ETHNOGRAPHY IN CAESAR'S GALLIC WAR AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR COMPOSITION

After long neglect, in English-language scholarship at least, the question of how Julius Caesar wrote and disseminated his Gallic War—as a single work? in multi-year chunks? year by year?—was revived by T.P. Wiseman in 1998, who argued anew for serial composition. This paper endeavours to provide further evidence for that conclusion by examining how Caesar depicts the non-Roman peoples he fights. Caesar's ethnographic passages, and their authorship, have been a point of contention among German scholars for over a century, but reading them and the rest of the text with eyes unclouded by the exhausted debate about possible interpolation reveals details that bear upon wider questions of composition. In these passages Caesar devised an ethnographic framework in order to rank against one another the levels of threat posed by different barbarian peoples, downplaying the relative ferocity of the Gauls in contrast to other groups in an effort to magnify the peril the others posed to Rome and the glory to be obtained from their defeat. This ethnographic framework is significant for understanding Caesar's method both because it provides insight into Caesar's reasons for including the ethnographic passages and because it implies that the Gallic War was composed in, at a minimum, four stages: Books 1–2, where the framework is first developed and used, by 56 b.c.; Books 3–4 and 5–6, where it is elaborated and extended, by 54 and 52 b.c. respectively; and finally Book 7, after 52 b.c., when Caesar, in recounting the campaign against Vercingetorix, was forced to abandon and contradict the ethnographic framework in a fashion that suggests that the earlier books were already in circulation, preventing him from adjusting them to the new circumstances of the campaign of that year.

Transformation Chains, Associative Areas, and a Principle of Form for Anton Webern’s Twelve-tone Music

Much of Webern’s twelve-tone music relies on conventional formal types to structure extended composition and long-range compositional strategy. This article describes how these forms were absorbed into his personal twelve-tone style through an exploration of three entwined techniques. His techniques of serial row chaining and associative organization create a deep musical hierarchy that is frequently navigated by a formal principle of large-scale complementation. The analyses appearing here are drawn from across Webern’s twelve-tone period and are elucidated through spatial representations that describe compositional potential and musical realization. In addition to providing a means for analytical interpretation, the analyses reveal how Webern’s fusion of form and twelve-tone technique resemble characteristics of the tonal system while amplifying basic axioms of serial composition.

The Rake's Progress and Stravinsky's Return: The Composer's Evolving Approach to Setting Text

Stravinsky has a deserved reputation for manipulating the sound of words, which, among other factors, has given rise to accusations of “antihumanism” against the composer and his music. However, close analysis of the opera The Rake's Progress (1948–51) shows that Stravinsky actually takes care to set the text intelligibly, and at certain moments, even expressively. By analyzing metric displacement and motivic development as it evolved from the composer's earlier neoclassical settings—including Oedipus Rex (1927), the Symphony of Psalms (1930), and Perséphone (1934)—through his first efforts at serial composition in the Cantata (1952), this article contextualizes the seemingly anomalous expressiveness in The Rake's Progress. Discovery of this evolution in his approach to setting text also entails a reassessment of the composer's aesthetic concerns.

Minimal realization in bicategories of automata

The context of this article is the programme to develop monoidal bicategories with a feedback operation as an algebra of processes, with applications to concurrency theory. The objective here is to study reachability, minimization and minimal realization in these bicategories. In this setting the automata are 1-cells, in contrast with previous studies where they appeared as objects. As a consequence, we are able to study the relation of minimization and minimal realization to serial composition of automata using (co)lax (co)monads. We are led to define suitable behaviour categories and prove minimal realization theorems that extend classical results.