The Continuity of Tradition Today

This chapter assesses the degree of continuity of the nohkan that is illustrated in three contemporary Noh play adaptations of William Butler Yeats's At the Hawk's Well by nohkan performers of the Issō School. It looks at interviews conducted with nohkan performers and a composer. It also highlights the nohkan's traditional role in contemporary and English-language Noh that allows variations and embellishments by performers, which demonstrate musical continuity in the context of experimentation. The chapter discusses a number of shinsaku Noh that have been successful and performed more frequently. It describes the performance of Yokomichi Mario's Taka no Izumi and Takahime, including the English-language Noh production of At the Hawk's Well by Theatre Nohgaku.

Toward a Music of Durational Indeterminacy

This chapter argues that the intense reduction of projective potential observed in Webern's op. 22 and carried even further by the brokenness of the projective field in Babbitt's Du invites comparison with efforts in the years following the Second World War to eliminate meter's hold on the attention and its involvement in the formation of those more or less determinate sonic durations called “phrases.” Boulez's le marteau sans maître's nine movements offers a great variety of approaches to musical continuity. Excerpts from this work thus lead to the end of the present study—a consideration of rhythm in music that has attempted to renounce meter's efficacy in the formation of phrase. An examination of these excerpts allows for a consideration of some more general questions of rhythm and some of the novel experiences offered by “the New Music.” The chapter also discusses the distinction of “constituent” and “phrase” in detail.

Multiplicity, Audibility, and Musical Continuity

ABSTRACTMusical works are both multiple — they have a plurality of instances — and audible — they can be heard by listening to their instances. Two prominent approaches to musical ontology designed to explain these features of musical works are the type-token model and the continuant-stage model. Julian Dodd has argued that the type-token model has an advantage over the continuant-stage model because it can offer a direct explanation of the audibility of musical works in terms of their ontological category. In this paper, I defend the continuant-stage model against Dodd's argument by invoking a work-unifying continuity relation.

Permeable boundaries in Mozart's Don Giovanni

Permeable boundaries form the musical ‘thread’ of Don Giovanni– a compositional strategy fundamental to the opera's character. Customary cadential borders get omitted or blurred; material heard early in the opera prominently returns; and all the accompanied recitative-set piece pairs act as ‘composite pieces’ – scenes in which musical material as well as dramatic function bind the accompanied recitative and aria or duet together and fuse them into one entity. ‘Permeability’ is heightened in Don Giovanni due to the supernatural elements of the plot, the title character's refusal to to submit to society's strictures, Gluck's association with the story, and Mozart's propensity for musical one-upmanship. Yet it is by no means unique to that work. Studying the relationships between accompanied recitatives and adjacent numbers reveals a ‘middleground’ of musical continuity that lies between long-range tonal plans and the motivic and tonal unities of individual numbers. Hence these passages challenge, as well as complement, some of our underlying assumptions about operatic form, and urge us to expand our definition of a ‘number’.

The Middle Generation

Gábor Darvas (b. 1911) emigrated to Chile soon after completing his composition studies under Kodály, where he worked with Erich Kleiber. He returned to Hungary in 1958, and has since held numerous administrative positions. His development as a composer came unusually late. After his early pieces in the manner of Kodály and Bartók he was unproductive for many years, occupying himself with writing musical textbooks, and orchestration of piano works by Liszt and others. The continuation of his own creative work, after much preparatory thought, experiment, and study of many major contemporary works, came only in the 1960s. His ‘Improvisations symphoniques’ for piano and orchestra (1963), performed in 1966 at the Stockholm ISCM Festival, is virtually his Op. 1, an attribute that shows in the extremely varied and sometimes conflicting means it employs. But it has one distinctive feature which seems to be characteristic of the modern musical movement in Hungary generally: musical continuity. This does not necessarily mean thematicism, indeed it is perfectly reconcilable with post-Webernian abandonment of theme and development in the classical sense. It is more a matter of contrast. One of the weaknesses of much music today is the absence of contrasts of tempo, and the abandonment of the principle of construction by movements or sections of opposed character. What Darvas has sought in this work is to use contrast again as one of the means of sustaining continuity.