Pierre Boulez' "Sonatine für Flöte und Klavier" und ihre neu aufgetauchte Frühfassung

Die Sonatine für Flöte und Klavier (1946) gehört zu den frühesten veröffentlichten Kompositionen von Pierre Boulez. Sie dokumentiert das Bestreben des Zwanzigjährigen, verschiedene Kompositionsverfahren zu einer neuartigen Musiksprache zu verbinden. Beschreibungen des Werks bestaunen den zukunftsweisenden, an Anton Webern orientierten Umgang mit der Zwölftontechnik. Nun sind Dokumente aufgetaucht, die belegen, dass vor der Druckfassung 1949 eine deutliche Überarbeitung stattfand. Wie die Frühfassung zeigt, hielt die Prägung des jungen Boulez durch seinen Lehrer Olivier Messiaen länger an und war stärker wirksam, als man es bisher annahm.

Poetamenos, de Augusto de Campos: uma transcriação intersemiótica da Klangfarbenmelodie, de Anton Von Webern

Resumo Poetamenos, o principal precursor do concretismo no Brasil, é uma transcriação intersemiótica da Klangfarbenmelodie, de Anton Webern. Trata-se de uma série de seis poemas, elaborados por Augusto de Campos entre 1952 e 1953. A transcriação da técnica serial musical está relacionada ao fim do ciclo histórico do verso e fornece à “linha evolutiva” preconizada pelos concretistas um modelo e um método criativo rigorosos. Em nossa argumentação, Poetamenos revela: (i) uma compreensão dialética da tensão som-silêncio através da fragmentação, dispersão e acúmulo de letras, sílabas e estruturas lexicais; (ii) o rigor formal e metodológico elaborado por Webern; (iii) os efeitos do serialismo weberniano nos anos 1950, cuja entrada no Brasil deve-se a Hans-Joachim Koellreutter. Também concluímos que o uso de procedimentos gráfico-espaciais, plurilíngues e policromáticos, no Poetamenos, não possui uma precisa correspondência com componentes composicionais do serialismo, nem com qualquer das obras de Webern, em particular, como muitos autores defendem.

A Struggle for Recognition, 1911–15

Chapter 3 covers Berg’s life and music from the end of his apprenticeship until his conscription in the Austrian army during World War II. During this time Berg worked mainly as an assistant for his teacher, Schoenberg, and he also made several piano arrangements for the publisher Universal Edition. Berg was increasingly active as a writer on music, and in 1913 he completed a lengthy technical analysis of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder. His compositions during the period contain many new procedures and materials that go beyond those approved of by Schoenberg. His Altenberg Songs (1912) and Orchestra Pieces (1914–15) reach a new level of complexity in their deep structure, and these works are intensely unified by the development and variation of themes. His Clarinet Pieces (1913) are brief works in an “aphoristic” style also used at the time by Schoenberg and Anton Webern.

The Three Piano Sonatas by José de Almeida Penalva

This research project discusses the three piano sonatas by José de Almeida Penalva (1924-2002), a priest and composer from the southern region of Brazil, who lived most of his life in the city of Curitiba, in Paraná state. Along with overall information about the composer’s life and general output, the reader will find brief discussions of Penalva’s keyboard works, along with comprehensive formal analyses of his three piano sonatas. Sonata no. 1 (1970, chronologically the second to be written) appears in one large movement that reveals two distinct sections. Its language is atonal and its first section displays sonata-allegro form. The work employs twelve-tone technique along with folklore elements from the Brazilian genres seresta and desafio. Sonata no. 2 (1960, chronologically the first to be written) employs free modal language in each of its three contrasting movements. According to Penalva’s own indications, the first movement draws on the styles of George Gershwin and Béla Bartók, the second movement refers to Camargo Guarnieri (Brazilian composer who lived from 1907-1993), and the third evokes Anton Webern. Although no material from these composers is directly quoted, it is possible to recognize their stylistic traits within the respective movements. Sonata no. 3 (1991) is the most complex and technically demanding among the three sonatas. It employs free atonal language and displays three highly contrasting movements. Some folk elements also appear, as for example the third movement's energetic rhythm, which clearly suggests the Brazilian popular genre baião. This research project is the first part of a larger undertaking that the author hopes will eventually include a commercial recording of all three sonatas, along with preparing a new performance edition that takes into account the many discrepancies among the composer’s manuscripts and the currently available editions. It is the author’s sincere hope that this research can help to popularize this repertoire, which is colorful and satisfying, but remains relatively unknown, both in Brazil and beyond.

The Expectancy Dynamics of Anti-Tonal Twelve-Tone Rows: A Commentary and Reanalysis of von Hippel & Huron (2020)

This commentary provides two methodological expansions of von Hippel and Huron's (2020) empirical report on (anti-)tonality in twelve-tone rows by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg. First, motivated by the theoretical importance of equality between all pitch classes in twelve-tone music, a full replication of their findings of "anti-tonality" in rows by Schoenberg and Webern is offered using a revised tonal fit measure which is not biased towards row-initial and row-final sub-segments. Second, motivated by a long-standing debate in music cognition research between distributional and sequential/dynamic tonality concepts, information-theoretic measures of entropy and information content are estimated by a computational model and pitted against distributional tonal fit measures. Whereas Schoenberg's rows are characterized by low distributional tonal fit, but do not strongly capitalize on tonal expectancy dynamics, Berg's rows exhibit tonal traits in terms of low unexpectedness, and Webern's rows achieve anti-tonal traits by combining high uncertainty and low unexpectedness through prominent use of the semitone interval. This analysis offers a complementary–and arguably more nuanced–picture of dodecaphonic compositional practice.

Tonal and "Anti-Tonal" Cognitive Structure in Viennese Twelve-Tone Rows

We show that the twelve-tone rows of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern are "anti-tonal"—that is, structured to avoid or undermine listener's tonal schemata. Compared to randomly generated rows, segments from Schoenberg's and Webern's rows have significantly lower fit to major and minor key profiles. The anti-tonal structure of Schoenberg's and Webern's rows is still evident when we statistically controlled for their preference for other row features such as mirror symmetry, derived and hexachordal structures, and preferences for certain intervals and trichords. The twelve-tone composer Alban Berg, by contrast, often wrote rows with segments that fit major or minor keys quite well.

Serialism

In the 1950s and 1960s, many composers, influenced by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, embraced serial compositional techniques. Tonal music became atonal and composers, such as Pierre Boulez from France and the German composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, championed this new compositional approach. This chapter defines serialism and how composers applied it to works for percussion instruments. Music examples include Stockhausen’s solo work, Zyklus, with its totally original notational system, and a setting of an E. E. Cummings poem, Circles, by the Italian composer Luciano Berio. American composer Charles Wuorinen’s use of Milton Babbitt’s “time point” system in both his solo work Janissary Music and his forty-five-minute Percussion Symphony is presented, as is the work of Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, who contributed to the literature one of the twentieth century’s largest percussion works, Cantata para América Mágica, for dramatic soprano and fifty-three percussion instruments. A discussion of percussion solo and ensemble works by the Greek composer, architect, and mathematician Iannis Xenakis completes the chapter.