1973. Straus, Joseph N. Twelve-Tone Music in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music. Vol. 5, The Late Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Wierzbicki, James. “Reflections on Rochberg and ‘Postmodernism.’” Perspectives of New Music 45, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 108–32. Wood, Hugh. “Thoughts on a Modern Quartet.” Tempo 111 (December 1974): 23–26.

The Macro- and Micro-Lives of Sounds in Morton Feldman’s The Viola in My Life I Judit Frigyesi What do we hear in a pitch? What does our ear and mind perceive when, at a particular moment in a composition, we face a new pitch? What emotions does a pitch provoke? I would like to experiment with an analysis that views pitch and tonality from the angle of the perception of the musical process – as fluid concepts, which are not complemented by, but somehow float within the complex terrain of our perception of the sound experience. I am aware of the fact that perception is subjective and the descriptions of one’s experience of music lack precision and consistent terminology. Already the above description of the purpose of my investigation might strike the reader as unscholarly: what do I mean by “somehow float” and by “terrain of perception”? Yet I believe that it is impossible to write about the evoked emotions – the perception – of a complex and multifaceted work in any other manner than what might sound somewhat ambiguous and unscholarly. It is impossible to give here an overview of the numerous fascinating recent studies that attempt to understand the perception of music. Arguments and counterarguments have been circulating in various interrelated fields of music cognition, music analysis, music history, semiotics and philosophy; various theses have been supported by experiments and, in turn, been called into question by subsequent experiments. I will mention here one problem that underlies most investigations that attempt to explain the perception of music. Based on studies describing experiments with both initiated and non-initiated listeners, Nicholas Cook argues that since listeners are able to hear tonal coherence only within an extremely short time span, the arrival of the tonic at the end of a large-scale work seems to have no such unifying effect: “tonal closure [at the end of a large-scale composition] does not have any very clearly defined effect on listeners’ responses.”1 On the basis of Alan Smith’s experiments, Cook claims also that the situation is similar with form: “musically sophisticated subjects can keep track [of large-scale form] but normally do not do so unless specifically asked.” As Cook goes on to say, the experiment raises questions regarding the aesthetic relevance of conscious tracking for listeners: “it is hard to believe that following the unfolding of form in such a manner can be an important source of listening pleasure if people who have the ability to do it don’t normally bother to.”2

1 2

Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 52. Ibid., 46.

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But what is the significance of the fact that the subjects in Smith’s experiment did not mention certain structural aspects when asked to describe their global experience of the piece, even though it was clear from other experiments that they could have done so? Does this mean that when not asked to conceptualize (describe in words) the form, they don’t hear it? Do we only hear what we conceptualize as having heard? We do not hear the overtones, and yet are capable of identifying the different sonorities of the instruments – wouldn’t that prove that we do hear overtones? What makes it not only difficult but virtually impossible to draw any meaningful conclusion from such experiments is that music perception occurs on the borderline of the conscious and the subconscious. In the course of listening our mind (or heart) constantly fluctuates between these two domains – if these are distinct domains at all. I don’t think that making the experience of music conscious by verbalizing it would take away music’s power to reach the subconscious. But I also don’t think that aspects of music that are not verbalized necessarily go unnoticed, or that they do not affect the listener. How, if at all, the complex unity of subconscious and conscious experiences could be analyzed remains an open question.3 The unanalyzable nature of the interaction of conscious and subconscious levels of attention appears to be one of the main problems in the analysis of Morton Feldman’s music. Scholarly and semi-scholarly writings on Feldman have grown rapidly in recent years. There is an enormous amount of general assessments of Feldman’s art – CD and program notes, popular lectures, lecture-concerts, personal remembrances, internet sites – and such semi-scholarly genres are often combined with serious analyses.4 Among scholarly topics, Feldman’s cultural environment, especially his connection to composers, painters, poets and writers, is much discussed. The determining theme in scholarly works, however, is an attempt to reconcile an aesthetic or philosophical interpretation of his music on the one hand and structural analysis on the other (see writings by Welsh, DeLio, Aliston, Griffiths, Hirata, among others).5 Articles often begin with a deeply poetic description of the personal experience of 3 4

5

I made an attempt to explain the emotional effect of the interaction of the conscious and non-conscious domains of listening in my public lecture “The Paradox of Classical Music: Gesture, Story, Speed and the Subconscious,” NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, May 9, 2013. For instance Clark Lunberry’s article on String Quartet No. 2 contains a lengthy narrative about the planned and ultimately cancelled performance of the work; Louis Goldstein’s analysis is embedded in philosophical ideas about “the shape of time”; many of Paul Griffiths’s writings contain descriptions of the music’s emotional effect, conveyed in a style closer to poetry than to scholarly writing. Lunberry, “Departing Landscapes: Morton Feldman’s String Quartet II and Triadic Memories,” SubStance 35 (2006): 17–50; Louis Goldstein, “Morton Feldman and The Shape of Time,” Perspectives on American Music Since 1950, ed. James R. Heintze (New York: Garland, 1999), 67–80; Griffiths, notes for recording ECM New Series 1798, 4765777. John Welsh, “Projection I (1950),” in The Music of Morton Feldman, ed. Thomas DeLio (New York: Excelsior Music Publishing, 1996), 21–35; Thomas DeLio, “Last Pieces 3 (1959),” in ibid., 39–68; Alistair Noble, Composing Ambiguity: The Early Music of Morton Feldman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Griffiths, Modern Music and After: Directions Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Catherine Costello Hirata, “The Sounds of the Sounds Themselves: Analyzing the Early Music of Morton Feldman,” Perspectives of New Music 34 (1996):

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listening to Feldman’s music, and then move on to systematic discussion of structures. But these two sides – the emotional/poetic and the strictly structural – do not in the end connect. It is rare for an analyst to insist on keeping alive her original philosophical question, as Catherine Costello Hirata does in her path-breaking work. I do not want to claim that I have arrived at an analytical method that reconciles emotional experience and structural analysis or even to suggest that such reconciliation is possible. What I attempt in the following is to recount those ideas I arrived at by forcing myself to ask, with regard to every detail of the structural analysis: how does this relate to what I experienced while listening to the piece? I I have been studying and teaching The Viola in my Life I (1970) in courses and creative writing workshops for almost ten years. In my courses, whether we deal with unfamiliar music or with the standard Classical repertory, participants are asked to come to terms with their emotions as they emerge during the listening. They are asked to listen to the piece on their own and make an attempt to become aware of what they feel and what kind of thoughts and sensations occur to them during the listening and after the last note has faded away. The listening experiments and later individual and group meetings are too complex and subtle to be explained here in detail. This particular piece evokes some of the strongest and most personal reactions. These reactions, at least those that students have shared with me, have become part of my assessment of the piece. What is this piece about? Are we the spectators at a Greek drama with a lonely actor (the solo viola) on the stage declaiming his adventures of epic dimensions in front of a wise but indifferent chorus? Is it the story of a ray of light shattered by the circling of the planets? Is it “things” extinguished long ago so that now only their voices sound across a hollow and deserted terrain? Is it a bird trying to soar in a confined landscape? Is it life’s attempt to be born in the midst of unfeeling matter? Is it a stage with masked personages moving around a masked protagonist? Is it an image of memory coming back but without being able to move the story from its stasis? Is it the shocked quietness of recollection, in the sense both of remembering and of gathering oneself together? Two of the above descriptions are by Feldman himself, another is by Griffiths, and the rest were told to me by participants in courses and workshops.6 In spite of their seeming differences, the above images, situations, and stories share a basic essence. All capture a primeval human consciousness, a moment of – or a journey

6

6–27. I find the descriptions of emotional experience in some of the above writings not only precise but also beautiful. Feldman, “The Viola in My Life,” in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 90–91; Griffiths, ECM recording notes.

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toward – the realization of existence within cosmic nothingness.7 It is the loneliness of our unknowable existence in the midst of, against, or framed by, the breathing and transforming, yet indifferent and unknowable (“masked”) sonorous context. These are images and fantasies to capture life’s cosmic loneliness – that ever-changing and yet static environment within or against which, life struggles to remember itself. During the series of experiments I carried out on myself in order to come to terms with what I felt while listening to this piece, I gave myself the exercise of marking, in memory, those moments that sounded somehow special. After weeks, in the course of which I listened to the piece several times, I opened the score and began to read it as if it were a story. This visual and mental work, complemented by my memory of the sound of the piece, was a great pleasure: it was like tracing a past experience. I began my analysis by drawing a table in which I named each event of the piece, “translating” the notes to signs on the paper, measure by measure, sound by sound. Except for a few instances, I ignored the pitch content. The table is based on the instrumentation and performing instruction – on the sonority that included, for me, the register, but only rarely the actual pitch. I tried to create a blueprint of the piece as a story of “colors.” Table 1 is the result of that work. The cursive large numbers on the top line of every system indicate my extremely tentative sectioning of the piece and the line below the corresponding measure numbers. Other lines from top to bottom correspond to the parts of the viola, piano, the ensemble of flute and strings, and at the bottom, the percussion. The instruments and performing instructions follow the customary abbreviations (Fl, Vl, Vc, pizz, tr = tremolo, etc.); the meaning of other signs is as follows: =viola, CH = chord/cluster (meaning always also = piano), ◊ = harmonics. I use Greek letters (γ, ε, λ, π, etc.) to mark a chord or motive that recurs identically, usually within a short time span. In exceptional cases, I have marked the pitch in brackets. Such a table is possible to draw only because in this work the musical event that corresponds to our concept of motive is a single note or chord, and furthermore, the manner of performance of the notes and their distribution among the instruments are also limited. The work is composed of a few basic elements each associated with an instrument: (1) the motive of the viola: a single note played crescendo; (2) the motive of the piano: a single chord (cluster) played piano; (3) the motive of the flute, violin and cello: a single note that is either natural, harmonics, or pizzicato (in the following, I will refer to any single or combined utterance of these instruments as pertaining to “the ensemble”); (4) the motive of the percussion instruments: a single note played with tremolo; (5) one additional motive: silence for all instruments. 7

Space limitations preclude my elaborating a discussion of the concept of the primeval and its importance for Feldman’s art, though it remains indispensable for the argument I pursue here. Among the works influential for my conceptualization of Feldman’s music in this manner were Joseph Campbell’s writings on primitive mythology and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (La poétique de l’espace, 1958).

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Table 1 cont.

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These five elements or motives appear in various permutations and combinations and, as we progress into the piece, motives expand, the playing style is transformed, and the roles of the instruments change. Finally, at the end of the piece, this system breaks down entirely, giving way to something strikingly different. While drawing Table 1, I was surprised to find how often elements recur in exactly the same manner in the course of the piece (these are framed by {} on the table). The musical process, which seems to be constantly changing, is interwoven with little hidden symmetries – quasi-songs – which, because of the complexity of the whole, are barely noticable. The miniature symmetrical forms, like all other events and formations, emerge and vanish with the fleeting moment. And yet we feel this emerging-disappearing symmetry somehow in the subconscious domain of our brain. What is most striking in this work, and in Feldman’s music in general, is the perfection with which he creates an integrity within a musical progression that exists on two levels: on the level of the macro and that of the micro, and in addition to these, and in spite of the seamless continuity of the music, there is also a sense of a sequence of “almost-phrases.” It is like the flow of water. One may sit on the bank of the river for hours without being able to grasp what a single wave-motion really looks like, where it begins and ends. The exact shape and speed and color of each wave is far too complex to be captured by the mind. One perceives the flow of the water as a continuous and undividable whole – an eternal movement – barely noticing the micro-drama of the clashing waves. Is that small trembling on the surface of the water the afterthought of the previous wave or the beginning of a new one? How many shades of colors are merged in a wave and are they the same as those of the wave that went by a second ago? Like the waves, the segments of Feldman’s piece are not variants of one another – they create an eternally moving phenomenon in which the whole and its elements become inseparable. The representation of such a process can never be exact. How shall we listen to this piece? Space limitations do not permit mentioning those of Feldman’s writings that gave me the initial impetus for thinking about this piece in two intercalated levels: micro and macro. As a point of direction, I would say that what I mean by “macro” should be understood as the global experience of the work, what Feldman sometimes refers to as the “abstract” quality, the “inexplicable” or the “atmosphere,” or that “other place” to which music should take us. By “micro,” I mean an attitude that Feldman writes about countless times: the autonomous life of individual sounds, the conception of the sound as a living being and the place of the composer (and the listener) as being within the sounds.8 8

On “autonomous nature,” “the life of sounds,” or “the composer/listener’s being within the sounds” see, for example, the following pages in Feldman’s collected writings: Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964–1987, ed. Chris Villars (London: Hyphen Press, 2015), 28, 32, 51, 55, 56, 77, 92, 144, 237; and Morton Feldman Essays, ed. Walter Zimmermann (Wasserburg: Beginner Press, 1985), 39, 63, 64, 69, 77, 104, 107, 114. On the experience of the “abstract,” the “inexplicable,” “atmosphere” and the “other place,” see Morton Feldman Says, 40, 92, 69, 145, 138; and Morton Feldman Essays, 87, 107.

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When, after completing my assignment, I looked over Table 1, I realized that it was marked all over with circles, asterisks, exclamation marks, and wavy lines, in multiple colors. In my memory, the piece reminded me of the surface of a silent and almost motionless lake with minuscule vibrations. It was only when I forced myself to descend to the details that I began to be able to recall those moments that I felt as special. I realized that under this seemingly calm surface lies a constantly evolving life in that each moment holds a lived-through experience. Barely four measures go by without an unexpected and striking event. But once I noticed this, I realized also that these “events in the lives of the notes” – the micro-level – amounted to threads of story-lines perceptible also on the macro level. One such thread is the attempt to “move out” from a framework already established. I marked on Table 1 the beginning and/or culminating moments of such attempts by placing asterisks (********) under those instruments where the drama occurs. This line is most evident in the viola part. The note repetitions, sudden changes of registers, and later, the twice-reiterated upward reaching gesture (mm. 54, 60) signal the viola’s attempt to escape – in Feldman’s metaphor – “like a bird trying to soar in a confined landscape.”9 I felt also that changes and transitions in the color of the percussion instruments amount to a particular story line. We become aware of this thread already at the beginning. After the balance of high and low – alteration of tenor and bass drum in sections 1–4 (mm. 1–16) – begins a gradual descent (in sonority): repeated bass drum tremolo and then the timpani (sections 5–8, mm. 17–30), as if the trembling above and around would sink and transfigure into the trembling of the earth. In the course of the listening, I discerned sonorities which I felt were especially beautiful. They impressed me as if coming from another world. I marked these with the sign ҈ (the circularity and the fluffiness of this sign suggesting their lightness and beauty). Such a sound appears first in m. 29. We hear in this measure a single note (B) orchestrated in such a way that it sounds almost immaterial: the flute’s note colored by the violin’s harmonics. This is not an entirely new idea, but previously in the piece this sonority appeared together with the piano’s cluster. It is hard for me to explain why I felt the gentleness and almost immaterial character of this sound (which recurs several times in the piece) as an element pointing toward that “other place.” After the first few sections of relatively “normal” sonorities of the tenor and bass drums and timpani, in section 12 (m. 47), the tremolo moves to the temple block. I found that sonority also beautiful and as if coming from a distant terrain, but its beauty was of a different nature. It reminded me of something hollow and pure, clean and mysterious – the vibration of the cosmos. I used Ԇ Ԇ Ԇ Ԇ for this cosmic sound. I marked several sonorities with this sign, including the bass drum/ timpani oscillation in mm. 55–58. To me, these measures were awe-inspiring. It is as if there were no longer solid matter below and around – as if matter were fluctuating according to its own will. The sound of vibraphone and the glockenspiel are also marked by this sign. They are obviously the messengers from the other world 9

Feldman, “The Viola in My Life,” in Friedman, Give My Regards, 90.

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– this sonority and these instruments will become central in the last part of the piece. It cannot be an accident that these cosmic sounds are prominent around and after one of the most striking and extraordinary events of the piece. In m. 44, a few measures after the viola’s emphatic note repetitions in dialogue with the tenor drum (mm. 35–38) and a few measures before the entry of the temple block, the piano-sonority, as if it would fall out of this world, plunges into a chromatic cluster in a very low register – something completely out of character. A few phrases later, after the first appearance of the temple block (m. 47), and a measure after the viola’s first statement of its only motive (a searching upward reaching gesture, m. 54), and superposed on the alternating timpani-bass drum sequence (described above, mm. 55–58), the piano-personage suddenly “flies up” and, as if touching the skies for a moment, hits a C octave (in m. 55). It is perhaps also no accident that in between these two dramatic sonorities, the pitches D-F-A, which as we shall see function as a kind of tonic frame, are reiterated over and over. I leave it to the reader to discover other story lines, either those marked on Table 1, or those to be discovered by drawing a different analysis-table according to his/her own liking. What any analysis will surely agree on, however, is that the story of multi-directional and intercalated dramas breaks down at measure 85 or 86 (85 if we regard silence as the beginning, 86 if we regard silence as occuring at the end of the preceding section). Retrospectively, I realized that all the above threads of “sound-stories,” which in the course of listening had meaning in and of themselves, were actually leading toward this last section. Feldman writes about the unusual style of this piece and also about the fact that its last part is like stepping into another realm of existence: the themes here are almost like “found objects” (“photographs pasted on a painting”).10 A door opens and allows us to glimpse the world on the other side. It is the past, memory, hope, life after death. The motives remain stable: they repeat over and over again without variation: only the length of the notes and the silences between them change as they become gradually more fragmentary. A dream is frozen and slowly vanishes. Visions and sounds of things that had never been and that, in spite of all, are real and immediate – the bird call, the bell, and the flight of birds – are halted, at the end of each attempted flight, by an invisible, gentle but solid “wall” (the violin harmonics and a high-pitched percussion tremolo). These are my signs:

the bird call,

10

; the bell,

; the flight of birds,

.

Richard Bernas and Adrian Jack, “The Brink of Silence,” Music and Musicians (June 1972); and Tracy Caras and Cole Gagne, “Morton Feldman,” Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1982); both reproduced in Morton Feldman Says, 44 and 91–93.

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II Whereas I feel relatively certain in proposing that motives, performing styles, and sounds – an ascending phrase, the transition from bass drum to timpani, a solo vibraphone note, a measure-long silence, a long crescendo note – provoke emotions, sensations, or states of minds, or even associations and images, it is difficult to say that the difference between the pitch D and the pitch E has such evocative powers (except perhaps for those with absolute pitch). Feldman himself thought of the “life of the sound” in terms of sonority rather than pitch, saying, in fact, “I can’t get that excited about pitch relationships.”11 In spite of that, I will argue that pitch connections and even single pitches can be heard and remembered, and that these, although always part of a larger sonority, are crucial in creating the atmosphere of this piece. Within this sound-atmosphere, the piano has a special position, as if on a separate stage. It does not respond and does not interact but is, emphatically, present. The piano’s chord clusters form a narrative in their own right, though in the following analysis, I will not discuss this narrative or its function for the piece. Before I explain how I hear the piece on the micro-level, I must make a detour apologizing for the rhetoric I will use. I will attempt to grasp the “events” in the “lives of the sounds” on the micro level by presenting them in a dramatic manner, sometimes almost like scenes in a theater. The reader might feel that such dramatization of minuscule musical sounds, and, in general, of Feldman’s music is a betrayal. It gives the impression that the piece is somehow “romantic” and “expressive,” contrary to Feldman’s statement that there is “absolutely no drama” in his music. But Feldman also wrote that he is “concerned with their lives” – i. e., those of sounds – and that he is a “character in the piece.”12 I believe that the effect we associate with the macro level of the music – its overall atmosphere of “silence” and that it gravitates toward the abstract and toward the “other plane” as seen in Table 1 – derives also from the intense and livedthrough “drama” of the micro-level.13 It may be that Feldman thought of this narrative when he spoke of “the lives of the sounds.” This narrative is not confined, however, to musical-structural ideas of contrast, transition, theme, recapitulation, tension, suspension, resolution, and the like. Michael Eldred was perhaps the first to put the emphasis on the lack of traditional logic in Feldman’s compositions: “With Feldman, the break with the lo/goj is not so visible and demonstrable, nor spectacular, but it is there and resides hidden in the enigmatic nature of his mu11 12 13

Feldman, “Conversations without Stravinsky,” Feldman Essays, 64. About Feldman’s emphasis on sonority/sound as opposed to pitch, see also Morton Feldman Says, 27, 143. Morton Feldman Says, 138, 144, and 237. Several scholars have attempted new techniques of analysis and a different style when speaking about twentieth-century music. Among those that were influential for this article, I would like to highlight Hirata’s essay mentioned above; Dora Hanninen’s “A Theory of Recontextualization in Music: Analyzing Phenomenal Transformation of Repetition,” Music Theory Spectrum 25 (2003): 59–97; and Lawrence Ferrara, “Phenomenology as a Tool for Musical Analysis,” Musical Quarterly 70 (1984): 355–73. First and foremost, I learned this manner of hearing music from my teacher, György Kurtág. I have not found scholarly studies experimenting with analyzing micro-level sound events in Feldman’s music similarly to what I propose here.

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sic.”14 Eldred’s approach was inspirational for me but with one correction: I do not hear the music’s lack of lo/goj [logoi] as ambiguity. What I hear is that the life of the sounds on the micro level does not always, or perhaps never fully, touches the conscious domain during listening.15 By saying this, I do not want to suggest that the narratives I am describing cannot be heard, but rather that they are not perceived and conceptualized as dramas during the listening – they become, like the vibrations of the surface of the water, part of an atmosphere. Like the subjects in Cook’s and Smith’s experiments, listeners are able to hear these events if forced to do so, but they don’t conceptualize them if they “merely” listen. Who are the characters – Feldman’s “sounds” – acting in this drama? Are they the color of the particular instruments? The individual pitches? Certain sound effects? * * * The piece opens with a long solo note played crescendo by the viola. The protagonist comes to the stage and takes a place in the center. The viola awakens to its voice, character, playing style, its typical “gesture,” and to a pitch center: A. Its appearance is slow, calm and restrained, almost like light that gradually becomes stronger at dawn, or like the first sound that emerges from silence. To the viola’s A comes the response of the surrounding world – the chord (m. 4). There is an immediate tension: the viola stands on a low platfom, while the response comes as if from above (the lowest note of the chord is higher than the viola’s A). In theater and in life, one of the most meaningful aspects of a situation is where one stands in relation to the rest of the world. Curiously, this chord is preceded by an arpeggio in the cello that remains as if hanging in the air – as if another character, perhaps a spirit, was supposed to enter, but at the moment the door opened, had vanished. The chord comes from the higher spheres, but its emphasis on the pitch A (in flute and violin) pulls the unfolding melodic line downward, almost “correcting” the viola, as if it were out of tune. At the same time, this A, although in absolute terms a lower pitch, sounds more brilliant and lighter, timbrally, than the somber A of the viola. The chord is followed by a bass drum tremolo and with this, the circle of the sound universe is completed for the moment. In the center stands a human protagonist – human, because of the long and natural note “spoken” in the middle register, the sonority and associations of the string instrument (and in particular, the viola), and its crescendo. Above and around is the vibration of the air, and the noises 14 15

Michael Eldred, The Quivering of Propriation: A Parallel Way to Music (1998), section II.4.4, “A musical subversion of harmonically logical time (Feldman)”; published by artefact: http:// www.arte-fact.org/qvrpropn.html (accessed Feb. 2016). In writing about what I would call the intrusion of the micro into the macro, Noble talks about states of tension: “Part of the difficulty is that, while Feldman’s music is often described as delicate, quiet, passive and gently intuitive, it is also, in some circumstances, irritating, discomforting, or even profoundly disturbing” (Composing Ambiguity, 1). For related perspectives, see Bryn Harrison, “The Auditive Memory and its function in the late works of Morton Feldman” (http://www.cnvill.net/mfbrynh.htm), and Goldstein, “Morton Feldman.”

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of the spatial environment: the airy sound of the flute, the bell-like cluster of the piano in the middle and high register, and the harmonics of the violin. Below is the bass drum tremolo – a trembling of the earth. Then, there is another chord (m. 6), as if the surrounding noises would now descend in order to approach the viola. The piano’s chord sinks considerably and it is now the cello that plays the A harmonics – two octaves lower, below the register of the viola. It is as if these noises would seduce and call to the viola: “here is the A, we bring it down to you, take it, come toward us.” It is as if the A pitch itself were a character: a flower, an idea, a little creature that is shown and offered. At its next entry the viola sinks to the pitch A (m. 7). Is this a response, a gesture of obedience, or a spontaneous motion to assimilate to what is around? The tenor drum enters (m. 8), and at the end of the same measure there is a hesitant and barely audible upbeat. It is again as if something would want to begin, as if something from behind the stage were almost about to enter. But the upbeat leads to nothingness: a full measure of complete silence (m. 9). This moment of silence – beautiful, moving and ghostly – signals silence’s significance within this piece. It is silence – the nothing – from which the sound of the viola was born. I hear, retrospectively, that the arpeggio upbeat was supposed to lead also to a measure of silence, but the sounds around – the chord – interrupted. Silence seems to be almost a personage – only it is unseeable and unhearable. Silence seems to lurk all around: it is behind every motion.16 This upbeat, which is not identical to but rhymes with the earlier arpeggio, is a sign. In my hearing, this is an upbeat pointing already to the last section – a promise of the silence that precedes the last part of the piece, and also perhaps the forshadowing of the grace note of the bird call. The fact that this upbeat leads to silence makes us understand that, in a sense, the last part of the piece is itself silence – a silence (“that other place”) made audible for the viola, and for us humans. After the silent measure comes a chord (m. 10) that is somehow different from the previous two: it is at once more cluster-like and more widely spaced. At this point, the viola protagonist is disturbed and confused, entering a beat after the chord has begun on a low D pitch. There is definite urgency to this statement: this is the first instance of those few when the viola does not wait for the end of an event in order to play its melody as a solo, but interrupts. Could it be that the viola now corrects its obedient A back to its own tonality? Or could it be that it sensed the message of the silence? In any case, this descent to D is an arrival, marking the A-D pitch axis, which – as we will see – functions as a kind of tonic axis for the piece. I hear the following few measures as an unfolding play between D-A centered and C-G centered tonal assemblages, constantly contradicted and led astray by As and Ds. But there is more at stake here than the development of the pitch content. 16

Since John Cage’s path-breaking Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), the concept of silence has entered broader aesthetic and music-analytical discourse; see e. g. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Styles of Radical Will (New York: Picador, 1969), 3–30; and David Metzer, “Modern Silence,” Journal of Musicology 23 (2006): 331–74. An interesting attempt to incorporate silence into structural analysis is Welsh’s “Projection I (1950),” mentioned above.

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As we have seen, already at the beginning, the viola’s crescendo sonority is positioned as being within and at the same time standing against its surrounding. Its opening A was both echoed and corrected by the responding chord. Still, the totality of the experience is balanced and the music flows in quasi-symmetrical phrases (see Table 1). Yet just when we reach the last phrase of the would-be “stanza,” there is another full measure of silence (m. 13). As if that silence were a reminder of a path forgotten, the viola with its next entry (m. 14) not only “agrees” to the pitch A but imitates also the performing style (harmonics) belonging to the violin and cello. Then, realizing that this is still not enough, it repeats the A harmonics while joining in with the chorus of the chord (m. 15). This might be a minuscule scene, yet one of great significance: it is the first moment we see the viola “act”: as if it were asking its surroundings to accept it, and for achieving this, it were ready to give up its solo status and sound-character. In order to escape loneliness, the viola is trying to become something that it is not. Paradoxically, the chord that comes as a response to the viola’s A (m. 15) does not itself contain the pitch A. The flute and the violin must remember their As from the first chord, and besides, they have just heard the viola playing it. The piano, moreover, plays here exactly the same chord as at the beginning: chord π, which at its first appearance was complemented by flute and violin As (m. 4 = m. 15). It is as if the viola seeks to begin all over again, now fitting in with the A sound of its surroundings. But the flute and violin glide out of this would-be perfect picture by asserting G’s (rather than restating As). A perfect union of protagonist and surroundings is not to be. Yet I don’t feel sadness or drama in this chord. It has all of the first chord (with the viola now contributing the pitch A) but it is fuller and more embracing because of the added sonority of the viola and also because it contains the G. To my ear, G is not a contradiction to the A but its neighbor – its color. If we look ahead in the score, we realize that the pitch G will become the voice of the viola responding to the bird call. It may be that the sounds of the space do not merely respond to (or contradict) the viola, but foreshadow the viola’s future voice in ways as yet unknowable. In the next moment, as if coming to its senses, the viola returns to its normal playing style, arriving at the pitch F (m. 17) to complete a D minor triad (perhaps a tonic triad). We would expect now a chord played by the piano and, then, the “cadential” drum roll, the event sequence already established in the opening passage. But the bass drum enters immediately, preventing the other instruments from reflecting or responding with their chord. One beat into the bass drum tremolo, without waiting for it to finish, the viola enters again (m. 18), correcting its previous F to a G (as if saying: “oh, no, this is not the end yet, don’t interrupt; I need a response from the piano and ensemble, but if you don’t like my F, I will try something else”).17 After this correction to G, the response from the piano and ensemble ar17

Feldman’s descriptions (see Note 9 above) of sounds as creatures that “breath,” have their “own lives,” and don’t allow themselves be “pushed around,” inspires me to make the viola “speak.”

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rives, curiously, with emphasis on the pitch D (flute and violin). It is as if these sounds from all around were encouraging the viola to stick to its own central tone and put things back in order. Now would be the moment – after the chord – for the drum to close the phrase. But the viola interrupts again with an emphatic jump to a high D (m. 20) – thereby opposing the flute/violin D suggestion, and also abandoning its normal playing register.18 When, after this “outcry,” the drum enters, its tremolo no longer impresses as closure but rather like some menacing roar. It is no accident that here, for the first time, the pattern of alternation between bass and tenor drum is broken (the bass drum enters twice, at m. 18, and again at m. 21). After the viola arrives at its D, whose high register is “dramatized” by the bass drum’s tremolo, we hear a beautiful and calming chord/cluster whose prominent message, for me, is the flute’s reiteration of the pitch D (m. 22). Though blurred by the chord and contradicted by the cello’s E, D sounds as the most stable tonal element so far, having been stated a few measures earlier by the viola and three measures beforehand by the flute (mm. 12, 19). It is as if now the flute sonority (the air) would caress the viola, offering reassurance that it has a place. A new dialogue begins in m. 23. The viola remains in the high register and moves toward a new tonal axis: C-E. This gesture, in an almost absurdly high register for the viola, is like a desperate cry to break out, to fly away, to reach the sky. The totality of melodic experience within the texture, however, is more complex because the notes of the viola are intercalated in a hocket-like manner with those of the other instruments. The viola’s high C is answered by a flute D in the same octave, and after the viola’s E, the timpani’s first entry pulls the melody down to the low register to the pitch C (= D). This sequence of viola-flute-viola-timpani pitches create a latent melody, C-D-E-D (= C), the first three in the high register, the last a tremendous fall. The pitch that the viola has tried to escape (D) now sounds from the depths with a trembling sonority – itself a gravitational force. (Feldman: “The lower register is gravity. If you omit it and use only higher registers, there is no gravity. The music remains supended and ethereal.”19) Perhaps the timpani tremolo is a call to obey gravity: after “hearing” it, the viola collapses back to its low register, onto the pitch E, while only the cello attempts a barely audible, hesitant reminder of the tonic D (m. 27). After this series of dramatic exchanges comes a haltingly beautiful moment. For the length of a whole measure, we hear a single B – a clear and transparent sound as if coming from heaven (the sonority is that of the flute colored by a violin harmonic, as noted before). The B rhymes with the viola’s preceding E, the progression sounding almost like a modal motion from subdominant to tonic, enhancing the sense of something pure, from a forgotten past. It is as if the surrounding voices of the flute and viola would transfigure into a new character, into a new sound, even a new instrument, that, instead of pulling back the viola – showing it its place and marking its separateness – would show the path that leads forward. But 18 19

Timbre and range were more important to Feldman than pitches; Tom Johnson, “Remembrance,” Musik Texte (December 1987), reprinted in Morton Feldman Says, 36. Johnson, “Remembrance,” 35.

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perhaps it always had been this way. Not long ago, the flute and violin opposed the viola’s A with their G, foretelling its pitch for the last section. Or perhaps, it is not the violin and the flute, but the pitch B that is the character on stage and that now enters? The idea of “masked characters moving on a stage” is indeed visionary.20 The measure after this “voice from the distance” brings the moment of remembrance: the cello enters with a long C and, joined, after a beat, by the E of the timpani tremolo (m. 30). Both pitches echo events heard not long before: C echoes the m. 26 timpani roll; E is the timpani’s belated acceptance of the highest pitch of the viola’s outcry in mm. 24–25. It is as if the high sound of the flute and violin is pointing to the outside and the future, while the low-register instruments resonate with events already gone by. The B is a signpost signalling to the viola it should follow the E-B tonal axis in its search for new terrains. For two measures, the viola insists on the high register but using already the pitch E (mm. 31–32, echoed by the violin in m. 34), then it finally arrives at its normal register and at the pitch B. Finding its register and tonality, the viola now reiterates long Bs several times (mm. 35–38). This is a gesture of searching but one that is more stable, persistent and balanced than what went before, as if the viola already knows which way to go. During the repeated Bs, spread out over four measures, the viola is almost alone, conversing only with the “pitchless” high sound of the tenor drum: a relief after the density of sounds and directions that has populated the stage until now. And as if this moment of calmness were also a new beginning, a measure after this dialogue, we hear a chord whose prominent pitch is A (m. 39) – the same pitch dominant in the first chord of the piece. It is as if a space were opening: the flute’s A is in the higher octave, while the cello, from its lower register, produces an A harmonic. Again, I feel almost as if the characters are not the flute and cello.21 It is A itself that enters and that, after all that it has gone through, is now more full and beautiful and grand. The A is a character with delicate and hesitant motions: it is the twin of the A, correcting it, supporting it, encouraging it. It is the hesitant motion of the viola in its attempt to join in. And it always remains in our mind that this pitch – the dominant pitch in the first chord – was part of the first sonority of the space as it opened around the viola. The most dramatic return to the D-A tonal axis takes place a few measures after the section just described in a passage that, like all the others, is both a recollection of memories and an opening towards new terrain. Events now follow one another with enormous speed, bringing something new and unexpected almost in every measure. In measure 44, we hear the shocking low-register piano cluster (discussed earlier) that is a pivotal moment leading toward the last part of the piece. The cluster awakens the pitch D, as if the earth were opening and Erda – the voice of Earth – were emerging to fortell the future. Erda speaks here through the voice of the viola and timpani together, both playing the same low D (mm. 44–45). This remarkable reconciliation of forces and characters – a momentary unification of the sounds 20 Throughout this section the piano remains separate in its world of alternating clusters (γ and λ). 21 Feldman insisted on the importance of sounds as such as opposed to the sounds as belonging to instruments. Morton Feldman Says, 27, 48–49, 143; Morton Feldman Essays, 114.

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of viola and timpani – is memorable and it is perhaps no accident that the rest of the surrounding world resonates to it by the magically beautiful reiteration of A, the opening pitch of the piece, in flute and a cello harmonic (mm. 46–47), responding to D and completing the D-A tonal axis. But the pitch and sonority connects also with earlier passages. It sounds like the “brightening” of the As of the last full chord before the piano cluster (whose sonority may still be in our ears from m. 39); the flute/string harmonic timbre also recalls the color of the earlier B (m. 29), but because of the expanded register and the open color of the pitch A, the new sound (at m. 46) impresses as even more fragile and “airy” than before. The flute’s and cello’s A pitch is repeated, superposed on the violin’s harmonic and the piano chord (m. 47), and two beats later, with this magical sonority still sounding, the viola enters with its “searching” high-register repetition of E. The gesture is similar to the earlier repeating Bs (mm. 35–38), though much more tense because of the higher register. Superposed on the viola’s voice, and entering in exact synchronization with it, is the first sound of the temple block. This “cosmic” sound (to my ears) accentuates the loneliness of the viola. The viola is searching desperately, while the familiar sounds of its environment have already disappeared; the only reponse comes as if from the void. After the chord fades away, only the viola and temple block remain on stage (mm. 47–50) creating an almost frightening emptiness. Then, unexpectedly, there is an attempt (in m. 51) at a strange “recapitulation.” Within the time-frame of a single measure, the viola plays several notes: a density of events unusual not only for the viola but for the piece in general. This measure-long music (with upbeat) is like a series of miniature flash-backs superposed on one another, each vanishing in a split second. There is a recollection of the arpeggio that appeared only once before (with differing pitch content), at the opening of the piece. The arpeggio here leads to the note A and continues into the harmonic G. A has already appeared wearing many different costumes. For the viola, most importantly, the returning A recalls its first gesture of the piece – the descent from A to A (mm. 1–8) that offers an attempt to fit in. The low G in m. 51, meanwhile, foreshadows the viola’s response at the end of the piece. To me, this strangly cramped measure is one of the mysteries of Feldman’s design: why these ideas, why here and why in such an uncharacteristically dense manner? It is as if not just the viola, but Feldman himself – the protagonist(s) of this journey – suddenly speaks out of character. It is perhaps no accident that, just after this measure so loaded with undigested memories, the vibraphone should enter for the first time (m. 52). It completes the quasi- D minor chord with the bell-like resonating sound of a low F. After a measure, in which the vibraphone F is echoed by the cello pizzicato and the earlier viola G is reinforced by the flute and the violin (m. 53), the viola plays, for the first time, its ascending four-note motive (m. 54). Could it be that the viola senses that the vibraphone’s bell-like sound, which will be part of the sonority of the bird call, is a sign that its journey is close to its goal? In a piece in which till now we have heard exclusively separate notes, the viola’s almost romantic motive, with the evocation of a gesture trying to reach upward, is heartrending. It is answered by the D in the low register – by an awe-inspiring passage (mm. 55–58) of alternating timpani and

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Example 1: Morton Feldman, The Viola in My Life I, pitch summary

bass drum strokes, in which the stability of the earth seems to shake itself loose. And just as matter is trembling beneath our feet, the piano reaches up to the skies, touching for a fleeting moment a high C (m. 55). It appears that, until the last part of the piece, a blueprint of the music’s global pitch progression might be captured by tracing the sequence of pitches played by the viola. I summarize this pitch content in the upper two staves in Example 1; in the lower three staves I show a pitch summary of all voices of the last part. The point of stability within the viola’s unstable universe is the D-F-A pitch assemblage and its shadow universe of corrections and tonal counterpoles: D-A. The C major-like motive (contrary to inherited Western conceptions of “light”) is a gesture of desperation and hysteria, typically in the high register – one that leads the protagonist nowhere (D-C-E in mm. 20–25, C-E-C and F-G in mm. 67–70). There is also the motive of searching with persistence: a long repeating B or E (see mm. 31, 35, 47, and 79). Finally, there is the viola’s only clear gesture – that of an arm stretching upward – but with a timidity and hesitation that is moving. The viola at first tries the pitches G-E-G-B, but when this does not seem to work, corrects its pronounciation, so to speak, replacing each pitch with one a neighboring half step lower or higher: F-E-A-C (mm. 54, 60). It is as if the viola contains several personages within itself: one hesitant and wanting to fit in, another hysterical and desperately trying to break out, a third searching patiently and persistently for new terrain. Each of these has its characteristic tonality reinforcing my idea that the personalities in these piece are perhaps not

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the instruments but pitches or timbres (or groups of pitches and timbres) speaking through the voices of the instruments. III How should we interpret the tonal situation at the end of the piece? For the first time, the piano and ensemble join in creating the experience of one global tonal feel. The chord of the bird call (m. 86, 87, etc.) has, for me, a B minorish atmosphere, with a natural seventh. The upper voice in the piano outlines melodically a descending minor third, A-F, under which sounds a prominent B pitch. If we list all chord tones, we arrive at a B minor scale pattern with F coloring: B-C-E-(F) F-A. The bell motive (mm. 93, 95, 97, etc.) does not seem to confine itself to any tonality: the cluster is too dense to be conceptualized as having a tonal center. But perhaps this is the source of the beauty of subsequent themes: the quasi-tonal sound of the bird call is followed by the cluster-like noise of bells. The last motive, the flight of birds (mm. 99, 102, etc.) once again conveys a tonal impression: it is a tower of fifths (C-G-D) with added pitches (D and E) that sound as chromatic jumping-off points. The flight of fifths is halted by the violin’s A harmonic – once again, as if to echo the conspicuous As of the first chord in the piece. In my reading, these motives fulfill the desire of the viola for the serenity and stillness of loneliness. Bird calls, bells, and the halted flight of birds: the call of the bright terrain of the afterlife; the magical dream one is always searching for and never reaches. And yet during the motives of the bird-call and bells, the viola speaks as if distinctly separate from these motives. Its separation is evident from the spacing of its response – coming like an afterthought – but also from the tonal aspect: its G is posited against the B minorish sound of the bird call. To the cluster of the bell motive, the viola answers with the pitch D – the home tonic from which it had earlier sought to break away. In the motive of flight, its pitches finally cohere in a G-D fifth, only to be halted by the violin’s A. Could the emphasis on the pitch G and on the G-D axis be the viola’s last thought? Perhaps G should be conceived not as contradicting the quasi-B minor tonality of the bird call but as its would-be submediant? But this is not how it sounds. Is the G a descent to another even more unfamiliar existence? Is the consonant and pure interval – G-D – an arrival, or something hollow and empty, a purity beyond hope? And what are we to make of the last two measures of the piece? The beautiful sound of the piano and glockenspiel with the cello harmonic (m. 125) gives a feeling of F minor (because of the high register pitches), the C being emphasized by the sonority of the glockenspiel. The sense of a cluster is also strong (a latent B minor in the lower four piano pitches, opposed by the cello’s B harmonic). This chord is followed by two tentative viola harmonics – E and G – ending the piece on a G. Is this ending a new beginning? Is this the confirmation of the G with which the viola earlier answered the bird call? Is it a reminiscence of the flight of birds reaching from the cello’s D to the viola’s G-D fifth? Or simply a return to the numerous

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appearances of G pitches that occur throughout the landscape of the piece? Is there a “modulation” at the end of the work? And if there is: is it an arrival in some magic land, or a surreal “coda” pointing toward a terrain even more unfamiliar than that we hoped to escape from? If there is modulation here, it is certainly not merely one involving the tonal relationships among pitches. This modulation is from one emotional-mental framework to a new one – the modulation of a spirit that flies away from an existing situation, or perhaps finds new potential within that situation. The viola’s “loneliness” is not resolved; the piece is not completed. Yet the end evokes a different sense of loneliness: it is a loneliness that allows the protagonist to be more at home with itself in a quiet existence. Or is it? Could it perhaps be the sight of the Promised Land where (like Moses) the viola will never enter? What is the meaning of the return to the harmonics? Perhaps at some deep level serenity and home are things unattainable.22 Is it natural for a piece to suggest, at its end, a sense of arrival – a home? Do we have, did we ever have, a home? Perhaps it is just as natural for music’s inner voice to ascend and shift, take a turn, and never come back. Perhaps there is a beautiful landscape over the hill, around the corner – and perhaps the turn or the shift are precisely what we have dreamt about – it is perhaps the non-return and the non-cohesion which are the resolution. At the very least, they offer a fresh look at things. Or a question. Or perhaps a dream in which stasis, question, and resolution overlap. I could end this chapter by quoting Feldman, who wrote that “sound is all our dreams of music.”23 To do so, however, might conform too blatantly to the reader’s expectation. I will, instead, quote a sentence from the Hungarian writer Zsuzsa Beney, one that Feldman himself might well have said: “Wanderer, stop for a moment … And accept that the terrain of your existence is nothing more than an intuition which never unfolds, and find comfort in the thought … that all we hold to be true … is unrecognizable in its labyrinth of hollow beams.”24

22

23 24

Transposed into another era and style, one could ask a similar question regarding the Classical sonata. Why do we accept without a single morsel of doubt that at the end of the recapitulation, when the second theme returns in the tonic (instead of in its original dominant tonality), it provides a resolution? What matters more: the fact that we hear the tonic, or the fact that the second theme – transposed higher or lower in the recapitulation – does not sound the way it sounded when we first heard it in the exposition? Feldman, “Sound, Noise, Varèse, Boulez” (1958), in Friedman, Give My Regards, 2. Zsuzsa Beney, Möbius-szalag [The Mobius Band] (Budapest: Vigilia, 2006), 79; the English translation of this excerpt is by Ben Niran.

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Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. La poétique de l’espace [The Poetics of Space]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958. Beney, Zsuzsa. Möbius-szalag [The Mobius Band]. Budapest: Vigilia, 2006. Bernas, Richard and Adrian Jack. “The Brink of Silence.” Reprinted in Morton Feldman Says, edited by Chris Villars, 44. Originally published in Music and Musicians (June 1972). Cage, John. Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. Caras, Tracy and Cole Gagne. “Morton Feldman.” Reprinted in Morton Feldman Says, edited by Chris Villars, 91–93. Originally published in Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1982). Cook, Nicholas. Music, Imagination, and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. DeLio, Thomas. “Last Pieces 3 (1959).” In The Music of Morton Feldman, 39–68. ––. ed. The Music of Morton Feldman. New York: Excelsior Music Publishing, 1996. Eldred, Michael. “The Quivering of Propriation: A Parallel Way to Music” (1998). artefact: http:// www.arte-fact.org/qvrpropn.html (accessed February 2016). Ferrara, Lawrence. “Phenomenology as a Tool for Musical Analysis.” Musical Quarterly 70 (1984): 355–73. Friedman, B. H., ed. Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000. Goldstein, Louis. “Morton Feldman and The Shape of Time.” In Perspectives on American Music Since 1950, edited by James R. Heintze, 67–80. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999. Griffiths, Paul. Modern Music and After: Directions Since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ––. Notes for the Cikada Ensemble’s and Marek Konstantynowicz’s recording of The Viola in My Life. CD Recording. ECM New Series 1798, 4765777. Hanninen, Dora A. “A Theory of Recontextualization in Music: Analyzing Phenomenal Transformation of Repetition.” Music Theory Spectrum 25 (2003): 59–97. Harrison, Bryn. “The Auditive Memory and its Function in the Late Works of Morton Feldman” (1999). http://www.cnvill.net/mfbrynh.htm (accessed February 2016). Hirata, Catherine Costello. “The Sounds of the Sounds Themselves: Analyzing the Early Music of Morton Feldman.” Perspectives of New Music 34 (1996): 6–27. Johnson, Tom. “Remembrance.” Musik Texte (December 1987), reprinted in Villars, Morton Feldman Says, 36. Lunberry, Clark. “Departing Landscapes: Morton Feldman’s String Quartet II and Triadic Memories.” SubStance 35, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 17–50. Metzer, David. “Modern Silence.” Journal of Musicology 23 (2006): 331–74. Noble, Alistair. Composing Ambiguity: The Early Music of Morton Feldman. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Sontag, Susan. “The Aesthetics of Silence.” In Styles of Radical Will, 3–30. New York: Picador, 1969. Villars, Chris, ed. Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964–1987. London: Hyphen Press, 2015. Welsh, John, “Projection I (1950).” In DeLio, The Music of Morton Feldman, 21–35. Zimmermann, Walter, ed. Morton Feldman Essays. Wasserburg: Beginner Press, 1985.

Processes, Objects, Functions, and Resonances: Directions Since 1970

Harmonic Progressions as a Gradual Process: Towards an Understanding of the Development of Tonality in the Music of Steve Reich Keith Potter Introduction: Steve Reich’s Tonal Practice before 1998 In 1970, in the course of making “Some Optimistic Predictions … about the Future of Music,” Steve Reich wrote that “The pulse and the concept of clear tonal center will re-emerge as basic sources of new music.”1 When the composer’s writings were republished thirty-two years later, Paul Hillier (the editor of this subsequent volume) – or, quite probably, actually Reich himself – added an explanatory paragraph to the reproduction of these “Predictions,” suggesting that “30 years later [they] seem to have proven largely correct.”2 Pitch, however – traditionally regarded as the primary musical parameter – had, by 1970, been usurped by rhythm as the prime instigator and driver of Reich’s compositional processes. In 1986, the composer insisted, in interview with the present author, that in the late 1960s rhythmic structure was his “sine qua non.” “In those early pieces,” he said, “the focus was on rhythm, and rhythm, and then again rhythm. The pitches were chosen, and they were chosen quite carefully, believe me, but once they were chosen – finished with that decision. You load the machine – and it runs.”3 This emphasis on rhythm, and on process, will be familiar to those who have read any of Reich’s writings about his early music.4 At the same time, it is self-evident that a composition for two pianos such as Piano Phase (1967), which uses just seven discrete pitches of the equal-tempered scale, will inevitably demonstrate a greater focus on pitch per se than does, say, a tape composition based on speech samples, such as It’s Gonna Rain (1965), however pitch-inflected those speech samples may be. By its very nature, the move from It’s Gonna Rain to Piano Phase (the latter being the first of the composer’s mature instrumental pieces to use the technique of phasing) involved Reich in a shift in thinking about the role of pitch in his compositions. And once that move was made, one could then summarize the rest of Reich’s career as a composer of instrumental and, later, also of vocal music as one driven at least as much by pitch 1 2 3 4

Reprinted in Steve Reich, “Some Optimistic Predictions (1970) about the Future of Music,” in Writings on Music 1965–2000, ed. Paul Hillier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 51–52 (52). Ibid., 51. Quoted in Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 188. Reich, Writings on Music, particularly “Music as a Gradual Process (1968),” 34–36.

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considerations as by other ones: even, and in certain respects particularly, in the sample-based works that he composed following his return to speech as his initial raw material in Different Trains of 1988. What Ronald Woodley has called Reich’s “gradual realignment with certain branches of ‘mainstream’ European music, a realignment achieved, however, through radicalization rather than compliant re-absorption”5 had, perhaps inevitably, to begin with the purging power of rhythmic repetition of pitch materials themselves so drastically reduced that little remained in them, for the listener, of their possible Western classical associations. The present author has, though, argued elsewhere not only that Four Organs (1970) represents its composer’s first minimalist work to be based on a chord, rather than on a modal collection, but that it also marks the beginning of Reich’s serious interest in harmonic motion.6 A dominant-eleventh chord constitutes this work’s entire pitch material; and it is chordal, rather than melodic and contrapuntal, repetition that forms the basis of what today many would call the “interrogation” of its harmonic kernel. The fact that such an “interrogation” is conducted with the aid of a harmonic motion that is best described as implicit, not explicit, makes the approach to tonality in Four Organs all the more interesting, and still characteristic of its composer’s firmly focused manner at the time. Such an implicit – we might even risk suggesting the description of illicit – stance permitted the process of composition and the process of listening to be as intertwined in this work as it is in Piano Phase; even if the less followable nature of Four Organs’ compositional process leads to outcomes for the listener that are almost certain to have less to do with tracing the note-to-note processes of the music than do the listening outcomes arising from Reich’s phase compositions of the same period. As Example 1 shows, just six pitch classes are used in this composition. Ordered in thirds (see Example 1a), according to the principle familiar from more usual seventh and ninth chords, these would read E G B D F and A, making what would be termed an E11 chord. To present this aggregate in the form of what Reich calls “stacked fifths” (see Example 1b) is to offer a further means of clarifying its relationship both to the composer’s earlier modal practice in pieces such as Piano Phase and to the jazz traditions from which such an approach to harmony arguably came; this formulation – E B F (but no C) G D and A – is closer to the way in which these pitches are deployed in this work’s textural layout. Reich had previously been antipathetic to what he had considered the inevitable functionality of the bass in determining and spelling out a tonal center. With a firm bass note (E) on which this harmonic aggregate can rest for the first time in his minimalist output, the dominant-eleventh chord of Four Organs implies a V–I cadence, “hung out to dry” for the listener’s inspection over some fifteen minutes. This kind of harmonic material soon became the bedrock for Reich’s own “realignment” of the concept of “clear tonal center” to be found in all his output over the ensuing four-and-a-half decades. 5 6

Ronald Woodley, “Steve Reich,” in Contemporary Composers, ed. Brian Morton and Pamela Collins (London: St. James Press, 1992), 767–69 (768). See, for example, Potter, Four Musical Minimalists, 200–03.

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(b)

(c)

Example 1: Steve Reich, Four Organs (1970): three ways of describing its basic gamut of six pitches – (a) In thirds; (b) In “stacked fifths”; (c) As a mode.

The approaches to dissecting such material already entwined in the above description of Four Organs can now be teased out a little further, with their potential for the would-be analyst of this composer’s music as a whole in mind. First, despite an increasing interest in what one might call a “real bass” part – especially from Music for 18 Musicians (1974–76) onwards, though that work retains a highly ambiguous approach to the concept of “bass” – Reich sometimes continues to favor modal terminology to describe his pitch materials. Example 1c follows the composer’s lead here and labels the Four Organs aggregate as derived from the Ionian mode on A without the third: that is, the familiar major scale, based on A (the tonic note of the major key with three sharps as its signature), but missing the third note of that scale, C. The only specific mention, in any guise, of pitch in the composer’s “Music as a Gradual Process” essay of 1968 (a kind of manifesto of his own practice around that time) involves reference to “[s]everal currently popular modal musics like Indian classical and drug-oriented rock and roll,”7 which he mentions to comment on the way in which such music permits listeners to focus on moment-to-moment details that so much concerned him at the time. Might a modal-based attempt at describing harmonic materials, as employed in Example 1c, offer a cogent account of Reich’s tonal practice in such later compositions as his Triple Quartet (1998–99)? Such a “horizontal” rather than “vertical” description could order the pitches used into collections that might, for instance, facilitate comparisons between them more readily than does the terminology of E11 and so on. But it is hard to imagine that descriptors such as “Ionian mode on A without the third” might mean very much, if anything, in the context of the chromaticism embedded into the composer’s harmonic language of at least the last twenty years. Modal terminology is, in the opinion of the present author, of dubious analytical value even in the more clearly diatonic context of some of Reich’s earlier music.8 7 8

Reich, “Music as a Gradual Process,” 36. Modal terminology has, though, been helpfully incorporated by Ronald Woodley into a wide-ranging analytical investigation of Reich’s canonic techniques; see Woodley, “Steve Re-

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So might descriptive terminologies for music analysis using E11 or, say, B7, B9, B11, and so on, or, alternatively, the “stacked-fifths” principle, end up telling us anything more meaningful about the music in question? Or would the choices opened up by the principle of the “dominant chord” – already part of his harmonic thinking back in 1970 and subsequently taken much further, as we shall see – allow the would-be music analyst to develop dimensions for interrogating Reich’s harmonic practice by working with the terminology for it with which the composer himself was rather obsessed in the late 1990s? His tendency, in a work such as Triple Quartet, to spice up what are already “dominant chords” of more complex construction than Four Organs’ “dominant eleventh” with chromatic sidesteps and other kinds of variant to give a new complexity to his harmonic palette would appear to make the maintenance of any kind of terminological coherence difficult, and the achievement of a musically satisfying analytical outcome probably impossible. Since Reich continued to set great store by deploying the familiar vocabularies of tonal, as well as more self-consciously modal, harmony, perhaps the clue lies in an attempt to integrate all, or at least some, of the above to construct a version of Woodley’s “radicalized realignment” that fits this composer’s later output better than resorting to the simpler modalities of his early minimalist scores. After all, Reich has found his inspiration not only in non-Western musics and in medieval music of the West (repertoires long close to this composer’s heart and with which he is quite familiar) but also in the works of twentieth-century modernists, particularly Debussy, Bartók, and Stravinsky. He has found ways to refresh and extend these approaches to pitch organization by exploiting the potential ambiguities of his basic materials: a project that these composers had, of course, already begun. Key signatures, for instance, can be major, minor, both or neither. And once he returns to thinking more directly in chordal, as well as rhythmic, melodic and contrapuntal terms, and starts using bass notes in ways more familiar from earlier musics than from his compositional approach in Four Organs, then the layout of Reich’s chords often separates the bass from the upper notes – not only in terms of spacing but also in terms of function, or indeed lack thereof. Thinking in terms of bass notes that are, in practice, ambiguous both about their role within the individual chord of which they are part, and also about their function in connecting chords together to form a sequence, is central to Reich’s approach from the early 1970s up to the present day. Care is, however, required regarding how terms associated with the tonal music of previous eras are employed in twentieth- and twenty-first-century compositional contexts such as the one described here. Warnings have frequently been issued by music theorists concerned with the output of the Second Viennese School composers about the need to handle “tonal” descriptors such as “augmented triad” and “diminished seventh” with great sensitivity, if indeed at all, in analyzing the music of Alban Berg:

ich’s Proverb, Canon, and a Little Wittgenstein,” in Katelijne Schiltz and Bonnie J. Blackburn, eds., Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th–16th Centuries: Theory, Practice, and Reception History (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 457–81.

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Because we have ready-made names for certain collections it is tempting to use them, but that temptation should be avoided. One danger is that by privileging certain collections by such names we overlook or ignore what might possibly be more important collections simply because they have no names. Another is that by so describing these collections we bring inappropriate responses to them from our experience of tonal music. 9

While David Roberts was writing here about the music of Berg, and thus in a context that many would describe as “atonal,” such an admonition should surely also be heeded by the analyst of Reich’s compositions; for, to put the matter another way, the presence of elements of “vocabulary” commonly linked with earlier tonal musics cannot be assumed to guarantee that such elements are functioning within the “grammar” also associated with such repertoire.10 The present author once picked a quarrel with Reich over whether he should really be calling the “dominant eleventh” of Four Organs a “dominant chord” at all, since this was to risk ascribing to it a tonal functionality that, by any conventional terms, it seemed singularly to lack. An interpretation of putative harmonic motion in this composition such as the one given above goes some way to creating a defense for that term, of course. But even at his most radically reductive, Reich never appears to have given serious consideration to the idea that his “dominant”-based terminology could be viewed as in any way inappropriate. Yet of course the more Reich’s music can be demonstrated to approach Western musics of the past in terms of its “grammar”, the less there appears to be a need to avoid the terminology of the “vocabulary” associated with those musics. For instance, the thinking behind Reich’s practice of using “dominant chords” in his Triple Quartet could be summarized as concerned with the decision to regard the bass of any harmonic aggregate as the dominant, not the tonic, of the key in question. Whatever localized pitch centricity is already to be discerned in that chord itself will, if the fuller implications of using such terminology are accepted, then also provide a tonal context offering wider ramifications for it in the music in which it is embedded. The vocabulary of “dominant chords” that results from this – which can vary a good deal in its chromaticism, especially in some of the composer’s later output – then gives rise to a tonal grammar of considerable complexity. The Reichian tonal grammar that ensues has, as yet, only just begun to be explored by music analysts, and it would be unwise to make too many assumptions about it based on familiarity with earlier tonal practices. The analytical comments on the composer’s Triple Quartet that follow should thus be construed as an interim report on progress in this area.

9 10

David Roberts, review of The Music of Alban Berg, by Douglas Jarman, Contact 21 (1980): 25–26 (25). For two cogent accounts based on this view, see Jonathan Bernard, “Theory, Analysis, and the ‘Problem’ of Minimal Music,” Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, ed. Elisabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1995), 259–84; and Bernard, “Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality in Recent American Music,” American Music 21 (2003): 112–33.

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Reich’s Triple Quartet In Triple Quartet, Reich produced what he called in his program note “a piece considerably more dissonant and expressionistic than expected.”11 In adopting this new stance, he seems to have been affected by two other composers, in particular: one of them a long-term influence, the other brand-new for him in 1998. This note additionally claims that “The initial inspiration for the piece comes from the last movement of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet. While no musical material is taken from the Bartók, its energy was my starting point.”12 Though no specific characteristic of the concluding Allegro molto of Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet (1928) is mentioned in his note, Reich’s computer files made during work on Triple Quartet include a single page proving that the composer took the trouble to copy out – if, in this case, to transcribe probably using Finale, not by hand – the opening eleven measures of the fifth and final movement of this Bartók quartet.13 The increased chromaticism of Reich’s own composition is, though, linked most specifically by him in his program note to the influence of Alfred Schnittke, to whose string quartets the composer was introduced by Betty Freeman, his longtime benefactor. He reports being “struck by his virtuosity, and moved by the incredible mesto of his Second Quartet. Listening to the ‘density’ of his music goaded me to thicken my own plot harmonically and melodically.”14 Reich now says that this influence was not in fact very specific, and tells an anecdote about imagining the Russian composer asking him, “Wo ist der Schmutz?” (“Where is the dirt?”), Schnittke’s Germanic origins presumably influencing the experience.15 Example 2, the opening six measures of Triple Quartet, demonstrates the way in which the basic harmonies of this work are spiced up by chromatic sidesteps that quickly introduce pitches outside that tonality. Since this procedure is played out across a total of twelve lines in three quartet groupings – all three of which operate with some independence of each other as well as demonstrating strong elements of harmonic, rhythmic, and textural symbiosis – the potential for harmonic complexity is considerable.16 It is, though, still possible to use the terminologies of either the thirds-based or “stacked-fifths” chords to describe the essential harmonic building blocks here. Since these are underpinned by a bass that usually functions as the dominant pitch of the prevailing tonality, we are thus anyway, in the most basic sense, in a situation comparable to that of Four Organs; except that the harmonic motion of Triple Quartet, despite still being driven by powerful rhythmic repetition 11 Reich, “Triple Quartet (1999),” in Writings on Music, 208–10 (208). 12 Ibid., 208. 13 Steve Reich’s archival materials, significant in particular for the collection of sketchbooks they include, were acquired by the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland in 2009. This archive also incorporates a large number of computer files, the composer’s main medium for “composing out” the details of his works from 1986 onwards. 14 Reich, “Triple Quartet,” 208. 15 Reich, phone conversation with the author, September 16, 2013. 16 It should be noted that Triple Quartet exists in three versions: one for string quartet and pre-recorded tape (the most commonly heard), another for three string quartets (twelve players), and a third for a string orchestra of thirty-six players.

Example 2: Steve Reich, Triple Quartet: first movement (mm. 1–6). © Copyright 1999 by Hendon Music, Inc, A Boosey & Hawkes Company. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

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as well as other factors, could now be described – following the distinction made earlier – as a good deal more explicit in its nature than the essentially putative harmonic motion behind Four Organs. The Tonal and Harmonic Structure of Triple Quartet After some comment on the tonal planning of Reich’s Triple Quartet as a whole, this chapter will focus attention on the first movement, exploring some of the analytical methodologies that might cast light on the composer’s approach to harmony in the late 1990s. Reich himself, in his note, provides the clues about both its overall tonal plan and the basic harmonic structure of its first movement. Triple Quartet, he writes: “… is in three movements, fast-slow-fast, and is organized harmonically on four dominant chords in minor keys a minor third apart: E minor, G minor, B minor, C minor, and then returning to E minor to form a cycle.”17 We might – for convenience, and with due caution regarding what has already been said about any wider ramifications here – conceptualize this overall plan in the form of a “diminished seventh” using the pitches E, G, B, and C. Example 3 shows the tonal structure of the three movements. The overall tonal center of each movement charts a progress through only the first two of the four pitches of the “diminished seventh”: E for the first movement, E again for the second, and G for the third, but eventually returning to E. All these tonal centers are deployed via their minor modes. Breaking the movements down into sections, the 312 measures of the first movement run twice through the sequence of all four pitches: E, G, B and C; textures within each section are sometimes varied, usually by the introduction of more contrapuntal material, but some sections offer a largely unitary texture throughout. The slow middle movement has a simplified tonal structure entirely in a single key, E minor; texturally, it similarly begins simply, with a melody plus accompaniment, but elaborates this melody contrapuntally as the movement proceeds, before a more chordal ending. The finale begins in G minor and alternates this key and B minor before incorporating C minor in an alternating sequence as well, and then finally closes in E minor; essentially chordal, it operates with particular rhythmic drive and interplay between the twelve players involved.

I (E)

II E

III (G/E)

Example 3: Steve Reich, Triple Quartet: overall tonal structure of the three movements. 17

Reich, “Triple Quartet,” 208.

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Triple Quartet could thus be described as being “in E minor” as a whole; and its three movements as charting a tonal progression based on the four minor keys of the “diminished seventh” sequence. E minor is retained as the sole tonal center of the second movement, as well as the main center of the first. G minor is then posited as the main tonal center of the third movement, though both B and C are involved in this alternating sequence; and the finale eventually returns to E minor to bring the work as a whole full circle, tonally speaking. Example 4 reveals that, at around the time of its composition, Reich was sufficiently pleased with the progress in his harmonic thinking that was reflected in Triple Quartet to consider using these “good results” in his ongoing work on Three Tales (1998–2002), notably the second “tale,” “Bikini.”

Example 4: sketch for “Bikini,” using dominant chords of Triple Quartet (August 10, 1999). Reproduced by kind permission of the Paul Sacher Foundation.

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So what are the particular features of the “dominant chords” that do indeed dominate the sketches for Triple Quartet? Is there any kind of systematic theoretical proposition to be uncovered here? And what kind of “good results” did they lead to in this composition? To answer such questions, we will need to try and establish exactly how Reich was conceptualizing these “dominant chords” in the late 1990s: a task for which his sketchbooks, backed up by interview access, ought to prove invaluable. We shall also, of course, need to attempt to demonstrate how these “dominant chords” operate in the work itself.18 The single chord in Example 4 could be described as a G11 chord, with A and C, as well as D, above the bass G. In Example 5, a sketchbook entry made on July 19, 1998, each of the four keys involved – E minor, G minor, B minor and C minor – is supplied with a pair of chords, sometimes also plus an alternative, or more ambiguously additional, chord.

Example 5: Steve Reich, sketches for Triple Quartet: “Dominant chords,” first movement (July 19, 1998). Reproduced by kind permission of the Paul Sacher Foundation.

The first pair of chords is designated “E mi[nor] dom[inant]”: B, the bass note here, is, as the dominant of E minor, clearly the fundamental pitch of both the chords built upon it. These chords themselves may also be identified as B13 and B11. This sketch then proceeds onwards through the now-expected sequence of E minor, G minor, B minor and C minor, with a pair of “dominant chords” applied to each key (and a third option considered for C minor). All pitches selected can be argued to fall within their given minor keys; though the inclusion of both A and A in the B minor chords makes it evident that, even before he has started to add chromatic chords to this basic scaffolding of dominant chords, Reich is thinking of the possible chromatic alternatives for such harmonic aggregates. 18

There also appear to be some wrong notes in the published score, creating further hazards for the would-be analyst.

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The seeker for any theoretical system here needs to bear in mind the discovery that the composer himself emphasizes the importance of intuition and flexibility in mulling over the potential of such “dominant chords,” over any kind of systematic approach, still less a fully-fledged “theory.” This would seem to apply both to the actual construction of these chords themselves and to their deployment in the work, as the following quotation makes clear: I can tell you that outside of the general use of dominants in keys a minor third apart, there is no system being used. There is a basic area defined and the details are worked out by ear at the keyboard and/or computer.19

“I’m not analyzing, I work by ear” and “I’m flying blind” – two other comments that the composer has made to the present author about how he worked on the harmonies of Triple Quartet – appear further to undermine any notion of constructing a grand Theory of the Dominant Chord based on the extensive materials for this work’s composition. Included among the considerable expenditure of effort to determine chordal structures and progressions in the fifty-five pages of paper sketches for Triple Quartet is a good deal of experimentation with added chromatic aggregates. One instance must suffice to illustrate the insights that these sketches give on how Reich structured, and then composed with, such materials. Example 6 – dating from August 18, 1998, almost a month after the sketch illustrated in Example 5 – accounts for quite a few of the harmonies to be found in the first few measures of this work’s first movement:

Example 6: Steve Reich, sketch for Triple Quartet: further chordal elaboration, first movement (August 18, 1998). Reproduced by kind permission of the Paul Sacher Foundation.

19

This and the two further quotations here are from Steve Reich, e-mail to the author, September 16, 2013.

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The first and penultimate aggregates here, with B as their bass note, will be recognized as being the same as the initial pair of chords in Example 5. The “dominant chord” of E minor forms the main initial harmonic material of Quartet 2, the first of the three quartets to play (see again Example 2). The second aggregate of Example 6, placed in brackets by Reich, marks the first occurrence in this sketch of what may be termed an additional, or simply extended, chord. In the score itself, Quartet 2 alternates this Gm11 with the opening B13 from m. 5 onwards. Likewise, the final aggregate of Example 6, again in brackets, ends up, from m. 3 in the score, performing the same alternating function for the B11 chord with which Quartet 3 opened. One label for this latter alternative aggregate would be Cm11; though, as with its counterpart in Quartet 2, a label not derived from its bass note might seem more meaningful – in which case, a kind of chromatic D9 could be proposed. Thus what Reich writes out sequentially in the sketch can eventually turn out to be rendered simultaneously in the score itself. Most of the other aggregate elaborations of Example 6 also find their way into the final score. The identical first and third chords of Quartet 1, in mm. 4 and 6 (the first “solo quartet” chord), are clearly derived from Example 6’s third aggregate, though the bass B indicated in the manuscript is, in the score, provided by the continued underpinning “dominant” pitch in Quartets 2 and 3, as is Example 6’s alternative bass note here, C. Problems of Terminology and Analytical Methodology Attempts such as these to describe Reich’s sketch materials in order to build on the kinds of harmonic approach outlined at the beginning of this chapter face clear challenges of musical meaningfulness and coherence, as we saw earlier, if they are to contribute to the project of making an in-depth sense of this composer’s own tonal and harmonic practice. So what analytical methodology might tell us most about how an approach to harmony such as that in Triple Quartet is developed into a fully-fledged tonal structure? Using Tonal Voice-leading as a Starting Point Example 7 shows an attempt to reflect the harmonic unfolding of the two sections of Triple Quartet’s first movement that deploy the initial key signature of one sharp: mm. 1–40 (Example 7a) and mm. 115–53 (Example 7b), henceforth to be called Sections 1a and 1b. An adapted form of the graphic representation of pitch materials familiar from Schenkerian and post-Schenkerian analysis is used here. It must be emphasized that such efforts, at least as pursued only to this stage, do not aspire to the heights of Schenkerian profundity, and Schenkerian notation has been freely adapted in only a limited application; this is merely a preliminary investigation of analytical possibilities.

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Example 7a: Steve Reich, Triple Quartet: voice-leading analysis used to compare the harmonic structures of Sections 1a and 1b: Section 1a, mm. 1–40.

Example 7b: Steve Reich, Triple Quartet: Section 1b, mm. 115–53

In this notation, arrows on note stems – or, occasionally, attached to groups of notes without stems – indicate that a sequence of such notes or chords is subject to repetition or, when it represents the last sequence in a series, that it continues throughout the remainder of the section. Among the initial observations that can be made here are the following: Both the pitch content of these sections themselves, and their mixture of separate layering of essentially fairly familiar harmonic structures and shared features, seem to be exposed quite clearly with such a method. One can, for instance, readily appreciate how, in both these sections, the bass moves away from and back to the note B. The main harmony above this, in Quartets 2 and 3, is also clearly shown as departing from a basic chord in which the shared upper pitches are A and C, each quartet adding two further pitches to this to form, with the bass, a six-note aggregate

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in which all notes of the one-sharp mode based on E are represented, except D. The chromatic departures from this aggregate are, again, readily observable, with both their common pitches (D and G) and their independent introduction of notes foreign to the one-sharp mode (E and B) clearly evident. It is perhaps the less apparently “grounded” pitch content of Quartet 1 that is best revealed by this means. In Section 1a, the musical material here becomes more melodic and, eventually, contrapuntal, rather than essentially chordal. In Example 7a, the total pitch gamut of seven pitches (E, F, A, B, C, D and E) that it explores – Reich calls this “altered Phrygian” in the sketch materials for the work – has both E and C contending for a kind of tonal centricity that extends the tonality found in Quartets 2 and 3. Examples 7a and 7b taken together provide quite a promising basis for a comparison of the two sections. Note, for example, the way in which Example 7b clearly shows how Quartet 1 is, in mm. 115–53, now at first more chordal (and sustained), and how the pitches of its D9 chord relate to those of Quartets 2 and 3 (which, we should observe, have exchanged harmonic materials here). The pitches A and C are now common to all three quartets (so maybe some way of highlighting this on this graph would be appropriate in future attempts); E is now found only in Quartet 2 and F in Quartet 3. In both sections, the bass outlines a stepwise progression from B to E, mainly accompanied by notes a perfect fifth above. In Section Ib, a descent to low D at m. 130 is also indicated in Example 7b; though this also featured in Section Ia, Example 7a omits it on the grounds that this feature is less significant in the earlier context, due not least to the fact that more extended rhythmic repetition renders this descent more telling in Section Ib than in Section Ia. The dilemma this raises for the analyst attempting to apply such methods, perhaps especially to music involving a great deal of repetition, can perhaps stand for the more general problem it suggests: how much detail of this kind can be included without making any graphic representation too cluttered to be really informative, and musically revealing? Finally here, a comment on the chords at mm. 120, 123, and 138 in Example 7b, where both black and white note-heads have been used within the same chord. The intention of this is to signal the difference in function between a main chord (white notes) and a more temporary subsidiary one (black notes). For the chord in m. 120, one might question the choice of black rather than white for what is, after all, only the same aggregate as the opening chord of Quartet 2 at m. 115, now simply raised an octave. Yet though this chord lasts three measures (mm. 120–23) at the upper octave before descending again, the black-note notation seems to correctly represent this upper octave’s subsidiary status when compared to the chord at the lower octave. In Quartet 1 in m. 123, on the other hand, the separation into black and white notes in this analytical notation is intended to indicate the different emphases placed on the two pairs of notes that make up this aggregate of just three pitch classes. The top note, A, and the lower of the two F’s, given in black, are really just components of the ensuing repeated melody, partly in thirds, that now replaces the initial chordal structure in Quartet 1. The upper F and the low D, on the other hand, given in

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white, suggest both the extent to which F is rhythmically repeated and the fact that both these notes are held several times for around two measures, while the melody intermittently swirls around them. Using Overall Pitch Content Identification as a Starting Point To find out if the total pitch gamut of music such as this can be analyzed with greater consistency, we must take another approach. Example 8 charts the complete pitch content of the whole of Triple Quartet’s first movement, showing how much of the total chromatic pitch-class gamut is occupied in each of its eight sections. This diagram demonstrates how many pitch-classes are in play, indicating which notes are omitted. Each of the eight sections includes between seven and nine of the twelve available pitch classes. Example 8 also includes some basic information about keys and dominant-functioning notes.

Measure numbers

E minor

G minor

B  minor

C minor

1st cycle:

1–40

41–60

61–78

79–114

2nd cycle:

115–153

154–202

203–253

254–312

“Dominant”

B

D

F

Number of Pitches

9 9

7(8) 8

8 8

G

D F  A

B  D  E  [F ] A 

No Change

Now includes D from m. 186

B D E G [new pitches: D  F  A ]

Pitches Omitted Differences Between Cycles

Now includes A from m. 186

Example 8: Steve Reich, Triple Quartet: pitch structure of first movement.

7 9

B B D F G Now includes F  only in mm. 254–60 and D  only in mm. 272–74 and 305–08

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Both one-sharp sections discussed in detail above deploy the same nine pitch classes, omitting D, F, and A. In all the other three pairs of sections, however, there is some difference between the pitch-class content of each one. In Section IIa, mm. 41–60, the first of the two one-flat sections, there are basically just seven pitch classes in play. The “triad” of D, F, and A noted in Section Ia continues to be absent (except for one moment in m. 46, when an eighth pitch, a quaver F , fleetingly occurs as a kind of “passing-note”, marked in brackets in Example 8). The remaining two missing pitches, B and E, are newly omitted here; we should note that these pitsches have only just previously underpinned the whole “dominant harmony” of Section Ia’s E minor. The change in pitch content from mm. 1–40 to mm. 41–60 thus reflects a move away from the two central pitches of the work’s opening, strengthening the new focus on G and its dominant, D. Section IIb, mm. 154–202, initially retains the same pitch aggregate as Section IIa, omitting the “triad” of D, F , and A (not even a fleeting F can be heard here), and both B and E. However, in this “second pass” through a two-flat key signature with D and G as the central pitches, D arrives over halfway through, at m. 186, meaning that the later part of Section IIb has eight pitches, compared to the basic seven of Section IIa. There is insufficient space here to do more than make a few quick points concerning the possible significance behind the shifting pitch gamuts of the remaining sections of the first movement. Section IIIa, mm. 61–78, is the first to add the previously missing D, F, and A “triad” to the pitch gamut of Triple Quartet. After sixty measures without these three pitches, Section IIIa’s tonality of B minor quite readily accommodates them, of course, as the third, fifth and seventh of what might be regarded as its “tonic chord,” with B strongly underpinned by F functioning, as before, as the dominant of the key in question. The full chromatic gamut has thus now been put into play in the work; though it must be noted that the pitch-class aggregate of Section IIIa itself is not, in fact, a twelve-note one. Only eight pitches are deployed here. Following the earlier-discussed strategy whereby a new section omits the central pitches of its predecessor, Section IIIa, and also its counterpart, Section IIIb, now omit all four of the pitches (B and E, previously also missing in Sections IIa and IIb; and now additionally D and G) that have held dominant or tonic functions up to that point. In Section IIIb, mm. 203–53, A is preferred over A until m. 236, around two-thirds of the way through this section, when A enters. The flat seventh does not, though, now displace the “raised,” sharp seventh at this or any other point in this section; both continue to its end. Finally, Section IVa, mm. 79–114, with a key signature of four sharps and a tonal center of C underpinned by its dominant G, reduces the total pitch gamut to seven, with B, B, D, F, and G all omitted. As before, this means that both the dominant and the tonic (F and B) of the immediately preceding section are left out, as are the dominant and tonic (D and G) of the section before that, plus the dominant of the first section (B). The E that would have completed the set of missing pitches now functions as the third of the tonic chord of C minor. Such consequences of this gamut-shifting may, of course, be merely, or even mainly, accidental by-products of the “diminished-seventh”-based key scheme that Reich is employing here. Never-

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theless, these observations still appear interesting outcomes of an approach to tonality that is sufficiently chromatic, and also sufficiently systematic, to make considerations about the scope of the total pitch gamut at work across this music a valid topic for discussion – and something to which the listener will also respond, even if not to all its details. As Example 8 shows, in the process of closing the first movement, Section IVb, mm. 254–312, is rather equivocal in its treatment of F and D, two of the five pitches previously omitted in Section IVa. Section IVb, running for fifty-nine measures, is not only significantly longer than its counterpart, four-sharp section, Section IVa (a mere thirty-six measures), but also much longer than any other section of this movement. Clearly, the proportions in which these keys are used must be investigated in the course of a more comprehensive analysis of the first movement as a whole. Conclusion Any conclusions must be provisional at this stage, pending further research. If inevitably limited thus far, the outcomes of these preliminary efforts to engage modified versions of Schenkerian and pitch-class content analytical methodologies in order to “interrogate” Steve Reich’s late-twentieth-century brand of tonality and harmonic practice seem to hold some promise. Using thirds- and “stacked”-fifthsbased terminology, and the scaffolding of modal practice that might shed light on this, should not be rejected outright at this stage, but both these look likely to have only modest analytical advantages. Voice-leading methods, on the other hand, offer much potential, especially in music such as Reich’s Triple Quartet that takes a texturally multi-layered, and sometimes contrapuntal, approach to musical materials that are still, in essence, often harmonic in character. A voice-leading analysis much more developed than the example given here, that takes care to estimate the extent to which Reichian tonal practice meshes with the previous kinds of tonal practice for which such analytical methods were devised, seems a wise route to take. Attempts at analyzing pitch content such as the one illustrated above raise the question as to whether the extension, and refinement, of such an approach via recourse to the set theoretical methods of Allen Forte and others might offer even greater potential for understanding Reich’s harmony, especially in his later compositions. Such methods have been applied quite successfully not only to the repertoires of the Second Viennese School composers from which set theory originally grew – music from which Reich has usually distanced himself – but also to Bartók and Stravinsky, both of whom have always been close to Reich’s heart, and seemingly also his own tonal thinking.20 20 A set-theoretic approach was first applied to Bartók’s music in George Perle, “Symmetrical Formations in the String Quartets of Béla Bartók,” Music Review 16 (1955): 300–12. In a large theoretical literature since then, two among the leading analytical articles on Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet, the work referenced by Reich in the composition of his own Triple Quartet, also cover relevant ground here, including, in addition to musical symmetry (not discussed in the

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We must, however, remain wary, as music theorists advise, of the dangers of what Joseph Straus calls “[engaging] the entire apparatus of [Western] tonal theory” in analyzing the works of any twentieth-, or indeed twenty-first-century composer whose music can reasonably be regarded as “clearly post-tonal in nature.”21 While Reich’s “post-tonality” is clearly of a different order from Bartók’s, never mind Schoenberg’s, Straus’s condemnation of any strategy that will cause us to view the works under scrutiny as merely “strange, deformed tonal compositions that employ traditional techniques grudgingly, incompletely, and unsuccessfully” seems apt. For the present author, too, strategies that fail to take due account both of the crucial ambiguities found in Reichian tonality and to integrate the listening process that throws such essential ambiguities into full focus into the analytical process are worth very little.22 It nevertheless seems that an analysis of tonal and harmonic processes in such compositions as Reich’s Triple Quartet might benefit from the invocation of such concepts as pitch-class sets and saturation of chromatic space.23 Music that appears tonal, or modal, in new ways that are consequent, not least, upon their deployment of an unusual degree of repetition also benefits from the deployment of other analytical methodologies more readily associated with older tonal repertoires: neo-Riemannian theory, for instance, for the output of John Adams, as illustrated by Timothy A. Johnson.24 Stances influenced by “serial thinking,” in particular, will seem an anathema to some, doubtless including Reich himself, when applied to music such as his. They may also be regarded with suspicion by those music analysts who are keen to preserve the integrity of their methodologies. Yet the potential that such approaches have to provide evidence-based answers to specific questions, such as how the shifting gamuts of the first movement of Reich’s Triple Quartet relate to that work’s application of a fixed pattern of tonal centers, seems clear.

21 22 23

24

present chapter, though it doubtless ought to be), what may be termed post-Schenkerian as well as voice-leading approaches; these are Leo Treitler, “Harmonic Procedures in the Fourth Quartet of Béla Bartók,” Journal of Music Theory 3 (1959): 292–98, and Roy Travis, “Tonal Coherence in the First Movement of Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet,” Music Forum 2 (1970): 298– 371. For an overview of the broader issues here, see Joseph N. Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Though a textbook, Straus’s Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 3rd edition, 2014) includes a pitch-class-set analysis of, again, the first movement of Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet, on pages 73–78. All the quotations in this paragraph are from Straus, Remaking the Past, 184. For a further discussion of Reich’s tonality, including in the context of the listening process, see Linda Ann Garton, “Tonality and the Music of Steve Reich” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2004). Forte’s pitch-class theory has already been deployed by Richard Cohn to examine what he terms “beat-class sets” in Reich’s music; see, for instance, Cohn, “Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class Sets in Steve Reich’s Phase-Shifting Music,” Perspectives of New Music 30, no. 2 (1992): 146–77. This approach has also been extended by John Roeder to incorporate concepts of beat-class “tonic” and “mode”; see Roeder, “Beat-class Modulation in Steve Reich’s Music,” Music Theory Spectrum 25 (2003): 275–304. See Timothy A. Johnson, John Adams’s Nixon in China: Musical Analysis, Historical and Political Perspectives (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011).

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Constructing an overarching “theory of post-minimalist tonality,” on the other hand, will require the deployment of a range of analytical methods previously applied to a variety of different kinds of music. Bibliography Bernard, Jonathan. “Theory, Analysis, and the ‘Problem’ of Minimal Music.” In Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, edited by Elisabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann, 259–84. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1995. ––. “Minimalism, Postminimalism, and the Resurgence of Tonality in Recent American Music.” American Music 21 (2003): 112–33. Cohn, Richard. “Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class Sets in Steve Reich’s Phase-Shifting Music.” Perspectives of New Music 30, no. 2 (1992): 146–77. Garton, Linda Ann. “Tonality and the Music of Steve Reich.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2004. Johnson, Timothy A. John Adams’s Nixon in China: Musical Analysis, Historical and Political Perspectives. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011. Perle, George. “Symmetrical Formations in the String Quartets of Béla Bartók.” Music Review 16 (1955): 300–12. Potter, Keith. Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Reich, Steve. “Music as a Gradual Process (1968).” In Writings on Music 1965–2000, 34–36. ––. “Some Optimistic Predictions (1970) about the Future of Music.” In Writings on Music 1965– 2000, 51–52. ––. “Triple Quartet (1999),” in Writings on Music, 208–10. ––. Writings on Music 1965–2000. Edited by Paul Hillier. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Roberts, David. Review of The Music of Alban Berg, by Douglas Jarman. Contact 21 (1980): 25–26. Roeder, John. “Beat-class Modulation in Steve Reich’s Music.” Music Theory Spectrum 25 (2003): 275–304. Straus, Joseph N. Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory. 3rd ed. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2014. ––. Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Travis, Roy. “Tonal Coherence in the First Movement of Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet.” Music Forum 2 (1970): 298–371. Treitler, Leo. “Harmonic Procedures in the Fourth Quartet of Béla Bartók.” Journal of Music Theory 3 (1959): 292–98. Woodley, Ronald. “Steve Reich.” In Contemporary Composers, edited by Brian Morton and Pamela Collins, 767–69. London: St. James Press, 1992. ––. “Steve Reich’s Proverb, Canon, and a Little Wittgenstein.” In Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th–16th Centuries: Theory, Practice, and Reception History, edited by Katelijne Schiltz and Bonnie J. Blackburn, 457–81. Leuven: Peeters, 2007. The above list is mainly confined to the published secondary sources quoted in this chapter, plus a few examples of relevant analytical literature on Bartók and Reich. For a much more comprehensive bibliography for minimalist music, including a number of other publications covering Reich’s tonality and harmony, see: Potter, Keith, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll ap Siôn, eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013. Examples 4, 5 and 6 are reproduced by kind permission of the Paul Sacher Foundation (Steve Reich Collection).

Tonality Rediscovered: Oliver Knussen and the Musical “Object” in the 1970s Philip Rupprecht Introduction: Tonality and Historical Regression Looking back on his music of the 1970s with the benefit of three decades’ hindsight, the British composer Oliver Knussen has spoken of his compositional language in an almost tactile way.* Of the pitch materials in his Autumnal for violin and piano (1976–77) Knussen, writing in 2012, comments: I remember thinking about trying to integrate some of the highly original chord-voicings and cadences that I love most in Britten’s later music into my own vocabulary, but in such a way that one would perceive them simply as objects, abstracted from their original expressive context. In any case, like Trumpets and Ophelia Dances (both from 1975), Autumnal is made out of a deliberately limited repertory of melodic cells and related chords, a way of composing that was explored further in several pieces from the late ’80s and early ’90s.1

Speaking of chords and their concatenation into cadences as “objects,” Knussen transposes music’s time-bound passing into physical terms in a way that exceeds the usual metaphorical transferences of critical writing. His choice of words seems calculated to defamiliarize received tropes of music’s fluidity. Chords and cadences, far from arising as passing coincidences amid linear-melodic flows, are understood as asserting a stubborn physicality, as if detached – “abstracted,” Knussen says – from any surrounding continuum. Remembering the specific historical context of Autumnal, a piece dedicated to the memory of Benjamin Britten, one might hear chordal objects offering a species of intertextual allusion to the sound world of a composer whom Knussen had admired from an early age, and had known personally. These objects, one might speculate, function as sonic markers of a memorial site; Autumnal, a tombeau, resonates with memories of an earlier musician’s art. With Knussen, though, the notion of object transcends the purely personal or biographical, encompassing a much broader historical milieu. Focusing on the intervallic makeup of individual sounds (“chord-voicings”), and downplaying music’s dynamic push-pull of tension and resolution, he foregrounds structuralist values idiomatic to the technical preoccupations of post-war musical modernism. The chordal object, for Knussen, is one type within a field or taxonomy, a “deliberately limited repertory of melodic cells and related chords.” * 1

I am grateful to Keith Potter, Philip Stoecker, and Arnold Whittall for comments on a draft of this essay. Oliver Knussen, Liner note to CD recording Autumnal (London: NMC D178, 2012), 7.

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Knussen’s comment about Autumnal is representative of his public accounts of his compositional aesthetic. In interviews and recording program notes, he often speaks of his own music in terms of chordal-intervallic vocabulary, polyrhythmic schemes, and twelve-tone pitch routines.2 In a brief “self-observation,” published in 1995, Knussen described his music after 1970 as having followed “a fairly consistent progression from a simple melodic twelve-tone technique within a quasi-tonal harmonic approach, toward a quasi-modal approach to a serially-derived harmonic technique.”3 In this narrative, Knussen mentions the “pretty unambiguous ‘classical’ D minor” of his Horn Concerto, completed in 1995, as a kind of rule-proving exception to a style of generally more chromatic surface. That Knussen characterizes his art in serial or constructivist terms, while avoiding much reference to elements of key or a functional pitch hierarchy – in short, to what listeners usually understand as “tonality” – is a sign of the polemical atmosphere and crisis of communication between composers and listeners that was a prevalent condition of musical life in the decades after 1945. As a serial and then an aleatoric avant-garde attained fashionable prominence among composers and critics, there was an equal and opposite movement – at least, publicly – away from less progressive directions, including music regarded as traditionally tonal. A remark of Benjamin Britten’s to Murray Schafer in a 1963 interview – “I cannot feel that tonality is outworn” – catches one facet of the early-sixties British scene in particular, and the international mood more broadly. One hears the unmistakable note of defensiveness in Britten’s voice, and it is significant that Schafer’s original question figured tonality and serialism as irreconcilable polarities.4 If ambivalence in the face of tonal tradition is perhaps typical for a composer of Knussen’s generation (he was born in 1952), in considering his music specifically in terms of its pitch dimension, it seems important to observe the highly eclectic cast of his interests and influences. He credits works as disparate in pitch idiom as Schoenberg’s Herzgewächse and Stravinsky’s Orpheus as having “sank in deep somewhere” from childhood radio listening.5 Voicing admiration for Elliott Carter’s work, Knussen approaches a more technically specific account of “compositional grammar”: “I learned from Carter’s music that for me the crucial things to sort out precisely and hold to are the big shape of the piece, and a clearly defined vocabulary for it (Britten had told me almost exactly the same thing when I went to see him …).” Knussen’s Carter-Britten pairing steers clear of the cruder progressive/traditionalist polarity that plagues much recent music history; but it is the American composer’s way of treating “individual intervals (or pairs of intervals) 2

3 4 5

See for example Knussen, interview in Paul Griffiths, New Sounds, New Personalities: British Composers of the 1980s in Conversation (London: Faber, 1985), 54–64; “Self-Observation,” International Journal of Musicology 4 (1995): 363–65; notes to Knussen Conducts Knussen, recording Deutsche Grammophon 449 572–2 (1996); “Notes by the Composer,” Oliver Knussen (Virgin Classics 0777 7 59308–2, 1993), 10–14. Knussen, “Self-Observation,” 364. Britten, in Murray Schafer, British Composers in Interview (1963); repr. in Paul Kildea, ed., Britten on Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 223–32 (228). Griffiths, New Sounds, 61. Knussen’s eclectic spirit is manifest in his reviews of Bernstein, Del Tredici, Finnissy, Sessions, and Messiaen, published in Tempo between 1976 and 1979.

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with respect” that he cites specifically – rather than, say, the purely diatonic major-mode stretches in works of his English colleague – when touching on harmonic matters.6 The tonal dimensions of Knussen’s pitch idiom have assumed greater prominence for his more recent critics. Analyzing Knussen’s later harmonic practices with close descriptions of chordal rotation matrices, Julian Anderson notes the resulting pitch hierarchy: transposing successive chord inversions to a single root, Knussen creates “an easily recognizable modal tonic which guides the ear through the many simultaneous complexities of the music’s textures.”7 Anderson – like Knussen himself – singles out the Horn Concerto’s “classical tonality” as a marked stylistic feature, noting its “real bass line” and a network of semitonal key shifts. He also voices a hope that “tonal structuring might once again provide an understood framework against which composers are able to invent and improvise coherently, without any sense of historical regression or anxiety.”8 Another analyst sensitive to Knussen’s hexachordal rotation schemes, Arnold Whittall, has noted the survival of “tonally tinged harmony” in a fairly recent Knussen work, Ophelia’s Last Dance (2009–10): in the score’s final thematic appearance “diatonic dissolves into chromatic, consonance into dissonance.”9 In the present essay, attention will focus exclusively on early Knussen, the 1970s composer for whom tonality was something slightly risky, a mode of expression from which “objects” – chord voicings, cadences, a repertory of melodic cells – might be abstracted for contemplation. As I hope to show, the degree to which listeners experience tonality in Knussen’s music – the extent to which tonal hierarchies are audible at given moments, or across complete pieces – varies widely according to the nature of the music’s at-times intricate surfaces. In the pieces I consider – Ophelia Dances (1975), Sonya’s Lullaby (1977), Coursing, and the Third Symphony (both 1979) – certain elements clearly project tonality for the listener: bass-register pedals, recurring tonic emphases, conventional dominant-to-tonic cadences. But such events appear in an expanded tonal-harmonic universe populated also by rapid chromatic pitch circulation, local chord constellations of dissonant intervallic makeup, and thick layerings of sound in contrasting registers. A search for definitional purity, though, in the case of tonality, will always disappoint: Richard Cohn’s phenomenological view – that “tonality is equally invested in the listener rather than the listened-to musical ‘object’” – offers a welcome conceptual caution. Even among triadic musics, Cohn observes, “tonal listening is capable of spontaneous suspension and reengagement without notice or fuss.”10 Once more, in 6 7 8 9 10

Knussen, in Griffiths, New Sounds, 56. Julian Anderson, “Harmonic Practices in Oliver Knussen’s Music since 1988: Part I,” Tempo 221 (July 2002): 2–13 (4). Anderson, “A la Mode,” Musical Times 136 (June 1995): 290–93 (291, 292). Arnold Whittall, “‘Into the Breach’: Oliver Knussen in His Time,” Tempo 265 (July 2013): 16–27 (25). Whittall quotes the phrase “tonally tinged harmony” from Anderson, “Harmonic Practices in Oliver Knussen’s Later Music since 1988: Part II,” Tempo 223 (2003), 38. Richard Cohn, “Peter, the Wolf, and the Hexatonic Uncanny,” in Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice, ed. Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012), 47–62 (47, 50).

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seeking tonality, we hear talk of musical objects as well as of listeners. It is time to inspect some of Knussen’s objects more closely. Tonal Objects: from Ophelia Dances to Sonya’s Lullaby Knussen wrote Ophelia Dances using two of the three “Sphinx” ciphers Schumann invented for his Carnaval. Like his Romantic forebear he advertises the presence of the four-note figures in a set of tiny scenes inspired, in Knussen’s case, by the Shakespearean figure Ophelia (a focus also of the Third Symphony). Both Sphinxes are printed in the Ophelia Dances score as a preface, and in the “Intrada (Sphinx I),” it is the first, a four-pitch cell, in Schumann’s original melodic ordering < A-EC-B >, as well as in rotations, that is announced (Example 1). As an exposition of thematic shapes and of a tonal-harmonic area, this music is mysterious: allusive and fixed, elusive and fleeting. The entire Intrada passage (through m. 11) rests on alternating A and A pedals, though it is clearly the lower of the two, the horn’s A4, that asserts a loose “tonic” function as the only sustained lower register pitch in the texture. Above it, in the wind filigree, the flute offers a ten-pitch class run in which Sphinx I is embedded with metric and contour emphasis on the boundary tritone pitches (E-A). In isolation, the flute approximates an octatonic collection (e. g. A, A, B, C …), while adding extra-collectional pitches at the end. So the context is chromatic, but the concluding turn – an (036) trichord – is motivic and, as {G, D, B}, serves to further tonicize A (acting, in functional terms, as the diminished triad “vii°”). The same ten pcs are restated more rapidly in the piano (m. 3). Here, in the top voice, Schumann’s Sphinx I is heard unequivocally, < A-E-C-B >. It is a sign of the density of Knussen’s harmonic workings that the three tetrachord verticals beneath this descant are also forms of the Sphinx tetrachord a, prime form (0236).11 Knussen’s ten-pc collection excludes the dyad {D, E} from the texture, intensifying the tonal focus on the E pitch of Sphinx I, and its two partner-pitches, A, or the local pedal “tonic,” A. The prevalent tonal condition, effectively, is of a hazy oscillation between the groundedness of an A-E fifth, and the ambiguous stasis of the A-E tritone. The A of Sphinx I seems to dominate, with A a lurking sign of Sphinx II, motivically present in the clarinet and violin lines. The objects at the opening of Ophelia Dances are, admittedly, evanescent, but their harmonic patterning and presence is advertised to listeners by the title hint – “… (Sphinx I)” – and with keen listening one catches their shapes scurrying past. Even for listeners experiencing 11 The three piano verticals in m. 3 – listed in normal form as tetrachords – are [E, F, G, A], [F, A, B, C], and [F, A, A, B]; one notes too the bass-line echo of the flute’s closing melodic trichord, < G-D-B >. I follow standard conventions for pitch and pitch-class groupings in chromatic music: square brackets for pitches or pitch classes arranged in compact “normal” form; parentheses for set classes in prime form; curly brackets for unordered collections; angle brackets for ordered melodic strings of pitches.

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Example 1: Knussen, Ophelia Dances, Book I (1975), “Intrada (Sphinx I),” opening, mm. 1–4

only a shimmering woodwind arabesque, the anchoring horn As are static, a form of “pedal” tonality.12 Readers skeptical thus far that music of a patently chromatic surface sheen might project tonality may find a second object – heard at the opening of Sonya’s Lullaby (Example 2) – worthy of attention. For his solo piano piece, Knussen has 12

On pedals as a tonal force amid otherwise chromatic work, see Wallace Berry, Structural Functions in Music (New York: Dover, 1987), 171–72.

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cited “the harmonic exploitation of overtones produced from the lowest register of the instrument by composers as diverse as Brahms, Scriabin, Copland and Carter” as a stimulus.13 A glance at the opening chorale-like phrase – which returns four times in succession during the first half of the piece – confirms both the clear bass function of the lower voice, and the intricacy of Chords 1–3 as five- and six-pitch class chords floating in the mid-register chord space.14 Sonya’s Lullaby fully exploits the modern piano’s registral extremes, from the low E1 of Chord 3 at the opening, to the activation of tinkling upper pitches in the closing section (after m. 59). In this sound world, Knussen invites listeners to consider middle-register events, such as the gnomic B-F tritone at the center of Chord 3, as sounding overtones in relation to a deep bass. The effect, even on the piano’s modern equal temperament, is spectralist in conception.15 At a molto tranquillo pacing, Knussen gives listeners the very opposite of the scorrevole shimmer in Ophelia: in the Lullaby, rather, we contemplate aurally an object – three chords – that lies plainly before us, and that returns, unchanged, to allow future “viewings.” The object is fixed; it is also complex, multi-faceted, and ambiguous in tonal meanings, while moving to an unmistakable arrival on the E-rooted Chord 3. That “tonic” includes the pitches of a major triad – a major third G (the only octave-doubled pitch class in the progression) and a fifth, B – along with other colorations: an added sixth, sharp-seventh, and minor ninth (see Example 2b). By its voicing, Chord 3 allows for a polychordal hearing, in which a conventionally formed C dominant-seventh chord is recognizable. Such glimpses, though, are in keeping with the dusky colors of the preceding harmonies: the clustering whole steps (pitch interval [2]) in Chord 1, the wider spacings of the fourths and tritones in Chords 2 and 3. By outer voice counterpoint (see Example 2c), the chorale proceeds from conventional intervallic tensions – a seventh, then an eleventh – to the stability of the widely spaced major tenth, E1-G5. Major tenths contribute no less forcefully to the complex of overtone colors hovering over the preceding bass notes: the D2 (with F3) of Chord 1, and the B1 (with D4) of Chord 2. With further contemplation, one catches the prominent octatonic inflections of all three harmonies (Example 2d). Only Chord 1, the hexachord [C, D, E, F, F, G], is a pure octatonic scale segment; Chord 2, [C, D, E, F, G, A, B], contains the diminished seventh (0369) subset [C, E, F A]; Chord 3, the hexachord [C, D, E, F, G, B], includes most of the complementary (0369) in the subset [F, G, B]. This music cannot be subsumed easily into a plain octatonic background, however: neither Chord 2’s B bass nor Chord 3’s E pedal – the tonic of the passage – affirm the referential collection of Chord 1, though their Scriabinesque tritone-fall is a suggestively angular octatonic bass move. 13 Knussen, “Notes by the Composer,” 13. 14 For a register-specific model of tonality, parsed in terms of root space (pitches below C3), chord space, and overtone space (pitches above C6), see Daniel Harrison, Pieces of Tradition: An Analysis of Contemporary Tonal Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 15 As in Tristan Murail’s exactly contemporaneous Territoires de l’Oubli (1977), liberal use of the piano’s sustaining pedal foregrounds a rich blending of overtones.

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Example 2: (a) Sonya’s Lullaby (1977), refrain Chords 1–3; (b) Chord 3, triadic detail; (c) outer voice counterpoint; (d) octatonic affiliations, Chords 1–3

Chords 1–3 in Sonya’s Lullaby as a group traverse the chromatic pitch aggregate in prismatic shards of tonal reference. The meanings, again, are shifting and unstable: as the first low E recedes, the B-F tritone acquires its own middle-register bass function, the backdrop to the treble melody that begins in m. 2. The piece’s tonal meaning, though, is defined very audibly by the fixity of its principal elements: the absolute continuity of the mid-register tritone itself, a lullaby topic (“gently rocking,” after m. 8), and the regularly returning chorale refrain. There is a Ravelian calm to this nocturnal, and if these “objects” are indeed tonal, they remain both familiar and somehow just out of reach, as in a dreamscape. Tonal Objects in Motion: Coursing (1979) As the openings of both Ophelia Dances and Sonya’s Lullaby suggest, Knussen’s decision deliberately to limit his tonal-harmonic vocabulary to a small group of “objects” can yield radically contrasting expressive results, depending on tempo,

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texture, and many other aspects of the musical surface. In both cases, though, listeners are offered a music self-evidently focused initially on one thing. In Autumnal too – returning briefly to the piece Knussen names as consciously object-oriented – the two movements of the diptych (“Nocturne” and “Serenade”) present contrasting impressions of a single family of pitch groupings. These might be defined by the overall stasis of a small number of intervals: an A-G seventh, and various hollow perfect-fifth pairs. By nervous tremolando note-repetitions or reverberating streams of chords, the pieces concentrate on minute, shifting visions of the object in question. It is deliberately an intensely reflective discourse, meditative rather than questing. Knussen has noted his inability to “conceive pitch in the abstract, divorced from timbre,” and his practice of sketching from specific sound ideas, conceived “like a photograph.”16 The notion of object seems appealingly post-modern: a token of musical discourses rich in fragments, artifacts, images, and quotations. With the appeal to visual analogies, Knussen seems to part company with more traditional views of tonal music as a language of organic coherence, including the Schenkerian understanding of an unfolding of a single key over the extended temporal span of complete movements. If tonal objects are relatively autonomous and self-contained entities, how then does a composer create motion? Tempting though it is to propose new models for tonality in the late twentieth century, there is every reason to recognize precursors for an object-oriented view of harmonic materials even within earlier periods of triadic writing. Carl Dahlhaus posited an “individualization of harmony” in nineteenth century music: for Wagner and Liszt, he notes, “the accent falls on harmonic details – on single chords or unusual progressions,” a technique realized in chords of leitmotivic significance.17 Joseph Auner links such a view to the much broader objectifying discourses inherent in the technologies of sound recording. Ideas of the chord as “static vibrating object,” he finds, are as relevant to the fixity of a non-triadic tetrachord {C, E, F, B} in Schoenberg’s song “Am Strande” (1908–09) as to the stretching of sound possible with twenty-first-century computer-produced technologies.18 Returning to questions of how music moves between harmonic objects, I observe in Knussen’s music a variety of strategies for defining and controlling motion. Much depends on the nature and intervallic properties of the objects involved, a point best explored ostensively. Coursing, Knussen’s 1979 score for chamber orchestra, well exemplifies the consciously austere compositional approach of his other 1970s scores. The “lim16 Knussen, in Griffiths, New Sounds, 56. 17 Carl Dahlhaus, “Issues of Composition” (1974), in Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 73. 18 Joseph Auner, “Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality: How we became Phonometrographers,” in Tonality 1900–1950, 25–46 (33–5). Surveying the prominence of the object metaphor in musicological discourse, Auner’s discussion also cites Dahlhaus’s concept of chordal “individualization,” along with Robert Morgan’s observation of an early twentiethcentury compositional shift from substructure to “surface,” and Richard Taruskin’s recognition of harmonic fixity (chords “hypostatized, turned to stone”) in Stravinsky’s music.

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ited” pitch repertory, in this case, might be defined closely in terms of the prominence of a single chordal-melodic object – intervallically, the trichord (026) – stated in numerous transpositionally and inversionally related forms. Even amid the twists and turns of the opening precipitato melody – a complex “unison,” shared heterophonically by all ensemble members (Example 3) – the conjunction of major thirds (ic [interval class] 4), minor sevenths or major seconds (ic 2), and tritones (ic 6), crops up frequently enough to define (026) as a motivic object, as well as the central term of Coursing’s musical vocabulary, right from the outset. The four instances of (026) in mm. 1–4 hardly exhaust the pitch repertory of the line: a chromatic motive T (for “Twist”) – initially a < B-B-A > cell (marked in Example 3a) – is also characteristic, and perfect fourths appear quickly. There is enough intervallic repetition to signal a pattern. The patterning intensifies as the line gathers momentum. By contour and rhythmic choices, Knussen crafts a compound melody with unmistakable emphasis on the initial E as a tonic, with a strongly Mixolydian inflection (G as major third, D as seventh).19 This local tonic is temporarily displaced by mm. 7–8, even as the proliferation of (026) segments grows denser, though its subsequent influence is easily heard (as a tonal return at m. 22, and especially with the “da capo” like repeat of the opening at m. 36). With the (026) so fluidly transposed by whole- and halfstep, the tritone dyads within each trichord often trace a middleground voice-leading continuity, disguised by local octave displacements. Inspecting trichords 6–8 (see Example 3b), one hears a retrograde of the T motive, homing in (by double-neighbor motion) on the B-F tritone introduced with trichord 8. This is not to argue that a single tritone leap comprises any sort of final destination, tonally; merely to note that the leaps, when they arise, are usually prepared by stepwise approach in a given register. That these recurring (026) trichords are salient tonal-harmonic objects, and not mere epiphenomena within a harmonic discourse of alternate design, is confirmed by Knussen’s more systematic and ubiquitous concentration, later in Coursing, on (026) as a vertical sonority. This harmonic focus is announced from the moment actual trichord verticals enter the texture (mm. 42–44) until the very last seconds of the piece. The first trichord entrance (Example 4a) is paradigmatic in its close-position voicing; the concentration on registrally autonomous pitch groupings is crucial to the aural definition of objects in Coursing. If chords in tonal theory are typically assemblages of pitch-classes (always already an abstraction), only when made concrete in pitch space, do they sound like objects. The sustained {G5, D6, E6} trichord offers an upper-register pedal sonority (winds, with metallophone doubling), against which competing countermelodies – in brass, piano, and strings – strain rhythmically and harmonically. The kaleidoscopic complexity of the moment is typical of Coursing. If the upper trichord suggests an E-rooted “six-five,” it is the bounding sevenths in the lower voice (D4 to C5), and finally the piano’s melodic < D-C-F > trichord that provide the more stable tonal meaning, with the D “root” 19 The segmentation of trichord 2 as , in m. 2, projects a sense of “I–V7–I” model for the purely monodic pitch sequence of mm. 1–4, even allowing for the intervening E grace-note as an interruptive tonic pitch.

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Example 3: Coursing (1979), opening melody: (a) (026) trichords and T (Twist) motives; (b) T motive as middleground voice leading

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Example 4: (a) Coursing, mm. 43–44; (b) (026) trichords and “V7” tetrachords on competing D and E roots

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serving as bass for the texture (see Example 4, lower-staff reduction). Other chromatic pitches – As and then As – both complicate the harmonic situation (by adding new pitches beyond the sounding hexachord) and starken the sense of polar opposition among complete dominant-seventh tetrachords on competing roots, D and E. The registral simultaneity of competing tonic-like pitches – a high E6, a lower D4 – creates ambiguities of harmonic meaning in the preceding passage. Two tonal objects, fixed in seemingly autonomous strata, are superimposed as pitch discrepancies, one on top of the other.20 At a break-neck speed, Coursing traverses many such moments of elaborate registral interplay. At the same time, we begin to hear motion between the objects within individual layers, particularly through Knussen’s exploration of chains of (026) trichords progressing by roots a fifth apart. The opening gesture of one such passage, the chordal woodwind phrase in m. 74, is shown in Example 5a. The close-position trichords, in this case, punningly allude to the voice-leading inherent in old-fashioned V7-I motions; by sequential repetition, a chain of such (026)/V7 sonorities – see Example 5c – will quickly traverse a chromatic aggregate (with some repeating pcs marked in closed noteheads), in ways familiar from earlier tonal styles.21 Example 5b gives a summary of the music that follows the opening woodwind gesture in mm. 74–77. As in earlier excerpts, one hears rapid kaleidoscopic timbral shifts, but the underlying harmonic texture is entirely confined to (026) trichords, often in close-position voicings. Perusal of this passage confirms once again the tonal force of an E tonic in Coursing, with Mixolydian emphasis, as at the piece’s opening. With E as referent, one might hear a quasi dominant-tonic motion in the local m. 74 wind progression. Subsequent bars elaborate, but do not necessarily displace, the hierarchical significance of E as a tonic, sustained in m. 76, and further solidified as a root by the lowbass doubling of the (026) trichord voiced as {E1, D1, G2}, with E as bass. A comparison of Examples 5b and 5c reveals that most of the musical surface can be understood in terms of a systematic traversal of cycles of (026) trichords. Melodic fourths (rising and falling) proliferate in this passage, strengthening the impression of traditional “V7-I” cadences, multiplied in varying voicings – in pitch intervals, either [6, 2], [2, 4], [10, 6], or [8, 6] – and in fleeting sequential chains.22 Such a passage is fully chromatic in its rapid cycling through the pitch-class aggregate; in its local intervallic processes, though, the music pivots precariously on the edge of a familiar tonal discourse in which discrete chord pairs enact multiple V–I gestures.23 20 For analogues of the traditional consonance/dissonance binary, operating in textures defined by registrally discrete strata, I speak of congruency and discrepancy among pitches; see Philip Rupprecht, “Tonal Stratification and Uncertainty in Britten’s Music,” Journal of Music Theory 40 (1996): 311–46 (320–21). 21 As in Mozart’s G-minor Symphony (K550), I, mm. 48–50. Similar chromatic sequences are a staple of modern tonal pedagogy; see for example, L. Poundie Burstein and Joseph N. Straus, Concise Introduction to Tonal Harmony (New York: Norton, 2015), 311. 22 In m. 77, the (036) trichord {B, G, C} possibly reflects scribal error (B for B). 23 The Ex. 5c cycle, as a simultaneous interweaving of T5 and T11 cycles, projects a transformation familiar in a range of chromatic musics, including the second of Berg’s Vier Gesänge,

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Example 5: Coursing (a) woodwind incipit, m. 74; (b) summary of trichord layers, mm. 74–77; (c) voice leading model for (026) chains

As the bass pitch and anchoring “root” of an (026) trichord, E asserts a tonic-like hierarchical centricity in this passage. At the same time, however, by rapid and “mechanical” multiplication of chordal-intervallic objects – block transposition in parallel motion in three voices – Knussen defamiliarizes the (026) trichord, robbing it of an entirely traditional tonal-harmonic role. Tritones, conventionally Op. 2. For close study of aligned interval cycles as a compositional resource, see Philip Stoecker, “Aligned Cycles in Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet,” Music Analysis 33 (2014): 32–64. On the question of stylistic affinities between Knussen’s music and Berg’s, see also Whittall, “‘Into the Breach,’” 22.

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treated as dissonant intervals, in this music do not smoothly resolve by half-step to stable thirds or sixths; in Knussen’s sequential chains, the tritones move to new tritones, maintaining a basic ambiguity at the phrase level in relation to traditional major-minor models of key. Tonal Objects and Large-Scale Form: Symphony No. 3 A fuller analysis of Coursing, particularly of its ending, would reveal some longrange tonal effects beneath its roiled surface. Perusal of the score confirms a clear dominant “arrival” over the bass note B (mm. 112–122), and extensive concluding maneuvers prior to the advent of an E tonic bass (m. 134), returning after brief displacement at the Calmo passage (m. 145) that provides the work’s coda.24 A comparable slowly unfolding tonal background of quasi dominant and tonic functions animates the large-scale forms in other Knussen scores; an overlay of chromatic pitch colorations floats above bass pitches acting as traditional pedal points. The opening E majorish tonic in Sonya’s Lullaby – see Example 6 – is ultimately superseded, in the closing music (mm. 59–74), by a B-rooted conclusion, very nearly an old-fashioned dominant seventh, as if to reach an open-ended close (a half-cadence, i. e., if E is considered the work’s tonic). The impression of local resolution applies most forcefully to the hanging B-F tritone of the middle register, which is finally led (at m. 74) to a stable B-F fifth. And here the music stops in its tracks, as the child falls asleep. On the music’s surface, the traditional tonal resources of fifth-related triads are pushed to the piano’s registral extremities. Foregrounding the noisiness of the extreme bass, the penumbra of upper partials ringing above the piano’s sustain pedal, and tintinnabulating high-treble attacks, Knussen’s Lullaby revels in a world of musical objects. These objects one might plausibly define – as electronic and tape music composers have done since the mid twentieth century – not simply as well-tempered harmonies, but in terms of their rich sonic materiality.25 With questions of large-scale form in mind, this chapter turns in closing to Knussen’s largest project of the 1970s, the fifteen-minute-long Symphony No. 3. I will focus on the work’s closing Chorale passacaglia, a little over five minutes in duration, and the short coda (about 35” long). It is in this phase of the work that listeners probably experience most clearly a sense of grounded tonality, by recognizing a specific tonic E. A short-score reduction of the Chorale’s thirteen chords in their first statement (Cycle 1, mm. 286–332) is shown in Example 7. This music, Knussen has noted, originated in a “cortège-finale” sketched in 1973 for a symphonic poem about Shakespeare’s Ophelia, an idea “suggested by the famous 24 Bayan Northcott observed “a move from tonic to dominant of E flat” towards the end of Coursing; liner note to Oliver Knussen, CD recording (Unicorn-Kanchana UK CD 2010, 1988), 6. 25 Observing thick pedal-point sonorities in a Bach organ excerpt, the tape-music composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer defined musical objects by distinguishing “sound matter” from harmonic organization. “The Musical Object,” in Schaeffer, In Search of A Concrete Music (1952), trans. Christine North and John Dack (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 139.

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Example 6: Sonya’s Lullaby: tonic-to-dominant motion as a tonal background

pre-Raphaelite pictures.”26 Other parts of the project were completed and premiered in 1974 as a separate Introduction and Masque; in Symphony No. 3, finally, the musics were conjoined to create a continuous form. The two halves of the work are dramatically separated by a single tutti chord (R24 in the score, marked with a down-arrow in Example 7) with its own claims to object status. It is here, as Knussen says in an LP liner note, that the orchestra “rears up” to mark the turning point of the Symphony: The chord is seen to be the first of an immensely slow chorale, which is used as a passacaglia-like ground. This sounds like a new idea, but is actually a vast “blow-up” of the initial [R11] carillon entry, overlapped and re-scored for double string-orchestra. In the course of seven variations, most of the music from the Allegro con fuoco is seen through the light of this chorale-ground.27

Once again, Knussen is describing a listener’s experience of his music in emphatically visual terms. The “blow-up” is an explicitly photographic-cinematic concept; earlier in his note, he recalls his fascination with “the potential relationship in film between a tough but fluid directional form, and the detail which can be frozen or ‘blown-up’ at any point.”28 26

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Knussen, LP liner note to Bainbridge Viola Concerto/Knussen Third Symphony, recording Unicorn RHD 400 (1981). The painting Ophelia by Arthur Hughes (1851) is reproduced on the cover of this LP and a later CD reissue (Unicorn CD 2010, 1988). Knussen’s comment also alludes to the iconic 1852 painting (also titled Ophelia) of John Everett Millais. Knussen, Bainbridge Viola Concerto/Knussen Third Symphony, LP liner note. Knussen, Bainbridge Viola Concerto/Knussen Third Symphony, LP liner note. Despite a Hitchcock reference, Knussen’s description of cinematic techniques of freeze-frame and blow-up resonates more closely with the work of 1960s New Wave directors. Exploring the innovative editing techniques in Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim (1961), for example, the film critics Diana

Example 7: Symphony No. 3: (top) Catastrophe chord and closing Chorale, Cycle 1; (below) first-movement “Carillon” chords

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Remembering the title Knussen appends to the score – “(… Ophelia)” – as well as the remarks just cited, listeners might well interpret the R24 chord rhetorically and dramatically as a moment of catastrophe. By climactic centrality and rhetorical force, the vastness of this single Catastrophe chord corresponds in some sense to the most central fact of Ophelia’s existence, her death by water. The chord surely has more in common with Millais’s iconic painted image of the lifeless Ophelia, floating glassy-eyed in the brook, than with other pre-Raphaelite images of her precariously seated on a willow branch.29 To hear the orchestral sonority in narrowly literal terms, as a direct depiction of Ophelia’s jump “in the weeping brook,” would probably be to mistake psychological realism for mimetic precision.30 Even so, what seems abundantly clear in performance – to recall Knussen’s cinematic analogies – is the impression of a single musico-dramatic action caught in freeze-frame. By sheer duration the Catastrophe chord presents as a basically static musical object, immobile over forty to forty-five seconds.31 In a score previously so hectic with detail, the unchanging orchestral sonority offers a precisely calibrated dying fade. This is defined by a fff dynamic, receding to ppp in all instruments; independent balancing of orchestral choirs enhances the effect of seamless acoustical decay. Following the tutti attack, horn and percussion after-shocks with harp touches (mm. 272–73) evoke an Ophelian orchestral realm, redolent of a watery surface penetrated and roiled before returning gradually to calm.32 As a musical object, the Catastrophe chord can be defined convincingly by non-pitch parameters: dynamics, timbres, duration, attack and decay. This is not to exclude pitch choices entirely; the chord’s near-chromatic saturation (ten pitch classes) and vast registral gamut create a murky harmonic conglomeration from which the simpler pentachordal sonorities of the Chorale emerge. The Chorale itself is a slowly moving cortège: in the initial presentation of Chords 1–13 (Cycle 1), the total duration, notated in half-note beats at the tempo MM 72, is one minute nineteen seconds. Cycles 2 and 3 (after mm. 333 and 356 respectively) each last around one minute, in proportionally faster beats (at MM 48); Cycles 4–7 each last roughly half a minute; for the Coda, Knussen returns to the initial MM 72 tempo.33 Within cycles, the internal motion between chords is

29 30 31

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Holmes and Robert Ingram observe that “the freeze-frame … momentarily arrests the passage of time, and hence may be used to represent permanence”; François Truffaut (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 72. Depicting a still living subject, Hughes’s Ophelia imbues the viewer’s gaze with an awful pathos and the dramatic irony of recognizing impending disaster. Knussen (LP liner note) mentions “perhaps the ghost of Ophelia perceptible in the background,” but refrains from more specific comment. The chord lasts 45” in Vladimir Ashkenazy’s live recording (RPO Records, CD RPO 7015, 1989), 40” in Michael Tilson Thomas’s studio recording (the Unicorn LP and CD). Internal tempo markings between mm. 268 and 286 are precise, but fermata signs and a graduated rallentando admit flexibility in performance. Coursing, inspired by a sighting of the rapids of Niagara Falls (Northcott, liner note, 6), traces a comparable gesture following the climactic tutti at R13. My commentary on rhythmic details will be most vivid for readers accessing Knussen’s score after R26.

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also slow, but unpredictable, since the relative durations of individual chords varies widely: Cycle 1 traces a gradual acceleration over its thirteen-chord succession.34 The detailed sculpting of speed enhances the object-like autonomy of individual chords: varying the temporal flow, Knussen avoids a regular harmonic rhythm. Each chord is a now, more or less self-contained – related to its surroundings, but not conventionally concatenated in the continuity musicians term “progression.” By double-string orchestral scoring in Cycles 1 and 2, moreover, Knussen favors overlapping chords. It is a water-colorish mixing of tints, a blurring of edges. At larger levels, too, the cyclic ground plan – seven untransposed statements of the same Chorale – promotes continual aural reassessment of a single, closely defined set of objects. This string orchestral ground, at another perspectival level, provides the backdrop for isolated returns in the wind, brass, and percussion layers of the ensemble, as Knussen re-stages fragments of the Symphony’s faster opening movement, “seen through the light of” the chorale-ground.35 In a tonal and rhetorical climax to this sequence, the Catastrophe chord returns, ushering in some memorably dramatic horn-calls, arpeggiations of a simple dominant seventh chord on E (mm. 411–16), the apotheosis of a characteristic trumpet signal heard at the Symphony’s opening. As a tonal resolution of the highly chromatic Catastrophe chord, the Chorale allows listeners to discover tonal clarity, more or less for the first time in the Symphony. Analysis of this E-rooted tonality might begin from the repeating V7-I cadences that mark the openings of Cycles 2–4. That Knussen adjusts the Chord 1 bass from an E to a G in Cycles 3 and 4 (at mm. 356 and 388) does not detract from the aural force of dominant-to-tonic harmonic motion. The V7-I boundary chords create an E-major frame for a chord cycle defined by a varied succession of ten bass-register “roots” (only D and F are lacking).36 This bass line moves variously by ic 1, 2, 3, and 4, as well as by the tonally suggestive ic 5 (the rising fifths, B to F, from chords 5–6, falling B to E in chords 13–1). The crucial tonal feature, though, is the intervallic similarity of individual verticals, all of which are pentachords, i. e., five-pitch chords without internal pitch-class doublings. The initial impression of these Chorale chords is of local heterogeneity: intervallically, there are eight distinct set classes (labeled a to h in Example 7).37 Closer inspection confirms what the ear will easily absorb: the predominance of the “dominant-seventh” sonority as a tetrachordal presence – set class (0258) – within each pentachord. This is expressed either literally, by complete V7 formations over the bass notes of chords 1 {E, G, B, D} and 5 {B, D, F, A}, or by the V7 surrogate familiar from Coursing, trichord (026). Forms of the (026) trichord grounded on the 34 35 36 37

In Cycle 1, at the notated MM 72 speed, chord spans steadily attenuate from 9.5 beats (chords 1–2, mm. 286–95), 11.5 beats (chord 3, mm. 295–301) to the much briefer durations of chords 12 (4 1/3 beats) and 13 (1 1/2 beats) at mm. 330–32. Knussen, liner note. The Catastrophe chord itself is also a ten-pc collection, though it does not correspond to the bass roots of Chords 1–13. Their intervallic contents, expressed as set classes in prime form, are a (01258); b (01248); c (02368); d (01367); e (01457); f (02468); g (01346); and h (01347).

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lowest sounding pitch of a chord appear in seven instances: chords 2 {Eb, G, C}, 3 {A, C, G}, 6 {F, A, E}, 9 {E, G, C}, 10 {F, A, E}, 11 {A, C, G} and 13 {B, D, A}. Other apparently anomalous chords are also suggestively triadic in subsets – chords 4 and 7 – or include a crucial minor seventh over the bass (chord 12).38 Knussen’s pentachord vocabulary is rich, then, in chords suggestive of the traditional V7 (0258) or its trichordal subset (026). An inspection of Example 7 confirms untransposed return of pentachord b (in chords 2 and 7), revoiced to present different bass roots, and of chords d and e. The three repetitions of pentachord c are transposed: chords 3 and 9 share four pcs – equivalent to the French augmented sixth chord (0268) – but in chord 5, the intervallic equivalence is expressed by new pcs. Seeking “rules” of succession in Knussen’s Chorale, one might point to instances in which multiple common tones bind together adjacent chords: these pitchclass continuities are marked in Example 7 with open noteheads, and – when there is a literal suspension between two chords (without any registral shift of a common pc, i. e.) – with dashed ties. One finds three common-tone pcs at Chords 1–2, 2–3, and 8–9; four common tones if chords 12–13 are considered as separate verticals. Other chords proceed by pairs of common tones; only twice (moving to chords 5 and 7) do four “new” pcs appear at once. Recalling the (026) cycles of Coursing, one might observe certain intervallic similarities in the motion of the Symphony’s Chorale chords, and some contrasts of behavior. In both works the (06) pc tritone is often expressed on the musical surface by pitch dyads in [0, 6] close-position voicing. Most frequently, in the chorale, the tritone pair occurs in registrally adjacent voices, as in the succession of chords 2, 3, and 4, where Knussen repeats the [C5, G6] dyad of chord 2 in a lower octave with registral reordering in chord 3 (as [G3, C4]), then returns the pc dyad to its original treble position in chord 4. Working with the larger harmonic world of pentachords in the Symphony, Knussen often disperses tritone subsets of a chord across multiple octaves in a manner distant from the clustering of Coursing. As if to stave off any too-perfunctory effect of V7-I resolution involving the leading tone of E, Knussen’s Chorale – chords 3, 9, 10, and 13 – scrupulously avoids close-position voicing of the E(D)/A tritone pc dyad. A skeptic might doubt such intervallic niceties are perceptually relevant, and yet it is precisely the inner life of the chords that commands attention at the cortègeslow pacing of the Chorale. That vertical structures favor the (026) trichord and V7 tetrachord is significant, but we listen above all to chords as glittering objects. Whereas in Coursing the (026) trichord was most consistently a closely spaced patch of sound, in the Chorale Knussen favors overtone-series spacings welling up from deep bass pitches. As in Sonya’s Lullaby, each object is kaleidoscopic and multi-faceted, defined by the sonic materiality of pitches in high or low registers, as well as by its situation within a chain of events. A discourse of tonal-harmonic objects is particularly varied in the Symphony’s Chorale. This music is far from the “deliberately limited” vocabulary of Autumnal, 38

Chord 4, rooted on C, includes a {C, E, G} triadic subset, and, as its lower three pitches, the (026) formation {C, E, F}.

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and more elaborate as a linear succession than the gnomic chordal refrains in Sonya’s Lullaby. The Chorale objects constitute a field of intervallic individuality, a chordal language in which distinctive single harmonies concatenate into the slow-moving processional. Still, the objects, as Knussen himself observes, are not actually new to the Symphony, but are instead re-discoveries of materials presented much earlier. What does Knussen mean by describing the Chorale as a cinematic “blow-up” of earlier events in the score? The specific objects under magnification in this case are the “Carillon” chords (R11, mm. 133 ff.) marked A to O in Example 7. This chord stream offers a still more individuated intervallic vocabulary of pentachords, hexachords, and occasionally larger collections than the later Chorale, albeit at a dizzyingly rapid pace. An event is prefigured, fleetingly. It is only with the radically slower presentation of the Chorale that listeners can get a proper “look” at these objects. The first four Chorale chords are traceable as derivations of the more complex Carillon sonorities: Chorale Chord 1 as a crystallization of tonal meaning from the more diffuse intervallic patterning of the nine pitch classes and 11 discrete pitches in Carillon chord A; Chord 2 as a through-the-looking-glass registral inversion of Carillon B (the celesta’s aerial E6 descant becoming a bass root, E2); the overtone-like spacing of Chord 3 revoices the more astringent and closely-packed pcs of pentachord C; and so on. The full Carillon sequence is governed by such pre-echoes of the Chorale – a music that will only fully reveal itself after listeners have traversed the liminal space of the Catastrophe chord. The Carillon flits by in less than eight seconds, so for most listeners, links felt across the form hardly register consciously. Even so, they do exist, and without such intricately worked detail, both the impact of local sonorities and the longer-range mood progression of the Symphony would be different. Knussen the designer of musical objects operates on a spectrum of expositional definition, redolent of the classic Freudian distinction between latent and manifest mental images. Meanings accrue through layering and circling-back motions; perception is not necessarily conscious. Knussen allows a given object greater or lesser presence at a given moment, in a carefully wrought technique of occlusion or revelation. We are back to the notion of “blow-up” as a magnification of a previously invisible detail. The quixotic celesta-guitar-harp Carillon returns, whether or not we consciously sense it, in the shimmering half-light of the Chorale. The objects are in many ways unchanged, but by radical contrast of tempo they become individually clear to listeners. The Symphony’s temporal expansion is idiomatic to a discourse of autonomous tonal objects (once again, a mid-twentieth century technological definition of the musical object seems relevant).39 Knussen’s preferred analogy – the cinematic concepts of images, enlarged, frozen, or otherwise reworked – is more than a convenient metaphor. In tangible ways, he works tonally and harmonically in a world of discrete objects. 39 On musical objects defined by “total transposition” of pitch and duration, see the discussion of the Dies Irae fragments in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique in Schaeffer, “Musical Object,” 143.

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* * * A more comprehensive reading of Knussen’s Symphony No. 3 might hear in the Chorale a rediscovery of chordal euphony and even – with its prominent B and E chordal roots – of functional major-minor tonality. The rootedness of E is all the more powerful, over the course of the piece as a whole, as a hard-won achievement: tonal hierarchy emerges following the complex layerings of the turbulent first movement, and the near-chromatic saturation of the Catastrophe chord. I am tempted to hear in the Symphony’s overarching progression a narrative with affinities to the wider stylistic and historical progression of European-American art music after mid-century. I suggested earlier that tonality was for Knussen something risky, and that his interest in “objects,” abstracted from earlier expressive contexts, might represent a way of approaching difficult compositional territory. The point might be expressed still more simply by admitting that Knussen and his colleagues, in the Seventies, were after something very specific in their music – permission to rediscover tonality, both for themselves, as a compositional resource, and for listeners, as a realm of experience. Let us invoke briefly the musical world of the 1970s that Knussen in his early twenties was entering. The composer himself has offered two anecdotes that seem revealing. The first concerns his awareness of Per Nørgård’s Voyage Into the Golden Screen (1968–69), a score he recalls being “bowled over by” at a 1971 ISCM performance. His fascination was with Nørgård’s focus on harmonies as material sound: “As with the later French spectralists, the idea or concept is the piece; the work is an exploration of what goes on inside a particular sound or idea.”40 Second, there are Knussen’s memories of studying Schoenberg’s Op. 9 Kammersymphonie and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at Dartington, in Peter Maxwell Davies’s class of 1974. In a letter to William Glock, Knussen recalled Davies’s analysis in class of “tonality-suspending” harmonic usages in the Schoenberg, and he cited the lasting impact of the compositional assignments: “The concentration on harmonic control and thought confirmed things that I knew would have to be tackled in my own music. My Ophelia Dances grew from the Dartington exercise technically, and much of my work in the mid-1970s out of that, at least in part.”41 In what sense, though, are the glittering tetrachord-Sphinxes of Knussen’s early chromatic music beholden to a pivotal Schoenberg score of 1906? Perhaps it is in the local density of harmonic progression – the sheer speed at which his chords fly by. Knussen, in effect, returns in his own way to expressive resources broached by his Viennese forebearer. Davies’s pedagogical emphasis – on Schoenbergian harmonic schemes conducive (or not) to tonality – equally, calls to mind the dialectic broached at the 40 41

“Oliver Knussen in Conversation with Paul Kildea,” Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts program book (Aldeburgh, Suffolk, 1999), 119. Knussen, 1985 letter to William Glock, cited in Glock, Notes in Advance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 73. Glock silently edits Knussen’s original; the reference to “tonality-suspending” harmonic usage is cited from Knussen’s original letter: British Library, Glock Papers, MS Mus 954, fols. 36–38 (fol. 36).

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opening of this chapter: between chords as facets of a larger syntactic and expressive flow, and chords as singular entities, objects in their own right. Knussen’s recollections evoke the stylistic-technical ferment of the period. They remind one that he was grappling, like his colleagues, with the question that had bothered so many throughout the twentieth century – whether tonality was (in Britten’s word) “outworn,” or once again a viable creative resource. That Knussen himself was susceptible to an eclectic range of historically disparate influences – both contemporary and early twentieth-century – is possibly not surprising or even unusual. To investigate the tonal “objects” in his music of the 1970s at a historical distance of several decades is worthwhile in its own right; the inquiry, at the same time, tells us something of broader concern to the story of tonality in the later twentieth century. Bibliography Anderson, Julian. “A la Mode.” Musical Times 136 (June 1995): 290–93. ––. “Harmonic Practices in Oliver Knussen’s Music since 1988: Part I” and “Part II.” Tempo 221 (2002): 2–13 and Tempo 223 (2003): 16–41. Auner, Joseph. “Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality: How We Became Phonometrographers.” In Wörner et al., Tonality 1900–1950, 25–46. Berry, Wallace. Structural Functions in Music. 1976. Repr. New York: Dover, 1987. Britten, Benjamin. Interview in Murray Schafer, British Composers in Interview, 113–24. London: Faber, 1963; repr. in Paul Kildea, ed., Britten on Music, 223–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Burstein, L. Poundie, and Joseph N. Straus, Concise Introduction to Tonal Harmony. New York: Norton, 2015. Cohn, Richard. “Peter, the Wolf, and the Hexatonic Uncanny.” In Wörner et al., Tonality 1900–1950, 47–62. Dahlhaus, Carl. “Issues of Composition.” 1974. In Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. Mary Whittall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, 40–78. Glock, William. Notes in Advance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Harrison, Daniel. Pieces of Tradition: An Analysis of Contemporary Tonal Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Holmes, Diana, and Robert Ingram. François Truffaut. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Knussen, Oliver. Interview in Paul Griffiths, New Sounds, New Personalities: British Composers of the 1980s in Conversation, 54–64. London: Faber, 1985. ––. LP liner note to Bainbridge Viola Concerto/Knussen Third Symphony, recording Unicorn RHD 400, 1981. ––. “Notes by the Composer.” Oliver Knussen. CD recording Virgin Classics 0777 7 59308-2, 1993: 10–14. ––. Notes to CD recording Autumnal. London: NMC D178, 2012: 6–11. ––. Notes to Knussen Conducts Knussen. CD recording Deutsche Grammophon 449 572–2 (1996): 3–6. ––. “Oliver Knussen in Conversation with Paul Kildea.” Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts program book. Aldeburgh, Suffolk, 1999: 119. ––. “Self-Observation.” International Journal of Musicology 4 (1995): 363–35. Northcott, Bayan. Liner note to Oliver Knussen, CD recording. Unicorn-Kanchana UK CD 2010, 1988: 5–6.

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Rupprecht, Philip. “Tonal Stratification and Uncertainty in Britten’s Music.” Journal of Music Theory 40 (1996): 311–46. Schaeffer, Pierre. “The Musical Object.” In Schaeffer, In Search of A Concrete Music (1952), 131– 46. Translated by Christine North and John Dack. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Stoecker, Philip. “Aligned Cycles in Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet.” Music Analysis 33 (2014): 32–64. Whittall, Arnold. “‘Into the Breach’: Oliver Knussen in His Time.” Tempo 265 (July 2013): 16–27. Wörner, Felix, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht, eds. Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012.

Tonality After “New Tonality”: Silvestrov, Schnittke, and Polystylism in the Late USSR Peter J. Schmelz Oblivion? – There is no such thing as oblivion, Silvestrov says with his ‘Messenger’: it is enough to fling a window open, to strike a match, to look at a cloud, to hear a triad, for memories – not only ours but also those, unknown to us, of all these messengers – to start working a miracle. Alexei Lubimov, “The Messenger”1 He may pretend to be diatonically meek and mild, decently four-square, but we won’t forget with whom we are dealing, and all the while we’ll accept any sort of tonal shock as right and proper. Then in the finale, when he forswears the shocks, we take it as somehow uplifting and noble. Schnittke on Stravinsky’s Apollo2

In the 1960s and 1970s, ambitious, young Soviet theorists assimilated and advocated compositional developments including serialism, twelve-tone writing, and other expanded approaches, many of which they gathered into the hopeful category “new tonality” (novaya tonal’nost’). Mikhail Tarakanov (1928–96) was among the first. In a 1972 essay called “New Tonality in Twentieth-Century Music,” Tarakanov calmly led readers through a sustained investigation of the ins and outs of this “new tonality,” beginning with a reflection on what constituted tonality in various theoretical traditions, including Europe, America, and Russia. He noted that Russian theory lacked an exact equivalent for the English “tonality” (as well as the German “Tonalität”), acknowledging as well the fuzziness of the Russian near-relative lad.3 1 2 3

In Der Bote, ECM CD New Series 1771, 461 812–2 (2002), 8 (unnumbered). In “Paradox as a Feature of Stravinsky’s Musical Logic (1973),” in Alfred Schnittke, A Schnittke Reader, ed. Alexander Ivashkin, trans. John Goodliffe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 159. Russian theorists employ a more overarching concept called lad (adjectival form: ladovïy) which is simultaneously “modal” and “tonal,” among other concepts. As Roy Guenther notes, “the Russian lad concept is much more general in dealing with functional relationships, such that many learned and folk styles can be accommodated by it. Thus, in translation, in addition to modal, it is often necessary to use tonal, gravitational, polar, and other related terms to convey the proper sense of the Russian usage to non-Russian musicians.” See Roy J. Guenther, “Varvara Dernova’s System of Analysis of the Music of Skryabin,” in Russian Theoretical Thought in Music, ed. Gordon D. McQuere (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983; reprint ed. University of Rochester Press, 2009), 381 (glossary). See also Yuriy Kholopov, “Tonal’nost’,” Muzïkal’naya entsiklopediya, ed. Yu. V. Keldïsh (Moscow: Sovetskaya entsiklope-

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For Tarakanov, “new tonality” required three components: 1) “Basis on a twelve-step row instead of a seven-step scale,” 2) “A strict order of intervallic relationships between pitches”; and 3) “A tight coordination of horizontal and vertical, originating from a single intonational complex.” Despite the precision, Tarakanov allowed for flexibility, noting that these were “tendencies, allowing for different, more or less consistent, concrete results.”4 Tarakanov’s examples support his flexibility. Most of the discussion is oriented toward twelve-tone or atonal scores, with examples from Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky, and Berg. But he also calls attention to excerpts from Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Kara Karayev.5 Other leading young Soviet theorists engaged with “new tonality,” chief among them Yuriy Kholopov (1932–2003), who began elaborating a flexible twelve-pitch tonal system in his early work on Sergey Prokofiev.6 Kholopov agreed with Tarakanov’s assessment of “tonality” as the “question of questions” in the theory of contemporary music, and authored the comprehensive article on tonality in the Soviet music encyclopedia of the late 1970s, devoting substantial space to a discussion of “new tonality.”7 For Kholopov, “new tonality,” like traditional tonality, was a “hierarchical scheme of functionally differentiated pitch connections embodying logical connections in the pitch structure.” But “unlike old tonality, new tonality may rely on not only a consonant tonic but also on any expediently selected group of tones, not only on a diatonic basis, but also widely used harmonies on any of the functionally independent twelve pitches.”8

4 5

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diya, 1981), 5:564–75; Kholopov, Garmoniya (St. Petersburg: Lan’, 2003), 235–36; and Yu. N. Kholopov, “K probleme lada v russkom teoreticheskom muzïkoznanii,” in Garmoniya: problem nauki i metodiki 2 (Rostov-on-Don: RGK, 2005). Mikhaíl Tarakanov, “Novaya tonal’nost’ v muzïke XX veka,” Problemï muzïkal’noy nauki 1 (1972): 29. Tarakanov’s work might be compared to the contemporary research of George Perle on what he called “twelve-tone tonality.” See George Perle, Twelve-tone Tonality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1st ed. 1977, 2nd rev. ed., 1996). Tarakanov cites Perle’s Serial Composition and Atonality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962) in “Novaya tonal’nost’ v muzïke XX veka,” 8. Kholopov, Sovremennïye chertï garmonii Prokof’yeva (Moscow: Muzïka, 1967), Part II: “Tonal’nost’.” See also Peter J. Schmelz, “After Prokofiev,” Sergey Prokofiev and His World, ed. Simon Morrison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 509–11; and Tarakanov, Stil’ simfoniy Prokof’yeva (Moscow: Muzïka, 1968), 9–14 (NB he does not use the term “new tonality” here). Quotation from Tarakanov in Kholopov, “Problema novoy tonal’nosti v russkom i sovetskom teoreticheskom muzïkoznanii,” in Idei Yu. N. Kholopova v XXI veke: k 75-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya, ed. T. S. Kyuregyan (Moscow: Muzizdat, 2008), 199 (without attribution); this article was originally written in 1976 and first published in 1981 in Voprosï metodologii sovetskogo muzïkoznaniya (Moscow: 1981). See also Kholopov, “Tonal’nost’.” Kholopov, “Tonal’nost’,” 5:569.

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Like Tarakanov, Kholopov stressed both the uniformity of the “new tonality,” its structural logic within individual compositions, and also its elasticity across compositions by a single composer and from composer to composer: “New tonality is individualized and therefore does not have a single, unified complex of pitch elements, that is, it does not possess functional uniformity.” Like Tarakanov, he cited a wide range of examples, placing compositions by Scriabin, Berg, Schoenberg, Babadzhanyan, Shchedrin, Webern, Denisov, and Schnittke in this category.9 In Kholopov’s later harmonic analysis workbook for conservatory students, “new tonality” receives a more constrained interpretation: a separate chapter exemplified by Act II, scene 3 of Berg’s Wozzeck.10 Here, again, Kholopov emphasizes the flexibility and capaciousness of the new system: “At the same time, deprived of its most important quality of immediate gravitation, tonality became varied and diverse … The question is not in what tonality is this composition, but what kind of tonal structures does it contain.”11 As Soviet theorists struggled to stay abreast with European and American compositional developments, they fixated on serialism and twelve-tone practices. Yet, in so doing, they ignored a new Soviet approach to tonality found within the even more varied, diverse, and all-encompassing, domain of polystylism. Tonality, and its symbolic baggage, was the anchor for polystylism’s representative richness. A majority of collage or pastiche compositions were founded on tonal quotations and tonal modeling, but tonal gestures, often of limited scope, operated along the entire spectrum of polystylistic ways and means. In his illuminating study of Schnittke’s triadic tonality in his compositions from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, theorist Christopher Segall deems referring to Schnittke’s triadic usage in relation to polystylism “problematic inasmuch as Schnittke frequently uses triads in contexts that do not otherwise invoke historical styles.”12 Yet both because of Schnittke’s own polystylistic advocacy and because of its symbolic freight in the Soviet Union, tonality – even isolated triads – always evoked and symbolized polystylism in his compositions. It called attention even when specific or multiple styles were not quoted, imitated, or otherwise alluded to. After all, in the Soviet Union, tonality (or diatonicism or modality more generally) 9 10

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Ibid., 5:569–71. Kholopov, Garmonicheskiy analiz v 3-kh chastyakh, vol. 3 (Moscow: Moskovskaya konservatoriya, 2009), 82–99. See also Kholopov, “Problema novoy tonal’nosti v russkom i sovetskom teoreticheskom muzïkoznanii”; Kholopov, Garmoniya, 447 (“novaya dvenadtsatistupennaya … gamma”; “boleye rasshirennaya tonal’naya sistema – khromaticheskaya”); also M. I. Katunyan, “K izucheniyu novïkh tonal’nïkh system v sovremennoy muzïke,” Problemï muzïkal’noy nauki 5 (Moscow, 1983): 4–44. Kholopov, Garmonicheskiy analiz v 3-kh chastyakh, 3:82 (“Vopros ne v tom, ‘v kakoy tonal’nosti’ p’esa,’ a kakova v ney tonal’naya struktura”). It is possible that Kholopov was influenced by the thought of Filip Gershkovich (1906–89), a transplanted Rumanian composer/ theorist who had studied with Webern. See, e. g., Filip Gershkovich, “Dodekafoniya i tonal’nost’ [1972],” in O muzïke, ed. A. Vustin (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1991), 214–46. Christopher Mark Segall, “Triadic Music in Twentieth-Century Russia” (PhD Dissertation, City University of New York, 2013), 125 (compare to his comments on Schnittke, triads, and polystylism on 160–63).

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represented accessibility and comprehensibility, one of the linchpins of socialist realist aesthetic thought. The widespread Soviet theory of “intonations” required referable content, much of which derived from diatonic, modal, or other tonal or tonally-inflected sources.13 Theorists such as Tarakanov and Kholopov attempted to rationalize the new experiments of younger composers, especially those involving serialism, by building upon conventional definitions of tonality without pushing overtly against socialist realist rhetoric, or engaging with it at all. The rigorously supported assertions that this was still “tonality,” only updated, were the primary concessions. But portentous disjunctions remained between the reception of tonality and “new tonality.” Official mouthpieces heard tonality and other “realistic innovations” that expressed “contemporaneity” in all its positive, life-affirming senses as “alive,” while twelvetone writing, atonality, and other “avant-garde” approaches were “dead.”14 Polystylism bridged the gap between the two. Rather than a static entity, it was an active process. It became a powerful way to reconcile tonality’s accessibility with the new “avant-garde” approaches of the postwar, post-Stalin period.15 Yet by the end of the 1980s, tonality represented something more complicated: a technique kept artificially alive, or worse, only temporarily resurrected. After both “new tonality” and polystylism, tonality could no longer be just tonality. The crisis of tonality in the late USSR and its role in the evolution and dissolution of polystylism opens another vantage point on the traditional story of art music in the second half of the twentieth century, a tale in which various compositional procedures – chance or aleatory approaches as well as diverse tonal references (quotation, collage, minimalism) – supplanted serialism. The story of polystylism is larger than tonality, but tonality addresses some of its primary themes in a concentrated form. Tonality particularly helps emphasize polystylism as a lived creative process, a way of positioning the self in a multifaceted world, torn between past, present, and future. Below I investigate tonality in selected compositions by Valentin Silvestrov and Alfred Schnittke, considering each composer’s idiosyncratic tonal syntax that simultaneously paid homage to and recognized the impossibility of past tonal practices. Silvestrov composed unending endings; Schnittke viewed “earlier music” as a “beautiful way of writing that has disappeared and will never come back.”16 Tonality offers 13 14

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See Malcolm Hamrick Brown, “The Soviet Russian Concepts of ‘Intonazia’ And ‘Musical Imagery,’” Musical Quarterly 60 (1974): 557–67 (esp. 559). G. Shneyerson, O muzïke zhivoy i myortvoy (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1960), 280–81. Shneyerson did not explicitly single out tonality, preferring to make familiar generalizations about the content and mood of socialist realism, but he repeatedly condemned the formal fixations of avant-garde approaches, especially twelve-tone techniques and serialism. This builds upon my Such Freedom, if Only Musical, in which I used the concepts of “abstraction” and “mimesis” to explore the change in the compositional styles of unofficial Soviet composers from serialism and twelve-tone practices to polystylism. See Schmelz, Such Freedom, if Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (New York: Oxford, 2009), introduction. Schnittke quoted by Allan Kozinn, “An Eclectic Mix, Through a Contemporary Prism,” New York Times, 22 May 1988, 23.

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an opportunity to further investigate two composers whose repertoire, given their importance, is still little understood and comparatively under-examined.17 Pro et contra Even before Soviet theorists started seriously tussling with “new tonality,” composers began expressing reservations: tonality and the “new tonality” collided in their music. These collisions became most apparent in a series of compositional beginnings and endings. Although the bulk of this essay concerns music in the Soviet Union, we start in Poland, with the striking C-major conclusion to a decidedly nonC-major composition by Krzysztof Penderecki, Polymorphia for forty-eight strings from 1961. Adrian Thomas comments, “there has been no rational explanation why Polymorphia should end with a chord of C major.”18 Yet, following its 1962 premiere in Hamburg, a critic stated that the composition “would have provoked unhesitating protest if the composer had not resorted to a glorious, old-fashioned common chord for his final full-stop.”19 Penderecki agreed: this C major was a necessary conclusion – it resolved the cluster that preceded it. He also contended that the entire composition had arisen from this tonal triad.20 Built upon the composer’s signature sonorism, Polymorphia shows a strange, unbalanced opposition between tonality and atonality. Regardless of its pushing at the limits of expressivity, Penderecki still felt compelled to include a remnant of traditional closure, however strained and irrational. Thomas avers that this conclusion’s “radical challenge to what Penderecki had established as his norms” had implications for the remainder of Penderecki’s output.21 In a sonoristic context, tonality carried great force: it conveyed a challenge. But the gesture also had ramifications far beyond Penderecki’s compositions, and beyond even the borders of Poland.22 Polymorphia’s unexpected, seemingly inexplicable ending anchors – and likely helped initiate – a web of tonal gestures with symbolic force in East European, and 17 This project complements, augments, and amplifies themes that I develop in my book in progress: Sonic Overload: Polystylism as Cultural Practice in the Late USSR. 18 Adrian Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 179. 19 Quoted in Bernard Jacobson, A Polish Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1996), 150 (the source of the quotation is apparently an unidentified article from the Hamburger Abendblatt). 20 Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski, 179; and also Peggy Monastra, “Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia and Flourescences,” in The Rosaleen Moldenhauer Memorial: Music History from Primary Sources – A Guide to the Moldenhauer Archives, ed. Jon Newsom and Alfred Mann (Washington, D. C.: Library of Congress, 2000), 353. 21 Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski, 179. Penderecki’s Stabat Mater (1962) ends with a D major triad; but its overall context is more diatonic than Polymorphia. See ibid., 180. 22 The bare fifth that ends Górecki’s Symphony no. 1, “1959,” op. 14, may be a precursor, but it functions in a more oblique manner in the work: it does not offer such a stark contrast between tonality and atonality (or sonoristics). See Thomas, Górecki (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 19–20.

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specifically Soviet (Estonian, Russian, and Ukrainian) music that I will briefly trace.23 The renaissance of tonality in the polystylistic compositions by Silvestrov and Schnittke, among other late Soviets, emerged directly out of clashes between tonality and atonality in the 1960s. Bare tonal/atonal collisions sparked polystylism, and when polystylism began to fade, tonality endured, still charged. The later symbolic tonal ventures cannot be understood outside the compositional line from which they emerge. Fundamentally, after the “new tonality,” both tonality and atonality became flexible, contextually determined. As a critic commented on an earlier Polish instance of a surprise concluding tonality, Zbigniew Turski’s Symphony no. 2, “Olympic” (1948), a possible precursor for Penderecki’s own final swerve in Polymorphia: “The final E major triad, when juxtaposed with the remaining dissonances, itself seems to be a dissonance.”24 The E major in the trumpets, trombones, and tuba at the end of Turski’s symphony emerges abruptly – for some, too abruptly – from the dissonant preceding sonorities and the extended diatonicism of the remainder of the composition (although there was precedence in earlier E triads in the first section, e. g., mm. 16–20). Similar enigmatic moments occur in later Soviet compositions, but the initial juxtapositions of tonality and atonality were crystal clear. The first Soviet to abruptly clash tonality and atonality was not Schnittke or Silvestrov but Arvo Pärt. His Collage on the Theme BACH (1964) arguably initiated the “collage wave” in Soviet music of the 1960s to 1980s. It used Bach as a model: the second movement, Sarabande, the most discordant of the three, began with a quotation from the Sarabande from the English Suite no. 6 in D minor that was immediately recast in stridently ugly, absurdly dissonant tones. Pärt’s Pro et contra, Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1966) set the terms of the debate more bluntly. It opened with a fortissimo D major chord in the woodwinds and strings followed by a clashing cluster in the strings, aleatory blocks in the brass and winds, jagged improvisatory lines in the piano (played with the palm of the hand), and a twelve-tone row repeated ad libitum in the vibraphone and marimba. The cello then entered alone, playing an extended solo with tapped rhythms and other expanded techniques. The second movement, only four measures long, featured one of what Schnittke called the composition’s “parodied Baroque cadential formulae.”25 After a propulsive “contemporary” opening, culminating in spiky woodwind lines, the final movement ultimately echoed the second with a Handelian cadence in all its glory and grandeur. If there were any questions remaining as to his allegiances, by Pärt’s 1968 Credo he had definitively arrived on the side of the “pro,” represented again by undiluted tonality and Bach. 23

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Polymorphia’s web extends up to the present day: in 2011 composer and Radiohead member Jonny Greenwood composed 48 Responses to Polymorphia, released on Krzysztof Penderecki and Jonny Greenwood, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima / Popcorn Superhet Receiver / Polymorphia / 48 Responses to Polymorphia, Nonesuch CD, 530223–2 (2012). Quoted in Thomas, Polish Music since Szymanowski, 47. Schnittke, “Polystylistic Tendencies in Modern Music,” in Schnittke, A Schnittke Reader, 87.

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In a 2005 radio interview, Pärt vividly explained the motivation for his collages of the 1960s: I was like skin that got burnt and I needed a skin graft. One piece of new skin at a time. New live tissue was needed and planted on my burnt spots. They were my collages and these pieces started to grow together after a while. They formed a new skin in a way.26

For Pärt, preexisting quotations, and bare tonal gestures from the past, paradoxically represented “live tissue.” Such extreme declarations were characteristic of the expanding boundaries of the 1960s USSR, when past, present, and future were hotly debated under the rubric of “contemporaneity” (sovremennost’). Progressive, usually younger, composers argued that in order to be contemporary one had to use a contemporary, that is to say modernist, musical language, while others argued, in typical Soviet fashion, that in order to be properly contemporary one had to build upon the achievements of the past, foremost among them tonality.27 Against this backdrop, Pärt’s tonal references assumed heightened import, as did the early polystylistic forays of Schnittke and Silvestrov. What seemed like regression really reflected an active engagement in current debates. All three composers wrestled with tonality on multiple levels, public and private; they sought a fitting, “contemporary” framework for tonality in a decidedly cacophonous – “atonal” – world, an overloaded soundscape in which jazz, rock, folk music, and classical music past and present vied for attention. Polystylism offered what seemed a fitting stylistic setting for their musical responses, tonal, atonal, and everything in between. Silvestrov’s Tonal Atonality In the 1960s, Silvestrov passionately advocated on behalf of the “new tonality.” He told an interviewer in 1967 that, besides its destructive tendencies, the avant-garde also attempted to find the origins of musical style, the origin of genre, the origin of tradition, the origin of the gesture that found rhythm and became, for example, the waltz. We have become accustomed to music that has already developed, that is tonal, after all tonality is the basis of musical education. And music that is logical in its standards seems natural.

But this “naturalness” carried dangers: It is comfortable, and peaceful to sit and work in the scale, in tonality, but it is a questionable comfort: inertia often bars creative activity. In its best manifestations, the avant-garde is a revolt against the inertia of compositional thought. 26

Quoted in Immo Mihkelson, “A Narrow Path to the Truth: Arvo Pärt and the 1960s and 1970s in Soviet Estonia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt, ed. Andrew Shenton (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2012), 25. A similar statement can be found in Enzo Restagno, Leopold Brauneiss, Saale Kareda, and Arvo Pärt, Arvo Pärt in Conversation, trans. Robert Crow (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012), 17. 27 See Schmelz, “After Prokofiev,” 513.

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Silvestrov decried the term “atonal”: “There is no such thing as ‘atonal’ music; there is a type of new tonality providing for new expressivity.”28 Silvestrov’s compositions in the 1960s reflected his attempts to revolt against the inertia of past musical practices. In a striking series of large-scale compositions, including Spectrums (Spektrï, 1965), Poem in memoriam B. N. Lyatoshinskiy (1965), Symphony no. 3, “Eschatophony” (1966), and Hymn (1967), he pitted aleatoric, sonoristic structures against twelve-tone (or twelve-tonish) pointillism, avoiding any hints of “comfortable” tonality. Yet only a few short years after his interview proclaiming his avant-garde allegiances, Silvestrov shifted gears. His compositions of the early 1970s, most notably Drama (1970–71) and Meditation (1972), still explored avant-garde processes, including a manifest theatrical sensibility: musicians move about the stage and use props, including lit matches. But tonal elements began to reenter the frame as he developed his own type of polystylism, his attempt to guarantee the “identity [i. e., the oneness] of all the systems and styles appearing in a composition.”29 Nowhere was this more audible than in the conclusion to Meditation, which ended with a clear G major sonority on the harpsichord (overlaid by the cello playing C and E). His compositions begun in 1973 and 1974, including the song cycle Quiet Songs (1973–77) and the String Quartet no. 1 (1974) returned decisively to tonality, but of a very particular sort, seen through increasingly nostalgic applications of polystylism. These compositions set in motion a series of “kitsch” compositions influenced by popular music and past harmonic practice alike. It was a turn toward accessibility justified by Silvestrov’s explicitly non-ironic attempt to elevate “lower” genres, the commonplace creations of both past and present. By the early 1980s his aesthetic justifications transformed into his “post” aesthetic. While writing his central Symphony no. 5 from 1980 to 1982, Silvestrov composed a set of three Postludes that exemplify some of the central musical and philosophical aspects of his “post” style and help further explore his unique musical language.30 The first Postlude of the cycle (for soprano, violin, cello, and piano) grapples with a very specific legacy – that of the recently deceased dean of Soviet composers, Dmitriy Shostakovich. Silvestrov prominently quotes the DSCH motto, but the piece does not emulate Shostakovich as the “kitsch” music emulated romanticism. It does not sound like Shostakovich. Moreover, Postlude no. 1 carries a disguised religious message: the soprano’s vocalise is revealed at the end of the piece to be a drawn-out “A-men.” Musicologist Tatyana Frumkis presents it as a “polemically ‘quiet’ homage to D. Shostakovich (in opposition to the monumental 28 29 30

Valentin Sil’vestrov and Natal’ya Gorbanevskaya, “Valentin Sil’vestrov: ‘Vïyti iz zamknutogo prostranstva …,’ ” Yunost’ 9 (1967): 100–101 (101). Valentin Sil’vestrov and Tat’yana Frumkis, “Sokhranyat’ dostoinstvo,” Sovetskaya muzïka, no. 4 (1990): 11–17 (13). I explore the Symphony no. 5 and Silvestrov’s “post” style in more detail in my “Valentin Silvestrov and the Echoes of Music History,” Journal of Musicology 31 (2014): 231–71, which is a shorter version of chapter 5 of my Sonic Overload: Polystylism as Cultural Practice in the Late USSR.

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memorials [to the composer], which are often epigonic in spirit),” and Allan Kozinn, reviewing a 1988 New York performance, noted the style as “suffused with a haunting serenity.”31 The second Postlude (for solo violin) stands out from the other two because it disrupts this serenity. Its agitated outbursts and dripping triplets break the placid surface of the set (starting in m. 36). Frumkis heard earlier influences here, singling out the neo-Baroque colorings in its “contrast of the cantilena prelude and virtuoso toccata-ness.”32 Of the three postludes, the third, which Frumkis labels “an elegiac miniature,” best illuminates Silvestrov’s “post” aesthetics, complementing the Symphony no. 5 and setting the stage for the other “post” works that followed.33 While the Symphony no. 5 explicitly dealt with stasis and progression, creating a vast sense of neverending space and time, Postlude no. 3 is more intimate, condensed. Let us briefly consider the piece. Both Frumkis and Savenko hear it as a continuation of the Quiet Songs: it carries on its “elegiac tone” (Savenko) while extending its “song-like epilogues” (Frumkis).34 In Postlude no. 3, familiar tonal gestures and harmonies remain, but the syntax has been stretched, loosened. It lacks a strong articulation of form or forward momentum. (See Example 1a [beginning] and Example 1b [ending]). The recurring rocking pattern heard primarily in the piano conveys stasis, a dominant characteristic of Silvestrov’s “post” style. The harmony is restricted; there are a few passing tones, and sevenths, ninths, and elevenths, but limited accidentals. Chords have tendencies but no strong cadences exist.35 Speaking of other, more recent works by Silvestrov, British critic Calum MacDonald notes that this is “harmony that has been leached of all direction.”36 Also speaking of these more recent compositions, particularly his Bagatelles for piano (opus 1–5, 2005–06), Silvestrov has acknowledged his “tonal atonality,” saying “those Bagatelles, which arise like some kind of flowers, they, of course, operate in a tonal sphere, but if you listen carefully then that tonal sphere, is, as a matter of fact, a tonal atonality [tonal’naya atonal’nost’].” “But most important,” he adds, “the ato31

Tat’yana Frumkis, “ ‘Landshaftï dlya slukha’ Valentina Sil’vestrova,” in Tvorchestvo sovremennïkh kompozitorov. A. Karamanov, V. Sil’vestrov, F. Glass, Ekspress – informatsiya/Informkul’tura, vol. 4 (Moscow: Ministerstvo Kul’turï SSSR/Gosudarstvennaya biblioteka SSSR imeni V. I. Lenina, 1991), 5; and Allan Kozinn, “Celebrating a Ukrainian Composer’s 50th Birthday,” New York Times, 11 April 1988, C14. See also Schmelz, “What was ‘Shostakovich,’ And What Came Next?” Journal of Musicology 24 (2007): 329–33. 32 Frumkis, “ ‘Landshaftï dlya slukha’ Valentina Sil’vestrova,” 5. 33 Ibid. See also Schmelz, “Valentin Silvestrov and the Echoes of Music History,” 239 (Table 1). 34 Svetlana Savenko, “Rukotvornïy kosmos Valentina Sil’vestrova,” in Muzïka iz bïvshego SSSR, ed. Valeriya Tsenova, vol. 1 (Moscow: Kompozitor, 1994), 79; and Frumkis, “ ‘Landshaftï dlya slukha’ Valentina Sil’vestrova,” 5. 35 An exceptional resolution from dominant to tonic occurs in mm. 36–37, from A to D, complicated by the G passing tone in the soprano voice. But this D is not a resting point: it passes to A major with a major seventh. 36 MacDonald, Calum. Review of Silvestrov: Nostalghia; Sonata no. 1; Two Dialogues with an Epilogue; Three Postludes; Three Waltzes etc. Classical-music.com (BBC Music Magazine), 20 January 2012, http://www.classical-music.com/review/silvestrov-4 (Accessed 13 August 2015).

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Example 1: (a) Silvestrov, Postlude no. 3, beginning

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Example 1: (b) Silvestrov, Postlude no. 3, ending

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Example 1: (b) cont.

nality [of the Bagatelles] is not direct, but oblique.”37 Savenko noted a similar “impression of a hidden atonality” in the Symphony no. 5.38 These observations also apply to the contemporaneous Postludes. The phonemes, the building blocks, of earlier music remain, but they have been recombined in new and unexpected ways. Although the flexible harmonic approach is similar, the stripping of these phonemes becomes more acute in the Postludes than in Silvestrov’s earlier Quiet Songs, stressed by the lack of structural backbone provided by a melodic line or a text. What stands out from the Postlude’s diffuse melody are bare gestures: weeping drops of a major second in the piano from mm. 47–57. If harmony does not point the way in Postlude no. 3, then texture and dynamics do, albeit tentatively. Suggestions of movement – of slow progression, or rather regression – are provided by the hesitant unfolding of the opening melody over the course of the postlude, as well as by the role exchange of the two instruments in m. 47, when the piano rises to prominence with its lament figuration. Despite a few slight crescendos, diminuendos predominate. Nothing louder than piano is heard; by the end the volume has sunk beyond pianississimo (ppp). The impression is of stasis gradually fading away. The Postlude attenuates as time passes. It does not end as much as stop, although “stop” seems too active for its hesitant close. This ending is both arbitrary and inevitable. The piece consistently hovers on the edge of audibility and might stop now or later. Form provides little help, with only two moments of brief articulation provided by the fermatas in mm. 27 and 35, and the role exchange of the instruments in m. 47. Despite Silvestrov’s ambivalent aesthetics – endings that do not end –, the constantly fading dynamics of Postlude no. 3 understandably convey ending to many listeners. Most suggestively, the entire Postlude was appropriated as the conclusion of the soundtrack (including the beginning of the end titles) for the French film, Time to Leave (Le temps qui reste, 2005), about the last days of a young, gay cancer-stricken fashion photographer. The film ends with the main character on the 37 38

Valentin Sil’vestrov and Sergey Pilyutikov, Dozhdat’sya muzïki: Lektsii-besedï (Kiev: Dukh i litera, 2010), 278. Savenko, “Rukotvornïy kosmos Valentina Sil’vestrova,” 82; see also Schmelz, “Valentin Silvestrov and the Echoes of Music History,” 256–58.

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beach dying to the sound of Postlude no. 3 (reminiscent of Aschenbach’s demise in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice). The sun sets and the crowds dissipate; the postlude’s fading both accompanies and aurally embodies his end. The film capitalizes upon the composition’s sense of ending: the meditative and nostalgic reverie of diminishing stasis, heightened especially by the ECM record label’s characteristically reverberant production style.39 Yet, in a certain sense, Postlude no. 3 does not end, for Silvestrov also included it as a large-scale quotation within his Sonata for Cello and Piano (1983) (R. 33 to 4 after R. 42). More recently, Silvestrov has stressed the importance of melody in music, recalling his reaction to contemporary German music in the 1990s, when he declared that “Winter has already ended, it’s time to set free the leaves and flowers.” He quoted Adorno’s dictum about the impossibility of art following the Holocaust, responding, “but, after all, winter threatens not only humanity, but also the trees, and they believe, although they know that again the cold will arrive.”40 For the more recent Silvestrov, beauty, aligned with melody and tonality, carries a sense of grace and redemption, however tentative and quietly presented. In its quietude lies its strength, its constancy, and its inevitability. Schnittke’s Late Chorales: Contra et pro The rationale behind Silvestrov’s oblique adoptions of tonality may have altered from the 1970s to the 2000s, but it never veered from the “pro” side of Pärt’s original formulation. Whether rescued kitsch or prolonged past, tonality remained positive for Silvestrov: it was about belief and beauty. What Schnittke’s various adoptions of tonality meant over the course of his engagement with polystylism were more difficult to pin down. In the early 1960s, Schnittke had publicly argued for an expansion of theoretical discussions beyond the tired I–IV–V harmonies sanctioned by Soviet conservatories.41 Yet he continued to employ tonal elements in his “advanced” scores throughout the decade, from the passacaglia in the third movement of this Violin Sonata no. 1 (1963), which employed a twelve-tone row harmonized with diatonic triads, to one of his early polystylistic compositions, Violin Sonata no. 2, “Quasi una Sonata” (1968). The second sonata followed in the footsteps of Pärt’s Pro et contra and Collage on the Theme BACH. It obsessed over a G minor chord and the BACH motto, and incorporated various tonal references and quasi-citations including Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, and Franck. But the conclusion is less decisive than Pärt: In the final pages the piano unrelentingly pounds the G minor chord, while the 39 The film uses the recording by Anja Lechner (cello) and Silke Avenhaus (piano), which appears on: Valentin Silvestrov, Leggiero, Pesante, ECM New Series CD, ECM 1776 (2002); the soundtrack also includes music by Arvo Pärt and Alexander Knaifel. 40 Svetlana Polyakova and Valentin Sil’vestrov, “Valentin Sil’vestrov: ‘Pervïy orden ya poluchil v detstve,’” gazeta.ru, 30 October 2007 (http://www.gazeta.ru/culture/2007/10/30/a_2276182. shtml, accessed 22 December 2014). 41 See Shnitke, “Razvivat’ nauku o garmonii,” Sovetskaya muzïka, no. 10 (1961): 44–45.

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violin has the last word: a dissonantly harmonized intoning of the BACH motto. The hammered G minor chords at the conclusion of Violin Sonata no. 2 go beyond emphatic assertion: they menace. In the compositions that followed, Schnittke often used tonality in his quotations or adaptations of past practices; even if its meanings often remained opaque, it became an integral, readily identifiable signpost for polystylism. Schnittke wrote several theoretical studies in the 1970s, some of which touch extensively on tonality, most notably his essay “Paradox as a Feature of Stravinsky’s Musical Logic,” published in 1973.42 But as a theorist he was as occupied with form, time, and timbre, and, of course, style. Schnittke does not specifically mention tonality in his better-known polystylism manifesto, “Polystylistic Tendencies of Modern Music (1971),” only referring there to various tonal styles and models: “Eighteenth-century music with its succession of tonic-dominant motion and diminished seventh chords” in relation to the passacaglia in Shostakovich’s Piano Trio, op. 67, and the “parodied Baroque cadential formulae” in Pärt’s Pro et contra.43 Other early evidence points to the symbolic value Schnittke accorded tonality, keys, and modes. In a 1973 review of a performance by pianist Alexei Lyubimov, Schnittke commented on the macro form of the entire concert, with Mozart’s Prelude and Fugue in C Major (K. 392) first and his Fantasy in C Minor last. He noted the “youthful freshness of the major key in the ‘exposition’ section of the recital and the mature bitterness of the minor key in the ‘reprise’ section.”44 Like his description of Stravinsky in the second epigraph above, Schnittke often pretended to be diatonically meek and mild. In many instances, as in his Suite in the Old Style (1972), film music repurposed, and later disavowed, by the composer, he seemed to hold tonality at arm’s length, dissecting it from a distance.45 But Schnittke held a flexible approach to tonality, employing it selectively as only one trick up his sleeve. As Segall discusses, his triadic approach often sought to avoid traditional tonal motion.46 He tried to preserve the sound of tonal gestures while maintaining the flexibility of a post-tonal idiom framed by polystylism. The collision of styles afforded him the dynamism of form that had once been fueled solely by tonality.47 He noted the “islands of the tonal amid a sea of the atonal or aleato42

43 44 45 46 47

Shnitke, “Paradoksal’nost’ kak cherta muzïkal’noy logiki Stravinskogo,” in I. F. Stravinskiy: Stat’i i materialï, ed. L. S. D’yachkova (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1973), 383–434; in English as, “Paradox as a Feature of Stravinsky’s Musical Logic (1973),” in Schnittke, A Schnittke Reader, 151–200. Schnittke, “Polystylistic Tendencies in Modern Music,” 87. Schnittke, “Subjective Notes on an Objective Performance (On Alexei Lyubimov) (1973),” in Schnittke, A Schnittke Reader, 79. Originally in Sovetskaya muzïka, no. 2 (1974): 63–65. Al’fred Shnitke and Dmitriy Shul’gin, Godï neizvestnosti Al’freda Shnitke (Moscow: Delovaya Liga, 1993), 61. Segall, “Triadic Music in Twentieth-Century Russia,” 122. Schnittke, Program Note for Violin Sonata no. 2, “Quasi una Sonata,” in Alfred Schnittke zum 60. Geburtstag – Eine Festschrift, ed. Jürgen Köchel, Hans-Ulrich Duffek, et al. (Hamburg: Sikorski, 1994), 119.

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ric” in Violin Sonata no. 2, which gave rise to the “tension” that drove the composition.48 Apart from his actual quotations or pastiches, Schnittke’s tonal gestures often followed set patterns, as Segall notes in Schnittke’s works from 1974–85, emphasizing major-minor switching, movement by minor thirds, and chromatic sliding between triads.49 In 1976 Schnittke mentioned his fondness for a type of motion he indicated as an A major triad moving to a C minor 6/4 chord – the major to minor shift he used so frequently in his music. He also called attention to his favored nontonal sonorities: tritone/major seventh (“characteristic of the majority of my works of the last fifteen years”), as well as a “tone with a half-step return” (“ton s polutonovym vozvratom”), presumably acknowledging his fondness for stacked or alternating minor seconds.50 He told a German interviewer in 1982 about his penchant for superimposing different tonalities, often those related by half-step, as at the end of the first movement of his Piano Quintet (1972–76), where F major and G minor triads are superimposed. For Schnittke, these and similar sonorities formed the “best path … from tonality to atonality.”51 Schnittke’s polystylistic approach to tonality reacted to his earlier engagement with “new tonality.” Tonality was crucial to polystylism, but so too was its inevitable degradation, its contamination by atonality. Stille Nacht for violin and piano (1978) seems most representative: the slow dissolving of its familiar tune was a broken music box grinding to a halt, as he said.52 Many of Schnittke’s works track this path from innocent pastiche to chaos, as in the second movements of Symphonies nos. 1 and 3. Schnittke’s dialectics of style favored an uneasy, ultimately contingent synthesis, contingent because the beauties of past music had vanished forevermore.53 His late period in particular showed a diffusion of his earlier methods 48 49

50 51 52 53

Al’fred Shnitke and Aleksandr Ivashkin, Besedï s Al’fredom Shnitke, Second expanded ed. (Moscow: Klassika – XXI, 2005), 213. Segall highlights three transformations: P (Parallel), e. g., C major to C minor; S (SLIDE), e. g., C minor to C major or B minor to B major; and M (minor third), e. g., C major and E minor (always ascending). See Segall, “Triadic Music in Twentieth-Century Russia,” 123. Svetlana Kalashnikova has also analyzed the major/minor triadic motion in Schnittke’s compositions from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s in her, “Universal’nost’ i – lakonizm?: Paradoksï i taynï zvukovïsotnogo pis’ma Al’freda Shnitke,” Muzïkal’naya akademiya 2 (1999): 84–90. In a related study, Yevgeniya Chigaryova investigates the semantic significance of Schnittke’s use of tonality across his output. Chigaryova pays particular attention to what she hears as the consistent symbolic meanings Schnittke accorded certain keys (among them, C major, C minor, G major, and D major). See Chigaryova, “K probleme semantiki tonal’nostey u Al’freda Shnitke,” in Al’fred Shnitke posvyashchayetsya 6 (Moscow: Kompozitor, 2008), 19–35. Shnitke and Shul’gin, Godï neizvestnosti Al’freda Shnitke, 93–94 (97 in the second ed.). He refers to the first type of sonority using theorist Lev Mazel’s label: “Single-pitch single-third tonalities.” Alfred Schnittke and Joachim Hansberger, “Alfred Schnittke im Gespräch über sein Klavierquintett und anderer Kompositionen,” Zeitschrift für Musikpädagogik 7, no. 20 (November 1982): 45. Schnittke, Program note for Stille Nacht, in Köchel et al., Alfred Schnittke zum 60. Geburtstag, 118. Kozinn, “An Eclectic Mix, Through a Contemporary Prism.”

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and a blurring of the lines between styles, tonality, and atonality. Looking at tonality, or rather tonal gestures, provides another, more focused demonstration of the dissolution of polystylism in late Schnittke. In the late 1970s Schnittke continued to hunt for unity. He stressed “similarity” rather than “contrast” in a 1976 interview: Now it would be more interesting for me to find some kind of new technique of unification, neither serial nor tonal, but at the same time guaranteeing some kind of unity. It should be new, but found by a natural path. He added, with some chagrin, “I do not yet feel it, to be honest.”54

Schnittke amplified this sentiment in comments he made about his Violin Concerto no. 3 from 1978: I have long been preoccupied by the opposition of the tonal and the atonal. In this work I tried to construct a unified system of intonations linking the two sound worlds organically – that is, not only through the contrasting effects of night and day but also by means of the morning and evening transitions and the ever-present play of shadows and color modulation. Atonality can be reached from any point in tonality (and vice versa).55

At this point Schnittke also spoke of balancing “high” and “low” elements in his compositions as he tried to realize his “dream of a unified style.”56 Serialism/atonality and tonality roughly corresponded to these two domains, high and low, although they were not exactly equivalent. Instead, Schnittke sought an equilibrium between many opposed qualities within his music, also including the affects of comedy and tragedy. Needless to say, he never achieved a result satisfactory to him and by the mid-1980s had largely abandoned the high/low fusions. Yet the tonal/ atonal/serial ones retained force, even if their application varied over time. With notable exceptions, namely the Concerto for Choir (1984–85), Psalms of Repentance (Stikhi pokayannïye, 1987), and Concerto Grosso no. 4/Symphony no. 5 (1988), over the course of the 1980s his most overt gestures to the tonal past receded, particularly quotations and pastiche modeling. He now spoke of polystylism as a séance, a temporary recalling of the dead.57 Only trills, chorales, and eventually single chords remained. In 1989 conductor Gennadiy Rozhdestvensky remarked about Schnittke, “One is constantly struck by the way he can keep reminding us what a triad is – quite remarkable! The appearance of a simple triad makes the most powerful impression!”58 Rozhdestvensky’s statement misdirects. By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, triads served at times as “powerful” – even clarifying – signals in Schnittke’s music, but at other moments, they only muddied the waters. Tonality and atonality became fluid; as the critic of Turski’s final E major chord observed, in such a con54 55 56 57 58

Shnitke and Shul’gin, Godï neizvestnosti Al’freda Shnitke, 91. Liner notes to Schnittke, Violin Concertos no. 3 and no. 4, BIS CD 517 (1991), 4; originally in Köchel et al., Alfred Schnittke zum 60. Geburtstag, 94–95. Schnittke, “On Concerto Grosso no. 1 (Late 1970s),” in Schnittke, A Schnittke Reader, 45. Shnitke and Ivashkin, Besedï s Al’fredom Shnitke, 65. Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, “Gennadi Rozhdestvensky on Schnittke (1989),” in Schnittke, A Schnittke Reader, 237.

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Example 2: Schnittke, Piano Sonata no. 1, movement 1, final four systems

text, tonality itself seemed dissonant, like the repeated pounding G minor triads in Schnittke’s Violin Sonata no. 2. * * * Waltzes, tangos, and marches head the list of Schnittke’s favorite topical references. But near the end of his life chorales assumed newfound importance; he turned to them with some frequency in his late works. An early precursor can be found in the “lively children’s chorale” that opens (and closes) Concerto Grosso no. 1 (1976– 77).59 The end of the first movement of Schnittke’s Violin Concerto no. 3 (1978) presents another, lengthier example. But the most chronologically dense sequence of chorale references appears in compositions Schnittke composed in the late 1980s: Piano Sonata no. 1 (1987), String Quartet no. 4 (1989), Five Aphorisms for piano, no. 1 (1990), and Piano Sonata no. 2 (1990–91). This is the first time this group of references has been discussed as a group. In the interest of space, I will concentrate on Piano Sonata no. 1 and the Five Aphorisms, no. 1.60 But the entire group of cho59 60

Schnittke, “On Concerto Grosso No. 1,” 45. I discuss Schnittke’s Piano Sonata no. 2 at length in Sonic Overload: Polystylism as Cultural

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Example 3: Schnittke, Piano Sonata no. 1, movement 4, return of chorale, mm. 112–21

rales suggests the value that Schnittke placed on the topic as a blank, yet suggestive, hallmark of tonality, a way to keep polystylistically blending tonality and atonality both symbolically and structurally. (György Kurtág already noted this tendency in Schnittke’s music in 1985 when he wrote a piano piece called “An apocryphal hymn [in the style of Alfred Schnittke],” part of book 5 of the series Játékok.) The chorales echo and expand upon many of Segall’s “limited number of triadto-triad relations.”61 But others recall familiar harmonic practice. Some do both. In

61

Practice in the Late USSR. Segall, “Triadic Music in Twentieth-Century Russia,” 124.

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Example 4: Schnittke, Five Aphorisms, no. 1, mm. 36–41

the lengthy chorale near the end of the first movement of Schnittke’s Piano Sonata no. 1, two traditional progressions emerge (see Example 2). The entire first phrase can be understood within B major: VI, IV, V7, I; it is repeated again a minor third lower in the fourth phrase, now in G major. The recurrence signals a loose repetition of the first three phrases: the phrase lengths and shapes are almost exactly the same, but at different transposition levels, most related by thirds (both ascending and descending, including enharmonic equivalents). The third phrase ends on a G major triad; its parallel, the sixth phrase, concludes on a C minor triad. The preceding chords in each phrase do not share any neat correspondences. Within the third and sixth phrases the movement is unpredictable, rooted largely in motion by thirds, both major and minor (descending), and seconds, also major or minor.62 The entire chorale returns at the end of the sonata’s third movement, where it gives way finally to rising dissonant cluster-infused sonorities. Remarkably, it also undergirds the climax of the fourth movement, where rapid, dissonant figures cascade around the diatonic chords (see Example 3). Tonal and atonal merge and clash. The first of the Five Aphorisms includes a briefer chorale reference. The piece begins with an arpeggiated E minor triad that quickly takes a chromatic turn. Triadic formations occur throughout the atonal composition; prominent held B minor chords sound in m. 7, and B minor is arpeggiated (over a clashing E) in m. 13. But as common are typical Schnittke sonorities – minor seconds, sevenths, tritones, and 62

This movement prominently employs the initials of its dedicatee, Vladimir Feltsman, just before the entrance of the chorale: WlADimir OSkarowitsCH FElstman. For more on Schnittke’s penchant for encoding initials into the fabric of his compositions, see Segall, “Klingende Buchstaben: Principles of Alfred Schnittke’s Monogram Technique,” Journal of Musicology 30 (2013): 252–86 (Feltsman’s motto appears in example 9 on 272).

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clusters. The brief chorale gesture appears in m. 37, a still center to the movement (see Example 4). The bare triads here trace a strange path from C minor to B minor (without, of course, being in either key, or in any key, in a traditional sense). Unsettled, the root motion progresses by tritone, major second, and primarily by descending thirds (both major and minor). Here Schnittke achieves another blurring of tonal and atonal, while also continuing to signal the distinctions between the two. Style and tonality remain elusive but still subtly, momentarily tangible. The significance of each chorale in this sequence of compositions is uncertain. They might share an impetus with Schnittke’s religious compositions, or loosely conjure Bach, a recasting of the BACH references in Violin Sonata no. 2. In the program notes that survive for these compositions, Schnittke offers little help. For Piano Sonata no. 1, he again repeats his familiar anxiety about the impossibility of composing in the genre.63 Sonata no. 2, whose chorales are the most distorted of the set, is described as a form of risk-taking. At best, the chorale here seems to represent some type of (thwarted) hope.64 Yet, in most cases, contemporaneous reviews do not mention the chorales at all (String Quartet no. 4), or hear the entire composition as a type of absolute music (Sonata no. 2).65 In both compositions the chorales represent blank remnants of the I–IV–V tonality that Schnittke inveighed against in the late 1960s, now recalled with ambivalence. Tonality almost completely vanishes from Schnittke’s final compositions. While Silvestrov revives tonality, artificially prolonging it, Schnittke abandons it in his Third Piano Sonata (1992). Save for the very opening of the composition, a chromatic slither in the bass, each movement begins and ends with clusters – minor seconds, major sevenths, and whole-hand agglomerations. Threads of familiar language linger, but have become difficult to follow. Like the contemporaneous Symphony no. 6 (1992), it seems a skeleton of a fully developed composition. The dynamics subsist on the edge of audibility, the registers are low, the textures thin: two-voiced writing predominates. The language is built on tritones and fourths, as well as consistent seconds, sevenths, and clusters. There are no triads, but when a sequence of chromatically descending thirds appears in the final measures of movement 3 they sound like an intrusion, almost a quotation – a final glimpse of a tonal past (see Example 5). Near the end of the last movement, mm. 86–89 of movement 4, homophonic writing briefly breaks the forward propulsion (see Example 6). Hardly a chorale harmonically, even in Schnittke’s expanded sense, it nonetheless recalls the chorales from the late 1980s. The A major/minor chord in m. 87 acts as a superimposi63 64 65

Schnittke, Program note for Piano Sonata no. 1, in Köchel et al., Alfred Schnittke zum 60. Geburtstag, 113. Schnittke, Program note for Piano Sonata no. 2, in Köchel et al., Alfred Schnittke zum 60. Geburtstag, 113. I discuss the reception of these two compositions in chapter 6 of my Sonic Overload: Polystylism as Cultural Practice in the Late USSR (in progress). For more on the chorales in the String Quartet no. 4, see Aaminah Durrani, “Chorale and Canon in Alfred Schnittke’s Fourth String Quartet” (PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2005), 34–35 and passim.

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Example 5: Schnittke, Piano Sonata no. 3, movement 3, final four measures

Example 6: Schnittke, Piano Sonata no. 3, movement 4, mm. 86–95

tion of Schnittke’s favorite modal shifting. But the end of the second phrase of this deteriorated chorale in m. 89 tilts back to Schnittke’s astringent late syntax: major seconds surround a minor second (C-D/E-F). The repeated clusters that immediately follow evoke the repeated pounding G minor chords in his Violin Sonata no. 2. But contra has now replaced pro. The final sonority (not shown in example 6) – a cluster spanning the tritone E-A – is the ultimate question mark, the ultimate retreat into noise – the anticipated yet absent ending to Polymorphia. Tonality reemerges clearly in two final compositions by Schnittke. The Sonatina for Piano four hands (1994) is a lark, a neoclassical study for his wife and granddaughter. More disturbing are his Variations for String Quartet (1995–98), in which bare ascending and descending C major scales play out; there are no accidentals in the entire composition. The consonant bath culminates in repeated octave C’s, ultimately cut off mid-thought. Never has tonality sounded so haunting.

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Conclusion: To Everything a Tonic? Silvestrov and Schnittke grappled with tonality in a more anxious manner than others of their generation, Pärt excepted. But Pärt composed with polystylism only early in his career; his engagement with symbolic tonality was briefer, as crucial as it was for the tintinnabuli style he developed in the 1970s. Others, including Sofia Gubaidulina and Edison Denisov, had little use for tonality, although Denisov strived in such works as his Requiem (1980), opera L’Écume du jours (1977–81), and ballet Confession (Ispoved, 1984) to “[integrate] the elements of tonal music – without collage, without so-called polystylistics, and without overemphasizing the functional.”66 Gubaidulina’s stylistic matrix was broader: more personal, more refined. Both tonality and “new tonality” combined to form the backbone of her most famous composition, Offertorium, Concerto for violin and orchestra (1980/81/86): the theme from Bach’s Musical Offering, as reinscribed by Webern. Suggestively, Gubaidulina’s Quasi hoketus for viola, bassoon, and piano (1984; revised and premiered in January 1985) also casts diatonic chorale-like fragments within a largely post-tonal environment (e. g., one measure before R18 to R25). Others followed in the footsteps of Schnittke, Silvestrov, and early Pärt, albeit with less stress. The tendency to clash tonal and atonal elements in stylistic moral narratives continued. Although not as stark as Pärt’s or Schnittke’s 1960s experiments, Giya Kancheli belatedly set tonality (naïve, quiescent melodies) against abrasive dissonances in both his Symphony no. 4, “In Memory of Michelangelo” (1975) and his Symphony no. 5 (1977). Others pretended that the 1970s and 1980s had never happened: Shchedrin belatedly employed atonal/tonal pairings in his light-hearted Stalin Cocktail from 1992. While younger Russian composers such as Vladimir Tarnopolski followed the pursuits of the French spectralists into the constituent elements of pitches/tones, several others turned (or returned) to “conventional” tonality with great fervor. Latvian composer Georgs Pelēcis (b. 1947) achieved an aching purity in such compositions as his Concertino Bianco for piano and chamber ensemble (1989) and Nevertheless, Concerto for violin, piano, and strings (1994). He aligns himself with a trend in Belgium called “new consonant music.”67 Nikolai Korndorf (1947–2001) and Vladimir Martynov (b. 1946) also pursue (or pursued) similar lines of development; Pēlecis and Martynov engaged in a joint “epistolary” composition called Correspondence. The Switzerland-based Russian émigré Aleksandr Rabinovitch-Barakovsky (b. 1945, also spelled variously Rabinowitsch or, translated literally, Rabinovich, often without the second surname) rewrites nineteenth-century virtuosity – Chopin and Schubert – under the influence of American minimalism (notably Riley’s In C) in his Musique expressive … (1976), La belle musique no. 3 (1977) and no. 4 (1987), Musique triste, parfois tragique (1980), Pourquoi je suis si sentimental (1980), and 66 Roman Yukub, “Interview with Edisson Denisov [sic],” Ex tempore 11, no. 1 (2002): 115. 67 Georgs Pelēcis, liner notes to Pelēcis, Revelation, Megadisc CD, MDC 7797 (c. 2006), unnumbered page 2.

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Musique Populaire (1980), among other pieces.68 Musicologist Elena Dubinets labels his style “triumphantly unstable stability.”69 Musicologist Pyotr Pospelov, likely paraphrasing the composer, notes that the “main hero” of Rabinovich-Barakovsky’s composition “In illo tempore,” concerto for two pianos and large orchestra (1989) is “tonality,” the “‘forgotten understanding’ that was ‘forever’ banished from the musical dictionary by ‘Boulezism-Stalinism’ in order to favor progress and lead to the ‘bright future of music.’”70 In this analogy, tonality carries both aesthetic and ideological overtones; tonality offers a recuperation of a past obscured (if not obliterated) by Stalinism and Stalinism’s musical parallel: Boulez. All of these composers extend Silvestrov’s “kitsch” music to an extreme of tonal reconstruction and reconfiguration, if not resurrection. By a more objective historiographical reckoning, it is the music of these composers, alongside Silvestrov’s “kitsch” and “post” styles, that constitutes the actual late-twentieth century Russian “new tonality.”71 But their work has not seen sustained theoretical research; the most attention to Rabinovitch-Barakovsky came in Pospelov’s important Russian treatment of minimalism from 1992.72 Kholopov seized upon the “retro” turn in the music of Martynov as one indication of a specifically Russian – Eurasianist – path forward in the late 1990s. By then revived nationalistic – if not chauvinistic – sentiments trumped any niceties of harmonic logic.73 Although his music sounds nothing like that of Pelēcis and Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, composer Yuriy Kasparov (b. 1955), a Denisov student and sometime polystylistic practitioner (as in his best-known score Devil’s Trill, after Tartini [1990]), advocates the continued importance of “tonic,” interpreting it in a much broader sense. According to Pospelov, Kasparov contends that “outside of a tonic … music is senseless.” Yet for Kasparov tonic can mean “metro-rhythmical” or any “timbral-temporal structure.”74 In some quarters, by the early 1990s tonality had expanded to mean almost anything, any kind of support. Just as Tarakanov and Kho68

Yelena Dubinets, Motsart otechestva ne vïbirayet: O muzïke sovremennogo russkogo zarubezh’ya (Moscow: Muzizdat, 2016), 76. 69 Ibid., 62. 70 Pyotr Pospelov, “Vo vremya ono,” program booklet for Alternativa festival, 1990. Available online at: http://www.proarte.spb.su/ru/komposers/music-articles/spec1990/19900003.htm (accessed 4 August 2015). 71 Pelēcis has said that “I have no desire to stylize older musics, but simply to give life to music as a principle of euphony and to maintain it as long as possible. In that, I am ‘contemporary,’ I think.” Quoted in http://www.music.lv/Composers/Pelecis/ (accessed 24 December 2014). 72 Pospelov, “Minimalizm i repetitivnaya tekhnika,” Muzïkal’naya akademiya 4 (1992): 80–81. 73 Kholopov, “Muzïka Rossii: mezhdu AVANT i RETRO,” in Muzïka XX veka: Moskovskiy Forum: Materialï mezhdunarodnïkh nauchnïkh konferentsiy, edited by A. S. Sokolov, V. G. Tarnopol’skiy, and V. S. Tsenova, Nauchnïye trudï Moskovskoy gosudarstvennoy konservatorii imeni P. I. Chaikovskogo, 25 (Moscow: Moskovskaya gosudarstvennaya konservatoriya imeni P. I. Chaikovskogo, 1999), 23–25. 74 Pospelov, “Yuriy Kasparov: Tonika muzïkal’noy zhizni,” in Muzïka iz bïvshego SSSR, ed. Valeriya Tsenova, vol. 2 (Moscow: Kompozitor, 1996), 175 (“vne toniki … muzïka nemïslima”); see also Alla Vladimirovna Grigor’yeva, “Kasparov, Yury Sergeyevich,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed 24 December 2014, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/44392.

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lopov had advocated a rigorous yet flexible interpretation of “new tonality,” now anything could be anchored by a “tonic,” however broadly or amorphously conceived – anything to tether the polystylistic free-for-all. Bibliography Brown, Malcolm Hamrick. “The Soviet Russian Concepts of ‘Intonazia’ and ‘Musical Imagery.’” Musical Quarterly 60 (1974): 557–67. Chigaryova, Yevgeniya. “K probleme semantiki tonal’nostey u Al’freda Shnitke.” In Al’fred Shnitke posvyashchayetsya 6: 19–35. Moscow: Kompozitor, 2008. Dubinets, Yelena. Motsart otechestva ne vïbirayet: O muzïke sovremennogo russkogo zarubezh’ya. Moscow: Muzizdat, 2016. Durrani, Aaminah. “Chorale and Canon in Alfred Schnittke’s Fourth String Quartet.” PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2005 Frumkis, Tat’yana. “‘Landshaftï dlya slukha’ Valentina Sil’vestrova.” In Tvorchestvo sovremennïkh kompozitorov. A. Karamanov, V. Sil’vestrov, F. Glass, Ekspress-informatsiya/Informkul’tura, 4:2–16. Moscow: Ministerstvo Kul’turï SSSR/Gosudarstvennaya biblioteka SSSR imeni V. I. Lenina, 1991. Gershkovich, Filip. “Dodekafoniya i tonal’nost’.” 1972. In O muzïke, edited by A. Vustin, 214–46. Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1991. Grigor’yeva, Alla Vladimirovna. “Kasparov, Yury Sergeyevich,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/ grove/music/44392 (accessed 24 December 2014). Guenther, Roy J. “Varvara Dernova’s System of Analysis of the Music of Skryabin.” In Russian Theoretical Thought in Music, edited by Gordon D. McQuere, 165–216. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983. Reprinted University of Rochester Press, 2009. Jacobson, Bernard. A Polish Renaissance. London: Phaidon, 1996. Kalshnikova, Svetlana. “Universal’nost’ i – lakonizm?: Paradoksï i taynï zvukovïsotnogo pis’ma Al’freda Shnitke.” Muzïkal’naya akademiya no. 2 (1999): 84–90. Katunyan, M. I. “K izucheniyu novïkh tonal’nïkh system v sovremennoy muzïke.” Problemï muzïkal’noy nauki 5 (1983): 4–44. Kholopov, Yu. N. [Yuriy Nikolayevich]. Garmonicheskiy analiz v 3-kh chastyakh. Vol. 3. Moscow: Moskovskaya konservatoriya, 2009. ––. Garmoniya: Teoreticheskiy kurs. St. Petersburg: Lan’, 2003. ––. “K probleme lada v russkom teoreticheskom muzïkoznanii.” In Garmoniya: problem nauki i metodiki 2, 79–100. Rostov-on-Don: RGK, 2005. ––. “Muzïka Rossii: mezhdu AVANT i RETRO.” In Muzïka XX veka: Moskovskiy Forum: Materialï mezhdunarodnïkh nauchnïkh konferentsiy, edited by A. S. Sokolov, V. G. Tarnopol’skiy, and V. S. Tsenova. Nauchnïye trudï Moskovskoy gosudarstvennoy konservatorii imeni P. I. Chaikovskogo, 25, 12–32. Moscow: Moskovskaya gosudarstvennaya konservatoriya imeni P. I. Chaikovskogo, 1999. ––. “Problema novoy tonal’nosti v russkom i sovetskom teoreticheskom muzïkoznanii.” In Idei Yu. N. Kholopova v XXI veke: k 75-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya, edited by T. S. Kyuregyan, 199– 219. Moscow: Muzizdat, 2008. ––. Sovremennïye chertï garmonii Prokof’yeva. Moscow: Muzïka, 1967. ––. “Tonal’nost’.” In Muzïkal’naya entsiklopediya, edited by Yu. V. Keldïsh, 5:564–75. Moscow: Sovetskaya entsiklopediya, 1981. Köchel, Jürgen, Hans-Ulrich Duffek, et al., eds. Alfred Schnittke zum 60. Geburtstag – Eine Festschrift. Hamburg: Sikorski, 1994. Kozinn, Allan. “Celebrating a Ukrainian Composer’s 50th Birthday.” New York Times, 11 April 1988, C14.

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––. “An Eclectic Mix, Through a Contemporary Prism.” New York Times, 22 May 1988, 23. Lubimov, Alexei [Lyubimov, Aleksey]. “The Messenger.” In Der Bote, ECM New Series 1771, CD 461 812–2 (2002): [7–8] (unnumbered). Mihkelson, Immo. “A Narrow Path to the Truth: Arvo Pärt and the 1960s and 1970s in Soviet Estonia.” In Shenton, Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt, 10–28. Monastra, Peggy. “Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia and Flourescences.” In The Rosaleen Moldenhauer Memorial: Music History from Primary Sources – A Guide to the Moldenhauer Archives, edited by Jon Newsom and Alfred Mann, 350–57. Washington, D. C.: Library of Congress, 2000. Pelēcis, Georgs. Liner notes in Georgs Pelēcis, Revelation, Megadisc CD, MDC 7797 (c. 2006). Perle, George. Serial Composition and Atonality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. ––. Twelve-tone Tonality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, 2nd rev. ed., 1996. Polyakova, Svetlana, and Valentin Sil’vestrov. “Valentin Sil’vestrov: ‘Pervïy orden ya poluchil v detstve.’” gazeta.ru, 30 October 2007 (http://www.gazeta.ru/culture/2007/10/30/a_2276182. shtml, accessed 22 December 2014). Pospelov, Pyotr. “Minimalizm i repetitivnaya tekhnika.” Muzïkal’naya akademiya, no. 4 (1992): 74–82. ––. “Vo vremya ono.” Program booklet for Alternativa festival, 1990. Available online: http:// www.proarte.spb.su/ru/komposers/music-articles/spec1990/19900003.htm (accessed 4 August 2015). ––. “Yuriy Kasparov: Tonika muzïkal’noy zhizni.” In Muzïka iz bïvshego SSSR, edited by Valeriya Tsenova, vol. 2, 157–79. Moscow: Kompozitor, 1996. Restagno, Enzo, Leopold Brauneiss, Saale Kareda, and Arvo Pärt. Arvo Pärt in Conversation. Translated by Robert Crow. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012. Originally published as Pärt im Gespräch. Vienna: Universal Edition, 2010. Rozhdestvensky, Gennadi. “Gennadi Rozhdestvensky on Schnittke (1989).” In Schnittke, A Schnittke Reader, 236–39. Savenko, Svetlana. “Rukotvornïy kosmos Valentina Sil’vestrova.” In Muzïka iz bïvshego SSSR, edited by Valeriya Tsenova, vol. 1, 72–87. Moscow: Kompozitor, 1994. Schmelz, Peter J. “After Prokofiev.” In Sergey Prokofiev and His World, edited by Simon Morrison, 493–529. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. ––. Such Freedom, if Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw. New York: Oxford, 2009. ––. “Valentin Silvestrov and the Echoes of Music History.” Journal of Musicology 31 (2014): 231– 71. ––. “What was ‘Shostakovich,’ And What Came Next?” Journal of Musicology 24 (2007): 297– 338. Schnittke, Alfred. A Schnittke Reader. Edited by Alexander Ivashkin, translated by John Goodliffe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. ––. “On Concerto Grosso no. 1 (Late 1970s).” In Schnittke, A Schnittke Reader, 45–46. ––. “Paradox as a Feature of Stravinsky’s Musical Logic (1973).” In Schnittke, A Schnittke Reader, 151–200; originally published as: Shnitke, Al’fred. “Paradoksal’nost’ kak cherta muzïkal’noy logiki Stravinskogo.” In I. F. Stravinskiy: Stat’i i materialï, edited by L. S. D’yachkova, 383– 434. Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1973. ––. “Polystylistic Tendencies in Modern Music (c. 1971).” In Schnittke, A Schnittke Reader, 87– 90. ––. Program note for Piano Sonata no. 1. In Köchel et al., Alfred Schnittke zum 60. Geburtstag, 113. ––. Program note for Piano Sonata no. 2. In Köchel et al., Alfred Schnittke zum 60. Geburtstag, 113–14. ––. Program note for Stille Nacht. In Köchel et al., Alfred Schnittke zum 60. Geburtstag, 118. ––. Program note for Violin Concerto no. 3. In Köchel et al., Alfred Schnittke zum 60. Geburtstag, 94–95. English translation in liner notes to Schnittke, Violin Concertos no. 3 and no. 4. BIS CD, 517 (1991).

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––. Program Note for Violin Sonata no. 2 [“Quasi una Sonata”]. In Köchel et al., Alfred Schnittke zum 60. Geburtstag, 118–19. ––. [Shnitke, Al’fred]. “Razvivat’ nauku o garmonii.” Sovetskaya muzïka, no. 10 (1961): 44–45. ––. “Subjective Notes on an Objective Performance (On Alexei Liubimov) (1973).” In Schnittke, A Schnittke Reader, 79–82; originally in Sovetskaya muzïka, no. 2 (1974): 63–65. Schnittke, Alfred, and Joachim Hansberger. “Alfred Schnittke im Gespräch über sein Klavierquintett und anderer Kompositionen.” Zeitschrift für Musikpädagogik 7, no. 20 (November 1982): 44–50. Schnittke, Alfred [Shnitke, Al’fred], and Aleksandr Ivashkin. Besedï s Al’fredom Shnitke. 2nd expanded edition. Moscow: Klassika – XXI, 2005. Schnittke, Alfred [Shnitke, Al’fred], and Dmitriy Shul’gin. Godï neizvestnosti Al’freda Shnitke. Moscow: Delovaya Liga, 1993 (first edition). Segall, Christopher. “Klingende Buchstaben: Principles of Alfred Schnittke’s Monogram Technique.” Journal of Musicology 30 (2013): 252–86. ––. “Triadic Music in Twentieth-Century Russia.” PhD Dissertation, City University of New York, 2013. Shenton, Andrew, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Shneyerson, G. [Grigoriy]. O muzïke zhivoy i myortvoy. Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1960 (first edition). Sil’vestrov, Valentin, and Tat’yana Frumkis. “Sokhranyat’ dostoinstvo.” Sovetskaya muzïka, no. 4 (1990): 11–17. Sil’vestrov, Valentin, and Natal’ya Gorbanevskaya. “Valentin Sil’vestrov: ‘Vïyti iz zamknutogo prostranstva …’ ” Yunost’ 9 (1967): 100–01. Sil’vestrov, Valentin, and Sergey Pilyutikov. Dozhdat’sya muzïki: Lektsii-besedï. Kiev: Dukh i litera, 2010. Tarakanov, Mikhaíl. “Novaya tonal’nost’ v muzïke XX veka.” Problemï muzïkal’noy nauki 1:5–35. Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1972. ––. Stil’ simfoniy Prokof’yeva. Moscow: Muzïka, 1968. Thomas, Adrian. Górecki. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. ––. Polish Music since Szymanowski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Yukub, Roman. “Interview with Edisson Denisov [sic].” Ex tempore 11, no. 1 (2002): 112–18. Also available at: http://www.ex-tempore.org/denisov.html (accessed 13 August 2015). Websites: MacDonald, Calum. Review of Silvestrov: Nostalghia; Sonata no. 1; Two Dialogues with an Epilogue; Three Postludes; Three Waltzes etc. Classical-music.com (BBC Music Magazine). 20 January 2012. http://www.classical-music.com/review/silvestrov-4 (accessed 13 August 2015). “Georgs Pelecis Comments.” 3 July 2002. http://www.music.lv/Composers/Pelecis/ (Accessed 13 August 2015). Discography: Lubimov, Alexei. Der Bote. ECM CD, ECM New Series 1771, 461 812–2 (2002). Pelēcis, Georgs. Revelation. Megadisc CD, MDC 7797 (c. 2006). Penderecki, Krzysztof, and Jonny Greenwood. Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima / Popcorn Superhet Receiver / Polymorphia / 48 Responses to Polymorphia. Nonesuch CD, 530223–2 (2012). Schnittke, Alfred. Violin Concertos no. 3 and no. 4. BIS CD, 517 (1991). Silvestrov, Valentin. Leggiero, Pesante. ECM CD, ECM New Series 1776 (2002).

Saariaho, Timbre, and Tonality Eric Drott In a 1987 essay titled “Timbre and Harmony,” Kaija Saariaho shed light on her prior endeavors and future ambitions as a composer. After discussing at length her approach to the two parameters referenced in the essay’s title, she posed a question upon which her aesthetic project seemed to hinge: “can timbre, like tonal harmony, serve to construct tensions on several levels, or would it be in spite of everything a secondary parameter in relation to rhythm and tonality, as has often been supposed?”1 At the time of the essay’s writing, the question raised by Saariaho was not a new one. Generations of composers, from Arnold Schoenberg to György Ligeti, had sought to elevate timbre from the subordinate, “coloristic” role it had long played in Western art music to a structural one. Where Saariaho distinguished herself from these forebears was in her effort to ground timbre’s constitutive role in shaping musical form on experimentally validated psychoacoustic bases. During the same period she was writing “Timbre and Harmony,” Saariaho was also collaborating with the psychoacoustician Stephen McAdams on a research project at IRCAM whose goal was to determine to what extent timbre could act as a “form-bearing element” in music.2 But the same research that held out such promise for the development of new compositional resources also presented risks. Of particular concern was the seemingly inevitable reliance on tonal hierarchies as a model for imagining timbral hierarchies: “to set out on a course of research on hierarchical models in tonal music can – and must, even – be thought of as questionable.”3 Saariaho’s choice of words is notable. The claim that analogies with tonality can be regarded as “questionable” tacitly acknowledges a longstanding line of modernist critique to which her pursuits left her exposed. It is as if Saariaho was able to anticipate the negative response that her efforts to construct a syntax of timbres would elicit within the contemporary music circles in which she operated. However, the further claim that such analogies must be regarded as “questionable” transforms the possibility of critique into a necessity. It was not just that some subset of this musical community might see her recourse to tonal models as atavistic. All were bound to do so, including Saariaho herself. Transformed into a normative principle, skepticism toward tonal models – a skepticism that risked subverting her own aesthetic project – became a stance to which Saariaho had little choice but to subscribe. 1 2 3

Kaija Saariaho, “Timbre and Harmony: Interpolations of Timbral Structures,” Contemporary Music Review 2 (1987): 131. Stephen McAdams and Kaija Saariaho, “Qualities and Functions of Musical Timbre,” Proceedings of the 1985 International Computer Music Conference (San Francisco: Computer Music Association, 1985), 367–74. Saariaho, “Timbre and Harmony,” 132.

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The resulting ambivalence in Saariaho’s discourse is nowhere more evident than in the final paragraphs of “Timbre and Harmony,” where she registers reservations regarding her efforts to develop timbral analogues to tonal processes. “Personally, I am bothered by having to mention the subject of tonal harmony so many times in the course of this article,” she laments, before assuring readers of her conviction that tonality “is an out-dated approach to the problems posed by the organization of pitch structures.”4 Yet at the very moment Saariaho seems poised to consign tonality to the rubbish-heap of history, as so many other modernists have done, she hesitates. Her reluctance to be finished with tonality stems from its unique affordances, above all its capacity to create “dynamic forms.” But it also stems from her belief in the existence of certain invariants of human perception. “I believe that a certain part of our approach to the world is effectively innate,” she remarks, most notably “the principle of approaching and analyzing things and forms by way of differences.”5 Although Saariaho doesn’t spell out the implications of this assertion, they follow from her remarks. Tonality, it appears, is one system that builds upon this innate human propensity to apprehend the world through a grid of significant differences. But it is not the only one. Others might be identified – or invented. Presumably this was true of the timbral hierarchies that preoccupied Saariaho. Positing a “deep” cognitive mechanism that subtended both tonal and timbral hierarchies had the advantage of reducing their asymmetry, putting them on an equal footing. The tensions created by Saariaho’s simultaneous referral to and refusal of tonal function are thereby attenuated, if not entirely resolved. Instead of extending tonal principles to a novel domain, timbre, her compositional project is recast as an effort to develop a more expansive approach to musical hierarchy, one that encompassed but was not limited to tonality. Thus relativized, tonality would be transformed from a model to be emulated into a particular manifestation of a more general organizational principle: “just as the universe of Newton is contained within the universe of Einstein, contemporary music can similarly contain, in addition to other elements, all the developed knowledge of our civilization, as well as the knowledge that we have been able to acquire about other civilizations.”6 The goal was not to surmount but to subsume tonality, acquiring its powers without being ruled by them. Armed with the scientific knowledge furnished by psychoacoustics, modern music no longer needed to proscribe tonality in order to guarantee its autonomy – autonomy understood in the literal sense, as self-rule. Tonality was henceforth something that could be circumscribed, contained, and therefore controlled. Or so Saariaho suggested. This essay seeks to identify the sources of Saariaho’s ambivalence toward tonality and trace the effects of this ambivalence on her development during the 1980s, the period in which she is said to have found her voice as a composer.7 An examination of her landmark work Lichtbogen (1986) reveals how her complicated relationship with tonality plays out within her compositional practice. But a key 4 5 6 7

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Pirkko Moisala, Kaija Saariaho (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 26–27.

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question to be addressed first concerns the processes of identification and disidentification animating Saariaho’s evolving aesthetic. Specifically, given Saariaho’s decision to settle in Paris in 1982, what pressures did the French contemporary music scene – and, more specifically, the modernist doxa that had achieved hegemonic status within this scene by the early 1980s – exert upon her efforts to fashion a distinctive compositional identity?8 While the economies of prestige and strategies of distinction peculiar to this field encouraged a disavowal of tonality of the sort manifest in Saariaho’s writings and works, it remains unclear how effective this gesture of refusal actually was. Indeed, we have already seen how the specter of tonality was never fully dislodged from Saariaho’s musical and aesthetic discourse. Disavowal of tonality did not result in its absolute erasure, but in a lingering attachment reminiscent of the psychic retention of “lost objects” that Freud placed at the center of his theory of subject formation.9 Direct application of tonal procedures may have been ruled out in practice, but tonality itself was transformed into an abstract model for hierarchical organization that could still prove useful for a late modernist like Saariaho. Abetting this transfiguration of tonality’s status was the fact that the contemporary music scene was not the only source of legitimation to which Saariaho and her peers could appeal. Also important was the validation furnished by science, and psychoacoustics more specifically. Too explicit or straightforward an adoption of tonal materials may have been ruled out on aesthetic grounds, as being incapable of confronting the demands the contemporary world placed on composition. But that did not prevent it from being revalorized on scientific grounds, as a mode of musical organization that exploited human cognitive capacities in a manner that few works of postwar musical modernism could match. Contexts: Serialism / Spectralism / Post-Spectralism The modernist doxa to which Saariaho subscribed would not have exercised such influence were it not for the institutional consecration postserialism enjoyed in the decades prior to her emigration to France. The 1970s in particular had witnessed a reversal of fortunes within the field of la musique contemporaine, as the balance of power between “traditionalist” and “modernist” camps tipped decisively in favor of the latter. The clearest sign of postserialism’s ascendancy was the founding of IRCAM under Pierre Boulez’s leadership in 1970, coming just a few years after he had declared his intention to go on “strike” against the French musical establishment. Boulez’s brief estrangement from official musical life in France stemmed 8

9

This essay’s emphasis on the French musical field and its influence on Saariaho should not be taken as discounting the importance of her Finnish musical heritage. The continuing importance of this heritage has been examined at length in Moisala, Kaija Saariaho, and Tim Howell, After Sibelius: Studies in Finnish Music (London: Ashgate, 2006), 202–28. A more comprehensive study of the way her expatriate status has affected her music and aesthetic ideology would have to account for the interplay of these competing sources of identification. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2005), 201–18.

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from the decision taken in 1966 by then-Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux, to appoint the composer Marcel Landowski to oversee the newly created Service de la musique. The selection of Landowski over Emile Biasini, Boulez’s preferred candidate for the post, was taken as a tacit repudiation of the vision espoused by Boulez. Rightly or wrongly, Landowski’s allegiance to tonality and traditional forms, coupled with the support he enjoyed from the Comité national de musique headed by Jacques Chailley, reinforced the impression that he would be a reliable steward of France’s musical traditions.10 Given this history, it was hard not to interpret Boulez’s return to France at the beginning of the 1970s as a vindication, especially as it came at the behest of President Georges Pompidou. Ironically, the very moment of post-serialism’s triumph also witnessed the emergence in France of aesthetic currents taking aim at the premises upon which this form of institutionalized modernism was erected.11 Chief among these was spectralism. Admittedly, the emergence of the spectral movement in the mid-1970s scarcely marked a clean break with the modernist project. Its continued allegiance to ideals of progress and its faith in the capacity of science and technology to “revolutionize” musical language make its continuity with modernism clear. What set the scientism informing spectralism apart from its predecessors was its appeal to human perception. It was this appeal that underpinned Tristan Murail’s charge that serial and post-serial composers mistook notational symbols for the sounds they represented.12 The same line of argument also informed Gérard Grisey’s contention that serialism’s distribution of sonic phenomena along discrete, quantitative grids disregarded the obdurate reality of their qualitative difference. Against a belief in the “relativity of the [sonic] phenomenon,” which led inexorably to the leveling of musical distinctions and thus to “atonal drabness” [la grisaille atonale], Grisey argued that it was imperative to recognize certain polarities as manifest in human perception.13 Among these was the very distinction that Schoenberg had sought to abrogate, that which set consonance apart from dissonance. But for Grisey it was not mere convention or ideology that motivated this distinction: “Dissonance is not cultural, it is a phenomenon in itself; what is cultural are the attributes that one 10

11

12 13

For accounts of the Boulez/Landowski controversy, see Dominique Jameux, Pierre Boulez, trans. Susan Bradshaw (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 138–40; Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Avant-garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 82–83; and Eric Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 215–16. On spectralism’s complicated relationship with serialism, see Eric Drott, “Spectralism, Politics and the Post-Industrial Imagination,” in The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music ed. Björn Heile (London: Ashgate, 2009), 39–60; and Jonathan Goldman, “Boulez and the Spectralists between Descartes and Rameau: Who Said What about Whom?” Perspectives of New Music 48 (2010): 208–32. Tristan Murail, “La révolution des sons complexes” (1980), in Modèles & artifices, ed. Pierre Michel (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2004), 14. “En déduire la relativité du phénomène est insuffisant et ce voile pudique jeté sur la réalité acoustique nous a menés à la confusion et à la grisaille atonale.” Gérard Grisey, “La Musique: le devenir des sons” [1982], in Écrits, ou l’invention de la musique spectrale (Paris: Editions MF, 2008), 46.

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confers upon it and the usage that follows from this.”14 While the acoustic difference between consonance and dissonance may be one of degree, the psychoacoustic difference is one of kind. The same may be said for other polarities, such as harmonicity versus inharmonicity, or periodicity versus aperiodicity. These, too, possess a perceptual reality that composers disregard at their own peril. The rhetorical efficacy of the spectral critique stemmed in part from its reliance on a familiar species of argument, one that sets realist truth against idealist fancy. For spectralists, it is the hard evidence of human perception that curbs the theoretical excesses of serialism and post-serialism. By insisting upon the existence of psychophysical mechanisms that constrain musical intelligibility, Grisey, Murail, Dufourt, and their allies were able to undercut a foundational assumption of postserial aesthetics: that music, as a human invention, is unbounded by any constraints except those freely chosen by some sovereign human agency. Viewed from this vantage-point, the oppositions structuring spectralist discourse – between the real and the ideal, between experience and theory – reflected a substantive disagreement regarding the bases of human understanding. If the constraints auditory mechanisms placed on musical comprehension were impervious to modification or displacement, this suggested that humans were not the blank slates presupposed by modernist aesthetics, capable of assimilating any possible configuration of sound given sufficient exposure or education. Rather, individuals were endowed with certain innate propensities that structure the space of musical intelligibility, without entirely specifying its topography (hence Grisey’s claim that the consonance/dissonance distinction was invariant, even if the value attached to the two opposed terms was not). Spectralist claims regarding the “primacy of perception” were more than just a resource for critique. They also had a positive, enabling function. In addition to taking aim at the foundations upon which a then-hegemonic postserial aesthetic rested, the position staked out by the spectralists also allowed musical resources hitherto banished from avant-garde discourse to be rehabilitated. Consonance, periodicity, polarities of tension and release, directed harmonic motion – these and other features suppressed because of their association with tonality could now be safely reintegrated into contemporary composition. Shielding the restoration of such features from critique was their recontextualization within a musical language that ostensibly stripped them of conventional associations, reframing them not as cultural but as psychoacoustic phenomena. Periodic rhythms, for instance, might superficially resemble the metric regularities encountered in musics of the common practice era, but they did not function in the same way. Instead of providing a normative framework against which deviations could be measured, periodicity represented but one point along a continuum of rhythmic possibilities, of no greater or lesser importance than others: “We do not take periodicity as either basic material nor as the unit of rhythmic structure, but as the most simple phenomenon, the most

14

“La dissonance n’est pas culturelle, c’est un phénomène en soi; ce qui est, ce sont les attributs qu’on lui confère et l’usage qui s’ensuit.” Ibid.

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probable; we are tempted to see it as the ideal point of reference for the perception of time […], but in no way as the a priori foundation of a hierarchical system.”15 The same reasoning applied to other entities that flirted with tonal phenomena. The most salient of these were the spectral sonorities featured in works like Grisey’s Dérives or Murail’s Gondwana, sonorities whose resemblance to ninth, eleventh, and other extended tertian harmonies was indisputable – and for exactly that reason hotly disputed. Some sense of their problematic character can be discerned in Philippe Hurel’s claim that hearing them as the tertian chords they so manifestly resembled would constitute “a perversion of the ear.”16 No sooner had tonal associations been evoked than they had to be renounced. That these sonorities be defined in terms of spectral models alone was vital, lest the composers who deployed them be susceptible to the charge of ideological regression. What is important to recognize in arguments like Hurel’s is how the anchoring of the spectralist aesthetic in purported invariants of human perception allowed its adepts to re-appropriate elements evocative of tonal practice, even as they denied that this was what they were doing. In this way, certain elements of the modernist ideology could be set aside (such as its belief in the infinite plasticity of hearing) and others retained (including its commitment to the idea of historical progress). Stylistic traits that might otherwise have been criticized as marking a retreat could instead be characterized as an advance, partly because of their alleged grounding in human perception, partly because of the aura of scientific rationality surrounding the discourse of psychoacoustics to which spectralism referred. Saariaho’s tenure at IRCAM came at a time when spectralism’s core tenets were making significant inroads at the research center, informing many of the aesthetic debates taking place there during the mid-1980s. As Georgina Born observes in her ethnography of IRCAM, the institution’s musical and intellectual vanguard was preoccupied mainly by “interrelated concerns with timbre and with musical form.”17 Part of this reorientation of aesthetic priorities was due to the arrival at IRCAM of a new generation of composers, tutors, and researchers, many of whom were sympathetic to spectralism’s core concerns. Apart from Saariaho were such similarly inclined figures as Marc-André Dalbavie, Philippe Hurel, Claudy Malherbe, and Jean-Baptiste Barrière. Equally significant were the invitations extended 15

16

17

“Nous ne prenons pas la périodicité ni comme matériau de base ni comme unité de structure rythmique, mais en tant que phénomène le plus simple, le plus probable; nous sommes tentés d’y voir le point de repère idéal pour la perception du temps […] mais nullement le fondement a priori d’un système hiérarchisant.” Grisey, “Tempus ex Machina: Réflexions d’un compositeur sur le temps musical” (1980), in Écrits, 64. Hurel’s remark is situated in a broader, normative statement that distinguishes how spectral sonorities are heard from how they should be heard: “il n’y a rien de bien gênant à admettre que malgré la réussite sonore de la première section de Partiels sur le plan de la « synthèse », l’auditeur musicien entende la tierce, la quinte, la septième, la neuvième […]. De là à les entendre comme un accord classé me semble relever d’une perversion de l’oreille, oreille qui serait, elle, tonale” (emphasis mine). Philippe Hurel, “Le phénomène sonore, un modèle pour la composition,” in Le timbre, métaphore pour la composition, ed. Jean-Baptiste Barrière (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991), 263. Born, Rationalizing Culture, 197.

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to Murail, Grisey, Dufourt, and other figures associated with the spectral movement to conduct research, participate in workshops, and/or pursue compositional projects at IRCAM. These residencies not only reflected the increased traction their arguments were enjoying within IRCAM by the early 1980s; they also extended this influence further. But as spectralist ideas spread, they underwent significant transformation. Although the various high modernist shibboleths that prevailed at IRCAM had been the object of a withering – if partial – critique within spectralist discourse, they remained potent enough to impose changes upon spectralism. Indeed, these changes were so consequential that it makes sense to speak of a transition from a more or less orthodox spectralism of the 1970s to the increasingly heterodox post-spectralism of the 1980s. One manifestation of this shift may be seen in the way Barrière, Saariaho and others marked their distance with respect to their spectralist forebears, even while celebrating the latter’s role in pointing the way past the impasses of serialism and post-serialism. For Barrière, spectralism represented a crucial stage in the development of postwar composition, albeit one whose time had passed. To overcome limitations that earlier analog technologies had imposed on electroacoustic composition, first-generation spectralists had looked not to more advanced forms of technological mediation, but to earlier ones. To go forward it had been necessary to go back, to instrumental ensembles and notated scores, which were paradoxically the best tools then available for realizing ideas inspired by technologies of electronic sound production – ideas that these technologies were not yet capable of rendering adequately themselves: “notation was substituted [for electronics] in light of its lack of control and hence lack of freedom.”18 Yet recent advances in digital computing provided the kind of precision that made such makeshift solutions unnecessary. According to this narrative, the work then being undertaken at IRCAM represented both the logical continuation of spectralism and its surpassing: “The use of the computer represents a subsequent stage in the process of conquering and modeling for the purposes of composition sonic phenomena and their transformations […] Only synthesis by means of the computer can allow us to envisage the totality of sonic phenomena.”19 Saariaho also engaged in efforts to distance her work from too close an identification with an earlier generation of spectralist composers. For Saariaho, unlike Barrière, the trouble with first-generation spectralism was less technological than compositional. At issue was the use of acoustic models to derive frequency structures at both “microphonic” (timbral) and “macrophonic” (harmonic) levels, a technique pioneered by Grisey and Murail. Recourse to such models was salutary insofar as it offered novel means of connecting timbral and harmonic domains. The problem was that in privileging acoustic models, this approach established an 18 19

“l’écriture se substitue au manque de contrôle et par consequent de liberté.” Jean-Baptiste Barrière, “Ecriture et modèles: remarques croisées sur séries et spectres,” Entretemps 8 (September 1989): 43. “L’utilisation de l’ordinateur représente la phase ultérieure dans ce processus de conquête et de modélisation des phénomènes sonores et de leurs transformations […]. Seule la synthèse avec ordinateur peut permettre d’envisager la globalité des phénomènes sonores […].” Ibid., 44.

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asymmetry between these domains: the microstructure of spectra generated harmonies, but the macrostructure of harmonies never generated spectra. This one-way relationship between timbre and harmony represented for Saariaho an unwarranted limitation on compositional agency. Describing her work on the composition Verblendungen (1984), she describes how the piece employs complementary forms of derivation: one “has the harmony derive from the frequency structure internal to a sound, an idea that is commonplace enough,” while the other reverses this process and “obtains the frequency structure internal to a sound from a harmony.”20 The insistence that symmetry prevail between timbre and harmony distinguished Saariaho’s approach from a spectralism whose techniques had become “commonplace by the early 1980s.” It also safeguarded her from the charge of fetishism leveled against spectral composers, whose efforts to ground culture (music) in nature (acoustics) was, from the perspective of a certain brand of post-Adornian critical theory, ideologically suspect.21 Clearly, post-spectralist critiques of early spectralism were motivated by principled objections to its expressive and constructional shortcomings.22 Yet it is also clear that these critiques responded to pressures endemic to the field of French contemporary music. As Bourdieu has observed in connection to markets for symbolic goods, there is a need for new entrants to dislodge incumbents if they are to develop their own distinctive niches. Typically this involves making more established artists and styles appear dated, accelerating processes of social aging and generational turnover.23 It is not hard to see such tactics at work in the critiques of Saariaho, Hurel, Dalbavie, and their post-spectralist peers. The fact that there were two sets of incumbents – one associated with the post-serial currents long dominant within IRCAM, the other with the spectralist aesthetic that was just beginning to enjoy a measure of institutional legitimacy—meant that these composers had to play a double game. By adopting certain key tenets of the spectral aesthetic, they were able to claim a vanguard position within IRCAM, one that used the spectralists’ criticisms of a consecrated Boulezian post-serialism to distinguish themselves from the institution’s de facto house style.24 However, by abandoning other key tenets of this aesthetic, Saariaho and her colleagues were able to claim a vanguard position with regard to spectralism as well. Doing so had the benefit of inoculating 20

21 22 23 24

She describes the alternatives as follows: “soit faire dériver l’harmonie des structures fréquentielles internes d’un son – une idée somme toute assez commune –, soit obtenir la structure fréquentielle interne d’un son à partir d’une harmonie.” Saariaho, “Une œuvre en chantier (Verblendungen),” in Le passage des frontières: Écrits sur la musique, ed. Stéphane Roth (Paris: Editions MF, 2013), 30. See for instance Ivanka Stoianova, “Klangforschung aktuell: Wege der ‘recherche musicale’ heute,” in Lust am Komponieren, ed. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1985), 114–28. Another line of critique was offered by Hurel, for whom the neglect of the thematic dimension in the textural works of Grisey, Dufourt, and Murail limited listeners’ capacity to retain events in memory, a prerequisite of musical form. See Hurel, “Le phénomène sonore,” 270. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 107. See Born, Rationalizing Culture, 193–207.

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the composers in question from charges of suivisme, of being little more than exponents of the latest trend in contemporary composition. What the selective retention and rejection of spectralist principles enabled, in other words, was for post-spectralist composers to display the sort of critical reflexivity privileged by the very modernist doxa they elsewhere appeared to call into question. Other factors were crucial for the shift from spectralism to post-spectralism. One was the primacy of digital technologies at IRCAM, itself symptomatic of the broader transition away from analog techniques of sound generation and manipulation during the latter half of the 1970s and early 1980s. Even if one did not go so far as Barrière and contend that digital computers promised to realize what previous generations of composers could only dream of, there is no doubt that their prevalence during the first half of the 1980s made for a very different technological ecosystem than the one in which spectralism had initially been formulated. Additive synthesis, tape re-injection loops, ring modulation, and other analog processes that had provided models for early spectral compositions were discarded as advances in digital computing lowered barriers of access, affordability, and functionality that had previously inhibited their widespread use. These new forms of technological mediation facilitated the analysis and resynthesis of more complex acoustic models, in addition to enabling more precise control over the evolution and succession of sound spectra.25 Indeed, it was this latter possibility that fueled interest among composers (including Saariaho) in the interpolation of different timbres, in the creation of incremental transitions between sound objects. As Saariaho herself acknowledged, her work on timbral transitions was “totally inspired by the computer” and they “could not be realized without the digital ability [to create] arbitrary frequency structures at will.”26 Also inflecting spectralist ideas once they entered into circulation at IRCAM was the institution’s dual mandate, to serve not only as a studio for the production of contemporary music but as a center for research into acoustics, auditory perception, and related fields of scientific inquiry. The Bauhaus model famously advocated by Boulez, according to which musicians and scientific researchers would collaborate in the hope that their complementary skills and mindsets might stimulate advances in both fields, meant that the psychoacoustic principles to which early spectral discourse referred in a somewhat loose and approximate fashion were increasingly treated with greater precision and in a more thorough-going fashion.27 While this was in part a signaling device, a means of legitimizing compositional pursuits by infusing them with an aura of scientific respectability, recourse to psy25

26 27

Important in this regard was the CHANT synthesis system developed at IRCAM by Xavier Rodet and his colleagues, which Saariaho used extensively in her work of the 1980s and 90s. See Xavier Rodet, Yves Potard, and Jean-Baptiste Barrière, “The CHANT Project: From the Synthesis of the Singing Voice to Synthesis in General,” Computer Music Journal 8 (Autumn 1984): 15–31. Saariaho, “Using the Computer in a Search for New Aspects of Timbre Organisation and Composition,” Proceedings of the 1983 International Computer Music Conference (San Francisco: Computer Music Association, 1983), 271–72. On the Bauhaus model, see Born, Rationalizing Culture, 100.

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choacoustics was not limited to this function. Paradigms governing work in cognitive psychology and auditory perception clearly shaped how composers imagined the field of musical possibility, just as composers’ creative activities delineated areas where further research was needed, as was the case with timbre perception. Notable in this regard was how work in psychoacoustics and music perception fortified the contention that there existed perceptual and cognitive constraints on musical communication. Here, too, one can witness how positions initially articulated by figures such as Grisey and Murail underwent an intensification once filtered through a scientific discourse that could lay claim to a privileged access to the truth of physical reality. No longer was it a small group of composers who claimed there existed immutable limits of cognition and perception. Now they could count among their allies scientific researchers, who brandished an authority that appeals to artistic values and aesthetic ideologies were ill-equipped to countermand. In Search of a Timbral Syntax There is perhaps no better illustration of the entwinement of post-spectralism and psychoacoustics in the 1980s than Saariaho’s collaboration with Stephen McAdams, the fruits of which were summarized in a jointly-authored paper presented at the 1985 conference of the International Computer Music Conference.28 As mentioned above, the objective of their research was to determine timbre’s suitability as a bearer of musical form. Saariaho’s interest in this question predated her work with McAdams by some years. Already in compositions like Verblendungen (1984) and Jardin Sécret no. 1 (1984–85) movement through timbral space was a principal determinant of formal design. This space was organized around two axes. One mapped the continuum extending from “pure” sounds at one end (timbres with harmonic spectra) to noisy ones at the other (timbres with inharmonic spectra). The second axis characterized sounds according to their apparent proximity or distance to the listener. Insofar as the distinction between “pure” and “noisy” sounds became less salient the further they receded into the distance, the resulting map of timbral space took the form of a triangle, with pure sounds at one vertex, noisy sounds at another, and distant sounds at a third.29 To be noted is how tonal analogues are at once built into this model of timbral space and complicated by it. On the one hand, the pure/noisy polarity in the domain of timbre corresponds to the consonance/dissonance polarity in the domain of harmony, a parallelism Saariaho readily acknowledged: “Noise is already, physically speaking, a developed version of dissonance.”30 This makes it capable of assuming functions similar to those performed by dissonance in tonal music, so that moving from noise to a clearer, more harmonic timbre is “a comparable listening experience to hear[ing] harmonical tension resolve into a tonic chord.”31 On the other hand, the addition of a secondary axis opposing prox28 29 30 31

McAdams and Saariaho, “Qualities and Functions.” Saariaho, “Using the Computer,” 272. Ibid., 271. Ibid.

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imate and remote sounds confounded any simple one-to-one correspondence between traditional tonal relations and the system of timbral relations she had developed. In “Qualities and Functions of Musical Timbre,” Saariaho and McAdams built upon – but also substantially revised – these initial forays into the mapping of timbral space. They framed their undertaking as a broader general inquiry into what conditions must be met for any parameter to function as a carrier of form, musical or otherwise, with timbre serving as a test-case for their hypotheses. That such conditions existed had been demonstrated, both positively and negatively: positively, in the hierarchical organization of harmonic relations that tonal syntax afforded; negatively, in the successive efforts composers had made since the beginning of the twentieth century to impose on different musical parameters structures whose intelligibility for listeners was doubtful at best. In a veiled jab at serialism and its sequels, Saariaho and McAdams observed that “structuring itself is not enough if it cannot be apprehended or decoded for various reasons, including biological or psychological limits on the processing of […] acoustic structures.”32 To avoid this pitfall and ensure that compositional structure translated into perceptible form, it was necessary that musical features satisfy a number of requirements. Saariaho and McAdams identify six: – parameters must be capable of supporting segmentation into discrete, perceptually distinct units; – units must exhibit functional relations with respect to one another; – functional relations need to possess varying degrees of strength; – listeners must be capable of attending to different levels of structure (units, their relations, and the combination of these relations); – relations should preserve a degree of invariance across transformations; and – both units and functional relations alike need to “either reflect the existing structure of the mind and world or be susceptible to learning by listeners.”33 This last point is crucial, insofar as it furnished the objective ground upon which a form’s intelligibility – or at least the claim to intelligibility – rested. Yet this stipulation also proved problematic, not least because it mandated a curtailment of composers’ freedom of action. More crucially, such curtailment also ran counter to the modernist value system whose power, though diminished by the critiques leveled by spectralism, was still considerable in France, nowhere more so than at IRCAM. As was the case with Saariaho’s invocations of tonality elsewhere, the demand for psychoacoustically validated criteria of intelligibility was a source of evident discomfort: “This argument is a bit dangerous in the sense that it easily becomes cannon fodder for conservative attitudes that would use it to debase works they are not able to understand.”34 To ward off this danger, McAdams and Saariaho staked out a middle position, one that aimed at transcending the limitations of both a blinkered 32 33 34

McAdams and Saariaho, “Qualities and Functions,” 367. Ibid., 367–68. Ibid., 368.

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traditionalism and an equally blinkered modernism. Hence the rhetorical question they posed: “isn’t art both a fight against conservatism and an exploration of the limits of the possible?”35 Having delineated the conditions that a parameter must meet if it is to act as a bearer of form, Saariaho and McAdams then proceed to marshal evidence in support of timbre’s aptness for fulfilling this musical function. But instead of demonstrating timbre’s capacity to satisfy these conditions in theory, they argue that it has already done so in practice – just not in the realm of musical practice. It has been poetry, not music, that has explored timbre’s formative potential most thoroughly. Focusing on poetic speech, the authors observe that its constituent materials – vowels and consonants – have timbral characteristics that align with features of musical timbre. Vowels are characterized by their “spectral form or envelope,” a fact that connects them to the quality of “spectral color” in musical timbre (i. e., the frequency structure of spectra). Consonants, by contrast, are characterized by the noises generated by changes in the vocal tract and the disruption of the flow of air as it passes over the tongue, teeth, and lips; in this regard, they resemble the noise elements that are the defining feature of certain instrumental groups (percussion in particular), but that are present in all sounds produced by mechanical instruments, as attack and decay transients. It is through the combination of the timbral resources provided by vowels and consonants that sonorous effects of poetic language – alliteration, assonance, and rhyme – are created. It is the manipulation of timbre that differentiates the heightened language of poetry from the mundane language of prose. That Saariaho and McAdams looked to poetry as a precedent for timbre composition was not surprising, considering its centrality in Saariaho’s compositional practice. More than mere texts whose value is exhausted in being set to music, poems often function in Saariaho’s œuvre as a kind of musical material, obscuring the distinction between verbal utterance and musical sound. In Laconisme de l’aile (1982), for instance, an excerpt from Saint-Jean Perse’s collection Oiseaux is intoned by the flautist before dissolving into the timbre of the flute, while in Lichtbogen phonemes drawn from Henry Vaughn’s poem “The World” are recited (once again by a flautist), their semantic dimension suppressed to better emphasize their sonorous qualities. Aesthetic considerations aside, there were also pragmatic reasons why Saariaho and McAdams cited poetic speech to support their work on timbre. For one thing, similarities in how the space of phonemes and the space of musical timbres were organized suggested that the same mechanisms underlay both – which lent credence to the hypothesis that the form-bearing functions that phonemes assume in poetry might likewise be assumed by timbre. More significantly, the status of harmonic sounds (vowels) vis-à-vis inharmonic sounds (consonants) was reversed in poetic speech as compared to music. While few rules governed the succession of vowel sounds in speech (at least in Indo-European languages), the succession of consonants was tightly regulated: “The constraints on combination of consonants into complexes appear much more extensive: one never finds the com35

Ibid.

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bination /lb/ at the beginning of a syllable in English, for example, while /bl/ is not uncommon.”36 This differs from Western music, where it is the succession of harmonic, pitched sounds that has historically been subject to strict regulation. The existence of rudimentary rules governing the ordering of noise elements in language suggested that the same might be possible for music: “In the construction of a language of timbres the rules of phonetic combination, and particularly the constraints on these, could serve as a level of organization preceding a timbral syntax.”37 Timbral syntax was not only possible, but actually existed already: it was just a matter of applying to music the lessons of poetry. Saariaho’s collaboration with McAdams thus provided a form of validation for her compositional activity. Irrespective of how her music might be judged aesthetically, the research she conducted with McAdams suggested that it at least passed the muster of scientific judgment, having been realized in accordance with verifiable facts of cognition and psychoacoustics. Regardless of how the musical processes Saariaho fashioned were actually perceived by listeners – or if they were even perceived at all – these processes met the standard of perceptibility. Furthermore, the authority of science that gave credibility to her exploration of timbral hierarchies also had the effect of rehabilitating tonality, shielding it from the condemnations to which it had long been subject within the aesthetic ideology of modernism. Tonality was to be valued not as a token of musical tradition, nor as a fact of nature, but as a vehicle of the kind of hierarchical organization that cognitive science claimed was the sine qua non of musical communication. One sees adumbrated here an argument that would be further fleshed out in Saariaho’s later essay, “Timbre and Harmony,” according to which tonality was not to be treated as the model of musical hierarchy so much as but one of its many possible expressions. Being equipped with knowledge of the perceptual and cognitive principles subtending such hierarchies not only meant that composers could extend them to different domains (like timbre). It also meant that tonality could henceforth be encompassed within the more general language of contemporary composition – a language whose generality was underwritten by the putatively universal laws of human perception it mobilized. Hierarchy and Centricity in Lichtbogen Composed in the interval between the publication of her research with McAdams in 1985 and her essay “Timbre and Harmony” in 1987, Lichtbogen (1985–86) brought to fruition many of the ideas regarding timbre, harmony, and their mutual entanglement that had preoccupied Saariaho since her arrival in France. The composition may also be heard as exhibiting the kind of ambivalence toward tonality that Saariaho had voiced in her writings. On the one hand, tonal materials and processes can be seen to haunt the spectral models and transformations Saariaho deploys in the 36 37

Ibid., 370. Ibid.

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work. On the other hand, their translation into a markedly different musical vocabulary and aesthetic sensibility defamiliarizes such oblique tonal references to the point they are scarcely discernible. Written for nine instruments plus live electronics, Lichtbogen was inspired by the aurora borealis phenomenon Saariaho witnessed during a trip to Lapland in December 1984 – whence the “arcs of light” referred to in the work’s title.38 Saariaho’s experience of “silent lights invading the black immensity of night” (as she described it in a program note to the work) finds a number of parallels in the composition. These range from the nebulous fields of sound that expand and contract over the course of the piece, to the phonemes extracted from Henry Vaughn’s poem “The World” that the flautist speaks into the instrument during the closing section of the work (“I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light”).39 But even though such sonic and poetic figurations of sublime immensity are crucial to the work’s rhetoric, their effect depends equally upon their juxtaposition with that which they dwarf (the human observer in the case of the aurora borealis) or encompass (the timbral and textural transformations that animate the musical surface in the case of Lichtbogen). The idea that in Lichtbogen “the extremely small is intimately related to the infinitely large” (as Anne Sivuoja-Gunaratnam puts it) plays out across a number of dimensions of the work, not least of which is the relation between timbre and harmony that so concerned Saariaho and other post-spectral composers.40 Embodying Saariaho’s desire to develop hierarchical forms capable of supporting varying degrees of stability and instability, the work unfolds along two interconnected planes. At the local level, musical progression is largely a function of timbral transformation. Movement within a timbral space encompassing relative noise, purity, or distance creates local cycles of tension and release, with noisy timbres playing the part of dissonance, “pure” sounds that of consonance, and “distant” ones – created either through the use of extended instrumental techniques or electronic reverberation – mediating between these two poles. Doubling this “microphonic” layer of timbral organization is the “macrophonic” one of harmonic organization. Like other spectral and post-spectral composers, Saariaho ensures a certain level of interdependence between these two planes by using spectral analyses to derive much of the work’s harmonic material. Specifically, analyses of a cello F subjected to various kinds of timbral transitions furnished harmonic structures exhibiting analogous degrees of tension and repose. Harmony is thus conceived as spectral structure dilated in time and diffracted into its constituent elements, just as timbre is conceived as harmonic structure contracted in time and condensed into a single unified percept.41

38 39 40 41

For a consideration of the title’s polysemy, see Howell, After Sibelius, 210. The phonemes are drawn from a French translation of the poem. Anne Sivuoja-Gunaratnam, “Miniatures and Tensions: Phenomenological Reverberations in and around Kaija Saariaho’s Lichtbogen (1985–6),” Intersections 25 (2005): 52–53. Vesa Kankaanpää, “Dichotomies, Relationships: Timbre and Harmony in Revolution,” in Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues, ed. Tim Howell, Jon Hargreaves, and Michael Rofe, (London: Ashgate, 2011), 166–67.

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Perhaps the most obvious analogue to tonal processes in Lichtbogen is Saariaho’s use of timbral-harmonic transformations to regulate the degree of acoustic dissonance and consonance in the work (the notion of “acoustic consonance” and “acoustic dissonance” is to be understood here in the broadest possible sense, as encompassing both micro- and macro-levels of frequency structure). Doing so allows Saariaho to foster sensations of tension and resolution reminiscent of tonal practice. Nowhere is this more obvious than at the opening of the piece, where the ensemble sustains a single pitch (F4) for forty-two measures, creating a Klangfarbenmelodie that hearkens back to works like the opening of Ligeti’s Cello Concerto, first movement. This reduction of activity in the pitch domain redirects attention to other parameters, which are charged with sustaining the listener’s interest. Saariaho makes use of a wide variety of timbral transformations to create a sense of activity and motion in this otherwise harmonically and melodically static passage. Shifts in bow position (from sul tasto to normal to sul ponticello), application or cessation of tremolo, transitions back and forth between senza to full vibrato, the introduction of microtonal fluctuations toward the end of the section – such techniques used in different combinations produce varied degrees of stability and instability, ranging from the placid acoustic consonances that begin and end the section to the more agitated and acoustically dissonant timbres that characterize its interior. Hence the moments of repose framing the section result from the use of sonorities whose dissonant upper partials have been suppressed: in mm. 2–3 this is achieved by having the strings play sul tasto and without vibrato, while in mm. 40–41 it results from a lone double bass harmonic sustaining F4 after the other instruments in the ensemble have dropped out (see Examples 1a and 1b). By contrast, the section’s dramatic highpoints feature an array of devices that intensify acoustic dissonance. In mm. 29–31, for instance, strings move rapidly back and forth between sul ponticello and sul tasto playing, while flute and strings slide away from F up a quarter-tone, destabilizing the overall sonority. Trills and tremolos increase the graininess of the ensemble’s composite timbre throughout this passage, as do the struck and plucked notes strewn across the vibraphone, piano, harp, and string parts (see Example 2). More notable than such extremes are the gradations that fall somewhere in between. The overall trajectory of the opening section may be straightforward, featuring an intensification of acoustic dissonance that abruptly resolves in m. 40. But the music’s moment-to-moment unfolding is far more complex. That the overall level of acoustic consonance or dissonance at any moment results from an aggregation of variables (bow pressure, bow position, level of rhythmic agitation) is what enables local, nonlinear processes – accelerations, decelerations, deviations, and reversals of direction – to complicate what is at a global level a straightforward linear progression. The same goes for the second section of Lichtbogen (mm. 42–70), which also oscillates between poles of acoustic consonance and dissonance. In contrast to the opening, however, this polarity is realized at the microtonal and harmonic (or “macrotonal”) levels, in addition to the timbral level. The interaction of processes unfolding across these three dimensions allow complex, nested hierarchies to emerge. Moments of microtonal or timbral consonance might be embedded in pas-

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Example 1a: Lichtbogen, mm. 1–4

Example 1b: Lichtbogen, mm. 39–41

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Example 2: Lichtbogen, mm. 29–31

sages characterized by macrotonal dissonance, just as stretches of macrotonal consonance might accommodate at a more local level microtonal or timbral dissonances. Another distinctive feature of the second section is the musical texture’s bifurcation into two distinct layers. One of these consists of the piano, glockenspiel, and harp, the other of strings and flute. The first of these instrumental groups presents a series of harmonic fields over the course of the section, exhibiting varying degrees of harmonicity and inharmonicity. The second group (strings and flute) appears to be charged with catalyzing the transition between successive harmonic fields. Such

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Example 3: Lichtbogen, mm. 49–50

moments of transition are marked by a gradual rise and fall in acoustic dissonance, which generates the sensation that each new harmonic field represents a local “resolution” of the dissonance leading into it (see Example 3). Timbral distortions generated by extended instrumental techniques are partly responsible for this effect. At first used sparingly, then with greater frequency as the section progresses, changing bow pressure in the string parts creates a crescendo effect, peaking at a state of relative acoustic dissonance (signaled by a harsh, scratchy sound), which then di-

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minishes to relative acoustic consonance. By reserving such moments of timbral distortion for moments of harmonic transition, Saariaho is able to mimic the kind of dissonance treatment familiar from common practice tonal music: just as tonal dissonance demands resolution, so too does timbral dissonance. Also contributing to the sense that each harmonic field represents a resolution of acoustic dissonance are microtonal distortions, produced through the use of real-time digital processing. Captured by microphones, the flute and string signals are passed through a harmonizer, whose settings are programmed to shift frequencies by +40/-35 cents. By gradually increasing and decreasing the level of the harmonizer effect at points of transition between chords, Saariaho is able to create a momentary microtonal clouding to bridge the transition between harmonic fields; this can be seen in Example 3, notated as the cross-hatched crescendo/decrescendo figure marked H at the bottom of the system. Notably, the intensity of this effect changes over the course of the section as a whole, with the peak value of the harmonizer effect moving from 25% of its maximum setting in mm. 47–57, to 50% in mm. 60–64, to 75% in m. 69. As with excessive bow pressure, the emergence and resolution of microtonal distortions parody traditional forms of dissonance treatment.

Example 4: Expanding harmonic cluster, mm. 42–67

At a still broader level, flute and string parts unfold a harmonic process that parallels these lower-level processes of timbral and microtonal transformation. While piano, glockenspiel and harp are busy articulating a series of distinctive harmonic objects, the flute and strings expand outward from the F4 held over from the opening section to form a cluster of ever-increasing size (see Example 4). It is as if the harmonizer effect were being magnified: even as individual harmonies are detuned at a microtonal level, there is a larger scale “detuning” of the nodal F4 at the “macrotonal” level of equally-tempered intervals. The culmination of this harmonic process coincides with the moment when the harmonizer effect attains its maximal level (75%) and the employment of increased bow pressure is at its peak. As a consequence, the harmonic noise of the E4-A 4 cluster reinforces – and is itself reinforced by – the local effects of microtonal and timbral distortion. As is the case throughout Lichtbogen, the combination of different forms of acoustic consonance and dissonance enables Saariaho to navigate between fine-grained degrees of stability and instability. While the climactic passage of mm. 67–72 features the three different levels acting in concert, elsewhere they act at cross-purposes (as when lower-order timbral and microtonal dissonances are offset by higher-order harmonic consonances and vice versa). While each level taken in isolation only allows for a binary relation to emerge, a pendulum-like movement between consonance and dissonance, their combination allows a more nuanced sense of progression to emerge.

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Of course, the regulation of consonance and dissonance is only one feature habitually associated with tonality. Another of equal if not greater importance is centricity. Though weak, the traces of centricity that Lichtbogen does harbor are significant. Most obviously, the F that serves as the basis of the opening Klangfarbenmelodie enjoys a certain primacy, even if only on account of the brute fact of its continuous presence through m. 42. Subsequent developments reinforce the hierarchy of pitch relations the F helps establish. The pitch is sustained into the second section of the work, though its presence is progressively obscured by the cluster that expands outward from it in mm. 57–70. The significance of F is reaffirmed later in the work, at what may be justifiably called the structural fulcrum of Lichtbogen. Transferred from a middle register to a higher one (from F4 to F6), the pitch-class only gradually regains the salience it possessed at the outset of the work: first as part of an ascending figure in piccolo, glockenspiel and piano in m. 240, then as a trill in the piccolo in mm. 242–44, before being articulated by a series of uneven quintuplet attacks distributed across the piccolo, crotales, piano, harp, viola, and cello in mm. 244–46. Coinciding with the passage from rhythmic irregularity to regularity in m. 246 (rehearsal V) is a transformation in the quality and significance of the pitch. At the very moment the rhythm stabilizes, a B1 enters in the double bass. The effect is to divest F of its claim to centricity, a status now transferred to the low B. The fleeting D harmonics that enter beginning in m. 249 only reinforce the B’s primacy. Construed spectrally, the F6 may be heard as an upper partial of the B1’s fundamental. Construed tonally, it may be heard locally as the fifth of a B major triad, and globally as the dominant to the B’s tonic (from the latter perspective, the opening section would be reinterpreted as a large-scale tonal anacrusis). These hearings are not mutually exclusive: the moment affords both interpretations, much in the same way that Lichtbogen can be heard as an exemplar of the post-spectral current as well as the broader Western art music tradition of which it equally partakes. Yet no sooner does this double-coded allusion to tonal and spectral practices materialize than Saariaho destabilizes it. The sonority’s promise of tonal repose is rescinded by the various forms of timbral and microtonal distortion its constituent pitches undergo. In mm. 246–47 the harmonizer recommences its crescendo-decrescendo pattern of microtonal fluctuation, while the use of extreme bow pressure returns in the cello part in m. 247, before spreading to the other string parts (see Example 5). Throughout the entire forty-odd measures that the harmony on B is sustained (mm. 246–88), there is scarcely a moment when its components do not undergo some kind of microtonal or timbral transformation. Whatever sense of tonal resolution the attainment of macroharmonic consonance conveys is undercut by the microharmonic dissonance that pervades this passage. * * * Expressed discursively in texts like “Timbre and Harmony,” Saariaho’s ambivalence toward tonality is expressed compositionally in Lichtbogen. On the one hand, the realization of the B tonic-cum-fundamental in mm. 246–88 evinces the sort of

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Example 5: Lichtbogen, mm. 246–47

complex nesting of acoustic consonance and dissonance that Saariaho valorized, as local timbral and microtonal dissonances participate in the articulation of a larger-scale harmonic consonance. On the other hand, the sonic and functional resemblance the sonority bears to the fundamental unit of tonal music, the triad, is obscured by the local dissonances that animate it. One could easily interpret this compositional gesture as yet another instance of the sort of institutionalized apostasy that has historically typified modernism’s relation to tonality. In such a reading, tokens of tonal practices would be invoked for the sole purpose of their symbolic disfigurement. But this is not the only reading the passage affords. One could just as easily hear it as marking an opening, however tentatively and warily it is broached by Saariaho. Understood in these terms, what appears in Lichtbogen as a backward glance to the kinds of sounds and hierarchical structures that characterize tonality might also be understood as looking forward: not only to later works of hers, like

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Du cristal/ … à la fumée (1989–90), Amers (1992), Cendres (1998) and L’Amour de loin (2000), all of which evince greater assurance and less anxiety in their treatment of consonant sonorities, but to the broader trend since the 1990s in which composers like Marc-André Dalbavie and Magnus Lindberg have, along with Saariaho, increasingly reconciled tonal expression with post-spectral technique.42 Bibliography Barrière, Jean-Baptiste. “Écriture et modèles: remarques croisées sur séries et spectres.” Entretemps 8 (September 1989): 25–45. Born, Georgina. Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Avantgarde. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Calico, Joy. “Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin: Modernist Opera in the Twenty-First Century.” In Modernism and Opera, edited by Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith, 341–60. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Drott, Eric. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. ––. “Spectralism, Politics and the Post-Industrial Imagination.” In The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music, edited by Björn Heile, 39–60. London: Ashgate, 2009. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, translated by Shaun Whiteside, 201–18. London: Penguin, 2005. Goldman, Jonathan. “Boulez and the Spectralists between Descartes and Rameau: Who Said What about Whom?” Perspectives of New Music 48 (2010): 208–32. Grisey, Gérard. “La Musique: le devenir des sons.” 1982. In Écrits, ou l’invention de la musique spectrale, edited by Guy Lelong, 45–56. Paris: Editions MF, 2008. ––. “Tempus ex Machina: Réflexions d’un compositeur sur le temps musical.” 1980. In Écrits, ou l’invention de la musique spectrale, edited by Guy Lelong, 57–88. Paris: Editions MF, 2008. Howell, Tim. After Sibelius: Studies in Finnish Music. London: Ashgate, 2006. Hurel, Philippe. “Le phénomène sonore, un modèle pour la composition.” In Le timbre, métaphore pour la composition, edited by Jean-Baptiste Barrière, 261–71. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991. Jameux, Dominique. Pierre Boulez. Translated by Susan Bradshaw. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Kankaanpää, Vesa. “Dichotomies, Relationships: Timbre and Harmony in Revolution.” In Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues, edited by Tim Howell, Jon Hargreaves, and Michael Rofe, 159–76. London: Ashgate, 2011. McAdams, Stephen and Kaija Saariaho. “Qualities and Functions of Musical Timbre.” In Proceedings of the 1985 International Computer Music Conference, 367–74. San Francisco: Computer Music Association, 1985. Moisala, Pirkko. Kaija Saariaho. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Murail, Tristan. “La révolution des sons complexes.” 1980. In Modèles & artifices, edited by Pierre Michel, 11–29. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2004.

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For an illuminating account of L’Amour de loin that addresses the quasi-tonal harmonic language and modal allusions that traverse the work, see Joy Calico, “Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin: Modernist Opera in the Twenty-First Century,” in Modernism and Opera, ed. Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 341–60.

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Rodet, Xavier, Yves Potard, and Jean-Baptiste Barrière. “The CHANT Project: From the Synthesis of the Singing Voice to Synthesis in General.” Computer Music Journal 8 (1984): 15–31. Saariaho, Kaija. “Une œuvre en chantier (Verblendungen).” In Le passage des frontières: Écrits sur la musique, edited by Stéphane Roth, 29–32. Paris: Editions MF, 2013. ––. “Using the Computer in a Search for New Aspects of Timbre Organisation and Composition.” In Proceedings of the 1983 International Computer Music Conference, 269–74. San Francisco, CA: Computer Music Association, 1983. ––. “Timbre and Harmony: Interpolations of Timbral Structures.” Contemporary Music Review 2 (1987): 93–133. Sivuoja-Gunaratnam, Anne. “Miniatures and Tensions: Phenomenological Reverberations in and around Kaija Saariaho’s Lichtbogen (1985–6).” Intersections 25 (2005): 44–66. Stoianova, Ivanka. “Klangforschung aktuell: Wege der ‘recherche musicale’ heute.” In Lust am Komponieren, edited by Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, 114–28. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1985.

Projected Resonance: Tonal Dimensions of Microtonal Composition in Music by Georg Friedrich Haas Simone Heilgendorff I This chapter concerns the musical output and thinking of the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas, a figure whose music did not achieve widespread recognition until he was in his forties, although he is among the most widely profiled and best known composers of contemporary music these days. In the following essay, I shall agree with him that the performance of music is a crucial element for understanding musical compositions, especially in the area of microtonal music. Microtonal performance relies on the auditory and/or visual experiences of performers and their audience; the written musical score, in this setting, offers little more than a vision of what will happen in time and space during a performance, but remains a necessary aid for those who bring the notated material to life. Haas has been very active lately, not only as a composer, but increasingly as a university teacher and a participant in public interviews and round tables. In September 2013 he accepted a position as Professor of Composition at Columbia University in New York City (succeeding Tristan Murail). Among Haas’s published texts are two of a similar scheme, organized in groups of five and six numbered theses respectively, in which he enumerates his most important thoughts on microtonal composition and on current music theory. A third more historically-oriented text should also be mentioned.1 A selection of Haas’s theses, derived from those texts, will serve as my reference for initial observations on the topic of resonance in his musical output. In the second phase of this discussion, I will develop a set of “tools” for understanding the typical and essential principles or elements of Haas’s compositional style. Thirdly, I will take a closer look at two pieces by Haas: his Second String Quartet (1998, 20’), the beginning of which allows us to perceive the layering of the overtone spectrum in an almost textbook fashion; and in vain for large ensemble of twenty-four instruments (2000, approximately 70’). The term “tonality” in this context refers to a rather general understanding of sound organized in pitches, removed from nineteenth-century definitions, including 1

Georg Friedrich Haas, “Fünf Thesen zur Mikrotonalität,” Positionen: Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 48 (Aug. 2001): 42–44; “Grundlagen für eine neue Musiktheorie: Sechs Thesen,” Dissonance/Dissonanz 117 (March 2012): 15–21; “Mikrotonalitäten,” Musik der anderen Tradition: Mikrotonale Tonwelten (Musik-Konzepte Sonderband), ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2003), 59–65; first published in Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 54, no. 6 (June 1999): 9–15.

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those of Hugo Riemann, or those strongly connecting with harmonic functions of sound. Tonality in the context of Haas’s usage of the overtone spectrum nonetheless keeps track of a “harmonic” foundation on a low pitch, which serves as a reference for the spectrum of partials above. I do not know of any written statement by Haas in which he uses the term microtonality to refer to tonality in his work, though I expect he would agree with my usage of the term “tonality”: microtonality, in essence, refers to a conceptual fusion – a composite of “tonality” and “micro” scale – and in this sense represents a specific understanding and concept of tonality. II Three central theses by Haas on the topic of microtonality and on the scope of music theory today are of special importance for my observations on his music. Thesis No. 1: “The object of research in music theory is not notation any more, but sound as an immediately perceivable acoustic phenomenon.”2 This first thesis refers to Haas’s belief that music today is much more than what is written down in notation. To a greater extent than previously, music needs a composer’s vision of sound in time and space. Such a vision engages the notion of musical performance as an integral part of a new composition. Haas refers to Nono’s string quartet Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima, which he finds touching and convincing only because Nono had a very specific vision of what the music is about in the sense of its performance. Haas mentions that a traditional structural analysis would not find what really drives the piece. He repeatedly refers to human perception and human needs for certain sound procedures, which we need to search for beyond the score. In 1995 Haas publicly introduced the term “projection” for the description of such phenomena.3 He considers the process of composition as one of developing images (in German, he uses the term Abbildung), as settings for sound spectra, with all the advantages and disadvantages of such actions. The next thesis comes as no surprise: Thesis No. 2: “The opposition between dissonance and consonance is a historical phenomenon of a certain segment of the European musical tradition. These terms are to be replaced by a new concept for the naming of sound categories.”4 2 3

4

“These Nr. 1: Das Objekt der musiktheoretischen Untersuchungen ist nicht mehr die Notation, sondern der Klang als unmittelbar wahrnehmbares akustisches Phänomen.” Haas, “Grundlagen,” 16. Georg Friedrich Haas, “Die Abbildung akustischer Phänomene als Material kompositorischer Gestaltung,” ton 96, no. 4/97, no. 1 (1996/97 double issue): 24–27 (26). Haas (on p. 27) considers “projection” to be a rather old principle in the history of music, even though his name for it is new. “These Nr. 5: Der Gegensatz von Dissonanz und Konsonanz ist ein historisches Phänomen

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Here Haas argues that certain music of a specific time in Europe, with its dialectic tension between consonance and dissonance, has been superseded by a usage of sound with a large variety of references. They range from noise and microtonal settings to chords made of fourths or harmonics of the minor and major scales. He also states that human beings need the grating quality of sound, the sense of conflict and narrowness that specific mixtures of pitches can cause. To experience such sounds happening in one of Haas’s “projections,” as he calls the compositional processes and resulting performances of his scores, may lead as a reference to the third and last thesis chosen for my observations, which is No. 5 in Haas’s text: Thesis No. 3: “Microtonal music requires its own shaping of time.”5 Haas considers a sensitive handling of time issues essential for music in general, but for microtonal music, form, as it results from processes in time, needs to be derived from the intervals and the sequences of intervals chosen. Narrow intervals need more time to unfold, their beats need time to reach the perception of both the audience and the musicians performing. Musical intervals tend to be “blurred” (to introduce another term from the visual sphere). The faster the musical motion, especially of narrow intervals, the more blurred they appear to perception. One interval illustrating this as such is the 3/4-tone second, called the neutral second, often found in Haas’s music. Also, the construction of melodic (or vertical) lines goes far beyond conventional intervallic usages. They eventually line up to create vertical sequences one might call, or perceive as, melodic, but the intervals are not separable from their singular character or from their embedding in the microtonal core material. The vertical setting is dominant, and the horizontal line often appears as an accidental result. The only exception to this request for sufficient time Haas can see is when a composer seeks to present the “pure joy of discoloration [Verfärben]” – as, for example, in Charles Ives’s Quarter-Tone Pieces for two pianos tuned a quarter tone apart.6

5 6

eines bestimmten Abschnittes der europäischen Musiktradition. Diese Begriffe sind durch ein neues Konzept der Benennung von Klangkategorien zu ersetzen.” Haas, “Grundlagen,” 19. “These 5: Mikrotonale Musik erfordert eine ihr eigene Gestaltung der Zeit.” Haas, “Fünf Thesen zur Mikrotonalität,” 44. “Je kleiner die komponierten Intervallunterschiede werden, desto mehr Zeit benötigt die menschliche Wahrnehmung, um sie zu unterscheiden. Während zum Beispiel innerhalb von Sekundenbruchteilen der Zweiklang einer kleinen Sekunde von dem einer großen auseinandergehalten werden kann, dauert es wesentlich länger, um langsame Schwebungen überhaupt zu bemerken. Ein aus Proportionen der Partialtonreihe gebildeter Akkord benötigt viel Zeit, um ‘einrasten’ zu können (sowohl bei den InterpretInnen als auch bei den HörerInnen). Rasche Bewegungen innerhalb des Vierteltonsystems (oder noch engmaschigeren Systemen) bewirken dagegen eine Eintrübung, eine Neutralisierung der Tonhöhendifferenzen. “Die Veränderungen der Zeitgestaltung im rhythmischen Bereich verursachen Veränderungen in formaler Hinsicht. Generell läßt sich sagen, daß mikrotonale Musik mehr Raum, mehr Zeit, mehr Entfaltungsmöglichkeiten benötigt – es sei denn es wird etwas völlig anderes angestrebt: die Freude am Verfärben, wie sie etwa Charles Ives in seinen Three Quarter-Tone Pieces vorgeführt hat.” Haas, “Fünf Thesen,” 44.

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It can be concluded that Haas wants to cultivate not only new modes of musical composition, but even more he wants to encourage new ways of listening and multisensory perception. For his compositional processes Haas takes into account the conscious use of his sound material as “projected” (as he puts it) into a new setting specific for the new work. Thus the musical notation depends throughout on the envisioned prospective space for this work (both symbolically and for the composed sound and its performance). The experience of sound, including its preparation for live performance by the musicians, is already part of Haas’s decision-making process during the act of composing and it remains an ever-present feature of his compositions. The resonant quality of sound produced during performances thus qualifies as a substantial aspect for the perception of Haas’s music. One can get addicted to the somehow “clean” and sonorous quality of the overtone seventh, the just fifth, and the narrow major thirds, and also to the “snapping in” of several sound combinations he uses. And one can almost endlessly linger in passages of blurred sound mixtures, to be relieved by the arrival of a tonally clear sonority in a following section. The beauty of this is less an explicitly narrative progression than the perception of a certain condition going on for a while before overlapping with and being taken over by another condition. It is similarly no surprise that none of Haas’s operas follows a simple plot, but are rather based on principles of associative montage. And he often supervises the lighting for performances, partly for the simple reason that it is usually there anyway, but also to orient perception toward sound. In some of his compositions, the absence of light in complete darkness (as in his Third String Quartet, In iij. Noct.), moments of darkness (in the ensemble piece in vain), or colors of light (as in the opera Nacht) are important elements of the musical performance. In the following two tables, I present several observations about Haas’s music: the resulting lists of features qualify as elements or even principles of his personal style based on microtonal material. These compositional “tools” connect with the three theses already discussed, and may also be considered key aspects of the great success of Haas’s music. The tools can be divided into two larger groupings, the first mainly concerned with pitch techniques, the second primarily dealing with Haas’s shaping of time and form. Tools (I): Pitch Techniques 1) Falling cascades: fast sequences of several different scales, for example of microtonal (often not exactly defined) scales and spectral descent, but also series of chromatic intervals, such as minor and major seconds or tritones (for example, in vain, beginning)7

7

Lisa Farthofer relates such materials to the psychoacoustic “Shepard tones” effect of an endlessly falling or rising pitch succession; Farthofer, Georg Friedrich Haas:“Im Klang denken” (Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2007), 85.

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2) Slow (sometimes extremely slow) motion of intervals (to leave temporal space for the auditory experience)8 3) Clearly audible and perceptible settings of intervals: (a) of overtone spectra; (b) of “grating” intervals like those with very narrow spacing (for example, the “neutral” or 3/4 second, between major and minor second), tritones, or sevenths; (c) of traditionally “perfect” diatonic intervals like the octave, fifth, fourth, and (in rare cases) thirds 4) Repetitions of pitches with changing meter, with strict coordination of a complete ensemble or divided into groups, also combined with glissando effects 5) Interval systems: mixtures (consecutive and simultaneous) of interval systems in one piece, like the overtone spectrum, dissonant intervals of the chromatic scale or fifth and octaves – with a preference for twelfth-tone (8 1/3 cent) intervals as a basis for divisions, as in Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s “cycles imparfaits”;9 layers of almost-pure octaves 6) Specific, practical microtonal notation: either with specified accidentals or with annotations on the position of pitches counted as partials in the overtone spectrum used at that specific moment (as fundamental “tonal” references). Haas spoke publicly about this “ruler” [Raster] in February 1995 in terms of the “projection” of interval systems he needs to adapt for the musicians.10 He talks about his awareness of human limits to perfectly and reliably bring very small intervallic deviations into sound and takes into account the possibility of small differences in the sound production of pitches on acoustic instruments. He wants to make sure that they can most easily bring the demanding system of pitches for his music to life in sound. He considers this technique as highly important for his work and refers to earlier similar approaches, such as Wyschnegradsky’s “cycles imparfaits.”11 Tools (II): Redefinitions of Time and Form 1) Changes of dynamics: (a) subtle, slow motion; but also (b) abrupt accented phrase openings as fast sequences among the instruments, often combined with a fast decrescendo after each impulse 2) Changes of meter: (a) in slow motion; (b) through abrupt changes (rare); (c) gradual accelerations and ritardandos; (d) fermatas 3) Thinking in sound (“im Klang denken”):12 The form of pieces follows the suggestive logic of the layering of intervals, sound qualities and spectra of certain instruments “projected” into the composition in question. Those materials 8 9 10 11 12

This phenomenon has been called “Superzeitlupe” by Farthofer, Georg Friedrich Haas, 85. Haas, “Die Abbildung akustischer Phänomene,” 26. Ibid. Ibid. This statement was used by Haas in an interview conducted by Farthofer on 29 March 2005 in Graz. Excerpts are published in Farthofer, Georg Friedrich Haas, 128–37.

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(“tools”) eventually suggest certain visions of time and sound, concrete sequences, and developments of the material. 4) Light and (complete) darkness, varying lighting colors during performance Rather than employing pitch class sets, rationally constructed interval sequences, and so on, Haas relies on a vision of sound and its perception for the development of a new composition. That vision includes excellent musicians’ experience of sound production on their instruments and the “natural” variance of sounds: as in, for example, the somewhat drifting production of harmonics on string instruments.13 It is obvious that such “tools” are directly connected with Haas’s theses on the revisionary actions music and music theory need today (its performed/live experience), and what microtonality as a timely basic principle or pool for appropriate solutions requires for its adequate perception, in the score, on the instruments, and during performances. I might also mention some approaches conventionally used in compositions of the European tradition which Haas has so far eschewed or even actively avoided. These include conventional forms like the cyclic sonata – with the notable exception of his orchestration and completion of Schubert’s “Reliquie” Sonata, D.840 – and sonata-allegro form; the typical elements of traditional opera; genres like the “Lied” (with piano and with ensemble or orchestra), piano trio, or symphony; and conventional titles (“Allegro,” e. g.) for movements. Despite such conscious evasions, Haas does compose for conventional ensembles including orchestras, soloists plus orchestra, string quartets, and he composes operas. Also concerning the usage of the instruments or the voice in the narrower sense of playing technique, he does not generally employ “extended” techniques for the instruments; and he composes for the voice in a surprisingly conventional way, while broadening the frameworks for dynamic, timbre, and tempo developments. III I will now discuss some passages from the two compositions mentioned earlier – the Second String Quartet (1998) and in vain (2000) – in order to exemplify Haas’s use of some of the compositional tools just introduced, and their effects in performance situations or recordings. Haas’s Second String Quartet, commissioned and world premiered by the Hagen Quartet, can serve as a reference for most of the principals and tools mentioned above. Its beginning, at least until m. 45 – Example 1 shows mm. 1–8 – serves as an excellent example of “easy listening.” The main tempo for this single-movement piece – quarter note beats at MM=60, in 4/4 meter – represents a common choice in Haas’s music: to keep the temporal domain simple. A spectral chord slowly develops above the low C string of the cello. It is completed with the 13

Haas, “Die Abbildung,” 26. See also no. 6 in the “Tools (I)” list above.

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Example 1: Georg Friedrich Haas, Second String Quartet, beginning

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pure fifth in the viola (G) coming in on beat 2, followed by octaves (C4 and G4) in the second and first violin respectively, all this with organic moves from “arco ordinario” to “poco sul pont.” and back, underlined by a simultaneous crescendo and decrescendo. From a dynamically unspecified beginning (obviously soft, but how soft?) to forte on the fundamental sound in the cello on the second and eighth beat of the piece, the quasi-organic, successive but overlapping peak dynamic mezzo forte for the added sounds in the other three instruments somehow arises. Already at this beginning the sound production will be a bit unstable, a situation which Haas very likely calculated (tools II/3). The slight instability adds extra attraction to the experience of this passage. The viola and the first violin in mm. 5–8 perform “grating” double stops by developing from C into a double stop ideally spanning a 16-cent distance (that is, C4 plus the C 16 cents higher) and from G4 into the double stop of G4 plus a G 16 cents higher. The pitch doublings are always supported by a slow glissando over approximately three beats, up to the 16-cent peak of difference and three beats down again, with simultaneous crescendo and decrescendo. Then the seventh partial (minor seventh minus ca. 30 cents) repeatedly appears with the dynamic development as before but without glissando, first in the viola part (m. 8), later (starting in m. 12) complemented by the ninth and tenth partials of the overtone spectrum on C. It is especially this minor seventh that leads us back to thesis No. 2, on the redefinition of consonance and dissonance in contemporary music. Experiencing the sound of the Quartet’s beginning, this seventh partial hardly seems dissonant but is instead resonant, even consonant. Thus the dissonance of the minor seventh in the conventional diatonic harmonic system has been overcome by the natural position of this interval as part of the overtone spectrum. Slowly the spectrum unfolds over the whole quartet up to the 21st partial (as far as m. 45), supported by the same dynamic motions, and with the cellist playing two strings bowed from underneath (mm. 29–41) thus producing several double stops with extreme distances. Returning to conventional bowing from above, there follow (mm. 42–45) ascending cascades of natural harmonics on the cello’s open C string. Those higher partials – in reference to an even-tempered system – of course do not all appear as consonant, but musicians trained in the system of Western art music can become fluent with the intonation of the overtone spectrum through practice; performing a piece like this, overtone-derived intonation and (micro-)tonality becomes customary to them. This beginning also underlines the importance of an auditory experience of this kind of music, as opposed to a silent reading of the score with imagination of sound as the only reference. This follows Haas’s thesis that an “immediately perceivable acoustic phenomenon” replaces musical notation as a central concern for music theory.14 The opening (mm. 1–45) also allows very direct experience of a “clearly audible and perceptible setting of intervals” (tools I/3) via overtone spectra, and of grating sounds (m. 17 ff.). We can also explore two aspects of Haas’s practical microtonal notation (tools I/6): the marking of overtones according to their position in the spectrum (using a circled number on top of each note), 14

Haas, “Grundlagen,” 16.

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and his additional signature system for a scale in twelfth-tones (combining the usual chromatic flat, natural, and sharp symbols with arrows or minus signs). Next to sounds derived from the overtone spectrum, Haas presents passages derived from a small selection of major seventh intervals – a technique recalling Wyschnegradsky’s usage of this interval in layered textures – as well as passages centering on tritones, small seconds, and thirds. Since the latter are often used with small microtonal glissando movements, accented or smoothly moving (cf. tools II/1), and/or depend on some natural variance in sound production, the overriding impression is of a microtonal piece rooted in the overtone spectrum. Could one go as far as saying that the microtonal setting of this passage almost neutralizes the traditional character of some intervals? Among the work’s “non-spectral”15 passages, the microtonally moving tritones (mm. 157–71) followed by gradually moving small seconds (mm.172–77) deserve to be mentioned. While those two materials refer to the principle of “grating sounds” (tools I/3b), the “angelic” ending (mm. 227–44), a reference to Schubert,16 creates strongly consonant resonances. One third is layered in all four instruments, paired in double octaves, to be performed out of metered time (indicated by fermatas over two 4/4-bars for each chord), with slow crescendo and decrescendo from pp to f for each chord and vibrato (“non troppo”). This passage of “empty chords” [“leere Akkorde”]17 is another good example of material where Haas counts on the “natural variance” (tools II/3) of the sound production. With all four instruments in rather high registers and vibrato combined with strong crescendo and decrescendo, pitches will most likely be somewhat unstable in definition and slightly mobile during the progressive shifts of dynamic level: the sounds of this passage produce a shimmering impression unique within the piece. The non-spectral passages are also consistently focused around a single type of pitch-intervallic material, and only appear in simultaneous layerings of spectral and chromatic material for comparably short transitional segments (e. g. mm. 136–56). We can analyze the form of Haas’s Second String Quartet as through-composed, following a varied sequence of spectra and intervals and contrasting compositional “tools” within each passage (see Figure 1).

15

This term is somewhat problematic, because all sounds produced in this quartet have their spectrum because they result from instruments with their own characteristic timbres. Surely Haas is aware of this! Nonetheless the term “spectral” here refers only to microtonal passages using intervals from the overtone spectrum. 16 See Simone Heilgendorff, “Schubert-Reliquien: Beobachtungen zu seinem Einfluss in der neueren Kunstmusik.” Rückspiegel: Zeitgenössisches Komponieren im Dialog mit älterer Musik, ed. Christian Thorau, Julia Cloot, and Marion Saxer (Mainz: Schott, 2010), 205–22 (218–21). 17 Heilgendorff, “Schubert-Reliquien,” 221.

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Figure 1: Haas, Second String Quartet: Formal Scheme Part 1 (introductory, mm. 1–56): unfolding and development of the overtone spectrum on C Part 2 (mm. 57–136): major sevenths and small seconds developing with glissando and oscillating microtonally and in changes of sound color around A4, resting on an overtone chord over D2, moving on to activities around E4 Part 3 (mm. 137–212): tritones, small seconds, followed after m. 198 by a pp passage with overtone spectra changing bar by bar with overlapping triads: A major, E major, G minor, B minor, E  major, F minor, ending on the tritone A/D Part 4 (final part, mm. 213–59): slowly moving spectral chords, transferring to “angelic” chords, moving back to spectral chords on C2 for the ending

Complementing the examples from Haas’s Second String Quartet we find other elements from his set of tools in the composition in vain (2000) for a large group of twenty-four instrumentalists (divided strings, a set of wind players, two percussionists, accordion, harp, and piano). In addition to the wide variety of sound colors offered by the scoring, the mix of two different intervallic systems (tools I/5), and the notated adjustments of light and darkness in the performance space are relevant sources for the setup of this composition and its temporal shaping. Over a timespan of approximately seventy minutes a mix of sequences from the overtone spectrum and from scales – mainly made of minor and major seconds or fourths, fifths, and tritones – serves as the principal source of pitches. The contrasting usage of light and darkness (tools II/4) appears with two periods of darkness during the performance, each introduced and finished by a phase of dimming. Lighting directions are notated separately on top of the score. Light is optionally reduced (in the first passage) and entirely “off” (in the second): both passages coincide with slowly moving microtonal material based on the pitches from the overtone spectrum, performed from memory; during the second the performers are additionally supported by light signals. Those passages are written mainly in time span notation, while the remainder of the score is notated in conventional meter (4/4 bars at MM 60 at the opening). Later in the piece we find long passages of shifting meters, ending with a last accelerando (from 60 to 120 beats per minute, tool I/4). At the beginning of in vain, the falling cascades (tools I/1) – Haas’s main material – are to be performed at the very soft dynamic of ppp, dominated by scales of major or minor seconds and tritones, specifications that lend a volatile impression to the sounds in performance. The cascades make up almost all of the first six minutes of the piece, causing the impression of an endless rolling on, reminiscent of the Shepard-tones effect of such material. Then, starting in m. 70, the cascades transfer into the first phase of darkness, introducing extremely slowly-moving narrow intervals, while the stage lighting slowly shuts down; the musical material transforms itself into selected single pitches moving in darkness (mm. 74 and 75). This happens in accordance with Haas’s thesis that perception of microtonal processes needs time to unfold (tools I/2) – even more so in darkness.

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During the seemingly endless m. 76, divided into rehearsal letters, Haas uses graphic time frame notation for the entire passage with darkness. It starts with chords from the overtone spectrum, introduced by small glissando variations of the pitches, often doubled in octaves or double octaves between two instruments. The passage at first aesthetically resembles Giacinto Scelsi’s way of focusing on one or two pitches with narrow deviations through slow movement or vibrato. The slow motion is supported by slow crescendo and decrescendo of single instruments with a dynamic range from the very soft ppp – as the foundation and thus referring to the beginning of the piece – to a robust forte (tools II/1a). Then the overtone spectrum unfolds, at rehearsal E starting on B as the fundamental tone, including the seventh partial on B which is the A6 played by the second violinist (notation similar to the Second String Quartet: flat accidentals plus an arrow for the sixth tone lower and the circled number 7, referring to the seventh overtone of B). Returning to metered notation by m. 77, Haas requires that the light be slowly turned on again. There follows a metered passage (notated in 4/4 at MM 72) with static, sustained overtone chords, for which Haas also adds the implied but unsounded fundamental pitch in parentheses next to the position number of the partial for the musicians’ convenience. This material continues all the way to the second passage in required complete darkness. During the transcendental bars another of Haas’s tools has been used: strictly coordinated “repetition of pitches with changing meter” (tools I/4) are applied here and extend into the next dark passage. This starts in m. 507 with the lowering of brightness until complete darkness in m. 527. In terms of activities, this passage is much denser than the first one and requires certain short additional optical signals (“like light flashes” [Lichtblitze]) marked in the score to organize the actions.18 At R23 the lighting slowly comes back, accompanying spectral chords, until it is back to standard lighting in m. 530. The last part of in vain returns to falling cascades, mostly composed of minor and major seconds, but now starting very slowly and softly with an acceleration towards m. 629 and with dynamic motion, continuing with several such passages until the soft end of the piece. IV Haas’s compositional approaches to microtonality are supported by a set of references derived from rules offered by spectral settings of pitch, microtonal results of traditionally “dissonant” intervals like tritones and sevenths, and microtonal aspects of sound resulting from natural variances in the sound production of acoustic instruments (with string instruments, for example, these include dynamic fluctuations, bow speed, contact point on the string, among other factors). Microtonality has the potential to replace the conventional “tonality” identified in Western music 18 On the interplay of tempered and just intonation in mm. 515–29, see also Robert Hasegawa, “Clashing harmonic systems in Haas’s Blumenstück and in vain,” Music Theory Spectrum 37 (Fall 2015): 204–23, especially 220–21. (Hasegawa’s article was published after my text was written.)

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theory, and to serve as a reliable and ample base for the pitch organization of complete new pieces. This is especially relevant for intersections between spectral scales and microtonal derivatives of chromatic even-tempered scales, which can only be discovered in their sounding results. The ways Haas applies such materials, as the essential means for each new creation, prove to be surprisingly consistent. Having been identified as proliferating tools for Haas’s overall personal style, they nonetheless allow the creation of singular shapes and specific expressive qualities in each new composition. Large-scale forms in Haas’s music are determined by implicit qualities of the material itself. The solution found in the shape of each piece often appears to be notably organic and far from artificially constructed. Such compositions appear as living examples of Haas’s “thinking in sound” and of his idea of composition as the projection of sound into new musical settings. To comprehend this music’s quality, one must therefore rely strongly on the sensory experience (listening and/or watching) of a performance or a recording; substantial aspects of the musical experience are lost to perception in silently reading the score. Haas’s conclusion – that music theory needs this experience – obviously applies to his own music, but also has broader implications, concerning the traditions of intonation of earlier style periods (in Schubert’s music, for example).19 The extent of the impact Haas’s music might have on the conventions or attitudes of musical perception is evident from a comment made by the Hagen Quartet after they had studied his Second String Quartet. As the composer reports, they now talk about “Haas intonation” when they search for purity of intonation in music from the Classical or Romantic era.20 Bibliography Farthofer, Lisa. Georg Friedrich Haas: “Im Klang denken.” Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2007. Haas, Georg Friedrich. “Die Abbildung akustischer Phänomene als Material kompositorischer Gestaltung.” In ton 96, no. 4/97, no. 1 (1996/97 double issue): 24–27. ––. “Fünf Thesen zur Mikrotonalität.” Positionen: Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 48 (Aug. 2001): 42–44. ––. “Grundlagen für eine neue Musiktheorie: Sechs Thesen.” Dissonance/Dissonanz 117 (March 2012): 15–21. ––. “Mikrotonalitäten.” In Musik der anderen Tradition: Mikrotonale Tonwelten. Edited by HeinzKlaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, 59–65. Munich: edition text + kritik, 2003. First published in Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 54, no. 6 (June 1999): 9–15. ––. “Vom Zauber ‘reiner’ Intervalle. Georg Friedrich Haas im Interview mit Heinz Rögl.” Musikblätter 5 (May 2013): 12–14. Hasegawa, Robert. “Clashing Harmonic Systems in Haas’s Blumenstück and in vain.” Music Theory Spectrum 37 (Fall 2015): 204–23. Heilgendorff, Simone. “Schubert-Reliquien: Beobachtungen zu seinem Einfluss in der neueren Kunstmusik.” In Rückspiegel: Zeitgenössisches Komponieren im Dialog mit älterer Musik, edited by Christian Thorau, Julia Cloot, and Marion Saxer, 205–22. Mainz: Schott, 2010. 19 20

See again Heilgendorff, “Schubert-Reliquien.” “Vom Zauber ‘reiner’ Intervalle. Georg Friedrich Haas im Interview mit Heinz Rögl,” Musikblätter 5 (May 2013): 12–14 (14).

Tonality as “Irrationally Functional Harmony”: Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet Felix Wörner Artistic production in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries is characterized by a remarkable and unprecedented simultaneity of disparate musical styles and compositional techniques, along with a plurality of associated aesthetic stances. The situation, occasionally labeled as “postmodern,”1 reflects a complex web of factors, in which the growing presence of music of the past, driven by the increasing affordability of and easy access to recorded music, certainly plays a decisive role. The opening up, or even the probable disappearance, of a defined canon of musical works – a concept which might presently be justified, if at all, only by social practices, rather than cultural values previously deemed universal2 – greatly extends the types of music surrounding us as well as our ways of apprehending music: music played, recorded, heard (perceived by the ear), (attentively) listened to, and studied. In a musical culture defined, at the present time, in diversified and extremely pluralistic terms – to embrace Western art music, “world music,” and popular music – our experience is affected and constantly enriched by something “other.” Because any contemporary musical experience incorporates widely contrasting works, which are nevertheless deemed equivalent in aesthetic value, the concept of “aesthetic value” itself might appear to be rendered meaningless. Nonetheless, such a vast supply of heterogenous musics demands an aesthetic positioning, a constant process of selection and the assumption of an attitude toward specific items chosen from the overwhelming availability of musics. While at the beginning of the twentieth century a “crisis of historicism”3 had already challenged the continuity of tradition with the 1

2 3

For a study of compositional features of “postmodernism” see Jonathan D. Kramer, “Beyond Unity: Toward an Understanding of Musical Postmodernism,” in Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, ed. Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1995), 11–33. Broader conceptual and historical assessments of the terms “postmodern” and “postmodernism” from both European and North American perspectives are given in Jörn Peter Hiekel, “Postmoderne,” in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed., ed. Ludwig Finscher (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2008), supplement, cols. 697–706; Jann Pasler, “Postmodernism,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), 20:213–16; Kenneth Gloag, Postmodernism in Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York: Routledge, 2002). See Karol Berger, “The Ends of Music History, or: the Old Masters in the Supermarket of Cultures,” Journal of Musicology 31 (2014): 186–96. See Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Krisis des Historismus” (1922), in idem, Schriften zur Politik und Kulturphilosophie (1918–1923), ed. Gangolf Hübinger (Ernst Troeltsch, Kritische Gesamtausgabe 15) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 437–55.

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present, at the beginning of the twenty-first, we witness increasing historical and cultural distance from the art music of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. This development requires of the present-day composer a conscious decision: whether or not to incorporate Western art music traditions into contemporary artistic statements. The British composer Thomas Adès, born in 1971, is a younger representative of an artistic practice whose distinguished forerunners include Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Luciano Berio, George Rochberg, Alfred Schnittke, Harrison Birtwistle, and Alexander Goehr. In each of these cases, one senses the composer’s establishment of an individual musical idiom in personal terms: seeking to define a musical language, each composer takes a position regarding composers and musical works of the past by commenting on, incorporating, and overwriting earlier musics within new compositions. For Berio, Rochberg, and many others, direct recourse to the musical past was the preferred approach, either through quotation or stylistic imitation. For Adès, meanwhile, the links to tradition, while not excluding such possibilities, take various forms. Central among these, as the present essay will show, is his particular notion of tonality. Ordinary usage of the term tonality suggests an understanding of the concept as designating a quasi-ontological property of a musical work. Certain compositional features such as triads, pedal points, cadential arrivals, and treatment of dissonances – possibly supported by historical knowledge of musical styles – are judged as evidence for the presence of tonality: therefore, based on the existence of certain components, we tend to categorize musical works as either “tonal” or “non-tonal.” Yet to understand tonality as an ontological property of a composition is highly problematic. Recent scholarship by Brian Hyer, Marion Guck, David Huron, Steven Rings, and Richard Cohn has convincingly demonstrated, that “tonality is an interpretative response, and not an intrinsic property of the music.”4 Such a shift to a phenomenological perspective changes our question from “Is this musical composition tonal?” to “Do we engage with a piece of music in such a way that we understand it as tonal?” Yet the underlying assumption that “a piece of music” triggers an unequivocal response must also be modified. Rather, tonality might be conceptualized as being expressed (through the music) as well as recognized, through attentive listening, with various degrees of clarity and consistency, presence and concealment. As such, tonality can be turned into a dynamic feature, which might be shaped as a means of artistic expression. From this vantage point, tonality as a process becomes a subject of analysis: the analyst (like the listener), will attend to the inherently dynamic activities of tonal centers and motions, the instability, the fadings in and out – in short: the varied fluctuations of the imagined projections that create an impression of tonality. Even a quick glance at some milestones of Western art music production in recent decades gives one a sense that tonality, broadly defined, has regained its attraction for composers. In his Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin 4

See Richard Cohn, “Peter, the Wolf, and the Hexatonic Uncanny,” in Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice, ed. Felix Wörner et al. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012), 47–62 (47).

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observes that “especially in America, virtually all the emerging talents in the last two decades of the [twentieth] century were ‘neotonalists,’”5 and lists no fewer than fifteen composers from John Adams to Ellen Taaffe Zwilich who have enjoyed public recognition and won notable honors. Although not included in Taruskin’s list, Adès is closely associated with this group: In 1999, he received the prestigious Grawemeyer Award, and has continued to consolidate his reputation as a tremendously productive composer and performer in Europe and North America. His prominence in the classical music industry is reflected by the programming of his operas at such leading venues as the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, by commissions from leading ensembles such as the Berlin Philharmonic, and by numerous CD recordings. Even so, the artistic significance of his output remains controversial. Taruskin hailed Adès in a 1999 New York Times article as a late “modernist” whose music, despite its vast stylistic variety, revealed a “late-romantic projection of a strong creative personality.”6 Ten years later, however, Elaine Barkin criticized this stylistic diversity in her listening report on the composer’s works in Perspectives of New Music. For Barkin, Adès appears as “a chutzpahdiker virtuoso” whose music is excessively interspersed with opposing polarities: “tangled and untangled; sweet and nasty; sleazy and genteel. Music’s past and present recalled; occasionally replicated in some fashion: classical (of all eras), music hall, dance, pop, jazz, blues, disco, rock, avant-garde. Mannerist surrealism. A diverse repertoire of ensembles and genres: orchestral, opera, chamber, secular, sacred, profane, choral, et al.”7 Whether Adès should be viewed as a “modernist” or after all perhaps rather as “post-modernist” will certainly depend on the observer’s perspective and underlying criteria of judgment; such discussions, however, will not be a central focus in what follows.8 For the moment, it will suffice to note that Adès has cultivated a loose attitude towards the music of the past. Indeed, he considers music of previous centuries as present and absolutely relevant for his own creative output. Asked in a 2012 interview about his early years as a composer, he made a revealing self-estimation: “I think I was being happily 5

6 7 8

Richard Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 454.That the phenomenon of tonality after 1950 is not geographically limited to North America, and that the multifaceted and complex issues involved reach far beyond a simple categorization as “neotonalists,” is certainly demonstrated by the range of topics of the edited book to which this essay belongs. Taruskin, “A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism” (1999), in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 144–52 (145). Elaine R. Barkin, “About Some Music of Thomas Adès,” Perspectives of New Music 47, no. 1 (2009): 165–73 (165). For further comments, see Andreas Domann, Postmoderne und Musik: Eine Diskursanalyse (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2012). Among recent studies that investigate compositional features of Adès’s music which meet the criteria for postmodern music formulated by Kramer in “Beyond Unity: Toward an Understanding of Musical Postmodernism,” see for example: Arnold Whittall, “Adès, Thomas,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001), 1:156; Christopher Fox, “Tempestuous Times: The Recent Music of Thomas Adès,” Musical Times 145 (2004): 41–56; and John Roeder, “Co-operating Continuities in the Music of Thomas Adès,” Music Analysis 25 (2006): 121–5.

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promiscuous with pre-existing music.”9 The carefree shifting between musical styles to be seen, for example, in the opera Powder Her Face (1995) is certainly a fingerprint of Adès’s musical craftsmanship. Yet Barkin’s label “mannerist surrealism,” with its hints of a kaleidoscope-like, seemingly illogical handling of fragmented items and a stream of allusions to styles of the past, captures Adès’s approaches only partially, since certain features of Adès’s bridging of past and present reveal a more focused and rational engagement. Such dialogues, whether open or hidden, are apparent on several levels. With the title Chamber Symphony for fifteen players, op. 2 (1990), for example, Adès makes an explicit reference to Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie, op. 9, and a work title such as “Violin Concerto – Concentric Paths,” op. 23 (2005), alludes more generally to a genre-tradition. Explicit references to stylistic models or specific composers may be found in the Three Studies from Couperin (2006); Studies for Piano Nos. 6 and 7 (an arrangement of a work by Nancarrow; 1998); Arcadiana for string quartet, op. 12 (1994); and Brahms for tenor and orchestra, op. 21 (2000).10 Finally, his Piano Quintet, op. 20 (2000), outlines with only slight modifications all sections of a traditional sonata form. Adès does not simply draw on the music of the past, however: his compositional practice also contains many connections to twentieth-century music. In view of Adès’s compositional dwelling in the musical past, it is no surprise that tonality in its broadest sense forms an important characteristic of his music. Adès’s concept of tonality creates a perceptible link to the musical past, and can be even understood as integrating past compositional practices with his own particular compositional approach. That said, its function in Ades’s oeuvre is to be differentiated clearly from how we generally understand so-called “common-practice” tonality. In his recently published talks with Tom Service, Adès describes music as a continuous but futile quest for stability: “The music we listen to is the residue of an endless search for stability.”11 As Adès goes on to explain, “most, if not all musical material tends to desire stability or resolution of some kind.”12 Yet even a seemingly stable musical situation, such as the resolution of a tonal conflict, will remain “a sort of illusion of stability in a piece.” Adès conceptualizes music as genuinely fluid, moving, processive; in music, as in life, no true stability exists. Still, if music is such a volatile phenomenon, what makes it move the way it does? Adès’s answer is at once simple and intricate. The simple answer is that no musical sound can be judged as stable, as a point of rest or repose. Even a single note, meaning a sounding pitch, entails a tendency to move, motivated by external or internal factors such as 9 10

11 12

Thomas Adès and Tom Service, Thomas Adès: Full of Noises. Conversations with Tom Service (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 26. While Adès’s Couperin and Nancarrow pieces can be characterized as re-workings of historical models, his approach to Brahms’s compositional practice and our image of Brahms as a composer shows a more subtle discussion of his achievements and his status as historical monument; see Edward Venn, “Thomas Adès and the Spectres of Brahms,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 140 (2015): 163–212. Thomas Adès: Full of Noises, 2. Ibid.

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musical context, performance style, performance situation, and so on.13 Following this line of thought, we recognize the intricate part of his answer. If we conceive any piece as a succession of complex events (sounds), and if any such event implies multiple possible successions, we cannot imagine sounding events as a logical (in the sense of rational, comprehensible, linear, and well-founded) sequence. Rather, we might better conceptualize them as a play of forces, a play of pulling and pushing, attracting and detracting, accelerating and retarding. Here, Adès seems to diminish the composer’s role in the creative process, depicting him as a gentle, maieutic guide, helping music’s inherent tendencies to become manifest. Tonality itself is introduced as a concept to grasp the existing “magnetic forces of notes.”14 Adès advances his notion of single notes – intervals as well as complex sounds – as having virtual magnetic fields of tension such as attraction and repulsion. Yet those fields of tension no longer function as did the shared notions of tonality did in the common-practice period, when tonal composers worked within an established system (albeit one shaped by shifting conventions and cultural practices).15 Instead of conforming to relatively well-defined functional relations between chords and to their respective tonic, chords for Adès behave independently of a preconceived system, influenced by their structure, expression, and contextualization. Functional tonality’s loss of validity makes new demands by adhering to the supposed “magnetic pull of the notes put in a given disposition, their shifting relative weights”16 in order to put those tensions into effect through the artistic form of each individual composition. Like Arnold Schoenberg, Adès negates any categorical distinction between “tonal” and “atonal”; he describes the behavior of chords in his compositions metaphorically as equipped with momentum and a tendency to move, independent of context, individual structure, and even the creative will of the composer. The abandonment of functional tonality, Adès argues, changes the behavior of chords: possible sequences of chords and voice-leading rules no longer follow established practices. Adès refers to the behavior of consonant and dissonant chords independent of pre-given regulations as an “irrational functional harmony.”17 As precedents for the notion of “irrational functional harmony,” Adès names precursors and influential pioneers of the concept. Already in some works of Hector Berlioz, he observes an occasional momentary discontinuation of harmonic logic of chord sequences, so that certain chords acquire a different, non-functional mean13

“I can hear a single note and feel all the directions it wants to move in. It might be something in the room that makes it want to move, something in the nature of the way it is played, or a quality inside me at that moment; but essentially, the note is alive and therefore unstable.” Ibid., 2. 14 Ibid., 10. 15 For more extended definitions of tonality and the usage of the term, see Brian Hyer, “Tonality,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 726–52; and Michael Beiche, “Tonalität” (1992), Terminologie in der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995), 412–33. 16 Thomas Adès: Full of Noises, 3. 17 See Thomas Adès: Full of Noises, 141; 144–46.

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ing.18 Similar “irrational” behavior can be found in Leos Janáček’s compositions, in which Adès discovers a “redefinition of structural tonality through an unprecedented concentration on ambiguous, and particularly enharmonic, key relationships.”19 In his personal compositional style, Adès claims to have further developed certain characteristic aspects of such “irrational functional harmony.” By placing himself in a line starting with a nineteenth-century French composer and an early twentieth-century Moravian composer, might Adès be attempting to distance himself from the concept of tonality so closely associated with the Austro-German musical canon? Certainly, according to German music historians, both French and Moravian musics have frequently been placed in opposition to the Austro-German musical tradition. In addition to these historical points of reference, Adès connects his interest in diatonic harmony with some more recent developments of the avantgarde, drawing attention to the distinctive use of tonal chords in Ligeti’s Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano (1982). He regards this piece as a real event, a work in which Ligeti provocatively demonstrated the immense potential of tonal chords and certain kinds of tonality, and admits that Ligeti’s piece had a strong impact on his own understanding of diatonic harmony and was a stimulus for the development of his own new perspective on it. Adès’s comments on his notion of “irrational functional harmony” actually reveal more about his musical poetics than they do about his theoretical approach to tonality. His main assumption of how irrational functional harmony works within his compositional practice is based on the (vague) idea of “magnetic force” and his advocating for the rather unspecific concept of “attraction” and “repulsion” between chords. Although the proposal that tensions and forces between chords provide the essential drive of tonal motion is not unattractive, it remains vague without more specific arguments about how the concept actually works.20 While Adès assumes that these forces are somehow encapsulated in tones and chords, it is for the composer to make use of these tensions within an actual composition. The analytical challenge consists precisely in demonstrating how tonal motion happens and behaves outside functional harmony – how, for example, melodic and harmonic structures complement each other; how rhythmic and metric design plays into the horizontal and vertical dimension; how articulation (phrasing, dynamics, gesture, sound) highlights or downplays other structural elements; how listening expectations are created; and finally, how these features are perceived. The latter aspect should address Adès’s handling of tonal features so that tonality is never just present; rather, tonal moments appear, are alluded to, become momentarily perceivable, 18 Adès mentions as an example the song “La spectre de la Rose” from Les nuits d´été; ibid. 19 Adès, “‘Nothing but Pranks and Puns’: Janáček’s solo Piano Music,” in Janáček Studies, ed. Paul Wingfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 18–35 (18). Janáček’s handling of tonal connections includes the exploration of “relationships between individual harmonic/coloristic objects almost to the exclusion of conventions of tonal ‘logic’” (ibid., 22). 20 For recent explorations of the theoretical dimension of tonal forces, see Steve Larson, Musical Forces. Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); and Robert Hatten, “Musical Forces and Agential Energies: an Expansion of Steve Larson’s Model,” Music Theory Online 18, no. 3 (2013); (http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.12. 18.3/mto.12.18.3.hatten.php, accessed November 1, 2015).

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and recede. Tonal features are continuously changing, their spectrum of presence reaching from prominence to complete absence. Samples for this investigation could be drawn from many compositions – the string quartet Arcadiana, the orchestral piece Tevot, the opera The Tempest, the Violin Concerto “Concentric Paths,” or In Seven Days, among others. Because the one-movement Piano Quintet (2000) displays the above-mentioned features quite prominently, it will form the basis for our investigation. Analysis of the Quintet might open up ways to a more adequate understanding of Adès’s strategic use of tonal materials and schemes in other works. The frequent appearance of diatonic chords, such as major and minor triads, and chromatic chords, such as augmented triads and diminished sevenths, is a common feature in most of Adès’s compositions. Horizontally, melodic lines are often shaped by succession of half- and whole-steps, thirds, and fifths. Occasionally, such vertical and horizontal elements invoke passing impressions of functional tonality. Since those features happen mostly momentarily, however, any expectations of tonal continuation entertained by listeners remains unfulfilled. The outer scheme of the Piano Quintet follows a modified sonata form with exposition (m. 1 to six measures after R12, to be repeated), development section (six measures after R12 to R19), and compressed recapitulation (after R19). With this clearly articulated formal outline the composition alludes to a traditional, Romantic model; frequently, Brahms has been named as point of reference.21

Example 1: Thomas Adès, Piano Quintet, Violin 1, mm. 1–15 21

See Emma Gallon, “Narrativities in the Music of Thomas Adès: The Piano Quintet and Brahms,” in Music and Narrative since 1900, ed. Michael L. Klein and Nicholas W. Reyland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 216–33 (220). Adès himself notes that Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in D major, op. 28 preoccupied him while composing the Quintet and might have served as a formal model (Thomas Adès: Full of Noises, 50).

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The beginning of the Quintet sets out not just thematic material, but also introduces what one might interpret as one of the work’s chief compositional ideas: the question of how to handle tonality. The opening solo passage for violin 1 presents material and compositional devices important for the entire work. An ascending melodic line, C-D-E, is harmonized with three chords (see Example 1): the first two chords – a C major triad, followed by a G major triad – might be perceived as setting up expectations of functional tonality: the first triad acting as the tonic (C), the second as its dominant (G).22 A listener associating the two chords with such tonal-functional relations will expect the next pitch, E, to be harmonized as part of this progression with a functional diatonic chord, representing the tonic. At this point, the progression behaves “irrationally,” however; in other words, this expectation remains unfulfilled. In all later instances of this pattern, the pitch E is harmonized either with a non-diatonic trichord (e. g., D-A-E, as in m. 2), or with a consonant chord not functionally related to an assumed C major tonic. While the momentous association of the pitch C with the function of a tonal center remains unfulfilled, the entire passage hints at a competing tonal pole. Before the melodic line shifts to eighth-note patterns (three measures before R1), the pitch F is highlighted six times by change of direction as the highest pitch of the violin’s line, and with accent marks. This prominence of the F sonority is further strengthened by the harmonization of the pitch C with an F major triad (in m. 7 and m. 9), twice marking F major as momentary goal of tonal motion. The first section ends when the melodic line, at the beginning shaped by the two whole-tone scales (scale I: ascending C-D-E; scale II: descending F-E-D-B-A), shifts to a transition in eighth notes, consisting intervallically of minor and major seconds and thirds. The entry of the piano (R1) begins a second section (R1 to R2), drawing on material of the first (violins 1 and 2 continue the eighth-note line; the piano uses the first thematic idea). The tonal focus shifts to triads of B major and F major (see the motion in the piano upbeat to R1’s downbeat, repeated in m. 3 and 5 after R1) before changing to E major (at 7 after R1). Before the beginning of the third section (R2) the piano plays another F major-B major triad progression; with the third entry of the thematic idea, the omitted strings (violin 2, viola, cello) move from B major to F major (two measures after R2); all chords are unstable, in six-three or six-four inversions. In addition to the surface features described above, a structural analysis of the beginning reveals further technical aspects of Adès’s language. At the beginning, the upper voice of the first three chords moves up in whole-tone steps, the middle voice in ascending minor thirds, and the lower voice in ascending major thirds. This technique of “aligned cycles” was first described by Alban Berg.23 As the American music theorist Philip Stoecker has recently demonstrated, three-part aligned intervallic cycles as a structural device in Adès are not limited to the Quintet’s beginning. Indeed, this feature, expanded through rhythmical and textural modifica22 23

These two chords could, of course, also be interpreted as presenting a subdominant-tonic relation. In a letter to Schoenberg, dated July 27, 1920. The technical term “aligned cycles” seems to have been introduced by Dave Headlam, in The Music of Alban Berg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 77–79.

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tions – and in interaction with one-, two-, and five-part as well as “multi-aggregate” cycles – governs large parts of the horizontal and vertical succession of events in the Piano Quintet; Stoecker also claims that they are relevant for the large-scale formal organization of this and other of the composer’s scores.24 By uncovering the theoretical potential of aligned cycles and investigating their compositional realization, Stoecker’s analysis explores an essential structural aspect of the pitch organization of the composition. Yet these results match only partially a listener’s immediate perceptual experience. Particularly in a post-tonal environment, occurrences of tonal chords – either in isolation, or within a succession of chords – constitute marked events and make an immediate impact on the listening experience. The focus of the investigation can be expanded, then, to address the following question: what challenges do the use of diatonic chords pose for listening strategies in a post-tonal context? After the end of the common-practice period and the irreversible loss of tonality’s status as basic principle of musical language(s), tonally colored events – whether as allusions or fragments, whether disguised or modified in other ways – act as general, familiar resources for expression and communication. As such, any form of tonal allusion triggers direct reactions on the listener’s part, through the recognition of familiar sounds, expectations of directed harmonic motion, and so on. As I have already shown, the beginning of Adès’s Piano Quintet points to tonal materials and functions independently of the composition’s actual structural principles. With such a gesture, a concrete expectation is raised, yet almost immediately (in this case with the third melodic pitch and its harmonization) undermined and called into question. Any listener familiar with Western art music experiences an unfulfilled expectation: first signs of tonal harmony, then a deviation from the reference, registering as a negation of the anticipated continuation. Based on the later repetitions of the first phrase’s beginning (including the unexpected continuation), listeners may manage more and more successfully to distance themselves from the spontaneously anticipated progression and to recognize in the unexpected “other,” “modified” course a meaningful potential. By the process of such recognition, communication between composer and listener takes place: a progression that at first seemed “irrational” reveals its meaning. In the Piano Quintet, tonally charged sonorities like those described above do not remain an isolated event. Indeed, Adès’s allusions to tonally colored progressions are manifold, and further examples will expand our understanding of the process and its effect. In addition to a fifth-related progression, which Adès introduces at the beginning and articulates several times during the piece, he uses frequently non-functional tonal progressions including augmented triads and diminished-seventh chords. One of the most striking passages, however, is a markedly tonal segment, which stands out as an episode. 24

Philip Stoecker, “Aligned Cycles in Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet,” Music Analysis 33 (2014): 32–64 (esp. 34). Adès’s use of aligned cycles is not limited to the Quintet; see also Philip Stoecker, “Harmony, Voice-Leading, and Cyclic Structures in Thomas Adès’s ‘Chori,’” Music Theory and Analysis 2 (2015): 204–18.

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Example 2: Thomas Adès, Piano Quintet, “A major episode” (after R8)

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The entire passage (see Example 2) is in context striking to the listener because of its harmonic design and sonic structure. Harmonically, the passage is clearly set in A major: the harmony after R8 accompanies a simple folk tune-like melody. This new texture proceeds for ten bars in an almost exclusively steady rhythmic fashion (long-short; beginning with an upbeat). Harmonically, the texture is one of a simple rocking between the tonic A major (I6; short) and a dominant chord (V42 ; long); after an extended predominant progression (ten measures after R8) the passage arrives at a strong V7-I cadence. Syntactically, the phrase is built as a period with antecedent-consequent structure; the consequent intensifies harmonically and through increased rhythmic motion in the string parts. Above the piano there are two additional compositional layers: the violins articulate a pedal on A, while the viola and cello insert falling minor-third figures. The antecedent’s harmonic and syntactic construction displays an almost textbook-like regularity, albeit undermined by three different rhythmic levels (three against four against five); the consequent shows an increasingly complex metric construction.25 This kind of over-articulation of tonal structure provokes the question: how does Adès integrate the phrase into the surrounding post-tonal idiom? There are a number of compositional features which help to disguise the clarity of the tonal structure. In the piano, the metric sequence positions the (long) dominant chords consistently on the felt downbeats (indicated in the “as if”-stave below the score), so that there is a split between harmonic resolution (tonic) and metric emphasis (downbeat). Furthermore, Adès demands from the piano a specific sound world, invoked with the indication lontanissimo, affondato sempre; this gives the music an almost unreal quality. The sound of the added strings is equally unsubstantial: violin 1 plays harmonics, violin 2 “flautando, ppp, marcato,” and the added thirds in the lower strings are also played very softly. All these features turn the most tonally stable passage into a disembodied sound world. Because of this sound world, the regular and stable setting of the A major phrase does not appear as a distant idyll: the idyll is unmasked as illusion. The passage is integrated by further compositional means. The primary rhythmic-metric figure “short-long” is introduced as far back as R3, and the melodic gesture in the piano right hand is prepared after R6. The tonally stable passage does not end with a caesura but dissolves into a new section. The consonant chords, then, no longer function in a tonal context as in the A major passage; at the same time the falling thirds, introduced after R8, become increasingly prominent through their quantity and through their clearer articulation and presence. Rhythms and motives are successively reduced to their core interval structure of seconds and minor thirds, a process leading to a transition and finally into a new section at R10. The A major passage, in its explicit allusion to tonal features (after R8), is uncharacteristic. Its later restatement in the recapitulation (after R18) is designed very differently: in contrast to the exposition, the piano part does not articulate a tonal center (the voices of the chordal texture progress in stepwise motion). In the strings, 25

Six measures after R8, violin 2, viola, and cello start forming their own metric layer against the violin 1/piano activity, while building an increasingly enriched texture.

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the outer voices (violin 1 and cello) and the inner voices (violin 2 and viola) form two rhythmically distinct layers, beginning with an emphasis on the pitch B. Beginning five measures after R18, the strings add the major third D or the minor third D over B, introducing a shift between major and minor modes. In addition to these sections of explicit major-mode triadic reference, Adès alludes frequently to tonality by using tonal chordal materials (triads or diminished sevenths, for example) throughout the piece without necessarily establishing tonal centers. To demonstrate his various means and their different functions, I will provide just a few more examples. After R4, Adès designs a dialogic passage between strings and piano in which the voices move mostly in stepwise and contrary motion (see Example 3). This non-functional progression of chromatic chords might well be embedded in a highly chromatic texture. In the piano part, though, we observe an accumulation of diatonic and chromatic chords: an A major triad (in six-three inversion), followed by a dominant seventh chord (in six-five inversion), and an augmented triad (two after R4); the following phrase (beginning at four after R4) presents a root-position A minor triad, a C dominant seventh (in four-two inversion), and a B minor triad. After R5, the dialogue between piano and strings continues. Six times, the minor third C-E, already introduced at R3, is played by all the strings and set against a repeating diminished seventh chord (F-G-B-D) in the piano. This reiteration highlights a shift in the dramatic structure, emphatically marking the end of a section. While the “dialogue” appears as a kind of stasis, in the following measures the interval of the minor third in the strings is expanded to a chain of diminished seventh chords (four before R6), dissolving and transitioning from the static moment into a new section. By insisting on the interval C-E, Adès alludes to a tonal disposition with the tonal center C, in particular since the tone C was already singled out by the beginning and twice after R3. The C-E motive is taken up again by the strings in octaves at R10 (after the A major section discussed above and the subsequent transitional passage). The strings’ minor third motive is now answered four times by an ascending major ninth B-C in the piano. The music continues with a repeated, quasi-cadential progression in dyads, suggestive of the triad pair F major-B major (two before R11). The progression does not arrive on its seemingly intended goal B major but deviates to B minor (R11), an unexpected tonal shift coinciding with a drastic change of texture. Over a sustained B minor pedal chord (piano left hand), the strings play a slowly moving chord progression, starting in very high register (“ppp, lontanissimo, calmo, senza vib.”). The texture contracts towards the first double bar (after R12), moving into a stable B major tonality (shifted to a B major sonority respectively just before the repeat of the second part). The selected examples could easily be multiplied; particularly notable passages are the recapitulation at R19 with the return of C major (though disguised by other sonorities), or the explicitly cadential motion between G major and C major triads that closes the Quintet. The examples indicate that tonal motions or associations permeate the composition. More important than the mere presence of tonally charged chords, though, is the way tonal effects are articulated, including the di-

Example 3: Thomas Adès, Piano Quintet, R4

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mensions of sound color and articulation. From the discussion of the selected examples, it should be clear that any reference to functional tonality remains an exceptional and isolated phenomenon (e. g., the “A-major” passage at R8). Other tonal moments offer isolated musical gestures, albeit marking formal caesuras, such as the frequently used ascending minor third C-E, or self-evident cadential motions. In addition, diatonic as well as chromatic chordal motions independent of conventional tonal logic occur throughout the piece. All these references to tonal structures can be recognized, yet remain momentary, unstable, and elusive. Adès’s concept of an “irrationally functional harmony” argues that such progressions are non-“functional,” in the sense that they do not refer to and depend on a central tonic, or keep to conventional directed voice-leading motions; but his notion of the “irrationally functional” also suggests that any appearance of tonality remains cursory and associative. In the Piano Quintet, the evidence of tonality constantly fluctuates. The situation varies from a state of complete absence of tonal materials or key definition, to more blurred or fleeting tonal presences, to rather distinct articulations manifest in clearly articulated harmonic progressions. The Quintet’s tonal phenomena are insufficiently captured by technical analysis or the discussion of short excerpts, since their specifically transitory quality is almost completely lost when not experienced within the durational dimensions of the music. This transitory aspect, however, is essential to the tonal effect at a given moment; it must be experienced directly. Tonality, in the Piano Quintet, is never just present; rather, tonal moments appear, are alluded to, become briefly perceivable, and recede. Even semantically charged tonal motions such as the frequently used tonic-dominant relationships among complete triads (alluding to a cadential motion) do not function structurally. In addition, an analytically observable feature such as the strategic use of C major sonorities at the beginning of the exposition, recapitulation, and at the end of the piece, does not consolidate a structural tonal motion, but works rather as a rhetorical gesture. The continuously shifting and fluctuating appearance of tonal features and allusions in the Quintet ensure that tonality remains an unstable resource for Adès, one that never gains a truly structural quality or authority. In place of Adès’s metaphor of a “magnetic pull of the notes,” it may be more accurate to emphasize the composer’s artistic scope for what I will call “design,” considering the listener’s point of view by analogy with the aesthetic experience of watching films. The fading in and out of tonal events, the cross-fading of different levels, the choice of sharpness of focus, the highlighting of single objects (sounds), the moving tonal centers, the appearance of different perspectives on a situation – all such effects capture Adès’s artistic intent in the Piano Quintet. By questioning tonality’s familiarity as a structural resource for listeners, while unfolding unfamiliar schemes of tonal or harmonic organization, the composer discloses new forms of meaning.

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Bibliography Adès, Thomas and Tom Service. Thomas Adès: Full of Noises. Conversations with Tom Service. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Adès, Thomas. “‘Nothing but Pranks and Puns’: Janáček’s Solo Piano Music.” In Janáček Studies, edited by Paul Wingfield, 18–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Barkin, Elaine R. “About Some Music of Thomas Adès.” Perspectives of New Music 47, no. 1 (2009): 165–73. Beiche, Michael. “Tonalität.” 1992. In Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, 412–33. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995. Berger, Karol. “The Ends of Music History, or: the Old Masters in the Supermarket of Cultures.” Journal of Musicology 31 (2014): 186–96. Cohn, Richard. “Peter, the Wolf, and the Hexatonic Uncanny.” In Wörner et al., Tonality 1900–1950, 47–62. Domann, Andreas. Postmoderne und Musik: Eine Diskursanalyse. Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2012. Fox, Christopher. “Tempestuous Times: The Recent Music of Thomas Adès.” Musical Times 145 (2004): 41–56. Gallon, Emma. “Narrativities in the Music of Thomas Adès: The Piano Quintet and Brahms.” In Music and Narrative since 1900, edited by Michael L. Klein and Nicholas W. Reyland, 216–33. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Gloag, Kenneth. Postmodernism in Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Hatten, Robert. “Musical Forces and Agential Energies: An Expansion of Steve Larson’s Model.” Music Theory Online 18, no. 3 (2013). http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.12.18.3/mto.12.18.3. hatten.php (accessed November 1, 2015). Headlam, Dave The Music of Alban Berg. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Hiekel, Jörn Peter. “Postmoderne.” In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed., edited by Ludwig Finscher, supplement, cols. 697–706. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2008. Hyer, Brian. “Tonality.” In The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, 726–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kramer, Jonathan D. “Beyond Unity: Toward an Understanding of Musical Postmodernism.” In Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, edited by Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann, 11–33. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1995. Larson, Steve. Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Lochhead, Judy, and Joseph Auner, eds. Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pasler, Jann. “Postmodernism.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie, 20:213–16. London: Macmillan, 2001. Roeder, John. “Co-operating Continuities in the Music of Thomas Adès.” Music Analysis 25 (2006): 121–54. Stoecker, Philip. “Aligned Cycles in Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet.” Music Analysis 33 (2014): 32–64. ––. “Harmony, Voice-Leading, and Cyclic Structures in Thomas Adès’s ‘Chori.’” Music Theory and Analysis 2 (2015): 204–18. Taruskin, Richard. Music in the Late Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ––. “A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism.” 1999. Reprinted in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays, 144–52. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Troeltsch, Ernst. “Die Krisis des Historismus.” 1922. In Troeltsch, Schriften zur Politik und Kulturphilosophie (1918–1923), edited by Gangolf Hübinger (Ernst Troeltsch, Kritische Gesamtausgabe 15), 437–55. Berlin: de Gruyter 2002.

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Venn, Edward. “Thomas Adès and the Spectres of Brahms.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 140 (2015): 163–212. Whittall, Arnold. “Adès, Thomas.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie, 1:156. London: Macmillan, 2001. Wörner, Felix, Ullrich Scheideler, and Philip Rupprecht, eds. Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012.

“Hungarian Tonality”? György Kurtág’s … rappel des oiseaux … from the Perspective of Albert Simon’s Theory of Tonfelder Volker Helbing When Bernhard Haas introduced Albert Simon’s theory of Tonfelder to the German-speaking public in 2004, he claimed nothing less than to outline the essentials of what he called Die Neue Tonalität von Schubert bis Webern (The New Tonality from Schubert to Webern).1 In the foreword to his book, Haas acknowledges that this theory had been developed to analyze Bartók’s music, and only later adapted/ transmitted to the music of other composers of earlier and later periods. But in the body of the book, the theory’s origins are carefully ignored. Haas’s analyses of compositions by Schubert, Alkan, Franck, Liszt, Schoenberg, and Webern were intended to demonstrate – apparently absolutely in line with Simon’s own thought – that the validity of Simon’s theories was the much broader one designated in his title.2 Seven years later, in an issue of the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie devoted entirely to the theory of Tonfelder, Haas corrected this image by editing two Bartók analyses by Simon from the inventories of the Paul Sacher Foundation.3 These texts were apparently part of – or preliminary studies for – a work in progress on Bartók initiated in the mid-1980s but never published; in the same 2011 journal issue, Konstantin Bodamer drew attention to Simon’s roots in Hungarian music theory of the 1950s and 1960s.4 The originality, plausibility, and validity of the theory of Tonfelder has been discussed broadly in recent years, albeit without any publically critical perspectives on Simon’s work.5 One obvious question has not yet been addressed in any detail: 1

2

3 4 5

Bernhard Haas, Die neue Tonalität von Schubert bis Webern: Hören und Analysieren nach Albert Simon (Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel, 2004). Haas’s book is based on his 1994 lessons with Albert Simon (1926–2000). Except for two Bartók analyses published by Haas in 2011 (see Note 3 below), Simon’s analyses are unpublished. Besides a considerable number of Bartók analyses, Simon left analyses of works by Schoenberg, Webern, and Varèse (Haas, Die neue Tonalität, 9), and believed that “his system was valid from Purcell or at least Bach up to Bartók, Schoenberg, Webern and Varèse” (10). Haas was given examples by “Wagner, Franck, and again and again Bartók” (10). Haas, “Zu zwei Bartók-Analysen Albert Simons,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 8 (2011): 299–334. The typescripts presented by Haas came to the Paul Sacher Foundation in 1985, but it is not known how old they were at that time. Haas, Die neue Tonalität, 8 (preface by András Schiff) and 9; Konstantin Bodamer, “Albert Simon – ein ungarischer Autor,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 8 (2011): 335– 49. See Michael Polth, “Zum Verhältnis von Harmonik und Instrumentation vor ‘Wagner,’” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 11 (2014), http://www.gmth.de/zeitschrift/artikel/778. aspx; Dres Schiltknecht, “‘Post-tonale Prolongation’: ein amerikanischer Diskurs als Impuls-

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the extent to which the theory’s basic hypotheses – deeply rooted in Hungarian research on Liszt and Bartók – may have influenced the compositional thought of Hungarian composers of Simon’s generation.6 The following analysis of György Kurtág’s … rappel des oiseaux … – the fifth movement of his Six moments musicaux for string quartet, op. 44 (2005) – is no more than a first step in this direction. It is preceded by a short introduction to basic components of the theory of Tonfelder, their roots in Hungarian music theory, and Kurtág’s familiarity with them. I. Components of the Theory of Tonfelder Since Haas’s laconic 2004 book does not really claim to offer an introduction to broad conceptual questions, it was left to Michael Polth to make the theory of Tonfelder accessible to a broader professional audience through a series of reviews, analyses, and lectures.7 Nevertheless, awareness of the theory still seems lacking among English-language audiences, so it seems necessary to briefly outline some basic concepts. According to Polth, the chords of a piece characterized by “new tonality” are not connected by their relation to a common tonic (however hierarchically graded), but by their membership within one or more Tonfelder, or “pitch fields,” which control harmonic coherence on several structural levels, in ways comparable to the structural levels of Schenkerian analysis.8 The three species of Tonfelder known until now – the “Functions,” “Constructions,” and “Fifth Rows” shown in Example 1 – are symmetrical intervallic constellations, at least two of which are long since familiar under different names.9

6

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8 9

geber für methodische Ansätze einer (europäischen) Tonfeld-Theorie” (paper presented at the fourteenth annual congress of the GMTH, Geneva, 17–19 October 2014); Polth, “Einzelton und harmonischer Kontext in der Tonfeld-Theorie” (paper presented at the eighth European Music Analysis Conference, Leuven, 17–21 September 2014); Jan Philipp Sprick, “Sequences between Affirmation and Destruction of Tonality” (paper presented at the eighth European Music Analysis Conference, Leuven, 17–21 September 2014); and Jonathan Gammert, “Die ‘Theorie der Tonfelder’ und die Neo-Riemannian Theory: Wie kam Riemann nach Ungarn?” (paper presented at the eleventh annual congress of the GMTH, Bern, 2–4 December 2011). Simone Hohmaier addresses this question in an indirect and rather cursory way from an analytical perspective. See Hohmaier, “Mutual Roots of Musical Thinking: György Kurtág, Péter Eötvös and Their Relation to Ernő Lendvai’s Theories,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 43 (2002): 223–34. Polth, “Tonalität der Tonfelder: Anmerkungen zu Bernhard Haas, ‘Die neue Tonalität von Schubert bis Webern. Hören und Analysieren nach Albert Simon,’” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 3 (2006): 167–78; Polth, “Zur Artikulation von Tonfelder bei Brahms, Debussy und Stockhausen,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 8 (2011): 225–65; Polth, “Einzelton und harmonischer Kontext in der Tonfeld-Theorie.” Polth, “Tonalität der Tonfelder,” 169; the English translation of Tonfelder – pitch fields – is from Polth, “Einzelton und harmonischer Kontext.” Example 1 summarizes theoretical distinctions presented in Polth, “Zur Artikulation,” 226.

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Example 1: Tonfelder (after Polth, “Zur Artikulation von Tonfelder bei Brahms, Debussy und Stockhausen”)

With regard to pitch-class material, Funktion corresponds to what has been called, inter alia, the octatonic scale, the Korsakovian scale, or (in Messiaen’s treatises), the second mode of limited transposition: it may be construed as four perfect-fifth dyads transposed in a cycle of minor thirds. The term Funktion starts from the hypothesis that the members of a cycle of minor thirds are equivalent in terms of (Riemannian) function.10 Konstrukt is known (still only with respect to pc material) in English-language music theory as the hexatonic collection,11 and through concepts of an alternating six-note scale (alternierende Sechsstufigkeit) and Ernö Lendvai’s Modell 1:3 (“intertonal minor third model”).12 These Konstrukte may be construed as three perfect-fifth dyads transposed in a cycle of major thirds. Quintenreihen (rows of perfect fifths), by contrast, are not based on equal division of the octave: they may be described as reduced or extended variants of the diatonic scale, depending on the number of fifths that constitute a given row. Thus a Triton consists

10 Ernö Lendvai, “Einführung in die Formen- und Harmoniewelt Bartóks,” in Béla Bartók: Weg und Werk, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Bence Szabolcsi, 2nd ed. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1972), 105– 49 (105–17); Olivier Messiaen, Technik meiner musikalischen Sprache, trans. Sieglinde Ahrens (Paris: Leduc, 1966, single-volume edition), 94–96 (chapter 17); originally published as Technique de mon langage musicale (Paris: Leduc, 1944). 11 Richard Cohn, “Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Progressions,” Music Analysis 15 (1996): 9–40. 12 Zoltán Gárdonyi, “Neue Ordnungsprinzipien der Tonhöhen in Liszts Frühwerken,” in Franz Liszt: Beiträge ungarischer Autoren, ed. Klára Hamburger (Budapest: Corvina, 1978), 226–73; Lendvai, “Einführung,” 131–37.

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of a three-note succession of fifths, a Tetraton of a four-note succession of fifths, and so on.13 It should be emphasized, however, that it is not the tone collections per se which are new in the theory of Tonfelder. Quite the contrary: a first hypothesis here is that these three species of Tonfelder constitute the harmonic coherence of the “new tonality”14; a related claim is that Tonfelder form a kind of deep structure comparable to the “Ursatz-Tonalität” of Schenker.15 The theory of Tonfelder does not claim to explain the quality of the analyzed music, or how we hear this music, but – in another parallel to Schenkerian paradigms – “it aims to influence our perception of music. It encourages the reader to hear the musical work of art in a specific way.”16 II. Simon, Kurtág, Lendvai, and Bartók Research after 1945 There can be no doubt that Kurtág grew up as a composer with the basic tenets of the theory of Tonfelder in his mind, although he did not necessarily associate them with the name of Simon. Their studies at the Franz Liszt Academy overlapped,17 and the two musicians met there again as faculty members (Kurtág for chamber music, Simon for conducting). Kurtág appreciated his colleague and confessed to have “learned a great deal” from him.18 Yet his birthday piece from 1996 – … A Solemn Air … a 70 éves Simon Albert tiszteletére, for two pianos or for orchestra19 – does not suggest any reference to Simon’s theories.20 As a matter of fact, Simon seems to have been uninterested in presenting his theories to anyone outside his 13 Of course one of the first tasks to be done with regard to the theory of Tonfelder should be to find a new, unambiguous terminology. It is hardly feasible to use Oktoton, Hexaton, Triton, even Funktion, in senses completely different from familiar music-theoretic usages (the “octatonic” or “hexatonic” collections, the tritone interval, Riemannian functions). 14 Simon’s own analysis of Bartók’s “Staccato” (Mikrokosmos, No. 123) emphasizes the wholetone scale containing the tonic A as one of the essential structural elements of the piece; Haas, Bartók Analysen, 300–13 (esp. 306, 313). However, Simon felt that the whole-tone scale’s exclusion of perfect fifths was one point (among others) against its integration into the class of Tonfelder (private communication from Polth). 15 Polth, “Tonalität der Tonfelder,” 168. 16 “Die Theorie […] möchte Einfluss auf die Wahrnehmung der Musik nehmen. Sie sinnt dem Leser an, das erklingende Kunstwerk auf eine bestimmte Weise wahrzunehmen.” Polth, “Tonalität der Tonfelder,” 170. 17 Simon studied there from 1947–52 (composition and conducting); Kurtág, from 1945–55 (composition, piano, and chamber music). 18 Bálint András Varga, ed., György Kurtág: Drei Gespräche mit Bálint András Varga und Ligeti Hommagen (Hofheim: Wolke, 2010), 13. 19 … A Solemn Air … Hommage à Simon Albert 70 (1996) in Jatékok 8, no. 21 (dated 7 March to 4 April and 12 August 1996); and Messages for Orchestra, op. 34 (1991–96), third movement (orchestrated for orchestra without violins and with such “Kurtágian” additional instruments as alto recorder and pianino with super sordino). 20 With its stately triple time, the almost exclusive use of major sevenths, minor ninths, and their octave equivalents in ever-changing, mostly low registers and with its tendency toward chromatic saturation, the piece is rather suggestive of funeral music.

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own conducting class, at least during his time at the Academy.21 Regarding the question, however, of whether Kurtág knew Simon’s Tonfelder or not, it does not matter to what extent he was familiar with his analyses or theories: The basic components of Simon’s theory date back to the time when Kurtág and Simon, as well as György Ligeti and Ernő Lendvai, studied at the Franz Liszt Academy. As early as 1947, during a Bartók seminar conducted by Bence Szabolcsi – famous for its “exciting and sharp discussions”22 – Lendvai first presented his Bartók analyses23 in the presence of Ligeti, Kurtág, and in all probability Simon.24 And no doubt one of these analyses was of the first movement of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, published in 1948.25 There Lendvai presented for the first time what he called Modell 1:2 (“intertonal major second model”) – the octatonic collection – and Modell 1:3 (intertonal minor third model) – the hexatonic collection.26 The former was known among those who (like Kurtág and Ligeti) visited the courses of Lajos Bárdos (1899–1986) as Dante-Skala, i. e., as a scale associated above all with Liszt.27 Lendvai made it the basis of his “axis system,” stating the functional equivalence of C, F, A, and D as tonic; G, C, E, A as dominant; and F, B, D and G as subdominant. Gárdonyi and Bárdos demonstrated that the “intertonal minor third model” can also be found in the works of Liszt in writings published and translated by the late 1960s.28 It was also Bárdos who in the mid-1950s described Quintenreihen as variants of the diatonic scale, and found them in folk music, Gregorian chant, Pa21 According to Haas, Simon planned several publications on Bartók beginning in the mid-1980s. Haas, Die neue Tonalität, 9. 22 See György Ligeti, “Neues aus Budapest: Zwölftonmusik oder ‘Neue Tonalität’?” in Monika Lichtenfeld (ed.), György Ligeti: Gesammelte Schriften (Mainz: Schott), I:56–60 (60), written in 1948, first published in Melos (1950). 23 Varga, György Kurtág, 158. 24 The extent to which Ligeti was influenced by Lendvai’s axis system becomes evident from “Zur Chromatik Bartóks” (Hungarian original, first published 1955; trans. Éva Pintér in Lichtenfeld, György Ligeti, I:295–301) and “Über Bartóks Harmonik” (1961), first published in Lichtenfeld, György Ligeti, I:302–8. For Lendvai’s influence on Kurtág and Eötvös, see Hohmaier, “Mutual roots of musical thinking,” 223–34, and Hohmaier, “Ein zweiter Pfad der Tradition”: Kompositorische Bartók-Rezeption (Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2003), 54, 58, 86, and 100. 25 Lendvai, “Bartók: Szonáta két zongorára és ütőhangszerekre: Az I. tétel analízise” [Bartók, Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion: Analysis of the first movement], Zenei Szemle 8 (1948): 412–26; Lendvai, Bartók stílusa a “Szonáta két zongorára és ütőhangszerekre” és a “Zene húros-, ütőhangszerekre és celestára” tükrében [Bartók’s Style: As Reflected in the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta”] (Budapest: Zeneműkiadó, 1955). 26 Lendvai, Bartók’s Style as Reflected in the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, and Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, trans. Paul Merrick and Judit Pokoly (Budapest: Akkord, 1999), 32. Twenty years later Zoltan Gárdonyi (who taught music theory at the Franz Liszt Academy from 1941–1967) proved that Modell 1:3 also occurred in the early works of Liszt. Gardonyi, “Neue Tonleiter- und Sequenztypen in Liszts Frühwerken,” Studia Musicologica 11 (1969): 169–99 (190–93). 27 Lajos Bárdos, “Die volksmusikalischen Tonleitern bei Liszt,” in Hamburger, Franz Liszt, 168– 96 (191). 28 Bárdos, ibid., 192–93. The original Hungarian version of this article was published as early as 1955 (Hamburger, ibid., 325).

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lestrina’s modal harmony, and – as a kind of response to Palestrina – in Liszt.29 Bárdos was appreciated by both Kurtág and Ligeti. The latter, when reporting on the compositional scene in Hungary around 1950, repeatedly referred to Bárdos as teacher as well as author of a (then) still unpublished “basic theory of the diatonic system.”30 Hence, Kurtág was aware of the essential components of Tonfelder theory from the time of his studies at the Academy; they determined his view on Bartók and, as a consequence, his own composing.31 The name that he connected to at least two basic components of the theory was not Simon’s, however, but Lendvai’s: for in contrast to the birthday piece for Simon, Kurtág’s (second) musical obituary – One more Word to Ernő Lendvai (1993; see Example 2) – may certainly be understood as an homage to Lendvai the music theorist.32 After the melody of the antecedent (mm. 1–5.2) has filled out the major third G-B, the consequent (mm. 5.3–11) passes through the adjacent third C-E by a quite similar sequence of pitches.33 A change of register in m. 8 (introducing D6) combined with a thinning out of texture signals that the piece has already passed its climax. The orientation of this climax is supported by the lengthening of phrases, from two and three pitches in the antecedent to four and four in the consequent. The harmony is defined by Konstrukte IIa and IIb, which combine to traverse the complete chromatic scale: antecedent and consequent open with a juxtaposition of subsets of each (mm. 1–3, mm. 5.3–6.1). The consequent ends with their stratification into a twelve tone set (mm. 7–11), whereas the antecedent closes with a juxtaposition of Ib and Ia (mm. 4.2–5.1). Equally clear are the hierarchies within the pair IIa/ IIb: since in mm. 1–3 and mm. 7–11 IIb enters (and overlaps) after IIa is already established, it is hardly (mm. 1–3) perceptible, or (in mm. 7–11) only belatedly perceptible as such. Only at the beginning of the consequent (mm. 5 ff.) are representatives of both IIa and IIb juxtaposed as distinct units. Moreover, the specific sound of the piece – painful and biting, corresponding perfectly to the melody’s lament character – is itself a result of the typical constitution of the Konstrukt as two augmented triads a half-step apart. 29

Bárdos, “Modale Harmonien in den Werken von Franz Liszt,” in Hamburger, Franz Liszt, 133– 67 (original Hungarian edition, 1956), and “Natürliche Tonsysteme. Methode ihrer Messung,” in Studia Memoriae Belae Bartók Sacra, 2nd edition (Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1959), 209–48. 30 Possibly Bárdos’s Modális harmóniák (Budapest: Zeneműkiadó, 1961). Ligeti, “Zur Chromatik Bartóks,” in Lichtenfeld, György Ligeti, I:296. Ligeti here notes that he attended Bárdos’s theory classes in 1950–55, at a time when he himself already taught music theory at the Academy. 31 In an analytical sketch showing the (potentially octatonic) structure of fourths (D-A-B-F-GD) in Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto, Kurtág noted: “Now I know it by experience, not from Lendvai”; cited in Hohmaier, “Mutual roots,” 228. 32 Még egy szó Lendvai Ernőhöz, dated 20–21 October 1993. The first musical obituary Lendvai Ernő in memoriam (Játékok 6, no. 42), dated 12 February 1993 (two weeks after Lendvai’s death), turns out to be quite restrained and – combining a syncopation in the left and a kind of psalmody in the right hand – extremely cryptic. 33 The Bartókian sequence G-G-B-B-A is answered by C-C-E-E / D-C.

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Example 2: Még egy szó Lendvai Ernőhöz (One more Word to Ernő Lendvai), from Játékok VI, No. 38 (1993, published 1997)

Funktionen serve as prolongations that help to underline the leading role of Konstrukte IIa and IIb. Whereas the stratification of minor thirds in m. 3 (Funktion F-G–B-D) fans out the initial chord (IIa), the first chord in m. 4 (Funktion G-BC-E), initiates another fanning-out gesture – this time completely symmetrical in intervallic makeup – before leading to the Ia-Ib juxtaposition that concludes the antecedent. Funktion C-E-F-A in the upper voices of mm. 5.3–6.2 “prolongs” Konstrukt IIb. Lendvai would have spoken of a cadential progression (S-D-T), and the

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interpretation of Funktion C-E-F-A as “tonic” does not seem completely unreasonable.34 Not only do C and A form the frame of the piece; the falling line after the climax (D-C / B-A) may be (and has been) analyzed as representing another S-D-T cadence.35 The prominence of the axis C-E-F-A throughout the piece supports such an interpretation.36 Even so, the somewhat questioning ending on A does not sound exactly like a classical tonic. However, if it is true that this second obituary is conceived as a kind of homage to Lendvai the theorist, then it aims to highlight two of the basic components of his work, and of the theory of Tonfelder too: Modell 1:3 (or Simon’s Konstrukte) which in this piece is responsible for actual (vertical) sounds, local harmonic relations, and the music’s overall harmonic character; and Modell 1:2 (Simon’s Funktionen), responsible in this piece for the prolongation of single Konstrukt chords, and for the constitution of the tonal axis. That such processes work without departing from Kurtág’s own musical idiom suggests that the latter is rooted not only in the theories of Lendvai and Simon, but also in a conception of Bartók’s musical language. That conception originated in what appears to have been an exceedingly fruitful period at the Liszt Academy in the first few years following World War II. III. Kurtág, … rappel des oiseaux … In 2005, on behalf of the Concours International de Quatuor à Cordes de Bordeaux, Kurtág compiled and arranged for string quartet six character pieces composed between 1999 and 2005 under the title Moments musicaux, op. 44. The title of the fifth piece is borrowed from one of Rameau’s Pièces de Clavecin of 1724. The point of contact is apparently the ostinato-like, nearly minimalistic beginning of Rameau’s piece, displaying (in the harpsichordist’s right hand) B and E in an accelerating pendular movement, until G completes the tonic triad (whose double repetition functions as an upbeat to the dominant version of the whole five-bar phrase). Kurtág’s … rappel des oiseaux … – with the bracketed subtitle “étude pour les harmoniques” – and with its almost exclusive reliance on third and fifth harmonics, may be understood as an homage to Rameau the theorist, who founded his system essentially on these two harmonics.37 The following analysis, proceeding section by section through the piece (see the overview in Fig. 1) will concentrate on harmony, especially on the relevance of Tonfelder.

34 35 36 37

Hohmaier, “Mutual Roots,” 232. Ibid., 232. Thus m. 3 (left hand: F-A-C) as an extension of m. 1 (left hand C-E), the framing pitches of m. 5 (C-A and D-C), the minor third axis C-F-A in the right hand at the beginning of the consequent. Instead of major-third-harmonics, Kurtág writes major-sixth harmonics throughout. The resulting pitch is the same (the fifth harmonic or major third plus two octaves), as well as – to my knowledge – the timbre. The intention could be to facilitate performance.

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Figure 1: Kurtág, … rappel des oiseaux … : overview

1–5

Ouverture

19–39

B section, climax in mm. 37–39

6–18

40–45

A section, concluding with a cadence in G, mm. 17–18 Coda, resuming the A section, forming – as a whole – an implied plagal cadence in C

Ouverture (mm. 1–5) The “Ouverture” – so named in the score, mm. 1–5 – follows Kurtág’s typical procedure of starting from the most elemental materials, which, however, are mostly presented in a quite unconventional or unexpected way. Here, it is the disposition of the open strings that functions as a point of departure, and as the basis of the modal structure of the piece (see Examples 3 and 4). A basic set of five pitches built by the open strings and the third (natural) harmonics (C-G-D-A-E) is expanded to a ninefold Quintenreihe – hereafter referred to as Q – by fifth (natural) harmonics. The pitch class B, having no place between E7 and F7, is displaced from its cyclic position to a lower register (as B4); only G appears with octave doubling in more than one register.38 Two potential modal centers within Q are exposed in this opening (see Example 5): A, represented by an added-sixth chord with a major seventh in the high register as a slightly sharpening component (hereafter referred to as the “A chord”)39; and G, as root of a major triad spanning three octaves with quasi-functional support from the cello’s low C. In the concrete compositional fabric of the “Ouverture,” A dominates, both as pedal note and as starting point for a twofold expansion based on the A chord and the G chord, respectively; the G chord as a whole emerges fleetingly at the beginning of m. 4. A section (mm. 6–18) The harmonic motion in mm. 6–18 presents itself in a (sometimes non-harmonic) relation to a harmonic surface determined largely by the A chord and its components, i. e., the violin tenths A5-C7 and E6-G7. The progression is initially based on falling thirds, with internal pairs of alternating major and minor thirds (see Example 6). An augmented triad over G (m. 8 ff.), highlighting the point of greatest tonal distance, brings the harmonic motion to a temporary halt; the subsequent A chord (after m. 10) interrupts the pattern – as a third minor-third skip – so returning the progression to its point of departure. The juxtaposition of this progression with the tenths on the harmonic surface results in a series of Konstrukt-like passages, featuring mostly harmonic aggregates that could be described as stratified components of augmented triads distanced by major sevenths or minor ninths. (Thus the 38 For B, as an alternative Kurtág could have chosen B5 as fifth natural harmonic on G3; G is also the only pitch that appears as both second and fourth harmonic. 39 Forming a kind of secondary partial (to E and C), the G doesn’t really sound dissonant. Ravel sometimes used the major seventh as a kind of frozen suspension to the added sixth.

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initial augmented triad E-C-G at m. 6 is supplemented by the augmented triad F-A-C – formed by the violin’s A-C and the cello’s pizz. F – that also accompanies the G-B-D at mm. 7–9.)

Example 3: Kurtág, … rappel des oiseaux …, Moments musicaux for string quartet, op. 44, No. 5, “Ouverture” (mm. 1–5), piano reduction. (Diamond-shaped noteheads indicate the actual pitches of notes produced as harmonics.)

Example 4: … rappel des oiseaux …, mm. 1–5, pitch content based on the disposition of strings (=Q).

Example 5: … rappel des oiseaux …, mm. 1–5, modal centers

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Example 6: … rappel des oiseaux …, mm. 6–10, piano reduction and falling thirds (bottom staff). Hollow noteheads with dots indicate notes played pizzicato.

The tenth A-C, which is prominent in the opening, functions as hinge between Konstrukt IIa and the A major-seventh chord, the latter being a subset of the A-chord as well as of Konstrukt Ia. (See Example 7, displaying the larger tonal harmonic dimensions of the Tonfelder within the A section; in the lower staff, components of the A chord that are not part of Ia are marked by triangular note-heads.) This at first mostly clear structure is increasingly interrupted by isolated flashbacks (see the down-arrows), as in m. 9 (reflecting m. 6) and m. 14 (reflecting the end of m. 4), or by “foreign objects,” such as the harmonic glissandi of mm. 11 and 15. Konstrukt IIb, originally forming the basis of m. 15, is pushed into the background: its representative pitches are played mostly pizzicato (see the hollow noteheads with dots), and are grouped in major sevenths and minor ninths – rather than thirds and fifths. By m. 16, they are followed by additional major sevenths (on C, B, E, F, and B) and a minor ninth (on F) which – together with the violin’s G – result in a complete chromatic aggregate. The acoustic foreground of this passage projecting these Tonfelder consists of the harmonics – i. e., primarily the descending fifth between the harmonic glissandi (D-G) in m. 15 – and the viola’s m. 16 “melody” (F-G-F-B) leading to a G major/minor chord (m. 16, last eighth-note), embedded within an octatonic field that represents Funktion G-B-C-E. Both events prepare the “cadence” in m. 17: here, the Quintenreihe of the “Ouverture” (Q), a hybrid combining components of Q and Ia, and (for the first time) Ib are juxtaposed in a manner that – as gesture – suggests the three components of a traditional cadence.40 Harmonically, though, one could speak of a kind of “Mixolydian” cadence (C-F-G). 40

I assume that even in post-tonal music there are closing gestures that, as a way of leading to the final chord of a piece or phrase, show some similarity with the traditional cadence, without necessarily restoring or even reflecting the harmonic implications of the latter. One of the basic concepts of cadence from the organum to the Classical style is its composition of antepenultima, penultima, and ultima or – speaking in terms of poyphonic music – dissonance, resolution, and finalis. Traces of this can be found in many post-tonal “cadences” of the early twentieth century. Harmonically speaking, “modal” composers such as Debussy, Ravel, Bartók, Ligeti, or Kurtág tend to use “modal” cadences (Phrygian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and so on).

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Example 7: … rappel des oiseaux …, mm. 6–18, piano reduction and Konstrukte (lower staff)

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The transition between Q and a compositional structure governed by Konstrukte has proved to be rather gradual, with Konstrukt Ia serving mostly as a hinge: Whereas Ia in m. 6 differs from Q only by the F and by the “false” octave position of C and G, the A major seventh chord at the end of m. 10 represents Q as well as Ia; its variant on D (m. 14, beat 2), as another subset of Q, differs from Ia by two pcs.41 The “penultima” at the end of m. 17 piles up components of both Tonfelder to create a hybrid. However, whereas Q (or members of Q) operates primarily as harmonic invariant, Konstrukte are more responsible for harmonic progressions: they form a vehicle for quick transitions between remote fundamentals – remote in terms of the circle of fifths – such as A and G. The sound of the passage is both highly homogenous and harmonic: the latter characterization references the somewhat sharp-edged biting harmonicity of Konstrukte, characterized not only by major thirds and perfect fifths, but also by the augmented fifth and major seventh. Because most harmonic entities are initially supported by thirds and fifths, hierarchies within harmonic entities and relations between them can form hierarchies comparable to the chordal relations familiar in more traditional tonal idioms. Where this harmonicity threatens to dissipate – as with the shift towards major sevenths and minor ninths (after m. 15) – the harmonic glissandi and the major/minor chord at the end of m. 16 help to (re-)direct the progression towards G as the second tonal center of the Ouverture. That tonic, originally rather weak, is here confirmed by the “Mixolydian cadence” of mm. 17–18. B section (mm. 19–39) The harmonic evolution in the middle section (mm. 19–39) may be construed as two Quintenreihen drifting apart (see Example 8). The process begins in m. 19 and 22 respectively, taking as its starting point the Triton D-G-C (as subset of Q) and meeting, so to speak, at the opposite side of the circle, with G-D / F-C. The harmonic process is interrupted by a short recourse to the final chord of the Ouverture (in m. 21), leading to a constellation that, by taking G6 and C2 as a frame, also refers back to Q (m. 27 ff.). Beginning with m. 25, F emerges as modal center, supported chiefly by the violins and by the sustained fifth in m. 27. At the same time, the Heptaton over G (m. 24, lower strings) splits into complementary whole-tone segments that, together with the cello’s open C string (m. 27) tend to distort F as modal center, without however really questioning it. On the harmonic surface, the drifting apart of the Quintenreihen makes itself felt initially with chromatically-displaced pitches in contrasting octaves (D4 and E4 vs. D5, E5 and F5 in mm. 19 and 22 ff.), then with a kind of bicinium that, by concentrating on major tenths and minor thirteenths (mm. 25 and 31), aims at false relations. In each case, one of the diatonic layers is emphasized, and at the same time becomes the object of chromatic irritation: the “lower” Quintenreihe in mm. 19–24, the “upper” in mm. 25–28.

41

Concerning the function of major seventh chords as hinges between Quintenreihe and Konstrukte, see Polth, “Zur Artikulation,” 227.

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Example 8: … rappel des oiseaux …, mm. 18–28, piano reduction and Quintenreihen

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Example 9: … rappel des oiseaux …, mm. 29–39, piano reduction and Quintenreihen

Climax G pitches, completely absent since m. 22, forcefully reenter the texture at m. 29, and in the following passage establish a competing modal center (see Example 9). Kurtág emphasizes the dramatic character of this interjection (mm. 29–30, echoed at 35–36) by underlaying the words “ … mors, mors stupebit …” in the cello part, hinting apparently at the corresponding passage in Verdi’s Requiem, which also stands out as a gesture of suddenly decreasing rhythmic and dynamic intensity. The interjection stimulates a harmonic crisis in the shape of an initially successive, then simultaneous polymodality. Whereas in mm. 31–34 the upper voice remains faithful to changing subsets of the Hexaton on A, the lower voices alternate between subsets of the Pentaton on C (artificial harmonics) and the Hexaton on C (natural harmonics).42 The result is a polymodal oscillation between contrasting diatonic regions, leading (by the end of m. 30) to a kind of polymodal split in the short octatonic passage, based on the Funktion G-B-C-E. 42

Mostly the C and the A Hexatons are clearly separated; only with F and C in mm. 32–33 does the viola enter the realm of the A Hexaton.

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The actual climax however (mm. 37–39), following the second interjection, consists of a stratification of three harmonic layers: the repeating-note figures quote the interjection of mm. 29 ff.; an internal extension in m. 37.2, however, leads to a short whole-tone segment (E-F-A-B). The pitches that confine the glissandi (lower staff) belong to the Funktion (C- E-F-A) that already governed mm. 35 ff. The parts playing harmonics start from a constellation similar to mm. 32 ff.: a Quintenreihe, corresponding basically to that of the upper voice in mm. 32 ff., is expanded successively from five to eleven pitches and finally replaced by (or filtered to) Konstrukt IIb, previously exposed in the passages at mm. 7, 12, and 15. The interaction of these layers at first glance seems to be oriented toward the chromatic scale (above all in mm. 37–38). The details, however, reveal that the combination of major thirds in the repeating-note figures and Quintenreihen harmonics results in Konstrukt-like harmonies. The harmonies within the framed passages consist of an augmented triad E-G-B, mostly enriched by F or C as part of Q, and in which G is clearly emphasized. Not only is G sustained (repeated); it is also aimed at by two glissandi in m. 37 and two “bass clauses” at the end of mm. 37 (viola) and 38 (violin 2). By contrast, m. 39 however is based almost completely on Konstrukt IIb. Coda (mm. 40–45) The coda combines aspects of traditional cadence and a résumé (see Example 10). An almost invariant layer consisting of C, G, D, and E pitches as components of Q, in cello and viola, is enriched to create a sort of plagal cadence. Only m. 44, representing the actual subdominant, stands apart, harmonically. The pitch “enrichments” – i. e. all pitches that transcend a simple major triad – in mm. 41 and 44 are Konstrukt-like: the respective triads (on C and F) are enriched by the augmented fifth, major seventh, and minor third. (In both cases, D is not part of the Konstrukt.)43 Due to the markedly different disposition of registers, however, a clear tendency towards the minor mode is articulated in m. 41, whereas the subdominant in m. 44, an added-sixth chord on F, is made slightly sharper by C and E as (fifth) harmonics of A and C and G as harmonics “of the second degree” (= fifth harmonic of E). The “applied dominant” in m. 42, by simply imitating the harmonic series, displays what could be easily expected from a piece called étude pour les harmoniques. The seventh partial, though, is tempered, and the eleventh, played as fifth harmonic, sounds only 14 cents (instead of 49 cents) lower than the tempered augmented fourth. IV. Conclusion The results of this analysis of … rappel des oiseaux … in terms of its constituent Tonfelder may be summarized in five points: 43 Compare the final chord of the A-section in m. 18 (G-B-D-E-B).

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Example 10: … rappel des oiseaux …, mm. 40–45, piano reduction and Tonfelder

1. The tonal path of the piece may be described as a shift of hierarchies within the lowest notes of the Quintenreihe Q, leading from A (mm. 1–5) over G (mm. 18 and 29–39) to C (mm. 40–45). The tension between A on the one hand and G and C on the other is anticipated by the “Ouverture.” The formal function of mm. 19–39 as contrasting middle section is suggested by the prominence of Quintenreihen including F, B, E, A and D – pitches not contained within Q and not representable as natural harmonics – and by the oscillation of these Quintenreihen with the “lower” notes of Q, while the Hexaton on A functions as an invariant pitch component. 2. Quintenreihen and Konstrukte, as the defining harmonic structures of the piece, are “preset” by its basic materials: Quintenreihen through the preference given to open strings and natural (third, fourth, and fifth) harmonics; Konstrukte through the major-third relations that result from the combination of open strings and third or fourth harmonics on the one hand and fifth harmonics on the other.44 Whereas Q (or subsets of Q, such as the A chord or the three lowest notes) functions as both a variable but still recognizable central sonority and an invariable layer of the compositional fabric, allowing us to perceive harmonic motions and distances, the main role of Konstrukte is to generate and to enable such motions, and to mark cessations of tonal motion. 44

Konstrukte IIa and Ia each intersect with Q by five pitch classes.

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3. Common-practice or other traditional components are embedded in the largerscale structures defined by Tonfelder as Quintenreihen and Konstrukte. These include Pentatone or Heptatone rows (pentatonic or diatonic fifth rows), major thirds, triads, major seventh chords, third relations, or even cadences. Thus while the composition is not directed along traditional harmonic paths, traditional means help to emphasize the centers of the polycentric structures generated by Tonfelder. Internal hierarchies are generated by the actual compositional fabric of a given passage. 4. The complex sonorities resulting from the tendency to Konstrukte may be characterized, dependent on the respective subset and on the disposition of intervals and registers, as rough (mm. 18, 37–39), painful (41), or more or less sharp (m. 9, seventh to eighth sixteenth notes, m. 44). The label Konstrukt informs us of a structural relation, possibly also of an aspect of Kurtág’s compositional thought; other categories will be necessary in order to define the aesthetic impact and formal function of these sonorities. 5. Analytic parsings according to Tonfelder do not however address the immediately intelligible, evocative, and sometimes drastic rhetoric one recognizes in Kurtág. His is a mode of speech that, with the help of tonal allusions, clarifies the harmonic path of a piece. One might point here to the “pas de dance” (mm. 9 and 12) as marking a temporary stop within a contrasting region; to the “cadence” on G (mm. 17–18); or to the Verdi allusion (mm. 29–30, 35–36) – all moments at which harmonic motion is directed towards the two lowest strings. The same is true of the final cadence. Analysis of Tonfelder suggests itself naturally in the case of Kurtág’s … rappel des oiseaux … , because the component pitch fields are set in advance by the basic materials of the piece. Nevertheless, the music can be regarded as paradigmatic for Kurtág insofar as fifths – in the form of Pentatone and Heptatone – are the recurring elemental starting points of his compositions, and, as Konstrukt-like extensions of the augmented, minor, or major triads, form an integral part of his harmonic vocabulary, even a hallmark. As analysis of One more word to Ernő Lendvai makes clear, it is not unreasonable, likewise, to hear Kurtág’s Bartók reception as taking place through the ears of Lendvai or perhaps Simon. If Tonfelder analysis ever makes sense in late twentiethor early twenty-first-century music, it is as a means of approaching the works of Kurtág (or at least some of them). Such an analysis will require that we don’t lose sight of Kurtág’s pragmatic and elemental way of thinking – his tendency to start composing always from the “raw materials” given by the instruments at hand. Bibliography Bárdos, Lajos. “Die volksmusikalischen Tonleitern bei Liszt.” In Hamburger, Franz Liszt (1978), 168–96. ––. “Modale Harmonien in den Werken von Franz Liszt.” In Hamburger, Franz Liszt (1978), 133– 67. (First appeared in a Hungarian-language edition, 1956.)

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––. Modális harmóniák. Budapest: Zeneműkiadó, 1961. ––. “Natürliche Tonsysteme: Methode ihrer Messung.” Studia Memoriae Belae Bartók Sacra. Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2nd edition, 1957, 209–48. Bodamer, Konstantin. “Albert Simon – ein ungarischer Autor.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 8 (2011): 335–49. Cohn, Richard. “Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Progressions.” Music Analysis 15 (1996): 9–40. Gammert, Jonathan. “Die ‘Theorie der Tonfelder’ und die Neo-Riemannian Theory: Wie kam Riemann nach Ungarn?” Paper presented at the eleventh annual congress of the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, Bern, 2–4 December 2011. Gárdonyi, Zoltán. “Neue Tonleiter- und Sequenztypen in Liszts Frühwerken.” Studia Musicologica 11 (1969): 169–99. ––. “Neue Ordnungsprinzipien der Tonhöhen in Liszts Frühwerken.” In Hamburger, Franz Liszt (1978), 226–73. Haas, Bernhard. Die neue Tonalität von Schubert bis Webern: Hören und Analysieren nach Albert Simon. Wilhelmshaven: Noetzel, 2004. ––. “Zu zwei Bartók-Analysen Albert Simons.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 8 (2011): 299–334. Hamburger, Klára, ed. Franz Liszt: Beiträge ungarischer Autoren. Budapest: Corvina, 1978. Hohmaier, Simone. “Mutual Roots of Musical Thinking: György Kurtág, Péter Eötvös, and Their Relation to Ernő Lendvai’s Theories.” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 43 (2002): 223–34. ––. “Ein zweiter Pfad der Tradition”: Kompositorische Bartók-Rezeption. Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2003. Lendvai, Ernő. “Einführung in die Formen- und Harmoniewelt Bartóks.” In Béla Bartók:Weg und Werk, Schriften und Briefe, 2nd edition, edited by Bence Szabolcsi, 105–49. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1972. ––. Bartók stílusa a “Szonáta két zongorára és ütőhangszerekre” és a “Zene húros-, ütőhangszerekre és celestára” tükrében [Bartók’s Style as Reflected in the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta]. Budapest: Zeneműkiadó, 1955. ––. Bartók’s Style as Reflected in the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Trans. Paul Merrick and Judit Pokoly. Budapest: Akkord, 1999. ––. “Bartók: Szonáta két zongorára és ütőhangszerekre: Az I. tétel analízise” [Bartók, Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion: Analysis of the first Movement]. Budapest: Zenei Szemle 8 (1948): 412–26. Lichtenfeld, Monika, ed. György Ligeti: Gesammelte Schriften. Veröffentlichungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 10. 2 vols. Mainz: Schott, 2007. Ligeti, György. “Neues aus Budapest: Zwölftonmusik oder ‘Neue Tonalität’?” In Lichtenfeld, György Ligeti (Mainz: Schott, 2007), I:56–60. Originally published in Melos, 1950. ––. “Über Bartóks Harmonik.” 1961. In Lichtenfeld, György Ligeti: Gesammelte Schriften (Mainz: Schott, 2007), I:302–08. ––. “Zur Chromatik Bartóks” [Notes on some conditions in the origins of Bartók’s chromaticism]. German translation by Éva Pintér in Lichtenfeld, György Ligeti, I:295–301. Originally published as “Megjegyzések a bartóki kromatika kialakulásának egyes feltétéleirol” in Új Zenei Szemle 6, no. 9 (1955): 41–44. Messiaen, Olivier. Technik meiner musikalischen Sprache, trans. Sieglinde Ahrens. Paris: Leduc, ca. 1966. Single-volume edition. Originally published as Technique de mon langage musical (Paris: Leduc, 1944). Polth, Michael. “Einzelton und harmonischer Kontext in der Tonfeld-Theorie.” Paper presented at the eighth European Music Analysis Conference, Leuven, Belgium, 17–21 September 2014. ––. “Tonalität der Tonfelder: Anmerkungen zu Bernhard Haas, ‘Die neue Tonalität von Schubert bis Webern. Hören und Analysieren nach Albert Simon.’” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 3 (2006): 167–78.

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––. “Zum Verhältnis von Harmonik und Instrumentation ‘vor Wagner.’” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 11 (2014): 37–61, http://www.gmth.de/zeitschrift/artikel/778.aspx ––. “Zur Artikulation von Tonfeldern bei Brahms, Debussy und Stockhausen.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 8 (2011): 225–65. Schiltknecht, Dres. “‘Post-tonale Prolongation’: ein amerikanischer Diskurs als Impulsgeber für methodische Ansätze einer (europäischen) Tonfeld-Theorie.” Paper presented at the fourteenth annual congress of the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, Geneva, 17–19 October 2014. Sprick, Jan Philipp. “Sequences between Affirmation and Destruction of Tonality.” Paper presented at the eighth European Music Analysis Conference, Leuven, 17–21 September 2014. Varga, Bálint András, ed. György Kurtág: Drei Gespräche mit Bálint András Varga und Ligeti Hommagen. Hofheim: Wolke, 2010.

Index Note: entries marked I refer to page numbers in Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2012); entries marked II refer to pages in the present volume. Adams, John, II:206, 297 Harmonielehre, I:78–79 Adams, Robert D. W., I:113, 119–20 Adès, Thomas, II:16, 295–309 Arcadiana, II:298, 301 Brahms, II:298 Chamber Symphony, II:298 In Seven Days, II:301 Piano Quintet, op. 20, II:221n2, 298, 301–09 Powder Her Face, II:298 The Tempest, II:301 Tevot, II:301 Three Studies from Couperin, II:298 Violin Concerto: “Concentric Paths,” II:301 Nancarrow Studies for Piano Nos. 6 and 7 (arr. Adès), II:298 Adler, Guido, I:69, 126 Adorno, Theodor W., I:17, 82, 91, 137, 220, 221; II:124–26, 245 Philosophie der neuen Musik / Philosophy of New Music, I:72, 82, 91 “Ad vocem Hindemith,” II:51 “Composing for the Films,” II:125 “Ernst Kurths ‘Musikpsychologie,’” II:30 “Die gegängelte Musik,” II:124 “Gegen die neue Tonalität,” I:220 “On the Fetish Character of Music,” I:41 “Schöne Stellen,” I:179n14 Agmon, Eytan, I:49, 51 Albright, Daniel, I:34, 42 Alkan, Charles-Valentin, II:313 Anderson, Julian, II:80, 211 Ansermet, Ernest, II:39–40 Antheil, George, I:27 Ballet mécanique, I:37 Apollinaire, Guillaume Les Peintres Cubistes, I:12n4 archaism, I:69, 173, 203, 205, 210, 216, 219, 221 Ashby, Arved, I:39; II:72n26 Ashton, Frederick, II:140n25, 141 atonality, I:11–12, 68, 84, 90, 102, 109,

113–15, 117, 121–22, 143–47, 149–54, 158, 159–62, 192, 207, 210, 223, 225–26, 228–30, 251; II:12–13, 16, 22, 28, 53, 61, 90n7, 105, 107, 108, 133n18, 151, 155, 164, 193, 234, 238, 240, 244, 247–48, 250–52, 262, 299 Auden, W. H., I:243 augmented triads, I:194, 199, 228, 253, 265; II:192, 301, 321, 328 Auric, Georges, I:40, 143, 146, 148 Austin, William, I:12 avant-garde, I:11, 69, 78, 145–49, 151, 157, 223; II:16–17, 18, 39, 51, 61, 69, 129n2, 130, 157–58, 210, 236, 240, 263, 297 Babadzhanyan (Babajanian), Arno, II:235 Babbitt, Milton, I:70, 73n27, 78 Bachelard, Gaston, II:170n7 Bach, Johann Sebastian, I:15, 17, 33, 65, 73, 77, 89, 158, 220 Duetto BWV 803, I:158 Fugue in E Minor BWV 548, II:57, 60 Sinfonia in F minor, I:84–85, 87 Well-Tempered Clavier I Fugue in C# minor, I:184n25 Fugue in D major, I:86–87 quotations of, II:74, 238, 245, 252, 254 Balinese music, I:33 Barber, Samuel, I:18, 189 Nocturne: Homage to John Field, op. 33, I:261–76 Piano Sonata, op. 26, I:264n6 Bárdos, Lajos, II:317–18 Barkin, Elaine, II:297–98 Barrière, Jean-Baptiste, II:264–65, 267 Bartók, Béla, I:17, 27, 32, 58–59, 108, 120, 147, 173, 174n2, 185n27, 216; II:155, 159, 192, 205, 234, 313, 314, 315n10, 316–20, 323n40 Mikrokosmos, I:205n8 String Quartet No. 4, II:194, 205n20, 206 String Quartet No. 6, I:94 Harvard lectures, I:174n2, 216n36 Bauhaus, II:267 The Beatles, II:14

334

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“Can’t Buy Me Love,” II:14, 97 “A Day in the Life,” II:69, 70 “Hey Jude,” II:96 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, II:69 Beethoven, Ludwig van, I:25, 31, 41, 43, 66, 73, 77, 190; II:245 Pastoral Symphony, I:189–90 Piano sonatas, I:15 Symphony No. 5, I:41–42, 190 Symphony No. 9, I:197 Rochberg’s imitation of, II:155, 159–60, 162 Becher, Johannes R., II:116, 117 Beiche, Michael, I:13, 223; II:27n3, 28n6, 299n15 Benjamin, Walter, I:38, 40; II:115–116n18 Berg, Alban, I:17, 27, 38, 108, 225, 261, 275–76; II:133, 192–93, 302 Chamber Concerto, I:38 Lulu, I:38; II:55, 57, 133n18 Violin Concerto, I:251n7, 261, 276; II:55, 133n18 Der Wein, I:38 Wozzeck, I:152, 275n14; II:235 Bergson, Henri, I:126, 130–31, 135 Berio, Luciano, II:70, 296 Sinfonia, II:36–39, 47, 61, 155–56 Berlin, Irving “That Mysterious Rag,” I:42 Berlioz, Hector, II:228n39, 299 Bernstein, Leonard, I:78; II:210n5 Candide, II:60–61 Trouble in Tahiti, II:60–61 Bieber, Justin, I:43; II:84 Billings, William, I:66 bimodality, I:174n2 bitonality, I:147, 150, 159–60, 162, 166, 170–71, 229–30, 254; II:143; see also polytonality Blech, Leo, I:64 Bloch, Ernest, I:70; II:106n4 Bloch, Ernst, I:122 Bloom, Harold, I:66 blues, II:16, 18, 89–95, 97, 297 Bodamer, Konstantin, II:313 Böggemann, Markus, I:120 Borio, Gianmario, II:69n15, 72n26, 129n2 Born, Georgina, II:67n6, 262n10, 264 Boulanger, Nadia, I:64, 65, 70, 248, 250 Boulez, Pierre, I:11, 37, 275; II:56, 57, 73, 129, 185n23, 255, 261–62, 266–67 Bourdieu, Pierre, I:143, 148, 150; II:266

Brackett, David, II:90n6 Brahms, Johannes, I:15, 65, 70, 73, 77; II:214, 245, 301 Variations on a Theme by Paganini, II:162–63 Brecht, Bertolt, II:118 Bridge, Frank, I:224, 226, 231 String Quartet No. 3, I:229–30 Brinkman, Alexander, II:95n23 Britten, Benjamin, I:15, 18, 223–45; II:209– 10, 230 Billy Budd, I:238n55 Bridge Variations, I:223 Hymn to the Virgin, I:230 “Villes” (Les illuminations), I:223–24, 231, 233–40 Quartet in D (1931), I:224 Quartettino, I:224, 230 Quatre Chansons Françaises, I:225 Michelangelo Sonnets, I:223 “Veggio co’ bei vostri occhi,” I:240–43 Sextet for Wind, I:224, 230–33, 242 Sinfonietta, op. 1, I:224 Temporal Suite, I:230n42 Violin Concerto, I:240 Young Apollo, I:231 War Requiem, I:241n59 Brockhaus, Heinz Alfred, II:117 Brown, Malcolm Hamrick, II:236n13 Buchla, Donald, II:73, 79, 81 Burkholder, Peter, I:65 Busoni, Ferruccio, I:17, 27, 35, 65, 227 Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, I:32 Cage, John, I:27, 37, 40, 77–78; II:71n23, 178n16, 0’0”, II:69–70 “A History of Experimental Music in the United States,” I:36, 40; II:74 Organ2/ASLSP, II:72 Silence, II:74n36 Cahn, Peter, II:131 Campbell, Joseph, II:170n7 Carlos, Wendy (Walter) Switched on Bach, II:82 Carter, Elliott, II:210, 214 Carter, Roy E., I:113, 120 Chadabe, Joel, II:67, 79n54, 80, 81n65 Chadwick, George, I:64 Chailley, Jacques, II:262 CHANT Project, II:267n25 Charpentier, Gustave Louise, I:191n7 Chigaryova, Yevgeniya, II:247n49

Index Chinese Music, I:33, 41; II:53 Chopin, Frédéric, I:274; II:155, 254 chromaticism, I:15, 17–18, 49, 53, 55, 58, 61, 83, 133, 146, 158, 160, 162, 166–67, 173, 189, 210, 216, 218, 220, 225, 229, 230–31, 235, 239, 251, 262, 272; II:13, 15, 41, 56, 58, 61n28, 72, 92, 94–95, 98, 114n16, 135, 194, 199–200, 220, 247, 287, 291, 294, 318, 325 Ciamaga, Gustav, II:75–76, 81–82 Clark, Suzannah, II:72 Clutsam, G. H., I:227 Cohn, Richard, I:233, 235, 237; II:15, 206n23, 211, 296, 315n11 collapse/dissolution of tonality, I:11, 13, 67, 107–08, 125, 146, 153, 157–58, 194, 220, 223; II:13–14, 18 Collet, Henri, I:144 Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, II:79 common practice (Piston), I:115; II:14–15 Cone, Edward T., I:70 Connor, Steven, I:26, 29 consonance/dissonance binary, I:15, 29, 32, 49, 51, 54, 69–70, 72, 87, 101, 104, 108–09, 115–16, 118n15, 134, 185, 194, 210, 239, 247–49, 254, 259n18, 263, 274; II:18, 39, 41, 54–55, 96, 105, 211, 220n20, 262–63, 268, 272, 277–79, 284–85, 290 contemporaneity/sovremennost’, II:236, 239 Cook, Nicholas, II:95n23, 167, 177 Copland, Aaron, I:12, 17, 64, 247; II:17, 214 counterpoint/polyphony, I:11, 13, 16, 64, 68, 70, 73, 75, 77, 100, 132, 147, 152, 158, 182–83, 189, 198, 205, 207, 210–11, 216, 218–20, 224, 229, 235, 241, 256, 276; II:11, 15, 130, 133, 135, 143–44, 146, 164, 214–15 Cowell, Henry, I:27, 64, 67–69, 79, 227, 256 New Musical Resources, I:68, 161n14 Crumb, George Ancient Voices of Children, II:74, 77 Cubism, I:12, 221; II:105 Dahlhaus, Carl, I:14, 74, 119; II:27, 39n17, 71 Between Romanticism and Modernism, I:34; II:68n11, 216 “What is ‘History of Music Theory’?,” I:119 Dalbavie, Marc-André, II:264, 266, 280 Dallapiccola, Luigi, I:275n14; II:57 Darmstadt Ferienkurse, II:17, 53, 68n12, 129 Daudet, Lucien, I:144n4 Davidovsky, Mario

335

Synchronism No. 6, II:79 Davies, Peter Maxwell, II:229 Davis, H. Walford, I:228 Debussy, Claude, I:12, 27, 28, 41, 144, 147, 149, 169, 225, 227, 253; II:36, 192, 322 Canope, I:38 La soirée dans Grenade (Estampes), I:37 de Clercq, Trevor, II:89n3, 90n6, 92n13, 93n14–17, 94 Deep Purple “Smoke on the Water,” II:97 deLio, Thomas, II:168 Delius, Frederick Paris: The Song of a Great City, I:193 Denisov, Edison, II:235, 255 Confession [Ispoved], II:254 L’Écume du Jours, II:254 Requiem, II:254 Deroux, Jean, I:161 Dessau, Paul Das Eisenbahnspiel, I:203n2 Deutsch, Diana, II:76 Deutsche Kammermusik festival (Baden-Baden), I:203n1, 218n38 developing variation, I:103n22, 184; II:41 DeVoto, Mark, I:17 diatonicism, I:17, 48–49, 51, 87, 146–47, 158–59, 162–67, 176–79, 188–89, 194, 197, 205, 209–10, 216, 218–21, 229, 240–41, 250, 252; II:13, 15, 59–60, 92, 95–96, 112, 144–45, 148, 191, 234, 236, 237n21, 238, 254, 290, 300–03, 315, 317–18, 325, 330 digital processing, II:82, 277 Dilthey, Wilhelm, I:138 Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, I:128 Dobberstein, Marcel, II:39 Doflein, Erich and Elma, I:205n8 Doll, Christopher, II:91, 94n22 Domann, Andreas, II:157n9, 297n8 Donaueschinger Musiktage, I:203n1 Donizetti, Gaetano, II:131 Lucia di Lammermoor, I:31 Doppler, Christian, I:30 double plagal progression, II:96 Ducasse, Jean Roger, I:149 Dufourt, Hugues, II:263, 265, 266n22 Dupré, Marcel, I:162, 169 Traité de l’Improvisation à l’Orgue, I:162 Durey, Louis, I:144 Dvořák, Antonín, I:64 Dwight, John Sullivan, I:65–66

336

Index

Dyson, George, I:226, 229; II:11n4, 15 Eaton, John, II:81 Edison, Thomas, I:26, 28–29, 40 Eimert, Herbert Atonale Musiklehre, I:160n8 Eisler, Hanns, I:17, 122; II:105–27 “Composing for the Films,” II:125 “Das Wunderland,” II:118–24 Nationalhymne der DDR, II:109–12, 116, 119, 125 Neue deutsche Volkslieder, II:109, 114, 117–18 Eldred, Michael, II:176–77 Elgar, Edward Cockaigne: In London Town, I:193 Ellington, Duke, I:12 emancipation of dissonance, I:11, 33, 68, 70, 78, 108, 115, 117–18, 121–22, 185, 256 Eno, Brian Music for Airports, II:84 Enya, II:84 Erpf, Hermann Studien zur Harmonie- und Klangtechnik der neueren Musik, I:160n6 Evans, Edwin, I:228–29, 231 Everett, Walter, II:89n1, 90n7, 91, 94–96 exotic, I:27–28, 32–33, 40–41, 189; II:59 expressionism, I:72, 121, 123, 136, 225 Fabian, Johannes, I:41 Farthofer, Lisa, II:286n7, 287n8 Fauré, Gabriel, I:149, 230 fauxbourdon, I:216, 256 Fédération Musicale Populaire, I:153 Feldman, Morton, II:167–85 Give My Regards to Eighth Street, II:169n6, 174n9, 185n23 The Viola in My Life I, II:169–85 Fétis, François-Joseph, I:14, 18, 48–49, 50, 66–67 Traité complet de la théorie et de la pratique de l’harmonie, I:14, 48n7; II:53 Field, John, I:261–62, 270, 274 Fink, Robert, II:71, 78n50 Fischer, Hans, I:213 folkloristic tonality, I:13, 17, 27, 69, 187, 204, 248; II:13, 89, 90, 93, 117, 233n3, 306, 317 Forte, Allen, I:114; II:205, 206n23 Foss, Lukas Baroque Variations, II:155–56 Foulds, John, I:226 Fourier, Joseph, I:30

Franck, César, II:245, 313 Three Organ Chorales, I:183n22 Freeman, Betty, II:194 Freud, Sigmund, I:50–52, 121, 126, II:261 Frisch, Walter, I:100, 117 Fuchs, Robert, I:64 function (harmonic), I:15, 48, 160, 167, 169n23, 176, 216, 219n43, 235, 241–42, 264; II:12, 30, 54–55, 76, 90–91, 95–96, 97n24, 98, 133, 136, 140, 148–51, 154, 161, 190, 192–94, 198, 200, 204, 212, 214, 220, 223, 226, 233n3, 234–35, 254, 260, 269–70, 279, 284, 299–309, 315, 317, 321 fundamental tone, I:34, 114, 133–34, 248; II:44, 198, 278, 290, 293, 325 “furniture music,” I:34 Futurists, Italian, I:27, 32 Gamelan, Javanese, I:28; II:75 Gebrauchsmusik, I:17, 203, 217, 221 Gemeinschaftskunst, I:203, 205 Geitel, Klaus, II:132n13, 151 Gentle Giant, II:90n7 German music (national tradition), I:75, 146, 148–49, 158, 170n26; II:131 Gershwin, George, I:12, 64, 247 Gesualdo, Carlo, I:92, 220 Gilson, Paul Traité d’Harmonie, I:161 Ginastera, Alberto, I:18 Gloag, Kenneth, II:157n9, 295n1 Goddard, Scott, I:224 Goehr, Alexander, II:296 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, II:132 Goldman, Jonathan, II:262n11 Goldmark, Karl, I:64 Goldmark, Rubin, I:64 Gregorian chant, I:253; II:317 Dies irae, I:84; II:228n39 Veni creator spiritus, II:51–52 Grey, Cecil, I:226 Grisey, Gérard, II:12–13, 80, 262–65, 266n22, 268 Dérives, II:264 Partiels, II:68, 264n16 Grundgestalt, I:250 Griffiths, Paul, I:12; II:75, 168n4 and 5 Gubaidulina, Sofia Offertorium, II:254 Quasi hoketus, II:254 Guck, Marion, II:296 guitar, II:16, 90–91, 96, 98 Haas, Bernhard, II:313–14

Index Haas, Georg Friedrich, II:283–94 in vain, II:283, 286, 288, 292–93 Nacht, II:286 String Quartet No. 2, II:288–92 String Quartet No. 3, In iij. Noct., II:286 Haimo, Ethan, I:114 Halm, August, I:204n4 Handschin, Jacques, I:71 “harmonisches Gefälle” (Hindemith), I:84 Harrison, Daniel, II:14n18, 15, 72, 214n14 Harris, Roy, I:189, 247–60; II:14n17 Ode to Consonance, I:258–59 Piano Quintet, I:250–51, 256 Piano Sonata, I:250 Symphony 1933, I:249–50 Third String Quartet, I:249 Third Symphony, I:254–55, 257 Hartmann, Karl Amadeus, II:131 Hauer, Josef Matthias, I:113, 115; II:53 Vom Melos zur Pauke: Einführung in die Zwölftonmusik, I:160n7 heavy metal, II:89n1, 93, 96 Heinsheimer, Hans, I:211–12 Heiß, Hermann, II:53 Helmholtz, Hermann von, I:30, 32, 66; II:30 On the Sensation of Tones, I:26 Hendrix, Jimi “Hey Joe,” II:14, 98 Henze, Hans Werner, II:12, 17, 129–52 Apollo et Hyazinthus, II:133–34 Bohemian Fifths (Reiselieder mit böhmischen Quinten), II:17n34, 129n1, 130n5 Boulevard Solitude, II:130, 135, 137–42, 146, 151 Das Ende einer Welt, II:135–37, 140, 146, 151 Das Floß der Medusa, II:132 Der junge Lord, II:130, 146–50, 151 König Hirsch, II:129n3, 130, 146 Der Prinz von Homburg, II:130 Symphony No. 2, II:129 Undine, II:132n12, 140–45, 151 Versuch über Schweine, II:132 Violin Concerto No. 1, II:60, 129 Whispers from Heavenly Death, II:133 Musik und Politik, II:13n11, 131n11, 132n13, 133n17, 151n34 hexatonic collection/poles; see pitch collections Hindemith, Paul, I:17, 27, 38, 67, 70–76, 79, 81–96, 205–06, 217–19, 220; II:51–60 Lehrstück, I:217

337

Ludus tonalis, I:89 Mathis der Maler, I:75, 84 Plöner Musiktag, I:206, 218–19, 221 Sinfonietta in E, I:16 Wir bauen eine Stadt, I:203n2, 217 Writings: A Composer’s World / Komponist in seiner Welt, I:90; II:52 A Concentrated Course in Traditional Harmony, I:74 “Hören und Verstehen unbekannter Musik,” I:90, 91 “Sterbende Gewässer” lecture, I:90, 91; II:51–54, 62 Unterweisung im Tonsatz / The Craft of Musical Composition, I:71, 74–75, 81–96, 218; II:51–52, 54, 58 Hinton, Stephen, I:221 Hirata, Catherine Costello, II:168, 169, 176n13 Holland, John Acoustic Wave Spectrum, I:43 Holst, Gustav, I:187, 230 Honegger, Arthur, I:144 Le Roi David, I:148 Hornbostel, Erich von, I:32, 38, 40, 69 Hull, Arthur Eaglefield, I:228, 229 Modern Harmony, I:227 Hurel, Philippe, II:264, 266 Huron, David, II:296 Hyer, Brian, I:13, 28, 109, 223; II:11n4, 28–29, 296, 299n15 individualization of harmony, I:34; II:68n11, 216 Indy, Vincent d’, I:148–49 Inge, Leif 9 Beet Stretch, I:43; II:72, 84 IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), II:68, 262n10, 264–67, 269 Ireland, John, I:224, 230 Ives, Charles, I:27, 37, 64, 67, 161n14, 194, 200; II:154 Central Park in the Dark, I:193 “Comedy” (Symphony No. 4), I:65 Quarter-Tone Pieces, II:285 The Unanswered Question, I:66 Memos, I:65 Ives, George, I:65 Jalowetz, Heinrich, I:33 Janáček, Leoš, I:27, 32, 39; II:300 “Strolling,” I:39 Mládi, I:230 jazz, I:67; II:16n28, 52, 59, 61, 190, 239, 297

338

Index

Jentsch, Ernst, I:52 Jöde, Fritz, I:204n4 John, Elton “Crocodile Rock,” II:96 Johnson, Timothy A., II:206 Johnson, Tom, II:180n18 Joyce, James Ulysses, I:192 Julien, Olivier, II:90n4 Kagel, Mauricio, II:59, 61 Kahn, Douglas, I:31 Kanai, Ryota, II:76 Kandinsky, Wassily Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), I:33 Kancheli, Giya Symphony No. 4, “In Memory of Michelangelo,” II:254 Symphony No. 5, II:254 Kane, Brian, II:76 Kapp, Reinhard, I:77 Karayev, Kara, II:234 Kasparov, Yuriy Devil’s Trill, II:255 Katz, Mark, I:29, 36, 38; II:71n26 Kayser, Hans, II:52–53 Keller, Hans, I:76, 224 Kelly, Barbara, I:149 Kelly, Elaine, II:107n6 Kemp, Ian, I:213 Kempelen, Wolfgang von Vox Humana, I:31 Kestenberg, Leo, I:204–05 Kholopov, Yuri, II:233n3, 234–36, 255 King Crimson, II:90n7 Kirchner, Leon, I:78 Kittler, Friedrich, I:26, 31, 36, 40 Klang, see sound Klangfarbenmelodie, I:33, 33n31, 121; II:273 Klangfläche, II:71 Klein, Fritz Heinrich “Die Grenze der Halbtonwelt,” I:160n9 Knussen, Oliver, II:209–30 Autumnal, II:209–10, 216, 227 Coursing, II:211, 215–22, 225n32, 226 Horn Concerto, II:210, 211 Introduction and Masque, II:223 Ophelia Dances, II:209, 211–15, 229 Ophelia’s Last Dance, II:211 Sonya’s Lullaby, II:211–15, 222–23, 227 Symphony No. 3, II:222–30 Trumpets, II:209 Kodály, Zoltán, I:32

Koechlin, Charles, I:143, 147, 149–54, 158, 161 “Tonal ou Atonal?,” I:150–52 König, Rudolph, I:32 Korndorf, Nikolai, II:254 Kovacs, Inge, II:129n2, 132n15 Kozinn, Allan, II:12n9, 236n16, 241n31 Kramer, Jonathan, II:67n7, 71, 73, 80, 295n1, 297n8 Kraus, Karl, I:191 Krenek, Ernst, I:70, 151, 153 Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae, II:58 Studies in Counterpoint, I:269n1, 275; II:133 Über neue Musik, I:71–72 Kurtág, György, II:176n13, 313–31 One more Word to Ernö Lendvai (Játékok VI, 38), II:318–20 Six moments musicaux, II:320–31 A Solemn Air … a 70 éves Simon Albert tiszteletére, II:316 Kurth, Ernst, I:13, 125–39, 227; II:14, 30n10 Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts, I:129, 133 Musikpsychologie, I:127, 137 Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners Tristan, I:125, 128–29, 132, 135 Die Voraussetzungen der theoretischen Harmonik und der tonalen Darstellungssysteme, I:126–27 Lachenmann, Helmut II:27, 47–48, 57–58, 73 Accanto, II:47 Allegro sostenuto, II:30–36 lad, II:233 Lambert, Constant Music Ho!, I:226 Landormy, Paul, I:145 Landowski, Marcel, II:262 Larson, Steve, II:300n20 Laurencin, Marie, I:144n4 Leibowitz, René, I:275; II:132 Leichtentritt, Hugo, I:99–100, 110 Lendvai, Ernö, I:185n27; II:314n6, 315, 316–20, 331 Lenormand, René, I:227 Les Six, I:17, 143–44, 148, 150 Levin, Thomas, I:32 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, II:40 Lewin, David, I:38, 238n55 Lewin, Frank, I:75 Ligeti, György, II:12, 13, 58, 61, 69, 259, 317–18, 323n40 Cello Concerto, II:273

Index First String Quartet, II:59 Le grand macabre, II:59 Musica Ricercata, II:59 Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano, II:300 Violin Concerto, II:59 “Metamorphoses of Musical Form,” I:43 Lilja, Esa, II:93n18 Lindberg, Magnus, II:280 Liszt, Franz, II:15, 59n24, 155, 216, 245, 313, 318 Orpheus, I:185n27 Lortzing, Albert Zar und Zimmerman, II:148 Louis, Rudolf, I:106, 117–18, 123 Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart, I:117 Lück, Hartmut, II:133n19, 134n21 Luhmann, Niklas, II:111, 116n18 Lyubimov, Alexei, II:246 MacDonald, Calum, II:241 Mach, Ernst, I:33n31 Machabey, Armand “Dissonance, Atonalité, Polytonalité,” I:162 Machaut, Guillaume de Ballad, “Il m’est avis,” I:84 Mahler, Alma, I:33 Mahler, Gustav, I:27, 33, 231, 238, 239; II:61, 131, 155, 164, 229 Das Lied von der Erde, I:40–41 Symphony No. 3, I:37 quotations of, II:36, 47 Malherbe, Claudy, II:264 Manning, Peter, II:66, 69 Mann, Thomas, II:245 Margulis, Elizabeth, II:67, 73, 75–76 Martin, Frank, I:18; II:56 Martynov, Vladimir, II:255 Correspondence, II:254 Marvin, Elizabeth West, II:95n23, 193n10, 295n1 Marzynski, Georg, I:217 “Music for amateurs,” I:205 McAdams, Stephen, II:259, 268–71 McPhee, Colin, I:27, 33 Médicis, François de, I:144, 148 Mellers, Wilfrid, I:157 melodic-harmonic divorce, II:89n2, 91, 97 melodic tonality, I:14, 147, 160, 205–06, 210–11, 218, 220–21; II:27–28, 52, 143, 144 Mendel, Arthur, I:81–82, 84, 250 Messiaen, Olivier, I:22; II:16,18n41, 56–57, 142, 210n5, 315

339

Metzer, David, II:157n13, 178n16 Meyer, Ernst Hermann Musik im Zeitgeschehen, II:107 microtonality, II:41, 91, 95, 273, 275, 277–79, 283–94 Middleton, Richard, II:90n6 Milhaud, Darius, I:17, 143–44, 145–49, 152–54, 157–71 “Étude” (Cinq Symphonies, no. 4), I:163–65, 171 “Polytonalité et Atonalité,” I:153, 158–61 Saudades do Brazil, I:163, 165–71 “Botafogo,” I:167, 169, 170n25 “Corcovado,” I:168–69, 170n25 “Ipanema,” I:169–70 “Sorocaba,” I:165–67 Third Symphony for Small Orchestra, I:146–48 Miller, Dayton The Science of Musical Sounds, I:30–31 modality, I:17, 43, 83, 91n29, 132, 150, 162, 169, 173–76, 180, 182, 184, 189, 194, 198, 210, 214, 216, 220, 236, 249–51; II:13, 142, 191 modernism (musical), I:26, 78, 118, 125, 152, 161, 188, 191–94, 203, 205, 211, 216, 220–21, 226–28, 249–50, 256, 276; II:16, 53, 261–62, 270, 279; see also postmodernism; Ultra-Modernism modulation, I:53, 65, 70, 77, 125, 158, 163, 167n22, 170n24, 175n7, 228–29, 231, 256; II:94, 111, 142n29, 185 Monier, Georges, I:161–62 montage, I:216–17, 221; II:66n3, 286 Monteverdi, Claudio, I:18, 117, 118n14, 123 Moore, Allan F., II:89n2, 91n11 Morand, Paul, I:144n4 Morgan, Robert P., I:32–33, 37; II:216n18 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, I:33, 77, 105, 107; II:12, 47, 112n15, 131, 156, 220n21, 246 Piano Concerto, K. 466, II:148 Muradeli, Vano Velikaya druzhba, II:105–06 Murail, Tristan, II:214n15, 262, 263, 265, 266n22, 268, 283 Gondwana, II:264 Mussat, Marie-Claire, I:144 Neher, Caspar, I:212n30 neoclassicism, I:70, 223, 247, 248, 250; II:146, 253 Neo-Riemannian theory, I:15; II:15, 72,

340

Index

94n21, 206, 314n5; see also Riemann, Hugo Neue Musik Berlin 1930 festival, I:203, 206 Neue Sachlichkeit, I:212 Newlin, Dika, I:76–77 Newman, Ernest, I:226, 227 “New Simplicity,” II:18n38, 61 “New Tonality,” I:12, 220, 221; II:18, 58, 233–40, 254–56, 313–14, 316 Nobile, Drew, II:97n24 Noble, Alistair, II:168n5, 177n15 Nono, Luigi, II:51, 56–58, 129n2 Il Canto Sospeso, II:57 Fragmente—Stille, An Diotima, II:284 Nørgård, Per Voyage into the Golden Screen, II:229 “nostalgic tonality,” I:18; II:155 octatonicism; see pitch collections Offenbach, Jacques The Tales of Hoffmann, II:137 Ohm, Georg, I:30 Oliveros, Pauline, II:74–75 organum, I:69, 256; II:72, 323n40 Ornstein, Leo, I:69 overtone series, I:28–29, 33–35, 68, 103–04, 108, 115, 119, 241, 249n4, 254, 261n1; II:28, 44, 48, 54–55, 59, 61, 122, 168, 214, 227, 255, 283, 286–91; see also sound; spectralism Paganini, Nicolò Caprice for solo violin in A minor, II:161–63 Paine, John Knowles, I:63 Parker, Horatio, I:64, 65, 70 Pärt, Arvo, I:12; II:238–39, 254 Collage on the Theme BACH, II:238, 245 Credo, II:238 Pro et Contra, II:238, 245 Partch, Henry Genesis of a Music, I:31 pastoral, I:187, 189–190, 191n9, 200, 225, 228, 254–56 Pelēcis, Georgs, II:254–55 Concertino Bianco, II:254 Correspondence, II:254 Nevertheless, II:254 Penderecki, Krzysztof Polymorphia, II:237–38 Perle, George, II:205n20, 234n5 Perse, Saint-Jean, II:270 Petersen, Peter, II:141, 144n30 Petrushka chord, I:58n26

Pfitzner, Hans Palestrina, I:41 Pfrogner, Hermann, I:91, 94 Die Zwölfordnung der Töne, I:89 Phrygian (mode), II:93, 95, 202, 323n40 Piaf, Édith Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, I:43; II:84 Pinch, Trevor, II:70n18, 79n56, 81 Piston, Walter, I:115, 255 Harmony, I:71; II:15 pitch-class sets, II:205 pitch collections; see also modality; Tonfelder acoustic scale, II:59 hexatonic, I:15, 50–61, 176, 180–82, 194–95, 197, 199, 224, 228, 231–43; II:15, 97, 211n10, 298n4, 315, 316n13, 317 octatonic, I:57, 175–76, 177–81, 194, 233, 238–40, 253, 271–73; II:15, 142, 212, 214, 315, 318, 323, 328 pentatonic, I:174, 177–79, 183–84, 198; II:13, 53, 89, 91, 95–97, 330 whole-tone, I:99, 175–76, 180, 184, 194, 198, 227, 231, 253, 270, 272; II:142, 302, 316n14 Plöner Musiktag, I:218n39 Polth, Michael, II:313n5, 314–16, 325n41 polychord, I:254–56; II:214 polymodality, I:173, 174n2, 216, 220; II:58, 328 polytonality, I:68, 143–54, 157–63, 165, 169–71, 252, 254–56, 259n18; II:40 popular music, I:26, 66, 165–66, 189, 191n7, 261n1; II:89–97, 99, 107–08, 158, 191, 240, 295, 297 Porter, Cole, I:12 Pospelov, Pyotr, II:255 postmodernism, I:12, 78; II:156, 157n9, 216, 295, 297 power chord, II:91, 92, 95–96 Poulenc, Francis, I:12, 17, 144–45, 148, 149, 151, 233 Prokofiev, Sergey, I:15, 17 Peter and the Wolf, I:47–62 progressive tonality, I:76; II:93–94 Puffett, Derrick, I:122 Purcell, Henry, I:18, 241; II:313n2 Rabinovitch–Barakovsky, Aleksandr, II:254– 55 In illo tempore, II:255 Radigue, Éliane, II:82 Radiguet, Raymond, I:144n4

Index Rameau, Jean-Philippe, I:134, 189; II:52, 262n11 Pièces de Clavecin, II:320 Ravel, Maurice, I:15, 28, 41, 144, 147, 149, 169, 173–86, 227; II:215, 321n39, 323n40 Concerto pour la main gauche, I:183n23 Daphnis et Chloé, I:183n23 “Le Gibet,” I:182, 183n23 Ma mère l’Oye, I:176n8 Miroirs, I:174, 185 “Une barque sur l’océan,” I:174n3 and 5, 178, 179n15 “Noctuelles,” I:182 “Oiseaux tristes,” I:179n15, 183n23 Piano Trio, I:174n3, 5 and 6 Rapsodie espagnole, I:185 Shéhérazade, I:174n3 Sonate pour violon et violoncelle, I:173–86 Sonatine, I:176n8 Le Tombeau de Couperin, I:174n3 and 8, 176n8 Valses nobles et sentimentales, I:174n3 and 5 Reed, Peter Hugh, I:253 Reger, Max, I:65; II:54 Rehding, Alexander, I:15, 32, 40; II:17n28, 72, 74n35, 80n59 Reich, Steve, II:13, 14, 18, 65n1, 73, 75, 189–207 City Life, I:39 Come Out, II:70, 77 Different Trains, II:82, 190 Four Organs, II:78, 190–94, 196 It’s gonna rain, II:77, 189 Music for 18 Musicians, II:191 My name is ____, II:77 Pendulum Music, II:78 Piano Phase, II:189–90 Slow Motion Sound, II:70 Three Tales, II:197 Triple Quartet, II:191, 194–207 Violin Phase, II:71n23, 77–78 Reineke, Christian, I:120, 122 resonance, I:34–36, 161, 185, 252, 254; II:283, 291 Réti, Rudolph, II:61 return to tonality, I:67, 76–78, 125, 145, 152, 243; II:13, 51, 240, 254 Reutter, Hermann Der neue Hiob, I:203n2 Rheinberger, Josef, I:64

341

Richter, Ernst Friedrich, I:63, 106 Rickert, Heinrich, I:130 Riemann, Hugo, I:13–15, 48, 64, 67, 69, 126, 132, 183, 227; II:52, 284, 315 Folkloristische Tonalitätsstudien, I:13n13, 32 Rihm, Wolfgang, II:18, 28n5, 47 Astralis, II:40–43 Riley, Terry, I:12, 17; II:254 In C, II:18, 59, 73, 155–56 Mescalin Mix, II:70 Rilke, Rainer Maria, II:154 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, II:315 Rings, Steven, II:16n28, 296 Roberts, David, II:193 Rochberg, George, II:18, 153–64, 296 Caprice Variations, II:162–63 Carnival Music, II:158 Imago Mundi, II:158 Music for the Magic Theater, II:156, 159 String Quartet No. 2, II:153–55 String Quartet No. 3, II:153–62, 164 Symphony No. 3, II:156 Roeder, John, II:206n23, 297n8 Rosen, Charles, I:12 Roth, Hermann, I:74 Roussel, Albert, I:147 Rozhdestvensky, Gennadiy, II:248 Rufer, Josef, II:132n15, 133n18 Ruggles, Carl, I:68 Rush “Hyperspace,” II:98 “Natural Science,” II:98 Russell, George Lydian Chromatic Concept, II:61 Saariaho, Kaija, II:259–80 Amers, II:280 L’Amour de loin, II:280 Cendres, II:280 Du cristal … /… à la fumée, II:280 Jardin Sécret no. 1, II:268 Laconisme de l’aile, II:270 Lichtbogen, II:260, 270–79 Verblendungen, II:268 San Francisco Tape Music Center, II:70 Satie, Erik, I:25, 27, 34, 36, 41, 144n4, 149, 150 Cold Pieces (Pièces froids), I:29 Desiccated Embryos, I:40, 42 Parade, I:39–40, 42 Sports and Divertissements, I:40 Vexations, I:42 “What I am,” I:25, 31, 42–43

342

Index

Scelsi, Giacinto, II:293 Quattro Pezzi, II:69 Schaeffer, Pierre, I:29 II:74, 76, 222n25, 228n39 Schafer, Murray, II:210 Schenker, Heinrich, I:14, 16, 18, 48, 65, 67, 70–75, 89, 171, 227; II:14, 122, 124, 200, 216, 314, 316 Der freie Satz, I:42, 71 Harmonielehre, I:13 Kontrapunkt, I:13 Neue musikalische Theorien, II:115 Scherchen, Hermann, II:129n3 Schillinger, Joseph, I:64; II:52 Schmitt, Florent, I:149 Schnittke, Alfred, I:12; II:12, 61, 194, 233, 235–36, 238–39, 245–54, 296 Concerto for Choir, II:248 Concerto Grosso No. 1, II:249 Concerto Grosso No. 4/Symphony No. 5, II:248 Five Aphorisms, II:249, 251–53 Piano Quintet, II:247 Piano Sonata No. 1, II:249–51 Piano Sonata No. 2, II:249 Piano Sonata No. 3, II:252–53 Psalms of Repentance, II:248 Sonatina for Piano four hands, II:253 Stille Nacht, II:247 String Quartet No. 2, II:194 String Quartet No. 4, II:249 Suite in the Old Style, II:246 Violin Concerto No. 3, II:248, 249 Violin Sonata No. 2, II:246, 247, 249, 252–53 Schoenberg, Arnold, I:11–12, 14, 16, 27, 35, 65, 70, 72, 77, 78, 143, 145, 146, 150, 192, 194, 225, 229, 274–75; II:14, 36, 51, 53–55, 57, 60–61, 131, 154, 164, 206, 234, 235, 299, 301n23 Am Strande, I:34–35; II:216 Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, op. 15, I:144 Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11, I:34, 68, 99, 226, 229 Erwartung, I:115-16, 117, 118, 121 Fünf Orchesterstücke, op. 16, I:121, 226, 227 Die glückliche Hand, I:33 Gurrelieder, I:226, 227 Herzgewächse, II:210 Kammersymphonie, op. 9, I:230, 231; II:229

Klavierstück, op. 33a, I:84, 87–88, 91, 93 Kol Nidre, op. 39, I:76 Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, II:133n18 “Parodie Pfitzner: Drei Akte der Revanche von Palestrina,” I:41 Pierrot lunaire, I:36–37, 144, 146, 149, 152, 226, 230 Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19, I:226, 230 Serenade, op. 24, I:37, 38 String Quartet No. 2, op. 10, I:180; II:154n1 String Quartet No. 3, op. 30, I:93, 94 Suite, op. 25, I:170n26, 230 Suite for String Orchestra, I:76 Theme and Variations, op. 43a, I:76 Variations for Orchestra, op. 31, I:226; II:58n19 Variations on a Recitative, op. 40, I:76 Verklärte Nacht, I:67–68 Zwei Lieder, op. 14, I:34 Writings: Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony), I:13, 33, 69, 74, 99–111, 113–24, 227 Structural Functions of Harmony, II:54–55 “Composition with Twelve Tones,” I:37 “Gesinnung oder Erkenntnis?,” I:117 “Hauers Theorien,” I:114n3 “My Evolution,” I:11n3, 121 “Probleme der Harmonie,” I:114n5 Schreker, Franz, I:108, 120 Schubert, Franz, I:16, 50, 185n27, 228, 238; II:72, 131, 144n30, 254, 291, 294 Piano Sonata, “Reliquie,” D. 840, II:288 String Quintet, I:177n12 Schumann, Robert, II:155, 212 Schütz, Heinrich, II:156 Scott de Martinville, Édouard-Léon, I:26, 29, 30 Scriabin, Alexander, I:33, 225, 230, 231 Piano Sonata No. 6, I:227 Piano Sonata No. 7, I:227 Promethée, I:227 Scruton, Roger, II:39 Searle, Humphrey, I:163 Sechter, Simon, I:134 Seeger, Charles, I:12, 67, 68–70, 78 Principia Musicologica, I:69 “Tradition and Experiment,” I:12n8 Seeger, Ruth Crawford, I:27, 63 Segall, Christopher, II:235, 246, 250, 251n62 Sender, Ramon, II:81

Index Seppings, Amelia, I:229 Service, Tom, II:298 Sessions, Roger, I:64, 67, 70–74, 78 Shchedrin, Rodion, II:235 Stalin Cocktail, II:254 Shostakovich, Dmitry. I:17, 231; II:17, 240 Piano Trio No. 2, op. 67, II:246 Sibelius, Jean, I:12 Sickert, Walter, I:191 Silvestrov, Valentin, II:18, 233, 236, 239–45, 252, 254 Bagatelles for Piano, II:241, 244 Drama, II:240 Hymn, II:240 Meditation, II:240 Poem, II:240 Quiet Songs, II:240–41, 244 Spectrums, II:240 String Quartet No. 1, II:240 Symphony No. 3, “Eschatophony,” II:240 Symphony No. 5, II:240, 241, 244 Three Postludes, II:240–44 Time to Leave (soundtrack), II:244 Simmel, Georg, I:191n8 Simms, Bryan, I:117 Simon, Albert, II:313–314, 316–20, 331 Sivuoja-Gunaratnam, Anne, II:272 Slonimsky, Nicolas, I:252, 254–55 Smith, Alan, II:167–68, 177 socialist realism, II:105, 107–08, 111, 235, 236n14 Société Musicale Independante, I:149 sound, I:25–43, 66, 87, 103–04, 108–09, 127, 135; II:52–53, 58, 68–70, 78–84, 111, 125, 167, 170, 173–82, 214, 216, 222, 229, 262, 265–72, 279, 283–88, 290–93, 306, 325, 328–29; see also overtone series Soundgarden “Black Hole Sun,” II:14, 98 spectralism, II:65, 80, 214, 229, 254, 261–69 Spicer, Mark, II:65, 89 Stalin, Joseph I:53n21; II:105, 236 Stein, Erwin Praktischer Leitfaden zu Schönbergs Harmonielehre, I:119, 120 Sterne, Jonathan, I:26, 31, 40, 41; II:71n26 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, II:53, 71, 129 Gruppen, II:56–57 Kontakte, II:73 “The Concept of Unity in Electronic Music,” II:80 Stoecker, Philip, II:221n2, 302–03

343

Stöhr, Richard, I:106 Starr, Larry, I:247 Straus, Joseph N., I:76; II:17n36, 155n2, 206, 220n21 Strauss, Richard, I:41, 65, 106, 144; II:44, 48, 54, 60 Elektra, I:227 Hymne, op. 34, no. 2, II:29–34, 41 Stravinsky, Igor, I:16–17, 33, 37, 147, 189; II:17, 36, 216n18 Apollon Musagète, I:224 Étude for pianola, I:37 Octuor, I:17 Orpheus, II:210 Petrushka, I:57–58, 235 Piano Sonata, I:84 The Rite of Spring, I:34, 249; II:67 Serenade in A, I:36 Symphony in C, I:16, 223 Symphony of Psalms, I:224 “Some Ideas About my Octuor,” I:17n28 Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, I:76 Stufengang, I:84 Stumpf, Carl, I:70 Stürmer, Bruno, I:205–11, 216, 218–21 Feierliche Musik, I:206–11, 219, 221 Mass for Machine-Men, I:206 “Die neue Tonalität,” I:206–07, 210 Subotnick, Morton, II:81 Supertramp “The Logical Song,” II:97 symmetry/asymmetry (among pitches), I:15, 160, 177n11, 180, 185, 194, 234–35, 237–40, 243, 253; II:72, 142, 154, 164, 173, 179, 205n20, 266, 314, 319 synthesizer, II:65–67, 69–70, 73, 75, 78–84, 96 Akai MPC, II:83 E-Mu, II:82 Fairlight CMI, II:82 Moog, II:70n18, 79, 81 Szabolcsi, Bence, II:317 Tagg, Philip, II:89n2 Tailleferre, Germaine, I:144, 145, 149 tape loop, II:65–67, 74–77, 83–84, 267 Tarakanov, Mikhail, II:233–36, 255 Taruskin, Richard, I:27, 34, 37, 51–52, 55, 59; II:14n16, 216n18, 296–97 Temperley, David, II:89n2, 90n6, 91n11, 92n13, 94 “tendency of the material,” I:69; II:61 Théberge, Paul, II:83 Thomas, Adrian, II:237 Thomson, Virgil, I:67, 75, 82; II:16

344

Index

Thuille, Ludwig, I:106 Tin Pan Alley, II:90, 95 Tippett, Michael, I:12 Toch, Ernst Das Wasser, I:203n2 Tonfelder, I:185n27; II:313–25, 329–31; see also pitch collections tonic-dominant relations, I:15, 59, 133, 166–67, 169, 209, 220, 231, 235–36, 242; II:29, 40, 91, 97, 112, 148, 193, 204, 211, 220, 222–23, 226, 246, 278, 302, 309, 317, 320 Tonnetz, I:15, 53–58 Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, II:70 total tonality, II:52, 54–55, 59–62 Tovey, Donald Francis, I:227; II:11 “Tonality in Schubert,” I:228 traditional harmony/tonality, I:15, 32–33, 66, 67, 74–75, 77, 83, 99, 101, 108, 122, 134, 151, 206, 213, 216, 218–19, 221, 241, 254; II:15–16, 30–33, 68, 130–31, 148, 151, 210, 234, 239, 246, 251–52, 269, 278, 284, 288, 296, 301, 323, 330 triads, I:15, 17, 50–52, 223, 224, 231–43, 252–53, 261, 270; II:15, 16, 299, 315n11 Troeltsch, Ernst, II:295n3 Turski, Zbigniew Symphony No. 2, “Olympic,” II:238, 248 twelve-tone technique/serialism, I:11, 12, 17–18, 37–38, 43, 68, 70, 72, 73, 76–78, 81, 87, 91–93, 115, 118, 121–22, 143, 151, 158n5, 170n26, 192, 226, 250–51, 261–68, 272–76; II:12, 16–18, 29, 51, 53–62, 70n19, 73, 79–80, 105, 129n2, 131–35, 137, 140, 151, 154, 157, 206, 210, 233–36, 238, 240, 245, 248, 261–63, 265–66, 269, 318 Tymoczko, Dmitri, II:15, 62n30, 72n29, 91 Tyndall, John On Sound, I:26 Tzara, Tristan, I:144n4 Ultra-Modernism, I:68–70 Urlinie / Ursatz (Schenker), I:13, 48, 73–74; II:113–15, 122–24, 200–03, 215, 218, 316; see also Schenker, Heinrich Varèse, Edgard, I:37; II:154, 313n2 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, I:15, 17, 233; II:14 Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, I:189 The Lark Ascending, I:189 A London Symphony, I:187–202 On Wenlock Edge, I:189

A Pastoral Symphony, I:187, 200, 228 Symphony No. 4, I:194 Verdi, Giuseppe, I:25, 41–42; II:328, 330 vocoder, II:77 voice leading, I:49, 51–52, 61, 100, 101, 105, 182, 214–15, 219, 221, 234–35, 237, 242–43, 254; II:92–93, 96, 200–03, 220–21, 299, 309 Vuillemin, Louis, I:149 Wagner, Hans Joachim, II:137 Wagner, Richard, I:87, 106, 144, 158, 197; II:51 Parsifal, I:15, 60 Ring cycle, I:51, 59 Tarnhelm motive, I:51, 52, 57, 61 Tristan und Isolde, I:84, 125, 132, 189; II:13 Walton, William, I:224 Wason, Robert, I:120 Watkins, Holly, I:192, 194 Weber, Gottfried, I:49 Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst, I:48n6 Webern, Anton, I:11, 27, 49, 108, 120; II:55, 58n19, 235, 254 Der Weg zur Neuen Musik (The Path to the New Music), I:11n2 Weidig, Adolf, I:63 Weigl, Bruno Harmonielehre, I:160n10 Weill, Kurt, I:17, 27 Der Jasager, I:203n2, 206, 212–17, 220–21 Der Protagonist, I:211 Der Zar läßt sich photographieren, I:211 Die Dreigroschenoper, I:211, 213 Happy End, I:211, 212 Mahagonny, I:211, 213 Royal Palace, I:211 Wells, H. G. Tono Bungay, I:193, 199 Welsh, John, II:168, 178n16 Whittall, Arnold, II:211, 221n2 Wiéner, Jean, I:149 whole-tone scale; see pitch collections Wolpe, Stefan “Stehende Musik,” I:34n36 Woodley, Ronald, II:190, 191n8, 192 Wyschnegradsky, Ivan, II:287, 291 youth music movement, I:204–05, 221 Zender, Hans Logos-Fragmente, II:41, 44–48 Zhdanov, Andrei, II:105, 106n3, 107

Index Ziehn, Bernhard, I:14, 64–65 Zimmer, Hans Inception (soundtrack), I:43; II:84 Zimmerman, Bernd Alois, II:158 Zwilich, Ellen Taafe, II:297

345

Tihomir Popovic

Mäzene – Manuskripte – Modi Untersuchungen zu My Ladye Nevells Booke

Archiv für MusikwissenschAft – beiheft 71 Der Autor

Tihomir Popović ist Professor und Forschungskoordinator für theoretische und historische Fächer an der Hochschule Luzern – Musik. Darüber hinaus ist er Lehrbeauftragter für Musiktheorie an der Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind die englische Musik vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, Musik und Diskursanalyse, Postcolonial Studies, Tonartenlehre und Claude Debussy.

Die elisabethanische Epoche wird traditionell als „goldenes Zeitalter“ der englischen Musik für Tasteninstrumente wahrgenommen – mit William Byrd, John Bull und Orlando Gibbons als „Triumvirn“ dieser Gattung. Diese Vorstellung mag idealisiert sein, es ist dennoch nicht zu bestreiten, dass das elisabethanische Zeitalter zumindest eine Welle der Verschriftlichung sowie bedeutende Veränderungen in der Kompositionstechnik der Tastenmusik hervorgebracht hat. Am Beispiel der Sammlung My Ladye Nevells Booke, die 42 Stücke William Byrds enthält, untersucht Tihomir Popovic sowohl die sozial- und kulturgeschichtlichen Hintergründe dieses Phänomens als auch seine musikalische Qualität. Im historischen Teil der Studie steht das Milieu der elisabethanischen Aristokratie, in dem die Sammlung entstand, im Fokus der Aufmerksamkeit. Im analytischen Teil geht der Autor auf die Intensität der Verschriftlichung kompositionstechnischer Einzelheiten ein sowie auf die Wahl der Gattungen für My Ladye Nevells Booke und auf die Veränderungen in der Kompositionstechnik auf der Ebene der Tonartbehandlung. Die Ergebnisse stellt er dabei in den Kontext der sozial- und kulturgeschichtlichen Untersuchungen.

2013 269 Seiten 978-3-515-10214-8 geb. 978-3-515-10349-7 e-book

Hier bestellen: www.steiner-verlag.de

Tihomir Popovic´

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Indien-Konstruktionen in der britischen Musik und dem Musikschrifttum 1784 –1914

Tihomir Popović

Der Dschungel und der Tempel Franz Steiner Verlag

Tihomir Popovic´

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DEr DSchuNGEL uND DEr TEMPEL

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DEr DSchuNGEL uND DEr TEMPEL

Der autor Tihomir Popović ist Professor und Forschungskoordinator für theoretische und historische Fächer an der Hochschule Luzern – Musik. Darüber hinaus ist er Lehrbeauftragter für Musiktheorie an der Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind die englische Musik vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, Musik und Diskursanalyse, Postcolonial Studies, Tonartenlehre und Claude Debussy.

Indien-Konstruktionen in der britischen Musik und dem Musikschrifttum 1784–1914

Die Stereotype, mit denen man in der Kolonialzeit Indien beschrieb, haben auch die britische Musik und das Musikschrifttum geprägt. Wie in zahlreichen Werken der kolonialen Literatur, so wird Indien auch hier als ein Land der wilden Natur und der Gefahren, als ein feminin konnotiertes Land und ein Land der Mystik konstruiert – aber auch als ein Land des Verfalls einstiger Zivilisationen. Dadurch entsteht ein binärer Kontrast zum Selbstbild des dynamischen, aufstrebenden und maskulinen britischen Weltreiches. In seiner transdisziplinären Studie untersucht Tihomir Popović sowohl Texte über Musik aus der Epoche 1784–1914 als auch ausgewählte Musikwerke mit Indien-Bezügen, um die Prozesse der kolonialen Indien-Konstruktion aufzuspüren, zu beschreiben und zu interpretieren. Seine diskurskritischen und musikanalytischen Überlegungen kontextualisiert er im Dialog mit der Geschichtswissenschaft und den Postcolonial Studies. aus Dem Inhalt Vorwort | Der Mahut und der Ritter | Der koloniale Diskurs im britischen Musikschrifttum | Das Koloniale in der Musik | Jenseits der »Safari-Mentalität«: ein Rückblick | Anhang: 52 Notenbeispiele | Musikalische Quellen | Literaturverzeichnis | Lexika

2017 Ca. 372 Seiten 978-3-515-11652-7 geb. 978-3-515-11653-4 e-book

Hier bestellen: www.steiner-verlag.de

Felix Wörner / Ullrich Scheideler / Philip Rupprecht (Hg.)

Tonality 1900–1950 Concept and Practice

Tonality – or the feeling of key in music – achieved crisp theoretical definition in the early 20th century, even as the musical avant-garde pronounced it obsolete. The notion of a general collapse or loss of tonality, ca. 1910, remains influential within music historiography, and yet the textbook narrative sits uneasily with a continued flourishing of tonal music throughout the past century. Tonality, from an early 21st-century perspective, never did fade from cultural attention; but it remains a prismatic formation, defined as much by ideological-cultural valences as by its role in technical understandings of musical practice. Tonality 1900–1950: Concept and Practice brings together new essays by 15 leading American and European scholars. Contributors

Felix Wörner, Ullrich Scheideler, Philip Rupprecht, Joseph Auner, Richard Cohn, Wolfgang Rathert, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, Markus Böggemann, Stephen Hinton, Marianne Wheeldon, Mark Delaere, Volker Helbing, Alain Frogley, Ullrich Scheideler, Beth E. Levy, Daniel Harrison

2012 276 pages, 11 b/w ill., numerous examples 978-3-515-10160-8 Hardcov. 978-3-515-10206-3 e-book

Hier bestellen: www.steiner-verlag.de

Tonality Since 1950 documents the debate surrounding one of the most basic technical and artistic resources of music in the later 20th century. The obvious flourishing of tonality – a return to key, pitch center, and consonance – in recent decades has undermined received views of its disintegration or collapse ca. 1910, intensifying the discussion of music’s acoustical-theoretical bases, and of its broader cultural and metaphysical meanings. While historians of 20th-century music have often marginalized tonal practices, the present volume offers a new emphasis on emergent historical continuities. Musicians as diverse as Hindemith, the Beatles, Reich, and Saariaho have approached tonality from many different angles: as a figure of nostalgic longing, or as a universal law; as a quoted artefact of music’s sedimented stylistic past, or as a timeless harmonic resource. Essays by 15 leading contributors cover a wide repertoire of concert and pop/rock music composed in Europe and America over the past half-century.

ona ISBN 978-3-515-11582-7

www.steiner-verlag.de Franz Steiner Verlag