For reasons of chronology and style, Webern's Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9 are generally understood to have been composed in an unsystematic, intuitive fashion. The present study seeks to question this assumption, suggesting that these short pieces in fact employ a specific approach to pitch grammar involving the consistent deployment of chromatic wedge structures. This technique, termed the structuring of tonal space, serves to explain note‐to‐note processes as well as aspects of larger‐scale formal design.
This chapter explores key concepts that are central, but not exclusive, to Gerhard’s life and work: national identity; exile; serialism; and musical meaning. The categories of ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ are used to clarify certain potential contradictions in the deployment of these concepts in our understanding of Gerhard. Further, it is suggested that a rigorous parsing of the artwork into phases of creation and interpretation, roughly congruent with Bense’s aesthetics, will sharpen our insights and conclusions.
The Webern Collection of the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel holds a fair copy of an early version of the Drei Stücke für Streichquartett (1913), comprising the song ‘Schmerz, immer Blick nach über’ together with what later became numbers 1 and 6 of the Sechs Bagatellen op.9. This document is highly interesting on many counts: here I will mainly discuss one, the existence of a discarded ending to the third piece (later op.9 no.6). This passage is heavily blacked-out in mauve pencil in the manuscript, but the notes, dynamics and indications can be discerned with a strong light and magnifying glass.
Joan Guinjoan's opera Gaudí: el trencadís i l'absolut was commissioned as part of the cultural programme parallel to the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992. Guinjoan completed the work in June of that year, but it was not staged until November 2004, the delay due in part to the fire of January 1994 that completely destroyed Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu opera house (this had happened before, in April 1861). The rebuilding was completed in late 1999, though Guinjoan had to wait a further five years to see the opera staged. Librettist Josep Maria Carandell was not so lucky: he died in 2003.
The Fourth Symphony has almost invariably been seen as innocent and optimistic: an evocation of past elegance and a vision of future happiness. In this context the literary and musical text of the last movement is seen to prompt ‘retrospective enlightenment’ in performance, causing us to reappraise our understanding of the first three movements. Yet the musical surface is not entirely placid and untroubled: even the exposition of the first movement is rife with discontinuities in texture, orchestration and thematic development. This chapter will suggest that the first movement of the Fourth might profitably be seen as an elaborately-realised illusion. Seemingly hermetic, it resists outside threats, but is undermined from within by a corruption of its own processes. Various possible interpretations of the ‘threat’—suggested by historical and cultural circumstances—are offered.
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