Serialism

Giacomo Manzoni composed his theatrical work Atomtod between 1961 and 1965. It is well known that here the composer resorted to «Stilpluralismus», making use of many different compositional styles and techniques, from jazz to eighteenth century opera’s clichés, to serialism. This article the first in-depth examination of Atomtod’s serialism, and tries as well to contextualize it both within the overall dramatic structure of the work, and in the evolution of Manzoni’s compositional techniques.

The 20th century ushered in an explosion of individual mythology, requiring every artist in the 20th and 21st century to construct a personal mythology to aid in their own artistic practice. Being a 21st composer has forced me to create an individual framework of mythologies to structure my compositional and artistic thought. In general, my own music applies a mythologization of post-war serialism and Medieval era music (primarily music of the Ars Nova). This mythological application means that instead of applying the techniques of serial organization or medieval compositional techniques, my music features a superficial “gloss” that establishes a connection between my music and this music of the past.

An analysis of the relationship between Pierre Schaeffer and the musical avant-garde of 1953, with particular reference to Pierre Boulez and to Schaeffer's shift from musique concrète to recherche musicale. The main source is Schaeffer's 'Vers une musique expérimentale' (La revue musicale 236); extensive excerpts are translated here into English. The antagonism between the Paris and Cologne studios is discussed in the light of two different approaches to technology and tradition; for the exponents of elektronische Musik new technology was a means to perfect Western music, while for Schaeffer it was simply a means to make new musical discoveries. [RILM]

This essay analyzes Stockhausen Studie II: Elektronische Musik (1954), focusing on his study of additive synthesis in electronic music. While the first study, Studie I: Elektronische Musik (1953), employs pure sine waves utilizing overtones, the second study, Studie II: Elektronische Musik (1954), abandons the harmonic series altogether. Studie II utilizes a serial algorithm to generate its collection of frequencies, which Stockhausen serialistically synthesizes together. Only the second study’s score was published, hence, this analysis will focus on Studie II—written in a spectral graphic score that serialistically controls each sine wave’s organization.
Furthermore, this analysis traces Stockhausen’s use of multiple-serialism within Studie II. It will therefore explore the following serial methods, and attempt to trace what Stockhausen employs and understand how he utilizes them. Such serial methods include elements that serialistically control each sine wave’s (1) generation, (2) selection, (3) additive synthesis, and the score’s overall (4) structure—both at the macro- and micro-level. This essay will also include a spectrograph- and a structural analysis.
Subsequently, this essay poses some practical questions. How does this kind of electronic spectral serialism support Stockhausen’s premise of treating sine waves as “pure” sound elements, uninhibited by human intervention and imperfection? Are these “pure” sine waves completely controllable—to the extent that the score’s realization precisely produces the exact sound that the score prescribes? And if so, can this spectral graphic score be objectively realized electronically, without the subjectivity and influence of human emotion and interpretation?

It had nothing to do with trying to find new sounds...

Concerned with the control of “musical time,” and the realization that we could hear so much more. A sentiment that would culminate serial composer, Milton Babbitt influenced a variety of other Experimental Music Composers and premier electronic music genres. He dreamt of an era where we could differentiate so much more and discriminate exponentially more than we could expect performers or ensemble to accommodate. “The hand is seldom faster than the ear.” –  Milton Babbitt, April 2000

This expository paper examines the evolution of Arnold Schönberg’s music at the turn of the century; from his increasing use of chromaticism and free atonality, and his experimentation with novel tones and textures, to his development of the twelve tone or dodecaphonic method
in music composition; the Second Viennese School. The twelve tone technique is demonstrated with the Suite for Piano, Op. 25; Schönberg’s first published work using the method. The initial reactions of audiences to performances of Schönberg’s work were either wonder, horror, or both. Even today, there is a widespread acknowledgement that works which evolved out of this School, referred to as Serialism, are perplexing, difficult to digest, somewhat esoteric and musically elitist.

Contrary to this popular belief, this new music system has established itself in an arena of popular culture which is readily consumed by the masses. In the same way that its predecessors of the First Viennese School (Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven) were intimately linked to the opera, works developed out of techniques of the Second Viennese School (Schönberg, Webern, Berg) have found a niche in the film industry and are infused in popular movie and television sound tracks to lend dramatic effect, engage audiences, support imagery and convey a wide range of
emotion and atmosphere. Specific examples of twelve tone compositions in film scores are identified in the works of Bradley, Frankel and Goldsmith, renowned film composers, and
briefly analysed.

This study seeks to determine the extent to which selected works by Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), and Tristan Murail (b. 1947) support or contradict the notion of “rupture” in the Parisian musical establishment during the twentieth century. Aesthetic and political considerations of the historical narrative frame comparative analyses of Murail’s Territoires de l’oubli (1977) to the ethos of Messiaen’s Sept haïkaï (1962) and Couleurs de la cité celeste (1963), and to the technique of Boulez’s Structures II for two pianos (1956-61). It is concluded that Messiaen’s influence on Murail was largely one of ethos and not technique. It is determined that Boulez and Murail share similarities in their approaches to form and the manipulation of piano sonority and resonance. It is thus considered that their aesthetic divide is of little substance to the content of their music.

This catalog of melodic and harmonic materials found in Yusef Lateef’s "Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns" is meant as a study guide for practical and academic use.

I have listed only the materials Lateef employed as general headings and source material for the text’s many etudes and harmonic studies. I hope that this paper stimulates further inquiry into this text in particular and in Lateef's creative output in general.

This is not an analytical paper and analysis has been kept to a minimum used solely for the purpose to aid in the general understanding of the materials and how they are used within the text . This catalog could be used both with the original text and without when the original text is not practically available.

Thomas Scott McGill
6.27.16

The musical output of Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (1933-2010) is commonly
perceived and evaluated in the West from the point of the astounding commercial success of his Symphony No. 3 “Symfonia pieśni żałosnych” (1977), resulting in a fixed and highly limited reference point to the composer’s earlier musical output. The musical trajectory of Górecki’s stylistic development is often mythologized in the press and media to create a narrative of divinatory or spiritual “revelation” surrounding Górecki’s post-Symphony No. 3 output (1977-2010), grouping him rather
erroneously as a “holy minimalist”, along with John Tavener (1944-2013) and Arvo Pärt (1935-). While these characterizations helped bolster Górecki’s mystique and reputation in the West, it frequently undermined and occasionally disparaged the composer’s roots in the Polish avant-garde and his artistic contribution to this musical environment.
From a surfaced viewpoint, it appears that Górecki’s earlier and later works are like oil and water, but in reality they form a continuous stream of artistic progress, unified by both an ardent personality and an unrelenting hunger for reconfiguration and development as a composer. This paper will argue that Górecki’s mature works are the result of a gradual stylistic morphologization, passing through periods of various
aesthetic fixations that define several “eras” in his composition output from 1960 to 1974.

This paper will examine Arnold Schönberg’s influence on modern jazz through the teachings of one of its most respected theorists and pedagogues Dennis Sandole, mentor to John Coltrane, James Moody, Art Farmer, Randy Brecker, Jim Hall, Rufus Harley, Pat Martino, and many other important jazz artists.

Through the analysis of musical examples, this paper proposes that important conceptual links exist between some of Schönberg’s key compositional concepts and Sandole’s pedagogical literature and practice which would go on to influence John Coltrane and many other jazz practitioners for decades to follow helping to solidify Schönbergian ideas and concepts within the syntax of modern jazz. Schönberg’s utilisation of various segmentation schemes such as trichords, tetrachords and hexachords, use of interval cycles particularly that of interval cycle 4 or major thirds, and the compositional practice of stating the complete chromatic collection within a relatively short musical space have provided jazz practitioners such as Sandole and Coltrane with a new conceptual framework for employing the total chromatic harmonically and melodically in modern jazz practice.

This short work will look at some possibilities for using Arnold Schoenberg’s symmetrical set from his Serenade Op. 24 Mvmt. 5 as pitch material in Jazz/Fusion improvisation.

I will examine some harmonic and melodic uses of the set’s two hexachords using an accepted Jazz Chord/Scale Relationship pedagogical methodology. My approach will look at these pitch groups as unordered sets or collections only, although their use as ordered sets is of course certainly possible. As many Jazz and Fusion Improvisers are familiar with Nicholas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns , I will reference this text in relation to the sets and subsets present in this survey for ease in cross referencing.

During the last two decades many scholars have focused on Maderna’s works, sketches and letters of the 1940s. Nevertheless, his First String Quartet (ca. 1943- 1945) has been left aside by this “Maderna Renaissance”. In this article I focus thus on this work in order to show why it constitutes an extraordinary viewpoint on Maderna’s pre-serial harmonic conceptions and on some forgotten sources of his poetics – such as Bartók and Hindemith. A specific “harmonic atmosphere”, i.e. octatonicism, informs the entire Quartet. Firstly, the symmetrical and acoustic qualities of the octatonic scale are the basis for recovering the dialectical principle of sonata form and for arranging the structures of the work (i.e. a palindrome) according to symmetrical criteria. Secondly, the octatonic collection is a way to problematise the historical dimension of the musical material – tonality and modality coexist with quartal harmony – and to avoid a perfect symmetrical construction. Because of its crucial relation to Bartók, I conclude that Maderna’s “War” Quartet ushers in an Italian Bartókian Wave during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Moreover, I postulate a continuity between this early work and Maderna’s serial works – a continuity based on the quest for a generative and homogeneous principle in musical composition as well as on a need for deconstructing preformed schemas and fixed points of reference.

After World War II, Milton Babbitt and the composer-theorists collected around him at Princeton University extended Schoenbergian serial and social practices. After Stravinsky’s serial turn, Babbitt reevaluated his music, courting his legacy: the cover of the “Princeton School journal,” Perspectives of New Music, to this day reproduces Stravinsky’s drawing representing his serial music. In the late 1960s, some members of the Princeton School “dropped out,” writing experimental texts and improvising. Joseph Kerman suggested, contentiously, that this dissolution of the Princeton School around 1971 occurred because of Stravinsky’s death that year.
In this talk I discuss Stravinsky reception within the Princeton School. After discussing Stravinsky’s advice to leave the academy, Babbitt’s reading of Stravinsky’s proto-serial procedures in The Rake’s Progress, and Babbitt’s reading of Stravinsky’s “verticals” in Movements, I discuss Princeton composer Benjamin Boretz’s readings of Stravinsky’s incorporation of pitch structure into durational structure in the first scene of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring generally. I discuss Princeton composer J. K. Randall’s compositional use of series of pitches fewer than twelve as a Stravinskian conceit. I discuss an influential article by Princeton composer Edward T. Cone which shows continuity across Stravinsky’s serial turn. Lastly, I discuss Babbitt and Boretz’s purging of impressionistic language in favor of formalist discourses as a kind of Stravinskian poetics.
This combination of Stravinskian poetics and serialism with the oft-discussed Schoenbergian socialization and serialism demonstrates an attempt by members of the Princeton School to unite the two principal strands of European modernism in their own American high-modernism.

Esta pesquisa sistematiza um catálogo de experimentos constituído de estudos musicais e seus algoritmos geradores, organizando procedimentos para composição assistida por
computador orientados por regras derivadas de análises musicais de contexto pós-tonal.
Os procedimentos são inspirados em apontamentos de estudos sobre pós-tonalidade no compositor Béla Bartók, encontrados nas obras de Lendvai (1971), Antokoletz (1984),
Cohn (1991) e Suchoff (2004). Problematizam-se aqui os conceitos de ciclos intervalares, eixos de simetria, polimodalismo e peculiaridades de coleções referenciais de classes de altura - conforme sugestões de Forte (1973), Straus (2004) e Susanni e Antokoletz (2012).
São detalhadas questões computacionais para esta implementação, utilizando como base as ferramentas OpenMusic e biblioteca Python Music21.

Morris's Arc (1988) for String Quartet flows; it flows with substance, and with purpose. By flowing, I don’t just mean in the trivial sense that all music flows because it is unfolding in time and time flows. Rather I mean that there is continuity to its various surges of eventfulness; these surges are not disjunct or sudden. And by substance I mean both that its sound is as a sensuous fluid material and that the unfolding of its constituent events presents a coherent organization, thus binding together into a statement that seems meaningful in retrospect. By purpose I mean not only that there is a local logic to the consequence of one note following another, but also that the flow of events enables the material to organize into processes that forge a trajectory toward a goal.
    The analysis first focuses on local details considered in terms of pitch and pitch-class formations as arising from twelve-tone rows; then it delves into aspects of form, process, and texture. These are considered in terms of emergent properties in flux. The modeling of these properties and their flux employs some mathematical formalisms, but the reader can rely on the fact that every mathematical definition and formula is described carefully in prose as well.
    In Arc, the twelve-tone pitch class details and the surging emergent qualities projecting form are not completely separate from each other. Rather, all these features interact. Thus not only does the article weave together connections between such facets as form, process, and texture, but it also connects these to the twelve-tone rows and pitch-class configurations that are more straightforwardly part of the compositional plan (and more usual in analyses) of Morris’s music.

[Download the pdf below, or contact the author jmailman@alumni.uchicago.edu, for a digital offprint. It can also accessed through JSTOR: www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.52.2.0249 ]

Analyzing the early work of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker-and particularly Rosas danst Rosas (1983)-this article examines the notion of "the storyless" in relation to the role: that pillar of dance, and especially choreography, which enables the individuation, transmission, and exchange of each dancer's part. Set in relation to the principles of serial music that De Keersmaeker had already explored in Fase (1982) and to the idea of seriality itself, the role provides a way to consider how "storylessness" could be both emancipatory and feminist. It responds to identitarian models of feminist argumentation by suggesting that a virtue of certain forms of abstraction lies in the pleasurable ways that dance's roles demonstrate the circulability and exchangeability of the self.

Open access link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twentieth-century-music/article/lachenmanns-silent-voices-and-the-speechless-echoes-of-nono-and-stockhausen/8546573D813CA7BB6D33BC73D3AF6A7C/share/21fa489959327a40cc003cc1e6e02212a4339498

This is the second chapter from my dissertation entitled "Anton Webern's Use of Guitar in Op. 18 and its Influence on His Late works." This chapter describes the various methods used in order to make a case for the connection between Webern's use of the serial method, his voice-leading practices, and the physical manifestations of these practices as they appear on the guitar.

Several scholars pointed already out the very quick evolution of Xenakis' style in his early works, from the folklorist tendancy of his first attempts to Dipli and Tripli Zyia (1952), the Anastenaria's cycle and finally Metastasis (53-54). However documents held in Xenakis' archives at the French National Library bring new lights on Xenakis' evolution during those years and make possible to evaluate even more precisely the early building of his creative personnality. On Anastenaria cycle whose genesis has so far remained somewhat unclear, notebooks and sketches enlighten the processes brought into play and the links with Metastasis, seen wrongly at the present time as the third part of the cycle. The study of these processes will make possible to understand Xenakis' evolution particularly during the year 1953 that appears as a real turning point in his artistic path.

This article addresses the role played by Allen Forte in establishing the Journal of Music Theory as a journal of record for the American discipline of music theory, as it emerged and evolved in the 1960s. The journal was founded at Yale University in 1957 by editor David Kraehenbuehl. When he left his position at both the university and the journal in 1960, the editorship passed to Allen Forte, who functioned in that capacity for the next seven years, making him not only the longest-serving editor in the journal’s history, but also one at an especially crucial period, when conceptions of the field were beginning to crystallize and circulate in the forms recognizable today. This article explores, in turn, the path Forte took to the journal (and Yale); aspects of editorship, design, and production during his time; the personal imprint he made on the journal, in terms of his editorial agenda; and his departure from the editorship and the legacy he left behind. Quotations from the author’s interviews with Forte are included.

It  is  well  known that  university  students  often suffer from  high levels  of stress, which can lead to higher  rates  of  mental  health  concerns  and  the use or  abuse of  alcohol  and  illicit  drugs.  This  stress may also  be relieved  by  channelling  it  into  humour  and  taking  risks  with  assessment.  This  paper provides  a  personal  reflection and explanation of the  process  of composing  an original  work for string  quartet,  using  previously  collected  survey  response data.  Several  manual  algorithms  used  to generate the score  are described,  along  with  an  explanation  of  other  musical  choices.  The completed score  and audio file  are  available  for download.

This unpublished analysis of Metastasis, written by Xenakis himself, brings with many details the serial structure of its median part to light. The composer develops his very personal and original conception of serialism,trying to go beyond what he thinks to be its limits. This conception reveals also very clearly the consistency and continuity of Xenakis' compositional ideas. In this text, he explains also the totally new concept of " differential duration " that he is using for the first time in Metastasis and that will become a key piece in his writing of rhythm. This text is of great importance not only because of the new light it brings on this work, bu mostly by the further developments it is bearing in seeds.

This research is an analysis of Ether-Cosmos no. XIII-XVII by Wiboon Trakulhun, the researcher focuses on how these compositions managed, by analyzed in the issues of pitch organization and rhythmic organization, which showed the composer’s identity.

The study of pitch organization showed that Ether-Cosmos no. XIII is free atonal music throughout the piece, the set appears in the piece is mostly abstract subset. In parts of EtherCosmos no. XIV-XVII are atonal music base on serialism but there are tonal music element hidden in some part of piece. In addition composer also emphasizes the symmetry in every pieces.

Composer give the rhythmic and meter the asymmetry and ambiguity by various process such as emphasizing the syncopated rhythms, irregular rhythmic groupings, augmentationdiminution including additive process, by using the metric displacement technique and using
2 meters simultaneously to create the character of polymeter and polyrhythm.

Overall results showed that composer used same set but the set reflect different sound quality because the difference of pitch organization in each pieces, including the using of various rhythmic technique. These methods created the rhythmic displacement. In addition, atonal music
from Ether-Cosmos by Wiboon Trakulhun has a symmetrical identity significantly.

Milton Babbitt has been a controversial and iconic figure, which has indirectly led to fallacious assumptions about how his music is made, and therefore to fundamental misconceptions about how it might be heard and appreciated. This video (the first of a three-part video essay) reconsiders his music in light of both his personal traits and a more precise examination of the constraints and freedoms entailed by his unusual and often misunderstood compositional practices, which are based inherently on partial ordering (as well as pitch repetition), which enables a surprising amount of freedom to compose the surface details we hear. The opening of Babbitt’s Composition for Four Instruments (1948) and three recompositions (based on re-ordering of pitches) demonstrate the freedoms intrinsic to partial ordering.  http://doi.org/10.30535/smtv.5.1

This edited transcript of a public pre-concert discussion with composer, theorist and critic Benjamin Boretz not only touches on early personal encounters with Babbitt but also ranges over issues of reception of his music, listening experiences, transfor- mations of music’s temporality, connections to Schoenberg, Webern, Cage, and postmodernism, stylistic changes over Babbitt’s career and composerly poetics, as well as motivations and consequences for pre- compositional structures and systems. The discussion took place on 22 November 2015, at the first of three recitals during the 2015–16 concert season at Spectrum, in New York City, in which Augustus Arnone for the second time performed all of Milton Babbitt’s solo piano works, this time in honour of the composer’s centenary.  (Access:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0040298216000322)

Conlon Nancarrow’s music has been the subject of analysis by some of the most astute composers and academics in modern music. His music and its accompanying scholarly literature are a potentially rich source of material for improvisation. As Nancarrow was influenced by expert jazz improvisers with virtuoso technique such as Art Tatum when constructing this music, this is a logical outcome.

Nancarrow’s work had made a substantial impact on the output of electric guitar virtuosos such as Frank Zappa and Shawn Lane, as the sheer speed of the linear material along with the dense polyrhythmic fabric present in the music had pushed these influential players to increase their technical capabilities of the instrument to a new much higher level. This in turn has had substantial impact on current electric guitar practice.

The video performance of an electric guitar piece based on Nancarrow’s Third Study for Player Piano (Boogie Woogie Suite) is performed on electric guitar improvisation based on melodic, intervallic, and rhythmic material within the piece against two tracks of pre-recorded electric guitars also performed by me following the harmonic structure of the piece and utilizing the polyrhythmic devices contained within the original music. The performance is roughly the same length as the original piece (3’ 22”), and demonstrates Nancarrow’s rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic concepts (including what he himself called “licks”) within an improvisational format.

Perpetuum Mobile

This piece was written using a nine-tone (Nonatonic) scale  (C#, D#, E#, G, A#, C, D, E, F#) constructed by 20th Century Jazz Theorist and Pedagogue Dennis Sandole (teacher of John Coltrane, James Moody, Jim Hall, Pat Martino amongst many others). My use of pitch material of a jazz origin such as Sandole’s was purposeful in order to conceptually align this work with Nancarrow’s clear jazz influences in his “Boogie Woogie Suite”.  This particular scale allows for liberal use of a trichord that includes a minor third and major third which features prominently in Nancarrow’s “Suite”.

I constructed this piece using octave (registral) displacement techniques combined with a rhythmic texture of sixteenth note rhythms similar to the constant “left hand” ostinato motion of Nancarrow’s Study#3. The octave displacement of lines creates a two part texture of predominately staccato attacks and the use of changing time signatures and registers in a variety of rhythmic note groupings was meant to give the illusion of two separate rhythmically independent parts unified by one basic scalar tonality. The few cascading arpeggio sections that feature liberal use of sustain pedal were inspired by Nancarrow studies 5, 27, 37, and 45c.

The general absence of harmonic writing places the emphasis on the rhythmic and contrapuntal elements of the music and the faux “player piano” sound is an obvious nod to Nancarrow and seems to work with this essentially staccato and rhythmic nature of the piece.

I wrote this composition not to imitate Nancarrow’s work directly, but to allow his overall musical approach to influence my own musical language.

In this paper I will show how the evolution of Anton Webern’s orchestration and composition style from his early atonal works through to his mature works is made possible largely through his inclusion of the guitar in Op. 18 which, in this light, becomes more of a pivotal work than previously considered and displays the composer moving towards the full realization of his aesthetic.
Webernʼs musical style evolves towards pointillist orchestration that features wide leaps, mixed rhythms and sharp attacks up to his early 12-tone works through to Op. 16. His use of guitar in Op. 18 and 19 is not only necessary to the development of his already emerging style, but it also enables Webern to take his style the next logical step by furthering the extremes of range and texture. The pointillist composition style that Webern develops through his early works, as well as a desire to connect his music to folk traditions as inspired by Gustav Mahler, leads him to the guitar, which in turn set him on the path to his mature composition style.
The scoring in Op. 17 is considerably lighter and the ensemble considerably less active than in the Op. 18 songs. In addition, the soprano is not required to navigate quite as many large leaps between registers in Op. 17 when compared to Op. 18. I argue that the addition of guitar, in both the Op. 18 songs of 1925 as well as the more fully scored Op. 19 from the following year, Webern finds himself liberated in terms of range and spacing. The guitar aids in supporting increasingly disjunct melodic lines traversed by the voice as well as the Eb clarinet that is used both as an extension and in support of the vocal line allowing for increased melodic abstraction. 
The guitar’s ability to perform music that is based principally on consistency of interval content rather than on specific, tonal, voice leading rules is advantageous to Webern. It is possible to play uniquely voiced chords that would be difficult, or impossible on any other instrument. Its folk characteristics were perhaps the impetus behind his selection of the guitar, but it also serves as the means to another end in that it provides the composer with an instrument that can support an ensemble not simply from a harmonic standpoint but also that of melodic support in the form of negotiating large leaps and extremes of range. Kathryn Bailey asserts that Webern’s Opp. 17-19 stand as his “pre-serial” work and most agree that the Op. 20 trio marks the beginning of Webern’s fully realized serial compositions. I feel that this observation places these underappreciated works in a position that should garner them further analysis.
Despite a new musical language, Webern suggests the natural evolution of Lieder through use of common texts, and folk instruments, with the guitar playing a pivotal and foundational role. The pieces that I aim to discuss do not simply indicate an evolution in Webern’s organizational ideas about pitch but also considerations of orchestration, and voicing of simultaneity.
It is with these considerations that I assert the importance of the guitar to Anton Webern’s compositional evolution. It is also with these considerations that I assert a higher degree of importance and attention should be placed upon these “pre-serial” works, Opp. 17-19.

Before his radical reassessment of serialism in « La crise de la musique sérielle », Xenakis tried to improve a very personal approach to serialist technique by, linking pitches and durations considered as intervals. I published two studies in 2003 and 2011, first in the critical edition of “Metastassis-Analyse”, an auto-analysis written by Xenakis in 1954, but which had remained unpublished (« MÉTASTASSIS-Analyse: un texte inédit de Iannis Xenakis sur Metastasis », Revue de Musicologie 89/1, juil. 2003, p. 129-187) and later, when Xenakis’s archives were made available at the BnF, by consulting voluminous sketch material associated with Metastasis, I was able to understand the last developments of Xenakis’s own practice in this work (« Xenakis et le sérialisme: l’apport d’une analyse génétique de Metastasis », Intersections – Revue Canadienne de Musique 31/2, nov. 2011, p. 3-22.). These articles complete one another and should ideally be read as a pair.

Resumo: É quase impossível traçar uma reflexão acerca das diversas abordagens composicionais atuantes na segunda metade do Século XX, sem passar, necessariamente, por um comentário sobre a função exercida pelo código musical no processo composicional e os diversos sistemas notacionais emergentes nesse período. O trabalho que segue, objetiva analisar dialeticamente (sob a luz da teoria da linguagem) a função dada a notação musical, de modo a apontar certas contradições e descompassos entre o desenvolvimento formal do código e sua função linguística.
//
Abstract: It is almost impossible to draw a reflection about the different compositional approaches active in the second half of the twentieth century without passing necessarily by a comment on the role of musical code in the compositional process and the various emerging notational systems employed in this period. The work that follows, aims to analyze dialectically (in the light of the theory of language) the function given to the musical notation, to point certain contradictions and dissonances between the formal development of the code and its linguistic function.

from: «Rewriting Recent Music History: the Development of Early Serialism. 1947–1957», ed. by Mark Delaere, Peeters, Leuven-Walpole, MA, 2011.
http://www.peeters-leuven.be/search_serie_book.asp?nr=246

Largely based on the study of extant sketches, the article aims at unveiling the compositional technique developed by Bruno Maderna in the context of the generalized renewal of the musical language in post-WWII Europe. Well trained in a solid compositional discipline, Maderna adopts the 12-tone technique while reinventing ideas and procedures derived from ancient examples (e.g. Renaissance polyphony). In the very early 1950s he finds his own way to serialism even managing to integrate methods derived both from Schoenberg and Hindemith.

Before his radical reassessment of serialism in « La crise de la musique sérielle », Xenakis tried to improve a very personal approach to serialist technique by, linking pitches and durations considered as intervals. I published two studies in 2003 and 2011, first in the critical edition of “Metastassis-Analyse”, an auto-analysis written by Xenakis in 1954, but which had remained unpublished (« MÉTASTASSIS-Analyse: un texte inédit de Iannis Xenakis sur Metastasis », Revue de Musicologie 89/1, juil. 2003, p. 129-187) and later, when Xenakis’s archives were made available at the BnF, by consulting voluminous sketch material associated with Metastasis, I was able to understand the last developments of Xenakis’s own practice in this work (« Xenakis et le sérialisme: l’apport d’une analyse génétique de Metastasis », Intersections – Revue Canadienne de Musique 31/2, nov. 2011, p. 3-22.). These articles complete one another and should ideally be read as a pair.

The article begins with a semiotic analysis of the first movement of Arnold Schoenberg's Third String Quartet, Op.30, the purpose of which is to investigate the extent to which order-number partitioning plays a supporting role in the overall form of the movement. Contrary to standard semiotic practice, the entire series, rather than the motif, is used as the unit of signification. Each individual series statement is assigned to a particular category based on order-number partitioning. The results of the analysis show a strong correlation between order-number partitioning and the arch form of the work. I interpret this as a contrast or 'dialectical opposition' of contiguous versus fragmented order-number partitioning between thematic and developmental areas. This opposition between thematic and developmental treatment of material, which I understand as pivotal to the creation of dramatic contrast within the movement, is then used as a model for the investigation of other serial and non-serial dialectical oppositions, which are analysed in terms of the extent to which they play a part in this overarching opposition. The article concludes with a summary of the oppositions examined, showing how their interaction with the general thematic / developmental opposition assists in the creation of dramatic contrast.