A central figure at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in the 1950s, Bruno Maderna (1920–73) pioneered a type of serialism that was as deeply rooted in the contrapuntal tradition of the past, as it was committed to the exploration of new avenues in musical expression. This article investigates the serial arrays that lie at the core of his works written between 1951 and 1956. The constructive principles behind Maderna’s tone rows are explained, as are the ways in which he subjected them to order permutations that he represented graphically in matrices, tabulating order positions and pitch-class space. The article further examines how Maderna’s matrices served as the source for his rhythmic language. With evidence from the sketch materials and other sources, the analyses show how Maderna designed his serial arrays in response to what he considered to have been the shortcomings of the twelve-tone technique.
Like many other composers who later distanced themselves from serialism, Luciano Berio (1925–2003) embraced its principles in the 1950s and beyond. While Berio's early serial techniques from the Due pezzi of 1951 to Nones of 1954 are well known, his subsequent serial practice is still little understood for three principal reasons: in his writings and interviews Berio provided only limited information on his serial works; it is very difficult to decipher Berio's later complex serial techniques from the published scores alone; and only one sketch survives for any of his serial works from 1951 to 1958 (for Allelujah I, 1955–6). Following a brief examination of the integral serialism in Nones (whose principles have been known for some time thanks to an analytical note by Berio), the present study investigates the serial techniques deployed in the Quartetto per archi (1955–6) and Allelujah I. Berio's serial materials are reconstructed with the help of distributional analyses and from an historical angle that has been little explored thus far: the influence of Bruno Maderna (1920–1973), Berio's mentor and close collaborator at the Studio di fonologia musicale in Milan.
Brian Cherney’s Fourth String Quartet (1994), in one movement lasting half an hour, is striking for its formal coherence and diversity of materials. The work achieves large-scale cohesion not only through an intricate interplay of three simultaneously unfolding “main structures”—four attacca movements in one, on one level, seven sections forming certain temporal proportions, on another, and four cycles of “breathing rhythms” derived from the same proportions on a third level, as documented in the manuscript sources—but also through the continually fluctuating tension we experience throughout the movement between ontological and psychological time. Pierre Souvtchinsky’s notion of a “counterpoint” between “ontological time” (i.e., clock or real time) and a particular music’s inherent time shaped by “the material and technical means by which [the] music is expressed” is referenced to demonstrate how in Cherney’s quartet fixed proportions and slow, stable polyrhythms active in the background afford space for foreground activity that has its own sense of time. The article further explores the notion of time in a second, metaphorical dimension, as concerns intertextual allusions in the quartet.
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