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Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers Concert Music, 1960–2000 Edited by Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft
1
1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. Oxford University Press 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Analytical essays on music by women composers : concert music, 1960–2000 / edited by Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–023686–1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Mamlok, Ursula. Panta rhei. 2. Beecroft, Norma. Improvvisazioni concertanti, no. 1. 3. Tower, Joan, 1938– Silver ladders. 4. Gubaidulina, Sofia, 1931– Quartet, no. 2. violins (2), viola, cello, 5. Chen, Yi, 1953– Symphonies, no. 2. 6. Saariaho, Kaija. Grammaire des rêves. 7. Larsen, Libby. Chanting to paradise. 8. Lutyens, Elisabeth, 1906–1983. Essence of our happinesses. I. Parsons, Laurel, editor. II. Ravenscroft, Brenda, 1961– editor. MT90.A556 2016 780.92′52—dc23 2015027822 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan, USA
Contents Acknowledgments About the Companion Website Chapter 1. Introduction
vii ix 1
Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft PA RT I : O R D E R , F R E E D O M , A N D D E S I G N
Chapter 2. Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei, Third Movement (1981) “Twelve-Tone in My Own Way”: An Analytical Study of Ursula Mamlok’s Panta Rhei, Third Movement, with Some Reflections on Twelve-Tone Music in America Joseph N. Straus
Chapter 3. Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 by Norma Beecroft: Serialism, Improvisatory Discourse, and the Musical Avant-Garde Christoph Neidhöfer
Chapter 4. Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) “Octatonicism,” the Octatonic Scale, and Large-Scale Structure in Joan Tower’s Silver Ladders Jonathan W. Bernard
15 17
18
32 33
67 68
PA RT I I : G E S T U R E , I D E N T I T Y, A N D C U LT U R E
Chapter 5. Sofia Gubaidulina, String Quartet No. 2 (1987) “Difference Inhabits Repetition”: Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 2 Judy Lochhead
Chapter 6. Chen Yi, Symphony No. 2 (1993) The Transformative Power of Musical Gestures: Cultural Translation in Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2 Nancy Yunhwa Rao PA RT I I I : M U S I C , W O R D S , A N D V O I C E S
Chapter 7. Kaija Saariaho, “The claw of the magnolia … ,” From the Grammar of Dreams (1988) Superposition in Kaija Saariaho’s “The claw of the magnolia …” John Roeder
Chapter 8. Libby Larsen, Chanting to Paradise (1997) Music as a Mirror: Libby Larsen’s Chanting to Paradise Brenda Ravenscroft
99 101 102
127 128
153
155 156
176 177
Chapter 9. Elisabeth Lutyens, Essence of Our Happinesses (1968)
196
“This Imaginary Halfe-Nothing”: Temporality in Elisabeth Lutyens’s Essence of Our Happinesses Laurel Parsons
197
Glossary Bibliography Index
vi Contents
221 225 237
Acknowledgments
A project of this size and scope, designed to stimulate change in a somewhat traditional environment, requires not only intellectual curiosity, but passion and advocacy to bring it to fruition. We acknowledge, with appreciation, all those who shared our vision and believed in this endeavor, and who encouraged us over the years, especially our trusted and generous advisor Joe Straus and our intrepid editor at Oxford University Press, Suzanne Ryan. Thank you to those who assisted in the research and production of the book, including all of our editorial assistants at OUP— Jessen O’Brien, Lisbeth Redfield, Daniel Gibney, and Andrew Maillet—and our research assistants—Timothy Wyman-McCarthy, Calista Michel, and Justin Boechler. We are grateful for the financial support provided through research funding from the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science at Queen’s University in Kingston. One of the guiding principles of our project has been to include works for which readers can acquire both a score and a recording. When efforts to make the archival BBC broadcast recording of Elisabeth Lutyens’s Essence of Our Happinesses available to our readers were unsuccessful, Dr. Jonathan Girard, director of the University of British Columbia Symphony Orchestra, responded with enthusiasm and generosity to our request for help. We are grateful to him and to the orchestra for recording the “Chronikos” section of the second movement, making it possible for readers to hear this excerpt through the companion website. In addition, Claire Irwin of the University of York Music Press helped secure the necessary scores, parts, and permissions with her usual efficiency and good humor. Co- editing and co- authoring requires a special partnership, and we deeply appreciate in each other the complex blend of inspiration, dependability, tenacity, and simple hard work that has carried us through this first phase of our multivolume project, while allowing us to remain friends.
The shared moments of unwavering support—and sometimes unbridled hilarity—have sustained us in trying times. The original concept of this book dates from 2007; we are indebted to our long-suffering authors for their patience, and acknowledge the suffering of our long-patient families. Glenn Parsons was a rock, stepping up in countless ways to keep the North Vancouver editorial headquarters from falling into chaos when he would probably have preferred to be out kayaking. We dedicate this volume to the six children (now young adults) who have shared their growing-up years with “The Book”: Andrew, Sarah, Sean, Rebecca, Berg, and Mitzi.
viii Acknowledgments
About the Companion Website
www.oup.com/us/musicbywomencomposers Username: Music5 Password: Book1745 Oxford has created a password-protected website to accompany Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers. On this companion website, readers will find all musical examples and illustrations, including color versions of Figures 5.1, 5.3, and 5.5, Example 7.2, and an audio recording for Chapter 9. For those who wish to examine larger versions of the volume’s visual materials, Oxford University Press has made it possible for readers to zoom in on all examples and illustrations. The reader is encouraged to consult this resource in conjunction the chapters. Examples available online are indicated in the text with Oxford’s symbol: .
Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers
1 Introduction Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft
I have no doubt that women think and feel differently than men, but it is not very important whether I am a woman or a man. What matters is that I am myself and develop my own ideas strictly toward the truth. —Sofia Gubaidulina
This book celebrates, through musical analysis, the work of eight outstanding composers active in the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries: Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–1983), Ursula Mamlok (b. 1923), Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931), Norma Beecroft (b. 1934), Joan Tower (b. 1938), Libby Larsen (b. 1950), Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952), and Chen Yi (b. 1953). Their compositions—in genres ranging from solo song to symphony, opera, film, and electroacoustic music—represent some of the most important musical trends of the twentieth century. Many of them have won the highest awards available to contemporary composers and have been honored by prestigious fellowships and commissions. Collectively, their lives and careers extend from Edwardian England to twenty-first-century North America, and their individual creative voices have thus been forged in environments shaped by the major political and cultural events of this period, including Nazi Germany, postwar Soviet Russia, and China’s Cultural Revolution. As we write in 2014, six of the eight composers—some now in their 80s and 90s—continue to pursue lively, successful, and productive careers. Each chapter in this volume presents a detailed analytical exploration of a single representative composition in the genres of song, chamber, and large- scale orchestral or choral music. (Electroacoustic, computer, and other contemporary musical genres will be represented in a later volume.) The compelling nature of the music, both aurally and intellectually, has been the primary motivation in the analysts’ selection of these particular compositions, as well as each work’s ability to demonstrate fundamental 1
aspects of its composer’s characteristic musical language. Without exception, these are the first published analytical studies of the works in question—hopefully, the first of many. The analytical approaches taken by the authors are as individual as the compositions they have chosen to analyze, ranging from Joseph N. Straus’s meticulous diagrams of hexatonic pitch-class structures in Mamlok’s Panta Rhei to Nancy Rao’s critical exegesis of Chinese operatic gestures in Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 2, and from Judy Lochhead’s examination of Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet through the perspective of Gilles Deleuze’s critical theories of différence to John Roeder’s illumination of Saariaho’s song “The claw of the magnolia …” through a blend of rhythmic, pitch, and poetic analysis. What they have in common, however, is the technical nature of the approach, and the depth and detail of the analytical insights into the music. As professional musicians making their living in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the composers featured in this collection—all women—have helped shape a remarkable period in the history of music in the classical Western tradition. While women have composed throughout that thousand-year history, it is only in the past century, propelled (as in many fields) by the early fight for women’s suffrage and, later, the civil rights movements of the 1960s, that they have flourished and gained public recognition as professional composers. Access to higher musical education has allowed women not only to attain the same level of advanced training in composition as their male peers, but also to begin forming the kind of social and institutional networks that have always been crucial in securing performances and establishing a professional reputation. In recent years, what James Briscoe has optimistically called the “new, powerful wave of composition by women” has brought with it an unprecedented opportunity for listeners to hear and explore a rich array of fresh, contemporary musical voices, born out of the experiences and ideas of female composers.1 Why, then, is it necessary or even justifiable today to link these essays together as exemplars of music by “women composers,” with that term’s old-fashioned and potentially marginalizing adjective? In many present- day societies, particularly in the developed world, activism and legislation have led to high levels of equity in professional fields, and women have achieved proportional representation in many areas, rendering terms such as “the woman doctor” antiquated if not obsolete. Surely when Gubaidulina asserts that “it is not very important whether I am a woman or a man,” she is stating a contemporary truth, an acknowledgment that in the twenty-first century there should be no need to distinguish music based on the sex of the composer.2 Her declaration expresses a desire—one expressed by many female composers over the last century—to have those who listen and consider her music receive it as an integral part of the world of contemporary 2 Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers
music, rather than as a marginal subset of compositions whose intrinsic interest lies merely in the composer’s gender. In this Gubaidulina has been particularly successful, her music having achieved wider international acclaim and scholarly attention within the still overwhelmingly male domain of contemporary classical composition than almost any other living female composer except Saariaho. Gubaidulina and Saariaho are, however, exceptions. The “powerful wave of composition by women” has not yet led to a similar wave of exploration into this repertoire, whether in the form of performance, listening, or scholarship, and the musical voices of many female composers remain as yet relatively unheard and unknown. Critical discussions of gender and classical composition by Marcia Citron and Jill Halstead in the 1990s point out that decades after the women’s movements of the 1960s began to recognize and promote the professional achievements of women in many traditionally male-dominated fields, perceptual and systemic barriers still prevented the music of female composers from being integrated into the canon, their music remaining largely underperformed and unstudied.3 Similarly, after describing in her preface to the 1995 Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers “a sea-change with regards to public acknowledgment,” Rhian Samuel notes that despite the increasing number of recordings, performances, and publications of music by women in score anthologies, these successes had not yet led to women composers becoming “established” in the same way as their male counterparts, particularly in terms of the absence of their compositions from the musical canon and from scholarly musical discourse.4 The volume of research into music by women has certainly grown since 1995, and in recent decades musicologists and a few music theorists have made outstanding contributions to our knowledge of the lives and careers of female composers and to our understanding of their music within a cultural context; feminist music scholars have also suggested alternative analytical approaches to music by female and male composers alike.5 However, most pertinent to this collection, mainstream music theory—traditionally the locus of the most detailed and rigorous analysis of individual musical compositions—has not kept pace, as we explain below. Our research into the 20-year period from 1994 to 2013 shows that since 1994, only 23, or 1.51 percent, of the 1,524 articles published by eight peer- reviewed music theory and analysis journals over 376 issues have been devoted to music by a female composer.6 At the time of writing, Music Theory Online leads these statistics with the highest percentage of articles on music by women at 2.91 percent (or 7 of 240 articles over 93 issues); the respective rates for Music Theory Spectrum and the Journal of Music Theory for this period are 1.25 percent (2 of 60 articles) and 0.58 percent (1 article out of 172).7 Introduction 3
While we have not sought similar data for books and monographs that have published analytical research into music by women composers, they are relatively rare, often blending biographical and analytical perspectives. An increasing number are available, however, including significant books by Straus on the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger and by Ellie M. Hisama on music by Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon.8 Research presentations on music by women composers in scholarly fora such as the Society for Music Theory (SMT) annual meetings also remain infrequent. Since 1994, of 1,372 SMT conference presentations, only 34, or 2.47 percent, were on compositions by women. This ratio is skewed upward, however, by the fact that 18 of the 34 papers were presented in special sessions sponsored by the Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in 2001, 2002, and 2010, making these annual conferences the only ones in the Society’s history to include more than three presentations on music by female composers; the rate for the other 17 conferences over this period is 1.41 percent.9 This low representation of women composers in theoretical and analytical presentations is paralleled in the European scholarly environment, where 1.98 percent (11 of 555) of the papers in 14 recent conferences focused on music by women.10 To appropriately interpret data representing scholarship into music by women composers, we need to take into account factors such as the ratio of female-to-male composers in a given period. Is the dearth of analytical writing about music by female composers because this music has been disproportionately ignored, or because it reflects a similarly low rate of participation by women in classical Western composition owing to a lack of access to higher education and the social restrictions placed on women’s creativity until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Our research into this question has found that ascertaining this ratio is no easy task. Even in the field of contemporary music definitive data is unavailable, but, based on consultations with several national and international composers’ organizations, it would seem that approximately 20 percent of contemporary composers are female—unquestionably a remarkable increase, but still a minority.11 There are many other factors that complicate the interpretation of the data we have presented above, including the degree to which analytical research has also overlooked much worthy repertoire by male composers owing to enduring interest in music by composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. What even the raw data highlight, however, is the disparity between the continuing near-absence of music by women from scholarly music-t heoretical discussion and the unprecedented rise in professional activity and compositional achievement of women over the past century. 4 Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers
Accordingly, the purpose, not only of the current collection of essays but of the entire multivolume project that it initiates, is threefold. First and foremost, we wish to ignite readers’ curiosity about a body of exciting and powerful contemporary concert music of which they may not yet be aware. Second, if we can inspire new research into serious and deserving—but as yet unexamined—music by women, a foundation of knowledge about the music can be established, enabling it not only to become an integral subject of music-theoretical colloquy, but also to influence the direction that colloquy will take, with regard to analytical methodology as well as musical value and canonicity. Finally, since the inclusion of music by women is still relatively rare in concerts, we hope that this collection will stimulate in performers and conductors an eagerness to program and perform this repertoire, based on its excellence and musical interest rather than its composers’ gender. Toward these ends, this inaugural volume brings together eight analytical studies of individual works or movements, each by a composer who has made a significant national or international contribution to contemporary classical music. Omissions are inevitable, owing in part to the proliferation of female professional composers over the last half century and in part to the current state of analytical research into music by women composers; in some cases we were not able to find any scholars engaged in the analytical study of a given composer’s music.12 The resulting essays thus reflect the nascent state of music-analytical research into the music of women composers. But if this collection of in-depth analyses of single works cannot possibly be comprehensive, we are confident that it is representative: in its inclusion of such internationally respected creative artists as Saariaho, Gubaidulina, and Tower; in the range of nations and interacting cultures represented by its composers (the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, Finland, Russia, and China); and in its exploration of music in a variety of genres from symphony to song cycle, through a spectrum of sophisticated analytical approaches. Some readers may ask if by choosing the particular compositions explored in this project, we are attempting to establish a new or revitalized musical canon. The answer to this is “no,” for two reasons. First, there would need to be a much deeper and more extensive tradition of scholarly analysis and performance before collective decisions could be made about which works, if any, could be considered canonical. Moreover, in recent decades the vigorous contestation of the very idea of canonicity challenges the basis of the question itself. We argue that a much more important question to ask is whether these compositions offer substantial aesthetic, intellectual, and musical rewards to analysts, listeners, and performers who pay them close attention, and to that we answer an unqualified “yes.” Introduction 5
The chapters in this volume are grouped thematically by analytical approach into three sections, each of which is preceded by a short introduction placing the analytical methods used in the essays that follow into the context of late twentieth-and early twenty-fi rst-century music theory. The essays in the first group, by Joseph Straus, Christoph Neidhöfer, and Jonathan Bernard, focus on pitch organization in serial or octatonic works by Mamlok, Beecroft, and Tower respectively. The second group of essays, by Judy Lochhead and Nancy Rao, takes a different approach, invoking gestural and cross-c ultural theory to gain insight into the music of Gubaidulina and Chen Yi. Finally, the essays in the third group, by John Roeder, Brenda Ravenscroft, and Laurel Parsons, analyze in detail the ways in which Saariaho, Larsen, and Lutyens have responded musically—even in a wordless orchestral movement—to texts they have chosen to set. Within these sections, each essay is preceded by a brief biographical sketch of the composer, providing the reader with a glimpse into the composer’s career and cultural-historical context. Each sketch highlights her greatest professional successes, the influential forces and figures that helped to shape her compositional language, and the ways in which she, in turn, has influenced younger composers or otherwise had an impact on the development of contemporary classical music. In addition to the print version of the book, the companion website offers important resources such as all examples and figures available in a format that allows readers to zoom in for closer examination, including several in their original color versions. The website also features a recording by the University of British Columbia Symphony Orchestra of an excerpt from Elisabeth Lutyens’s Essence of Our Happinesses, the only full recording of which is unavailable to listeners except by appointment at British Library’s National Sound Archive in London.13 Recordings of the remaining compositions explored in this volume are commercially available either on compact disc or through Internet music sources such as iTunes. While the analyses are complete with appropriate musical examples, we recommend that the reader wishing to use a particular analysis as a springboard for further research or teaching have the accompanying full score close at hand. Full scores for all works can be accessed either through university library holdings or directly from publishers. In both scholarly and popular discourse surrounding female creators in all the arts, the question often arises of whether the artistic creations of women exhibit common characteristics that bind them together as a group, making them in some way distinct from those of male creators.14 In the realm of musical composition, arguments about these potential 6 Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers
distinctions have had a long and, from a twenty-first-century perspective, sometimes uncomfortable history, especially when focused on perceived distinctions in quality (or “greatness”) as much as trait.15 As Halstead and Citron have shown, critical tropes abound in historic descriptions of music by female composers, from the use of adjectives such as “delicate” and “graceful” to assumptions that women are “naturally” better at writing in small forms like song and chamber music than they are at composing in large-scale forms such as symphony and opera.16 The compositions represented in this volume—and those to follow—demonstrate the inaccuracy of such stereotypes. However, readers may be curious to know what kind of threads weaving among the lives and music of these eight composers—if any—are revealed in this collection of essays. The biographies that introduce each composer note their diversity in terms of national or cultural background, as well as the aesthetic influences, attitudes, and techniques that have helped shape their compositional styles. But we also observe certain recurrent themes. Most notable, perhaps, is a common rejection by these composers of absolute formalism (integral serialism, for example) in favor of cultivating a more flexible and intuitive individual voice. Ellie Hisama, writing about modernism and gender, argues that women composers’ relative isolation from mainstream contemporary music circles in the first half of the twentieth century may have had the unintended benefit of liberating them to develop independent compositional voices and technical tools.17 This is not to suggest that these composers did not engage the most advanced compositional techniques of their time, but rather that, as the analyses in this volume show, their approaches to formalized systems are fluid—for example, in the way that Lutyens, Beecroft, and Mamlok mix serialism and free atonality to achieve their expressive goals. The rejection of strict formalism is not only about creating a unique compositional voice; it is also rooted in the keen desire expressed by many of the composers in this volume to reach out and connect with listeners through their music. Saariaho, for example, rejects structural complexity in favor of “communicating” through “audible musical forms,” Gubaidulina conceives of her music in terms of re-ligio (re-connecting), and Larsen argues that “it is the composer’s task … to communicate something about being alive through music.”18 Beecroft expresses this need for human connection in the clearest of terms: I want whatever I’m writing to communicate with somebody, and it has to have been inspired by some human factor, human emotion or reaction to something, otherwise it just doesn’t come out. . . . I’m not one of those composers who does not want an audience. I would like Introduction 7
an audience for what I write. I would like to know there’s a listener out there.19
But are these apparent commonalities attributable to the sex of these composers, or do they merely reflect attitudes and values shared by many late twentieth-and early twenty-fi rst-century composers, regardless of gender? Certainly we can find the same compositional approaches and beliefs in the works of many male composers of the past 50 years. Moreover, attributing shared characteristics to a group of composers on the basis of whether they are female or male perpetuates the binary categorization that in the early twenty-fi rst century is gradually giving way to more the flexible, finely nuanced concept of gender identity as a spectrum. Yet the question of whether there is a discernibly female compositional voice persists in contemporary scholarship, particularly in the work of feminist musicologists such as Sally Macarthur. In her 2002 book Feminist Aesthetics in Music, Macarthur confronts the dilemma for music analysts wishing “to demonstrate that women’s music is worthy of close analysis and of being included in the canon of masterworks,” citing Nicholas Cook’s question, “do you attempt to position women’s music within the mainstream, thereby risking its being swamped by a predominantly male tradition, or do you promote it as a separate tradition of its own, as women’s music, thereby risking marginalization within a male-dominated culture?”20 Macarthur opts for the latter, seeking common characteristics in compositions by women that are, in her view, distinct from those in “men’s music.”21 While welcoming the challenges that feminist scholarship poses to analytical methodologies developed in the still male-dominated discipline of music theory, we have taken the opposite approach in this book and the volumes that follow. We believe that to exclude music by women composers from these methodologies would be to artificially separate them from the epistemological context in which these composers received their formative training—surely as relevant to an understanding of any composer’s work as consideration of its sociocultural context. Furthermore, in the quest for insight into the inevitable, difficult, and likely unanswerable question of whether there is a compositional voice that is discernibly female, analysis has a vital, even urgent role to play. Although close analytical study of a musical composition can never in itself reveal more than part of what makes the music meaningful, delightful, or profound, it can nevertheless supply something that has hitherto been somewhat lacking in the discourse surrounding music by women composers: evidence from the works themselves. Whether or not there is such a thing as a female compositional 8 Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers
voice, or whether one finds the question completely irrelevant, until we know more about the music women have created, generalized claims that men and women compose differently will necessarily be based on provisional hypotheses and personal observation—perspectives that may be valuable but are insufficient for purposes of comparison. In this, we agree with Rhian Samuel’s argument, published in 1997 but just as relevant nearly 20 years later. What if a woman composer should speak differently from a man? Should she not then be evaluated differently? The fact of sociological conditioning certainly encourages us to consider the likelihood of a “gendered voice” for both men and women. And given the physicality and sensuousness of music itself, is it beyond the realms of possibility that even biology might have some influence on musical utterance too? Some critics emphatically deny its existence; but given that a comparative study of the male and female repertories is the only condition, by definition, that would reveal the existence of such a voice (and its male counterpart), and that no large-scale, detailed study of women’s music to rival that already afforded men’s has yet taken place, surely no soundly based judgment on this issue can at present be offered.22
It is in this spirit that we offer our collection of analytical studies as a contribution to the development of a body of evidence extensive and robust enough to respond to old questions and generate new ones. We invite our readers to join in this endeavor of discovery. For the scholarly community, these thoughtful analytical essays provide eight distinct entry points into a treasure trove of repertoire awaiting the attention of music theory and musicology researchers. For post-secondary instructors, the analyses may suggest potential new repertoire for inclusion in post-tonal theory and history courses, both graduate and upper-level undergraduate, and provide starting points for serious discussion of these compositions in courses on women and music. Finally, the detailed insight that distinguishes these essays makes this a useful sourcebook for the performing world; we hope that conductors, music directors, and performers will be inspired to explore and program the music of these composers and will find its analytical information a useful aid to making performance decisions. The musical and professional achievements of the composers featured in this volume provide clear evidence of an unstoppable wave of women’s participation as musical creators. And, while much work remains to be done, we look forward with excitement to the energy and renewal that their inclusion will inevitably bring to the future of contemporary music. Introduction 9
Notes 1 James R. Briscoe, ed., Contemporary Anthology of Music by Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), xi. Women’s participation in the world of music performance has also expanded. Women are regularly seen on the concert stage as soloists and, occasionally, on the podium as conductors. Female membership in orchestras is increasing, albeit gradually, and even the Vienna Philharmonic, with its notoriously misogynist policies, finally hired its first permanent female member in 1997 (William Osborne, “Art Is Just an Excuse: Gender Bias in International Orchestras,” Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music 2, no. 1 [October 1996]: 6–14). 2 Cited by Michael Kurtz in Sofia Gubaidulina: A Biography, ed. Malcolm Hamrick Brown, trans. Christoph K. Lohmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), vi. 3 Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (1993; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); and Jill Halstead, The Woman Composer: Creativity and the Gendered Politics of Musical Composition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997). In her 2007 reflection on the 15 years that had passed since the publication of Gender and the Musical Canon, Citron lauds the progress made in the “repertorial and disciplinary canons” of musicology, and in the dissemination of music by women composers. However, she cautions “we need to be careful lest historical women become erased again” (214) and emphasizes that “women’s music—scores, recordings, books—must continue as an important priority” (215) (“Women and the Western Art Canon: Where Are We Now?” Notes 64, no. 2 [Summer 2007]: 209–15). 4 Rhian Samuel, “Women’s Music: A Twentieth-Century Perspective,” in The Norton/ Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, ed. Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995), xiii. 5 Such scholarship focuses primarily on issues of gender and social context rather than technical analysis of the music, reflecting feminist music theory’s rejection of traditional analysis, with its valorization of an impossible objectivity and its lack of interest in the impact of composers’ gender, social, and cultural identities on the music they create. These views are presented in two notable issues of Perspectives of New Music (PNM) from the early 1990s, where a “Feminist Theory Forum” was followed in the subsequent volume by four papers grouped under the heading “Toward a Feminist Music Theory.” Pertinent articles include Fred Everett Maus, “Masculine Discourse in Music Theory,” PNM 31, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 264–93; Suzanne Cusick, “Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem,” PNM 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 8–27; Marion Guck, “A Woman’s (Theoretical) Work,” PNM 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 28–43; Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, “Of Poetics and Poiesis, Pleasure and Politics—Music Theory and Modes of the Feminine,” PNM 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 44–67; and Susan McClary, “Paradigm Dissonances: Music Theory, Cultural Studies, Feminist Criticism,” PNM 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 68–85. Founded a few years after these groundbreaking issues, the scholarly journal Women and Music publishes articles that explore “the relationships among gender, music and culture” (http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Women-and- Music,673171.aspx) but to date has published no detailed analyses of music by female composers. The Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music includes a broad spectrum of items about the professional achievements and activities of female composers, but, again, no detailed analyses. Karin Pendle and Melinda Boyd’s annotated bibliography, Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), assembles more than 25 years of feminist scholarship on music. 6 Journals reviewed for these statistics include the Dutch Journal of Music Theory, the Indiana Theory Review, the Journal of Music Theory, Music Analysis, Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, Perspectives on New Music, and Theory and Practice. For the
10 Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers
purposes of this study, a “journal article” was defined as a substantial work (usually over 15 pages) devoted primarily to the theoretical analysis of music. Book, conference, and performance reviews were excluded, as were prefaces, afterwards, short forum contributions, compositions, “in memoriam” pieces, and letters. To be counted as analytical work on a female composer, the music of the composer had to be the focal point of the article. 7 While the cited numbers for journal publications cover 1994–2013, in the case of Music Theory Spectrum (MTS) and the Journal of Music Theory (JMT), two of the oldest music theory journals, these numbers remain unchanged when one views their entire publishing histories. Launched in 1979, MTS has published two articles on music by women: Jocelyn R. Neal’s examination of music by the Dixie Chicks in “Narrative Paradigms, Musical Signifiers, and Form as Function in Country Music,” MTS 29, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 41–72; and Marianne Kielian-Gilbert’s exploration of the music of Gabriela Ortiz in “Musical Bordering, Connecting Histories, Becoming Performative,” MTS 33, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 200–207. The single article published by JMT since its founding in 1957 is Jennifer Bain, “Hildegard, Hermannus, and Late Chant Style,” JMT 52, no. 1 (2008): 123–49. 8 Joseph N. Straus, The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Ellie M. Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Harald Krebs and Sharon Krebs, Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Burt Jerome Levy and Laurdella Foulkes-Levy, Journeys through the Life and Music of Nancy van de Vate (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), combine biographical and analytical approaches in their studies. Also worthy of note are two multiauthor essay collections: Deborah Stein, ed., Engaging Music: Essays in Music Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), which includes analytical chapters on music by Lang, Barbara Kolb, and Sarah Maclachlan; and Tim Howell, ed., Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues (Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). Michael Slayton, Women of Influence in Contemporary Music: Nine American Composers (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011), includes analytical observations, as does the ecomusicologist Denise von Glahn’s Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 9 Of these 17 SMT meetings, eight did not include any papers on compositions by women; aside from one conference with three papers, the rest included one or (less often) two. 10 There is very little archived conference information available. By consulting the host organizations’ websites, we reviewed 14 conferences including ten Music Analysis TAGS (graduate) conferences that took place in the United Kingdom between 2005 and 2014 (159 presentations) and four European analysis conferences, three from 2011 and one from 2013 (396 papers). 11 In 2006 the British Music Information Centre (later absorbed into the organization Sound and Music) estimated that 17–20 percent of contemporary composers in the United Kingdom were women (cited by Jennifer Fowler in “The Proms 2006: Where are the Women?” Women in Music (May 2006), http://www.womeninmusic.org.uk/ PROMS06.htm). More current numbers are challenging to find. According to Kealy Cozens, Creative Project Leader for Sound and Music, out of 660 applicants for their composer programs, 183 (27.7 percent) were female. Cozens notes that applicants to these programs represent mostly emerging rather than established composers (e-mail message to the editors’ research assistant Tim Wyman-McCarthy, June 6, 2014). Data from the Canadian Music Centre, obtained through an e-mail message
Introduction 11
from Steve McNabb, Information Architect/Senior Developer, on May 21, 2014, indicate that 149 of 695, or 17.6 percent, of Canadian composers are female. The percentage of women composers listed in the American Composers Alliance database (accessed May 17, 2014, http://www.composers.com/content/aca-archive-collections) is lower, at 12 percent (62 of 515 composers), the lower percentage likely reflecting the fact that this includes both living and deceased composers. Given the size of the American population, it is clear that their methodology for compiling the database means that these numbers are too low to reflect the current gender distribution among American composers. 12 The early development of this collection included a widely publicized call for proposals, the responses to which, although more numerous than we had expected, revealed unfortunate gaps. One of the goals of this collection is to stimulate research that will result in these gaps being filled. 13 The recording on the companion website of the second movement’s orchestral “Chronikos,” discussed by Parsons in c hapter 9, has been made available thanks to Dr. Jonathan Girard, director, and the University of British Columbia Symphony Orchestra. The National Sound Archive’s recording is a reel-to-reel tape of the BBC Orchestra’s premiere of Essence of Our Happinesses under the direction of Norman del Mar. 14 The French poststructuralist literary critic and writer Hélène Cixous’s groundbreaking notion of l’écriture feminine holds that women’s bodies and experiences must be inscribed in women’s writing through (in part) the cyclical, nonlinear use of language, in direct opposition to the so-called phallogocentric norms of the male tradition. See Cixous, “Le rire de la Méduse” (1975), in Le rire de la Méduse et autres ironies (Paris: Galilée, 2010), translated into English as “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (Summer, 1976): 875–93. See also Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Hilde Hein and Caroline Korsmeyer, eds., Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and Gisela Ecker, ed., Feminist Aesthetics, trans. Harriet Anderson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), among others. 15 Telling examples of the “quality” debate since the late nineteenth century can be found in Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman: A Study of Secondary and Tertiary Sexual Characteristics (1894; London: Heinemann, 1934), and in a series of articles published over the past century bearing remarkably similar titles. In chronological order, these are George Trumbull Ladd, “Why Women Cannot Compose,” Yale Review 6 (July 1917): 789– 806; Carl E. Seashore, “Why No Great Women Composers?” in In Search of Beauty in Music: A Scientific Approach to Musical Esthetics (New York: Ronald Press, 1947): 363–67; Grace Rubin-Rabson, “Why Haven’t Women Become Great Composers?” High Fidelity/ Musical America 23 (February 1973): 47–50; and Eugene Gates, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Composers? Psychological Theories, Past and Present,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28, no. 2 (1994): 27–34. 16 See Citron, chapter 4 (especially 130– 32), and Halstead, chapter 6 (171– 214). Halstead opens her chapter by citing the English psychologist Glenn Wilson, writing in 1989: “Many women have written successful songs … but they have seldom put together musical works on a grander scale such as operas, symphonies or even musical comedies. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that some factor such as intrinsic motivation or ‘scale of thinking’ is another contributor to artistic genius” (171). 17 “Because it released these composers from the strictures of a common musical style by giving them the technical means to forge new musical procedures and narratives, modernism did not prove harmful to them, but rather stimulated their work in inventive and liberating ways.” Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism, 11.
12 Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers
18 See Pirkko Moisala, Kaija Saariaho (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 9; Kurtz, Sofia Gubaidulina: A Biography, 119; and Libby Larsen, Libby Larsen’s website, accessed January 5, 2013, http://libbylarsen.com/index.php?contentID=216. 19 Norma Beecroft, interview by Eitan Cornfield, Canadian Composers Portraits: Norma Beecroft, Centrediscs CD-CMCCD 9303, 2003, compact disc. A transcript of this interview is available at http://www.musiccentre.ca/sites/www.musiccentre.ca/files/resources/ pdfmedia/beecroft-portrait-en.pdf. If, as composers, these women have placed a high value on connecting and communicating with listeners through their music, a remarkable number have also initiated projects designed to revitalize the connections between contemporary composers, their audiences, and their communities. Larsen, for example, founded what is now the American Composers Forum to support and advocate on behalf of composers, and Lutyens instituted the Composers Concourse in London. Lutyens and others, including Beecroft, Tower, and Saariaho, also established or produced new music ensembles, concert series, and radio and television documentaries. 20 See Sally Macarthur, Feminist Aesthetics in Music (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 88. 21 In her conclusion, Macarthur suggests that, in terms of structure, music by women differs from that of men with regard to its positioning of climaxes, relative lengths of sections, and gestural construction (178), although elsewhere in the book she uses terms such as “warmth,” “tenderness,” and “softening [of dissonance]” to describe music that she hears as distinctively “feminine” (see, for example, her discussion of Elisabeth Lutyens’s serialism, 96–102). 22 Samuel, “Women’s Music: A Twentieth-Century Perspective,” xiv.
Introduction 13
Part I
Order, Freedom, and Design The unprecedented experimentation with new ways of ordering pitch marks the twentieth century as a uniquely creative period for musical composition. The most inf luential of these new compositional approaches was serialism, which evolved from Schoenberg’s establishment of the twelve-tone system in the years following the First World War into the all-e ncompassing integral serialism of Boulez and Babbitt following the Second. Alternative pitch-class collections, often involving the symmetrical distributions of intervals, also offered new possibilities to composers. Both Stravinsky (inf luenced by his Russian predecessors Mussorgsky and Rimsky-K orsakov) and Bartók created new sound worlds by drawing on one such collection—the octatonic scale—in many of their compositions. Composers continued to explore the possibilities of both serialism and octatonicism in the second half of the century, and the analytical essays that open this volume illustrate how Ursula Mamlok, Norma Beecroft, and Joan Tower have creatively adapted these principles in three works, each in its own way exemplifying the tension between order and freedom in postwar contemporary composition. To begin, Joseph N. Straus examines the third movement of the German- American composer Ursula Mamlok’s enigmatic 1981 twelve-tone piano trio, Panta Rhei (Time in Flux). Elucidating Mamlok’s distinct form of serialism, he traces the interplay of trichordal, triadic, and hexatonic collections throughout the movement and demonstrates how she extends the serial principle to rhythm. As Straus observes, the result is not simply an ingeniously structured composition, but a beautiful and expressive one. His essay ends with a reflection on the place of Mamlok’s music in the context of postwar American serialism and his seven “myths” of serial composition, arguing that Panta Rhei is “typical of the best twelve-tone music of the postwar period in America.” 15
In chapter 3, Christoph Neidhöfer introduces readers to the Canadian composer Norma Beecroft’s 1961 twelve-tone flute concerto Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1, written in Italy during a period in which she studied in Rome and attended the summer schools of Darmstadt and Dartington. While little known, this short but intense work perfectly encapsulates the dichotomy in the contemporary music of its time between the total compositional control offered by approaches such as integral serialism, and the renunciation of that control exemplified by the revolutionary chance music of John Cage. As Neidhöfer points out in his essay, despite her use of the word Improvvisazioni in the work’s title, Beecroft does not in fact allow the performer much freedom. Rather, she creates the illusion of extemporization through her flexible segmentation of the row coupled with precise notation of complex but aurally unpredictable rhythms. Following a careful explication of Beecroft’s sketches as well as her final score, Neidhöfer explains how this paradoxical composition fits into the broader aesthetic dialogue of the time, represented particularly in the writings of Umberto Eco. Finally, in chapter 4, Jonathan W. Bernard examines Joan Tower’s complex but creative use of octatonic collections in her highly successful orchestral composition Silver Ladders (1986), identifying a constellation of compositional strategies that he finds unprecedented in the works of earlier twentieth- century composers. Not limiting herself to a single transposition or rotation at a time, Tower combines simultaneous octatonic collections in multiple but distinct instrumental layers, and uses different techniques to gradually transform one octatonic collection into another or to transition from an octatonic to a non-octatonic collection. On the basis of meticulous analytical observation, Bernard develops a useful typology outlining the specific compositional mechanisms Tower uses to achieve these transformations and considers how their deployment may contribute to an understanding of the work’s formal design. He closes his exploration of Tower’s music by relating his analytical findings to her own statements describing her working methods, and her thoughts on contemporary composition. Given the originality of the compositional strategies he finds in Silver Ladders, Bernard’s essay represents an important contribution to the study not only of Tower’s music, but also of octatonicism in postwar American music.
16 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
2 Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei, Third Movement (1981)
Ursula Mamlok was born in Berlin in 1923.i Barely one step ahead of the European conflagration, she emigrated with her family to Ecuador in 1939. One year later, at the age of 17, she moved on her own to New York to study composition with George Szell (much better known as a conductor than as a composer) at the Mannes School of Music. In New York Mamlok was introduced to modernist, atonal music, an experience she initially did not enjoy.ii During the 1940s, however, her appreciation of this repertoire grew, particularly after 1944, when she attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina; there she heard regular performances of the Schoenberg string quartets by the Polish Quartet. She also had the opportunity learn from Ernst Krenek, Eduard Steuermann, and Roger Sessions, whose influence led her away from tonality and toward the adoption of serialism. Mamlok completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in her 30s at the Manhattan School of Music. Composition lessons with Stefan Wolpe, Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and George Perle exposed her to more systematic approaches to serialism, while subsequent studies with Ralph Shapey taught her to “take away the squareness” and develop a more imaginative rhythmic language.iii After teaching for over 40 years at the Manhattan School of Music and other universities, in 2006 she returned to her native Berlin, where she i. Biographical information about the composer is drawn from Barbara A. Petersen, “Mamlok, Ursula,” in Grove Music Online, ed. Deane L. Root, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com, and the composer’s website, www.ursulamamlok.com, both accessed September 10, 2014. ii. Ursula Mamlok, interview with Roxane Prevost, “Conversations with Ursula Mamlok,” Ex Tempore 11, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2003): 125. iii. Ibid., 129.
17
now lives and works. She has written more than 60 works for piano and various instrumental ensembles, large and small, and recordings of her music are currently available on nearly 20 CDs, four of them devoted exclusively to her compositions. Among the honors she has received are fellowships and commissions from the Guggenheim, Fromm, and Koussevitzky Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Although Mamlok is known today as a serial composer, her approach is as intuitive as it is systematic: I will wait until I find something that gives me a system for that particular piece. . . . And what’s interesting was for me to see that I can [mix serial and free atonal movements] because you don’t want to become a slave of the system.iv
“Twelve-Tone in My Own Way”: An Analytical Study of Ursula Mamlok’s Panta Rhei, Third Movement, with Some Reflections on Twelve-Tone Music in America Joseph N. Straus Mamlok’s piano trio, Panta Rhei, dates from 1981 and has been widely performed, recorded, and discussed.1 The work is in five movements, the third of which is a lyrical, meditative slow movement, marked molto tranquillo. Example 2.1 provides the score for mm. 1–15, roughly the first half of the work, with some analytical annotations . Throughout this excerpt, and throughout the whole movement, there are three independent lines. In mm. 1–7, the violin plays Ostinato 1 (sustained F ♭s, punctuated with a snap pizzicato); the piano right hand plays Ostinato 2 (short, repeated Ds, with the performance instruction to stop the string inside the piano with a finger of the left hand); and the cello, high in its register, plays a slow-moving melody, marked espressivo. In m. 8, these three lines change instrumentation: Ostinato 1 moves from violin to piano, Ostinato 2 moves from piano to cello, and the melody moves from cello to violin. Then, in m. 15, the lines change instrumentation again. The movement as a whole consists of four distinct formal sections, articulated by these shifts in instrumentation and texture (see Figure 2.1 ). iv. Ibid., 131.
18 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
Example 2.1 Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei, third movement, mm. 1–15, with hexatonic collections, triads, and members of sc(014)
(Continued)
The three different lines move systematically through the three instruments (and vice versa), with the fourth section restoring the arrangement of the first.2 In instrumentation and texture, then, we have a four-stage process, involving the systematic departure from and return to the original state. In the domain of pitch, shaped by a twelve-tone plan to be discussed shortly, the second half of the piece is the rough retrograde of the first: the P and I forms of the first half are repeated in retrograde and in reverse order in the second.
Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 19
Example 2.1 (Continued)
Figure 2.1 Formal chart
Looking in more detail at the pitch organization of the first two sections (see again Example 2.1), we note a profusion of consonant triads (members of sc(037)) and members of sc(014). These lie mostly within the melody, although some involve the combination of two melody notes with one note from one of the two ostinatos. In some passages, the music features triads gradually morphing into other triads (with occasional hints of 014), while in others the music features 014s gradually morphing into other 014s (with occasional hints of major or minor triads). And all of this activity 20 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
unfolds within the bounds of two of the hexatonic collections (members of sc(014589)). This sense of gradual shape shifting is mostly a result of the leisurely progress of the melody, which constantly reaches back to recall previously stated notes even as it slowly moves forward to bring in new ones. The first triad we hear is F♯ major, formed by the first two notes of the melody (B ♭ and D ♭, equivalent to A ♯ and C ♯) together with the F♯ in Ostinato 1. As the melody proceeds, the repeated B ♭ and D ♭ are followed by F, creating a new triad, B ♭ minor, that shares two notes with the preceding one. The melodic B ♭ and F can then be heard to combine with the D in Ostinato 2 to create a third triad, B ♭ major, which shares two notes with the preceding B ♭ minor. The melody moves next to A. The resulting D minor triad shares two notes with the preceding B ♭ major triad. Amid this progression of triads, in which each shares two notes with the previous one, we can hear hints of 014, for example in the combination of the first two melodic notes, B ♭ and D ♭, with the D in Ostinato 2. Other than the E in the melody, all of the notes in mm. 1–4 are referable to one of the four hexatonic collections, labeled HEX1,2 in Example 2.1. In m. 5 the hexatonic reference shifts to the complementary collection, HEX3,4, and the harmonic focus simultaneously shifts from triads to 014s. As with the triads in the preceding passage, the 014s bleed into each other, each one retaining two notes in common with the preceding one. And amid the progression of 014s we get distinct hints of triads, most notably in the recurring G ♯ major triad in the melody (C and E ♭, equivalent to B ♯ and D ♯ , together with G ♯). In m. 8 the hexatonic reference stays the same (still HEX3,4), but the harmonic focus shifts back to triads. The movement as a whole can be understood in a similar way, as involving progressions of triads or 014s, either of which might unfold within either of two complementary hexatonic collections. Figure 2.2 provides a more systematic account of both the harmonic progressions and the hexatonic sound world in which they unfold. Figure 2.2 offers a particular rendering of what Richard Cohn has designated the Northern and Southern hexatonic systems.3 Both systems (as well as the Eastern and Western systems, not shown here) arrange a progression of six major and minor triads around the circumference of a circle. Reading clockwise from C major in the 12 o’clock position of the Northern system, we have C major, C minor, A ♭ major, G ♯ minor, E major, E minor, and back to C major. As Cohn and others have observed, each move around the circle involves holding two notes in common and moving the third note to produce another major or minor triad.4 These six triads taken together involve only six pitch classes, namely those belonging to HEX3,4. The Southern system works the same way: six triads are arranged around Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 21
Figure 2.2 Triads and 014s plotted on Cohn’s Northern and Southern hexatonic systems
the outer circle, the triads are linked by two common tones, and together they project the notes of HEX1,2, the complement of HEX3,4. For both the Northern and Southern systems, I depart from Cohn by inserting a new circle inside the outer, triadic circle. This inner circle connects forms of 014 in the same way that the outer circle connects triads. Each move around the inner circle holds two notes in common and moves the third one, taking us to another form of 014. We still have a chain of harmonies, with two common tones retained, moving around a circle and projecting a hexatonic collection. The dotted lines connecting the 014s in the inner circles with the triads in the outer circles indicate the multiplicative operation M5, by which dissonant 014 trichords can be transformed into consonant 037 triads and vice versa.5 22 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
On these two double circles, Figure 2.2 traces the progression of Mamlok’s harmonies. The piece starts with PHRASE 1A (mm. 1–4) at the lower left of Figure 2.2: starting with an F♯ major triad, the music moves counterclockwise around the circle, through B ♭ minor and B ♭ major to D minor. D minor is the hexatonic pole of F♯ major—that is, these two triads, at opposite sides of the circle, are complements with respect to the underlying hexatonic collection.6 At this point, the music jumps to the inner circle of the Northern collection, to the 034 in the 12 o’clock position (indicated as PHRASE 1B, mm. 5–7). The music moves counterclockwise to the opposing form of 014: 034 and 78e, opposite each other on this inner circle, are hexatonic poles, just as F♯ major and D minor are. At this point (PHRASE 2A, mm. 8–10), 78e morphs into G♯ minor (with two notes, G♯ and B, in common), and the music moves clockwise around the outer Northern circle to C major. PHRASE 2A remains within HEX3,4, but the progression consists of triads instead of 014s. Having arrived at C major, the music jumps to the Southern circle, the inner circle, and Phrase 2B traces a progression of 014s within HEX1,2. In moving from phrase to phrase, the harmonic focus (triads vs. 014s) and the hexatonic reference (HEX1,2 vs. HEX3,4) may either change or remain the same. As suggested earlier, all of these harmonic and collectional relationships unfold within a twelve-tone framework. Figure 2.2 acknowledges that by identifying PHRASES 1A and 1B with a P ordering of an underlying twelve-tone series and identifying PHRASES 2A and 2B with an I ordering. Order positions within the series are indicated by numbers in italics.7 Figure 2.3 shows the twelve-tone series for the movement and for the whole work. This movement uses only the P and I forms shown plus their retrogrades. The hexatonic collection is the hexachord for the series, and these two series forms are hexachordally combinatorial: the first hexachord of P comes back as the second hexachord of I, and vice versa. As Figure 2.3a shows, both hexachords are ordered as RI-chains: for each bracketed trichord, the last two notes of one become the first two notes of the next, and the two trichords are related by the inversion that exchanges those two notes.8 The RI-chain of triads in the first hexachord of P is entirely systematic. The RI-chain of 014s in the second hexachord of P, however, has a glitch. The RI-chain shown in Figure 2.3a depends on reversing the written order of the G ♯ and B. In their actual written order, the chain is interrupted and a G ♯ major triad—D ♯ –C (B ♯)–G ♯ —pops up in the middle. This connects nicely to the G ♯ minor triad that begins the I form of the series, which then proceeds with its own RI-chains of triads and 014s. Mamlok’s musical realization, of course, is not as neat and systematic as Figures 2.2 and 2.3 might suggest, but these basic materials and their precompositional arrangement obviously exert a good deal of influence on the sound and progression of the music. Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 23
(a)
(b)
Figure 2.3a and 2.3b Pitch-class series and duration series
In this movement, and in much of her music, Mamlok is also interested in bringing the durations under some kind of serial control, and she has a number of different strategies for doing this. Figure 2.3b shows the duration series for this movement: 24 durations, measured in sixteenth notes, that mostly range in length from one to six sixteenth notes. After the P form of the duration series, we hear the same thing in retrograde (labeled R). In the duration series labeled I, each value in the P duration series is replaced by its complement mod 6: 5 becomes 1, 4 becomes 2, 3 stays as 3, and 6 stays as 6. Inversion in this case thus means complementation mod 6. There are a few glitches in the scheme, indicated by parentheses and asterisks on the chart (parentheses indicate omission of expected durations, and asterisks indicate durations that are slightly off). But for the most part, the durations are systematically serialized. They are also coordinated with the pitch series, as indicated at the right of Figure 2.3b: duration series P is projected by pitch series P; duration series R by pitch series I; duration series I by pitch series RI; and duration series RI by pitch series R. While the basic arrangement is clear enough, its musical motivation is more obscure. It is not obvious why the composer uses values between 1 and 6 (and thus relies on complementation mod 6 for her definition of inversion), how this 24-note duration series is internally organized, or how it relates to the pitch-class series. In other works, including the fourth movement of this piece, Mamlok uses a 12-note duration series that corresponds exactly with the 12-note pitch-class series, but in this movement she uses a 24-note duration series understood in terms of mod 6. It may be that she was not attempting an integration of pitch-class and duration series but instead was creating the duration series in an entirely free and possibly random way, perhaps by literally rolling the dice to produce random values from 1 to 6. That notion, purely conjectural, leads me to experience the free and unpredictable rhythms of the melody as a deliberately and perhaps literally aleatoric aspect of this piece. Example 2.2 presents the complete score of the movement. A 12-count of the pitch-class series is indicated by numbers corresponding to the order positions within the two series forms shown at the top of the example. The circled notes in the series (in order positions 1 and 5) are assigned to the two ostinato lines. The duration series, which unfolds within the melody (not within the two ostinato lines), is indicated by numbers in parentheses. The two ostinato lines have distinctive rhythmic patterns of their own. Ostinato 1, which starts with repeated F♯ s in the violin, projects a pattern of alternating values: from the initial attack to the pizzicato in the first measure is a duration of 10½ sixteenth notes. Seven sixteenth notes of rest follow. Then we hear another F♯ for 10½ sixteenth notes, and another rest of 7 sixteenth notes. Although this ostinato line moves from instrument to Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 25
Example 2.2 Complete score annotated with reference to the pitch-class and duration series
instrument, the durational pattern continues throughout: 10½ on, punctuated by a pizzicato, then 7 off. Ostinato 2, which begins with repeated Ds in the piano, involves attacks separated by 11 sixteenth notes, and this pattern continues, with occasional 26 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
Example 2.2 (Continued)
(Continued)
slight glitches, throughout the movement. The periodicities of the two ostinato lines do not coincide with each other, and neither coincides in any simple way with the beats of the notated $ 3 meter. The result is a sense of kaleidoscopic rhythmic interplay, with the aleatory but serialized durations of the melodic line interwoven with the regular patterns of the two ostinatos. This is a beautiful musical work, deeply thought out, richly imagined, and highly expressive. In each of those respects, it is typical not only of Mamlok’s music, but also of the best twelve-tone music of the postwar Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 27
Example 2.2 (Continued)
period in America. This repertoire has been sadly mischaracterized in both the scholarly and popular literature. A more accurate and balanced description of it provides a useful context for understanding Mamlok’s compositional achievement.9 Mamlok’s career and music vividly refute many of the myths that have accreted to twelve-tone music. The Myth of Serial Orthodoxy maintains that there is one normative, standard way to compose serial music—an orthodox mainstream—and composers must choose either to follow the orthodoxy or to deviate from it. The Myth of Serial Purity maintains that 28 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
serial compositions follow certain generic rules in relation to which nonconforming tones are understood as freedoms or liberties. In twelve-tone music, however—t hat is, in the actual twelve-tone music written by a very large number of composers over a long period of time—t here is no orthodoxy, just a series of local practices. And there are no general rules; rather, composers make up their own rules, grounded in innovative compositional designs of their own creation. So it would be wrong to measure Mamlok against Schoenberg, or Webern, or Babbitt, or any other composer you might care to name. They all differ from each other, and she differs from them. What they have in common is a commitment to a systematic exploration of the twelve-tone aggregate, but not much more than that. Rather than a coercive set of rules, the twelve-tone idea has been a point of departure for a variety of compositional initiatives. Many of the features of the third movement of Panta Rhei—its insistent repetition of notes and groups of notes, its frequent reference to major and minor triads, its ostinati, its playful attitude toward serial ordering, and its frequent systemic glitches—might give the impression of deviation from some normative standard, of liberties taken from some established, orthodox procedure. In fact, however, proceeding in this individual, idiosyncratic way—creating new compositional designs and realizing them in distinctive ways—is what twelve-tone composers have always done. Mamlok’s practice places her in a varied and eclectic mainstream of twelve-tone composition. Among the alleged rules of twelve-tone composition we often find ideas about non-repetition of tones and avoidance of tonal references. The Myth of Non-Repetition maintains that serial music is designed to prevent any of the twelve tones from receiving any particular musical emphasis by requiring that no tone may be repeated until the remaining 11 have been sounded. The Myth of Antitonality maintains that twelve-tone music is designed to avoid referring to the triads and key centers associated with common- practice tonal music. As we have seen, however, Mamlok’s music is full of repetitions of all kinds and deliberately cultivates tonal and triadic references. Indeed, it would be more accurate to turn these myths entirely on their heads and assert that the twelve-tone approach, as practiced by postwar American composers like Mamlok, is designed precisely to produce certain kinds of repetitions and to produce tonal effects. The Myths of Serial Tyranny and Serial Demise are falsehoods about the history of this compositional approach. The Myth of Serial Tyranny maintains that serial composition dominated the American musical scene during the 1950s and 1960s. I’ve written about that myth at some length, and I won’t belabor it here, except to say that to imagine Mamlok as a party to some sort of monstrous conspiracy to hold American music hostage is laughably false.10 The Myth of Serial Demise holds that at Ursula Mamlok, Panta Rhei (1981) 29
some point (there is wild disagreement in the literature about the actual date) either the mythical serial tyranny ended or composers simply stopped composing twelve-tone music altogether. In fact, the twelve-tone enterprise is alive and well into the 1980s, 1990s, and up to the present. Certainly that is true of Mamlok herself—she became a twelve-tone composer in 1961 and has remained true to that approach, in one way or another, ever since. A particularly nasty myth is the Myth of Inexpressiveness, which holds that twelve-tone music is inexpressive, uncommunicative, and ultimately meaningless. Insofar as it has expressive gestures, these are inappropriately borrowed from earlier music. It lacks human feeling and operates, at best, within an extremely narrow expressive range, usually having to do with pain and anguish, horror and alienation. That myth is refuted by a wide range of twelve-tone pieces, very much including the evocative and emotive third movement of Panta Rhei. Mamlok approach to twelve-tone composition has evolved over time, but her basic commitment to it has not wavered: From the 1960s onward, I’ve refined my style and have been doing that ever since. I think the moment you stop learning, that’s the end. As years go by, you change and your inf luences and goals are different. Now my music is less complex than it was in the ’50s and ’60s. I’m very comfortable writing 12-tone music but you will hear composers say, “That’s passé.” That’s the same as saying the C Major scale is passé—you can’t go by that, you have to have your own language.11
Mamlok’s own twelve-tone language has often involved taking unusual musical paths through the familiar 12 × 12 matrix of row forms. In some works, for example, the musical lines trace a spiral path through the matrix, a succession of diminishing concentric squares culminating in the notes that lie at the center of the matrix (see, for example, Stray Birds [1963], Haiku Settings for Soprano and Flute [1967], the Sextet [1977], Der Andreas Garten [1987], and Girasol [1990]). In many other works, including the fourth movement of Panta Rhei, she creates new sorts of charts, combining series forms in interesting, original ways. Mamlok has said that all of her music since 1961 has been “twelve-tone in my own way.”12 As the third movement of Panta Rhei clearly demonstrates, Mamlok’s way involves music of subtle craft and great expressive force, part of a musical idiom and an individual career that continue to grow and evolve into the second decade of this new century.
30 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
Notes 1. “Panta rhei” is a term from Heraclitus meaning “time in flux” or “everything flows.” There are two published recordings of the work: American Masters—Ursula Mamlok, various artists, CRI 891, 2002, compact disc; and Contemporary American Piano Trios, Vol. 2, with the Francesco Trio, Music and Arts 933, 2000, compact disc. Published discussions of the work include Roxane Prevost, “A Woman Composer among Men: A Theoretical Study of Ursula Mamlok’s Serial Works” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 2003); Roxane Prevost, “Metrical Ambiguities in Ursula Mamlok’s Panta Rhei, IV,” Canadian University Music Review 23, nos. 1–2 (2004): 147–67; and Joseph Straus, Twelve-Tone Music in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 2. The twelve-tone origin of these lines, identified in the chart as P, I, R(I), and R(P), will be discussed later in this chapter (see Figure 2.3a). 3. Richard Cohn, “Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Progressions,” Music Analysis 15, no. 1 (1996): 9–40. 4. Cohn and other neo-Riemannian theorists have been particularly interested in the minimal distance (a semitone) through which the moving note moves, considering this an instance of parsimonious voice leading. In the analytical discussion that follows, I will ignore this aspect in order to accommodate progressions of 014 as well as 037. 5. Pitch-class multiplication by five, mod 12 (M5), has the effect of mapping the chromatic scale onto the circle of fourths, and vice versa. Intervallically, its effect on a pitch- class set involves preserving the instances of ics 2, 3, 4, and 6, while exchanging the instances of ic1 and ic5. Tn(M5) maps members of sc(014) onto members of sc(037) and vice versa, retaining the minor and major thirds common to both sc, while replacing the perfect fifth of the triad with the semitone of the 014. In Figure 2.2 the dotted lines in the Northern system connect sets related by M5 followed by T4; in the Southern system the dotted lines connect sets related by M5 followed by T8. 6. On the structural and affective qualities of the hexatonic pole relationship, see Richard Cohn, “Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57, no. 2 (2004): 285–324. 7. This movement uses only P6 and I3 (a combinatorial pair) and their retrogrades (R6 and RI3). The series forms are labeled without subscript in the discussion that follows. 8. RI-chains are a recurrent point of interest in the theoretical and analytical work of David Lewin. See Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). 9. Straus, Twelve-Tone Music in America, offers close readings of more than 30 twelve- tone works and a refutation of the many myths that have gathered around it. The following discussion condenses material found there. 10. Straus, “The Myth of Serial ‘Tyranny’ in the 1950s and 1960s,” Musical Quarterly 83, no. 3 (1999): 301–43. 11. Liner notes to CRI recording (2002). 12. Ursula Mamlok, interview with the author, May 11, 2010.
Norma Beecroft’s influence on Canadian contemporary music from the 1950s to the 1980s was immense, not only as a composer, but also through her promotion of other Canadian composers and their music.i Born in Oshawa, Ontario, in 1934, Beecroft was trained in music from an early age by her father, a pianist and inventor. She left home at 16 to pursue a career in music, studying piano at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and, later, composition with John Weinzweig, Canada’s first twelve-tone composer. During this period Beecroft also began working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC’s) fledgling television network, initiating a long and illustrious parallel career as a contemporary music producer and host. In 1958 she received a scholarship to study with Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss at the Berkshire Music Center, Tanglewood, where she was inspired to further her compositional career in Europe. From 1959 to 1961 she studied composition with Goffredo Petrassi at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome and flute with Severino Gazzelloni. Beecroft also attended the summer schools of music at Dartington and Darmstadt, where her exposure to new ideas and sounds inspired radical changes in her compositional language. In particular, as Neidhöfer relates in his essay on her Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1, she was profoundly influenced by Bruno Maderna’s i. Biographical information about the composer is drawn from The Canadian Encyclopedia, s.v. “Norma Beecroft,” by Kenneth Winters and Betty Nygaard King, last modified December 15, 2013, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/norma-beecroft-emc, and from Norma Beecroft, interview by Eitan Cornfield, Canadian Composers Portraits: Norma Beecroft, Centrediscs CD-CMCCD 9303, 2003, compact disc. A transcription of this interview is available at http://www. musiccentre.ca/sites/,www.musiccentre.ca/files/resources/pdfmedia/beecroft-portrait-en.pdf.
32
lectures on twelve-tone technique. But Darmstadt also introduced her to the aleatory music of John Cage, and there she heard an early performance of Stockhausen’s Kontakte for four-channel tape and live instruments, an experience that led her to devote the remainder of her compositional career primarily to electroacoustic music. Following her return to Canada, Beecroft worked with Myron Schaeffer at the University of Toronto and Mario Davidovsky at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. As she developed her own electroacoustic musical voice throughout the 1960s, she also continued her broadcasting career, first with the CBC and later as a freelancer. Her contributions to contemporary Canadian musical life are remarkable: she produced many documentaries and a 13-album set of records featuring twentieth-century Canadian composers and computer music, hosted a weekly radio series called Music of Today, and cofounded and managed the Toronto New Music Concert series for nearly 20 years. In the 1980s, Beecroft taught electronic music and composition at York University in Toronto. She has been the recipient of many honors for her contributions to Canadian music, including the Canada Council’s Lynch-Staunton Award for composition (twice), the Major Armstrong Award for her 1975 documentary The Computer in Music, and an honorary doctorate from York University. Today Beecroft is retired and lives north of Toronto.
Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 by Norma Beecroft: Serialism, Improvisatory Discourse, and the Musical Avant-Garde Christoph Neidhöfer Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 for solo flute and orchestra (1961), together with Tre Pezzi Brevi for flute and harp (1960–61), marks the beginning of the Canadian composer Norma Beecroft’s international career.1 Both works were written during her three years in Europe, where she studied composition with Goffredo Petrassi, attended the summer courses and festivals in Darmstadt and Dartington (1960–61), and took flute lessons with Severino Gazzelloni, the virtuoso who inspired and performed much of the new music written for flute in the context of Darmstadt and other contemporary music venues.
When Beecroft entered the European scene, avant-garde music was at a crossroads. Following the rapid and breathtaking expansion of serial technique in the first half of the 1950s, and stimulated by the music of the New York School that was prominently featured at Darmstadt and elsewhere, many composers had begun to incorporate elements of chance and indeterminacy into their music by the end of the decade.2 Around this time, in 1959, Umberto Eco responded to recent compositional developments with an article, eventually included in the collection of essays entitled The Open Work, in which he presented a theoretical framework for the understanding of art and literary works that involve elements of chance and indeterminacy somewhere in their making, performance, or reception, usually leading to multiple and ambiguous meanings.3 Composers frequently turned to elements of improvisation by requiring performers either to literally improvise or to determine the order of sections in a piece during the performance itself. Sometimes composers would create an atmosphere of improvisatory discourse by way of written-out improvisations. This fresh interest in improvisation among the avant-garde led to a revival of the concerto genre, which— although enjoying continuing popularity among neoclassical composers—had been neglected by the pioneers of integral serialism during the first half of the 1950s.4 Norma Beecroft’s eight-minute concerto Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 exemplifies the revival in the intellectual climate portrayed by Eco’s essay. While Beecroft would eventually embrace aleatory techniques, the score of Improvvisazioni does not make use of them quite yet, nor does it require direct improvisation. The solo and orchestra parts are entirely written out, and the performative choices granted to the soloist stay completely within the range of a fully notated concerto score. Overall, however, the work creates the impression of a spontaneous, improvisatory discourse involving solo and orchestra. The work’s “simulated improvisations”—to borrow the term coined by André Hodeir for his written-out improvisations—are carefully worked out within a serial fabric that binds the solo and orchestra parts.5 I propose that Beecroft’s Improvvisazioni alludes to improvisation in three ways: (1) the solo flute part sounds as if it is presenting a sequence of extemporizations on a basic (serial) material, quasi-spontaneously transformed; (2) the soloist and the members of the orchestra give the impression of frequently taking license (abruptly changing speed, bringing about sudden and unexpected turns in the discourse); and (3) the form of the work does not follow a standard outline—such as the sonata, adagio, ritornello, or rondo form common in concerto movements since the Baroque— but unfolds in the manner of an “improvisation of form.”6 In the following
34 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
analysis I will survey the musical characters and the interaction between soloist and orchestra in Improvvisazioni and then examine Beecroft’s compositional techniques, based in part on information gleaned from her sketches. I will show how, on the one hand, Beecroft treats serial material in the solo part in a manner that could in fact have been extemporized by a skillful improviser, and how, on the other, many of the textures involving soloist and orchestra are of a serial complexity that simply could not have been improvised without some preestablished, mutually agreed-upon strategy. In conclusion, I will demonstrate how the work’s serial structure and discourse between soloist and orchestra—in the way they trade gestures, assert their respective identities, and so on—inspire a multitude of hermeneutic perspectives.
“Simulated improvisation” in Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 The five key passages reproduced in Examples 3.1–3.5, annotated with my serial analysis to be discussed below, show the range of strategies Beecroft uses to create the impression of improvisation in this work. I will first explore the features of each passage that contribute to the improvisatory character (or, as in Example 3.3, a lack thereof) before turning in more detail to the serial design. Example 3.1 shows the opening two pages of the full score.7 Over a low, soft rumbling harp tremolo and tam-tam roll, the solo flute enters in the second measure with partly tentative, partly assertive gestures against a backdrop of static, frosty string harmonics in mm. 3–5. The somewhat uncanny atmosphere is intensified by the soft thunder in the bass drum of mm. 4–5 and the brief, incisive gesture in the celli (beating the strings col legno) and harp at the end of m. 5, while the flute crescendos on B5 into a brief eruption in m. 6. As the solo line comes to a rest two measures later, the percussion continues with distant thunder. We may wonder: are soloist and orchestra a single entity here—that is, do they represent one “voice”— or are they instead pitted against each other in a polyvocal texture? While the phrase that immediately follows (not shown here) is equally ambiguous in this respect, the continuation shown in Example 3.2a draws a sharper distinction between orchestra and soloist, featuring larger sound masses versus solo virtuoso flourishes toward the end of the passage, which continues beyond the example. Still, it may not be clear whether the agitated flute response in m. 24 is one of opposition to or extension of the
simultaneous forceful brass swells. (Example 3.2b shows the serial combination used, reordered and with some pcs filtered out, in the brass and strings of mm. 19–21; I will return to this in Examples 3.13 and 3.14.) Contrasting with the improvisatory discourse between soloist and orchestra in the first two examples, the section shown in Example 3.3 , which follows these earlier passages, features a more steady and coordinated flow of materials. The high strings enter with chains of note-against-note dyads in opening and closing wedge counterpoint in quasi-canonic imitation (mm. 37–42) over continuing, disquieting rustling in the percussion, followed by a distant echo of an opening and closing wedge in the muted trumpets of mm. 43–44. The solo flute remains silent here, but when it reenters soon afterward (not shown), it again alternates between impulsively agitated and more lyrical improvisatory gestures, building up to an aggressive response from the orchestra in m. 65, as shown in Example 3.4 . 36 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
Example 3.1 (Continued)
(Continued)
The leaps and runs in the flute of mm. 63–64 use only six different pitch classes, as annotated in the example, presented in various orderings as if the soloist were freely improvising on a hexachord against the backdrop of sustained tremolos in the lower strings holding the complementary hexachord. (My labeling of the hexachords will become clear later on.) The two hexachords then clash head-on in the sound masses of m. 65. Sound masses burst onto the scene a few more times in the ensuing measures, leading into the section shown in Example 3.5 . This passage generates a strong continuous harmonic pull via a progression of sustained and pulsating chords built from fourths and fifths that progress via semitones (mm. 74–77) and an added fourth (m. 78)—as summarized below the example—culminating in the brass and percussion eruption of mm. 80–82. Examples 3.1–3.5 give a clear idea of the improvisatory character of the flute part, which, while fully written out, seems to unfold from spur-of-the-moment Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 37
Example 3.1 (Continued)
inspiration.8 Beecroft’s textures create this impression by means of a number of key features: (1) the solo part rarely shares rhythmic patterns with the orchestra—it usually goes its own way in this respect; (2) the soloist gives the impression of reacting quickly to sudden stimuli from the orchestra (e.g., in mm. 24–25 of Example 3.2); (3) where the orchestra might appear to be chasing or threatening the soloist (as in the same passage), the latter responds with 38 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
gestures of a clearly distinct identity; and (4) in a few places the soloist seems to be improvising while the orchestra is in a holding pattern (Example 3.4). Let us now examine these passages and the rest of the concerto in more detail in order to explore how the dramaturgy of the work interconnects with the serial construction. Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 39
Example 3.2a (Continued)
Example 3.2a (Continued)
Example 3.2b Combination of P6+I6, arranged as shown in Beecroft’s sketch
Series, invariants, and interval tension profiles The improvisatory character of Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 stems in part from reiterations of pitch material that sound like extemporized transformations of a motive or pitch-class set. Particular pitch-class cells recurring within short time spans following intervening material may create the impression of stream-of-consciousness discourse, wavering in and out of recurring materials. Example 3.6 compiles all forms of the twelve-tone series that Beecroft uses in the work, most of which occur in Examples 3.1–3.5. The format of Example 3.6 follows that of a 12 × 12 matrix, whereby prime forms of the series appear horizontally, to be read from left to right (with the corresponding retrogrades to be read from right to left), and inversions appear vertically, to be read from top to bottom (retrograde inversions from bottom up). For the purpose of illustration, I have filled in only the row forms that are actually employed in Beecroft’s score. Notably, they share a good number of shorter segments with each other, thanks to special properties of the particular twelve-tone series. For instance, the discrete dyads that I have marked with solid and broken brackets in P6 at the top recur frequently in other row forms, as indicated. Table 3.1 and Examples 3.7–3.13 take a closer look at these invariant pitch-class materials. Table 3.1 explains four types of invariant and discusses specific examples of each from the score: (1) the near-identical pitch-class ordering in the hexachords of the prime form and its inversion at the upper fifth (Examples 3.7– 3.8); (2) preservations of pitch- class cells under the twelve-tone operations P6, RI3, I3, R6 (Examples 3.9–3.11); (3) the retention of the same dyads, in permuted order, formed between two series (Example 3.12); and (4) the near-identical pitch-class content of the hexachords between the series and its inversion starting on the same pitch class (Example 3.13). Beecroft carefully analyzed the succession of intervals that results from the latter serial combination (used in the strings of Example 3.3), as shown in the excerpt from her sketches reproduced in Example 3.14 . With the two arrows above the second staff she draws attention to the wedge formed by the succession of dyads (with repeating dyads now omitted), in terms of their size as interval classes, beginning with the 42 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
unison F♯ followed by major second (ic2) and tritone (ic6), continuing with a decrease in interval-class size from a major third (ic4) and major ninth (ic2) to a unison on C, with another shorter wedge immediately following (minor sixth, major third, major second). Below this, Beecroft notes the “increase of tension” in the interval succession. She indicates this with a hairpin, the opening of which presumably symbolizes the approximate overall increase of both dissonance (tension) and interval size up to the fifth dyad (the major ninth B3–C ♯5), the insertion of the consonant and smaller fourth dyad notwithstanding.9 Beecroft’s attention to the tension of intervals was likely influenced by composer and conductor Bruno Maderna, whom she heard lecturing in Dartington in 1960, the year before the composition of Improvvisazioni. The Norma Beecroft Fonds of the University of Calgary Library, Special Collections, hold the notes that Beecroft took during Maderna’s lecture, partially reproduced in Example 3.15 . The excerpt at (b) shows how Maderna classified intervals, which loosely follows the categorization proposed by Paul Hindemith.10 As Beecroft demonstrates in her notes, Maderna assigned number values to the intervals, except the tritone, classifying them from most consonant (+3 for the perfect consonances) to least consonant (–2 for minor second and major seventh).11 Beecroft noted the cognitive rationale behind this ordering at the bottom: “Intervals are typed in this order for psychological reasons (of tension + consonance).” As we know from Maderna’s sketches for his own music, he had himself made use of this interval classification while teaching it to his students, including Luigi Nono.12 Like Maderna, Nono constructed, permuted, and analyzed twelve-tone series with respect to “tension profiles,” meticulously keeping track of the distribution of interval qualities within a series.13 Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 45
Example 3.4 (Continued)
Although Beecroft does not specifically plot out interval tension profiles in her sketches for Improvvisazioni, her notes from Maderna’s lecture and the reference in the sketch of Example 3.14 (“increase of tension”) suggest that she must have been thinking in terms of such profiles as she reordered the dyads from P6+I6 in the high strings of Example 3.3.14 Example 3.16 lists the succession of dyads from the second violins of Example 3.3 and visualizes the palindromic tension profile, using the number values from Example 3.15b.15 As the graph at the bottom of Example 3.16 illustrates, the 46 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
progression fluctuates between dyads of higher and lower degrees of dissonance. For present purposes I have placed the otherwise nonclassifiable tritone at the juncture between dissonant and consonant intervals (between values –1 and +1), even though Beecroft (following Maderna) would probably not have assigned a number value to the tritone (Example 3.15b).16 By way of an overview, Table 3.2 describes the form of Improvvisazioni, as delineated by changes in texture and in the ways soloist and orchestra interact, and summarizes the serial organization of the work. I have highlighted all serial labels in the table to illustrate how the work is built primarily from P6, isolated statements of its hexachords A and B (often internally reordered), I6, and the combinations of P6+I1 and P6+I6. The prevalence of these materials is what focuses the work around a handful of pitch-class constellations: I1 shares the same (unordered) hexachords A and B with P6 and R6 Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 47
Example 3.5 (Continued)
(Example 3.7). The discrete hexachords of I6 share five pitch classes with hexachords A or B from P6 respectively (Example 3.13). As a result, the first half of Example 3.13 expands hexachord A by one pitch class (E) to a chromatic heptachord, while the second half extends hexachord B by one pitch class (A ♭) to an inversionally symmetrical (0234568) heptachord. In other 48 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
Example 3.5 (Continued)
words, these heptachords—t hrough their close affinity with hexachords A and B—further contribute to the unity of the pitch structure. In practice, Beecroft often slides subtly from hexachord to heptachord and vice versa, as in the excerpt shown in Example 3.17 .17 A few further transpositions of the series notwithstanding (I3, RI3, P8, Pt, P0, I7 ), whose hexachords share Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 49
Example 3.6 Row forms used in the work
Table 3.1 Invariants in Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 1. Invariants between hexachords (Exx. 3.7–8):
2. Invariants in a chain of series (Exx. 3.9–11):
The ordered second hexachord B of the series is almost a transposed inversion of the first hexachord A (Ex. 3.7a). As a result, these ordered hexachords and those in the inversion of the series starting at the upper fifth (Ex. 3.7b) are almost identical: as per Ex. 3.8, the second hexachord of I1 is a slightly reordered version of hexachord A from P6, and the first hexachord of I1 is a slightly reordered version of hexachord B from P6 (the middle dyads of these hexachords are retrograded). Series P6, RI3, I3, and R6 share the four invariants a {G♯, A, C, C♯}, b {F, G}, c {D, E}, and d {B♭, B} (Ex. 3.9). Of these, a (partly fragmented) and b are most prominently featured in the opening solo line, in different registers (Ex. 3.10). Beecroft overrides serial principles in m. 14 in order to add one more (incomplete) statement of a and b. Compare m. 14 in Ex. 3.11 (which shows the original series from Beecroft’s sketch) with m. 14 in Ex. 3.10 (final version, altered to feature another partial statement of invariant a while preserving the melodic contour). The four invariants are internally ordered the same in P6 and RI3, and ditto in retrograde ordering in I3 and R6. (continued)
Table 3.1 (Continued) 3. Near-preservation of the order of dyads formed between two series (Ex. 3.12):
From category 1 above it follows that the note-against-note combination of P6 and I1 yields almost the same order of vertical dyads in both halves (the third and fourth dyads occur in reverse order; Ex. 3.12a). This combination is used in mm. 43–44 (muted trumpets and trombones at the end of Ex. 3.3, continuation not shown). The same six dyads arise, in a different order, in the combination of P0+I7 (Ex. 3.12b). Given the high degree of invariance here and the fact that Beecroft further reorders these dyads, P6+I1 and P0+I7 can be heard interchangeably (e.g., in mm. 43–57 and at the end of the work, mm. 103–8).
4. Near-identical hexachordal content in the series and its inversion starting on the same pitch class (Ex. 3.13):
The first hexachords of P6 and I6 share five pitch classes, thus adding up to a heptachord, and ditto for the second hexachords. Pruning immediate repetition of dyads yields the nine unisons/dyads numbered (compare with Exx. 3.2b and 3.14).
Example 3.7 P6 and I1
Example 3.8 Similarity between the discrete hexachords of P6 and I1
Example 3.9 Chain of P6, RI3, I3, and R6 and salient invariants
Example 3.11 Mm. 13–16 as they appear in Beecroft’s sketch, with serial analysis added
Example 3.12 (a) Note-against-note combination of P6+I1; (b) tritone transposition (P0+I7)
Example 3.13 Note-against-note combination of P6+I6
Example 3.14 Excerpt from a sketch for Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 showing intervallic tension profile. Reproduced by permission of Norma Beecroft.
Example 3.15 Excerpts from the notes Beecroft took during Bruno Maderna’s lecture. Reproduced by permission of Norma Beecroft. (a)
(b)
Example 3.16 Fluctuating tension profile in the second violins of mm. 37–41
Table 3.2 Form and serial organization in Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (strong eruptions) ↓
mm. 19 (with pickup)–36
mm. 37–44
Sections:
mm. 1–18
mm. 45–57
Musical characteristics:
Flute solo against background of soft, sustained string harmonics and rumbling percussion.
Three eruptions in the orchestra, each of which quiets down (mm.19–23, 24–28, 29–36). Flute participates in the second and third of these.
Soft, shining, high string lines moving in contrapuntal wedges, punctuated by high vibraphone and glockenspiel entries and distant, rumbling percussion (mm. 37–43). After a brief percussion crescendo the wedge is imitated by muted trumpets and trombones (mm.43–44).
Extended solo flute passage ranging from quiet to lively, accompanied by horn (initially), strings, and harp.
Serial organization:
Interlocking chain of P6–RI3–I3–R6
Mm. 19–23: combine dyads 1–4 from P6+I6 with fragment of first four pitch classes from P6, fragment of first three pitch classes from Pt, and an incomplete statement of P6. Mm. 24–28: two interlocking statements of P6 with some pitch classes omitted (mm. 24–26), followed by improvisatory passage in the flute based on hexachord A and then dyads 1–4 from P6+I6 (mm. 27–28). Brass of mm. 27–28 repeat and sustain pitch classes from before. Mm. 29–36: several statements of the first hexachords of P6 (hexachord A), P8, and I6interlocked (mm.29–30), incomplete statement of P6(m. 31), dyads from P6+I6 (in original order with entry of F and B delayed, mm.32–36).
Mm. 37–42: dyads from P6+I6 wedge reordered. Vibraphone and glockenspiel play fragments from P6. Mm. 43–44: dyads 1–4 from P6+I1 wedge (they continue into the following passage).
Mm. 45–51: flute slowly traverses P6, frequently repeating pitch-class segments on the way. Horn, strings, and harp add dyads from P6+I1 (these dyads intersect with the flute line). Mm. 52–57: flute and strings/ harp share dyads from P6+I6 (mm. 52–53), P6+I1 (mm. 54–55), and again P6+I6 (m. 56 with pickup). Strings and harp share dyads from P6+I1 in m. 57 (with pickup), ending on a fermata. The flute line of mm. 52–57 maintains much of P6.
(strong eruptions) ↓ mm. 58–64
(final eruption, at end of section) ↓ mm. 65–85
mm. 86–102
mm. 103–8
After a fermata, the solo flute takes the lead in a gradual, improvisatory buildup to the outburst of orchestral sound masses in m. 65.
Brief, very violent tutti outburst (mm. 65–66), followed by two further outbursts (mm. 67–73) and a nervous buildup to another eruption that then quickly calms down (mm. 74–85). The solo flute participates in all of this.
Quiet percussion texture with much resonance from the pitched instruments (glockenspiel, vibraphone, harp, timpani). Flute enters in m. 91 with mostly high and medium-range sustained pitches and flourishes, while the double basses (divisi) gradually form a carpet of sustained harmonics. Over this double-bass chord with added bass drum roll and a few vibraphone attacks, the flute performs a written-out cadenza (mm. 96–100) that leads into a final eruption in the percussion (mm. 100–101), followed by an echo of sustained brass harmony (m. 102 with pickup).
Final cadenza of the solo flute, flaring up and then quieting down (mm. 103–4). Woodblock attacks, accelerating into tremolo and overlapping with the end of this cadenza, lead into the concluding measures of the work (mm. 105–8). These combine quietly resonating percussion (triangle, tam- tam, cymbals, harp) with soft pointillist echoes in the muted brass, over which the soloist performs high harmonics, concluding with an upward leap to an accented and fading B♭6.
Flute unfolds P6 and fragments thereof, sometimes reordered. Fragment of P8 (fifth toeighth note) at end of m. 61. Starting in m. 59, the lower strings outline hexachord A (P6) which gradually enters in mm. 59–62 and whose pitches are sustained as tremoli and harmonics into mm. 63–64. Over this sustained harmony in mm. 63–64, the flute permutes hexachord B.
The sound masses in mm. 65–66 superimpose hexachords A and B. The following two outbursts both start with hexachord B in the brass followed by hexachord A in the solo flute and some of the other instruments (mm. 67–73). The following buildup initially focuses on hexachord B (mm. 74ff). over which the flute and other instruments present P6 and selected dyads from P6+I6 (mm. 77–85).
Mm. 86–91 extract and reorder the discrete trichords from P6. Flute enters with I6(mm. 91–94) and projects dyads 1 and 2 from P6+I1 (mm. 94–95). Double- bass harmony is built from (reordered) hexachord B (mm. 92–100). Flute cadenza in mm. 96–100 permutes hexachord A. Hexachord A is echoed in the brass of mm. 101–2.
Flute cadenza starts out with hexachord B (continuing from previous hexachord A in the brass), then uses dyads from P6+I1 and fragments from P6 and I6 (mm. 103–4). Concluding four measures are built from the dyads of P6+I1 or P0+I7 (both combinations form the same dyads).
fewer than five pitch classes with hexachords A or B, the overall focus on the latter and on constellations closely resembling them (Table 3.2) centers the work mainly on one twelve-tone “area.”18
Some thoughts on musical plot It is tempting to hear the musical discourse of a solo concerto in terms of a plot, and I would now like to contemplate this idea for Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1. Given the numerous perspectives from which listeners and analysts may approach a work such as this, I will not attempt one single interpretative reading of Improvvisazioni here, but rather will review the parameters that could inform a number of interpretations. In a concerto, an assigned plot would likely focus on the opposition of, and interaction between, soloist and orchestra (the individual vs. the masses), and while I will consider this angle, I would like to broaden the notion of plot to embrace possibilities that are not limited to metaphors of human behavior (I give an example of this in point 5 below). The main hermeneutic difficulty not only arises from the fact that music by itself is nonreferential, but also derives from the problem that any attempt to assign signification to music will invariably lead to contradictions. Yet, as I will demonstrate, for Beecroft’s concerto, being alert to potential interpretative contradictions is precisely what enriches our understanding of the music. The opening of Improvvisazioni (Example 3.1), as pointed out earlier, is a good example for the interpretative challenge: if we think of plot in terms of characters, do orchestra and soloist form one “voice” at the beginning, or is the soloist pitted against the orchestra, or are there perhaps more than two parties involved (e.g., rumbling percussion and harp vs. solo flute vs. string shimmers)? The flute line is sufficiently different from the rest to be perceived as a separate entity, and yet we could just as well hear the (generally softer) orchestra as a dimension of the persona of the 56 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
flute. In such a reading, a single character (flute plus orchestra) could be understood as struggling with an inner conflict rather than as being involved in an external one between individual and masses. Or perhaps the entire texture should not be interpreted as being about conflict at all, since, to me, even in places where sudden outbursts occur, they sound fairly nonconfrontational (for example, in the orchestra at the end of m. 5, or in the flute in m. 6). And so, in the end, perhaps the opening of the work is not about human character altogether, but about movement of a more abstract kind. The work’s title, the concertante genre it references, Beecroft’s sketches, and her few published commentaries on this composition do not give many clues to dramatic intent, and they give no indication at all of possible programmatic content.19 This does not mean, of course, that there is none. In fact, some of the biographical information mentioned earlier could stimulate a programmatic interpretation, as I suggest in point 6 below. But my question is a broader one, namely, what the work could mean to different listeners independent of, and perhaps despite, the composer’s specific intent. Answers to this question will depend heavily on factors such as the background, experience, interest, and mood of the listener, the particular insights of the analyst, the musical decisions of the performers, and so forth. Below I present a few thoughts on what could inform interpretative readings of Improvvisazioni.
1. Character and identity of the solo flute part One notable difference in the treatment of the solo instrument compared to that of the orchestra, for the most part, is the jaggedness of the flute lines. The flute generally moves in larger leaps, spanning a wide tessitura over often several octaves. By contrast, the instruments of the orchestra generally move with fewer skips and within smaller ranges (save for passages with incisive gestures, such as in mm. 19–23 of Example 3.2 or m. 65 of Example 3.4). The profile of the flute thus clearly distinguishes the soloist (individual) from the rest (masses). This distinction is particularly strong in places where the orchestra remains static while the flute rules the foreground (the opening in Example 3.1, the cadenza in Example 3.4, and even the buildup of Example 3.5). While this differentiation readily supports a reading of the concerto as nurturing an opposition of solo and orchestra, the leaps in the flute could also be understood less in terms of (confrontational) contrast than in terms of instrumental balance: leaps provide the flute with acoustical strength that it may not otherwise have. Against the trombone choir in m. 24 of Example 3.2, for instance, the Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 57
flute would be far less audible were it to play all of its pitches in a narrow range, say, between A4 and D5. The same would be true for Example 3.5. In these and similar places, one could thus understand the flute as moving on a par with, not in contrast to, the orchestra. I will come back to this in points 4 and 5.
2. Character and identity of individual orchestr al instruments Aside from textures that bind orchestral instruments into a more or less homogenous blend (e.g., the high strings in Examples 3.1 and 3.3, the brass in Example 3.2, and the entire orchestra in m. 65 of Example 3.4), individual instruments of the orchestra occasionally take on solo roles as well. Although this happens infrequently, such solos in the orchestra nevertheless suggest the presence of further “individuals,” perhaps in the manner of “third parties” (e.g., the solo trumpet in dialogue with the solo flute in mm. 34–35 and the dialogue with the vibraphone in mm. 97–99 over a sustained string chord, not shown here). The presence of multiple solo instruments is of course a central element in the concertante genre. Beecroft wrote two more Improvvisazioni Concertanti, No. 2 in 1971 and No. 3 in 1973. In No. 2, “leading players of the orchestra are often treated as soloists, performing in chamber ensembles such as a string quartet or woodwind quintet.”20 No. 3 also features solos.
3. Who are the protagonists, and how do they inter act? (External conflict) In a number of passages, two of which appear in Examples 3.4 and 3.5, the solo flute and orchestra could be heard as being embroiled in a conflict in which the flute eventually gets drowned out by the sound masses of the orchestra. These passages are located in the second half of the work (see Table 3.2, between the second and third arrows). The last of them (leading up to mm. 100–101, not shown) precedes the final cadenza, in the course of which the soloist bursts out a few more times before calming down and striking a conciliatory tone into the quiet final four measures of the work, shared with soft percussion and brass. A possible reading of this process is summarized in Table 3.2: soloist and orchestra peacefully stand side by side at the opening of the work (mm. 1–18). The orchestra provokes the flute with three short eruptions (mm. 19–36), the second and third of which generate immediate and agitated responses from the soloist. After a mostly quiet orchestra passage
58 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
(mm. 37–44), flute, strings, and harp engage in a friendly dialogue that ends on a fermata (mm. 45–57). Suddenly agitated, now about halfway through the piece, the flute initiates a nervous and accelerating buildup, triggering fp accents in the strings (held pitches, mostly tremolo) and prompting a most forceful response from the orchestra with the tutti clashes in mm. 65–66. This is followed by three more outbursts (in mm. 67ff. and 70ff., and leading into mm. 81–82) in which flute and orchestra seem to be struggling side by side, eventually collapsing in mm. 82–85. A quiet, peaceful section ensues (mm. 86–96), leading into the cadenza of mm. 97–100; this culminates in an intense crescendo, provoking one last violent response from the orchestra (mm. 100–101), and is followed by the final cadenza and conclusion of the work as described earlier. In sum, an interpretative reading such as this highlights the conflict between two main protagonists—with perhaps the addition of a few more agents along the way—and its eventual resolution.
4. A single protagonist? (Inner conflict) Although listeners are likely to think of the soloist and the orchestra as two different characters, especially when they see a performance, Improvvisazioni could also be heard as embodying a single persona, as I suggested for the opening of the work earlier. Such a reading could relocate the external conflict described under point 3 inside a single identity (merging flute and orchestra) in a type of monodrama that shows the inner emotional states and struggles of a single being, perhaps along the lines of Schoenberg’s Erwartung. Such inner struggles may imply the presence of a (perhaps hostile) outside world—itself, however, not represented in the music itself.
5. No conflict Another hearing, whether conceiving of flute and orchestra as one or several bodies, might reject the idea of conflict in Improvvisazioni altogether. In such a hearing, the orchestral sound masses that burst onto the scene would not feel confrontational, nor would the many “agitated” flute gestures. To some listeners—I am among them—Beecroft’s gestures come across not as aggressive but as beautifully and nonconfrontationally vibrant, in a discourse that vividly explores instrumental timbres, contrasts (but not conflicts) in harmony and register, and so forth. The overall “plot” that I hear is one of gradual intensification, in terms of sequence of ideas as well as of richness in combination. The beginning conveys a sense of open space (through wide registral gaps and a slow pace; Example 3.1) that is then filled in and thinned
out again, with the flute eventually reaching a degree of density that could hardly be surpassed (Example 3.4). This is followed until m. 85 by a breathless sequence of events (including those shown inExample 3.5) combining many of the kinds of gestures and colors heard earlier. The remainder of the movement (from m. 86 on) reenacts this overall discourse, compressed into a shorter timespan, progressing from open space and slow motion to rapid intensification, culminating in m. 100 and the following final cadenza, before completely calming down in the final measures.21
6. Biographical dimension Further interpretative angles could consider the biographical dimensions of Improvvisazioni. The work features Beecroft’s own instrument, the flute, in the solo part. With this in mind, we could hear the solo instrument as representing the composer conversing, dialoguing, struggling, or however we hear it, with the orchestra. Or we could experience the orchestra as an extension of the soloist, as suggested before, and thus as a dimension of the composer herself in the “plot,” whatever it may be. At the time Beecroft composed the work, she was studying with Severino Gazzelloni, whose unparalleled virtuosity had inspired many composers in Darmstadt and elsewhere to write solo pieces or works featuring solo flute for him.22 As she mentions in the 1982 interview, Improvvisazioni “was written essentially for Gazzelloni because I was so fascinated with the incredible things that he could do on the flute.”23 We could thus hear the solo instrument representing Gazzelloni and weigh possible interpretations accordingly, perhaps in conjunction with points 3, 4, and 5 above.And there is a third figure that belongs in the biography of the work and that could inform a reading of it: Beecroft’s composition teacher in Rome, Goffredo Petrassi, to whom the work is dedicated.
7. Serial construction Details of serial construction could provide further clues for interpretative readings of the work. We may, for instance, wonder about the serial relationships between protagonists. Do they pit different serial materials against each other or are their parts integrated on the serial-structural (as opposed to the gestural) level? This question, as the analysis has shown, has a clear answer: soloist and orchestra are for the most part intricately intertwined in terms of serial structure. For example, serially speaking, the opening of the work develops from one, not several, “lines.” It is almost 60 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
always a single row that unfolds at any given time; soloist and orchestra select their pitches from the same row but only rarely state it individually in a complete form.24 And this is by and large true for most of the work, including where Beecroft pairs two rows. As naïve as such a reading may be, the serial structure of the work might thus metaphorically suggest a nonconfrontational relationship between solo and orchestra. Or else, we might argue, what may sound confrontational on the surface (in terms of musical gesture) is mediated on the serial level.
Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 in the context of the Darmstadt avant-garde and Eco’s The Open Work As noted at the beginning of this essay, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1, together with Tre Pezzi Brevi, written the previous year, stands at the beginning of a group of Beecroft’s works that intersects with the latest developments in the European musical avant-garde. These works combine her sensibility for instrumental color—inspired particularly by Debussy, whose music has had an enduring impact on Beecroft ever since she first encountered it as a child—with some of the new serial and formal principles championed by the Darmstadt School. In Tre Pezzi Brevi, Beecroft worked out her own version of the type of serial permutation technique invented by Maderna, although she did not make use of it in Improvvisazioni.25 She also applied a variant of Maderna’s technique in her next work, Contrasts, for six performers, which was premiered in Palermo in 1962 and conducted by Maderna at Darmstadt in 1963. The nonteleological “moment form” of the latter work was strongly influenced by the music of Stockhausen, whose Kontakte for piano, percussion, and tape had left such a deep impression on Beecroft when she first heard the work in Darmstadt in 1961. Neither Improvvisazioni nor Tre Pezzi Brevi and Contrasts make use of aleatory composition, an approach then appearing more and more frequently in the works of certain other Darmstadt composers, but Beecroft would eventually incorporate such strategies in her own music (Rasas from 1968 and Improvvisazioni Concertanti Nos. 2 and 3 feature aleatory techniques, for instance).26 In 1959, the year Beecroft arrived in Italy, the journal on contemporary music founded and edited by Luciano Berio, Incontri musicali, published a number of essays that focused on the concept of the “open work.” The issue included the seminal essay on the open work, or “work in movement,” by Umberto Eco. In his article, Eco, inspired by the latest developments in contemporary music of the time, explains the extent to which works of art and literature are open and shows how these possibilities had been radically Norma Beecroft, Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 (1961) 61
expanded by the inclusion of aleatory technique in recent compositions by Berio, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Pousseur.27 Eco observes that works of art certainly can be, and have been, open without the use of aleatory techniques as well, and he enumerates a number of features that contribute to a work’s openness even where its text is fully written out. In a nutshell, according to Eco openness arises from ambiguities somewhere in the making or understanding of a work. These occur, for instance, when a work breaks with a particular convention, such as was the case with the new musical forms developed by contemporary composers who did away with traditional forms. In Darmstadt this interest in new approaches to form was nurtured by extended discussions and analyses of Debussy’s and other composers’ compositions. Debussy’s music and that of Webern were seen as the harbingers of a new way of thinking about form. To mention just two authors, Stockhausen, in a talk in 1954, recognized precursors of his “statistische Form” in Debussy’s Jeux, and Boulez spoke of “une forme en perpétuel renouvellement” in the same work.28 What Boulez meant was that in Debussy the musical material undergoes constant development and transformation, and that a work’s form resulted from the particular path of that transformation, rather than from the material’s being subordinated to a well-known form type. This represented a preference shared by many composers at the time—form as process as opposed to form following a fixed model—and Beecroft’s Improvvisazioni fully subscribes to this procedure of creating new forms. As we have seen, her work avoids symmetrical phrase structures, new gestures grow fluidly from earlier ones, pitch materials constantly expand upon earlier (serial) material, and so forth, without recourse to recurring “themes” and recapitulations.29 As Eco explains, openness results from “an act of improvised creation” when the form of a piece is chosen during performance.30 Obviously, anything that sounds as if it were the result of improvisation—whether literally improvised or performed from a written-out score—w ill give the impression of an open work, because it creates the feeling that the “improvisation” could in fact have led down a different path, requiring a different continuation than the one actually heard. And here again, Beecroft’s Improvvisazioni, with its fully written- out “improvisations,” takes full advantage of such suggestive possibilities. Through flexible and intricate use of serial techniques, distancing from traditional forms, constantly metamorphosing timbres, incorporation of a wide variety of instrumental techniques (particularly in the solo part), and lively improvisatory discourse, the work situates itself firmly in the avant-garde of its time. By synthesizing in this way the latest developments in the guise of a concerto for her own instrument, Beecroft delivered a most personal response to current trends in contemporary music. 62 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
Notes 1. I would like to thank Friedemann Sallis, Department of Music, University of Calgary, for drawing my attention to the sketches held in the Norma Beecroft Fonds of the University of Calgary Library, Special Collections. It was Professor Sallis who first observed in Beecroft’s sketches that she used techniques similar to those I had been studying in the music of Bruno Maderna. I would like to thank Archives & Special Collections, Libraries and Cultural Resources, University of Calgary, and especially librarian Apollonia Steele, for granting me access to Beecroft’s sketches and for their support during my stay at the archives and beyond. I am also grateful to the Archivio Luigi Nono in Venice and the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel for the opportunity to study the manuscripts of Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna. Archival research for this project was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Finally, I wish to extend a warm thank you to the composer, Dr. Norma Beecroft, for her permission to reproduce the score excerpts, as well as facsimiles and information from her sketches, in this essay. The score of Improvvisazioni Concertanti No. 1 was originally published by Leeds Music (Canada) and is now distributed by the Canadian Music Centre. A commercial recording is available on Canadian Composers Portraits: Norma Beecroft, with Nicholas Fiore (flute) and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra,conducted by Victor Feldbrill, Centrediscs CD- CMCCD 9303, 2003, compact disc. This is a remastering of the original LP recording released in 1972 (Audat 477–4001). I wish to thank Robert Aitken for confirming the name of the soloist, not listed on either record jacket. 2. Chance and indeterminacy constitute distinct aleatory compositional features: chance involves the use of chance operations somewhere in the compositional process, such as when a composer throws the dice to choose a musical object or attribute from a list of options, with that choice then being fully notated in the score. Compositions involving indeterminacy leave certain elements open, such as when a performer is required to improvise on a given material or when the type of sound production is only vaguely (or not at all) defined in the score. 3. Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni, introd. David Robey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1–23. The article was originally published under the title “L’opera in movimento e la coscienza dell’epoca,”Incontri Musicali 3 (1959): 32–54. 4. Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen did not publish any “concerti” in the 1950s, for instance. Between 1951 and 1958 Luigi Nono composed only two works featuring soloist and ensemble (Epitaffio per Federico García Lorca N. 2 [1952] and Varianti [1957]), Bruno Maderna one (Flute Concerto [1954]), and Luciano Berio two (Serenata I[1957] and Tempi concertati [1958–59]) before the onset of a new stream of concerti in Maderna’s œuvre and a long series of works featuring solo instruments and ensemble in Berio’s music. 5. André Hodeir, “Die simulierte Improvisation: Ihre Entstehung—Ihr Einfluß im Bereich des Jazz,” in Jazz Op. 3: Die heimliche Liebe des Jazz zur europäischen Moderne, ed. Ingrid Karl (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1986), 97. See also Wolfram Knauer, “‘Simulated Improvisation’ in Duke Ellington’s ‘Black, Brown and Beige,’”Black Perspective in Music 18, no. 1–2 (1990): 20–38. 6. I am borrowing the terms “license” (“license granted by improvisation”) and “improvisation of form” from Joseph Kerman, Concerto Conversations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 72 and 79.
7. The work is scored for a reduced orchestra of two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion (bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, wood block, glockenspiel, and vibraphone), harp, and strings. Aside from the solo flute, no other woodwinds are used. For ease of orientation, I show the solo flute part in larger print in the examples from the full score. (The published edition, which reproduces Beecroft’s handwritten score, shows all parts in the same size.) In my analysis, unordered sets are shown in braces (curly brackets), prime forms and normal orders of sets in parentheses. Pitch-class successions of series are shown with letter names on the scores; omitted pitch classes are indicated in square brackets. 8. I borrow the expression “spur-of-the-moment inspiration” from Kerman, Concerto Conversations, 80. 9. In this reading, the tritone would be considered less dissonant than the major ninth (see also the discussion of Example 3.16 below). In the last three dyads of Example 3.14, the larger intervals are less dissonant than the smaller one. 10. Maderna apparently deviated from Hindemith in that he paired the major third with the major (rather than the minor) sixth, and the minor third with the minor (rather than major) sixth. Compare Example 3.15b with Hindemith’s “series 2” in Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, trans. Arthur Mendel (New York: Schott, 1970), 85. Maderna’s interval classification mixes the theories of Hindemith and Gioseffo Zarlino, who in the third part of Le istitutioni harmoniche divides the imperfect consonances into two groups, the major third and major sixth on the one hand, and the minor third and minor sixth on the other. See Gioseffo Zarlino, Le istitutioni harmoniche (Venice, 1558), 155–56. I am indebted to Peter Schubert for pointing me to this passage. 11. The staff notation of the fourth and fifth groups (minor second/major seventh and major second/minor seventh) should switch places, as Beecroft indicates by small arrows. The number values that Maderna assigned to the intervals, and hence the grouping together of minor third and minor sixth, etc., are confirmed by his own preparatory notes for the Dartington lecture (July 31, 1960) preserved in the Collection Bruno Maderna of the Paul Sacher Foundation. 12. Veniero Rizzardi, “La ‘nuova scuola veneziana,’ 1948–1951,” in Le musiche degli anni cinquanta (Archivio Luigi Nono, Studi II, 2003), ed. Gianmario Borio, Giovanni Morelli, and Veniero Rizzardi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2004), 6–9. 13. I borrow the term “tension profile” from Jeannie Ma. Guerrero, “The Presence of Hindemith in Nono’s Sketches: A New Context for Nono’s Music,” Journal of Musicology 26, no. 4 (2010): 492. 14. Beecroft must already have been familiar with Hindemith’s theories from her studies with John Weinzweig, who encouraged his students to read The Craft of Musical Composition. See Robert Aitken, “How to Play Weinzweig,” in Weinzweig: Essays on His Life and Music, ed. John Beckwith and Brian Cherney (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011), 355. 15. The first violins in Example 3.3 imitate this succession in a truncated version that omits some dyads. The layers in the second and first violins form palindromes in themselves. 16. Distinct note-against-note combinations with clear tension profiles such as in Example 3.16 appear twice more in the work, in mm. 43–44 of Example 3.3 (muted brass) and in mm. 34–35 (not shown). 17. The two distinct heptachords of P6+I6 (Example 3.13, first and second half respectively) have maximally different pitch-class content, sharing the minimum number of pitch classes any two heptachords will have in common (two), thus still maintaining a sense of complementarity.
64 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
18. I am borrowing the term “area” from David Lewin, who in his analysis of Schoenberg’s Fantasy Op. 47 called distinct transpositions of the (unordered) discrete hexachords of the twelve-tone series “areas.” See David Lewin, “A Study of Hexachord Levels in Schoenberg’s Violin Fantasy,” in Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, ed. Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 78–92. 19. Beecroft briefly speaks about the work in a 1982 interview with Karen Kieser (“Interview with Norma Beecroft,” in Anthology of Canadian Music: Norma Beecroft [Radio Canada International, 1982]) and a 2003 interview with Eitan Cornfield (Canadian Composers Portraits: Norma Beecroft, Centrediscs CD-CMCCD 9303, 2003, compact disc). The liner notes for the LP of the first recording of Improvvisazioni state: “The flute solo demands much from the performer who plays almost without interruption and conveys the spirit of the improvisation, against a background of sustained orchestral passages” (see n. 1). 20. CD booklet notes (no author given) based on information provided by the composer (Ovation, vol. 3, Canada Music [CBC Records PSCD 2028-5, 2003, compact disc]). 21. With respect to recent work in musical narrative, the potential plots that I have drafted here suggest that Improvvisazioni does fulfill the conditions for a musical narrative as set out by Byron Almén, who “understand[s] narrative as articulating the dynamics and possible outcomes of conflict or interaction between elements, rendering meaningful the temporal succession of events, and coordinating these events into an interpretive whole.” A Theory of Musical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 13. Following the lead of Douglass Seaton in his review of this book, I prefer “plot” to “narrative” in my readings of Beecroft’s concerto sketched out here. Seaton’s review appears in Journal of Musicological Research 30 (2011): 72–76. 22. To mention just a few, Nono’s Epitaffio per Federico García Lorca N. 2 (1952) featuring solo flute, Maderna’s Flute Concerto (1954), Berio’s Serenata I (1957), Sequenza I (1958), and Tempi concertati (1958–59) were all written for and premiered by Gazzelloni. 23. Kieser, “Interview with Norma Beecroft.” 24. An early “exception” is RI3, fully stated by the solo flute in mm. 5–7. Also, P6 is echoed here in the orchestra while the soloist has already moved on beyond this row. 25. For introductions to Maderna’s permutation techniques, see Markus Fein, Die musikalische Poetik Bruno Madernas: Zum “seriellen” Komponieren zwischen 1951 und 1955 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001); Gianmario Borio, “Tempo e ritmo nelle composizioni seriali, 1952–1956,” in Le musiche degli anni cinquanta (Archivio Luigi Nono, Studi II, 2003), ed. Gianmario Borio, Giovanni Morelli, and Veniero Rizzardi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2004), 61–115; Rizzardi, “La ‘nuova scuola veneziana,’ 1948–1951”; and Christoph Neidhöfer, “Bruno Maderna’s Serial Arrays,”Music Theory Online 13, no. 1 (2007), http:// www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.07.13.1/mto.07.13.1.neidhofer.html. 26. “Norma Beecroft,” The CanadianEncyclopedia; Cornfield, Norma Beecroft. 27. Eco, “L’opera in movimento e la coscienza dell’epoca,”Incontri musicali 3 (1959): 32–54. Eco’s notion of indeterminacy in music is quite narrow at this point; he does not discuss Cage and the much broader implications of this concept in his music. This issue of Incontri musicali also featured Italian translations of Boulez’s article “Alea” and an article by Heinz-Klaus Metzger on Cage, as well as the first publication of Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” (in English), in addition to articles by Nicolas Ruwet, Henri Pousseur, André Souris, Berio, Niccolò Castiglioni, and Alfredo Lietti on serialism, form, timbre in Debussy, text and music, and aleatory phenomena in electronic music. 28. Stockhausen, “Von Webern zu Debussy: Bemerkungen zur statistischen Form,” in Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, ed. Dieter Schnebel (Cologne: DuMont, 1963), 75–85. Pierre Boulez, “Debussy: Jeux (poème de danse),” Gravesaner
Blätter 2–3 (1956): 4–5. For an in-depth discussion of the reception of Debussy’s music in Darmstadt, see Gianmario Borio, “La réception de l’œuvre de Debussy par les compositeurs sériels: discours analytique et construction collective d’une image du passé,” in L’analyse musicale: une pratique et son histoire, ed. Rémy Campos and Nicolas Donin (Geneva: Droz, HEM—Conservatoire supérieur de Musique de Genève, 2009), 197–222. 29. In a later essay titled “Series and Structure,” originally published in 1968, Eco, following Boulez, considers serial technique to lead to inherently open structures: “Serial thought aims at the production of a structure that is at once open and polyvalent. …” Eco, “Series and Structure,” in The Open Work, 217–35, at 218. 30. Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” 1.
66 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
4 Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986)
Joan Tower is one of the most successful and highly regarded American composers of our time. Born in New Rochelle, New York in 1938, her family moved to La Paz, Bolivia, when she was nine. There her immersion in the vibrant music and dance rhythms of Bolivia profoundly influenced the rhythmic language of her later music.i After returning to the United States in 1954, Tower enrolled at Bennington College in Vermont, initially studying physics and later taking music courses with the composer Henry Brant, who inspired in her a revelatory interest in composition.ii After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in music in 1961, Tower moved to New York, where the twelve-tone composers Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, and Mario Davidovsky became important mentors for her. She enrolled in the master’s composition program at Columbia University and studied with Otto Luening, Benjamin Boretz, Chou Wen-chung, and Ralph Shapey. In 1969 Tower founded the Da Capo Chamber Players, a contemporary music chamber group with herself as pianist, whose contributions to new music were recognized in 1973 by the esteemed Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award; she remained with the group for 15 years. Tower began teaching at Bard College in 1972. By the mid-1970s she was becoming disenchanted with what she perceived as the limitations of serialism and its lack of connection with most contemporary audiences. Beginning with Breakfast Rhythms II in 1975, Tower began to devise her own pitch systems “in which every pitch had a unique identity and a ranked order of importance in relation to all other pitches”—a principle that led
i. Biographical information about the composer is drawn from Ellen K. Grolman, Joan Tower: The Comprehensive Bio-Bibliography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007). ii. She later asserted that physics “fascinated me from the point of view of studying action and reaction phenomena in nature—something I have explored in music all my life.” Joan Tower, as cited in Grolman, Joan Tower, 15.
67
her back toward tonality.iii She also became dissatisfied with the arcane “rhythmic acrobatics” of much contemporary music, returning instead to the compelling rhythmic vitality of Latin dance music: Achieving an identity in music depends on risks. If you don’t take any risks, your particular compositional talents never shine through. Creating high-energy music is one of my special talents; I like to see just how high I can push a work’s energy level without making it chaotic or incoherent.iv In 1978 Tower completed her doctorate in composition and returned to Bard College, where she is currently Asher Edelman Professor of Music. She was composer-in-residence for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra from 1985 to 1987, during which time she composed the powerful Silver Ladders, a work that earned her the 1988 Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize and the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition two years later—the first time this prestigious prize was awarded to a woman. She has also received fellowships and grants from the Koussevitsky, Fromm, and other major foundations. In 2007, her orchestral piece Made in America (2004) won the Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.v
“Octatonicism,” the Octatonic Scale, and Large-Scale Structure in Joan Tower’s Silver Ladders Jonathan W. Bernard It would be hard to imagine a less ambiguous announcement, musically speaking, of the significance of the octatonic scale to a work than the opening of Joan Tower’s Silver Ladders (1986), the piece that, together with her earlier Sequoia (1981), secured her reputation as an orchestral composer of great brilliance, and that won her the Grawemeyer Award in 1990. The rising progression , its first three notes played iii. Ibid., 27. For an analytical discussion of Breakfast Rhythms II, see Judy Lochhead, “Joan Tower’s Wings and Breakfast Rhythms I and II: Some Thoughts on Form and Repetition,” Perspectives of New Music 30, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 132–56. This landmark article was the first full-length, English-language analytical study of music by a female composer to appear in a peer-reviewed music theory journal. iv. Tower, as cited in Grolman, Joan Tower, 28. v. The album on which it was recorded won two additional Grammys, for Best Classical Album and Best Orchestral Performance.
68 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
Example 4.1 Joan Tower, Silver Ladders, opening octatonic scale, mm. 12–24 (brass and low woodwinds only)
(Continued)
by the percussion alone in the first 11 measures, gets properly under way in m. 12 with most of the rest of the orchestra entering full force, in a new beginning on C. By m. 21 the entire scale, projected by way of staggered entries, is complete up to B; the octave of the initial C arrives at the fermata three measures later (see Example 4.1) .1 And as even the most cursory of hearings will bear out, the promise embodied in this dramatic gesture is delivered on as Tower’s work opens up before us: octatonic structures of various types seem to be everywhere. Prominent among these structures are, specifically, scales, as readers of the prefatory note to the score of Silver Ladders will already have been led to expect: “The first section is based on upward-moving scales (the ladder) formed largely of whole and half steps.”2 It is in the nature of such prefatory notes to simplify, of course, and also to avoid technical language where possible; however, the statement does at least suggest a plausible analytical approach to the work. First, one may infer that the upward-moving scales are not unrelievedly octatonic, even if the phrase “whole and half steps” is taken to mean regularly alternating whole and half steps, since the scales Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 69
Example 4.1 (Continued)
are only “formed largely” of such intervallic progressions. Nevertheless, they are so formed to a sufficient extent to suggest that the octatonic form of the scale comes to be heard throughout the work as the referential norm. Second, one may further conjecture that the contents of such scales can 70 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
also be taken as collections, to be deployed, perhaps, in lines that are not entirely or not at all scalar, or as harmony (chords)—in short, that the octatonic collection, or sc(0134679T), serves as a kind of master set class for the first section of Silver Ladders (ending around m. 365), if not for the rest of the work as well. Before getting down to actual analysis, however, where some hypotheses about Tower’s use of the octatonic in Silver Ladders will be developed and tested, a few preliminary matters need to be addressed. Octatonic structure, or “octatonicism,” has by now quite an extensive history in Western art music and in the secondary theoretical and analytical literature that has accumulated in response to that history. Whether it was the French, the Russians, or someone else who came up with the octatonic scale sometime during the latter half of the nineteenth century (or perhaps even earlier than that), or whether, as seems more likely, the idea arose more or less simultaneously in different geographical locations, its importance to the composition and analysis of music written since the early twentieth century is by now well established. Except in the most limited of situations, however, it must have been clear to composers from the time the octatonic first came into use that it can hardly stand as the exclusive source from which a composer’s pitch material would be drawn; in this respect it resembles the whole-tone scale, the limitations of which spring from its symmetrical properties. And like the whole-tone scale in, for instance, the music of Debussy, the octatonic seems deployed to best advantage in combination with other materials. Ideas of this sort readily made their way into the modern analytical literature, as for instance in the article by Arthur Berger that opened a major path to the study of Stravinsky’s music by exploring ways in which the octatonic might interact, or at least be juxtaposed, with diatonic or tonally based materials.3 Similarly, the octatonic has turned out to be of notable significance in the music of composers as diverse as Bartók, Messiaen, Scriabin, Shostakovich, Dallapiccola, and Takemitsu—usually, however, as but one mode of pitch organization among at least several and sometimes quite numerous possibilities.4 Although Tower’s music has not yet attracted sufficient attention from analysts to permit comparably general statements about it,5 on the evidence of her procedures involving scales of “whole and half steps” in Silver Ladders it does appear that she has arrived at an octatonic strategy quite markedly different from anything in the music of her twentieth-century predecessors. Under this strategy—perhaps more accurately called a cluster of strategies—the sound of the whole step/half step can remain insistently present for long periods of time without seeming to require relief in the form of diatonic or any other differently configured material. Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 71
In the excerpt from Silver Ladders beginning at m. 151 and ending at m. 365, during which scalar motion is featured to the effective exclusion of any other kind of texture, we find the octatonic employed in six basic ways. Category 1. Single scales are the simplest form of presentation. Such scales almost always begin with the whole step (organized, that is, according to van den Toorn’s Model B, a 2-1-2-1 tetrachord)6, as in Example 4.1 above.7 Category 2. Slightly more intricate are scales that are doubled at the minor third or major sixth (or minor tenth, etc.), resulting in composite formations in which all parts belong to the same octatonic collection at the same time (Example 4.2) . Where the parts shift to a new collection, they do so together, as in this example from T1 (mm. 177–78) to T0 (mm. 179–81). Example 4.2 Strings, mm. 177–81: Category 2 (doubling at minor third/major sixth)
Category 3. Next in order of intricacy are scales that are doubled at the major third (or minor sixth, or compounds of these intervals), resulting in composite formations in which each line belongs to a different octatonic collection. In Example 4.3, the viola and the cello’s higher notes are members of T0; the bass and cello’s lower notes are members of T1 . Example 4.3 Strings, mm. 61–64: Category 3 (doubling at major third/minor sixth)
72 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
Category 4. Probably the most involved of all are offshoots of Categories 2 and 3 (referred to henceforth, respectively, as “2-variant”and “3-variant”), in which the formations are doubled, resulting in composites of four lines, now with two or even all three octatonic collections represented. One possible 2-variant is shown in Example 4.4a . Here, the first and second trumpets in parallel minor thirds project T0, while the horns and third trumpet, also in parallel minor thirds, project T1. Notated as pitch intervals, the composite of parallel intervals forms the stack 3-5-3, or two sets of minor thirds separated by a perfect fourth, which could be thought of, informally, as “parallel major-minor triads in first inversion.” Example 4.4b illustrates a 3-variant in which the interval stack 6-4-4 is formed, with the two scales separated by a tritone belonging to one collection (cello and viola: T2), and the two others at successive major-third distances belonging to the other two collections (second violin, T0; first violin, T1). Example 4.4a Brass, mm. 246–47: Category 4 (2-variant)
Example 4.4b Strings, mm. 289–90: Category 4 (3-variant)
Category 5. Within a scalar segment (usually repeated several times) of four or five notes, two pitch changes are introduced, producing the
Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 73
basis for continuation of scalar motion in a different octatonic collection (Example 4.5) . In this example, the segment is repeated for two measures (mm. 121–22, the tail end of an unbroken series of repetitions of this segment that began in m. 185); then, in m. 123, B falls to B♭ and G♯ falls to G♮, shifting the octatonic collection from T0 to T1.8 Example 4.5 Scalar parts only, mm. 221–26: Category 5
Category 6. The last type of octatonic usage enumerated here involves shifts to or from the fully chromatic collection. These shifts are sometimes accomplished gradually, in which case they resemble the repeating- segment technique of Category 5 (Example 4.6) . In this example, the transition is indeed gradual: the fully chromatic scalar segment () persists through m. 315; at m. 316 a whole-tone gap opens up, as the G♯ falls to G♮; at m. 320 the A falls to G♯; at m. 323 the G and the A♯ fall to F♯ and A♮ respectively, bringing the scalar segment into conformance with T0.9 74 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
Example 4.6 Full score, mm. 305–26: Category 6
(Continued)
To summarize: among these scalar usages, the first and second categories are confined to a single collection; the third and fourth combine two or three collections in simultaneous projection; and the fifth and sixth provide ways of “mutating” a given octatonic collection, either into another octatonic collection or into one that is non-octatonic. The usages of Categories 1 and 2 are certainly straightforward enough; the mechanism of mutation from one octatonic collection to another in Category 5 equally so. The shift between octatonic and chromatic in Category 6 dilutes the octatonic content, but not by very much: we have already been led to expect that other scales will occasionally appear, and the inference drawn above—t hat octatonic forms dominate as the norm— remains intact. However, Categories 3 and 4 compel one to ask: just what is the meaning of “octatonic” in this piece? The customary definition of an octatonic structure requires the pitch classes that it contains (with relatively rare exceptions) to belong to a single octatonic collection. Granted, in the case of Tower’s parallel scales in major thirds, or in four-note chords, the collections are projected as separate strands, played by different instrumental parts; but without any rhythmic, timbral, or other means of differentiating them within their composite texture, the chances of the listener being able to hear them as truly separate entities would seem dim. Nor is there any apparent reason, in the excerpts illustrated in Examples 4.3 and 4.4 (typical of such usages), to assign priority to any one octatonic strand, which might enable the listener to hear the others as some form of coloration. Quite to the contrary, the strands all appear to be weighted equally, whether or not they belong to the same octatonic collection. The only real differences among the parallel-scale treatments inhere in the necessarily heavier orchestration of the 2-and 3-variants under Category 4. Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 75
Example 4.6 (Continued)
Before considering these issues any further, it would be well to examine the details of the excerpt itself. Example 4.7 provides a condensed view of the first part, mm. 151–239, keyed with boldface numbers to the categories above .10 The occasional all-chromatic passages that do not involve mutation to or from the octatonic (that is, are not classifiable under Category 6 above) are simply labeled “chrom.”11 One fruitful way to begin listening through this excerpt is to concentrate on the fluctuations between passages during which just one octatonic 76 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
Example 4.7 Pitch reduction, mm. 155–239
(Continued)
Example 4.7 (Continued)
Example 4.7 (Continued)
collection is heard and passages during which two or all three collections are deployed simultaneously. For a while, this approach is helpful. As summarized below in Table 4.1, after an initial, almost entirely chromatic rise in parallel major thirds (mm. 151–62), the major thirds are doubled in the manner of a 3-variant (Category 4) in mm. 163–64, as parallel major seventh chords (all three octatonic collections); then T0 takes over entirely for mm. 165–67, doubled in minor thirds (Category 2). In m. 168, the doubled minor thirds continue, but the figure, carried over from mm. 163–64, is now extended to A ♮ , introducing a chromatic tinge. In m. 169, the minor thirds are now doubled in the manner of a 2-variant (Category 4), bringing all three octatonic collections into the texture and connecting clearly with the previous mm. 163–64 even though the chordal structures are different. (One hears the connection also by way of the C ♯ –B –A ♯ of those earlier measures, as well as more locally to the version of that figure extended to A ♮ in the immediately previous m. 168). At m. 170, T2 takes over completely in doubled minor thirds (Category 2). At m. 179, E and G from the previous measure (top part) shift to E ♭ and G ♭ respectively, and C ♯ and E in the lower part shift to C ♮ and E ♭ (Category 5), returning the octatonic identity to T0. From mm. 179 through 222, T0 remains in place, at first rising and falling in doubled minor thirds in by now familiar fashion; then getting stuck on a rising five-note figure (m. 185). At m. 190 the minor-third doublings disappear, leaving just the rising in three octaves, projected as an ostinato. Under this rapid motion, longer notes in the lower parts (marked with stems in Example 4.6), beginning with G ♭ in m. 195, project an eventually complete T0 scale. Just as this scale is reaching its final notes, a Category 5 shift occurs in the ostinato (in m. 223, G♯ and B mutate to G ♮ and B ♭ respectively), changing the reigning collection to T1. T1’s duration is considerably shorter than that of the preceding T0 passage: at m. 239, another Category 5 shift (F♯ and A to F♮ and A ♭) introduces T2—which, however, is heard unadulterated only as a five-note figure for one measure. The action of mm. 151–239 is summarized in Table 4.1. Up to the end of this section, the fluctuations between octatonic transpositions, and the categories of usage into which they fall, are characterized by relatively long passages
Table 4.1 Summary, mm. 155–239: Categories of octatonic usage mm.
151–62 163–64 165–67
168
169
170–78 179–222 223–38 239
Collection chrom
T0, T1, T2
T0
chrom T0, T1, T2 mix
T2
T0
T1
T2
Category
4 (3-var)
2
4 (2-var)
2
5; 2, 1
5; 2
5; 1
80 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
during which a single scale/collection is heard exclusively, interspersed with relatively short passages (one or two measures) in which two or three collections are simultaneously present. Perhaps more interesting is the difference in “behavior”: while the multiple-collection parallel-chord patterns are confined to more or less narrowly bounded pitch spaces, the single-collection scalar patterns travel appreciable distances through these spaces and thus more clearly fulfill a ladder function (in keeping with the title of the work). In mm. 240–365, the pace of change accelerates appreciably. In contrast to the section discussed above, simultaneous use of different octatonic collections is more the rule than the exception. Where single collections occur at all, their duration is brief, soon superseded by other single collections or (much more frequently) composite usages that also tend to be fairly short in duration. Adding to the complexity of these 125 measures are two extended interjections of chromatic scales, as well as the fact that the excerpt comes to rest in chromatic territory. Particularly notable throughout this passage is the combination of Category 4 (2-and 3-variants) with the Category 5 mutation technique to connect short composite-collection segments. Example 4.8 presents a typical instance. Here (mm. 268–71), the first and second trumpets, at a distance of a minor third, together initially project T0, while the horns and third trumpet, also at the distance of a minor third, initially project T 1. Since these two pairs of instruments are separated by a perfect fourth and remain so throughout these four measures, they are always in different octatonic transpositions (Category 4, 2-variant). Note that the 3-5-3 vertical configuration is the same as the one illustrated in Example 4.4a; in contrast, however, to that earlier excerpt, Example 4.8 is characterized by rapid changes in the horizontal dimension as well (Category 5) . The T0/T1 pairing is maintained through m. 269; at the downbeat of m. 270 there is a shift to T2/T0, which lasts for only half a measure, succeeded in the second half by a shift to T1/T2; this in turn is followed by T2/T0 again at m. 271. At each shift, at least two notes change in each instrumental part, with the others remaining as common tones. Example 4.8 Brass, mm. 268–71: Categories 4 (2-variant) and 5 combined
Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 81
As a kind of counterweight, perhaps, to the rapid-fire, almost dizzying pace of fluctuation, in this second section of the excerpt substantial use is made of single octatonic collections in long tones unfolding in the lower parts. This is a feature already remarked upon in its one occurrence earlier in the excerpt, mm. 195–229 (see Example 4.7), to which I now recur to make a few additional, brief comments. The actual structural significance of such long tones remains somewhat enigmatic, although they do powerfully convey the idea of the octatonic collection working on different levels of motion and durational scale—an especially obvious feature of the long tones of T0 beginning at m. 195 on G ♭, since the first five of these long tones duplicate, in the same order, the notes of the rapidly articulated triple-octave ostinato higher in the texture. The long scale ends on F♯ , exactly at the point where the upper, rapid scalar motion, having mutated meanwhile from T0 to T1, simultaneously breaks free of the diminished-fifth span to which it had been confined and reacquires a minor-third doubling as it resumes its characteristic oscillating path. This synchrony seems to reinforce the importance of G ♭/F♯ in particular as a common tone between collections T0 and T1, although it is difficult to enlarge upon that observation to draw any general conclusions about pitch priority or centricity in this music. Even earlier in the piece, in fact at the very opening, the octatonic scale projected on two distinct durational levels seems to stand as an emblem of the importance of the octatonic at all levels of musical meaning. Example 4.9 is a reduction of the opening 35 measures, part of which was already examined in Example 4.1. Earlier we noted the opening in the percussion (mm. 1–11), a series of notes that takes on a kind of motivic significance in this passage in two ways. First, it occurs again in mm. 21–24 in the trombones (see Example 4.1), even before the full octatonic scale that began with the C in m. 12 has reached its octave (m. 24, fermata). Next, the T0 collection begins again, but now on D, the textural and rhythmic shift at the downbeat of m. 25 suggesting this point of articulation. This time the octatonic scale, doubled in registers 1 and 2, climbs up through two octaves; as this ascent proceeds, doublings successively added in registers 3–7 (not shown in Example 4.9) eventually bring the highest parts to E ♭ at the downbeat of m. 35, at which point new musical developments ensue . The large-scale outlining of seems quite explicit. Although one could not say that such “leveled” projection of the octatonic is a constant condition of Silver Ladders, there can be no doubt that Tower has made extensive use of it in the passage following the one treated in detail in Example 4.7. The first such usage (see Example 4.10) emerges quite clearly starting at m. 262, as a descending partial T 2 scale beginning with B . The first three long tones in the lower parts duplicate the initial 82 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
pitches of the rapid groups of five notes in the upper parts; then their content diverges as the partial scale ends with G and F (mm. 268–70). This last major second is filled chromatically (in the upper parts) by F♯ , the purpose of which very shortly becomes clear: in m. 271, another descending octatonic scale begins, in the T0 collection beginning on F♯ and continuing with F, thus dovetailing with the conclusion of the previous scale. As the stemmed notes in Example 4.10 show, this new scale continues in somewhat irregular durations down through D ♯ and D ♮ (mm. 271–72), then up to C in the upper registers (m. 275, as shown by the broken arrow) until its descent resumes. This descent can be traced by way of the uppermost first notes of each slurred group starting in m. 281 (B, A, G ♯ , F♯ , E ♯), but also doubled at the major third below (hence Category 3, joining T0 with T2). Although not literally on a separate plane of long notes, this descending scale can be traced a little farther by way of the uppermost last notes of the slurred groups starting in m. 285—D ♯ , D, C ♭ (skipping C)—before it peters out completely. In this final stage, the scale effectively merges with the upper parts for which it had been serving as a rhythmic reduction since m. 275, emphasizing the downbeats of the rapid-note figures.12 The last use of long-tone scales in this excerpt is also the most protracted, beginning in m. 305 in the T0 collection on G ♯ and descending a full octave plus a minor sixth before subsiding into the chromatic motion that serves as transition to the next part of the work (see Example 4.11) . It begins, interestingly enough, in the midst of a chromatic passage as well; as it descends, the accompanying rapid-note figures mutate from fully chromatic (m. 305) to fully octatonic (m. 323), also in the T0 collection. (This is the same passage that served to illustrate Category 5 above; see Example 4.6). There follows a series of shifts in the rapid notes, from T1 to T2 and back to T 1; then, just as the octave of the long-tone scale is about to be completed at m. 334, the figures become chromatic again and stay that way until the end of the excerpt. The long-tone scale does likewise, with a C ♯ intervening between the D and C, then continuing in all-chromatic motion from m. 354 on (not shown in the example). In all but one of the long-tone scales, T0 is either the sole component or the dominant one. This fact alone might suggest a kind of tonal interpretation, in which Silver Ladders is “centered” on that octatonic collection, with T2 perhaps in a secondary role. Since these long-tone scales cut across often numerous changes of collectional identity in the rapid-note strands that always accompany these scales, it might seem reasonable to hypothesize a hierarchical relationship, with the local rapid motion eventually subsumed under the structures of longer range. But to infer from this relationship a tonal orientation to the music might be forcing more out of the evidence than is really warranted. The long-tone scales are not always present—and Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 83
Example 4.9 Pitch reduction, mm. 1–35: levels of octatonic projection
Example 4.10 Pitch reduction, mm. 262–88
Example 4.11 Condensed view, mm. 305–54
even if their periodic appearances were to be taken as reaffirmations of a tonal basis that was otherwise in flux, one would find it difficult, owing to the symmetrical structure of the octatonic collection, to choose any particular one of its component pitch classes as a tonal center without other factors present to decide in favor of one interpretation or another. These issues are complicated enough with just one octatonic collection to deal with at a time; in the presence of octatonic combinations, such as the places where T0 and T2 work in tandem, the range of available choices becomes even more bewildering. My sense, as a listener, is that such factors are not in fact present to any significant degree—that is, that even the limited force of tonality usually denoted by the term “pitch centricity” does not figure strongly in Silver Ladders. Rather, what gives this piece its impetus, and its coherence, is the consistency of the division of pitch space into alternating whole and half steps, interestingly variegated by shifts between one octatonic collection and another or between composites featuring one pairing and another, or by all three collections at once. Such shifts occur at many different rates of speed and are accomplished through textural variation that verges at times on the positively kaleidoscopic. In other words, the listener is not encouraged to track pitch-class membership in octatonic collections and to make sense of the music in that fashion; rather, it is the indirect effect of the shifts in collections, and their groupings, that yields a satisfying aural result. The import of this strategy on Tower’s part becomes a good deal clearer in the last large section of the piece, where the motive force formerly assigned to alternating whole and half steps is diverted to perfect and augmented fourths. Again, quoting from Hyslop’s program note: “Although [Tower] does not consider Schoenberg to be a primary influence, a beautiful moment in his Chamber Symphony No. 1, Opus 9—a slow, stately motive in rising fourths—stuck in her ears throughout the years. This motive has appeared and reappeared in different guises in several of Tower’s works; she decided to give it prominence in this piece.”13 The imprecision of the musical reference to Schoenberg is striking: the famous rising motive of (purely) perfect fourths in the Chamber Symphony would sound very different if it combined perfect and augmented fourths. In fact, it ends up making a great deal of difference that Tower’s rising progressions of fourths consist of free alternations of intervals of five and six semitones— essentially free, that is, although she tends not to write more than two consecutive fourths of the same type.14 The combinations of perfect and augmented fourths turn out to be crucial because “the scale passages from the first section eventually mingle with the rising-fourths motive”15 —and motives consisting of all perfect fourths would have severely limited the Joan Tower, Silver Ladders (1986) 87
extent of this mingling, since even two perfect fourths in a row cannot belong to the same octatonic collection. To be sure, the possibilities are not greatly enlarged by allowing augmented fourths into the mix: written in semitone-span equivalents, the only available combinations are 5-6, 5-6 -6, and their reorderings (6-6, of course, also “works,” and would continue to do so in indefinite extension, but is essentially the trivial case here). What these mixed chains of fourths help bring into being is an environment in which shifts of octatonic collection occur either very rapidly or somewhat less so—that is, with some flexibility, although not a great deal— since such shifts could hardly happen very slowly: in the presence of some kind of octatonic harmonic vocabulary, no single octatonic collection could remain in place for very long. In fact, that last statement turns out to hold the key to what happens in the final section of Silver Ladders: chains of perfect and augmented fourths (descending as well as ascending, though more often the latter) typically divide into two or three segments as they travel from low to high, or high to low, with no two adjacent segments belonging to the same octatonic collection. This technique is analogous to the simultaneous projection of different octatonic collections as scales in the earlier section of the work, but it produces completely different surface features: the adjacent intervals seem to (and often literally do) project a single line, but the line is compound by implication, owing to disjunct melodic motion through different registers, rather than literally compound like the parallel scales in the first section. The excerpt reproduced in Example 4.12 (mm. 544–48) is representative of this technique. Naturally, however, the boundaries to be drawn between collections are not always perfectly clear, since any two octatonic collections have four pitch classes in common. This basic fact of octatonic usage already served to blur the respective identities of the parallel scales in the first section, and it becomes even more pertinent in the stacked-fourths section, where collections are often presented in far from complete form. In mm. 494–503, shortly after the beginning of the final section, the adjacent segments could be interpreted in at least two ways, with one pitch in each case doing double duty as a member of two segments (see Example 4.13, where the two alternatives are laid out above and below the two-stave reduction). Nothing Example 4.12 Thread of ascending and descending perfect/augmented fourths, mm. 544–48
88 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design
Example 4.13 Extracted chain of ascending perfect/augmented fourths, mm. 494–503
in either the orchestration or the rhythmic domain would appear to suggest that either of these partitionings should be favored over the other. Here, as in the first section, a successful hearing of the music seems to depend less on perceiving precise articulations of specific, distinct octatonic collections than on recognizing the intervallic consistency of (in this case) the stacked-fourths structures and their propensity for spreading across different octatonic regions.16 This kind of hearing, absent the octatonic context established in the earlier sections of the work, would probably not have much plausibility. And even with the anchoring effect of that context, its continued influence in the final section would seem to depend on at least occasional recourse to or reminiscence of octatonic structures. This does happen to some extent, although never to the extent of wholly eclipsing the new stacked-fourths basis. Example 4.14 displays one passage in which the T2 collection briefly assumes a primary role once again, assisted by T0 (mm. 558–78). Some of the harmonies here are hybrids, blending frameworks in fourths with other intervals. Immediately thereafter, however, stacked fourths reassert themselves with a vengeance, progressing as 5-5 in parallel chromatic scales and thus blotting out the octatonic completely until m. 586. The scalar motion comes across as a kind of vestige of the first section (and one must remember that chromatic scales do occur there, if rarely), but what one would imagine as an explicit synthesis of materials—a 5-5 or 5-6 structure, say, in parallel octatonic scales—never achieves the status of a climactic or cadential gesture in Silver Ladders. The “mingling” promised in the program note happens in more subtle and elliptical fashion. Example 4.15 (mm. 586–627) provides a continuation to Example 4.14, in which linear passages confined to single octatonic collections are punctuated by chords in stacked fourths—some of which also belong to single octatonic collections, although in more densely scored passages such as mm. 620–21 the collections are separated registrally, as earlier. (An interesting additional feature of this passage is the trumpet line, recognizably octatonic though consisting of only three notes, , but drawn from the one collection not represented in the accompanying chords.) By and large, as the piece draws to a close, the larger chordal structures tend to be drawn from single octatonic collections, and the last sonority heard, {E, G, B, D} (mm. 749–54), falls within T2. The last octatonic scales heard, beginning in m. 720 and ascending in a kind of rhythmic acceleration familiar from the opening of the work, are entirely in octaves, unadorned with fourths or, for that matter, any other harmonies. As these scales reach their apogee at B (m. 730), a Category 5 shift takes place: T2 is superseded by T0 in the form of the repeating segment , which then acquires, for five very quick measures (mm. 730–34), a 5-5 90 Part I: Order, Freedom, and Design