"To achieve perfect clarity of expression, that is my aim“

A characteristic attribute of the semantics which underly Benjamin Britten's oeuvre is the deliberate recourse to musical semantems of Renaissance and Baroque. In the "War Requiem", melodic texture is subject to constructive principles inspired by (1) Alban Berg's technique to handle symmetrical interval cycles as it can be found in Berg's opera "Lulu", and (2) the contrapuntal rules of western european modality and solmization controlling ambitus and diastematics of melodic progressions. The a cappella "Requiescant in pace" concluding the work is shown to be a locrian organum strucuture, probably representing Britten's hope for the pacifying power of humanistic tradition.

Repetition and a Beat-Based Timing Framework: What Determines the Duration of Intervals Between Repetitions of a Tapping Pattern?

The production of speech and music are two human behaviors that involve complex hierarchical structures with implications for timing. Timing constraints may arise from a human proclivity to form ‘self-organized’ metrical structures for perceived and produced event sequences, especially those that involve repetition. To test whether the propensity to organize events in time arises even for simple motor behaviors, we developed a novel experimental tapping paradigm investigating whether participants use the beat structure of a tapped pattern to determine the interval between repetitions. Participants listened to target patterns of 3, 4, or 5 events, occurring at one of four periodic rates, and tapped out the pattern 11 times, creating 10 inter-pattern intervals (IPIs), which participants chose freely. The ratio between mean IPI and mean inter-tap interval (ITI) was used to measure the beat-relatedness of the overall timing pattern; the closer this ratio is to an integer, the more likely the participant was timing the IPI to match a multiple of the target pattern beat. Results show that a beat-based strategy contributes prominently, although not universally, to IPI duration. Moreover, participants preferred interval cycles with even numbers of beats, especially cycles with four beats. Finally, the IPI/ITI ratio was affected by rate, with more beats of silence for the IPI at faster rates. These findings support the idea that people can generate a larger global timing structure when engaging in the repetition of simple periodic motor patterns, and use that structure to govern the timing of those motor events.

In Defense of Theory and Analysis: A Critical Evaluation of the Discipline and Its Application to Bartók’s Musical Language

This paper defends an evaluation of Bartók’s music based on analytical procedures that use abstract theoretical concepts instead of, as advocate some scholars like László Somfai, restrict it to the scrutiny of compositional sketches and ethnomusicological influences. The analytical contributions of Roy Travis, Malcolm Gillies, Erno Lendvai, János Kárpáti, Colin Mason, Allen Forte and Richard Cohn, among others, are evaluated in order to introduce an original model that proposes a nontraditional tonal system based on the interval cycles and inversional symmetry, following some of George Perle’s propositions.

Dissonant Harmony and “Seed-Tones”

French-American composer Dane Rudhyar’s (1895–1985) vision of dissonance as a spiritual discipline was profoundly influential upon American ultra-modernist composers in the 1920s and ’30s. Rudhyar’s own compositions manifest his theoretical ideas, which revolve around a mystical conception of Tone as the totality of all possible musical sounds. His prose reveals several interrelated methods of creating Tone: using the piano’s sounding board as a gong, employing dissonant harmony (relating pitches by geometric relationships, which manifest as interval cycles), applying “the new sense of space” (beginning from wholeness, which requires equal divisions of the octave), and creating organic forms by basing each composition on a “seed-tone” (a dissonant tonic sonority). Rudhyar’s theoretical writings suggest two compatible methods of constructing seed-tones: building quintal sonorities (which exemplify dissonant harmony in Rudhyar’s theory) and employing “interpenetrating harmonic series.” These two methods facilitate the identification of seed-tones and their elaborations in Rudhyar’s piano music. Schenkerian-style graphs accompany detailed analyses of two of Rudhyar’s piano pieces: “Stars” and the first movement of Granites. Rudhyar’s seed-tones may suggest new analytic perspectives for other post-tonal repertoire. In addition, Rudhyar’s connection of dissonance with spirituality serves as a reminder that many early-twentieth-century pioneers in atonality and dodecaphony perceived a numinousness in this new music.

FORM AND TRANSFORMATION IN THE ‘NOCTURNE’ FROM BRITTEN'S ‘SERENADE FOR TENOR, HORN AND STRINGS’

The ‘Nocturne’ from Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1943) presents a number of interesting melodic and motivic features effectively modelled by aspects of diatonic transformational theories. Following a brief review of important transformational operations in diatonic set theory (transposition within Mod-7 diatonic space, diatonic interval cycles, and ‘signature transformation’), this article presents an analysis of the ‘Nocturne’ drawing upon both traditional and recent developments in diatonic transformational theory. Doing so illustrates an intricate compositional technique, one that traces motivic associations in the vocal line, the horn part and the accompanying strings. A close reading reveals that these motivic techniques stem from the generic concept of echoing and reverberation at the heart of Tennyson's poem.

Tonal progression in Bartók's 'Etudes', Op. 18

Bartók's mature musical language was born of both folk and art-music sources which influenced the composer in equal measure. The Three Studies for piano, Op. 18, represent a significant step in the evolution of the composers synthesis of the art-music source. All three etudes are based on equal-interval chains called interval cycles. Each of the three etudes represents a stage in the process of intervallic augmentation the composer named diatonic expansion. This concept, together with that of chromatic compression, is fundamental to all his mature works. The first etude expands the chromatic scale to two whole-tone scales. In the second etude the intervals are expanded to include the minor and major thirds as well as the perfect fourth, while in the third etude the tritone becomes the final step in the expansion process. The interactions of the ever-expanding interval cycles generate an array of diatonic, non-diatonic and abstract pitch collections. Parts of the opus rely on the concept of tonal progression based on axes of symmetry, which reached its perfection in later works such as the Out of Doors Suite and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.